Christ Church

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

“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Rom. 12.2)

“How came we ashore,” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Prospero replies, “by Providence divine.” It is a wonderful insight into the nature of our lives under the grace of God. He has just been explaining to Miranda how he was once the Duke of Milan and is about to tell her how they ended up on the far off “Bermoothes,” Bermuda. “What foul play had we that we came from thence? Or blessèd was’t we did?” she asks. “Both, both” he says, “by foul play … but blessedly [helped] hither.” And while he goes on to tell her about how he was betrayed by his brother, Antonio, who conspired with Alonzo the King of Naples to overthrow Prospero and seize his dukedom, he confesses his own failings, “having neglected worldly ends,” the duties of his office, which, he admits, “awakened an evil nature” in his brother.

Yesterday was the great summer feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. It is at once a divine vision and testimony to who Christ is in his essential divinity and who he is for us. There is something seen and something heard. A kind of epiphany of the Trinity in the voice of the Father, in the Son transfigured, and in the cloud of God’s spirit, it also points to our transformation, to the nature of our participation in the things of God, “that we being purified and strengthened by thy grace may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory” (BCP, p. 289). How? By the words of the Father speaking out of the cloud about the Son transfigured before the inner circle of the disciples: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: Hear ye him.” Will we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the hearts and minds to know and love and to act upon what we are given to see and hear, to know and love? This is the challenge and question of today’s readings.

The Tempest, too, explores the theme of our humanity transformed by grace, as Ariel’s song puts it, “a sea change into something rich and strange.” How? In part through suffering and by being called to account but all under the theme of Providence which, as Lady Philosophy notes in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, “produces … a remarkable wonder, that evil men make evil men good.” God alone, Augustine notes, makes good out of our evil.

The play begins with a tempest conjured up by the magic of Prospero, itself a form of natural philosophy with the idea of our having a power over nature. By a kind of coincidence, the conjunction of various causes, all of Prospero’s enemies have now come within his reach. They had cast him out of Milan with Miranda and put them on a raft which somehow – such is the wonder of fiction, never mind that Milan is inland and not a port city – traversed the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. But what do we do with our enemies when they are in our hands? It was Abraham Lincoln, I think, who said that to test a man’s character, don’t make him suffer, give him power. What do we do when we have power over those who have injured us?

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

O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth: We humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 8:12-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 7:15-21

Artwork: Ellen Tanner, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 2013. Oil on panel, Private collection.

“A Walking Sacrament”
An address to the St. John Vianney Chapter of SSC by Fr. David Curry
August 4th, 2022
Christ Christ, Windsor, Nova Scotia

This address can be downloaded as a pdf document (which includes footnotes) by clicking here. A PowerPoint presentation accompanying the address can be downloaded here.

Thank you, Fratres, my brothers, for being here at Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia, and, especially, to those who have travelled such long distances in these seemingly ‘perilous times’ to come to what might seem to some of you to be, if not ultima thule, then at least very much next door to the farthest ends of the world!

SSC is a spiritual fellowship of Catholic Priests within the churches of the Anglican Communion, itself situated at least historically and traditionally within an understanding of how Anglicans, itself a later term, understand themselves as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Church in the undisputed Ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God, partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry of the same Apostolic Orders; and worship One God and Father through the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit who is given to them that believe to guide them into all truth,” to quote at length one of the most remarkable statements of catholicity and doctrinal restraint that is the legacy and living force of things in Canada, the Solemn Declaration of 1893 (Cdn BCP, viii). Yet, in my view, it speaks to something much deeper and much more profound and which relates to the aims and objectives of the SSC in the face of the various disorders of polity, moral, and doctrinal understanding that beset the churches in our age.

The task and challenge is to locate the spirituality of the priesthood within such a catholic vision that the Solemn Declaration envisions. That means finding ways to think about our priestly life, what it means in a reformed catholic understanding, and how it speaks to the spiritual confusions of our age. To be a priest is to be a servant of Christ in the midst of the body of Christ. What is impressed inwardly upon our lives of the sacrificial love of Christ is to be expressed outwardly in our work “to the glory of thy Name and the edification of thy Church” (BCP, p. 546). We do not live for ourselves but for others.

Yet we do so as a spiritual fellowship of priests, as those who have been called and chosen, set aside, dedicated, and charged by God’s grace to be “messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord” (BCP, p. 648). It is not us per se but what is given to move in us. SSC at its best, historically and prophetically, is about the radical nature of the call to service in Christ. It is not political or worldly; it is meant to be transformative spiritually. It speaks to the very heart of the ministry: another lives in us so that Christ can live in those whom we serve.

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The Collect for today, the Holy Day of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who on the holy mount didst reveal to chosen witnesses thy well-beloved Son wonderfully transfigured: Mercifully grant unto us such a vision of his divine majesty, that we, being purified and strengthened by thy grace, may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 St. Peter 1:16-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 17:1-9

Artwork: Gerard David, The Transfiguration of Christ (side panels painted in 1573 by Pieter Pourbus), c. 1520. Oil on panel, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Lady), Bruges.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Oswald (d. 642), King of Northumbria, Martyr (source):

O Lord God almighty,
who didst so kindle the faith of thy servant King Oswald with thy Spirit
that he set up the sign of the cross in his kingdom
and turned his people to the light of Christ:
grant that we, being fired by the same Spirit,
may ever bear our cross before the world
and be found faithful servants of the gospel;
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.

With the Epistle and Gospel for a Martyr from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

In AD 635, the army of Prince Oswald defeated the forces of king Caedwalla of Gwynedd (north Wales) at the Battle of Heavenfield (near present-day Hexham, Northumberland). Oswald was a Christian and nephew of King Edwin, the man Caedwalla had defeated a few years earlier to conquer the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Heavenfield proved to be a key battle in English history for it marked the end of paganism as a religious and political force in England.

Knowing that the fate of his kingdom would be decided on the following day, Oswald had a wooden cross erected beside which he and his men knelt and prayed to the Lord for victory. The badly outnumbered Christian soldiers defeated their apparently over-confident adversaries, and Oswald became King of Northumbria.

After his victory, Oswald invited monks to come from Iona and establish a monastery at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island. This was to become one of England’s most important centres of Christian scholarship and evangelism.

King Oswald was killed in battle in 642 defending his land and people against the pagan king Penda of Mercia.

Artwork: Andreas Meinrad von Ow, King Oswald of Northumbria translates the sermon of Aidan into the Anglo-Saxon language, 1778. Ceiling fresco, St. Oswald’s Parish Church, Otterswang, Bad Schussenried, Germany.

The collect for a Martyr, in commemoration of the Maccabean Martyrs (d. 166 B.C.), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Almighty God, by whose grace and power thy Martyrs the Holy Maccabees were enabled to witness to the truth and to be faithful unto death: Grant that we, who now remember them before thee, may likewise so bear witness unto thee in this world, that we may receive with them the crown of glory that fadeth not away; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 11:29-12:2
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:49-56

The Seven Holy Maccabean Martyrs are seven Jewish brothers who were tortured and killed by the order of Antiochus Epiphanes in 166 B.C. for refusing to participate in idolatrous worship and eat illicit food in violation of God’s laws. Their teacher, Eleazar the scribe, was also martyred at that time. Their mother was forced to watch her sons being cruelly put to death, and then she died. The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates her as St. Solomonia.

In 2 Maccabees, the account of Eleazar’s martyrdom is followed by the story of the seven brothers who submitted to martyrdom rather than transgress God’s law. One after another, they stated their willingness to be tortured and die based on a firm hope that God would raise them from the dead.

The episode can be found in 2 Maccabees 6:18-31 and 7:1-42. The valour of the Maccabean Martyrs is celebrated by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Artwork: Attavante degli Attavanti, Martyrdom of the Seven Hebrew Brothers, c. 1450. Illumination, Vatican Library.