Year: 2020

Prayers and liturgy

The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

Hans Holbein the Younger, Death and the MiserKEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Artwork: Hans Holbein the Younger, Death and the Miser (from The Dance of Death), 1538. Woodcut, British Museum, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), Archbishop of Canterbury (source):

St. Theodore of TarsusAlmighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray thee, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-5,10
The Gospel: St. Matthew 8:23-27

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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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Prayers and liturgy

Ninian, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Ninian (c. 360 – c. 432), Bishop of Galloway, Apostle to the Picts (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who didst call thy servant Ninian to preach the gospel
to the people of northern Britain:
raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land,
heralds and evangelists of thy kingdom,
that thy Church may make known the immeasurable riches
of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 49:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

Saint Margaret’s Chapel, Saint Ninian windowNinian was the first apostle of Christianity in Scotland. Born in Cumbria to Christian parents, he went to Rome for his education. After being ordained a priest and then a bishop, Ninian was commissioned by Pope Siricus to return to Britain to preach the Christian faith.

Tradition holds that Ninian’s mission to Scotland began in 397, when he landed at Whithorn on Solway Firth. The stone church he built there was known as Candida Casa (“White House”). Recent archaeological excavations in that area have found white masonry from what could be an ancient church.

Saint Ninian’s ministry was centred in the Whithorn and Galloway areas of Scotland, but he is also remembered for bringing the gospel to the “southern Picts”—people living in the areas now known as Perth, Fife, Stirling, Dundee, and Forfar.

As early as the 7th century, Christians were making pilgrimages to St. Ninian’s shrine. By the 12th century, a large cathedral had been built at Whithorn, but it fell into ruins after the Reformation. Yet today, pilgrims still travel there to visit St Ninian’s Cave, where the saint would go when he needed to pray in solitude.

During his 2010 visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Scotland on Saint Ninian’s Day.

Saint Ninian’s Cathedral, Antigonish, Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”), is the Episcopal Seat for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Antigonish. This prayer is posted at the Cathedral website:

Lord our God, You brought to Scotland the faith of the apostles through the teaching of St. Ninian. Grant that we, who have received from him the light of your truth, may remain strong in faith. We ask this through our Lord, Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

Artwork: Saint Ninian, stained glass, Saint Margaret’s Chapel, Edinburgh Castle. Photograph taken by admin, 24 July 2004.

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Sermons

Meditation for Holy Cross Day

And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me

The shadows of the Cross reach forwards and backwards, it seems. It is the central and defining image of the Christian Faith; everything is concentrated on the Cross. There we behold the realities of sin and love.

I am struck by the wonderful coincidence of the Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14th with the early beginning of the School year and the return to academic studies. The Feast itself as marked in the Prayer Book Calendar as Holy Cross Day refers to either the Invention of the Holy Cross associated with the celebrated visit of Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine to Jerusalem, and to her purported discovery of the Holy Cross in the early 4th century, or the 7th century celebration of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. These are, obviously, post-biblical events that belong to the living tradition of the Church, and yet reveal something about the symbolic significance of the Cross in the Christian understanding.

For some the Cross is an uncomfortable and disquieting symbol of human cruelty and civilisational barbarism. Yet it is something more than just that “strange and uncouth thing,” as George Herbert calls it (‘The Crosse’). Somehow there is in the idea of the Cross and in its representations a “beauteous form,” as John Donne suggests (‘What if this Present Were the World’s Last Night’). It is, in the Christian understanding, the meeting place of lovers. As Lancelot Andrewes beautifully puts it, the cross is liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read. It is the great symbol of God’s reconciling love in the redemption of our humanity, the recovery and restoration of our fallen being; of creation restored to God, we might say. The title, ‘invention,’ is suggestive of what belongs to intellectual life, to the discovery of truth and goodness. Invenio crucis. And in the exaltation, the lifting up of the Cross, we are reminded of Christ’s great teaching about the Cross. “And I, I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me” (John 12. 32).

Whether or not, Helena actually discovered the actual cross or pieces thereof upon which Christ was crucified is beside the point and unknowable. Who could possibly know and upon what evidence? There are things which can’t be known empirically or historically; things which are lost in the shadows of time.

We see but in “a glass darkly,” in enigmas and mysteries, in the shadows. The great wonder of Holy Cross Day is that something is glimpsed and known in and through the shadows of our broken world. If creation is revelation then so too is redemption. Something is made known under the shadows of the Cross.

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Prayers and liturgy

Holy Cross Day

The collect for today, Holy Cross Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O BLESSED Saviour, who by thy cross and passion hast given life unto the world: Grant that we thy servants may be given grace to take up the cross and follow thee through life and death; whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit we worship and glorify, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

With the Epistle and Gospel of Passion Sunday:
The Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:20-28

Juan de Valdés Leal, The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 1685Artwork: Juan de Valdés Leal, The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 1685. Oil on canvas, Chapel of St George, Hospital de la Santa Caridad (Holy Charity Hospital), Seville, Spain.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

Link to Audio File for Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 14, 2020

“One … turned back, giving him thanks;  and he was a Samaritan”

Living in the Spirit means walking in the Spirit, Paul says in Galatians. It is an interesting distinction. Living means more than merely existing, it seems. Walking suggests something intentional, something more about our lives, something more that moves in us without which we are not fully alive. That is what is shown in the Gospel. Walking in the Spirit is about the Spirit of God moving in us, living in us.

This Gospel story follows wonderfully upon last Sunday’s reading.. Once again it has to do with Samaritans, the outsiders within Judaism which Jesus often uses to criticize Israel in her failings about the Law. Last Sunday, as we saw, the so-called Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. He unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, the divine and the human. The love of Christ living and moving in us is the unity of divine and human alive in us. What appears as a double motion: on the one hand, human; on the other hand, divine, is the same motion viewed from different standpoints. It is the same thing here: it is all the one turning back and all God in him. Such is the dialectic of human and divine which defines the Christian religion.

Today’s Gospel is the classic story of thanksgiving. This Gospel is appointed for Thanksgiving Day, at least in terms of national thanksgiving. In our more primitive and yet profoundly natural realities, thanksgiving is associated with the harvest, Harvest Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in its larger sensibilities combines the natural and the spiritual, the political and the practical. Holding together the sense of the political with the sense of the natural belongs to the deeper understanding of thanksgiving, a moving from the natural to the political as embraced within the spiritual, we might say.

Voltaire, in his great classic of the Enlightenment, Candide, considers a utopia, a fictional place, an ideal society, in which the only religion is that of thanksgiving. The inhabitants of El Dorado give thanks to God who provides for them all that they need. Simple. And, in a way, profound. But it falls far short of the much more radical doctrine of thanksgiving which Luke presents to us here, and which in Luke’s telling occasions a kind of wonder in Jesus himself.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:25-6:5
The Gospel: St. Luke 17:11-19

James Christensen, Ten LepersArtwork: James Christensen, Ten Lepers, 2016.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 September

In the beginning God … Word

Two of the most foundational and formative intellectual and spiritual texts are before us at the first two Chapels of this first week of school. They challenge us and strengthen us in wonderful ways even in these uncertain times. It is not that they offer certainty but rather a certain way to think about the world and ourselves. They provide an important counter to the negativity of our times. To put it simply, if you see the world as something evil materially and physically speaking, it is not a big step to see one another as evil, as enemies. In short, how we think about the world around us shapes our thinking about our relations with one another. To see the world as evil leads to a discourse of division among ourselves.

I want to begin with where we left off in the bleakness of March last spring in the time of lockdown and isolation. ‘Be careful but be not fearful’, I suggested. How is that possible? In part because of the power and the wisdom of these complementary and interconnected readings from the beginning of Genesis and the beginning of the Gospel according to St. John. They are familiar passages yet we often misconstrue their meaning. What do we mean by ‘beginning’? In truth, at least as the rich and profound philosophical and theological traditions understand these passages, beginning here really means principle, an ????, a principia. We begin with a principle – God as Word – from which all else proceeds and as we shall see to which all returns because all is contained within this principle upon which the being and knowing of all things depends. Such a view unites what we so easily divide. Such a view begins with the Good and the goodness of creation itself without which we misunderstand evil.

I also want to make the related point stated at Encaenia to the graduates only a few weeks ago. It is this. Do not think of yourselves as Covid-19 victims. To think of yourself as a victim is to be a victim twice over. It is to rest in a discourse of division and can only lead to the dangerous demonization of one another and to the disturbing debilitating fear of the other, allophobia and its twin, xenophobia. It leads, in other words, to separation and division in place of unity and community. Schools are “cloisters of learning,” places where a certain kind of intellectual and spiritual intent binds us together. It counters the simplistic narratives of division that see the world as evil and threatening. The word cloister derives from the Persian word, “paradise”, meaning a closed park or garden. It has migrated into the various cultures of the euro-mediterranean world, into the monasteries and to Schools and colleges where it suggests the idea of being part of an intentional culture of learning.

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