Year: 2022

Prayers and liturgy

Martin of Tours

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Martin (c 316-397), Monk, Bishop of Tours (source):

Almighty God,
who didst call Martin from the armies of this world
to be a faithful soldier of Christ:
give us grace to follow him
in his love and compassion for those in need,
and empower thy Church to claim for all people
their inheritance as the children of God;
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: Isaiah 58:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:34-40

Baldassare Franceschini, St Martin sharing his Cloak with the BeggarOne of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, Martin was born to pagan parents and, although intending to become a Christian, followed his father into the Roman army. About three years later, in Amiens, France, came the famous incident portrayed in the painting seen here.

On a cold winter day, he met a beggar at the city gates. Drawing his sword, he cut his military cloak in two and gave half to the man. In a dream that night, he saw Christ wearing the half-cloak he had given away and saying, “Martin, yet a catechumen, has covered me with his garment”. Martin was baptised shortly thereafter.

After being discharged from the army, he met St. Hilary at Poitiers upon the latter’s return from exile in 360. Hilary provided a piece of land where Martin founded the first monastic community in Gaul. He lived there for ten years until 371, when he reluctantly accepted a call from the people of Tours to become their bishop.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 November

Greater love

“You will love again the stranger who was your self” (Love After Love). The Caribbean writer Derek Walcott’s words help to bring together the interplay of love and law which has been a large part of the ethical reflections in Chapel over the last month or so. We have had the reading of the Ten Commandments, of Christ’s command to love your enemies, of the Leviticus command to love your neighbour as yourself, and now as belonging to the vision of the Communion of Saints, the Beatitudes of Christ.

November is the grey month of our remembering: the remembering of the unity of our humanity as a community of love – such is the meaning of All Saints, the remembering of our common mortality – such is the meaning of the Solemnity of All Souls. This week brings us to Remembrance Day, the sad remembering of the horrific loss of life in the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, T.S. Eliot observes in The Burial of the Dead, the first part of “The Waste Land”, written exactly one hundred years ago. It is an allusion to Dante’s comment about the souls in the Vestibule of Hell in the Inferno of The Divine Comedy, imaged as chasing after this and that banner of ideological fads and fancies, souls worthy of neither heaven nor hell. If you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything, it seems.

Remembrance Day challenges us about our histories and about our life in community. In doing so it challenges us about ourselves and our assumptions about ourselves. The School on Remembrance Day marches as the Corps, meaning body, down to the Cenotaph in Windsor and back again to the School’s Cenotaph. A cenotaph is an empty tomb symbolic of the many, many young soldiers who never came back from campaigns in distant lands and places. Our students and faculty sit in Chapel in the very pews where those from King’s College and King’s Collegiate School once sat before they went off to war. We remember them by name even though they are in some sense complete strangers to us. But in another way they are part of us and we are part of them in the life and community of the School.

Our remembering is and should be a solemn and sober affair. It is not a celebration but a serious reminder of the ambiguities and complexities of life and about facing the past in all of its grandeur and misery, both the good and the evil which implicates us all. The blanket condemnation of everything before yesterday is the conceit of the naive and the self-righteous. How will those after us look upon us, after all? Our history is part of the life of our institutions and of ourselves. One of the great challenges of education is to help students to have a thoughtful relation to the past; for instance, to make sense of the senselessness of the great wars. It is easy to judge but much harder to understand.

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Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, LuxembourgO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, Luxembourg.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity (in the Octave of All Saints)

“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

But is God’s word alive in us? Here is the Gospel story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again, and all without seeing. And its effects extend to define a community of faith, “himself believed, and his whole house”. “Faith cometh by hearing” has its illustration in this touching scene. But does his Word have its resonance in us?

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvelous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, and recalls to us as well the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and world.

They remind us of what so much of our culture and church is often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that, properly speaking, define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the empty barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness, what one theologian has called “metaphysical boredom”.

This is the modern disease of secular society which has denied the deepest questions of meaning. But banishing such questions leaves a God-shaped hole in our hearts and our culture into which run a whole plethora of false gods. George Steiner, in a largely forgotten Massey Lecture, called attention to this modern phenomenon as “Nostalgia for the Absolute”, noting that in the place of religion, the ideologies of secular atheism rushed in with such things as Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism and the social anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, all ideologies which have come and gone. They have left in their wake “the incredulity of meta-narratives”, as François Lyotard puts it, a defining feature of what is sometimes called post-modernism.

Yet in the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are altogether about the resonance of God’s word in human lives. Without them our churches, like our souls, are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, in Shakespeare’s poignant words.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 7 – 13 November

Tuesday, November 8th
7:00 Parish Council Meeting

Friday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
11:00am Service at Windsor Cenotaph
12noon Service at KES Cenotaph

Sunday, November 13th, Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Saturday, November 19th
4:30-6:00pm Parish Hall: Ham Supper

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 6:10-20
The Gospel: St. John 4:46-54

Tissot, Healing of the Officer's SonArtwork: James Tissot, The Healing of the Officer’s Son, 1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 November

That time of year

November begins with All Saints’s Day just after the ‘revels’ of Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve. Hallow means Holy, as in the Lord’s prayer, “hallowed be thy name”. “Be ye holy as I am holy”, as God says in Leviticus. The ‘holy ones’ are the Saints, from the Latin sanctus. Shakespeare’s sonnet (#73) always reminds me of November and of All Saints: “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” For In the barren greyness of the dying of nature’s year, there is a gathering into the fullness of life. Such is the vision of the Communion of saints. It is about our lives as embraced in God’s love.

A vision of our redeemed humanity, All Saints speaks to our world of scattered souls which are like so many fallen leaves scattered on the wind. It celebrates instead the gathering into wholeness and blessedness of our fractured and fragmented selves. It is about our wholeness, our holiness, as found in God and in company with one another, a counter to our fractured and fragmented selves in a fractured and fragmented world. Such is the “Unreal City” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written exactly one hundred years ago just after the devastations and madnesses of the First World War.

All Saints offers a profound critique to a fragmented world in which we have turned ourselves into objects. The French author George Bernanos observed that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.” The Kentucky poet and environmentalist, Wendell Berry, remarks that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” To be a machine is to be a thing, where even our bodies have become objects, things, to ourselves, as the French philosopher, Michel Henry noted, things that we can manipulate as we see fit.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard Hooker, Doctor of the Church of England

The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):

Hooker Statue, Exeter CathedralO God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people
thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
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: 1 Corinthians 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23

The statue of Richard Hooker is situated outside Exeter Cathedral, England.

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Prayers and liturgy

All Souls’ Day

The collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
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: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27

Marten de Vos, The Last JudgmentArtwork: Marten de Vos, The Last Judgment, 1570. Oil on panel, Museum of Fine Arts of Seville, Spain.

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