Christ Church

The collect for today, the commemoration of George Herbert (1593-1633), Priest, Poet (source):

King of glory, king of peace,
who didst call thy servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and king:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to thy service;
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.
Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:1-4
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:1-10

The hymn, “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing”, was originally a poem by George Herbert, published in The Temple.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The church with psalms must shout,
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

George Herbert was born to a wealthy family in Montgomery, Wales. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he appeared headed for a prominent public career, but the deaths of King James I and two patrons ended that possibility.

He chose to pursue holy orders in the Church of England and became rector at Bemerton, near Salisbury, in 1629, where he died four years later of tuberculosis. His preaching and service to church and parishioners contributed to his reputation as an exemplary pastor. He did not become known as a poet until shortly after he died, when his poetry collection The Temple was published.

He is buried in Saint Andrew Bemerton Churchyard.

Artwork: William Dyce, George Herbert at Bemerton, Salisbury, 1860. Oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

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

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

What do we want? Do we really know? This Gospel story speaks directly to those realities and concerns. The Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy captures the essence of this Gospel story in its application to our lives in our wilderness pilgrimage to God.

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely and yet so humbly. But not simply for herself. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.” The troubles of the daughter are also the worries of the mother. They always are.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access”. Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption – our trusting in our own righteousness, our feelings and self-certainties – but our humility; our trusting in the manifold and great mercies of God. Against all that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing: the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. To have a hold of that is humility – she presumes upon nothing else. It is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of ‘I can’t do that’ which really means ‘I won’t even try’. It is not the whine of the ‘poor-me’s’ which is really our grovelling for attention. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption and pride. We demand all the attention as if we were the centre of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the centre and that we have access to him.

“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down before him is not manipulation. It is not grovelling self-abasement. It is instead the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility. It is the condition of our access to God. The woman does not presume to be the centre of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks. “Lord, help me.”

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

Thursday, February 29th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme: Reading with the Fathers II

Sunday, March 3rd, Third Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, March 10th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
1030am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 12th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, March 14th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme: Reading with the Fathers III

Sunday, March 17th, Fifth Sunday in Lent / Passion Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, March 21st
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme: Reading with the Fathers IV

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

ALMIGHTY God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 15:21-28

Artwork: Jean-François de Troy, Christ and the Canaanite Woman, 1743. Oil on canvas, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

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

O ALMIGHTY God, who into the place of the traitor Judas didst choose thy faithful servant Matthias to be of the number of the twelve Apostles: Grant that thy Church, being alway preserved from false Apostles, may be ordered and guided by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:15-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-11

The name of this saint is probably an abbreviation of Mattathias, meaning “gift of Yahweh”.

Matthias was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas had betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide. In the time between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost, the small band of disciples, numbering about 120, gathered together and Peter spoke of the necessity of selecting a twelfth apostle to replace Judas. Peter enunciated two criteria for the office of apostle: He must have been a follower of Jesus from the Baptism to the Ascension, and he must be a witness to the resurrected Lord. This meant that he had to be able to proclaim Jesus as Lord from first-hand personal experience. Two of the brothers were found to fulfill these qualifications: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas also called the Just. Matthias was chosen by lot. Neither of these two men is referred to by name in the four Gospels, although several early church witnesses, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, report that Matthias was one of the seventy-two disciples.

Like the other apostles and disciples, St. Matthias received the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Since he is not mentioned later in the New Testament, nothing else is known for certain about his activities. He is said to have preached in Judaea for some time and then traveled elsewhere. Various contradictory stories about his apostolate have existed since early in church history. The tradition held by the Greek Church is that he went to Cappadocia and the area near the Caspian Sea where he was crucified at Colchis. Some also say he went to Ethiopia before Cappadocia. Another tradition holds that he was stoned to death and then beheaded at Jerusalem.

The Empress St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have brought St Matthias’s relics to Rome c. 324, some of which were moved to the Benedictine Abbey of St Matthias, Trier, Germany, in the 11th century.

Artwork: Jacques Stella, Saint Matthias, 17th century. Woodcut on paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Under the shade

Genesis 18. 1-15 offers a most intriguing and intimate portrait of God’s engagement with our humanity. Three strangers – men or angels or the Lord (three in one?) all possible! – visit Abraham in the heat of the day under the shade of the Oaks of Mamre. A scene of exquisite oriental hospitality, on the one hand, it is also the scene of God’s revelation of the promised son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, on the other hand. “Is anything too hard (or impossible) for the Lord,” they (plural) or The Lord (singular) say in response to Sarah’s laughter.

The ambiguities are essential to the mystery of the encounter. Why? Because they challenge our temptation to reduce God to the limits of our thinking, to a kind of puzzle to be figured out rather than the mystery of reality to be adored. The laughter of Sarah reverberates down throughout the centuries; the laughter of doubt and human presumption that reduces God to our own assumptions, leaving us empty and bereft.

This story becomes the occasion for one of the most famous icons, Andrei Rublev’s Troitsa (Trinity) also called “The Hospitality of Abraham” painted in Russia in 1411. A copy of this icon is often on display in the Chapel. It captures the mystery and wonder of the story and becomes quite simply an invitation to a place of contemplation, the place of being with God. The story seeks to awaken us to a larger view of reality and the meaning of our place within it.

Two outstanding neuroscientists and philosophers, Iain McGilchrist at Cambridge and John Vervaeke at the University of Toronto, are very much aware of “the crisis of meaning” in our culture which they see in terms of the left brain hemispheric thinking usurping or denying the role and place of the right brain hemispheric thinking. Both are careful to avoid the fallacy of collapsing the mind into the brain. McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary chronicles this confusion and his magnus opus, The Matter of Things (puns on several levels) explores the interplay between the ways of knowing that belong to our humanity via the left and right brain hemispheres as well as exploring the areas of knowledge, some of which are lost or compromised by the misplaced dominance of left hemispheric thinking. (This ‘hemispheric’ language attends to the circuitry and activity of the human brain in all of its remarkable complexity) That kind of left hemisphere thinking is reductionist in the extreme, breaking everything down into parts, to the illusions of technique which now dominate education and culture.

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“All men are seeking for thee”

These wonderful words from the Gospel for the Lenten Embertide capture the nature of our wilderness pilgrimage and complement the Temptations of Christ in the command from Deuteronomy that “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” All our longings, our seekings are for God. All of the freedom and dignity of our humanity as finite creatures are found in worship and service of God in his infinite beauty, goodness and truth. It is a central tenet of the Fathers and their teaching about our life in Christ.

But who are the Fathers? Reading what with the Fathers? Our Lenten Programme intends to take a brief look at reading the Scriptures with the Fathers without whom we really can’t even begin to make sense of what is meant by the Scriptures and the Faith. What follows is a brief consideration of the term “the Fathers” or Patres which gives rise to the concept of the Patristic period and Patristic studies. Their influence on theology and prayer is considerable and has contributed to the thinking of many subsequent theologians and ecclesial traditions, including Anglicanism.

The term has an almost magical hold on our imaginations. It evokes a larger world, a universe of doctrine, at once authoritative and compelling in spite of its strangeness, mystical in its remoteness and yet, like all things mystical, very near.

The point is that the Fathers are very much with us. If we are strangers to them, it is only because we have estranged ourselves from the “consensus patrum” (the consensus of the Fathers) so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” (the consensus of the Faithful) of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Fathers, in no small measure, are the definitive voices of the essential catholicism of the Christian faith, to the sensus fidei, the understanding of the faith, which they in large measure worked out and defined. We can only enter into the breadth and depth of their understanding and wisdom.

Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers. Without the Fathers, we cannot begin to say what the Faith is, let alone think it. They would have us think and to think in their company, the company of the Fathers. That includes reading the Scriptures with the Fathers.

Roughly extending from the end of the first century AD to the beginning of the seventh or the end of the eighth century, the Patristic Period or “the Age of the Fathers” is variously described. For some, it runs from Clement of Rome (c.100) to Isidore of Seville (d.636) in the West or to John of Damascus (d.749) in the East; for others, from Ignatius of Antioch (c.115) to Gregory the Great (d.604). The differences reflect differing sensibilities about the authority of the great “oecumenical” councils, for instance, whether one emphasizes four councils or seven: 1st Nicaea, 325; 1st Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; 2nd Constantinople, 553; 3rd Constantinople, 681; 2nd Nicaea, 787. For classical Anglicans one might recall Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) convenient mnemonic device: “One Faith, Two Testaments, Three Creeds, Four Councils and Five Centuries” which encapsulates a strong sense of the mind of the Fathers and their formative role in shaping the Anglican theological tradition.

In general, the theological and spiritual writers from the first to the eighth centuries are known collectively as “The Fathers”. They embrace a wide range of theological outlooks, intellectual abilities and interests and different schools of thought, but together they comprise a remarkable uniformity of understanding about the essentials of the Christian Faith. They are altogether critical for the establishment of orthodoxy – right belief or right worship.

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The collect for today, the commemoration of Lindel Tsen (1885-1946), Bishop in China, consecrated 1929, and Paul Sasaki (1885-1954), Bishop in Japan, consecrated 1935 (source):

Almighty God, we offer thanks for the faith and witness of Paul Sasaki, bishop in the Nippon Sei Ko Kai [Anglican Church in Japan], tortured and imprisoned by his government, and Philip [Lindel] Tsen, leader of the Chinese Anglican Church, arrested for his faith. We pray that all Church leaders oppressed by hostile governments may be delivered by thy mercy, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit we may be faithful to the Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-32

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2023 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2022 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2023
Fr. David Curry
February 18th, 2024

“We go up to Jerusalem”

The word parish (παροικια from παροικεω) refers to where we dwell as sojourners in the land, and thus to the idea of the place of our abiding with God. The parish is where the concrete and corporate realities of our lives in faith are lived, via ad patriam. “For here we have no continuing city,” as Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14), “for our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3. 20). The parish is the place of our abiding in that hope and desire for the “Jerusalem which is above”(Gal. 4.26). The distinction between the eternal and the temporal is essential against the tendency to collapse the one into the other.

We go up to Jerusalem. It is one of the great images of pilgrimage, of our journey in and through the wilderness to the paradise of God in his beauty and truth. It signals the true fulfillment of our longings and desires. We journey in the abiding love of God which shapes and moves our hearts and minds. It is embodied in our liturgy and in our prayers and praises, our service and sacrifice; they are the motions of God’s love in us.

We have persevered and endured faithfully and in good cheer through all of the ups and downs of the past year amidst the confusions and chaos of our time spiritually and experientially. It has been a year of faithfulness and commitment and for that I am most grateful to all of you. We are continuing to learn and find strength and comfort from God’s Word and Sacraments that help us to bear witness and to face the uncertainties of a divided and divisive world. It seems to me that as a parish we are gaining a deeper sense of penitential adoration and contemplation as what defines and guides our lives.

There have been of course the constant challenges of maintaining roofs and other building and operational concerns. This includes the re-shingling of the north side of the Hall roof and so too emergency repairs on the clerestory roof on the King Street side of the Church. Most significantly, the solar panels installed in the Fall of 2022 became operational in late January of 2023 and we have been pleased with how this has contributed to the reduction of our electrical costs. In the fall-out from the Covid years, it has been challenging to find workman and carpenters who are able to undertake some of the work which needs to be done. I want to thank Alex Jurgens and David Appleby for their diligence and perseverance in finding ways to get things done. We have been fortunate, it seems, to have found an excellent carpenter as a result of the pre-Christmas wind and rain storm which wreaked such havoc everywhere. We are hoping to be able to get a number of projects done in a responsible fashion. Bear in mind, that as a parish, we have long recognised that the buildings are part of the mission and life of the parish for which we have stewardship obligation.

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