Year: 2021

Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1
The Gospel: St. John 6:5-14

Domenico Feti, Miracle of the Loaves and FishesArtwork: Domenico Feti, Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.

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Prayers and liturgy

Gregory the Great, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (540-604), Bishop of Rome, Doctor of the Church (source):

O merciful Father,
who didst choose thy bishop Gregory
to be a servant of the servants of God:
grant that, like him, we may ever desire to serve thee
by proclaiming thy gospel to the nations,
and may ever rejoice to sing 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: 1 Chronicles 25: 1a, 6-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:42-45

Peter Paul Rubens, St. Gregory the Great, 1620Artwork: Peter Paul Rubens, St. Gregory the Great, 1620. Oil on panel, Courtauld Gallery, London.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 March

“Even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”

Long before there was the felt need for International Women’s Day in our ever expanding advocacy culture, there was this story. It is the story of the Canaanite or Syro-Phoencian woman. It is the story of a very remarkable and strong woman and yet a most disturbing and troubling story. Crises bring out the best and the worst in people, it is sometimes said, but it is not ‘either/or’ so much as ‘both/and’. Sometimes the best and the worst are on display whether or not in equal measure is another matter.

This remarkable and strong woman is not an Israelite, that is to say, she is from outside of Israel, a non-Jew. And yet she shows what it means to be a true Israelite indeed, namely, one who wrestles or strives with God. Just so Jacob was renamed Israel. Part of what makes the exchange between this woman and Jesus so compelling is that it is really a form of self-criticism, a feature of the intellectual and ethical teachings of the religions and philosophies of the world. The story involves a critique of Israel and by extension to all and any who think that truth is something which they possess to the exclusion of others; in short, a denial of its universality. The modern version is the deconstructionist notion that there is only ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’ which is really no truth. The idea of being self-critical is an important feature of the Christian journey of Lent but it is equally an important feature of ethical reflection in many other traditions.

This woman undertakes a journey in seeking out Jesus not for herself but for the healing of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil.” That, too, is a contemporary concern in our culture of addiction, namely, the way in which we become dependent upon substances or digital devices and lose any proper sense of agency and responsibility. This strong woman has a hold of something which she knows and which she will not let go. This is her strength. It is a kind of prophetic insight or intellectus into the intellectual and spiritual principle of reality. It is not a kind of discursive reason, moving from one thing to another, but a simple and profound grasp of the truth itself as glimpsed and seen in Jesus.

That alone is wonderful but is almost eclipsed by the strange and troubling exchange. She asks for mercy for her daughter only to be greeted first with silence, then with dismissal and contempt by the disciples who complain to Jesus that she is bothering them. Jesus’ first response is really to them to state what in fact seems to be their thinking: “I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” thus dismissing her as well, it seems. To this she kneels and simply says, “Lord, help me.”

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Prayers and liturgy

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.

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Sermons

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.

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Events, Month at a Glance

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.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

Sébastien Bourdon, Healing the DemoniacArtwork: Sébastien Bourdon, Healing the Demoniac, c. 1853-57. Oil on canvas, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

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Prayers and liturgy

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.

Gustave Doré, The Christian MartyrsArtwork: Gustave Doré, The Christian Martyrs, 1871. Oil on canvas, Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, France.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

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.

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Sermons

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.”

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