Day: February 23, 2024

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 February

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.

Andrei Rublev, TrinityThis 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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Sermons

Reading with the Fathers I: Lenten Programme, 2024

“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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Prayers and liturgy

Lindel Tsen and Paul Sasaki, Bishops

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):

Bishop Paul Shinji SasakiBishop Philip Lindel TsenAlmighty 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

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