Year: 2021

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 February

For now we see through a glass darkly

But we see, however dimly, and that is the important insight. It belongs to the awareness of the limitations of our knowing that counters human presumption and arrogance. It is good to be reminded of this in the bleak midwinter.

A winter storm with snow and wind has given place to the not altogether unusual midwinter thaw. There is an almost spring-like feel to things in the return to School after the late January break. That spring-like feel is warranted from the perspective of the turn towards spring signaled by Candelmas observed on February 2nd. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter in the Christian understanding. Literally forty days after Christmas, it points us to Jerusalem, to the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter, which follows immediately upon the spring equinox.

It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. It is at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of the child with Mary and Joseph, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in the temple in Jerusalem. “The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple,” as Malachi prophesies. “They found him in the temple,” as we heard in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is Christ’s first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and, like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

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Prayers and liturgy

Anskar, Missionary and Bishop

Bendixen, Bishop AnsgarThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Anskar (801-865), Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, Missionary to Sweden and Denmark (source):

Almighty and gracious God,
who didst send thy servant Anskar
to spread the gospel among the Nordic people:
raise up in this our generation, we beseech thee,
messengers of thy good tidings
and heralds of thy kingdom,
that the world may come to know
the immeasurable riches of 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: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Mark 6:7-13

Artwork: Siegfried Detlev Bendixen, Bishop Ansgar, 1823. Holy Trinity Church, Hamburg, Germany.

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Sermons

Sermon for Candlemas

“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”

Candlemas is a wonderfully multi-layered feast of interrelated concepts and themes. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. Thus it complements the truer meaning of last week’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which belongs at the very least to the beginnings of the emergence of Christianity yet happens entirely within the context of Israel.

Even the title is a conjunction of themes: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of the Saint Mary the Virgin,” at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of a child and a mother, of Joseph and his mother in wonder, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast. We should be glad of its contraction into the simplicity of Candlemas, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The lesson from Malachi highlights the theme of the preparation of the way for the Lord who “shall suddenly come to his temple,” a coming which portends judgement and purification; in short, redemption. “They found him in the temple,” the Gospel for the First Sunday in Epiphany tells us in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is his first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

The temple itself takes on a whole new meaning. It is at once the sacred space that encapsulates and intensifies the teachings of Israel but extends to the sacred space that is the womb of Mary, itself an habitaculum dei. She, too, is the temple even as Christ’s body is the temple, and our bodies, too, are to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple carried the temple into the temple, as a preacher once put it. There is this wonderful sense of the necessity of the embodiment of ideas, a wonderful sense of the ways in which ideas are bodied forth, the ways in which we are gathered into the light and life of God through the forms of mediation.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin (also traditionally called Candlemas), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:22-40

Aert de Gelder, Simeon’s Song of PraiseArtwork: Aert de Gelder, Simeon’s Song of Praise, c. 1700-1710. Oil on canvas, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Septuagesima Sunday

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

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Sermons

Sermon for Septuagesima

Go ye also into the vineyard”

It is a suggestive and powerful image that belongs to the essential qualities of the itinerarium or spiritual journey of the soul upon which we embark this Sunday known as Septuagesima Sunday. Along with the other ‘gesima’ Sundays, it seems that we turn to the landscape of creation, literally to the vineyard, to the ground, and to the road near Jericho. Yet in all these ‘gesima’ Sundays, we are being turned to Jerusalem, to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God, in which the true yearnings of the soul are realized. What follows immediately from today’s Gospel, for instance, is Matthew’s account of what we have in the Gospel from Luke on Quinquagesima Sunday about “going up to Jerusalem” and which continues on to form the Gospel for Passion Sunday from Matthew.

In every way, these ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent. As such they speak directly to the forms of spiritual discipline necessary to the quintessential itinerary of the soul to God. Something is required of us. The spiritual journey is an activity of the soul in relation to God imagined here in terms of our relation to nature, to the landscape of creation, presented as a vineyard in which we labour.

As the Epistle teaches, that labour requires self-mastery or temperance in terms of the ultimate goal which is not a perishable or “a corruptible crown” but “an incorruptible”. What we strive and labour for is not something transitory and passing but everlasting. Such is the true yearning of the soul. “For it has become clear,” as Boethius puts it in his itinerary of the soul, The Consolation of Philosophy, “that all perfect things are prior to the less perfect.” All our desires are but shadows of the human longing for what is absolute, the great all-good, as it were.

Thus the ‘gesima’ Sundays are more than mere prelude to the play of Lent and are really part of the Lenten pilgrimage but with a certain sensibility about the land; in short to our relation to the land. But vineyards? Hardly so, it might seem, in the cold of January, however much vineyards have become such a distinctive feature of Nova Scotia, particularly here in the Valley. But in looking to Jerusalem in the itinerary of these ‘gesima’ Lenten Sundays, we look to the spring of our souls even in the throes of winter.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 1 – 7 February

Tuesday, February 2nd, Candlemas
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, February 7th, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion, followed by Annual Parish Meeting

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, February 16th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Christ Unabridged: Knowing and Loving the Son of Man: Essays (2020) and J.I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1990)

Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through March.

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Prayers and liturgy

Septuagesima

The collect for today, Septuagesima (or the Third Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people; that we, who are justly punished for our offences, may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness, for the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:1-16

Andrey Mironov, The Parable of the Workers in the VineyardArtwork: Andrey Mironov, The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, 2013. Oil on canvas. © Copyright Andrey Mirinov and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Prayers and liturgy

Charles Stuart, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the commemoration of Charles I (1600-1649), King of England, Martyr (source):

King of kings and Lord of lords,
whose faithful servant Charles
prayed for his persecutors
and died in the living hope of thine eternal kingdom:
grant us, by thy grace, so to follow his example
that we may love and bless our enemies,
through the intercession of thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

with the Epistle and Gospel for a Martyr:
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Edward Bower, Charles I at his TrialArtwork: Edward Bower, Charles I at his Trial, 1648. Oil on canvas, Royal Collection, Great Britain.

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Prayers and liturgy

John Chrysostom, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. John Chrysostom (347-407), Preacher, Doctor of the Church, Archbishop of Constantinople (source):

O God of truth and love,
who gavest to thy servant John Chrysostom
eloquence to declare thy righteousness in the great congregation
and courage to bear reproach for the honour of thy name:
mercifully grant to the ministers of thy word
such excellence in preaching
that all people may share with them
in the glory that shall be revealed;
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: Jeremiah 1:4-10
The Gospel: St Luke 21:12-15

Sebastiano del Piombo, St. John Chrysostom AltarpieceArtwork: Sebastiano del Piombo, St. John Chrysostom Altarpiece, 1510-11. Oil on canvas, San Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice.

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