Month: November 2020

Prayers and liturgy

Remembrance Day

A prayer of The Very Rev Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York:

Lest We ForgetO Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.

Brussels Cathedral, Memorial TabletThis memorial tablet to the British Empire dead of the First World War was unveiled in the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, Brussels, on 27 July 1927. Photograph taken by admin, 14 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

Martin of Tours

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Martin (c 316-397), Monk, Bishop of Tours (source):

Almighty God,
who didst call Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for those in need,
and empower thy Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as the children of God;
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 Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:34-40

Moreau, Saint MartinOne of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, Martin was born to pagan parents and, although intending to become a Christian, followed his father into the Roman army. About three years later, in Amiens, France, came the famous incident portrayed in the statue seen here.

On a cold winter day, he met a beggar at the city gates. Drawing his sword, he cut his military cloak in two and gave half to the man. In a dream that night, he saw Christ wearing the half-cloak he had given away and saying, “Martin, yet a catechumen, has covered me with his garment”. Martin was baptised shortly thereafter.

After being discharged from the army, he met St. Hilary at Poitiers upon the latter’s return from exile in 360. Hilary provided a piece of land where Martin founded the first monastic community in Gaul. He lived there for ten years until 371, when he reluctantly accepted a call from the people of Tours to become their bishop.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity on the Octave Day of All Saints

Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 22 on the Octave Day of All Saints

“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion?”

This Gospel question complements and even intensifies the teaching which is at the heart of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” The various readings provided for the Octave of All Saints along with the readings for today have very much to do with mercy. You get what you give, but if we are not merciful? Then there can be no mercy for us. As with all of the Beatitudes, the question is about what is moving in us. The question is about the inner qualities of soul, about the matters of character. What kind of person are you?

As such these readings speak to the contemporary confusions about the self and show us once again that the knowledge of the self is bound up with the knowledge of God. Character is about our lives as lived for something greater than ourselves without which we cannot be a self. Mercy lies at the heart of the story even in the denial of mercy.

Mercy is not about being nice. This is one of the common misconceptions about mercy. Being nice doesn’t really mean much of anything. A more serious misconception is to suppose that mercy overrides justice, that mercy and justice somehow stand in opposition to each other. One of the readings provided for services in the Octave and on patronal festivals is the Matthaean Apocalypse. It is a vision that seems to be harsh and judgemental in the separation of the sheep and the goats but really belongs to the mercy of being called to account. It provides the scriptural basis of what becomes the seven works of corporal mercy. In being called to account we discover that our actions towards one another reveal our relation to God. “Inasmuch as ye have done this to one of the least of these my brethren,” Jesus says,  “ye have done it also unto me.” Our actions reveal our hearts and minds. That is exactly the point of the Gospel of the unforgiving servant. It is an example from the negative about the importance and the necessity of showing mercy.

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Prayers and liturgy

Week at a Glance, 9 – 15 November

Tuesday, November 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, November 15th, Trinity 23
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, November 17th
7:00m Christ Church Book Club: Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals (2019) by Ken Follett and The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011) by David McCulloch.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Second Sunday After Trinity

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

LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy house hold the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 1:3-11
The Gospel: St Matthew 18:21-35

Claude Vignon, The Parable of the Unforgiving ServantArtwork: Claude Vignon, The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, 1629. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours

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Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

Abbey of Echternach, St. WillibrordO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: St. Willibrord, altarpiece, Abbey of Echternach, Luxembourg.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 November

They desire a better country

The readings in Chapel this week connect the sacred feast of All Saints with the secular observance of Remembrance Day upcoming next week. John’s vision of the redeemed community of our humanity in its essential unity expressed through diversity is further explicated precisely in the inner qualities of character that belong to an ethical understanding of the Summun Bonum, the highest good, found in the Beatitudes. The great ethical teaching of Christ grounds our happiness in God. We have seen how that ethical teaching about living for a principle that is greater than oneself is part of a long tradition that embraces the religious and philosophical traditions of ancient China, India, Greece and Rome as well as the traditions of moral philosophy that belong to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We do well to remember such a community of spirit.

That vision and teaching encompasses the Solemnity of All Souls within the eight-day Octave of All Saints and catapults us into the stark and sombre remembering of those who gave their lives in the defining and devastating wars of the twentieth century. In the history of the School, that remembrance looks back even further to the conflicts of the nineteenth century with all of the ambiguities and complexities that are part of the idea of empire and colonialism. It is neither a pretty picture nor a single story.

The lessons read on Thursday and Friday prepare us for Remembrance Day, a secular event enfolded within a sacred or religious understanding. To deny this is to deny the obvious at the same time as to make religion the scapegoat for all our discontents. But such thinking will not withstand much in the way of careful scrutiny. The lesson from Hebrews read in the Octave of All Saints says that “these all died in faith,” reminding us that we are part of “a great cloud of witnesses”, witnesses to what is greater than ourselves. At the very least, the idea of something more and greater than ourselves informs political life but cannot be reduced to it. The idea of desiring a better country provides a way to understand the enormous sacrifices that thousands upon thousands from distant lands made in the morass of the battlefields of Europe in the First World War and then more globally in the Second World War. The School’s cenotaph bears eloquent witness to the supreme sacrifice that students from King’s made to those defining events of the twentieth century. To remember their sacrifice is not to engage in some sort of anglo-philia or empire worship.

The desire for a better country requires serious reflection upon the ethical, upon the Summum Bonum. It is the great question for our disordered world. For whatever it means to desire a better country it cannot mean what benefits the cultural and corporate elites at the expense of everybody else. At issue is the commitment to the civic or mediating institutions such as family, school and church that temper and humanise the destructive, levelling, and totalising tendencies of the global world.

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Sermons

Sermon for All Souls’ Day

Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted

The Feast of All Saints embraces the Solemnity of All Souls. This is our comfort and consolation. We are reminded that the great multitude which no man can number includes the vast array of souls who have died and gone before us. True enough. But the Solemnity of All Souls confronts us with the limits of human memory.

Our memories are fragile and finite. We have in our parishes various ways in which we try to remember those who have gone before us in our churches, our communities and our families signalled in memorial plaques and window dedications and so forth. The sad and bitter truth is that our memories are poor and fragile things. At the time, there is the feeling of the intensity of loss but in the course of time that fades away like the leaves of autumn. We confront the sad failing of our memories.

This is hardly a comfort. Yet All Souls is the strongest possible counter and comfort to our failing memories. It reminds us in no uncertain terms that God’s remembering is not like our remembering, fragile and incomplete, more about forgetting than unforgetting. All Souls signals the profoundly comforting idea that all souls are known and loved in God. That is surely our comfort, our strength and our salvation.

It belongs to the radical meaning of the second Beatitude. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” Not only do we need not be defined by suffering or sorrow, by loss and death, but neither are we defeated and discouraged by our failures to remember those who were once so dear to us. Why not? Because they are remembered in God, known and loved in God. And so are we. The remembering of All Souls recalls us to who we are in God’s eternal loving and knowing of us. That is a great comfort and consolation in our shattered and broken world. All Souls is about God’s remembering love moving in us. That is always greater than our sorrows and loss.

Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted

Fr. David Curry
Solemnity of All Souls (transf.)
November 3rd, 2020

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Prayers and liturgy

All Souls’ Day

The collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
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 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27

Mercantonio Bassetti, ParadiseArtwork: Mercantonio Bassetti, Paradise, before 1630. Oil on canvas, Galleria Farnese, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard Hooker, Doctor of the Church of England

The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):

Hooker Statue, Exeter CathedralO God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people
thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
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 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23

The statue of Richard Hooker is situated outside Exeter Cathedral, England.

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