Month: January 2024

Prayers and liturgy

Vincent, Deacon and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Vincent of Saragossa (d. 304), Deacon and Martyr (source):

Almighty God, whose deacon Vincent, upheld by thee, was not terrified by threats nor overcome by torments: Strengthen us, we beseech thee, to endure all adversity with invincible and steadfast faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Revelation 7:13-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:4-12

Leon Picardo, Martyrdom of Saint VincentVincent is the proto-Martyr (first known martyr) of Spain and the patron saint of Lisbon. He was deacon of Saragossa, Aragon, under Bishop Valerius. Both were arrested during the persecution instigated by edicts of Diocletian and Maximian. Because Valerius had a speech impediment, Vincent testified to their faith in Christ, boldly and without fear.

Dacian, Roman governor of Spain, subjected Vincent to horrible tortures. The saint was thrown into prison and weakened by semi-starvation. After refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods, he was racked, burned, and kept in stocks. He died as a result of his sufferings.

St. Augustine of Hippo preached a sermon on Vincent’s martyrdom. Here is an excerpt:

“To you has been granted in Christ’s behalf not only that you should believe in him but also that you should suffer for him.” Vincent had received both these gifts and held them as his own. For how could he have them if he had not received them? And he displayed his faith in what he said, his endurance in what he suffered. No one ought to be confident in his own strength when he undergoes temptation. For whenever we endure evils courageously, our long-suffering comes from him Christ. He once said to his disciples: “In this world you will suffer persecution,” and then, to allay their fears, he added, “but rest assured, I have conquered the world.” There is no need to wonder then, my dearly beloved brothers, that Vincent conquered in him who conquered the world. It offers temptation to lead us astray; it strikes terror into us to break our spirit. Hence if our personal pleasures do not hold us captive, and if we are not frightened by brutality, then the world is overcome. At both of these approaches Christ rushes to our aid, and the Christian is not conquered.

Artwork: Leon Picardo, Martyrdom of Saint Vincent, 1524. Oil on wood, Retable of St. Casilda, Burgos Cathedral, Burgos, Spain.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Third Sunday after Epiphany

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany

“Speak the word only”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday provide the interpretative framework for the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God. The epiphany season is particularly about the pilgrimage or journey of the understanding with respect to the things of God made manifest in the images and teaching of the eucharistic lessons. They are at the heart of The Book of Common Prayer, itself the heart of Anglican Spirituality, at once reformed and catholic, and as embodying a credal or doctrinal reading of Scripture. It is a good devotional practice, I suggest, to pray and read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel before the service in preparation for hearing and receiving the Word proclaimed and celebrated.

Today’s Gospel presents us with a double healing, the healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder as we saw, I think, last Sunday. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper from within Israel and he heals the paralyzed servant of the Centurion who is part of the Roman military order, literally responsible for one hundred men, but who is from outside Israel. Jesus speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and beyond Israel; both to those near and those far away in every sense of distance literal and metaphorical, cultural and historical. Through the history and meaning of Israel, the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the whole world. The leper is healed within the context of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. Yet with the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.” For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany.

Christ is the wonder before he puts forth his hand, even before he speaks. The healing miracles are surprisingly not the glory. They are only the making visible of the glory which is already present in Christ Jesus. He is the glory. And he is the glory which is somehow known and known not just in his effects but in his person.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, January

(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, March 24th)

Thursday, January 25th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Parish Hall: ‘To Govern is To Serve: An Essay on Medieval Democracy’, Jacques Dalarun (2012, trans. 2023); and ‘Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State’, Anna Grzymala-Busse (2023). Note the change from Tuesday to Thursday.

Sunday, January 28th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

The Annual Parish Meeting will be held on Sunday, February 18th following a pot-luck luncheon after the 10:30am service.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday After The Epiphany

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

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth thy right hand to help and defend us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 12:16b-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 8:1-13

Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Heals the Centurion’s ServantArtwork: Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Heals the Centurion’s Servant, 1726-29. Oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 January

Wist ye not?

‘Wist’ is an Old English word with Germanic derivations from wissen, to know. We still use words like ‘wit’ to describe a certain form of thinking usually connected to clever play with words such as in puns. It is good to be reminded that the English language has both Germanic roots as well as Latinate roots. At the heart of this remarkable Gospel story from St. Luke, about the boy Jesus being found in the temple in Jerusalem at age twelve, is the rhetorical question that he puts to Mary who was worried about where he was. He had stayed behind in the temple among the doctors of the law, “both hearing them, and asking them questions,” to the amazement of all that heard him.

“Did you not know,” he says, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” The whole scene is a kind of epiphany, the making known or manifestation of the things of God in our midst. The story is always read on The First Sunday after the Epiphany, just after the celebration of the coming in and going out of the Magi-Kings. Like that story, it, too, is all about teaching. There can be no knowing without the idea of things being made known, or manifested. In this story, as it has been received and understood in over fifteen hundred years or more of liturgical use and commentary, is the Christian idea and teaching that Jesus is both true God and true man. Here he is the divine teacher and the human student.

It is the only story of Christ’s boyhood, found only in Luke’s Gospel following upon the infancy narratives. An infant is, literally, one without speech. Thus this story marks the first time that Jesus is reported as having spoken. The whole scene signals what we might call, to use a later Jewish term, Jesus’s bar mitzvah, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which carries over into the Christian traditions of ‘confirmation.’ What that entails is a knowledge of the Law, the Torah, for which the individual within the community’s life of prayer and devotion undertakes personal responsibility. It is about growing up into an understanding of ideas that are made manifest and which you undertake to grasp and make them part of yourself. It is about taking responsibility for your own education and learning, humanly speaking. That presupposes that there are things which are to be known and embraced in the constant pursuit of learning. There is the teaching but then there is the struggle to learn for us all; each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold.

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Prayers and liturgy

Henry, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for a missionary, on the Feast of St. Henry of Finland (d. 1150), Bishop, Missionary, Patron Saint of Finland, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Saint Henry of FinlandO GOD, our heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thy blessed Apostles and send them forth to preach thy Gospel of salvation unto all the nations: We bless thy holy Name for thy servant Henry, whose labours we commemorate this day, and we pray thee, according to thy holy Word, to send forth many labourers into thy harvest; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Acts 12:24-13:5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:13-24a

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Second Sunday after Epiphany

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Second Sunday after the Epiphany.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany

“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour is not yet come.”

This is, we are told, the “beginning of signs which Jesus did and manifested forth his glory.” Yet “this beginning of signs” is also the ending of signs, meaning the end or purpose of the signs. Signs here means miracles, the things of wonder which illuminate and transform our lives. But in what kinds of ways? Is it by the things of God being reduced to us and our inclinations and concerns, our obsessions and agendas? Or is it by our being shown the things of God which dignify and ennoble our humanity and raise us up into the things of God in which we participate and find our good? There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives and tendencies. This story counters and corrects the first by showing us the wonder and mystery of the second and does so in a way which moves our hearts and minds. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” upon the things of God revealed to us in which we find our highest good. It is about neither God nor ourselves being conformed to the world in its divisions, confusions, and conflicting agendas.

The story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee shows us the radical meaning of miracles or signs. They teach us about God in himself and about what God seeks for us, namely, the good of our humanity. Only John gives us this story. Most of the miracles of the Gospels are about the healing and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity such as we saw in Advent about the purpose of Christ’s coming: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them,” Jesus himself tells us. And even more, he adds, “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” All this is wonderful and true and belongs to the vision of our humanity as redeemed from sin and its consequences, a wonderful reminder of the wholeness and completeness of our humanity as found in communion with God.

What that really means, however, is seen in this Gospel story. For what end are we restored to wholeness? It is, I think, captured in the Westminster Shorter Catechism composed in 1647 by a synod of English and Scottish theologians of a decidedly Calvinist bent, but then our Anglican sacramental thinking follows Calvin and Thomas more than Luther. “What is the chief end of man?” it asks and answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “O what their joy and their glory must be, those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see,” as the medieval theologian Peter Abelard says in his lovely 10th century hymn, O Quanta Qualia, where “God shall be all and in all ever blessed,” in John Mason Neale’s translation. God is the beginning and end of all created beings, especially rational beings, as Aquinas teaches. This Gospel shows us that God seeks our social joys which have their meaning in our communion with God through Christ’s sacrifice.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, January

(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, March 24th)

Sunday, January 21st, Third Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, January 23rd
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Parish Hall: ‘To Govern is To Serve: An Essay on Medieval Democracy’, Jacques Dalarun (2012, trans. 2023); and ‘Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State’, Anna Grzymala-Busse (2023).

Sunday, January 28th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

The Annual Parish Meeting will be held on Sunday, February 18th following a pot-luck luncheon after the 10:30am service.

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