Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Palm Sunday
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Palm Sunday.
Year: 2022
Sermon for Palm Sunday
“Truly this was the Son of God”
“The dogma is the drama,” the novelist and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers once wisely noted. Nowhere is that idea more concentrated than in the liturgy of Palm Sunday. It begins the one long liturgy of Holy Week which culminates in Easter. It is the drama of salvation but only if we learn what the liturgy of Palm Sunday and Holy Week teaches us in and through its intensity.
We are not the victims in this story apart from the being the victims of ourselves in our judgements and vilification of others. In a strange way, there is a kind of reversal of the “scapegoat mechanism”. For the scapegoat of all our discontents, our hatred, and our fear of others is transformed, first, by Isaiah in the Servant Songs, and, then, in the Gospels into the Lamb of God. “Behold, the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospels read at the end of the Trinity Season and in Advent, and so in the intensity of the Passion in the Good Friday sentences (BCP, p.173). But in him we confront ourselves not as victims but as persecutors. Palm Sunday and Holy Week confront us with ourselves in the disarray, the chaos and the evil of human sin which wreaks such havoc in our world and day.
As the sociologist, philosopher and literary critic, René Girard, observes, major social and political crises, such as the Black Death in the 14th century (not unlike the Covid-19 pandemic), result in the dissolution of all cultural distinctions, the things which belong to our individuality within a community of order. The resulting confusion and fear leads to fixing blame for this confusion and break-down of order and life; hence, the scapegoat figure, someone or some group who stands out as different in some way or another becomes the target of our discontent, our fear, and our hatred. Thus in mythology and history, scapegoat stories are really persecution narratives.
This is inverted in the biblical understanding, especially in the Gospels. We confront ourselves as the persecutors in a radical internalizing of sin. The spectacle of Holy Week which begins with the drama of Palm Sunday is the spectacle of our humanity in all of the forms of its disarray, on the one hand, and the figure of Christ, on the other hand, in whose presence we are revealed to ourselves. Paradoxically, in the sense of a profound yet dialectical truth, that is the mercy, the good, if you will, of the Passion.
Holy Week at Christ Church – 2022
Sunday, April 10th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Monday, April 11th, Monday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Holy Communion
Tuesday, April 12th, Tuesday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Holy Communion
Wednesday, April 13th, Wednesday in Holy Week
4:00pm Tenebrae
Thursday, April 14th, Maundy Thursday
7:00pm Vespers & Holy Communion
Friday, April 15th, Good Friday
7:00am Matins & Penitential Service
7:00pm Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday
Saturday, April 16th, Holy Saturday / Easter Eve
10:00am Matins & Ante-Communion
7:00pm Easter Vigil
Sunday, April 17th, Easter
8:00am Easter Communion
10:30am Easter Communion
Monday, April 18th, Monday in Easter Week
10:00am Holy Communion
Tuesday, April 19th, Tuesday in Easter Week
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, April 24th, Octave Day of Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Events:
Tuesday, April 26th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Robert N. Spengler III’s Fruits of the Sand: The Silk Road Origins of the Food We Eat (2019) & Linda Colley’s The Gun, The Ship, and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021)
Wednesday, April 27th
3:00pm Cadet Church Parade
Palm Sunday
The collect for today, the Sunday Next before Easter, commonly called Palm Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 2:5-11
The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to St. Matthew
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:1-54
Artwork: Willem van Herp, Entry into Jerusalem, before 1677. Oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 April
You are the man.
Such a simple statement and yet so profound. We have been considering the story of David in Chapel throughout Lent. Last week we had before us the story of the sin of David. His sin(s) are our sins really, a wonderful and dynamic way of helping us think about the devious ways into sin which define us all as persons of sin. But are we to be left with simply the bleak picture of our sin and evil?
This week we have pondered the remarkable way in which David faces the contradictions of his behaviour. It is about how he is brought to account. The story is told in the form of understatement which presupposes a degree of intelligence on the hearer. Once again, the heart of David is opened to view but not just as hero but as sinner. Yet now, even more, as penitent, as one who confronts himself in his sin and evil.
It is a remarkable and touching story. It is about the true role of prophecy which should always be about an insight into two things: the human heart and God. God would not be God if we could somehow hide from him. We may try to hide from ourselves and one another. We may try, like David, to hide or conceal that which we have done which we should not have done. Such is our folly in relation to God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid” (BCP, p. 67). Nathan stands, in contrast to Samuel, as one who has an insight into human character and into the will of God. Such is the nature of prophecy; it has a grasp of the whole of reality of which we are but a part.
How does this confrontation with ourselves in our sin and folly happen? Through the telling of a story. The story shows something of the prophetic wisdom of Nathan. He tells a story to David which moves David to condemn the evil in the story. It is all rather touching. The rich man with many lambs and sheep takes the one little ewe lamb, which is loved like a daughter by the poor man, in order to provide the rites of hospitality for the wayfarer. We sense the injustice in the story and rightly so. The deeper point is about David’s reaction to the story. He immediately sees the injustice and unkindness of the rich man in the story, and, even more, the lack of pity or mercy. Nathan simply says, that is you. “You are the man.” This is exactly what you have done. The story works because David has a conscience which can be moved. He confronts himself in the story which Nathan tells and in its application to himself.
The lessons are clear, I think, for us. Chapel sets before you various Scriptural stories, ethically and philosophically considered, which awaken us to who we are in the sight of God. It is about coming to terms with ourselves. David does not make excuses. He does not try to deny or to diminish his own actions. He does not say ‘that is your truth and this is my truth’, the contemporary sophistic betrayal of all truth. He does not engage in the whine of the poor-me’s, in the litany of trying to justify the unjustifiable. No. He acknowledges what he has done and, mirabile dictu, he recognizes the deeper spiritual meaning of all sin. “I have sinned against the Lord.” This will feature as the strong teaching of Psalm 51, attributed to David and sometimes interpreted as David’s confession in relation to the sins of David seen in 2 Samuel. “Against thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51.4).
A powerful story powerfully told, the encounter between Nathan and David speaks to the whole of the educational project of the development of character and to the significance of the ethical at King’s-Edgehill. There is a certain understated beauty in Nathan’s simple words. “You are the man.” In confronting our sins, our failings and our follies, we also confront the overcoming of them; in short, we learn! The story of David is both a mirror and a window, a mirror in which we see ourselves and a window into the truth of God. Such is mercy.
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Lenten Meditation #4 on Leviticus
This is the fourth of four Lenten meditations on Leviticus. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
“He shall let the goat go into the wilderness”
It is the goat not offered as a sin offering to the Lord but the goat “sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.” Such are the rather obscure origins of a fairly common concept and term, scapegoat. It first appears in English with John Wycliffe’s 14th century translation and from there is carried forward by Tyndale in the 16th century and into the 17th century King James Version. The Latin Vulgate following the Greek Septuagint simply refers to “the goat which is sent away,” capro emissario, as the Vulgate puts it. Scapegoat is the goat that gets away, we might say, but in Leviticus, it is the goat which is sent away with the sins of Israel imposed upon it and sent away into the wilderness, to Azazel, a kind of demonic figure.
But for us the term is familiar as the figure of blame for social and political catastrophes especially those that seem to have an apocalyptic aspect. As René Girard observes, the use of the scapegoat belongs to the collective persecution narratives that accompany major disruptions and catastrophes to the social order such as plague. The scapegoat is the figure who is blamed for what is happening. He demonstrates this with respect to the black death of the 14th century which was blamed by some if not many upon the Jews. As Girard suggests, such events as a plague result in the leveling of all cultural distinctions and differences – all are affected. This leads, he argues, both historically and mythologically, to the assigning of blame to a victim, often one who conveniently has a disability, a difference. In other words, our use of the term scapegoat is about the persecution narratives which we produce.
Girard notes that this modern and ancient understanding contrasts with the revolutionary and revelatory perspective of the Bible, both in terms of the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. As he argues, the biblical view inverts this logic of the scapegoat mechanism; the whole direction of things, Old and New Testament alike, convict us as the persecutors while emphasizing the innocence of the appointed and chosen victim identified as the persecutor. The scapegoat as such is not the persecutor but the persecuted. Jesus’ passion completes the paradox, the victim is victor, the persecutor as the persecuted annuls or negates the conflict. “He reigns and triumphs from the tree,” as Venantius Fortunatus’ Passion Sunday hymn puts it. What the Gospels highlight is that we are the persecutors not the persecuted; we are those who condemn Christ without a cause, echoing the Psalmist’s phrase that “they hated me without a cause” (Ps. 69.4; Jn. 15.24), which carries over into the stupendous first word of the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk.23.34).
Ambrose, Doctor and Bishop
The collect for today, the Feast Day of St. Ambrose (339-397), Doctor of the Church, Poet, Bishop of Milan (source):
Lord God of hosts,
who didst call Ambrose from the governor’s throne
to be a bishop in thy Church
and a courageous champion of thy faithful people:
mercifully grant that, as he fearlessly rebuked rulers,
so we may with like courage
contend for the faith which we have received;
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 Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:13-20
Artwork: Antonio Vivarini, St. Ambrose Baptises St. Augustine, c. 1440. Tempera on panel, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Passion Sunday
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Passion Sunday.
Sermon for Passion Sunday
“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”
The Letter to the Hebrews is a very rich and demanding theological text. It is intriguing to see when passages from Hebrews are read in the classical lectionary. Hebrews is read at Christmas – the thundering words about the pageant of God’s word culminating in the Word and Son of God (Heb.1.1-12; BCP, p. 105). It is read today on Passion Sunday, the beginning of deep Lent, and, indeed, the end of the Epistle reading this morning (and our text) is the beginning of the Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week (Heb. 9.15-28; BCP, p. 163). Hebrews is read on Good Friday (Heb. 10.1-25; BCP, p. 174). Hebrews is read in the Octave of All Saints for the commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (Heb. 11.13-16; 12.1-2, BCP, p. 302), reminding us of our heavenly citizenship, at once “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” and “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” It is read on Ascension Day at Evening Prayer and throughout the Daily Offices of Ascensiontide, thus informing our understanding of the Ascension as the culmination of the Resurrection. Such things suggest the theological significance of Hebrews.
And it is not by accident that Hebrews 9.11-15 is read today just after a thematic selection of readings from Leviticus on Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening just past. In a way, Hebrews is the Christian re-working of the forms of reciprocity in worship that belongs to Leviticus and especially in terms of the ethical demands that the worship of God entails with respect to our dealings with one another and the land; in short, the love of neighbour, which includes the stranger and the sojourner, and our respect and care for the land. Such considerations speak to the idea of atonement, to our being at one with God and through God with one another in God’s creation. This is the significance of Jesus as “the Mediator of the new covenant.”
The idea of mediation assumes conflict, a division between parties. But the Mediator here is not about seeking some sort of compromise between competition over partial goods, trying to find some sort of consensus which we agree upon and make. The issue of mediation here is about the yawning and unbridgeable gap between God and man owing to human sin and evil. The divide or opposition which we have caused cannot be overcome or mediated by us. The Book of Leviticus, with all of the rigour of its proscriptions about ritual and sacrifice, takes seriously the relation between Israel and God as grounded in God’s own holiness. “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19.2). “I am the Lord your God” is a constantly repeated refrain in Leviticus, a constant reminder of the holy otherness of God as the ground for our actions towards one another and towards the created order. But such things presuppose our separation from both God and nature and from God and one another. What Leviticus seeks is atonement, actions commanded by God that seek the reconciliation of our humanity with God and with one another and with the created order.
Week at a Glance, 4 – 10 April
Tuesday, April 5th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme IV
Sunday, April 10th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through April 5th. Return to the Church for Holy Week & Easter.