Month: December 2020

Prayers and liturgy

John West, Missionary

The collect for a missionary, in commemoration of The Rev’d John West (1778-1845), Priest, first Protestant missionary to the Red River Valley, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

John WestO GOD, our heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thy blessed Apostles and send them forth to preach thy Gospel of salvation unto all the nations: We bless thy holy Name for thy servant John West, whose labours we commemorate this day, and we pray thee, according to thy holy Word, to send forth many labourers into thy harvest; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 12:24-13:5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:13-24a

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Prayers and liturgy

John Wycliffe, Scholar and Translator

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Wycliffe, (c 1320-84), Scholar, Translator of the Scriptures into English (source):

Thomas Kirkby, John WycliffeO Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant John Wyclif, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:9-16

Artwork: Thomas Kirkby, John Wycliffe, c. 1828. Oil on canvas, Balliol College, University of Oxford.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Becket, Archbishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Becket (1117-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr (source):

O Lord God,
who gavest to thy servant Thomas Becket
grace to put aside all earthly fear and be faithful even unto death:
grant that we, caring not for worldly esteem,
may fight against evil,
uphold thy rule,
and serve thee to our life’s end;
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 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Albert Pierre Dawant, The Murder of St. Thomas BecketThomas Becket was a close personal friend of King Henry II of England and served as his chancellor from 1155. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1162, Henry, seeing an opportunity to exercise control over the church, decided to have his chancellor elected to the post. Thomas saw the dangers of the king’s plan and warned Henry that, if he became archbishop, his first loyalty would be to God and not the king. He told Henry, “Several things you do in prejudice of the rights of the church make me fear that you would require of me what I could not agree to.” What Thomas feared soon came to pass.

After becoming archbishop, Thomas changed radically from defender of the king’s privileges and policies into an ardent champion of the church. Unexpectedly adopting an austere way of life in near-monastic simplicity, he celebrated or attended Mass daily, studied Scripture, distributed alms to the needy, and visited the sick. He became just as obstinate in asserting the church’s interests as he had formerly been in asserting the king’s.

Thomas rejected Henry’s claim to authority over the English Church. Relations with the king deteriorated so seriously that Thomas left England and spent six years in exile in France. He realised that he had to return when the Archbishop of York and six other bishops crowned the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, in contravention of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s rights and authority.

He returned to England with letters of papal support and immediately excommunicated the Archbishop of York and the six other bishops. On Christmas Day 1170 he publicly denounced them from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral. It was these actions that prompted Henry’s infamous angry words, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Innocents

“Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”

The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, argues that the God of the Old Testament is a most horrible character, to which the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins’ discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The use of the term Old Testament for the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures is characteristic of the Christian understanding because of the New Testament writings.

Dawkins’ view of the Old Testament is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the differences and overplays the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of the Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.

Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. It is a tendency that has infected many over the centuries. In the case of the 3rd President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus in accommodation to the precepts of human reason.

All such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally repulsive simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that is an essential part of the mystery of Christmas. If the martyrdom of St. Stephen was not enough of a wake-up call and shock to our thinking about the wondrous birth of Christ, we have the very shocking story of the slaughter to the little ones of Bethlehem, whom Herod slew in his fury, as the carol, puer nobis nascitur puts it.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Innocents’ Day

The collect for today, The Feast of the Holy Innocents, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths: Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith, even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 14:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 2:13-18

Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, 1626-27When wise men from the East visited King Herod in Jerusalem to ask where the king of the Jews had been born, Herod felt his throne was in jeopardy. So, he ordered all the boys of Bethlehem aged two and under to be killed. On this day, the church remembers those children.

The Massacre of the Innocents is recorded only in St Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said to be fulfillment of a prophecy of Jeremiah.

The church has kept this feast day since the fifth century. The Western churches commemorate the innocents on 28 December; the Eastern Orthodox Church on 29 December. Medieval authors spoke of up to 144,000 murdered boys, in accordance with Revelation 14:3. More recent estimates, however, recognising that Bethlehem was a very small town, place the number between ten and thirty.

This episode has been challenged as a fabrication with no basis in actual historical events. James Kiefer has a point-by-point presentation of the objections with replies in defence of biblical historicity.

This is an appropriate day to remember the victims of abortion.

Artwork: Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, 1626-27. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville, Paris.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist on the Sunday after Christmas.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

“The world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

The three holy days of Christmas illuminate our understanding of the Christmas mystery in wonderful ways. The Feast of St. Stephen on the day after Christmas reminds us that love is sacrificial and nothing less than the love which is God moves in us even in and through the sad realities of human suffering and evil. The Feast of the Holy Innocents tomorrow teaches us about innocence and purity as properties which ultimately belong to the Incarnate Christ and to the forms of our participation in his holy life, even by way of anticipation such as in the disturbing yet profound story of the slaughter of the little ones of Bethlehem. It is a hard but deep and radical saying that “thou madest infants to glory thee by their deaths” – yet how else to think about human life without its ground in God? How else to conceive the radical nature of the goodness of God who alone can make something good out of our evil?

But in between the martyrdom of Stephen and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents there is the Feast of St. John the Evangelist. With it we have the divine ground of human lives in all of their complexity. With it we are returned to the wonder of Christmas Eve in the pageant of God’s Word and Son in the Letter to the Hebrews and in John’s Prologue. With it we contemplate the radical mystery of the Incarnation by way of John’s first letter and the ending of the very last chapter of his Gospel. These endings and beginnings are nothing more than the ways in which we are enfolded in eternity, enfolded and embraced in the love of God toward us.

Our Parish tradition on the Sunday after Christmas at the 10:30am service is to have the Christmas Service of Nine Lessons. It is a glorious parade of words, of words written and proclaimed. It complements the Feast of St. John the Evangelist with its emphasis on the witness of John by way of his Gospel and letters, and perhaps his Revelation. Certainly the life of the Church and the doctrine of the Christian Faith is greatly influenced and shaped by “the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John”. Once again, the Divine Word signals life and light communicated to us through what has been seen, looked upon, touched and handled concerning the Word of life, and heard and declared, but importantly, “these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday After Christmas Day

The collect for today, the Sunday after Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Vicente López Portaña, Saint Joseph’s Dream, 1791-92ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:1-7
The Gospel: St Matthew 1:18-25

Artwork: Vicente López Portaña, Saint Joseph’s Dream, 1791-92. Oil on paper attached to cardboard, Prado, Madrid.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint John the Evangelist

The collect for today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

MERCIFUL Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 1:1-5
The Gospel: St. John 21:19-25

Titian, St. John the EvangelistJohn and his brother James (St. James the Greater) were Galilean fishermen and sons of Zebedee. Jesus called the two brothers Boanerges (“sons of thunder”), apparently because of their zealous character; for example, they wanted to call down fire from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritans. John and James, together with Peter, belonged to the inner group of the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. It was John and Peter whom Jesus sent to prepare the final Passover meal.

In the lists of disciples, John always appears among the first four, but usually after his brother, which may indicate that John was the younger of the two.

According to ancient church tradition, St. John the Evangelist was the author of the New Testament documents that bear his name: the fourth gospel, the three epistles of John, and Revelation. John’s name is not mentioned in the fourth gospel (but 21:2 refers to “the sons of Zebedee”), but he is usually if not always identified as the beloved disciple. It is also generally believed that John was the “other disciple” who, with Peter, followed Jesus after his arrest. John was the only disciple at the foot of the cross and was entrusted by Christ with the care of his mother Mary.

After Christ’s resurrection and ascension, John, together with Peter, took a leading role in the formation and guidance of the early church. John was present when Peter healed the lame beggar, following which both apostles were arrested. After reports reached Jerusalem that Samaria was receiving the word of God, the apostles sent Peter and John to visit the new Samaritan converts. Presumably, John was at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). He is not mentioned later in the Acts of the Apostles, so he appears to have left Palestine.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

They are familiar words from the liturgy known as the Benedictus. It follows immediately upon the Sanctus and then carries us into the Anaphora, the prayer of consecration in our modern Canadian Book of Common Prayer, which begins with the words “blessing and glory and thanksgiving.” Here words which echo the Gospel of the First Sunday in Advent (and Christ’s triumphal Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of his Passion), are equally the words that end the Gospel for the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr. Such words illuminate for us the radical meaning of Christmas, the radical meaning of Christ’s holy and blessed birth.

What is always God, always with God, and always of God, is with us. Such is the meaning of Christmas. God’s Word and Son is the Word made flesh. The God who ever is is God with us. We are being gathered together under the wings of Christ’s mothering love in spite of our sins and its destructive follies. The Gospel thus complements the powerful and disturbing lesson from Acts about the martyrdom of Stephen.

He is the proto-martyr, the prototype of all martyrdom or witness to Christ, not by being stoned to death, but as revealing the qualities of loving sacrifice which are at the heart of Christmas and at the heart of the meaning of Christ as Saviour. For centuries upon centuries, this feast followed immediately upon Christmas Day, memorialized in the carol, Good King Wenceslas, “on the Feast of Stephen”. Yet in our contemporary culture, the Feast of Stephen is better known as Boxing Day. The contrast is striking. It is the contrast between endless acquisition and loving sacrifice.

What began as a tradition of care for the servants of the aristocrats who were allowed to take the left-overs of the Christmas feast in boxes for themselves on the day following Christmas has become a day of special sales, a day of getting and spending which contrasts with the idea of sacrificial giving symbolized in the reversal of roles in the carol. The king goes out into the winter snows to bring Christmas cheer to the peasant in the woods. Christmas is for all, omnipopulo, and not just for the rich.

It means the sacrifice of oneself to the good of others and it signals a change in attitude. Stephen’s death imitates Christ’s death; thus his life, the life of Christ. “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”, he says even as Christ prays on the Cross, “Father, forgive them.” The blessings of Christmas are about the qualities of Christ’s life in us; he in us and we in him, just as at Communion we pray “that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us,” not on the presumption of our own righteousness “but in thy manifold and great mercies.” We come in the name of the Lord and not on our own. That is the blessing.

Stephen as the first martyr and proto-type of every form of Christian witness points us to the one in whom we live in the face of the world’s enmities and disorders. He shows us a new and better way, the way of endless love. Such is the love of God. With Stephen, we may say as Perpetua, a later saint, puts it, “another lives in me.”

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Fr. David Curry
Feast of Stephen, Christmastide 2020

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