Christ Church

The Calendar of Services and Events for the period September through December 2021 (tentative) can be downloaded here as a pdf document.

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

O ALMIGHTY God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist: Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:9-13

Artwork: Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem and Jan Baptist Weenix, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1657. Oil on panel, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Coleridge Patteson (1827-71), Missionary, First Bishop of Melanesia, Martyr (source):

O God of all tribes and peoples and tongues,
who didst call thy servant John Coleridge Patteson
to witness in life and death to the gospel of Christ
amongst the peoples of Melanesia:
grant us to hear thy call to service
and to respond with trust and joy
to Jesus Christ our redeemer,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Mark 8:34-38

John Coleridge Patteson was a curate in Devon when Bishop of New Zealand George A. Selwyn persuaded him to go out to the South Pacific as a missionary. In 1856 he journeyed to Melanesia. He encouraged boys to study at a school Selwyn had founded in New Zealand and later set up a school in Melanesia. He was very proficient in languages and eventually learned twenty-three different languages and dialects spoken in Melanesia and Polynesia.

In 1861 Patteson was consecrated Bishop of Melanesia; he travelled across his diocese constantly, preaching, teaching, baptising, confirming, building churches, and living among the people. On the main island of Mota most of the population were converted.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity.

“God hath visited his people.”

It is an intriguing phrase. The Greek verb translated here as visited also means to look upon or to watch over in the sense of having oversight from which derives the idea of bishops. Here it is about God’s oversight of our humanity.

Today’s readings offer an interesting sense of the dynamic interplay between abiding and visiting that belongs to a larger Scriptural and cultural understanding about the nature of our humanity. Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in [our] hearts by faith”, that we may be “rooted and grounded in love”; in short, in that which abides. In the Gospel Christ comes near the little city of Nain, visiting it, as it were, and yet something abides in and through that encounter. Both readings invite us to consider the nature of lives with one another and with God.

Is God simply a visitor? One who comes and goes, here today and gone tomorrow? A welcoming presence or something more disturbing? Ishtar, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and war (an interesting combination!), wants Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk, to be her boy-toy, her lover. But intimacy with the gods is not always a good thing. Gilgamesh rejects her advances because he knows that she turns all of her lovers into animals. In other words, you lose your humanity! Encounters between humans and the divine can be terrifying. “Our God is a consuming fire,” as Hebrews reminds us, recalling the sense of distance between God and man. “No one can see God and live,” as Exodus puts it.

Owing to the pandemic, there has been considerably less visiting among friends and family. Social distancing is the mantra for our isolation and separation from one another, tainting the forms of public interaction with fear and suspicion, with anxiety and even animosity. Perhaps, though, this may ultimately help us to reclaim the primacy of our lives as essentially social creatures in our care and concern for each other rather than radically autonomous beings whose relation to each other is merely instrumental, using each other for our own ends, trapped in the illusions of our self-completeness. This Sunday speaks to these deeper truths.

Visitors come and go. Yet, in the momentary intersection of their lives and ours, there is an abiding truth. There is the recognition of the common bond of our humanity. There is the opening out of our souls to each other, a sharing of our lives however fleeting, however brief. Visitors come and go but we, too, are visitors.

This leads to the ancient insight about hospitality as a moral obligation. The stranger, the foreigner, the alien is to be welcomed into our midst and treated with courtesy and grace. The sojourner, the visitor, is the one who has come near to us. He is, in fact, our neighbour. The stranger is owed what we owe our neighbour. The Old Testament makes this abundantly clear. “When a stranger sojourns with you in the land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself;  for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” as Leviticus states (Lev. 19.33,34). And it is further emphasized in the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament.

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Tuesday, September 21st
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence (2021) & Burning The Books (2020) by Richard Ovenden.

Sunday, September 26th, Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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

O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 3:13-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Artwork: Martino Altomonte, Raising of the Son of the Widow of Nain, 1731. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

“And behold, it was very good”

“God is the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures,” Thomas Aquinas says at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae. It calmly and clearly states a philosophical understanding of the concept of God that belongs in one way or another to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Implied in the statement is the understanding that God is clearly not one of those things which God creates. What kind of thing is God? He is nothing, no kind of thing at all but is distinct from all things as their source and end; in short as Creator, the principle of the being and knowing of all reality.

Junior Chapel on Monday considered the first Chapter of Genesis, touching upon the first day and then leap-frogging ahead to the fourth and fifth days. The simple but profound point is that creation is an orderly affair that involves distinguishing one thing from another: light from darkness, heaven and earth, earth and sea, creatures of the air and creatures of the land and the sea. “God saw that it was good” is the recurring refrain throughout the entire chapter. It is a powerful statement that speaks to our contemporary anxieties and fears about the natural world as if it were something evil or threatening. At issue for us is about learning how to honour and respect nature or creation. This stands in contrast to both ancient and modern fears that chaos might just be stronger and greater than order. Creation is something intellectual. As the 12th century Islamic theologian, Al Ghazali, notes, eight of the ninety-nine beautiful names of God, Allah, are all about God as Creator. The Quran echoes Genesis and John:  “Originator (Badi’) of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only  ‘Be!’ and it is” (Qur’an 2:117).

The biblical account is not primarily descriptive; it is a poetic explanation, a way of thinking about the world and, ultimately, about our place in it. We are in this story. Thus the Thursday and Friday Chapels looked at the work of the sixth day and about the seventh day. Where do we as human beings fit into this orderly picture of a world spoken and called into being by an intellectual principle, God as Word? We are the work of the sixth day. Whatever we mean by day, and there are many different ways of marking time in various cultures such as the four day ‘market week’ in the Nigerian Igbo culture, it functions as an ordering principle and pattern in a rhythmic, liturgical and mnemonic way. Here it belongs to the unfolding or process of a world that exists for thought in its order and pattern; an order in which we ultimately find our humanity. We are the work of the sixth day.

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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

Ninian 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.

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

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

Artwork: Caspar David Friedrich, Cross in the Mountains (also known as the Tetschen Altar), 1808. Oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.