Year: 2022

Sermons

Lenten Meditation #1 on Leviticus

“The Lord called Moses, and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,
Speak to the people of Israel.”

Along with “self-examination and repentance, … prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” the Church bids us to the observance of a holy Lent “by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 612).  Tonight we begin a little series of meditations on the Book of Leviticus. But why Leviticus? Not only is it one of the least read books of the Bible, I suspect, and certainly in the liturgical life of the Church but perhaps one of the most formidable books of the Bible. Nonetheless it belongs to Holy Scripture, which, as our Articles of Religion note, “containeth all things necessary to salvation,” apart from which nothing is required to “be believed as an article of the Faith” (Art. VI, p. 700). Leviticus belongs to the Torah, the Law, which has pride of place in the Jewish understanding even as the Gospels do for Christians.

It is certainly the least read book in the Church’s lectionaries. The Hebrew Scriptures are too extensive to be read through in their entirety in the course of the year in terms of the Daily Offices and the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer and in the Eucharistic readings, unlike the New Testament which is more or less read through twice in the course of the year. The endeavour with the first lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer is to read substantial sections of all the canonical texts of the Old Testament, as well as passages at certain times from the Deuterocanonical books. But while there are great chunks of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy that are read both in the Sunday Offices and in the Daily Offices, Leviticus gets exceptionally short shift even though it is part of the Torah.

Passages from Leviticus are read only at Evening Prayer on Friday of the Week of Lent 4, and at Morning Prayer and at Evening Prayer on the Saturday of that week, and then on the Wednesday of Holy Week at Evening Prayer; a total of four readings. As minimal as this may seem, the choice of readings and the time of their appointment are significant. The Friday evening and Saturday first lessons usher us into Passiontide, to deep Lent; in short to a more intense reflection on the sacrifice of Christ. It is not by accident that the New Testament counterpart to Leviticus, perhaps, is the Letter to the Hebrews from which the Epistle for Passion Sunday is taken (Heb. 9.11ff), a passage which builds upon the imagery and meaning of ritual and sacrifice found in the Torah and especially in Leviticus. In this sense, reading and meditating upon Leviticus belongs to our contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice in the Christian understanding. “By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us,” marking at once a connection and a difference between the two covenants. “For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling those who are unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh” (distinct references to Leviticus); “how much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, purify your  conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Christ is, as Hebrews insists, “the mediator of the new covenant.”

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Second Sunday in Lent

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”

We are called to holiness, St. Paul reminds us. Sanctification means being made holy. The doctrinal concepts of justification and sanctification are necessarily intertwined. Justification is how we are known in the sight of God. God sees us in Christ who is our justification, the one who makes us right with God. In other words, it is about our being known in the knowing love of God. Yet as Paul reminded us on Quinquagesima Sunday “now we see in a glass darkly”; we do not yet see ourselves fully and truly in God. Thus, while the justifying righteousness of Christ is perfect and inherent in him it is not yet fully realised in us. Sanctification is about living more fully truly and fully in Christ and in the work of redemption which he has accomplished for us. Lent is about our journey with Christ in that work of redemption. As such it recalls us to both the principles of justification and sanctification.

Today’s Collect helps us to understand the dynamic between the Epistle and Gospel. God sees “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” This puts starkly the human condition, our sinfulness and insufficiency. But to know this is to be looking to God, to his healing grace and truth for us and in us. What Paul is talking about in the Epistle reading from Thessalonians is about nothing less than seeking to be who we are in the sight of God. That turns on what we see in the Gospel, namely, the amazing story of the persistence and strength of an unnamed “woman of Canaan” who illustrates for us what it means to be looking to God for grace and mercy, for healing and salvation; in short, to being made whole, our sanctification.

The story is about the struggle that belongs to faith. Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel, meaning one who struggles with God. That struggle is about breaking into the heart of God, into the meaning of God’s will and purpose for our life. Here in this story of a non-Israelite we have, in my view, one of the most powerful images of what it truly means to be an Israelite, as it were, to be who we are in the sight of God and to be living in that understanding. It is found in the amazing but disturbing dialogue and exchange between Jesus, his disciples, and this woman. She has a hold of the one thing necessary: an insight into the truth of God in Jesus Christ who alone is the principle of life, on the one hand, and the healing or restoration of our wounded and broken humanity, on the other hand. She knows the human need for divine mercy. This is her litany and ours. The Prayer Book Litany, the first part of the Liturgy to be translated and reworked from Latin into English by Thomas Cranmer, simply explicates in a comprehensive and exhaustive way all the things for which we seek God’s help and mercy.

She illustrates the meaning of the idea “that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51, 17). She is deeply troubled about her “daughter grievously vexed with a devil.” It is a phrase worth pondering. It speaks directly to our contemporary culture of addiction and psychotic disorders, of neuroses and mental distresses that are destructive and paralysing and which affect not only the individual but their families and friends. They are part and parcel of a broken and troubled world. Such things are really about a loss of self, what we might call, a negative negating of the self. Though some may think that there are cures to be found in the therapeutic culture whether through prescribed drugs, the pill cure, or through the talking cure, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, the older view of Freud, for instance, was that there is no cure to the discontents that beset modernity; at best, there are only ways to cope.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 14 – 20 March

Tuesday, March 15th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I

Sunday, March 20th, Third Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Thursday, March 24th, Eve of the Annunciation
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme II

Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through April 5th. Return to the Church for Holy Week & Easter.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 15:21-28

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her DaughterArtwork: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her Daughter, 1909. Oil on canvas, Spelman College, Atlanta.

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Prayers and liturgy

Gregory the Great, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (540-604), Bishop of Rome, Doctor of the Church (source):

O merciful Father,
who didst choose thy bishop Gregory
to be a servant of the servants of God:
grant that, like him, we may ever desire to serve thee
by proclaiming thy gospel to the nations,
and may ever rejoice to sing thy praises;
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 Lesson: 1 Chronicles 25: 1a, 6-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:42-45

Spinello Aretino, The Apparition of St Michael the Archangel to St GregoryArtwork: Spinello Aretino, The Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel to St. Gregory, c.1402-1403. Fresco, Cappella Guasconi, Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo, Italy.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 March

“For he loved him as he loved his own soul” (1 Samuel 20. 17)

One of the disciplines of Lent is the idea of “reading and meditat[ing] upon God’s Holy Word.” It is to that end that we have embarked upon a brief look at parts of the wonderful narrative of the story of David. It belongs to the further idea of “self-examination and repentance” that is part of the spiritual discipline of Lent as it is in other religions traditions as well. In one sense, the Chapel readings in this last week before the March break speak to an ancient question raised by Plotinus. “But we … who are we?” Or to put it in another way, where are our hearts?

In the story of David, we see the heart of David which God sees. But that connects to what we see in one another’s hearts as well as to the project of self-knowing, knowing even as we are known. Thus in the great narrative arc of David’s story, there is the powerful story of the friendship between Jonathan and David. This places the David narrative within the larger spiritual and intellectual traditions of reflection about the power and nature of friendship and to the idea of our friendship with the Good.

It looks back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Enkidu is created to be Gilgamesh’s second self such that Gilgamesh learns to see others not as things to be abused and exploited but as persons to be respected and honoured. The death of Enkidu awakens Gilgamesh to wisdom and to a deeper form of self-awareness. It sets him on the quest for wisdom. Homer’s Iliad presents us with the profound friendship between Patroclus and Achilleus. Aristotle will write in the Nicomachean Ethics about the power of friendship. Later, Cicero will write an important treatise, de Amicitia, Of Friendship, offering the idea that “friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection”. In the early 12th century, Aelred of Rievaulx in northern England wrote his famous de Spirituali Amicitia, On Spiritual Friendship, translating the more familiar phrase “God is love” as “God is friendship”.  Friendship is a gift of God. The friend is “the companion of your soul, to whom you can entrust yourself as to another self,” an echo of the Epic of Gilgamesh. A true friend, he says “sees nothing in his/her friend but their heart”, echoing explicitly the story of Jonathan and David.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Priest, Friar, Poet, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
who didst enrich thy Church with the learning and holiness
of thy servant Thomas Aquinas:
grant to all who seek thee
a humble mind and a pure heart
that they may know thy Son Jesus Christ
to be the way, the truth and the life;
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Antoni Viladomat, St. Thomas AquinasBorn into a noble family near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, St. Thomas was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino until age thirteen, and then at the University of Naples. When he decided to join the Dominican Order, his family were dismayed because the Dominicans were mendicants and regarded as socially inferior to the Benedictines. Thomas’s brothers kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year in the family’s castle, but he finally escaped and became a Dominican friar in 1244.

The rest of Thomas’s life was spent studying, teaching, preaching, and writing. Initially, he studied philosophy and theology with Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. Albert was said to prophesy that, although Thomas was called the dumb ox (probably referring to his physical size), “his lowing would soon be heard all over the world”.

His two greatest works are Summa Contra Gentiles, begun c. 1259 and completed in 1264, and Summa Theologica, begun c. 1266 but uncompleted at his death.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, First Sunday in Lent

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

“As dying, and behold, we live”

The Epistle reading from 2 Corinthians 6 lays out in a powerful and compelling way the forms of our response to the grace of God now which is “the day of salvation.” Our text is simply one part of a wonderful series of dialectical and paradoxical relations which have to do with who we are and how we see ourselves in the sight of God “as the ministers of God.” It provides a way of thinking the question which Plotinus (3rd c. AD) will later articulate but which actually belongs to all philosophy and life. “But we … who are we?”

The preoccupation with ourselves is an ancient and modern question albeit in different registers of meaning. The story of Narcissus for the ancient Greeks is a cautionary tale which has a certain modern resonance. It is really about the forms of self-obsession perhaps best illustrated in the ‘selfie culture’ of our contemporary world, not to mention the self-absorbed features of social media in general. Just as Narcissus drowns in the image of himself in the pond so in our contemporary world we are obsessed with ourselves and drown in the image of ourselves. In both cases we lose sight of who we are in the greater canvass of reality and, more importantly, in the sight of God.

“Know thyself,” the great Greek maxim of the Delphic Oracle, has its perfect counterpart in the Hebrew idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10; Ps. 110.10; Job 28.28). This is, I think, completely different from our modern self-obsessions which are entirely solipsistic and entirely self-involved, as if reality is only what is in our minds rather than in our engagement with what is greater than ourselves. To “know thyself” means to know your place within the world as an ordered whole, the cosmos, hence reality. “The fear of the Lord” is the wisdom which knows God as the principle of all things.

Lent seeks to clarify who we are by placing us more clearly and more fully in the sight and life of God. Paul’s wonderful rhetorical flow in the Epistle confronts us with the necessary interchange and back-and-forth of opposites; in short, the dialectic of human life as informed and transformed, or at least in the process of such a transformation, by virtue of our response to the grace of God. Paul is calling attention to our attitude of mind towards everything which we confront and experience. It offers a kind of coincidence of opposites as well as a sense of inner resilience and strength over and against the ups and downs of the world. In that sense it is really about facing suffering and learning from it. Such is the meaning of the Exodus in its fullest sense.

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