Christ Church

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain

Isaiah is the great prophet of Advent. Advent, from the Latin, adventus, which means coming, is about the motions of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of the wilderness of our hearts and world. This is concentrated for us in the great pageant of the Advent and Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols. An important feature of that pageant are readings from Isaiah. This week in Chapel, one of those readings was highlighted and commented upon, Isaiah 11.1-3a, 4a, 6-9.

It provides a twofold reflection upon the Messianic King and the idea of Paradise Restored. The passage has had an enormous influence upon the theological understanding of our humanity and upon the idea of Creation as Paradise as well as contributing to the Christian understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. The idea of the Messianic King is associated with King David. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,” it begins, recalling us to the family tree or lineage of King David, the King who united the unruly tribes of Israel in the worship of God centered in Jerusalem, Zion.

In Isaiah’s vision, “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” The Holy Spirit of God conveys the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit upon the Messiah, the anointed one who is thought of as the saviour of the world. The gifts are spiritual principles which speak to the integrity of our humanity, to the unity of heart and mind and which are properties or qualities of the Messiah in us. The Hebrew text as we have it from a much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint, names six gifts but the Septuagint itself speaks of the seven gifts of the Spirit.

But what are these so-called gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” The Septuagint, probably out of sense of the rhetorical patterns of the Greek language, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to honouring or worshipping God.

They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts which come from God and speak to heart and mind. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God. Critical to that theological understanding is the idea of the integration of heart and mind, suggested in the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit. That these gifts are directly associated with the Messiah signify that these gifts ultimately derive from the Word and the Spirit of God and unite us with God. In other words, these spiritual gifts are principles that come from God to us and that speak to the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as seen in the sight of God.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who didst give such grace unto thy holy Apostle Saint Andrew, that he readily obeyed the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him without delay: Grant unto us all, that we, being called by thy holy word, may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 10:8-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:18-22

A native of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, Andrew was a fisherman, the son of the fisherman John, and the brother of the fisherman Simon Peter. He was at first, along with John the Evangelist, a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus was the Christ led the two to follow Jesus. Andrew then took his brother Simon Peter to meet Jesus. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Andrew is called the Protokletos (the First Called) because he is named as the first disciple summoned by Jesus into his service.

At first Andrew and Simon Peter continued to carry on their fishing trade, but the Lord later called them to stay with him all the time. He promised to make them fishers of men and, this time, they left their nets for good.

The only other specific reference to Andrew in the New Testament is at St. Mark 13:3, where he is one of those asking the questions that lead our Lord into his great eschatological discourse.

In the lists of the apostles that appear in the gospels, Andrew is always numbered among the first four. He is named individually three times in the Gospel of St. John. In addition to the story of his calling (John 1:35-42), he, together with Philip, presented the Gentiles to Christ (John 12:20-22), and he pointed out the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8).

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

“Master, where dwellest thou?”

The Sunday Next Before Advent is a day of double prepositions. It signals at once an ending and a beginning in the Lesson from Jeremiah and in the Gospel from the end of the first Chapter from John. Yet, for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel read on this day was from “the Bread of Life discourse” near the beginning of Chapter Six of John’s Gospel. It is the story of the miraculous feeding of the multitude in the wilderness also read on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, albeit with a different point of emphasis, namely, the idea of God’s provisions for his people in the wilderness. As read for centuries on this Sunday, the emphasis is more on the idea of the fullness of redemption, the gathering up of all of the broken fragments of our lives into the life of God; hence the sense of ending. “Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.”

The change to the Gospel which you heard this morning was one of the few changes made in the 1962 Canadian revision to the Prayer Book. It suggests the Advent theme of God’s turning to us, the Advent pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of our hearts and our world. But that doesn’t entirely eclipse the idea of an ending in the sense of meaning and purpose which is found in our dwelling with God and God with us. Thus the readings are complementary and belong to the transitions from one form of spiritual emphasis to another that are inescapably interrelated; the themes of justifying righteousness and sanctifying righteousness that belong to our incorporation into the life of Christ and to the hope of heaven, our end in glory.

“Come and see,” Jesus says to the disciples of John and to us. Ultimately, it is an invitation to the banquet of divine love opened out to us through the pageant of God’s Word. Advent signals the coming of God’s word to us. The constant struggle of our lives is about learning to live in and from that Word. The task of the Church is simply to proclaim the Word of God faithfully and sacramentally. Today marks a kind of gathering or summing up of the past year of grace even as it catapults us into a new year; a time of endings and beginnings. “In my beginning is my end” and “in my end is my beginning” (T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets).

God’s word coming to us is given as the principle of our abiding in the love of God. As George Herbert says, “the crosse taught all wood to resound his name” and that is very much signaled in the architecture wherein the wood of this Church resounds with the name of Christ so that his word may have its resonance in us.

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Tuesday, November 28th
7:00pm Gift-wrapping session for the Mission to Seafarers – Parish Hall

Thursday, November 30th, St. Andrew’s Day
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, December 1st
2:15pm Advent/Xmas Lessons & Carols
Junior School: Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Sunday, December 3rd, First Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Services:

Monday, December 4th
2:30pm Advent/Xmas Lessons & Carols
Gr. 10 & 11: Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Thursday, December 7th, Eve of the Conception of the BVM
7:00pm Advent Programme I

Saturday, December 9th
Advent Quiet Day – Fr. Curry at St. George’s, Halifax, 9am – 1:30pm

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: Giovanni Bellini, Christ Blessing, c. 1460. Tempera on panel, Louvre, Paris.

The collect for a virgin or matron, on the Feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria (early 4th century?), Virgin and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD Most High, the creator of all mankind, we bless thy holy Name for the virtue and grace which thou hast given unto holy women in all ages, especially thy servant Catherine; and we pray that the example of her faith and purity, and courage unto death, may inspire many souls in this generation to look unto thee, and to follow thy blessed Son Jesus Christ our Saviour; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 9:36-42
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

According to her legend, St. Catherine lived in Alexandria when Emperor Maxentius was persecuting the church. A noble and learned young Christian, Catherine prevailed in a public debate with philosophers who tried to convince her of the errors of Christianity. Maxentius had her scourged, imprisoned and condemned her to death. She was tied to a wheel embedded with razors, but this attempt to torture her to death failed when the machine (later a Catherine wheel) broke and onlookers were injured by flying fragments. Finally, she was beheaded. Tradition holds that she was martyred in 305.

The cult of Saint Catherine arose in the Eastern Church in the 8th or 9th century and spread to the West at the time of the Crusades. She is not mentioned in any early martyrologies. No reliable facts concerning her life or death have been established. Most historians now believe that she probably never existed.

St. Catherine is often portrayed holding a book, symbolic of her great learning. She is the patron saint of libraries and librarians, teachers and students.

Artwork: Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1510. Oil on panel, Prado, Madrid.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

At the end of this week in Chapel we have come full circle, as it were, and are now readying ourselves for the three Advent/Christmas Carol services at the School. The Junior School service will be next Friday, December 1st, 2:15pm in the Chapel. There is limited space for up to twenty parents or grandparents. The Grade 12 class service will be on Sunday evening, December 3rd, 7pm in the Chapel followed by a reception in Stanfield Hall. Parents and grandparents are invited to the service and the reception. The service for the Grade 10s and 11s will be in the Chapel on Monday, December 4th at 2:30pm.

These services are an adaptation of the Service of Nine Lessons with Carols devised in 1918 and used in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. A wonderful pageant of word and song, the service speaks of hope and peace in the face of the darkness of human violence and despair in every age, including our own.

But with God’s great question to Job, “where were you?” from The Book of Job read on Thursday and Friday of this week, we are reminded of God’s first question to our humanity in Genesis: “Where are you?” Beginnings and endings, it seems, which somehow speak to our present. T.S. Eliot’s second poem, East Coker, in his Four Quartets, opens with “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with “in my end is my beginning.” That paradox is very much at the heart of the Chapel programme of spiritual reflections that are really about a constant going forth and return to God as the principle of all things, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God. I love the questions of God in Genesis and the return to those questions over and over again in different registers throughout the Scriptures such as Jesus’ own question about John the Baptist which ultimately points to himself. “What went ye out for to see?” What are we seeking? What do we desire? Ultimately, all our desiring is not simply for this or that thing but for God, the absolute in whom we find the truth of our being and living and the truth of everything. Left to ourselves our desires are incomplete and partial, divided and in disarray.

God’s question to Job is really God’s answer to Job about the purpose and nature of creation and our place within its order. It is a check on human pride and presumption which seeks to reduce God and the world to mere instruments or things to be used by us. As if we are gods! Such are the delusions of our technocratic world which assumes that technology is the solution to all our problems, seemingly unaware of its ambiguities that make it just as much a problem. This is not new. We have forgotten what Neil Postman observed decades ago in Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. As he puts it, “the human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” Chapel, in part, seeks to awaken us to the wisdom which is more than knowledge and information. God’s rhetorical question reminds Job and us that the order of creation and the Law belongs to something far greater than us and yet as that in which we participate and find our good.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Clement (c. 30-c. 100), Bishop of Rome, Martyr (source):

Eternal Father, creator of all,
whose martyr Clement bore witness with his blood
to the love that he proclaimed and the gospel that he preached:
give us thankful hearts as we celebrate thy faithfulness,
revealed to us in the lives of thy saints,
and strengthen us in our pilgrimage as we follow thy Son,
Jesus Christ 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 2:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:37-45

Saint Clement was one of the first leaders of the church in the period immediately after the apostles. Some commentators believe that he is the Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3. If so, he was a companion and fellow-worker of Paul. The Roman Catholic Church regards him as the fourth pope.

St Clement is best known for his Epistle to the Corinthians, dated to about 95. Clement addressed some of the same issues that Paul had addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians. The church at Corinth apparently still had problems with internal dissension and challenges to those in authority. Clement reminds them of the importance of Christian unity and love, and that church leaders serve for the good of the whole body.

Although the letter was written in the name of the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth, St. Clement’s authorship is attested by early church writers. This epistle was held in very high regard in the early church; some even placed it on a par with the canonical writings of the New Testament.

Artwork: Sebastiano Conca, Miracle of St. Clement in the Crimea, 18th century, Palazzo Barberini, Rome.

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cecilia (3rd century), Virgin, Martyr (source):

Gracious God, whose servant Cecilia didst serve thee in song: Grant us to join her hymn of praise to thee in the face of all adversity, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 15:1-4
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

Artwork: Carlo Dolci, Saint Cecilia, 1670. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.