Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Aidan (d. 651), Monk of Iona, Missionary, first Bishop and Abbot of Lindisfarne (source):

O loving God, who didst call thy servant Aidan from the Peace of a cloister to re-establish the Christian mission in northern England, and didst endow him with gentleness, simplicity, and strength: Grant, we beseech thee, that we, following his example, may use what thou hast given us for the relief of human need, and may persevere in commending the saving Gospel of our Redeemer Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
The Gospel: St. Matthew 19:27-30

Artwork: Frank Brangwyn, The Brangwyn Mosaic: St Aidan Preaching, 1910-16. Mosaic, St. Aidan`s Church, Leeds.

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

O God, who didst send thy messenger, John the Baptist, to be the forerunner of the Lord, and to glorify thee by his death: Grant that we, who have received the truth of thy most holy Gospel, may bear our witness thereunto, and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth’s sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 1:17-19
The Gospel: St. Mark 6:17-29

Artwork: Jan Henryk de Rosen, Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, 1927-29. Fresco, Armenian Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Lviv, Ukraine.

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

“He that humbleth himself shall be exalted”

Dante, the poet, in the opening canto of the Purgatorio reminds us of the necessary condition of the soul’s journey to the blessedness of God. Cato, the embodiment of the classical virtues and of Roman liberty, and the guardian of the Mountain, directs Virgil to cleanse Dante’s face with the morning dew and to gird him about his waist with a reed. The reed is the humble plant from the humus, the ground. Humility is the necessary condition of the ascent to freedom and blessedness, to our good in the Goodness of God. Purgation is a necessary feature of sanctification.

Humility is the liberating quality without which we remain enslaved in ourselves like the Pharisee who “stood and prayed thus with himself” and thus not with God! He sees himself as better than others whom he despises, “thank[ing God] that [he] is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican.” It is all about himself in the posture of self-righteousness which is always divisive and judgemental. We are too much with ourselves, to be sure, particularly in the contemporary culture of ressentiment. For we look at one another not in love but in envy and resentment, seeing each other as threatening, as enemy. This is neither freedom nor our good. Such self-obsession and self-righteousness always points fingers at others and never at oneself. Such is the deadly nature of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. It is the vain and false endeavour to be God, making the self, rather than God, the centre around which everything else revolves. This is the great lie and our current obsession.

The first of the Beatitudes is humility, the counter to pride. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are precisely those who have been freed from their self-obsessions; they are not full of themselves and thus are able to see others with respect and love. In a wonderful image, Dante depicts the proud in Purgatory as bowed down under the weight of a great stone so that they contemplate engraved on the ground before them the great examples of humility in the figures of Mary, David, and even the Roman emperor, Trajan, and, on the other hand, behold the great examples of pride which Dante describes in a series of verses that form the acrostic UMO in Italian, meaning Man. Being bowed down is the opposite of being haughty with noses in the air in disdain and indifference towards others.

They pray the Lord’s Prayer as part of their penitence, offering the last petition about being led not into temptation and about being delivered from evil not for themselves but for others. Their purgation is completed with the singing of the first Beatitude, Beati pauperes spiritu, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Thus they have overcome themselves and are freed, freed to God and to the Communion of Saints. Bowed down they are raised up.

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

O GOD, who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
The Gospel: St Luke 18:9-14

Artwork: Cosmas Damian Asam, The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, 1732. Fresco, Papal Basilica of St. Margaretha, Osterhofen Abbey, Germany.

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who didst give to thine Apostle Bartholomew grace truly to believe and to preach thy Word; Grant, we beseech thee, unto thy Church, to love that Word which he believed, and both to preach and receive the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:10-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 22:24-30

The apostle Bartholomew, named in all three synoptic gospels, is generally identified with Nathanael, who is named only in the Gospel of St. John. (For more details, see here.) If this identification is accepted, we have a great deal of information on Bartholomew’s calling (St. John 1:45-51). Jesus described him as “an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit”.

Nothing is known for certain of his post-New Testament ministry. There are conflicting accounts of his missionary activity in Asia Minor, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and Egypt. Of these, Armenia has the strongest support, where he is said to have been skinned alive before being beheaded. The traditionally accepted place of his martyrdom is Albanopolis (present-day Derbent) near the western shore of the Caspian Sea.

Artwork: Stefano d’Antonio di Vanni, The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, c. 1430. Tempera on panel, Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, Boston.

The new list of discussion books for Christ Church Book Club is now available. The next series will kick off on Tuesday, 20 September, at 7:00pm, when the featured books will be The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray (2019) and The Madness of Crowds (2021) by Louise Penny;

Click here for the full schedule of books and other information.

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

“He beheld the city, and wept over it”

“Jesus wept,” in sorrow for his friend, Lazarus, John tells us in his Gospel (Jn. 11. 35). It is sometimes said to be the shortest verse in the Scriptures and a phrase used colloquially to express a sense of sorrow and regret at something particularly sad and unfortunate. Here Luke, the Church’s spiritual director especially in the Trinity season, tells us about Jesus coming near and beholding the city of Jerusalem and weeping over it. Why does Jesus weep?

“Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation,” Jesus says. We are ignorant, it seems, “concerning spiritual gifts,” as Paul puts it in the Epistle and thus to the nature of our lives in community and in communion with God and with one another. What follows is equally important: the difficult scene of Christ’s cleansing of the temple, “cast[ing[ out them that sold therein and them that bought,” upbraiding them and us for the misuse of the house of prayer, “mak[ing[ it a den of thieves.” Why? So as to re-establish its proper use. “And he taught daily in the temple.” Prayer and teaching go together; they are about the pilgrimage of our souls into the knowing love of God for us, our itinerarium mentis ad deum, “The Journey of The Mind to God,” in Bonaventure’s famous treatise by that name. “Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,/God’s breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,” Herbert says in a wonderful collection of images drawn from scripture, from nature, from domestic life, from the exotic and the intimate but ultimately summed up as “something understood.” Prayer is “something understood”.

We know the story of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple because it is set before us in Matthew’s Gospel on the First Sunday of Advent and, of course, on Palm Sunday. But in both it has to do more with the troubling theme of the wrath or anger of Christ. Here it seems, it is more about the sorrow and sadness of Christ. Jesus weeps for us at what we have not learned or for what we have ignored despite its being present to us because God “hath visited, and redeemed his people” (Benedictus, BCP, p.9). We know but do not know.

The concept of visitation here is spiritually significant. It has very much to do with what God wants us to know, with what belongs to the good of our humanity over and against the things which diminish and destroy us. In the providence of God we are meant to be looking for the things of God, to find “the good in everything,” as Shakespeare puts it (As You Like It), “books in the running brooks, sermons in stone;” in short, reading the providence of God in our lives. It means being recalled to who we are in God, to “know even as also [we] are known” (1 Cor. 13.12). That is an essential aspect of our summer journeyings in the land of the Trinity.

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

LET thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 19:41-47a

Artwork: Johannes Stradanus, Christ driving the Money-Changers from the Temple, 1572. Oil on panel, Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence.