Year: 2022

Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also”

“You have the poor with you always, and whensoever you will you may do them good,” Jesus famously says. But what do we will? It is a disturbing statement. What does it mean? What we will is what we love or desire and what we love or will is inescapably bound up with what we see and know in some sense or other. And what we do or do not do with the poor and with one another belongs to our knowing and loving God. That is the point and the challenge of this day.

The Epistle reading from 1 John 4. 7-21 is a theological tour-de-force. It highlights the mystery of the Trinity for us in our lives together with one another. How? By the necessary interplay of knowing and loving in God and that interplay in turn in our knowing and loving. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 Jn. 4.8). “God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 Jn. 4.9). “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us; because he hath given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4. 13). Everything is grounded in the mutual indwelling of God as Trinity. We live in the knowing love of God. Our loving is our knowing and vice versa.

The mystery of the Trinity perplexes us, perhaps. We may look askance at it because the images of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit may seem to be mere metaphors that reflect social and political power structures of our devising. This would assume that we make God in our own image and not the other way around. Yet last Sunday made us think upwards not downwards; that is the true meaning of thinking analogically. Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit are not metaphors; they are the names of God revealed by Jesus which open us to the mystery of God as love. “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth (or abideth) in love, dwelleth (or abideth) in God, and God in him” (1 Jn. 4. 16).

This statement governs our thinking and doing especially in the Trinity season. It governs how we see and deal with one another. “This commandment,” John tells us, “have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 Jn 4. 21). And our “brother” is the other who is inescapably one with us in our common humanity. The brother is the one whom we see and know in some sense or other and whom we are therefore commanded to love. This is a strong ethical imperative, the radical meaning of which is illustrated in the Gospel parable of Dives or the Rich Man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

While the poor man/rich man dichotomy reflects social and economic realities, the paradox of the parable is that it reverses them. The poor man turns out to be rich, and the rich man poor but only because the parable shows that the truth of our humanity is not found simply in matters of material wealth but in how we see and love one another. That turns entirely on our knowing and loving God.

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31

Luca Giordano (attrib.), Dives and LazarusArtwork: Luca Giordano (attrib.), Dives and Lazarus, c. 1680. Oil on canvas, Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Barnabas the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit: Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 11:22-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:12-16

Adriaen van Stalbemt, Paul and Barnabas at LystraArtwork: Adriaen van Stalbemt, Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, early 17th century. Oil on copper, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

(This commemoration has been transferred from 11 June.)

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2022

“O where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”

At last! An Encaenia in June, not August! Who can believe it? And here in the Chapel. Today marks the last time that you are in Chapel as students. In just a few hours you will have stepped up and out into the world as graduates and alumni. Congratulations! You are the class that has suffered through the sturm und drang of the pandemic and, now, at last, you have been able to have exams! What’s not to like?! You have persevered quite well and, I hope, quite wisely. How? By that constant renewing of our minds upon the principles that animate and shape our lives together. An ending that is at once a beginning.

Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and identity, a dedication service (εν καινος) with respect to the spiritual and intellectual principles that belong to the founding of institutions. From its ancient origins in the dedications of holy places, Encaenia became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and extends to the academic institutions which derive from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the English-speaking world, even to King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

One hundred years ago in 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land. Written shortly after the devastations of the First World War, the poem reflects profoundly upon the wilderness of modernity imaged as a wasteland, a world in ruins. Images of death and decay are drawn from Ezekiel, the poet-prophet of the exile, and from the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures, Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes. Our humanity, ben adam, “Son of Man”, knows only “a heap of broken images” and cannot say what lives and grows “out of this stony rubbish” of a world in ruins. The image is from Ezekiel: “Your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ez. 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

Yet the poem offers far more than darkness and dystopian despair, far more than fear and death. It suggests that wisdom may be found even in the ruins of our times. “Only There is shadow under this red rock.” The Rock is the dominant image of God in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy: “the Rock that begot you … the God who gave you birth”(Dt. 32.18). “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you,/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“Fear in a handful of dust”? How is that happy making? Yet it is about hope and life. It refers to the custom of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the dead but doing so “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life” (BCP, p. 602). Fear is more than the fear of death or the fear of Covid or the fear that haunts our broken and fragmented world of economic, social, political, and environmental uncertainties – our world, your world.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is really a dance, the dance of the understanding. It is wonderfully and powerfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed. It is nothing less than the dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology. These are the theological terms for positive and negative theology, the forms of thinking the mystery of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ. God is and God is not like anything else. God is, in short, no thing.

Positive theology affirms something of the idea and nature of God by analogy to created things; negative theology recognizes that God is utterly beyond and other, even not other, non aliud. This is the strongest possible counter to the problem of reducing God to any of the forms of human reason, which would make God a construct of our thinking. The dance of the understanding is the circling around the mystery of God as revealed yet revealed for thought. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”; think of the Trinity in this way of affirmation and negation. This is Thou and this is not Thou. Such is the dance of the understanding.

The Trinity is the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian Faith, but is equally the teaching which provides for and requires a respectful engagement with other philosophical religions. Hegel in the 19th century notes that the doctrine of the Trinity is in some sense adumbrated or shadowed forth in all religions. It is not by accident that the first article of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”. The first hymn in our Hymn Book, too, is a hymn to God as Trinity; the tune is called Nicaea after the Creed and Councils that determined the terms of our thinking the Trinity. Our thinking the mystery is our life. We cannot not think the Trinity. But how? Only by entering into what is revealed for our thinking and in the ways in which we have been given to think it.

“A door was opened in heaven,” John in Revelation tells us; a door not a window. One of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus is “I am the door” (Jn. 10.7). We go through the door and into the mystery of God revealed in Christ, at once the Son of man “that came down from heaven” and “who is in heaven.” To think this is to be born again, literally born upward into the things of God as signaled in the Gospel story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 13 – 19 June

Tuesday, June 14th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, June 19th, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

Trinity Sunday

The collect for today, the Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Titian, The Holy Trinity in GloryALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that this holy faith may evermore be our defence against all adversities; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 4:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 3:1-15

Artwork: Titian, The Holy Trinity in Glory, c. 1551-54. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 June

The Dance of the Understanding

The Lord of the Dance is the School’s favourite hymn bar none. It works in part because of its catchy refrain and because it is a story song; essentially the story of Christ told in the first person with a hint of its application to us in our lives. The melody is based on the American Shaker song, ‘Simple Gifts’ (1848), immortalized in Aaron Copland’s ballet, Appalachian Spring, originally commissioned for the dancer Martha Graham in 1943-44 and then reconfigured as a suite in 1945.

We come to the end of another School year. When I reflect on Chapel, the image of the dance comes quickly to mind because it suggests the reconciliation of tensions and oppositions in a unity of understanding and purpose. This is part and parcel of our wrestling with the questions about the ethical which requires a willingness to be challenged about our assumptions and those of contemporary culture, a willingness to give a voice to the wisdom of the ages and to let ideas dance in our minds.

It is easy to note the diverse cultures and languages from which our students and faculty come. It is not so easy to discern the morning miracle of our being together united in the struggle to understand the deep questions about reality. To be reminded of the world in its Greek and Hellenic sense as a cosmos, an ordered whole or in its Judeo-Christian and Islamic sense as created and good belongs to the dance of the understanding in which we just might glimpse what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the path of wisdom. The path of wisdom is the dance of the understanding when sacred truths begin to live and move in us.

Tomorrow at 9am there is the Encaenia service for the graduating class of 2022 and their parents and grandparents. “Lord of the Dance” will resound for one more time in the Chapel and in the hearts and minds of the class of 2022.

My humble thanks to faculty and students for their attention to the things of Chapel in this up and down year. I wish you all a good and restful summer.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Pentecost

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

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