Month: December 2023

Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday in Advent

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

RAISE up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:4-7
The Gospel: St John 1:19-29

Annibale Carracci, St. John the Baptist Bearing WitnessArtwork: Annibale Carracci, St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness, 1600. Oil on copper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Thomas

My Lord and My God

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

These are the last three verses from John Betjeman’s poem, “Christmas”.

Thomas is the Advent Saint who brings us to the mystery of Christmas. John Betjeman’s poem captures perfectly the underlying impulse of Thomas’ so-called doubting; it is really a kind of questioning and, as such, in pursuit of understanding. A Resurrection story, it recalls the appearance of Christ to the disciples who were huddled in fear behind closed doors on the evening of Easter Day. Thomas was not present with them. When he hears their report that “ we have seen the Lord,” he famously says, “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

The Feast of St. Thomas falls just before the festival of Christ’s Nativity. The Resurrection and the Nativity are completely intertwined and it is the same question, a question about the reality of Christ’s embrace of our humanity, soul and body, that belongs to the radical truth of the Incarnation. Thomas’ question helps us to think about its radical meaning. The birth and passion of Christ reveal to us both the nature of God and a fuller view of our humanity. In a way, Thomas’ question is about the reality of Christ’s humanity and in turn his divinity.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Thomas the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, who for the more confirmation of the faith didst suffer thy holy Apostle Thomas to be doubtful in thy Son’s resurrection: Grant us so perfectly, and without all doubt, to believe in thy Son Jesus Christ, that our faith in thy sight may never be reproved. Hear us, O Lord, through the same Jesus Christ, to whom, with thee and the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory, now and for evermore. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 2:19-22
The Gospel: St. John 20:24-29

Mattia Preti, Doubting ThomasSt. Thomas’s name is believed to come from an Aramaic word meaning twin, but it is not known whose twin he was. He is included in all the lists of the twelve apostles, but he is mentioned most often in St. John’s Gospel, where he is called “Didymus” (“twin” in Greek) three times (11:16; 20:24; 21:2).

St. Thomas appears to have been an impulsive man. He says he is prepared to go with Jesus to the tomb of Lazarus even if it means death (John 11:16). At the Last Supper, however, he confesses his ignorance about where Jesus is going and the way there (John 14:5). In response, Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

After the resurrection, Thomas was unwilling to believe his fellow disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead (John 20:24). He would not believe, he declared, unless he actually touched the wounds. Eight days later, Jesus gave “Doubting Thomas” the evidence he had asked for, whereupon Thomas confessed him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus then pronounces a blessing on all who have not seen and yet believe.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Third Sunday in Advent

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

“What went ye out into the wilderness to see?”

The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on the last two Sundays of Advent. They begin today with John’s great question to Jesus: “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” That, in turn, leads to the rhetorical questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asks, with triple intensity. “What went ye out for to see?” “But what went ye out for to see?” In a wonderful paradox, Jesus’ questions to us point us to John who in turn points us to Jesus. Likewise, next Sunday the questions about John the Baptist by the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem” lead to John the Baptist’s proclamation in “Bethany beyond Jordan” about Jesus as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

What are these advent questions really about? They awaken us to the redemption of our desires by placing our desires, what I am tempted to call the ‘bad infinity of our desires’ (schlechte unendlichkeit – with apologies to Hegel), with God in Christ . Such is the redemption of our desires. Our desires belong to prayer in the sense of longing but our longing itself is essentially tragic because it is a longing for what we do not have and cannot attain. It is a desire for this thing and that thing in an effort to find the truth of our desires which is always beyond us. Dante captures this sense of the endless restlessness of desire in the Convivio:

the infant intensely longing for an apple; and then, later on, for a little bird; and then, still further on, fine clothes; and then a horse; and then a mistress; then modest riches; then more; and then still more. And that is because in none of these things does it find that for which it ever seeks, and it believes to find it further on.

It belongs to human desire, as he puts it, to be always reaching out in one way or another. “And the reason is this: the deepest desire of each thing, arising from its very nature, is to return to its principle. And because God is the principle of our soul, and has made it like himself (as it is written, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’), the soul mightily desires to return to him;” in short, to God. Prayer, as George Herbert wonderfully says, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” essentially encapsulating the same understanding.

All this is profoundly beautiful and true and yet it is both forgotten and denied in our contemporary world. Radically incomplete and reductive forms of thinking such as psychology, economics, and the social sciences, collectively captured in the term ‘sociologism’, displace theology and philosophy as the primary forms of thought. We have lost a sense of God and our humanity in their intrinsic and necessary interrelation. This leads to the reduction of all authority to “mere power detached from any intrinsic ordination to truth and goodness”. As the Italian philosopher and statesman, Augusto Del Noce observes, sociologism effectively “reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures or forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life”. Reducing all conceptions of the world to a kind of ‘social constructivism’ not only negates the transcendence of God and the givenness of creation but also itself since all human and social constructions depend upon principles prior to themselves. It is as if we are gods, making the world and God in our own image.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 18 – 31 December

Thursday, December 21st, St. Thomas/Eve of Ember Friday
7:00pm Holy Communion

Christmas at Christ Church 2023

Sunday, December 24th, Advent IV/Christmas Eve
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00pm Children’s Crèche Service
9:30pm Christmas Communion

Monday, December 25th, Christmas Morn
10:00am Holy Communion

Tuesday, December 26th, St. Stephen
10:00am Holy Communion

Wednesday, December 27th, St. John the Evangelist
10:00am Holy Communion

Thursday, December 28th, Holy Innocents
10:00am Holy Communion

Sunday, December 31st, Sunday after Christmas Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Christmas Lessons & Carols

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Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday in Advent

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

O LORD Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:2-10

Moretto da Brescia, Christ in the wilderness blesses His cousin, St. John the BaptistArtwork: Moretto da Brescia, Christ in the wilderness blesses His cousin, St. John the Baptist, c. 1540. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 December

Waiting in the wilderness

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness. We are, perhaps, not so good about waiting, wanting instead the immediacy and intensity of ‘celebratory’ events. That is to forget the meaning of waiting. What is our waiting? It is at once human desire and the divine gift that redeems our desires. Our human desires for this and that thing are radically incomplete and unable to be fulfilled. Our waiting is really prayer; the desire for wholeness and completeness which by definition cannot be fulfilled in ourselves.

What is the wilderness? It is not the external world or a world without us. The wilderness is us. This is the strong message of Isaiah, the most ‘evangelical’ of all the prophets, as some have noted. Looking back and reflecting on the great themes of Creation and the Fall, Isaiah movingly highlights the wilderness within us. “Let me sing a love song for my beloved, … a love song concerning his vineyard,” Isaiah 5 begins. “My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is the wildness in us that makes the wilderness both within us and in our world. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” The question, like so many of the biblical questions, simply calls us to account and bids us reflect upon ourselves in our yearnings and desires. Ultimately what we seek is the absolute goodness of God which is more than what we can completely imagine and yet belongs to all our seeking and desiring.

But Isaiah, as we heard in the Advent Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols, shows us another view of ourselves and our world that stands in complete contrast to the sad and disturbing divisions and polarities of our divided and violent world. Isaiah offers us a picture of Paradise Restored, of the harmony between God and our humanity, the harmony of creation itself as grounded in the Creator. Instead of Nietzche’s will to power which supplants Darwin’s struggle for survival, the wolf and the lamb are envisioned as lying down together, an image of the interplay and interdependence of the natural world that transcends the binaries of distinction but without negating them. That image of Paradise Restored is the symbolic meaning of Bethlehem.

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Sermons

“The Lord Is At Hand”: Advent Programme

“The Lord is at hand”

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the Advent refrain for the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We wait upon the motions of God’s word coming to us but that waiting is about our active attention to God’s constant and eternal presence. His coming is really about our coming into a deeper understanding and meaning of our lives with the God who is always at hand, always near, and always with us. As we heard last Sunday in the thundering words of Luke’s apocalyptic gospel, “look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” And on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we will hear Paul’s words that “the Lord is at hand” even as that day will bring us to Christmas Eve and to the celebration of Christ’s holy nativity.

The kingdom of heaven, the Lord, your redemption. What does it mean to speak about these things that are “at hand,” that are “nigh”, or near us? Our Advent meditation tonight will focus on something of their meaning by way of Mark Frank, a seventeenth century Anglican preacher and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1613-1664), in ways which, I hope, will deepen our understanding of the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. It is really all about his eternal being and presence into which we come.

He notes that the Lord is said to be at hand or near us in several ways. First and foremost, “he is at hand, or near us, by his Divine essence,” by virtue of being God. For God, as the traditions of mystical theology and philosophy suggest, is “like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As Mark Frank says, “He is everywhere; we therefore nowhere, but that he is near us,” drawing upon Paul’s observation that God is “not far from every one of us” since we have no being, no life apart from him. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17. 27,28).

This highlights the primacy of God with respect to all our thinking and being and recalls us to the mystery which embraces our very being. The mystical traditions of thought are all about a constant redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of reality, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches. That mystery underlies all of the different forms of the kingdom of heaven, the Lord, and your redemption being at hand or nigh to us.

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Sermons

Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah, Advent Quiet Day, St. George’s Halifax

Fr. David Curry delivered this Advent Quiet Day address and homily at St. George’s Round Church, Halifax, on 9 December 2023. Click here to download a pdf version of this post, complete with footnotes.

Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah
Advent Quiet Day , St. George’s Halifax
9 December 2023
(Fr. David Curry)

Part One

Our Advent Quiet Day is a time of prayerful attention to what certain poets have to say about the mystery of God’s coming to us and our coming to God as informed in some fashion by Isaiah, the great prophet of Advent. My hope is that these texts will deepen our understanding and strengthen our wills. Some passages from Isaiah and a selection of poems are offered for your quiet meditation and reflection.

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness upon the motions of God coming to us. What is that waiting? It is our watching and wanting, our looking and desiring; in short, it is prayer. What is the wilderness? It is, as Isaiah will show us, very much about ourselves, the wilderness of our hearts which contributes to various other forms of wilderness. The simple point is that the wilderness is not a place without humans; it is about a kind of wildness within us, the wilderness of sin.

The images of the wilderness in Isaiah look back to the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis but with a wonderful kind of poignancy that moves our hearts and minds. “Let me sing for my beloved,” Isaiah 5 begins, “a love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”

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?

And now I will tell you
what I shall do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold a cry!

The wilderness in us turns the paradise of God’s creation into a wilderness outside us, the waste land of T.S.Eliot’s poem by that name, itself shaped by the imagery of Isaiah. Yet the wilderness, too, is the place of prayer.

Prayer at once acknowledges what we want but as such do not have. Yet it assumes and anticipates that there is an ultimate good in which we participate now. Prayer is both human desire and divine gift, as Fr. Robert Crouse so concisely put it, the divine gift which alone redeems our desires without which they are incomplete and partial, essentially dead and empty. “My soul is athirst for God, yea, even the living God,” the psalmist reminds us. Our sojourning in the wilderness is about our desire for wholeness, “like as the hart desires the water-brooks.” Prayer and wilderness belong to our yearning for something absolute, for “here have we no continuing city” but “desire a better country, that is an heavenly,” as Hebrews puts it. We are, as it were, sojourners in the wilderness longing and seeking for the true homeland of the spirit.

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