Day: September 17, 2020

Sermons

Meditation for the Eve of Ember Friday

The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you

Ember Days coincide more or less with the seasons of the natural year, explicitly so with the Autumn Ember Days. There are the Advent Ember Days just on the cusp of winter; the Lenten Ember Days in the spring, and the Ember Days which fall on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of the Octave of Pentecost. But all of the Ember Days have as an essential and central focus the ordained ministry and its meaning in the life of the Church. Thus the readings for Pentecost Ember Wednesday are appointed for each of the Wednesdays in the Ember Seasons.

The Ember Days recall us to the life of the Spirit in the Church and so to the role and place of the ordained ministry. For Anglicans, in particular, the focus is on the office in the person, not the person in the office; a calling attention to what the ordained ministry of deacons, priests and bishops is for. It is for all of us together in the body of Christ. The ordained ministry exists for the glory of God and the good of the Church and its people. It is rooted in service and sacrifice through which we are all reminded of the forms of our ministry.

In a way, it is all about grace, the grace that is given through the different gifts of the Spirit, gifts which belong to the building up of the body of Christ, to our life in Christ through our lives of prayer and praise, of sacrifice and service. The ordained ministry exists for the good of the whole body of Christ in preaching and teaching, in the proclamation of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments which belong to our life in the Spirit in the body of Christ.

Each Ember Season has a special focus of concern and prayer. The Autumn Ember Days pray for Labour and Industry; the Advent Ember Days for Peace in the World; the Lenten Ember Days for Missionary Work in our own Country; the  Ember Days of Pentecost for the Unity of the Christian Church. Such matters of concern remind us of the wider dimensions of prayer that reach out into every aspect of our lives. Christian life is a whole life, the whole of our life in, with and towards God.

The Gospel belongs to the themes of Pentecost in the gifts of the Spirit bestowed upon the ministers of the Church, unworthy as we are, for the good of the whole Church. Austin Farrer famously observed that a priest is a walking sacrament, the ordained means by which the kingdom of God is near us. The Ember Days remind us of the ways in which we are enfolded in grace.

The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you

Fr. David Curry
Eve of Ember Friday
September 17, 2020

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 September

So God created man in his own image

Everything unfolds from the principia, the principle of the being and knowing of all things, including our humanity. Such is the wonder of creation in its truth, its relation to the Creator. “God is the beginning and end of all things, especially rational creatures,” Thomas Aquinas reminds us, revealing how the Genesis story belongs to an intellectual consideration of the world as something for thought. So where are we in this story?

This week in Chapel we have pondered Genesis 1, looking at the pageant of creation in the first so-called five days and, then, on Thursday and Friday, the work of the sixth day which brings us to the creation of the ‘adam’, our humanity, collectively or generically speaking. ‘Adam’ here is not yet the name of an individual but the collective name for human beings. The story of creation in Genesis 1 is an unpacking of what is contained in the opening phrase especially as seen through the lens of John 1 and the traditions of Hellenic philosophy. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation is about an activity of distinguishing one thing from another within the unity of the world as an ordered whole, a cosmos, we might say. It is the unfolding of what is in the principia, God.

The significance of the Genesis account of creation lies in part in the repeated refrain that “God saw that it was good,” With the work of the sixth day, the whole of creation is said to be “very good.” Creation is an explicitly ordered affair; the formlessness, void, and abyss are all contained within the principle, God. This counters an ancient and modern view that posits chaos as prior to order and not just in a temporal sense. There is always the lingering fear in some ancient cultures, such as the Sumerians, that chaos will overwhelm and destroy all forms and aspects of order. That view results in a state of fearful uncertainty. Genesis frees us from the fear of the forces of an arbitrary nature by its relation to an intellectual principle. And our humanity?

Is humanity simply an afterthought, a left-over in the pageant of creation? No. Something quite wonderful and amazing is said alone about the ‘adam,’ about our humanity. Alone of all of the works of creation, only about our humanity is it said explicitly that we are made in the image of God. What does that mean? Creation is revelation, to be sure, the revelation of an ordering principle in the pageant of creation itself. All that we can say is that we are made in the image of that principle. It provides a very high view of the dignity of our humanity. To be made in the image of God also belongs to the essential goodness of the created order, something which is said not just to be good in each of its parts but the whole of it “very good.” We are at once  connected to everything else in the created order and to God himself.

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