Year: 2019

Prayers and liturgy

Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cyprian (c. 200-258), Bishop of Carthage, Martyr (source):

Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Saint Cyprian of CarthageO holy God,
who didst bring Cyprian to faith in Christ
and didst make him a bishop in the Church,
crowning his witness with a martyr’s death:
grant that, following his example,
we may love the Church and her doctrine,
find thy forgiveness within her fellowship,
and so come to share the heavenly banquet
which thou hast prepared for us;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:1-4,10-11
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Saint Cyprian of Carthage, 6th-century mosaic, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 September

And God saw that it was good

The first Chapel services last week began with the hymn, “I feel the winds of God today,” sung to a lovely English traditional melody called Kingsfold. I don’t know about the “winds of God,” but I think many of us certainly felt the winds of Hurricane Dorian! Wind and rain, falling branches and uprooted trees, one of which glanced off Alexandra Hall, the Headmaster’s House, power lines down, no internet. Catastrophic. Yet, unlike the Bahamas, there has been no loss of life, just lots of damage. We are keeping the people of the Bahamas in our prayers, especially in this difficult time of grief, and for all relief and restoration efforts. The experience of the storm raises the question, how is this good? The question relates to the opening chapter of Genesis and to what we heard in verses 6 – 23.

There is a great deal of contemporary concern about safety, about safe places and about feeling safe. But does the culture of safety-ism imply that the world, then, is a dangerous and threatening place? That evil lies outside in the ‘natural’ world? The culture of safety-ism suggests that we, too, are fearful and anxious. Yet one of the great “untruths” of contemporary culture, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, is the idea that you are fragile. The truth is that you are actually quite resilient. Which is why we need to remind ourselves yet again of the great wisdom of Genesis 1 with its recurring refrain, “and God saw that it was good.” Something profound is being said about the world as created and something profound is being said about us.

We can appreciate the wisdom of Genesis 1 by way of comparison to something like the creation stories of the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia. The Genesis story is told in contra-distinction to such accounts which see creation as a struggle between chaos and order. For the ancient Sumerians, who had achieved a great number of practical technological innovations, not unlike our modern world, there was a fearful uncertainty about reality as if chaos might just be greater than order. Chaos just might rise up and overthrow everything. Despite their technological advances, they lived in a state of fearful uncertainty, one of the images of which is Humbaba, the force of the forest who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is said to be “the evil in the land” and who, as “a battering ram,” is viewed as a threat to the city. The fearful uncertainty is not just the fear of the unknown but the greater fear of the unknowable, what is literally unable to be known and grasped intellectually. Evil or danger lies outside the city. The world is a fearful, dangerous and deadly place.

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund J. Peck, Missionary

The collect for today, the commemoration of Edmund J. Peck (1850-1924), Priest, Missionary to the Inuit, Translator (source):

Edmund J. PeckGod of our salvation, whose servant Edmund James Peck made the testimony of the Spirit his own and gladly proclaimed the riches of Christ among the Inuit people, give the joy of your gospel to us also, that we may exalt you in the congregation of all peoples and praise you in the abundance of your mercies; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

“Ephphatha”… “Be opened”

Hearing and seeing are the biblical senses of the understanding. It might seem, at first, that they are simply about what is received, that they are, as it were, merely passive senses, the senses of reception. Something seen is received by the eye; something heard is received by the ear. But there is an activity as well, the activity of seeing and the activity of hearing.

What is seen and heard is there for the understanding. There is something communicated, the meaning of which we enter into through the activity of understanding. For it is not just the words which are heard or the vision which is seen that is received. What the words signify, what the vision reveals, is given to be understood.

Our understanding is our wrestling with the significance of things. It is a profoundly spiritual activity. It speaks to who we are in the sight of God – those to whom God reveals himself and into whose presence he would have us come. Hearing and seeing as the senses of understanding mean that there is an acting upon what is received. There is a similar double-sidedness to our “being opened.”

In the Gospel for today, “they bring unto [Jesus] one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech”. They beseech the healing touch of Jesus upon someone who is deaf and, if not altogether dumb, at least impeded in his speech to the point that others must speak for him. In response to their request, Jesus puts his fingers into his ears, spits upon the ground, and touches his tongue – all outward, tangible and physical acts – but, as well, and just as remarkably, Jesus’ “look[s] up to heaven”, “he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, be opened”. There is, in short, a healing: “and straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.”

As with all the healing miracles of the gospels, they signify the restoration of our humanity. What is wanted by God is not the deformity of our being but the perfection of our humanity. What is wanted is our being made totally and completely adequate to the truth of God; in short, our being opened to God signals our willingness to will what God wills for us.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 9 – 15 September

Tuesday, September 10th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, September 12th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, September 13th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, September 15th, Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, September 17th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room:
The Kingdom of the Blind, by Louise Penny, and Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twelfth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 3:4-9
The Gospel: St. Mark 7:31-37

Breenburgh, Christ Heals a Deaf-MuteArtwork: Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Christ Healing a Deaf-Mute, 1635. Oil on panel, Louvre, Paris.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 September

In the beginning God … In the beginning the Word

And so it begins. It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read the two lessons which have become a special feature of the first two Chapel services. The two readings are Genesis 1. 1-5 and John 1. 1-5; two of the most profound texts that belong to intellectual thought and reflection. The reading from John is most clearly and obviously a kind of complement and commentary on the passage from Genesis. These readings from the Jewish Scriptures, and the Christian New Testament are also complemented by a wonderful passage from the Islamic Scriptures, the Qur’an. The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is.”

We begin with the radical concept of God and in a way which challenges our contemporary culture. These readings show the intimate and necessary relationship between power and wisdom. Power without wisdom, I think we know, is deadly, destructive, and dangerous. God speaks reality into being. God as Word (Logos) is an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These passages are poetic and philosophical. They are not ‘science’ in its modern sense though they are precisely what science in all its forms presupposes, namely the world as being in principle intelligible. They also belong to an older sense of scientia as an inward habit or virtue, a way of thinking and living.

In principle. En arche, In principia – for ‘beginning’ means principle as well. The idea of Creation is set before us in a much more radical way than is commonly understood or rather misunderstood. God does not make the world like a clock-maker to use a famous early modern image. Creation is about the animating principle which creates and sustains what is created. Creation is always about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not any one of the things of creation. Thomas Aquinas makes the point beautifully that God is “the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures.” In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badi (Absolute Cause), al-Bari (Producer), al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Mubdi (Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al-Qadir (All-Powerful), and al-Qahhar (Dominator). Such expressions emphasize that God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things.

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Prayers and liturgy

Robert Wolfall, Presbyter

The collect for bishops and other pastors, in commemoration of Robert Wolfall, Priest (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who didst call thy servant Robert Wolfall to proclaim thy glory
by a life of prayer and the zeal of a true pastor:
keep constant in faith the leaders of thy Church
and so bless thy people through their ministry
that the Church may grow into the full stature
of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Rev. Robert Wolfall was vicar of the Parish of West Harptree, Somerset, when he became chaplain to Martin Frobisher’s third Arctic expedition to Canada. On 3 September 1578, Rev’d Wolfall presided at the first recorded Holy Eucharist in what is now Canadian territory: Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island.

The service was held on the ship Anne Francis, whose captain later wrote:

Master Wolfall …. preached a godly sermon, which being ended he celebrated also a Communion upon the land …. The celebration of the divine mystery was the first sign, seal and confirmation of Christ’s name, death and passion ever known in these quarters. Master Wolfall made sermons and celebrated the Communion at sundry other times in several and sundry ships, because the whole company could never meet together at anyone place.

A few weeks later, Frobisher abandoned the hope of establishing a permanent settlement on Baffin Island and the expeditionary fleet returned home to England. Anglicans would not celebrate Holy Communion in Canada again for almost a century.

A commemoration of Robert Wolfall, written by Dr. William Cooke, Vice-President of the Toronto branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, is posted here. (See page 5 of pdf document.)

The Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “The First Thanksgiving in North America” is posted here.

Parish of West Hartree, Robert Wolfall Commemorative PlaqueA plaque commemorating Rev. Wolfall was recently placed on the inside wall of his parish church. The photograph was kindly sent to us by former Royal Navy Chaplain The Rev. Anthony Marks.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

“By the grace of God, I am what I am”

“Standing on the promises” is an old evangelical hymn composed by Russell Kelso Carter, professor of chemistry, natural science, civil engineering and mathematics at the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1886, just four years after the building of this Church. Some of you may know it. “Standing, standing/ standing on the promises of Christ my Saviour,/ Standing, standing,/ I’m standing on the promises of God.” It refers to the promises of God and signals the sure, rock-fast nature of those promises even in the face of “the howling storms of doubt and fear.” How? “By the living word of God.” It belongs, I think, to Paul’s message in today’s epistle.

But how do we stand? There are the things which God wants and promises for us and then there is our relation to such things. Paul talks about our standing on the gospel which has been preached to us and which has been received by us “by which also ye are saved,” he says. But he adds a conditional clause; “if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” At issue is the living word of God in us.

The promises are not to be taken for granted. They are given, to be sure. Paul goes on to talk about the Faith in more-or-less creedal terms and about his own early relation to the proclamation of the gospel – “I persecuted the Church of God,” he says in an honest and confessional way. How then does he now stand in relation to the gospel? As “the least of the Apostles,” he suggests, but nonetheless an Apostle – one who is sent. Such a standing and such a sending are nothing less than acts of grace: for it is “such a measure of thy grace” that allows us to “run the way of thy commandments” so that we “may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure” as today’s Collect puts it. Something is required on our part, to be sure, and yet, what is wanted has its source solely, utterly, and completely in God. Grace is what comes from God to us, but we are not merely the passive recipients of God’s grace; we have to run with it that it may define and shape us. “By the grace of God, I am what I am,” Paul states, aware of the transition and transformation from persecutor to follower and even more, to being an Apostle, to being who he is solely by the grace of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

The collect for today, the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

John Everett Millais, The Pharisee and the PublicanO GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
The Gospel: St Luke 18:9-14

Artwork: John Everett Millais, The Pharisee and the Publican, from Illustrations to `The Parables of Our Lord’, 1864. Relief print on paper, Tate Collections, London.

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