Christ Church

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Joan of Arc (1412-31), Virgin, Visionary, Patron Saint of France (source):

Holy God, whose power is made perfect in weakness: we honor thy calling of Jeanne d’Arc, who, though young, rose up in valor to bear thy standard for her country, and endured with grace and fortitude both victory and defeat; and we pray that we, like Jeanne, may bear witness to the truth that is in us to friends and enemies alike, and, encouraged by the companionship of thy saints, give ourselves bravely to the struggle for justice in our time; through Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 3:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 12:25-30

Artwork: Robert Alexander Hillingford, Joan of Arc holding banner, c. 1890. Oil on canvas, Private collection.

The collect for today, the Feast of The Venerable Bede (673-735), Monk, Historian, Doctor of the Church (source):

Almighty God, maker of all things,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to thy servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word which leadeth us to know thee and to love thee:
in thy goodness
grant that we also may come at length to thee,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before thy face;
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.

For The Epistle: Wisdom 7:15-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Saint Bede the Venerable was born and, as far as we know, lived his entire life in the north of England, yet he became perhaps the most learned scholar in all of Europe. At the age of 7, he was sent to Wearmouth Abbey for his education; at age 11, he continued his education at the new monastery at Jarrow, eventually becoming a monk and remaining there until his death. He lived a routine and outwardly uneventful life of prayer, devotion, study, writing, and teaching.

Bede’s writings cover a very wide range of interests, including natural history, orthography, chronology, and biblical translation and exposition. He was the first to translate the Bible into Old English. He considered his 25 volumes of Scripture commentary to be his most important writings. His best-known book is Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. This work earned him the popular title “Father of English History”, and not just because it was the first attempt to write a history of England. His historical research was thorough and far-reaching. For example, he asked friends traveling to Rome to bring him copies of documents relevant to English history, and he made use of oral traditions when written materials were not available. The book provides much historical information that can be found in no other source.

His pupil Cuthbert, later Abbot of Jarrow, has left a moving eyewitness account of St. Bede’s last hours. Bede fell ill shortly before Easter 735, when he was in the midst of translating the Gospel of John into the Anglo-Saxon language. Everyone realised that the end was near, but he was determined to complete the translation. Between Easter and Ascension Day, he persisted in the task while continuing to teach his students at his bedside.

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

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is a lovely image that belongs to our meeting together in the glory of God revealed, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings, all our comings and goings, and all the comings and goings of God with us in Word and Spirit, have their place of meeting and meaning in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

The Athanasian Creed is really an explication of the fuller meaning of that phrase. It sets before us the wonder and the mystery of God in terms of the interplay of positive and negative ways of thinking about God, kataphatic and apophatic theology, respectively. God is properly nothing, meaning no thing and thus all analogies that make God like this or that thing or concept have to be strongly qualified by the way of negative theology that distinguishes God absolutely from everything else. God is, as John Donne puts, “only and divinely most like himself,” while at one and the same time the principle of all that is. Revelation is about an understanding of the essential mystery of God made known through word and metaphor, through images and their meaning but without reducing God to the world and to the limits of finite thought. Only by staying close to the images of Scripture and thought can we begin to enter into what is revealed; in short, to enter into what we are given to behold.

Trinity Sunday signals an ending and marks a beginning. There is an ending of all that we have gone through from Advent to this day, an ending that is a kind of gathering, a threefold gathering: first, there is a gathering of all the history of salvation into this fullness of revelation; secondly, there is a gathering of all religion into this fullness of meaning (following Hegel’s insight that the world’s religions adumbrate the Trinity); and, thirdly, there is a gathering of all the substantial moments in the life of Christ into this fullness of understanding. Everything belongs to the mystery of God.

Trinity Sunday marks a beginning for us as well. There is our entry by grace, year by year, into the fullness of revelation, the fullness of meaning and understanding which is opened to view. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God. Such is the pageant of grace at work in us through the project of the Trinity Season. Having run through the Creeds in the sequence of Advent to Pentecost in the comings and goings of God, now the Creeds are meant to run through and live in us; such is our life in God.

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Tuesday, May 28th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas (2012); and The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis (1943).

Sunday, June 4th, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 9th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Saturday, June 15th
11:00am Encaenia Service at King’s-Edgehill School

Sunday, June 16th, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 23rd, Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 30th, Fifth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, the Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that this holy faith may evermore be our defence against all adversities; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 4:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 3:1-15

Artwork: Peter Paul Rubens, Holy Trinity, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

A certain beggar named Lazarus

Our Chapel reflections over the past couple of months have centered on the comings and goings of God with us made visible in the Word and Spirit of God. They reveal the meaning and purpose of our humanity and shape our ethical thinking and doing.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. The Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world which is gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, indifferent, and hostile. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. So, too, with how we think about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

Words and metaphors open us out to a deeper understanding of reality and of ourselves; and nowhere, perhaps, more profoundly than in the parables of Jesus. The parable read this week in Chapel is the story of Lazarus and Dives, a beggar and a rich man. Dives means the rich man. It is beautifully told and catches our attention, I hope. How we think about God affects how we think about one another. Our indifference to the one is also our indifference towards the other. This is what the parable shows. It is not simply about the great and glaring gaps of inequality between the abject poor and the extremely wealthy, as disturbing as such things may be. It is more about how we see one another and how we act accordingly.

A certain rich man, a certain beggar. Yet only the beggar is named. He is Lazarus. He lays at the gate of the rich man’s house, “full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” In Luke’s telling and moving phrase, it is only the dogs who attend to him: they “came and licked his sores.” We are reminded of another story where the Canaanite woman says that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Here Lazarus is served by the dogs but is not granted even the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. In short, Lazarus is ignored and overlooked; as if he doesn’t even exist. Only the dogs acknowledge him.

It is a telling indictment of a culture of indifference or avoidance towards those who are regarded as beneath our notice or a threat to our vision of ourselves in our comfortable complacencies. The parable is about a reversal of situation. The rich man turns out to be poor towards God and thus at a far remove from God and heaven while Lazarus, poor with respect to the things of the world, is rich in the things of God “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” an image of heaven. The parable imagines a dialogue between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. The dialogue turns on the question of our attention to God and to one another, upon the ultimate good of our humanity as found in God and only so with one another.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Feast of Pentecost.

“He shall teach you all things”

Wind and fire. The most intangible of all tangible things. Such are the paradoxes of this day. Who has seen the wind? Who can touch the fire? But such metaphors open us out to the mystery of God as Trinity, the mystery which we can only think and adore. We cannot take the mystery of God captive to our understanding. That is the essence of idolatry, the idea that God is made in our image.

Something of the spiritual reality of God is wonderfully signified in the Feast of Pentecost, in the coming down of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit who signifies the essential nature of God and whose descent upon the Apostles establishes the spiritual community that is the Church. We are raised up into the mystery of God by God’s embracing us in the vision of his glory. God engages our imaginations. God engages the cultural and linguistic distinctives of our humanity but without being reduced to the cultural, the linguistic and the experiential. God engages the whole of our humanity. It is all God and all us at one and the same time.

Pentecost gathers us into the whole pageant of God’s dealings with our humanity, the whole pageant of revelation laid out in the Scriptures. There is creation. “In the beginning God created … the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters,” bringing all things into order and being. This is the strong sense of creation as the spiritual act of the Creator. In the Christian understanding, creation is the spiritual act of the Trinity. The Spirit moving over the waters brings order and unity to the inchoate forms of the created and material world. God breathes his Spirit into the dust of humanity and we are made living beings, made in the image of God as spiritual creatures.

There is redemption – the pageant of God’s dealing with his wayward, recalcitrant and disobedient people, all who seek to have things their way. God speaks to prophet and people, constantly and steadfastly recalling them and us to his law, to his word and will for his people delivered on the mount of glory in a cloud of majesty and awe. God leads his people in the wilderness journeys despite our persistent sinfulness, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night.” Once again, these contrasting and elusive images of things seen and heard open us out to the transcendent mystery of the glory of God. Jesus breathes on the disciples on “the same day at evening,” the evening of the day of his Resurrection. He bestows upon them the grace and power of the forgiveness of sins consummated on the cross and extended to us in the life of the Church. The eternal mystery of God is shown to us through the God-given created differences of what belongs to the unity of creation: through the word and metaphor, even wind and fire, and through the languages and cultures of the world, equally God-given. Such is revelation.

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Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 2nd, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 9th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Saturday, June 15th
11:00am Encaenia Service at King’s-Edgehill School

Sunday, June 16th, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 23rd, Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, June 30th, Fifth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion