Year: 2020

Prayers and liturgy

Clement, Bishop of Rome

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Clement (c. 30-c. 100), Bishop of Rome, Martyr (source):

Eternal Father, creator of all,
whose martyr Clement bore witness with his blood
to the love that he proclaimed and the gospel that he preached:
give us thankful hearts as we celebrate thy faithfulness,
revealed to us in the lives of thy saints,
and strengthen us in our pilgrimage as we follow 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 Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:37-45

Pietro de' Pietri, St. Clement giving the veil to St, Flavia DomitillaSaint Clement was one of the first leaders of the church in the period immediately after the apostles. Some commentators believe that he is the Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3. If so, he was a companion and fellow-worker of Paul. The Roman Catholic Church regards him as the fourth pope.

St Clement is best known for his Epistle to the Corinthians, dated to about 95. Clement addressed some of the same issues that Paul had addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians. The church at Corinth apparently still had problems with internal dissension and challenges to those in authority. Clement reminds them of the importance of Christian unity and love, and that church leaders serve for the good of the whole body.

Although the letter was written in the name of the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth, St. Clement’s authorship is attested by early church writers. This epistle was held in very high regard in the early church; some even placed it on a par with the canonical writings of the New Testament.

Artwork: Pietro de’ Pietri, St. Clement giving the veil to St, Flavia Domitilla, c. 1710-16. Watercolour, Royal Collection, Windsor.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“Then Jesus turned”

Times of transition are times of renewal. There is a wonderful and profound complementarity in the turning of Jesus to us in today’s Gospel and the repeated refrain of turning in the Introit and Gradual Psalm for this day. “Turn us, O God our Saviour,” and with greater intensity, “Wilt thou not turn again and quicken us, / that thy people may rejoice in thee?” In Psalm 80 appointed for Morning Prayer, we also pray that God may “turn us again”. It is a repeated refrain with an increasing degree of intensity culminating in the phrase, “turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;/show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” Jesus turns his countenance, his face, towards us and that both sums up the whole course of our lives and inaugurates a renewal of our lives in the God in whom we find our wholeness.

We neglect the wonder of this Gospel passage. It belongs to the beginning of John’s Gospel and yet we read it at the near end of the Christian year. In John’s Gospel it is the first time in which Jesus speaks to us directly. It is the directness of his address that is so compelling. Jesus steps out of the background and into the foreground of our lives. He is highlighted by John the Baptist: “Behold, the Lamb of God.” He is our ending and our beginning.

“In my beginning is my end,” begins T.S.Eliot’s poem East Coker in his Four Quartets yet it ends with “In my end is my beginning”. There is a necessary kind of reciprocity and interchange between endings and beginnings. As he puts it in Little Gidding, “The end is where we start from.” This states simply but profoundly a philosophical commonplace, especially in terms of Aristotelian causality. The end, purpose or goal, is the necessary starting point for the understanding of any and all forms of change and development, and for the understanding of what things are.

And so this Sunday marks an ending and a beginning. That is its wonder and its beauty. It is redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back to the one from whom all things do come and to whom all things return. Is that return just about the same old, same old, the dreary rut of our usual patterns and our usual complaints, our sins and follies? Or is it about the possibility of a new and deeper understanding of who we are in the sight of the God who turns to us? This Sunday looks back and looks ahead only because it grounds us in the eternal abiding of God with us. Jesus turned to the disciples, to us. God turns us. The two movements are more than complementary; they are two movements in one. God’s turning to us is our turning to him.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday Next Before Advent

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

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45

Marten de Vos, Christ Triumphant over Death and SinArtwork: Marten de Vos, Christ Triumphant over Death and Sin, 1590. Oil on panel, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edmund (841-869), King of the East Angles, Martyr (source):

St. Michael’s Church, Ghent, S. Edmundus RexO eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
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 St. Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:16-22

Edmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St. Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St. Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St. Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

Click here to read Fr. David Curry’s sermon for the Feast of St. Edmund.

Artwork: S. Edmundus Rex, stained glass, St. Michael’s Church, Ghent. Photograph taken by admin, 11 October 2014.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 November

Thy word is a lantern unto my feet

The Psalms are the songs of the Hebrew Scriptures but also shape the hymnody and song traditions of the Christian Church. We may not be allowed to sing in Chapel but we can say the psalms which provide such a rich commentary and reflection upon the powerful ethical teachings presented to us in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and which connect as well to the wisdom and understanding of other philosophical and religious traditions. That is especially the case, it seems to me, with Psalm 119 in relation to the profound wisdom of the Ten Commandments; in short, the Law.

Psalm 119 is the longest psalm and indeed the longest chapter in the whole of the scriptures. It is made up of twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each for a total of one hundred and seventy-six verses. The first word in each stanza begins in order with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which consists of twenty-two letters. Every verse contains words which signify the Law – the various synonyms in the King James version are word, precepts, commandments, statutes, testimonies, judgements. The whole psalm is an extended meditation on God as Word in whose Law we find our delight and our freedom; in other words, our good.

This meditation on God’s Word or Law looks back to the Torah, the first five books or scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures, at the center of which are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai. Israel in the wilderness is the theme of the Book of Exodus, a going out of slavery in Egypt and into the freedom of service to God. Something is learned in the wilderness journeyings of the people of Israel, all their murmuring, complaining, (or kvetching to use a wonderful Yiddish word) notwithstanding. The freedom is the Law, the will of God for our humanity. The Ten Commandments are light and freedom.

This challenges our negative view of law as restraint and limitation and the assumption that freedom means doing just whatever you want or think you want to do. The very idea of the Ten Commandments counters the childish and adolescent commonplace of ‘you’re not the boss of me’ kind of attitude. To the contrary, the Ten Commandments are our freedom and truth. They are not a random  list of proscriptions or prescriptions; they embody a comprehensive understanding of the nature of our obligations and duties towards God and one another and as such articulate the truth of ourselves as responsible and rational agents. There are ten – no more no less. There is nothing to be taken away from nor added to them. They are complete, comprehensive, and compelling in their logic and form.

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Prayers and liturgy

Hilda, Abbess

St. Hilda Ashford, St. HildaThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Hilda (614-680), Abbess of Whitby (source):

O eternal God,
who madest the abbess Hilda to shine as a jewel in England
and through her holiness and leadership
didst bless thy Church with newness of life and unity:
so assist us by thy grace
that we, like her, may yearn for the gospel of Christ
and bring reconciliation to those who are divided;
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: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 19:27-29

Artwork: St. Hilda, stained glass, St. Hilda’s Church, Ashford, England.

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Prayers and liturgy

Margaret, Queen

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Margaret (1046-1093), Queen of Scotland, Philanthropist, Reformer of the Church (source):

O God, the ruler of all,
who didst call thy servant Margaret to an earthly throne
and gavest to her both zeal for thy Church and love for thy people,
that she might advance thy heavenly kingdom:
mercifully grant that we who commemorate her example
may be fruitful in good works
and attain to the glorious crown of thy saints;
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: Proverbs 31:10-11, 20, 26, 28
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:44-52

Joseph Noel Paton, Queen Margaret and King Malcom CanmoreSt. Margaret was born in Hungary to a Saxon noble family in exile. In 1057, she and her family were able to return to England, but they were forced to move to Scotland following William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066. A few years later, the princess Margaret married Malcolm Canmore, King of the Scots, in Dunfermline.

Queen Margaret was married to Malcolm for almost twenty-five years; her death followed his by only a few days. She bore six sons and two daughters. Three sons ruled as kings of Scotland—Edgar, Alexander I, and David I (later saint)—while a daughter, Matilda, became the queen of Henry I of England.

Margaret, an inspirational monarch of great Christian devotion, undertook many works of charity. She protected orphans, provided for the poor, visited prisoners in her husband’s dungeons, cleansed the sores of lepers, and washed the feet of beggars. She encouraged and enabled the founding of monasteries, churches, and hostels. Her excellent education served Scotland well, for under her influence the Scottish court became known as a place of culture and learning.

An advocate of church reform, Margaret supported revival of observances that had lapsed into disuse, including Lenten fasts, Easter communion, and refraining from work on Sundays. She also had Iona re-built following its destruction by Viking raiders.

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Prayers and liturgy

Hugh, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Hugh (1135-1200), Bishop of Lincoln (source):

Jan Erasmus Quellinus, Miracle of Saint Hugh of LincolnO God,
who didst endow thy servant Hugh
with a wise and cheerful boldness
and didst teach him to commend to earthly rulers
the discipline of a holy life:
give us grace like him to be bold in the service of the gospel,
putting our confidence in Christ alone,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Titus 2:7-8,11-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47

Artwork: Jan Erasmus Quellinus, Miracle of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, first half of 17th century. Oil on canvas, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 23

Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;
and unto God the things that are God’s

This ethical teaching speaks directly to the nature of our obligations towards one another and towards God. It seems straightforward and clear but as with most ethical teachings it is more about a way of thinking and acting regardless of circumstance and situation. Hence it is necessarily challenging. It is a kind of Solomonic judgment akin to Jesus’ equally famous words in the story of the woman taken in adultery: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” In other words, this ethical teaching calls us to account with respect to the love of God and the love of neighbour. It is about a distinction within a unity like the two tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments. Duties to one another are bound up in our duties to God. Such things belong to self-knowledge.

But what does that mean in our post-Christian culture and world? This New Testament saying becomes a critical part of a later discourse about the relationship between the sacred and the secular which plays out in such different ways at different times. There is, for example, Ambrose’s rebuke of the Emperor Theodosius, or the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages, or the Erastian mode where the church is a department of the state with or without restrictions on its teaching. Theology and politics are more often than not bound up with one another as the phrase cuius regio eius religiowhich defined early modern Europe reminds us – ‘whosever the region his the religion.’ But here in North America, Christ’s words usually refer to the so-called separation between church and state which is mostly misunderstood. In its modern and particularly American context, that separation means nothing more than that no ecclesiastical denomination, religious organisation or group would have any privileged standing politically speaking. In other words, no established church, state sponsored and with a certain special status. It doesn’t mean no religion or no sense of the idea of God or of ethical commitments. It is an endeavour to counter the sectarian forms of religion that have sometimes contributed to division and hatred.

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