Year: 2023

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 November

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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Prayers and liturgy

Clement, Bishop of Rome

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

Sebastiano Conca, Miracle of St. Clement in the CrimeaSaint 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.

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Prayers and liturgy

Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr

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

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

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edmund (841-869), King of the East Angles, Martyr (source):

O eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
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 St. Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:16-22

Abbo of Fleury, Martyrdom of St. EdmundEdmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St. Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St. Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St. Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

Click here to read Fr. David Curry’s sermon for the Feast of St. Edmund.

Artwork: Abbo of Fleury, Martyrdom of St Edmund, c. 1130. Illumination, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity

“We give thanks to God … for the hope which is laid up for you in heaven.”

At the heart of Paul’s lovely flow of words of prayer and praise to God for the people of Colossae is the hope of heaven which they have heard and received in what he calls “the word of truth in the Gospel; which is come unto you” and which “bringeth forth fruit and increaseth” in them “since the day ye heard of it, and knew the grace of God in truth.” His prayer is that they “might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,” and that they “might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.”

The passage in its intensity of warmth and expression belongs to the grace of God at work in our lives which has been a dominant feature of the Trinity season in terms of the idea of sanctification. Yet at the same time, the readings in the late Trinity season also point us to the coming of that grace towards us that belongs to Advent. Thus these Sundays are transitional; at once an ending and a beginning.

T.S. Eliot’s poem East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets, begins with the phrase “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning,’ capturing the nature of the transition that belongs to the interplay between justification and sanctification. It is really all a kind of redire ad principia, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of Christ, what Eliot terms the “still point of the turning world” … for “there the dance is” (Burnt Norton).

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

That end which is always present is God and the hope of heaven in us that “makes us meet to be partakers of the saints in light,” as Paul puts it. What that hope looks like is illustrated in the Gospel story. It is the yearning or desire for wholeness, for the integrity of our lives as found in Christ. That yearning is captured in the unspoken prayer of the woman who was diseased with an issue of blood for twelve years who came behind Jesus and “touched the hem of his garment.” As Matthew tells us, “she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Such is her insight into the grace of God in Christ and such is her desire for healing, for wholeness. Yet it is as if she thinks she can steal a cure from Jesus without his awareness. As such her desire is incomplete.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 20 – 26 November

Tuesday, November 21st
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Parish Hall: The Visible Unseen: Essays, Andrea Chapela & Kelsi Vanada (2022); and Floodmeadow, Toby Martinez de las Rivas (2023).

Sunday, November 26th, Sunday Next Before Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Services:

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

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

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

Upcoming Events:

Annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2023. Deadline for donations at Christ Church Windsor is the last Sunday in November (Nov. 26, 2023).

Tuesday, November 28th
7:00pm Packing shoeboxes for Mission to Seafarer’s Campaign – Parish Hall

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Trinity

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

O LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:3-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:18-26

Gabriel von Max, The Raising of Jairus Daughter, 1878Artwork: Gabriel von Max, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1878. Oil on canvas, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

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Prayers and liturgy

Hilda, Abbess

St. Augustine Kilburn, Saint HildaThe collect for today, the Feast of Saint 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. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 16 November

Love your neighbour as yourself

The remarkable parade of the ethical teachings of the Scriptures which we have canvassed over the past several weeks in Chapel would not be complete without Leviticus. While the love of God and the love of neighbour are implicit in the Ten Commandments and, for that matter, in the Beatitudes, and are concentrated in what is known as the Summary of the Law, the love of neighbour is made explicit in Leviticus and as explicitly connected to God.

The phrase “I am the Lord” punctuates repeatedly the various directives and laws in Leviticus. Thus Leviticus 19.9-18 ends with the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.” Thus this important ethical teaching is grounded in God and God’s relation to our humanity. The ethical and the holy are united. Leviticus helps us to think about the meaning of holiness and to see its relation to our lives ethically.

Leviticus is an especially formidable book. Yet it is an essential part of the Torah and reflects deeply upon the themes of creation. What makes Leviticus so formidable? It is a collection of rules and regulations that seem arbitrary and obscure in their detail and proscription. Yet is that really very much different from the technocratic world which we inhabit? A world of dictates and rules, of the endlessness of bureaucracy that seems to serve only itself? Our reading and meditating upon Leviticus may awaken us to a wisdom that speaks more deeply to us in our relations with one another.

One of the least read of the Scriptures, at least in the Christian Churches, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Why? Because some parts of it seem so antithetical to our contemporary sensibilities. There are daunting passages about cultic rituals and practices that have emerged over many centuries, the origins of which are obscure. They may seem entirely arbitrary but actually there is a logic at work in the distinction between clean and unclean, or pure and impure. Following the work of the sociologist, Mary Douglas, holiness and purity are closely associated but holiness means more than simply that which is set apart from common usage. It also relates to wholeness, to the idea of the integrity of beings. As she puts it: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual,” in the idea of things in their class or kind. As such, the distinctions in Leviticus are a further working out of the Genesis logic of creation as order through the distinguishing of things from one another. Similar arguments are present in Philo and Origen, Jewish and Christian exegetes from the first and third centuries CE as well as other Patristic writers.

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