Year: 2019

Prayers and liturgy

Boniface, Missionary, Bishop and Martyr

St. Augustine Kilburn, St. BonifaceThe collect for today, the Feast of Saint Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton (c. 675 – 754), Bishop, Apostle to the Germans, Patron Saint of Germany, Martyr (source):

O God our redeemer,
who didst call thy servant Boniface
to preach the gospel among the German people
and to build up thy Church in holiness:
grant that we may hold fast in our hearts
that faith which he taught with his words
and sealed with his blood,
and profess it in lives dedicated to 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 Lesson: Acts 20:17-28
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-53

Artwork: Sanctus Bonifacius, stained glass, St. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension Day

Sing ye praises with understanding

“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us. What does he mean? The Ascension and the Session of Christ, his sitting at the right hand of the Father, are a kind of ending. But what kind of ending? Is it like Great Big Sea’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine”? Only I don’t think we feel quite so fine.

“It is finished.” Jesus’ penultimate word on the Cross is about an ending, an ending which carries over into the Resurrection and the Ascension. What is finished, ended, is all that belongs to the reconciliation between humanity and God. The overcoming of sin and death inaugurates the radical new life of the Resurrection. We only live when we live for God and for one another. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection and belongs to its essential logic. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two of the great creedal doctrines of the Christian Faith and yet are often overlooked and ignored. We forget their radical meaning and connection to Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection.

They are altogether about our life with God, our life as lived to and for God and one another. They are about our life as embraced in God’s will and purpose for our humanity; in short, they are about humanity’s end with God. End here signifies purpose. The Ascension is Christ’s homecoming to the Father having gone forth into the world and having returned to the Father, not empty but having accomplished God’s will for our humanity through his sacrifice. Christ’s sacrifice gathers us to God.

In the tradition of the Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross, “it is finished” is the penultimate word. What, then, is the ultimate word, the last of the last words? It is exactly what the Ascension and the Session signify. “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit,” Jesus says. The first and last words of Christ are the words of the Son to the Father, words of prayer that in turn shape our prayer. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” – what we do. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” What then do the Ascension and the Session mean? Quite literally, that “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” Everything is gathered back to God. “God,” as Thomas Aquinas notes in a kind of summary phrase, “is the beginning and ending of all things, especially of rational creatures.” In other words, the radical truth of the world and of human life is found in God. The Ascension and the Session celebrate the gathering of all things to God. They teach us that the world and our humanity are embraced in the knowing love of God. We live in that sense of ending, an ending that is about the purpose  and truth of our lives. We live for God and in God.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 3 – 9 June

Tuesday, June 4th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, June 6th
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

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

Sunday, June 9th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The Ascension and the Session of Christ, his ascending to and his sitting on the right hand of the Father, are two of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith. Through these powerful and suggestive images we are reminded of the spiritual nature of our humanity. As the ancient fathers of the Church express it, the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity.” These doctrines speak to the spiritual understanding of our lives in faith.

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Prayers and liturgy

Sunday After Ascension Day

The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Bernaert van Orley, The Last Supper (from the Alba Passion)Artwork: Bernaert van Orley, The Last Supper (from The Alba Passion), c. 1525-28. Tapestry, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Statements and other writings

Letter to the Parish, June 2019

Dear Friends,

“Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The familiar words of the Sursum Corda, as it is known, capture an essential feature of the liturgical and sacramental life of our Parish. It is very much about our being gathered into the motions of the Ascension. “We ascend,” as Augustine beautifully puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Ascensiontide signals that profound gathering of all things to God in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. His homecoming opens out to us our true homeland of the Spirit, the Trinity.

Bev Morash has been the sexton of the Parish for many years but for reasons of health is stepping down officially as of the end of June. He and Jacoba wish to continue to help out with the sanctuary guild when and to what extent they can. Wonderful. On behalf of the Parish, I want to thank Bev and Jacoba for their many labours. We will be putting into place various ways of ensuring the continuing maintenance of the Parish and its operations. We have established a reasonable protocol about garbage which, thanks in part to Scotty and Kathy, will go to curbside when needed in accord with the stipulations of the Town of Windsor. Please note the directions in the Hall about garbage (clear bags), compost (small bin to big bin to green bin), and recyclables (blue bags in blue bin).

At the Annual Meeting of the Parish, ideas were raised about the possibility of replacing the siding of the Church with newer and improved vinyl including insulation, repairing the sills of the windows, and replacing the lexan protective panels. We are still endeavouring to get estimates about cost. This would be a major, major undertaking. I want to be clear about the financials of the Parish with respect to capital plans.

The operation of the Parish depends in part, indeed, a large part, upon contributions from the Christ Church Foundation. We have been able to maintain operations and some capital improvements from funds generated from the interest on its investment portfolio; we have not touched capital. We also depend upon the offerings of all of you. Like many small institutions, it is a constant struggle but one which I am pleased to say we have managed rather successfully in terms of our mission, thanks to so many of you.

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Prayers and liturgy

Justin Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Justin (c. 100 – 165), Philosopher, Apologist, Martyr at Rome (source):

St. Justin MartyrO God our redeemer,
who through the folly of the cross
didst teach thy martyr Justin
the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ:
free us, we beseech thee, from every kind of error,
that we, like him, may be firmly grounded in the faith,
and make thy name known to all peoples;
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 Corinthians 1:18-30
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-8

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Sermons

Sermon for Ascension Day

Lift up your hearts

“We ascend,” St. Augustine says,“in the ascension of our hearts”. It is an essential feature of our liturgy. We might even suggest that the Prayer Book liturgy is all “sursum corda,” all about the lifting up our hearts unto the Lord. Such motions are the motions of grace in us, the motions of Christ’s Ascension moving in us.

The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection and belongs to its essential logic. In a way, it is all about our being and dwelling with God who in Christ has dwelt among us, literally “tented among us,” itself a suggestive image, but only in order to bring us to the true homeland of the Spirit. “We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It is such a powerful and suggestive image: being like eagles “fly[ing] up to heaven in our hearts where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It speaks to our hearts and minds.

Homer’s great epic poem, The Odyssey, is all about homecoming. It chronicles the struggles of Odysseus in his ten year quest to achieve his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan War. That struggle is about knowing who you are which means overcoming all of the forms of our forgetting and the unknowing of ourselves. Home is a powerful image of the sense of place as belonging to identity. It is at once local and particular but also cosmic and universal. To know yourself is to know your place in a cosmic order. It is to know your relation to others and to God.

Christ’s Ascension is altogether about who he truly is, the eternal Son of the Father who always sits at the right hand of the Father, which is to say, that “there was not when he was not;” in other words,  that he is always God. His Ascension signals the gathering up of our humanity to its end and truth in God. His homecoming is “the exaltation of our humanity,” as the Fathers of the early Church argue, the lifting up of us to God in whom we truly live and move and have our being. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

All Saints Margaret Street, This same Jesus which is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come in like mannerArtwork: This same Jesus which is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come in like manner, All Saints Margaret Street, London. Photograph taken by admin, 25 September 2015.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 May

She reacheth from one end to the other mightily and sweetly ordereth all things

Strongly and sweetly. Fortiter et sauviter. Who is this ‘she’? In Chapel this week we read from the eighth chapter of the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It is a most famous passage. It is what I like to call a connector passage, writings which connect to many other  cultures and patterns of thinking. Students and faculty, for the most part, have perhaps never heard this passage but that doesn’t make it any less famous. The ‘she’ here is wisdom; sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin. The passage is a wonderful paean of praise to wisdom and as such speaks to the educational project of the School in terms of understanding and cultural literacy. Wisdom, not knowledge simply, and certainly not mere information is what is looked for and sought. Wisdom is about maturity of character, about a way of understanding that shapes a way of living ethically and responsibly.

Written in Greek probably in the first century BC, Wisdom connects directly to the forms of discourse and thinking that belong to Greek or Hellenistic philosophy. The created wisdom of God shows us that wisdom is to be sought above all other things. “If riches are a desirable possession in life, what is richer than wisdom who effects all things?” Wisdom teaches temperance, prudence, justice and courage, the four classical virtues of Greek and Latin antiquity which in turn contribute to the moral and ethical discourse of Christianity and Islam. Wisdom here is about an understanding of the created world and thus about ourselves. The influence of this text is altogether remarkable. It continues to speak to us even in the arrogance of our unwisdom.

Some seven centuries after the Book of Wisdom was written, Boethius wrote a most influential treatise known as the Consolation of Philosophy. Sometimes called the last of the Romans, Boethius was actually a Christian philosopher whose life ambition, largely unfulfilled, was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. The only explicit Scriptural reference in the Consolatio is this passage about wisdom strongly and sweetly ordering and moving all things. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas” – O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason, Boethius says. Wisdom is what is looked for in our lives.

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday

“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.

Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” …  “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “where we mean/ To mend her we end her,/ When we hew or delve” … “Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.

Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!

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