Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity.
Month: November 2021
Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“Jesus turned him about”
It is a poignant scene, a scene within a scene. A certain ruler seeks the raising to life of his daughter “even now dead”. “Jesus arose and followed him” only to encounter “a woman, diseased with an issue of blood twelve years”, who “said within herself, if I may touch his garment, I shall be whole.” The story may touch our hearts, too, and make us whole. But what does wholeness or salvation really mean?
It seems that something more is wanted than just a touch, more than just the touch of “the hem of his garment”. Certainly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then are we made whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows. She has a hold of something but in an incomplete way.
Yet Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us, a Deus absconditus, a hidden God, as it were. That is why he has turned himself to us. Such is Revelation. Such is the nature of Incarnate Love: “Jesus turned him about and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” These are wonderful words. They are saving words. They are told to her, face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us. And such is the tuning of God towards us in Revelation. Such is Advent.
It will not do to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him without him knowing it. Such is an incomplete awareness about the one from whom we seek wholeness. Jesus turns and looks at her, face-to-face, and only so do we find our wholeness. In a way, it is all in the turning. More than her secret, surreptitious touch, there is his turning to her, his looking upon her, and his speaking to her. Such is salvation – her wholeness and ours. It is found in his turning and looking upon her and her looking upon him. It is found by our being brought knowingly into his knowing love for us. It is what our liturgy as the symbolic reality of our lives is really all about: our being turned by the one who turns himself to us.
This scene within a scene captures the entire Gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who he truly is. More strongly, it denies the truth of God Incarnate. It denies the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. Yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found in the one whom we ignorantly deny.
Week at a Glance, 15 – 21 November
Saturday, November 20th
9:00-11:30am Brass Cleaning and General Clean-Up Day. All hands on deck!
Sunday, November 21st, Sunday Next Before Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Tuesday, November 23rd
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Jonathan Sacks’ Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (2020).
The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.
The Epistle: Colossians 1:3-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:18-26
Artwork: Firs Sergeyevich Zhuravlev, Christ Raises the Daughter of Jairus, 1890s. Mosaic, Church of the Saviour on the Spilt Blood, St. Petersburg.
Charles Simeon, Pastor
The collect for today, the commemoration of Charles Simeon (1759-1836), Priest, Evangelical Divine (source):
O eternal God,
who didst raise up Charles Simeon
to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ
and inspire thy people in service and mission:
grant that we, with all thy Church, may worship the Saviour,
turn away in true repentance from our sins
and walk in the way of holiness;
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: Romans 10:8b-17
The Gospel: St. John 21:15-19
Charles Simeon served as vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, from 1782 until his death. His zealous evangelical preaching was bitterly opposed by parish leaders, but proved immensely popular and influential among Cambridge undergraduates. He supported the British and Foreign Bible Society and helped to found the Church Missionary Society. His curate Henry Martyn became chaplain of the East India Company and one of India’s best-known missionaries.
Historian Lord Macaulay wrote of him, “If you knew what his authority and influence were, and how they extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, you would allow that his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any primate.”
A meditation on the life of Charles Simeon, by John Piper, is posted here.
Remembrance Day
A prayer of The Very Rev. Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York:
O Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.
Artwork: Charles Bosseron Chambers, The Return, 1917. Holy Innocents’ Church, New York City.
Martin of Tours
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Martin (c 316-397), Monk, Bishop of Tours (source):
Almighty God,
who didst call Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for those in need,
and empower thy Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as the children of God;
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 58:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:34-40
One of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, Martin was born to pagan parents and, although intending to become a Christian, followed his father into the Roman army. About three years later, in Amiens, France, came the famous incident portrayed in the painting seen here.
On a cold winter day, he met a beggar at the city gates. Drawing his sword, he cut his military cloak in two and gave half to the man. In a dream that night, he saw Christ wearing the half-cloak he had given away and saying, “Martin, yet a catechumen, has covered me with his garment”. Martin was baptised shortly thereafter.
After being discharged from the army, he met St. Hilary at Poitiers upon the latter’s return from exile in 360. Hilary provided a piece of land where Martin founded the first monastic community in Gaul. He lived there for ten years until 371, when he reluctantly accepted a call from the people of Tours to become their bishop.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 November
They desire a better country
The sacred remembering of All Saints and All Souls carries over into the secular observances of Remembrance Day. Students of the School have already been a part of the national programme of The Eleven Days of Remembrance. In Chapel this week, readings from John’s Gospel and from the Letter to the Hebrews bid us reflect more deeply upon the nature of our commitments and sacrifices for one another.
“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.” A powerful phrase, it adorns a thousand cenotaphs across the world. “They desire a better country” complements it. It is the motto for the Order of Canada, just one example of the obvious, namely, the way in which Scripture informs culture and shapes the secular imaginary. It suggests the sense of the incompleteness of our humanity in itself and the need for an openness to what perfects and completes our humanity.
Friendship is a most powerful concept and idea and it may seem paradoxical to invoke the concept of friendship in the context of Remembrance Day. Yet it belongs very much to the experience of war in the way of being together and supporting one another. One of the deep pains and sorrows of war veterans is the loss of comrades, those with whom they fought and who died while they survived. They remember their friends with a special intensity and sometimes with a sense of guilt. They survived while others didn’t.
Friendship is a long standing theme in the literary and philosophical traditions. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that contributes to the making of Gilgamesh as a hero, changing him from being a bad king, exploiting his people for his own interest, by making him aware of others. Enkidu is created to be his equal, his second self, a friend. The profound significance of this most ancient story is that through friendship we learn about the other in terms of respect, not dominance. And in that epic, Gilgamesh is profoundly moved by the death of his friend, Enkidu. It launches him upon the greatest journey, the quest for wisdom, for understanding and meaning. He confronts his own mortality in the death of Enkidu.
It marks the beginning of a long tradition about the power and nature of friendship as essential to what it means to be human. In the Jewish Scriptures, there is the tremendous story of the friendship of David and Jonathan. In the Iliad, there is the friendship of Achilleus and Patroclus, and so on. Philosophically, there is the idea of our friendship with the Good in our intellectual strivings captured in the ethical treatises of Plato and Aristotle, of Cicero and Aelred of Rievaulx, to name but a few. Aelred in the early 12th century goes so far as to articulate the radical idea that “God is friendship”, an remarkable adaptation of the idea that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, abiding in friendship and love. The reading from John’s Gospel is actually about our incorporation into the divine love which shapes our human loves, our friendship with one another through the divine friendship.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity in the Octave of All Saints’
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity in the Octave of All Saints’.
Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity (in the Octave of All Saints’)
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;
and unto God the things that are God’s”
When “golden October decline[s] into sombre November” bringing us ultimately through these times of endings to new beginnings in Advent, then, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, “who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the Saints at All Hallows, remembered the martyrs and saints who wait?” Somehow there is a significance about the Octave of All Saints that is meant to remain with us. Yet we so easily forget the glory of All Saints and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. The Octave of All Saints is the strong reminder to us of our true citizenship in heaven which is the pattern of our lives in faith.
“For here have we no continuing city”, Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14) and in the Octave’s commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (BCP, p. 302), the powerful lesson from Hebrews about the community of faith reminds us that “they”, reaching back to the saints of the Old Testament, we might say, as well as the great pageant of souls over the centuries who have gone before us, “seek a country”, indeed, “they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Paul, building upon such an understanding reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven”.
But that does not mean a flight from the world nor does it mean its contrary, collapsing the things of God into our world. It is more about how we participate now in heavenly things through our desire and longing for what is everlasting. November, in all of the fading glory of nature, reminds us of what does not pass away. All Saints’ recalls us to who we are with God in the Communion of Saints. Such is the true dignity and freedom of our souls. We are freed to God.
That freedom does not mean ignoring the constraints and laws that belong to the various forms of the human community; constraints, laws and regulations which are often arbitrary, annoying, inconsistent, questionable and even prejudicial. There are and have always been bad laws. There can be no doubt about the anti-Christian bias in some sectors of our country. But we don’t get to be anti-nominians, those who reject law. Rather it means tolerating all manner of things precisely because they are limited and finite. To put it in the language of today’s Gospel, Caesar is not God; worldly powers are not omnipotent however much they presume to such pretensions. Jesus says to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem at the time of his capture and passion and in response to such pretensions to absolute power that “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn 19.11).
Our prayers for those in authority over us is always that they not abuse their power in the overreach of authority or in the attempts to coerce our thinking. Our actions may be constrained out of some sense of the common good; that is one thing. It is quite another to require us to think only in a certain way, to try to compel our thinking by proscribing the use of language, and to demand not our toleration but our celebration of the agendas of identity politics and policies that are inherently divisive. That is intolerable and runs the risk of rendering unto Caesar the things of God.