Year: 2020

Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday After Trinity

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

O LORD, who never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love: Keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-24
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:15-24

Thornycroft, Parable of the Great SupperArtwork: Theresa Georgina Thornycroft (1855-1947), The Parable of the Great Supper. Oil on canvas, Croydon Art Collection, Museum of Croydon, UK.

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

Link to audio file of Matins & AnteCommunion for Trinity 1

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love

The great mantra for the Trinity season captures the divine self-relation which Trinity Sunday celebrates. That mantra is taken from today’s Epistle reading. The mantra, given as the opening Scriptural sentence for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, is familiar. “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him.” Since 1662, the Epistles and Gospels were taken from the King James Version of the Bible where abideth is translated as dwelleth, echoing perhaps the great Christmas Gospel in which we hear that “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” literally, “tented among us” which suggests something more transitory. “Abideth” suggests something more lasting which is most appropriate for the Trinity season which has very much to do with our abiding eternally in the love of God himself and in the interior realizations about the nature of that love.

In a way, the whole long Trinity Season is about the lessons of love taking root and abiding in us, growing in us, bearing fruit in us. So many of the images of the season, as we will see, are organic and agricultural. We are returned to the land, to the ground, as it were, and yet where we are is the ground where divine love is meant to be moving and living in us. Not because of any special quality in our wills and thoughts, but simply because of God’s love moving in us. God’s love is prior to our loves and without God’s love moving in us our loves are more than incomplete; they are, in fact, unlovely. That is the reason, I think, for this powerful Epistle reading from John that accompanies the equally powerful Gospel reading from St. Luke of the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

The argument and exhortation about God’s love in the Epistle is actually complemented by the Gospel story which highlights the problem of not loving God through our ignorance and indifference towards one another. In a way, it is all about paying attention, or not. “There was a certain rich man … and there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus.” The rich and the poor. These are the classic images of inequality which continue to bedevil our world and day and contribute to the current protests about racism and injustice. What could be more obscene than the grotesque wealth of the global transnational corporate elites, the wealth of a very few, who are virtually unaccountable to the political community? All white males, too, we might add. The parable is, to be sure, a critique of the privileged and the rich in relation to the poor and needy. But more profoundly, it calls attention to how we see one another and how we act or do not act towards one another.

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31

Eduard von Gebhardt, The Rich Man and LazarusArtwork: Eduard von Gebhardt, The Rich Man and Lazarus, 1865. Oil on canvas, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Barnabas the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit: Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 11:22-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:12-16

Willem de Poorter, St. Paul and St. Barnabas at LystraArtwork: Willem de Poorter, St. Paul and St. Barnabas at Lystra, 1636. Oil on panel, Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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Prayers and liturgy

Columba, Abbot of Iona

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Columba (c. 521-597), Abbot of Iona, Missionary (source):

Almighty God,
who didst fill the heart of Columba
with the joy of the Holy Spirit,
and with deep love for those in his care:
grant to thy pilgrim people grace to follow him,
strong in faith, sustained by hope,
and made one in the love that binds us to thee;
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 3:11-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:17-20

Frank Brangwyn, St Columba Landing at IonaArtwork: Frank Brangwyn, St. Columba Landing at Iona, c. 1920. Tempera on canvas, Christ’s Hospital Foundation, Horsham, Sussex.

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Sermons

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

In thanksgiving for the reopening of Christ Church for worship: Laus Deo

“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

God is communion. God is dance. Because “a door was opened in heaven”, our doors too are opened and we enter into the dance of the Trinity. “This is none other but the house of God; this is the Gate of Heaven.” It is written on the very walls of our church.”Behold!” The whole point and being of the Church is about our being opened to God and to our lives in and with God. And God is communion, the communion of the Trinity, and God is dance, the dance of reason and love, the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology so wonderfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed; in short, the ways in which God is utterly other and beyond yet intimately connected to all reality. To think God is to know and love God in the mystery of God’s own being and life. The Creed we just proclaimed provides nothing more or less than a way of thinking about how God is at once more and beyond and yet present and with us. Here is the love that thinks and loves all things in its own loving and thinking. It is about the dance, the dance that connects Christianity to the insights and concerns of the world’s religions and philosophies about a divine principle whose self-relation is the ground of its relation to all else.

We have all gotten used to the strange and awkward dance of social distancing in these unusual times. But the greater dance is the dance of the Lord. “I am the Lord of the Dance” is the most favourite hymn of students at the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill, but even more radically, God is the dance. The technical theological term is perichoresis, the mutual indwelling or dance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The doors are opened that we might celebrate the great wonder of God in himself without which God’s relation to us is mere idolatry and foolishness. How wonderful that our doors should finally be opened during the continuing concerns of the Covid-19 outbreak to celebrate God in himself. “Let us thus think of the Trinity!”

Think God. Nothing could be more counter-culture than this. We have missed out on the actual corporate celebrations of most of Lent, of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, of Easter and Eastertide, of Rogation and Ascension, of Ascensiontide and Pentecost, to be sure. But in the providence of God, we have been able to break our eucharistic fast, and never more wonderfully than on Trinity Sunday, the great feast of God in the majesty of himself, the feast which is the great gathering of all things into their source and ending, God as Trinity: God in the mutual indwelling life of Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Perichoresis signifies God in Himself, God in his own super-essential and utterly self-complete and self-sustaining life which is life essential for us and in every way.

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Prayers and liturgy

Trinity Sunday

The collect for today, the Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that this holy faith may evermore be our defence against all adversities; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 4:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 3:1-15

Giambattista Pittoni, The Nativity with God the Father and the Holy GhostArtwork: Giambattista Pittoni, The Nativity with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, c. 1740. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

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Sermons

Sermon for Pentecost

Click here to listen to audio file of the Services of Mattins & Ante-Communion for Pentecost

“If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another Comforter”

“Another Comforter”, Jesus says, and one that “may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of Truth”. It is a wonderful and profound statement about God and about our life with God. Jesus is the Comforter who has redeemed our humanity by gathering all things into his love for the Father. In his redeeming work, we are recalled to our end in God. Why then “another Comforter”? A substitute for Jesus? A consolation prize? No. It is all about our life in the Spirit of God. Such is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost or Whitsunday. It is not just God for us but God in us.

“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace”, Paul wisely tells us, words which perhaps speak to the fears of death in our current Covid dilemmas. Pentecost looks back to the Jewish celebration of the giving of the Law on the fiftieth day after Passover; the Ten Commandments as the universal moral code of our humanity and our freedom, our freedom to and with God in his will for us. In the Christian understanding, Pentecost is the celebration of the descent of the Holy Ghost or Spirit upon the disciples gathered in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, a celebration of grace which does not annihilate nature and law but perfects them both. The Holy Spirit is the love-knot of the Father and the Son. What joins them now joins us with them.

Wind and fire. These are the sensible and physical images that convey something invisible and spiritual. Such too is the logic of the sacraments; outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. It is not just Christ who is the Alpha and Omega of our lives. “The Holy Ghost”, as Lancelot Andrewes says (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon 1610), “is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities”, all our rituals of remembrance, all our life sacramentally in memoria. “In His coming down all the feasts begin”. He goes on to highlight the essential presence and work of the Spirit in the mysteries of the Faith. “At His annunciation, when He descended on the Blessed Virgin, whereby the Son of God did take our nature, the nature of man”, the beginning of the Incarnation. “And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in His descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually become ‘partakers of the divine nature’, the nature of God”. Pentecost is the Spirit’s “last and greatest coming”, he suggests, for in this text by Jesus we have “the promise and the performance”, the accomplishment of what belongs to the truth of our humanity. In the coming down of the Holy Spirit we are made “partakers of the divine nature”, if we keep his commandments.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Day of Pentecost

The collects for today, The Day of Pentecost, being the fiftieth day after Easter, commonly called Whit-Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

O GOD, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon thy disciples in Jerusalem: Grant that we who celebrate before thee the Feast of Pentecost may continue thine for ever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, until we come to thine eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 2:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-27

Luca Signorelli, Descent of the Holy SpiritArtwork: Luca Signorelli, Descent of the Holy Spirit, c. 1494. Oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino.

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Prayers and liturgy

Joan of Arc

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Joan of Arc (1412-31), Virgin, Visionary, Patron Saint of France (source):

Holy God, whose power is made perfect in weakness: we honor thy calling of Jeanne d’Arc, who, though young, rose up in valor to bear thy standard for her country, and endured with grace and fortitude both victory and defeat; and we pray that we, like Jeanne, may bear witness to the truth that is in us to friends and enemies alike, and, encouraged by the companionship of thy saints, give ourselves bravely to the struggle for justice in our time; through Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 3:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 12:25-30

Isidore Patrois, Joan of Arc Led to Her ExecutionArtwork: Isidore Patrois, Joan of Arc Led to Her Execution, 1867. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Rouen.

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