Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Third Sunday in Lent
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Third Sunday in Lent.
Month: March 2021
Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
“For ye were sometimes darkness”
How do we face the darkness of ourselves and the darkness of our world? Do we seek to deny the darkness of sin and evil, the darkness of despair and depression? Do we seek all manner of distractions to escape the things which we confront outside us and within us?
In a way, today’s Gospel is rather dark and disturbing. We are asked to think about evil not as something out there in some sort of Manichaean manner – as if COVID-19, or the world itself in the physical phenomenon of wind and storm, of disease and sickness is evil or that evil is other people. That is to divide the world into good and evil in a simplistic and dualistic way and to judge oneself to be good and others evil. We are challenged to consider the divisions and contradictions in ourselves and our relation to them and to ponder the darkness of despair and depression that are very much about how we think about ourselves and others.
As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act 2. 2) Everything turns on our thinking. C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image, itself a neglected (or discarded!) book, nicely paraphrases the great insight of Boethius (6th century AD): “the character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the subject known but on the knowing faculty,” on us as knowers, as thinkers. How we face the darkness is about our thinking. That is what this Gospel story sets before us.
But the Gospel, as we have it in our Canadian Prayer Book, is incomplete; it is an abbreviated form of the slightly longer and more complete pericope which had been read for centuries. Paul in his Epistle reading says that “ye were sometimes darkness,” only to go on to say “but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” It is as if the Gospel, as presented in its abbreviated form, attends only to the first clause and ignores the second which is illustrated in the more complete version.
“The last state of that man is worse than the first,” the Gospel reading ends. A kind of ending, to be sure, about the deep darkness of our despair really, but that is not the real ending of the Gospel passage. As Luke tells us, “and it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Lk. 11. 27-28). These last two verses complete the reading and help us to face the darkness.
Week at a Glance, 8 – 14 March
Tuesday, March 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, March 14th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Tuesday, March 16th, Eve of St. Patrick
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme III
Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through March.
The Third Sunday in Lent
The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
WE beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 5:1-14
The Gospel: St Luke 11:14-26
Artwork: Sébastien Bourdon, Healing the Demoniac, c. 1853-57. Oil on canvas, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.
Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Perpetua, Saint Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):
O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
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: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14
Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.
The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appear to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.
Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.
Artwork: Gustave Doré, The Christian Martyrs, 1871. Oil on canvas, Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, France.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 March
Out of the deep
De Profundis is the Latin title for Psalm 130, one of the seven Penitential Psalms in the Christian understanding, and one which has influenced poets and writers such as Christina Rossetti in a poem with that title. “I strain my heart, I stretch my hands, and catch at hope.” In lieu of hymns which have been curtailed by the restrictions of COVID-19, we have used the Psalms on occasion to complement the Scripture readings. The Psalms are the prayer book and hymn book for both Jews and Christians.
The various voices of the Psalms contribute to our ethical thinking about our life together as a community of learners. This week Psalm 130 complemented the two Gospel stories that were read in Chapel, the one for Junior Chapel and the Grade 10s on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and the other for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s respectively. Together they help in the task of facing honestly, responsibly, and maturely the stresses of our times.
On Monday and Tuesday, the story of Jesus stilling the sea-storm was read. It speaks to our world and day as captured in the opening line of Psalm 130. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.” On Thursday and Friday, that opening phrase of the Psalm also connects to the deep distress of suffering and the crying out for healing, not altogether unlike the cries for vaccines in our country and world. In this case, there is the wonder of a double healing which reveals the nature of the ethical: it is at once near to us and also reaches out to us from afar. Such is the healing touch and the healing word of Christ in the midst of the sea-storms of our hearts. Such is the nature of the Good which cannot be constrained.
How do we face the sturm und drang of our world and day? Sturm und drang is an intriguing German term for a literary movement in the late 18th century that contributed to German and English Romanticism. Taken from the title of a literary work, it literally means ‘storm and stress’. The point is that storm and stress are not just about the sea-storms of the natural world, including such storms as the current pandemic, but perhaps, more crucially, the sea-storms of our hearts. We confront such storms in terms of matters of personal health and well-being, like the leper from within Israel, or in terms of the concern of the Centurion for his servant who is sick. In both cases, Jesus wills to heal, reaching out and touching the leper; and healing the Centurion’s servant from afar. And in both cases with a word spoken.
Lenten Meditation #2: The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021
Lenten Meditation # 2: “O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation,/
neither chasten me in thy displeasure” (Psalm 6.1)
Domine, ne furore is the Latin title to Psalm 6 derived from the first half of the first verse. Along with Psalm 38 which bears the same Latin title and for the same reason, it brackets Psalm 32, Beati, quorum, “Blessed is he (those) whose unrighteousness is forgiven.” These three Psalms form a triplet of penitential reflection. Our intent is to concentrate upon the opening lines in relation to the other verses in each Psalm in order to identify the voice of the Psalm, the different tonal qualities of the voices of penitence in the Penitential Psalms. The idea which is part of the devotional tradition in the liturgies of the Church is that in praying these Psalms, their words become our words of prayer through which we enter more fully into the heart of all prayer, the prayer of Christ. Tonight we focus on Psalm 6 as the preliminary Psalm of Confession.
The Psalter or the Book of Psalms is also called the Psalms of David. What is true for the whole remains true for the part. This Psalm is specifically entitled “A Psalm of David” in the traditions by which the Psalms have come down to us. It is largely a title derived from the Septuagint translation (Greek) as following the Hebrew. Psalm 6 is a Psalm of David within the later designation of the Psalter as The Psalms of David.
The Psalms we have suggested are essentially a prayer book giving us, as Athanasius says, “a picture of the spiritual life,” providing us, as Calvin notes, “an anatomy of all of the parts of the soul,” and presenting to us, as Dean Comber says, “the quintessence of all scripture.” To this we may add St. Basil’s trenchant remark that the Psalms are “a compendium of all theology” so much so that “no other book is needed for spiritual uses but the Psalms.” Given such encomia of the Psalter, what does it mean to say the Psalms are the Psalms of David? Perhaps it is something like this. In David we have a kind of picture of every man. David is the great and attractive figure in the Jewish Scriptures or Old Testament. But why? Because he constitutes an example for all. His history concerns and embraces all. In other words, we are in the story of David.
This idea is wonderfully expressed by the poet/preacher John Donne. Speaking about David, he says, “his Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King.” David epitomizes the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. For the Christian understanding, that is why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so crucial. Jesus as “the Son of David,” as the blind man refers to him in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday, and as the Canaanite woman on the Second Sunday of Lent, locates Jesus within the scope of Jewish Messianic hopes and what will become the newly emerging Christian understanding. Moreover, David epitomizes the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity not only in its truth but also its untruth. As Donne notes: “his sinne includes all sinne.”
Something of the essential character of our humanity and something of the essential character of our sinfulness is revealed in the figure and story of David. “We need no other Example,” Donne says, “to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential ways out of sin, than the Author of that Book, David.”
John and Charles Wesley
The collect for today, the commemoration of John Wesley (1703-91) and Charles Wesley (1708-88), Evangelists, Hymn Writers, Leaders of the Methodist Revival (source):
Merciful God,
who didst inspire John and Charles Wesley with zeal for thy gospel:
grant to all people boldness to proclaim thy word
and a heart ever to rejoice in singing thy praises;
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: Isaiah 49:5-6
The Gospel: St. Luke 9:2-6
Artwork:
(left) Frank O. Salisbury, John Wesley as an Old Man, 1932. Oil on canvas, John Wesley’s House & The Museum of Methodism, London.
(right) Thomas Hudson, Reverend Charles Wesley, 1749. Oil on canvas, Epworth Old Rectory, Epworth, Lincolnshire.
Chad, Missionary and Bishop
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Chad (d. 672), Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary (source):
Almighty God,
who, from the first fruits of the English nation
that turned to Christ,
didst call thy servant Chad
to be an evangelist and bishop of his own people:
grant us grace so to follow his peaceable nature,
humble spirit and prayerful life,
that we may truly commend to others
the faith which we ourselves profess;
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: Philippians 4:10-13
The Gospel: St Luke 14:1,7-14
Artwork: St Chad of Lichfield, 19th-century stained glass, from the East window, North transept, Cartmel Priory, England. Photograph taken by admin, 9 August 2004.
Saint David of Wales
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint David (c. 520-589), Bishop of Menevia, Patron Saint of Wales (source):
Almighty God,
who didst call thy servant David
to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries
for the people of Wales:
in thy mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal
for the gospel of Christ,
we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit
be all honour and glory,
world without end.
The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-29
Artwork: Saint David, stained glass, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photograph taken by admin 20 October 2014.