Year: 2019

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 December

Be it unto me according to thy word

The readings in Chapel in this last week of classes help to prepare us for the pageant of Word and Song in the Advent/Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols on Sunday and as well for next week’s exams. The lesson from John’s Gospel (Jn. 4. 46-53) in particular highlights an important feature of education. It is the idea of resonance, the sounding forth within us of the words coming towards us whether in Chapel, in the classroom, in the venues of sports or in our social interactions. In the teaching environment, you are taught various things, but what have you learned? What have you taken into yourself and made a part of you? Exams provide some indication.

“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils/…. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music,” Lorenzo says in a famous passage about the power of music in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is very much about what moves within us. In the play, the idea of musical harmony relates to the themes of justice and mercy, to what has resonance within us.

In John’s Gospel, an Official comes to Jesus in Capernaum seeking the healing of his son who is at the point of death. He beseeches Jesus to come down, to make a house call, as it were, to which Jesus replies in a kind of general criticism of human expectations which is really about our attempt to make God subject to us. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,” he says. The Official repeats his request to which Jesus then says, “Go thy way; thy son liveth.” The wonder of the story is captured in John’s simple phrase. “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke unto him and he went his way.” Christ’s word has resonance within him. In going down to his house, his servants meet him to tell him that his son lives. He learns that he was healed in the self-same hour that Jesus said, “Thy son liveth.” Truth has its resonance in us.

The Word of God of itself cannot be constrained to the ordinary limits of time and space as we saw last week both in the pageant of the Ten Commandments, as the universal ethical code of our humanity and as known by natural reason, and in the marvel of the Centurion’s “speak the word only.” At issue is the resonance of God’s Word in us. It is about what we have learned, about instruction alive and living in us. Catechism means instruction by means of question and answer. The word points to the echo effect that is the resonance of the teaching in us, a sounding forth of what has been received and grasped.

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Prayers and liturgy

Clement of Alexandria, Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):

St. Clement of AlexandriaO Lord, who didst call thy servant Clement of Alexandria from the errors of ancient philosophy that he might learn and teach the saving Gospel of Christ: Turn thy Church from the conceits of worldly wisdom and, by the Spirit of truth, guide it into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63

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Uncategorized

The Gentleness of Wisdom – Advent Meditation 2019

Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and so to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent marks a new beginning. But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? Is the cycle of the Church Year another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives? “To make an end is to make a beginning,” T.S. Eliot observes for “the end is where we start from.” It is about the principle of our lives.

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time for our souls, as it were, a gathering up of the fruits of the past year’s grace in our lives. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed and all because “Jesus turned.” The turnings of the year and our turnings turn upon God’s turning to us.

In the barren emptiness of nature’s year, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73), Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness,” our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great suggests what this means.

As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time,
flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn,
so the fruit for winter is talk.

Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had quite enough talk, too much talk, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evening, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings? Surely, it is God’s talk, God’s Word and no other, God’s Word making his talk in us. For apart from God’s talk, our talk is vain and destructive. “The tongue,” as St. James notes, “is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous member…With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.” Such are our contradictions. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” As he says, “My brethren, this ought not to be so.” But sadly it is, for “no human being can tame the tongue.”

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

Love is the fulfilling of the law.

It is the great ethical insight of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding albeit in different registers of expression. To put it another way, law is love. That is a challenging concept which requires some thought about both terms.

Advent awakens us to the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity through the coming of God’s Word to us. That idea belongs to revelation and to reason. There is the coming of God’s Word to Moses on Mount Sinai in the thunderous words of the Law encapsulated profoundly in the Ten Commandments. There is the coming of God’s Word in judgement in the powerful Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem on what Christians will later call Palm Sunday and which is here already associated with the ancient Jewish rites of the Passover. But even more, as Cranmer understood in the sixteenth century, that coming in judgement is seen most tellingly in the cleansing of the Temple, the passage which follows immediately in Matthew’s Gospel upon the entrance into the city. Here is the wrath of Jesus and yet that wrath is really love, God’s love of his own righteousness  and truth without which there is no truth or righteousness.

Thus are we awakened to the dies irae, the day of judgment which is ever-present because truth is ever-present. The judgement is the coming of God’s Word as light and truth into the darknesses of our world and our hearts. But this is actually love. Why and how? Because the coming of God to us is the goodness of God for us. And it is something known at once by revelation and by reason.

The Ten Commandments mark the climax of the ethical and educational journey of the exodus. The Book of Exodus is an ethical treatise that seeks to awaken us to a fundamental truth and principle upon which our thinking and living depend. The idea of God is not and cannot be simply a human construct – the assumption of every  garden variety atheist. The wonder of the exodus is that God makes himself known as “I Am Who I Am” to Moses in the Burning Bush. In the exodus journey in the wilderness God reveals his will for our humanity in the thunderous words of the Ten Commandments. Allah is all but it is the will of Allah, of God, that defines Jew, and Christian, and Muslim alike. But that will, which itself is nothing less than the explicit expression of the goodness of God, is something that is also known through the exercise of reason in its discovery of that upon which our knowing and reason depend, a principle which cannot by definition be defined by anything prior to it but only by everything which depends upon it.

This is wonderful but not new. For centuries upon centuries and in different ways, the Law in its summary form and as the Ten Commandments has been known as the universal moral code for our humanity, something known at once as given authoritatively but also as given for thought. In our liturgy we regularly and perhaps complacently say the Summary of the Law. We rarely hear the Ten Commandments even though in the history of our own Anglican tradition, at least until the dominance of the 19th century Gothic revival, our churches in their seventeenth and eighteenth century architectural form as auditory chapels often had on the walls of the sanctuary “The Belief,” the summary of the Christian principles of the Faith; to wit, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed. What do Christians essentially believe? There it is. We forget and neglect such things at our peril. We also misunderstand those principles when we reduce them to a set of propositions but that is another story about modern and post-modern narratives and their self-contradictions.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 2 – 8 December

Monday, December 2nd
4:45-5:15pm Religious Inquirers’ Class – Rm. 206, KES
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, December 3rd
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I: Advent Psalms & Antiphons

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

Sunday, December 8th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols, with KES (Gr. 7-11)
7:00pm Advent Lessons and Carols – KES Chapel (Gr. 12s)

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, December 17th, St. Ignatius of Antioch
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Antonio Zanchi, Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the TempleArtwork: Antonio Zanchi, Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple, 1667. Oil on canvas, Ateneo Veneto (formerly Scuola di San Girolamo), Venice.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Andrew the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who didst give such grace unto thy holy Apostle Saint Andrew, that he readily obeyed the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him without delay: Grant unto us all, that we, being called by thy holy word, may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 10:8-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:18-22

Carlo Dolci, Saint Andrew Before the CrossA native of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, Andrew was a fisherman, the son of the fisherman John, and the brother of the fisherman Simon Peter. He was at first, along with John the Evangelist, a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus was the Christ led the two to follow Jesus. Andrew then took his brother Simon Peter to meet Jesus. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Andrew is called the Protokletos (the First Called) because he is named as the first disciple summoned by Jesus into his service.

At first Andrew and Simon Peter continued to carry on their fishing trade, but the Lord later called them to stay with him all the time. He promised to make them fishers of men and, this time, they left their nets for good.

The only other specific reference to Andrew in the New Testament is at St. Mark 13:3, where he is one of those asking the questions that lead our Lord into his great eschatological discourse.

In the lists of the apostles that appear in the gospels, Andrew is always numbered among the first four. He is named individually three times in the Gospel of St. John. In addition to the story of his calling (John 1:35-42), he, together with Philip, presented the Gentiles to Christ (John 12:20-22), and he pointed out the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8).

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Events, Music

Advent/Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols 2019

On Sunday, December 8th, 2019, at 4:00pm the annual Advent/Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols with King’s-Edgehill School (Grades 7-11) will be held at Christ Church. A pageant of Word and Song, the service is an integral feature of our intellectual and spiritual communities such as the School and the Parish. Members of the Parish and those of the wider community are invited and encouraged to attend.

There is something quite powerful and significant in the parade of readings and songs. It is not a show or a performance but a participatory event that challenges students and faculty, friends and family, priest and people to sit and listen, to stand and sing and to do all that together. It is one of the counter-cultural aspects of the School and the Parish.

It was just over one hundred years ago that this service was first inaugurated in December 1918 following the overwhelming and devastating ravages of the First World War. The service speaks of peace and hope in the face of the horrors of war and the evils of our humanity. It awakens us to the real dignity of our humanity as the counter to our deadly destructiveness. It is found in paying attention to the pageant of God’s Word coming as light into the darkness of the world and into the darkness of our hearts.

I encourage you to come and see, to sing and listen.

Fr. David Curry

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 November

I am the Lord thy God who brought you … out of the house of bondage.

The educational and ethical journey of the exodus reaches its climax with the story of the giving of the Law, the Ten Commandments. We have looked at the birth of Moses, the revelation of God as “I am Who I am” to Moses in the Burning Bush, the ‘star wars contest’ between Pharaoh as a ‘god’ and God with Moses as his agent culminating in the Passover story, the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea, and the provisions of manna to the people of Israel in the wilderness. That wilderness journey is about liberation from slavery understood literally and ethically. Something good is learned in the wilderness. The greater manna, we might say, is not simply God’s provisions for us physically but the manna of God’s Word and Will for us.

The Ten Commandments are not precisely numbered in the Exodus account and there are different traditions about their  numbering. They are neither a list from which we might pick and choose nor are they simply a set of suggestions. There can be no additions to nor substractions from them. In other words, they form a complete series of interrelated ethical principles that comprise the moral code for our humanity. They are universal and while presented authoritatively, they are actually the precepts that belong to natural reason. They are for thought and are about thought itself; God’s thinking for our thinking and acting. They are really the authority of thought or reason itself.

It might seem that they are negative given their proscriptive force: “thou shalt not.” But this is to miss the essential content and positive meaning of what is set before us and which shape an understanding of law and order externally and internally. They reveal for thought what is known by reason about ethical thinking and practice. They are the unfolding of the principle of God for us in terms of an understanding of the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It is an axiom of thought that a principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but only by the dependency of everything else upon it. The Ten Commandments are the unpacking of God as the principle of the being and knowing of all things. They begin with God as principle; “I Am Who I Am.” “I Am the Lord thy God” marks the beginning of the Commandments.

Because God is God there can be no other gods. Because God is God, God is not to be confused with anything in the created order; in short, God cannot be imaged for that would deny the reality of God as that upon which everything else depends. An image is not the reality. This is true and necessary for our thinking about God but also for us. You are not your ‘selfie’. Your instagram images are not you. You are more than your image. Thus our self-knowledge depends upon the knowledge of God and God’s self-knowledge. Because God is God, God’s name is not to be taken in vain which means that God is not to be used for our ends and purposes, as if God were subject to us.

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Prayers and liturgy

Catherine, Virgin and Martyr

The collect for a virgin or matron, on the Feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria (early 4th century?), Virgin and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD Most High, the creator of all mankind, we bless thy holy Name for the virtue and grace which thou hast given unto holy women in all ages, especially thy servant Catherine; and we pray that the example of her faith and purity, and courage unto death, may inspire many souls in this generation to look unto thee, and to follow thy blessed Son Jesus Christ our Saviour; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 9:36-42
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

Caravaggio, Saint Catherine of AlexandriaAccording to her legend, St. Catherine lived in Alexandria when Emperor Maxentius was persecuting the church. A noble and learned young Christian, Catherine prevailed in a public debate with philosophers who tried to convince her of the errors of Christianity. Maxentius had her scourged, imprisoned and condemned her to death. She was tied to a wheel embedded with razors, but this attempt to torture her to death failed when the machine (later a Catherine wheel) broke and onlookers were injured by flying fragments. Finally, she was beheaded. Tradition holds that she was martyred in 305.

The cult of Saint Catherine arose in the Eastern Church in the 8th or 9th century and spread to the West at the time of the Crusades. She is not mentioned in any early martyrologies. No reliable facts concerning her life or death have been established. Most historians now believe that she probably never existed.

St. Catherine is often portrayed holding a book, symbolic of her great learning. She is the patron saint of libraries and librarians, teachers and students.

Artwork: Caravaggio, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1598-99. Oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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