Christ Church

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

Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, Meek and sitting upon an ass

This Advent Gospel challenges all our assumptions about Advent. It is the story familiar to you from Palm Sunday, the story of Christ’s ‘triumphant’ entry into Jerusalem. Yet it signals the deeper meaning of Advent, not just as the season of penitential adoration and preparation for Christmas, which it certainly is, but even more in terms of the doctrine of Advent as the Revelation that holds all things together in the mind and heart of God.

Jesus comes as King, stepping into the expectations of Zechariah’s joyous prophecy about the coming of a Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ. He comes as King but what a strange kind of kingship! He comes without any of the trappings of military and worldly power. He comes, gentle and meek, sitting upon an ass, and the colt the foal of an ass. He does not come in worldly pomp and glory, but in the gentle humility of Zechariah’s vision and hope.

And yet as Zechariah goes on to say, he comes to “command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea”, the motto of Canada, we might note. But what is this kingship and peace, what is this dominion? It completely overturns all our assumptions about power and might and authority. Yet this Gospel inaugurates Advent. It highlights the more radical meaning of Advent as the constant coming of God to us, the Word of God in Law and Prophecy, in Gospel and Service. He comes as Light and Life, and ultimately, as “the Word made flesh”. It is all about what comes to us in the darkness of our world and day. Advent quite simply is God’s Word and very Person who is always coming to us. We can only enter into the meaning of what we see and hear. Advent recalls us to the truth of our lives as found in God.

This is the great joy of this scene. The multitudes sense that something special is happening even if they are unclear about what it means. Hosannas are sung. Branches are cut down from the trees and spread in the way. A procession, to be sure, but hardly much in the way of something regal and astounding, not much in the way of all that jazz.

Yet “all the city was moved, saying, who is this?” It seems that some of the people of Israel pick up on Zechariah’s imagery but not everyone. Here is the first of the great Advent questions that belong to Advent as Revelation. “The multitude said, This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee”. Bethlehem and Nazareth are all part of the Christmas story, to be sure, which includes references to Jerusalem, but the Jesus who comes as “Thy King” is the King of all Creation. He is God of God and God with us; something which we can only come to know by attending to the pageant of the everlasting Advent of God coming towards us.

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Tuesday, December 3rd
7:00pm Packaging Party for Shoeboxes for the Mission to Seafarers – Parish Hall

Thursday, December 5th (note date change)
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I

Friday, December 6th
3:00pm Advent/Christmas Pageant of Lessons & Carols with KES

Sunday, December 8th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, December 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

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

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Artwork: Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Christ Expels the Moneychangers from the Temple, 1556. Oil on panel, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, France.

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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Where shall wisdom be found?

Job’s words speak wonderfully to the whole meaning of the Advent season. They embrace and comprehend the other two readings in Chapel this week from the Prophet Micah and from the first Chapter of John’s Gospel. Our School Prayer begins with these words: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. As I write this I am listening to William Boyce’s lovely motet on this passage. The main point of the passage goes to the very nature of religious philosophy. All wisdom is of God.

The Genesis stories of creation and the fall provide the foundational and formative features of classical spirituality. There is nothing outside of the Word and Will of God, no reality not comprehended by God’s speaking all things into being and as such upholding them in their truth and meaning. This is why the tradition of the early Church theologians in preaching on the work of the six days to those preparing for Holy Baptism is so crucial; there are sermons and treatises from both eastern and western thinkers and a host of later commentaries on Genesis. Everything is embraced in the loving wisdom of God including the wilderness, the wilderness that is really us in our turning away from paradise. We are the wilderness but Paradise is always there. We cannot unmake it or make it for ourselves. It is folly to think that we can, though there is no end to the utopian attempts to do so over many, many centuries, including our own . But to know ourselves in the wilderness is to be recalled to paradise yet only “to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot put it in Little Gidding, Four Quartets. And that means that it is no longer simply a beginning but our end in God.

Advent season is one of the loveliest seasons of the Christian year. It signals the profound theme of God coming to us in Word and Light and, ultimately, in the Christian understanding as “the Word made flesh”, Jesus Christ, true God and true man. God’s Word comes in Law and Prophecy and Gospel. That word comes as love, the love which is the fulfilling of the Law not its extinguishment. Love is its perfection that marks the shift from the wilderness, the place of law, to the paradise of love. Advent presents us with a whole host of images about our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in the wilderness and in the via, the way, to our patria, the homeland of spirit, of paradise. It offers the vision and hope of wilderness transformed into paradise.

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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: Francisco Ribalta, Martyrdom of St. Catherine, 1600-02. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

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.

“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

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Sunday, December 1st, First Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, December 3rd
7:00pm Boxing up Seafarers’ Campaign contributions – Parish Hall

Friday, December 6th
3:00pm Advent/Christmas Pageant of Lessons & Carols with KES

Sunday, December 8th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion