Year: 2022

Prayers and liturgy

Sunday After Ascension Day

The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Taddeo Crivelli, The Last SupperO GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Artwork: Taddeo Crivelli, The Last Supper, 1469. Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Venerable Bede, Doctor and Historian

The collect for today, the Feast of The Venerable Bede (673-735), Monk, Historian, Doctor of the Church (source):

Almighty God, maker of all things,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to thy servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word which leadeth us to know thee and to love thee:
in thy goodness
grant that we also may come at length to thee,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before thy face;
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.

For The Epistle: Wisdom 7:15-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Norwich Cathedral, Saint BedeSaint Bede the Venerable was born and, as far as we know, lived his entire life in the north of England, yet he became perhaps the most learned scholar in all of Europe. At the age of 7, he was sent to Wearmouth Abbey for his education; at age 11, he continued his education at the new monastery at Jarrow, eventually becoming a monk and remaining there until his death. He lived a routine and outwardly uneventful life of prayer, devotion, study, writing, and teaching.

Bede’s writings cover a very wide range of interests, including natural history, orthography, chronology, and biblical translation and exposition. He was the first to translate the Bible into Old English. He considered his 25 volumes of Scripture commentary to be his most important writings. His best-known book is Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. This work earned him the popular title “Father of English History”, and not just because it was the first attempt to write a history of England. His historical research was thorough and far-reaching. For example, he asked friends traveling to Rome to bring him copies of documents relevant to English history, and he made use of oral traditions when written materials were not available. The book provides much historical information that can be found in no other source.

His pupil Cuthbert, later Abbot of Jarrow, has left a moving eyewitness account of St. Bede’s last hours. Bede fell ill shortly before Easter 735, when he was in the midst of translating the Gospel of John into the Anglo-Saxon language. Everyone realised that the end was near, but he was determined to complete the translation. Between Easter and Ascension Day, he persisted in the task while continuing to teach his students at his bedside.

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Sermons

Meditation for Ascension Day

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

There is something truly celebratory and delightful about Ascension Day. It signals a kind of participatory delight in the movements of God. The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. His homecoming to the right hand of the Father celebrates our homecoming, the idea that we have a home, a place with God. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world an, and go to the Father,” Jesus says. The meaning of that coming and going is captured in the Ascension of Christ and belongs to the promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus and sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. Such is the dynamic of spiritual life.

And there is the wonderful sense of a participatory pleasure and joy expressed by the Psalmist (Ps. 47.5). “God is gone up with a merry noise,/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet.” It is such a strong affirmation of the divine life which is the ground of all life. Not God has gone up but God is gone up! There is no life apart from the essential life of God. And as we have seen, the Resurrection is cosmic in scope and never lets us forget the Passion in all of its witness to the follies of sin and evil. Ascension bids us rejoice in God, in the motions of the Son’s homecoming to the Father which signals our home with God, our life in the life which does not end.

Ascension reminds us of an important feature of Christian spirituality partly in its Anglican expression. Our liturgy, shaped by a number of different traditions but in this case by Calvin, is very much the liturgy of the Ascension, the liturgy of the sursum corda, the lifting up of all things in prayer to the God who has descended and ascended and has gathered all things back to him from whom all things do come. Prayer is about our hearts in ascension. As Augustine wonderfully puts it, we ascend in the ascension of our hearts, ascendimus ascensiones in cordis. But he adds “et cantamus canticum graduum,” we sing a song of ascent, of degrees, of steps up to the wonder of God, the God who ever is.

In prayer and praise we participate in the life of God. Ascension is the strong reminder of the radical nature of prayer. In prayer we participate in the return of all things to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.

This teaching is marvellously expressed in the very building of Christ Church. It embodies the whole motion of prayer, the motion of the ascension. In the lifting up of our hearts, all things are lifted up to God and by God. Such is prayer in its deepest sense.

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for Ascension Day, 2022

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 May

Go and do thou likewise

The setting of the story of the Good Samaritan read in the last Chapels for Grades 11 and 12 this week is intriguing and significant for thinking and doing. It speaks to the challenges and conflicts of our confused and fragmented world. How to act? According to what set of protocols? Whose rules and why? What is it that is right to do? Why does that vary so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?

The setting of the parable is one of conflict and self-serving justification. “A certain lawyer” undertakes to tempt Jesus, to put him to the test in order to catch him out. He does so by raising the question about “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words, what is the good? Jesus asks in return a most important question. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?” Ethics is not just about rules. It is about the understanding of what binds us to one another and in what way. Jesus’ question draws out of the lawyer a marvelous summary of the essential ethical teaching that informs the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding and which has its strong counterparts in other religions and philosophies, what C.S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man called “the Tao,” referencing ancient Chinese philosophy. Here it joins together the love of God with the whole of our being in Deuteronomy with the love of neighbour in Leviticus.

Jesus applauds the lawyer’s answer as being right; “this do and thou shalt live.” But he, “willing to justify himself” asks “And who is my neighbour?” That is the setting for the powerful and moving parable of the Good Samaritan, as it has come to be known, which draws upon a host of passages from the Hebrew Scriptures about the stranger, the foreigner, the proverbial other as neighbour. The love of God and the love of neighbour, meaning one another, are inseparable. To do the one is to do the other and vice versa. Here is the ethic of care and compassion concentrated in a picture for us to read and in reading to follow.

But how? Only by that love moving in us, a love which is greater than our human loves which are incomplete and imperfect. In the Christian understanding, the love of God and the love of man meet in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, the mediator of the new covenant of love. The Resurrection has been all about the essential life of God revealed through both the Passion and the Resurrection. Here we see the dynamic of divine life at work in us when we allow what we read to move in us.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

Paolo Veronese, Ascension of ChristThe collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Artwork: Paolo Veronese, Ascension of Christ, c. 1585. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.

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Prayers and liturgy

Aldhelm, Bishop and Scholar

The collect for a Bishop or Archbishop, on the Feast of Saint Aldhelm (c. 639-709), Abbot of Malmesbury, Bishop of Sherborne, Poet, Scholar, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Sherborne Abbey, St. AldhelmO GOD, our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Aldhelmb to be a Bishop in thy Church and to feed thy flock: We beseech thee to send down upon all thy Bishops, the Pastors of thy Church, the abundant gift of thy Holy Spirit, that they, being endued with power from on high, and ever walking in the footsteps of thy holy Apostles, may minister before thee in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Aldhelm became the first Bishop of Sherborne in AD 705. Before then he had been Abbot of Malmesbury for some thirty years. He was born in about AD 639 and died in 709 in Doulting, Somerset. Saint Aldhelm is buried at Malmesbury. His name translated from the old English means “Old Helmet”. For more information, click here.

Photograph: St. Aldhelm, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset, U.K.
© Copyright Sarah Smith and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday

“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world”

Rogation Sunday concentrates wonderfully for us the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. It signals our freedom not from the world but in the world through our being grounded in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father,” Jesus says, capturing in a phrase the essential life of God himself, the life which overcomes all sin and evil, all that opposes the truth of God. Far from being a gnostic flight from the world as if it were evil, it signals the redemption of the world. The Resurrection gives us a way to face the difficult things of our troubled world, a world of tribulations and oppressions, of sufferings and sorrows, a world of fears and hatreds, of divisions and animosities.

These are words, as the disciples seem to begin to grasp, albeit yet in a glass darkly, spoken “plainly” and “no parable”. Jesus in response makes it equally clear that there are and there always will be tribulations in the world. “You shall be scattered every man to his own,” and in reference to his passion, you “shall leave me alone.” Such is the meaning of our betrayals of God; the meaning of our sin is seen in his desolation on the Cross in the terrifying aloneness of his suffering. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Nothing captures more fully the meaning of sin, the sense of abandonment because of our having forsaken God. “And yet,” as Jesus says, “I am not alone,” the little conjunction, “yet” highlights his being with the Father and the Father with him. Such is the dynamic of God’s goodness and truth which is by definition greater than the follies of sin and evil. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion.

The words of the Cross begin and end with the address of the Son to the Father: “Father, forgive them”; “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” Everything is gathered back to the Father in love. This is the radical meaning of his going forth and return to the Father. This is the victory of love over hatred and fear, over sin and evil. The Resurrection brings out the radical meaning of creation and our lives in the world, a world which is more than tribulation and oppression because it is God’s world. Thus, James bids us “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” because that is the radical truth of our knowing even as we are known in Christ. The Resurrection opens out to us “the perfect law of liberty,” which is our freedom in Christ, a freedom from sin and death. That freedom is grace, the grace that allows us to face the world and ourselves without fear. It gives us the courage to act and engage the world of nature and human affairs.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 23 – 29 May

Tuesday, May 24th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Anthony Grafton’s Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (2009) & Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998) by Umberto Eco.

Thursday, May 26th, Ascension Day
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 29th, Sunday after Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Ilya Repin, Even if all fall away, I will notArtwork: Ilya Repin, Even if all fall away, I will not, 1896. Oil on canvas, Ivanovo Arts Museum, Russia.

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