Christ Church

Lord, that I may receive my sight

The most important thing that has happened to you this week, perhaps, is that you have heard the reading from Luke 18.31-41. Coupled with the Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1st Corinthians 13, it speaks directly to the journey of our humanity. The concept of life as a journey is a commonplace but that doesn’t take away from its significance. The idea of a journey implies a destination, a place to which we are going but aren’t there yet. It suggests that there are limitations and obstacles which have to be overcome or engaged.

These two readings, the one which we heard in Chapel this week, the other a few weeks ago belong to the Christian preparation for Lent, a spiritual season of renewal and discipline. The essential elements of the Christian journey of the soul to God have their counterparts in the spiritual traditions of the other great religions and philosophies of the world. The journey is about illumination, purgation, and union or perfection. The reading from Luke as complemented with Paul’s great hymn of love speaks directly to the very nature of education. It, too, is about illumination or enlightenment, about purgation or the clearing of our minds and souls from all the clutter and chaos that results in confusion and disarray, and about union, a sense of oneness and wholeness of our being. But what makes this readings so particularly powerful is that they show us the essential conjunction of knowing and loving.

To put the point, very simply, there can be no learning, no journey without the desire to know. As Aristotle rather famously (or infamously) notes, “all men desire by nature to know.” In one way or another, the activity of thinking and knowing is fundamental to what it means to be human. Coupled to that activity is the activity of desire, of wanting to know, of love. The Gospel highlights this interconnection. Jesus says, “behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” There is a journey. He explains exactly what the journey means. It means the things of his passion and death out of which comes his resurrection. He tells them – us – what it means. But, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things.”

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The collect for today, the commemoration of George Herbert (1593-1633), Priest, Poet (source):

King of glory, king of peace,
who didst call thy servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and king:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to thy service;
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.
Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:1-4
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:1-10

The hymn, “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing”, was originally a poem by George Herbert, published in The Temple.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The church with psalms must shout,
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

George Herbert was born to a wealthy family in Montgomery, Wales. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he appeared headed for a prominent public career, but the deaths of King James I and two patrons ended that possibility.

He chose to pursue holy orders in the Church of England and became rector at Bemerton, near Salisbury, in 1629, where he died four years later of tuberculosis. His preaching and service to church and parishioners contributed to his reputation as an exemplary pastor. He did not become known as a poet until shortly after he died, when his poetry collection The Temple was published.

He is buried in Saint Andrew Bemerton Churchyard.

God bestoweth abundant grace

We begin with ashes for that is where we are or rather the way in which we awaken to ourselves as apart from God. Our self-consciousness in the biblical view begins with our separation, our self-will opposed and in denial of the will of God. “Did God say?” we ask with the serpent in Eden, knowing full well what God said to the Adam, to our humanity.

Ashes symbolize the profound awareness of ourselves as sinners. They are a symbol of repentance, a sign of our acknowledgment of ourselves as sinners, the realization that things are not as they should be or as we would like them to be about ourselves. This is then a kind of metanoia, a way of bringing ourselves to mind, and so to self-awareness. But this belongs to what the Epistle of James rightly calls God’s “abundant grace.” In bringing ourselves to mind, we are being returned to God.

The point is fairly straightforward. We can really only know ourselves as sinners through the prior awareness of the goodness of God. Sin and evil are privatory; they are privations of the prior goodness and grace of God. Thus it is by grace and only by grace that we can know ourselves as sinners. Paradoxically, this is the good news, the gospel itself, if you will. We can only know ourselves as sinners through having contradicted what we know (in some sense or other) as the good. Sin, in other words, presupposes God’s grace and goodness. To confess our sins is to confess the goodness of God which we have negated, denied, and ignored.

Ash Wednesday recalls us to the dust of creation and to the ashes of repentance. It is all about our turning back to God from whom in myriad ways we have turned away in our folly and sinfulness. To know this is the abundant grace of God bestowed upon each of us in our acknowledgement of our sinfulness. It is not just a one off, a penitential moment to get over and done with. It is a regular and recurring feature of our liturgy in the constant pattern of contrition, confession, and satisfaction that belong to the pilgrim ways of the soul through illumination, purgation, and union.

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The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21

Artwork: Gerard Seghers, Christ and the Penitents, 17th century. Oil on canvas, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Matthias the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who into the place of the traitor Judas didst choose thy faithful servant Matthias to be of the number of the twelve Apostles: Grant that thy Church, being alway preserved from false Apostles, may be ordered and guided by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:15-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-11

The name of this saint is probably an abbreviation of Mattathias, meaning “gift of Yahweh”.

Matthias was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas had betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide. In the time between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost, the small band of disciples, numbering about 120, gathered together and Peter spoke of the necessity of selecting a twelfth apostle to replace Judas. Peter enunciated two criteria for the office of apostle: He must have been a follower of Jesus from the Baptism to the Ascension, and he must be a witness to the resurrected Lord. This meant that he had to be able to proclaim Jesus as Lord from first-hand personal experience. Two of the brothers were found to fulfill these qualifications: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas also called the Just. Matthias was chosen by lot. Neither of these two men is referred to by name in the four Gospels, although several early church witnesses, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, report that Matthias was one of the seventy-two disciples.

Like the other apostles and disciples, St. Matthias received the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Since he is not mentioned later in the New Testament, nothing else is known for certain about his activities. He is said to have preached in Judaea for some time and then traveled elsewhere. Various contradictory stories about his apostolate have existed since early in church history. The tradition held by the Greek Church is that he went to Cappadocia and the area near the Caspian Sea where he was crucified at Colchis. Some also say he went to Ethiopia before Cappadocia. Another tradition holds that he was stoned to death and then beheaded at Jerusalem.

The Empress St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have brought St Matthias’s relics to Rome c. 324, some of which were moved to the Benedictine Abbey of St Matthias, Trier, Germany, in the 11th century.

Artwork: Veit Stoss, Saint Matthias (detail from Saint Mary’s Altar), 1477-89. Saint Mary’s Basilica, Krakow, Poland.

“For now we see in a glass darkly”

The most important thing that has happened to you today, and perhaps even the most important thing in your life is that you have heard the remarkable readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Now and then, nunc et tunc. “Now … in a glass darkly but then face to face.” Now and then. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A profound statement, it captures an essential aspect of our humanity. This ‘now and then’ is about the recognition that our knowing is at once limited and partial but, and this is the crucial point, something which belongs to the divine knowing and to our participation in that knowing. “[We] shall know even as [we are] known.” This is an amazing insight which checks and challenges, counters and corrects all our assumptions.

It is ancient wisdom in the sense of the realization that human knowing is by definition finite and incomplete and utterly dependent upon an intellectual principle which is beyond our knowing, and which at once unites the knowing and being of everything. It is the underlying assumption without which there can be no scientia, no knowing whatsoever, including our modern sense of science, for instance, and yet it is, shall we say, by definition beyond the unity of being and knowing as well. God, in other words, cannot be tied to us and to our interests and concerns, to our knowing.

Some will conclude, and many have in the culture of secular atheism, that God is completely irrelevant and unnecessary to our thinking and doing. That is the opposite to the kind of thinking that these readings present to us. What is revealed here for thought is precisely how we cannot think ourselves or the world without an awareness, albeit “in a glass darkly,” of that upon which our thinking and being necessarily depend. We see but “in a glass darkly,” yet we see and our seeing is part and necessarily a part of the greater knowing that belongs to God himself.

Such is the suggestive power of Paul’s most famous and intriguing hymn to love which launches us into Lent, into the programme of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that is the journey of the soul. It begins on Ash Wednesday and it begins profoundly with our awareness of our darkness and unknowing. Yet, more profoundly, it begins with love, the love of God at work in human hearts and minds. It begins with the awareness of something more than ourselves. It begins with love, the divine love which is light and life in itself and in us. It begins with the desire in us to go up to Jerusalem that we might begin to see what Jesus wants us to see and know. That is the connecting point to the Gospel. Knowing and loving are interconnected. There can be no knowing without the desire to know.

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Monday, February 24th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation-Inquirers’ – KES
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 25th, Shrove Tuesday
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-730pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Wednesday, February 26th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service with Ashes
12 noon Holy Communion with Ashes
2:35-2:45pm Imposition of Ashes – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

Thursday, February 27th
3:30pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, February 28th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 1st, The First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, March 3rd
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I

The collect for today, Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

Artwork: Václav Mánes, Christ Healing the Blind Man, 1832. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Prague.

Why are ye so fearful?

Sturm und drang. I always associate February with this wonderful German phrase which belongs to a literary work but which in turn gives the name to a cultural phenomenon that was the precursor to the rich traditions of German romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturm und drang means storm and stress. How do we deal with the storms and stresses of our world and day?

There are, to be sure, no end of the storms of nature that beset us in the bleak midwinter of February, the stresses that belong to travel and even survival in the rather harsh winter conditions of the Maritimes, not to mention the winter bruising and beating that Newfoundland has endured. It is a wonderful part of the consolation literature to be reminded that things could be worse and that sometimes for others they are far worse than what we have to endure. It is a way of helping us to face the rigours of winter.

But there is something far greater and far more challenging than simply the storms of nature, the winter storms of snow and ice, of wind and cold. Beyond such storms of nature, there are the endless and never-ending storms of the human heart. How do we deal with those storms and stresses? They are the storms of anxiety and fear within us. In a way, they are far greater than the storms of nature.

In Chapel this week, we read a wonderful story about Jesus in the midst of a storm at sea and about his response to our fearfulness and anxiety. The story has influenced the tradition of consolation literature. Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, draws upon this image in suggesting that out of the tempest, out of the sturm und drang of human life in all its disarray, there can be “sea-change into something rich and strange.” There is something that can be learned in and  through the storms of life, whatever they may be, ranging from our fears and worries about the coronavirus 2019 outbreak, now mercifully shortened to CoVid19, to our worries and anxieties about the climate, the economy, about the interrelation of nations and peoples or the lack thereof, and of course, the endless anxiety of parents about their children which only adds to anxiety upon anxiety.  Lots of sturm und drang, we might say!

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If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities

Courage and prudence are transformed into humility on this Sexagesima Sunday. We are turned not to the vineyard of creation but to something more basic and more humbling. We are turned to the dust and ground of creation with the parable of the sower and the seed. For courage can be at once unwise and destructive, brave but foolish, if it is not tempered by prudence, by practical wisdom; in short, if it is not aware of human limitations, of our own weakness and infirmity.  And prudence can be too cautious and timid unless tempered by courage. Both need justice and charity, love.

We are turned to the ground. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art.” God formed man from the dust of the ground breathing his spirit into us and so we become living beings. In being turned to the ground we are in effect being turned to God and to our connection with the created order. Only so can we begin to reclaim the dignified dust of our humanity. Only so can we be the good ground instead of the waste-ground of the wayside, the rocky ground, or the thorny ground, all of which signal something of the nature of our  falleness and our incompleteness, of folly and sin.

The parable is more than an image, more than an illustration. In Luke’s account, Jesus tells the parable but then provides the interpretation. This shows something of the radical meaning of the Gesima Sundays. They are about an awakening to the inner qualities of grace in us. That awakening means teaching and learning. Thus Paul provides a lesson about the correctives to courage and Luke about the deeper meaning of prudence. In both there is a kind of humility that recalls us to God in the very circumstances in which we find ourselves, a kind of awakening to ourselves in relation to God and creation.

Courage, in the sense of being bold and in calling attention to how well we have persevered in the face of animosities and persecution, can lead to an insidious pride which elevates us above others. We claim a particular identity which we then extol over others. It can easily become the kind of ‘look at me, look at me’ narcissism of our contemporary culture. This is the danger of incurvatus in se, our being turned in upon ourselves but not to the grace of God in us. Instead of self-awareness there is an ignorance of self in our shallow thoughtlessness, in our inconstancies and inconsistencies, and in our worldly preoccupations and distractions as presented in the images of the ground of the way-side, the rocky ground, and the thorny ground.

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