The collect for today, the Sunday Next before Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45
Artwork: Danese Cattaneo, Christ the Redeemer, 1565. Marble, Basilica di Sant’ Anastasia, Verona.
Isaiah’s beautiful and haunting love song (Is. 5.1-4, 7) brings to conclusion a kind of pageant of ethical thought that has been before us in Chapel over the past several months. We have pondered the mystery of Creation and the Fall, locating the ways in which those foundational stories in Genesis challenge many of our modern assumptions that separate our humanity from the Creator and creation and from one another even as they awaken us to self-consciousness. We have thought our way through the wisdom of the Ten Commandments as a comprehensive system of reasoning about the freedom and dignity of our obligations and duty towards God and one another. We have looked at the wisdom of Leviticus, at once a commentary on creation, and the biblical source for loving your neighbour as yourself and for loving the stranger as neighbour. We have considered Jesus’ words about loving our enemies! We have weighed the great mystery and wonder of the Beatitudes which recall us to who we are in the sight of God, come what may in the ups and downs of human experience. We are, it seems, more than the externalities which so often claim to define us. In short, there is a blessedness in all these teachings.
What makes Isaiah’s love song so poignant and powerful is that it imagines God speaking to our humanity as the beloved and the lover: beloved of us and the lover of our humanity which is imagined as the vineyard of creation. There is the love of God for his creation, his vineyard, and there is the sad reality of our violation and destruction of creation and one another. The song imagines God’s dismay and distress at human folly in ways that are meant to move our hearts and minds. It convicts us. “What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” It is a moving indictment of human sin and its consequences; the ‘barbarism’ which makes a ruin of culture and thus, of life itself. “Every culture is a culture of life,” as Michel Henry notes (Barbarism, 1987), but we have become disconnected from our lifeworld through the devaluation of human life and culture by way of the quantifying logic of science reduced to technology.
The song makes it clear that the vineyard is “the house of Israel” which takes on a universal significance, especially in Isaiah, as the human community and in terms of the theme of justice. God “looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold a cry!” Such is our betrayal and contradiction of ourselves and the good order of creation. Yet the love song is a wake-up call to the truth of our humanity as ultimately defined by the justice and holiness of God such as we have seen in the great ethical teaching not only of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures but by way of Buddhism and Hinduism or what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, invoking the wisdom of the Far East as a collective term for the necessity of the ethical. “But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness” (Is. 5. 16)). We are brought low and humbled in order to be raised up in knowledge and love. Such is the blessing of “the poor in spirit,” the humble ones who are open to the truth and beauty of God and his creation; such is the blessing really of “the kingdom of heaven.”
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Hilda (614-680), Abbess of Whitby (source):
O eternal God,
who madest the abbess Hilda to shine as a jewel in England
and through her holiness and leadership
didst bless thy Church with newness of life and unity:
so assist us by thy grace
that we, like her, may yearn for the gospel of Christ
and bring reconciliation to those who are divided;
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: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 19:27-29
Artwork: St. Hilda, stained glass, St. Hilda’s Church, Ashford, England.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Margaret (1046-1093), Queen of Scotland, Philanthropist, Reformer of the Church (source):
O God, the ruler of all,
who didst call thy servant Margaret to an earthly throne
and gavest to her both zeal for thy Church and love for thy people,
that she might advance thy heavenly kingdom:
mercifully grant that we who commemorate her example
may be fruitful in good works
and attain to the glorious crown of thy saints;
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: Proverbs 31:10-11, 20, 26, 28
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:44-52
St. Margaret was born in Hungary to a Saxon noble family in exile. In 1057, she and her family were able to return to England, but they were forced to move to Scotland following William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066. A few years later, the princess Margaret married Malcolm Canmore, King of the Scots, in Dunfermline.
Queen Margaret was married to Malcolm for almost twenty-five years; her death followed his by only a few days. She bore six sons and two daughters. Three sons ruled as kings of Scotland—Edgar, Alexander I, and David I (later saint)—while a daughter, Matilda, became the queen of Henry I of England.
Margaret, an inspirational monarch of great Christian devotion, undertook many works of charity. She protected orphans, provided for the poor, visited prisoners in her husband’s dungeons, cleansed the sores of lepers, and washed the feet of beggars. She encouraged and enabled the founding of monasteries, churches, and hostels. Her excellent education served Scotland well, for under her influence the Scottish court became known as a place of culture and learning.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Hugh (1135-1200), Bishop of Lincoln (source):
O God,
who didst endow thy servant Hugh
with a wise and cheerful boldness
and didst teach him to commend to earthly rulers
the discipline of a holy life:
give us grace like him to be bold in the service of the gospel,
putting our confidence in Christ alone,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: Titus 2:7-8,11-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47
Artwork: Ambrogio da Fossano (Il Bergognone), Saint Hugh of Lincoln (detail of altarpiece), 1490-1500. Oil on canvas, Cattedrale di San Giusto, Susa, Italy.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity.
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Such are some of the great ethical teachings that belong to the philosophical and religious traditions that once shaped our souls and our worlds. Are we alive to them and to their transformative power? That is the question which is set before us in today’s readings.
The year runs out in a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of judgement and forgiveness. In the Gospel, the servant whose ears are still ringing with the words of forgiveness refuses to forgive another. In the Epistle, Paul prays “that your love may abound yet more and more in all knowledge and in all judgement … being filled with the fruits of righteousness.” The pageant of the Trinity season is concentrated for us in these readings. These are all the motions of God’s grace towards us but is that grace moving and alive in us?
We come to the near end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. It marks the transition from the pageant of God’s grace which seeks our increase in holiness and virtue, the grace of sanctification, to the pageant of justifying grace in Advent through to Trinity Sunday. We come to an end only to be returned to our beginning. Our end and beginning are one and the same. We end and begin again with the grace of forgiveness. As always the challenge is about what is in our hearts with respect to the ethical teachings which in some sense or another belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God. The Gospel offers at once a strong warning and great mercy. The warning is all about ignoring the great mercy, the forgiveness which is really beyond number. It is, after all, the infinite quality of God’s grace given to us in the finite conditions of our lives.
Tuesday, November 15th
7:00pm Parish Hall: Christ Church Book Club: Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast (2021) by Cynthia Saltzman & By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose (2021) by Simon Morley;
Saturday, November 19th
4:30-6:00pm Parish Hall: Ham Supper
Sunday, November 20th, Sunday Next Before Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The collect for today, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy house hold the Church in continual godliness; that through thy protection it may be free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 1:3-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:21-35
Artwork: Domenico Feti, Parable of the Wicked Servant, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden.
A prayer of The Very Rev. Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York:
O Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.
Artwork: Yuri Andreyev, Faith Under the Rubble, 2006.