Month: December 2020

Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday in Advent

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

RAISE up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:4-7
The Gospel: St John 1:19-29

Master of San Torpè, The Witness of John the BaptistArtwork: Master of San Torpè, The Witness of John the Baptist, 1310-20. Tempera on panel, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 December

December Last Chapels

Last chapels, whether at the end of Michaelmas Term or at the end of the school year, are rather poignant times. This year our last chapel services seem somewhat anticlimactic coming after the Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Psalms owing to the shift from exams to classes. Yet they provide an opportunity to think more deeply about the great Advent pageant of Word coming to us in the Service of Nine Lessons.

All of the readings were prefaced by introductory phrases that give an explicitly Christian meaning to the service. The two lessons from Genesis, the three lessons from Isaiah, and the lesson from Micah are all seen in terms of their fulfillment in the story of Christ illustrated by Luke’s account of the Annunciation, Matthew’s account of the birth in Bethlehem, and John’s prologue about the Word made flesh. The readings form a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration.

Though explicitly Christian, the readings are not exclusively so since they really belong to a long and profound tradition of reading and thinking about God as Word, logos. In other words, the service is logos-centric, something which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common in terms of their indebtedness to logos, word or reason, as coming out of the Greek and Hellenic traditions of philosophical reflection. Advent is profoundly philosophical.

That is signified through the great questions of Advent which open us to the truth of God ever present and ever coming towards us in the ways of our endeavours to understand that which is greater than ourselves. In our last Chapel service for the 11s, we read the story of the Annunciation with Mary’s question, “How shall this be?”. It is a question of genuine intellectual interest belonging to the desire to know. It leads to her great response, “Be it unto me according to thy word,” a phrase which speaks to the educational project of being defined by ideas conveyed by words coming to us. We also read at the last Chapel service for the 12s the great Christmas Gospel, the last reading in the Pageant from John’s Prologue, about “the Word made flesh”. Augustine famously noted that he already knew about the Word which was “in the beginning”, the Word which “was God”, and the Word which “was God”, words that mark the beginning of that Gospel, from the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists. This looks back to Plato and forwards to his heirs in the Neoplatonisms of Augustine’s own time. The Word is the intellectual-principle, the principle of the being and knowing of all things in God. Thus the Advent Christmas Pageant of Word has a universal dimension and scope.

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Prayers and liturgy

Ignatius, Bishop & Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Ignatius (d. c. 107), Bishop of Antioch, Martyr (source):

Feed us, O Lord, with the living bread
and make us drink deep of the cup of salvation
that, following the teaching of thy bishop Ignatius,
and rejoicing in the faith
with which he embraced the death of a martyr,
we may be nourished for that eternal life
which he ever desired;
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: Romans 8:35-39
The Gospel: St. John 12:23-26

Maxim Sheshukov, The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius the God-bearerIgnatius, who became Bishop of Antioch c. 69, is a key witness of the early church in the era immediately following the apostles.

Nothing certain is known of his episcopate before his journey from Antioch to Rome as a prisoner condemned to death in the arena. Arrested during the persecution of the emperor Trajan, he was received in Smyrna by Bishop (later Saint) Polycarp and delegates from several other churches in Asia Minor.

While at Smyrna, Ignatius wrote letters to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, and Rome. Later, at Troas, he wrote to the churches at Philadelphia and Smyrna, and to Polycarp.

In his letters, Ignatius clearly affirmed Christ’s divinity and his resurrection from the dead. He encouraged all Christians to maintain church unity in and through the Eucharist and the authority of the local bishop, and he wrote against a heresy that contained elements of Docetism, Judaism, and possibly Gnosticism.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 3

“Art thou he that should come?”

“How shall this be?” Mary asks the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Advent, too, is all annunciation, we might say. “Art thou he that should come?” John the Baptist in prison asks Jesus by way of two of his disciples. Jesus in turn asks the multitudes with repeated intensity about John the Baptist, “what went ye out for to see?” The questions of Advent call us to account because they call us into the presence of God at once always present and yet always coming to us. The question the city asks in the Gospel for Advent 1, namely, “Who is this?”, is really the question about  ’who is God?’ and ‘who is God with us?’

At issue is our awareness of God, the divine light enlightening the darkness of our minds again and again in the ways of our coming to God. The questions illuminate an important feature of our humanity. They signal the desire to know, the eros, the passionate desire to know, as Plato teaches. We are created to know ‘each in accord with the capacity of the beholder to behold’. Man desires and delights to praise God, Augustine teaches (“laudare te vult homo… ut laudare te delectet”). It belongs to our nature to know, Aristotle says. That in turn presupposes that there is something to be learned, something to be known. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our hearts are restless – inquietum – until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine, Confessions 1.1).

This goes a long way towards countering several different modern dilemmas about whether education is in any way possible. The question that John the Baptist has his disciples ask Jesus informs the wonderful and beautiful Matin Responsory of Palestrina, sometimes sung at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, quoting the Gospel directly, “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”

The great readings of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols are all prefaced by introductory phrases that give the service a clearly Christian context and meaning. The two readings from Genesis, the three readings from Isaiah, and the reading from Micah all locate certain themes in terms of their fulfillment in Christ signalled in the readings from Luke, Matthew, and John. The whole sequence forms a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the radical meaning of redemption in the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration, as it were, but all through a kind of meditation on the meaning of God with us, Emmanuel. But that idea of the Word made flesh coming to us through the pageant of the Word written and proclaimed belongs to a larger consideration about the nature of education and about our lives in faith. In other words, though the service is explicitly Christian, it is not exclusively so since it touches upon the logos-centric nature of God as Word, as intellectual-principle, as it were, summed up in the 9th Lesson from John’s Prologue, itself the great Gospel of Christmas.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 14 – 20 December

Tuesday, December 15th, Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme 2: St. Augustine’s Confessions

Sunday, December 20th, Fourth Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:2-10

Massimo Stanzione, John the Baptist Preaching in the WildernessArtwork: Massimo Stanzione, John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 December

How shall this be?

Advent is the season of holy questions that belong to the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light opening us out to hope, joy, and peace. Nowhere is that concentrated more profoundly than in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, a service first instituted at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. It spoke to a world in darkness and despair and in the agony of loss. So, too, it speaks to us at King’s-Edgehill in these challenging times. Like Mary’s question, it opens us out to a kind of miracle.

We were unable to have the ‘big’ service of Grades 6 through 11 at Christ Church this year or to be allowed to have congregational singing but we were able to find creative ways to have services for all the School within certain groupings; in short, four services involving a wonderful range of readers, musicians, and servers, and all in the Chapel. While not all together as one, we were nonetheless together in the hearing of the same powerful lessons of Scripture. The service was structured around the great Advent Matin Responsory (arranged by Palestrina, 16th century) and by way of the traditional verses of the Veni Emmanuel which is built around the Great ‘O’ Antiphons. Those antiphons highlight various scriptural names and titles associated with Jesus Christ such as O Emmanuel (God with us), O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai(Lord), O Jesse Virgula (Rod of Jesse), O Clavis Davidica (Key of David), O Oriens (Day-spring or star), and O Rex Gentium (King of the Gentiles). The initial worlds of the antiphons more or less in their reverse order form an acrostic: O Emmanuel, O Rex, O Oriens, O Clavis, O Radix (‘virgula” in the hymn), O Adonai, O Sapientia, forming ERO CRASwhich can be loosely translated as “I will be there tomorrow”, in anticipation of the advent of Christ.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The collect for today, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who stooped to raise fallen humanity
through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:
grant that we, who have seen thy glory
revealed in our human nature
and thy love made perfect in our weakness,
may daily be renewed in thine image
and conformed to the pattern of thy Son
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Proverbs 8:22-35
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-28

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, Madonna of the RoseArtwork: Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, Madonna of the Rose, 1885. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

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Events

Service of Lessons and Carols 2020

On Sunday, 6 December, the annual Service of Lessons and Carols was held at Hensley Memorial Chapel, King’s-Edgehill School, Windsor. Due to Covid-19, congregational singing is not permitted, so Fr. David Curry re-arranged the order of service to include congregational responsorial readings from the Book of Psalms, based on the great Advent Matins Responsory as arranged by Palestrina.

The Order of Service is posted here.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 2

“My words shall not pass away”

Today’s strong and rather disturbing words seem to complement the apocalyptic nature of our current times. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring”.  They seem to speak to our fears and worries, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, to our anxieties on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. How, we might ask, is this comforting? How is this good news if even “the powers of heaven shall be shaken”? Such things must surely unsettle us. They seem to convey the opposite of hyggelig, the Danish word for coziness and material comfort, the cuddle and huddle of the sentimental and the sensual that seems to define our age.

There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present. Yet these disturbing warnings about judgement are intended to provide us with patience and comfort and, even more, with hope. Such is the burden of Cranmer’s Collect which derives from the Epistle and from Jesus’s claim in the Gospel that “my words shall not pass away”.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logos-centric. They are all quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions which place a high value on the Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Quran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture means that which is written. What is revealed is for thought, for serious philosophical reflection.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime”, St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” He is referring to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and not what will come to be the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, the greatest number of which will paradoxically come from him. He states an important principle about revealed religion. It is something written down for our learning. This grants a priority to reading, especially reading out loud such as in our liturgy because God, as Cranmer puts it, “has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning”.

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