Month: April 2021

Prayers and liturgy

Easter Even

The collect for today, Easter Even, or Holy Saturday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that, through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:17-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:57-66

Tintoretto, Lamentation over the Dead ChristArtwork: Tintoretto, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1550-60. Oil on canvas, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

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Sermons

Sermon for Good Friday

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Good Friday brings us to the Cross. Simply as spectators? As mere on-lookers? Is this a matter of curiosity? A spectacle? Something of passing interest? A matter indifferent?

Good Friday goes to the heart of the Christian Faith. What unfolds before us in Scripture and Liturgy on this day is utterly essential. No Good Friday, no Easter. Easter is meaningless without Good Friday. It is the tragedy of the contemporary churches to have downplayed the meaning and significance of Good Friday. So what is the real and essential good of Good Friday? That we confront the spectacle of human sin in all of its destructive force in the figure of the Crucified. The good is the love of God manifest in the terror of the Cross. The good is our sense of being utterly and completely broken-hearted because of what we do in our sins. Here is sin writ large. It is what we contemplate in the crucified Christ. We contemplate the utter folly and destructive nonsense of human sin.

What is that folly and nonsense? Our parody of God. We presume to kill God. Good Friday is the death of God because of the willingness of God in Christ to place himself in our hands. What we do is crucify him as if to annihilate God from the horizons of our minds. Such is the folly of our humanity in its disarray and disorder, in its destructive attitude to the world around us and towards one another. Good Friday challenges and counters all of the nonsense of our fallen humanity. The good of Good Friday is our being humbled and broken-hearted at the spectacle of human wickedness in the greater spectacle of divine love.

It has always been something of a shock to me about how little attention is paid to Good Friday in our Maritime world. The intensity and drama of Good Friday, as I have sometimes experienced it, included the three-hour service of preaching on the Seven Last Words as well as the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The second is what we have in this service. The first is practically unknown, unthinkable and unwelcome. “Look on me all ye who pass by.” Indeed. Look and pass. Unaware and unmoved by the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian faith. No wonder our churches are empty. We are insensible to the truth of this day.

Good Friday is at once a workout for our hearts and minds. It counters the middle class presumption to life as all comfort and coziness and to the more deadly assumption of ourselves as the center of everything. In that sense, Good Friday calls us to account, to reality, to the reality of sin and suffering. Even more, the real good of Good Friday is nothing less than the greater spectacle of divine love. We behold sin and love but not in equal measure. Love is the greater power that makes out of our own awareness of sin the way of love in us. This is the wonder of Good Friday that makes it already the resurrection. Such is the radical nature of love.

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Prayers and liturgy

Good Friday

The collects for today, Good Friday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplications and prayers, which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same, in his vocation and ministry, may truly and godly serve thee; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:1-25
The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint John
The Gospel: St. John 18:33-19:37

Pietro Lorenzetti, The CrucifixionArtwork: Pietro Lorenzetti, The Crucifixion, 1340. Tempera and gold leaf on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Sermons

Sermon for Maundy Thursday

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy days of Holy Week. It is a day of many events: Jesus washing of the feet of the disciples; the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the upper room; the later traditions of the King’s touch and gift of money to the afflicted; the stripping of the altar; the watching with Christ in Gethsemane; in short, a great cluster and confusion of events that belong to our participation in the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which we confront ourselves in our brokenness, on the one hand, and the ways in which we look upon Christ, on the other hand.

What unites all these events of Maundy Thursday? Simply the term which designates this day, maundy. It is the Englishing of the Latin term, mandatum, meaning commandment. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you love one another” (Jn. 13.34). That word is given by John in his account of the Last Supper which focuses on the washing of the feet of the disciples and the betrayal of Judas and not on the words of institution at all, an interesting point about the Gospel which is, in other respects, the most sacramental in its theology. But it is that concept of a new commandment that is most crucial for this day. For it highlights the theme of sacrificial service. That is the theme that unites all of the disparate elements of the liturgies of Maundy Thursday.

The idea of sacrificial service is profoundly counter-culture and constitutes a profound ethical rebuke to our contemporary culture which is really about the pretense to privilege, prestige, and prominence; in short, the idea of getting ahead in the world which is always about putting others down or at least using others as means to our own ends. Such is the dog-eat-dog world of endless conflict and destruction; the world of the dominance of the few at the expense of the many. What is lost is precisely this ethical sense of the common good. Maundy Thursday provides the most radical picture of the ethical teaching and meaning of sacrificial service. Such is the true worth and dignity of our humanity. It is not found in the pursuit of power and privilege but in the dignity of service. This was the point of the Passion Sunday Gospel. “Whosoever would be great among you let him be your minister. Whosoever would be great among you let him be your servant,” literally your slave. This brings out the meaning of the famous Master-Slave dialectic of Hegel. It is not simply that the Master discovers his dependence upon the Slave and thus a kind of role reversal, but rather the more profound realization of mutual interdependence and mutuality that is the deeper truth of all forms of ordered life.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 1 April

And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter

There is an incredible intensity to this week which in the churches of the Western Christian world is known as Holy Week. It is the intensity of the Passion of Christ. We immerse ourselves in the Passion. Why? To confront the painful reality of our own unknowing of ourselves and to discover the radical meaning of the ethical idea of sacrificial service.

A feature of the Anglican liturgical tradition is the reading of the Passion from all four of the Gospels beginning on Palm Sunday with Matthew’s account, and followed by Mark on Monday and Tuesday, Luke on Wednesday and Maundy Thursday, and John on Good Friday. Each of the Gospels offers not only a different perspective but a different voice, a different focus or emphasis that together contribute to the mystery of human redemption but only if we are willing to confront the contradictions in our souls and our world. Such is the challenge. We are meant to be the community of the broken-hearted precisely through the awareness of how we are in these stories. We find ourselves in the crowd that swirls around Christ. Quite literally, we are those who cry “Hosanna to the King” and then immediately turn around and shout, “Crucify, Crucify”. Such is a graphic illustration on the fickle and contradictory nature of our humanity in disarray.

There is a remarkable power to the accounts of the Passion. We look upon him whom we have pierced so that we might be pierced with sorrow is the theological point. But we also hear Christ from the Cross in what becomes the tradition of the Seven Last Words. Matthew and Mark give us what has become known as the Fourth Word of the Cross – the cry of desolation, the cry of the God-forsaken. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Christ gives voice to the radical meaning of all sin. Sin is how we deny and forsake the reality of God in our parody of God. We presume to be God which we are not. God wills in Christ to place himself in our hands. Crucifixion is what we do in our parody of God. But God makes something greater out of our parody of his way through the pageant of his Passion. Such is Resurrection.

Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh Words of the Crucified, John the third, fifth, and the sixth. Luke’s words frame the whole pattern of devotion on the Seven Last Words, a devotional tradition that has shaped the imaginary of modern Protestant and Catholic churches. The practice of preaching on the Seven Last Words of Christ actually originated in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, just after a devastating series of earthquakes in 1678 and 1687. Devised by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, the devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn.

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Prayers and liturgy

Maundy Thursday

The collects for today, Thursday in Holy Week, commonly called Maundy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also he made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O GOD, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion: Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption; who livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 11:23-29
The Continuation of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke
The Gospel: St. Luke 23:1-49

Vasily Perov, Christ in GethsemaneArtwork: Vasily Perov, Christ in Gethsemane, 1878. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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