Christ Church

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

The three holy days of Christmas illuminate the deeper mystery of Christmas in striking ways. The Feast of St. Stephen today celebrates the protomartyr or first martyr of the Christian Church, Stephen, whose life and death mirror the life and death of Christ, especially the idea of loving sacrifice and forgiveness. Stephen, one of the first deacons of the emerging Church, is stoned to death because he followed what was at first known only as The Way. Like Christ, as the Collect puts it, he “prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus.” His words, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” as Acts puts it, echo Christ’s first word from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” perhaps the most gentle and yet most compelling rebuke of our sinful humanity in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, the only feature of St. Stephen’s Day readings which connect to the more usual sentiments and feelings of the Christmas season which otherwise this feast counters and challenges.

Yet the feast of Stephen is embedded in our Western Christian imaginary more likely through the 19th century hymn by the English priest John Mason Neale. It is based on a poem by the Czech poet Vaclav Svaboda’s retelling of a 10th century legend about Wenceslaus, the Duke of Bohemia (not a king!). The hymn is set to a tune Tempest Adest Floridum found in a 16th century collection of 74 medieval Latin songs that were popular in Scandinavia, a collection known in its abbreviation as Piae Cantiones. Wenceslaus, at once an historical and mythological figure, is the only medieval ruler to be mentioned in any of the carols of Christmas and as obscure as he and Bohemia might seem to us, the carol has captured the Christian imagination. Strange to say, it is one of the better known carols. It is probably the only way that people even know about the Feast of Stephen rather than Boxing Day!

What John Mason Neale does with the poem and story is to extend the idea of Stephen’s Christian witness to the idea of sacrifice in service. In this case, Good King Wenceslaus looks out the window of his palace and sees a poor man “gath’ring winter fuel” and undertakes to help him by bringing him food and wine. All on the Feast of Stephen. Wenceslaus and his page or servant make the arduous journey to his dwelling near St. Agnes’ fountain despite “the rude wind’s wild lament and the bitter weather.” His page finds the going hard and thinks he “can go no longer.” Wenceslaus bids him tread in his own footsteps. He is determined to help the poor and needy. Wenceslaus is himself, of course, walking in the steps of Christ even as Stephen’s life and death mirror the way of Christ. Lovely images and associations.

There is even more to the symbolic significance of St. Stephen’s Day for our deeper understanding of the wonder and mystery of Christ’s birth. It is captured in T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. There the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, caught up in what is known as the Investiture Controversy about the relation and respective powers of Church and State, was someone King Henry II saw as a ‘troublesome priest’. “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” He is supposed to have said. Some of his knights, hearing this, took it upon themselves to murder the Archbishop at the altar in Canterbury.

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The collect for today, the Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that in all our sufferings here upon earth, for the testimony of thy truth, we may stedfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Spirit, may learn to love and bless our persecutors, by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those that suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 7:55-60
The Gospel: St. Matthew 23:34-39

All that is known of St. Stephen’s life is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 6 and 7. He is reckoned as the first Christian martyr–the proto-martyr. Although his name is Greek for “crown”, he was a Jew by birth; he would have been born outside Palestine and raised as a Greek-speaking Jew. The New Testament does not record the circumstances of his conversion to Christianity.

Stephen first appears as one of the seven deacons chosen in response to protests by Hellenist (Greek-speaking) Christians that their widows were being neglected in the distribution of alms. The apostles were too busy preaching the word of God to deal with this problem, so they commissioned seven men from among the Hellenists “of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom”, then prayed and laid hands on them. Stephen, the first among the seven, is described as “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit”. A few verses later, Stephen is said to be “full of grace and power [and] doing great wonders and signs among the people”.

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Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 10:00am Holy Communion service at Christ Church on Christmas Morn.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”

In the Christian imaginary, Bethlehem is a crowded scene of symbolic significance. How much, we might say, is imagined and created out of what seems so little in terms of detail and information? There is not much data about Bethlehem but so much more in the way of symbol and significance. “This shall be a sign unto you,” the Angel says to the Shepherds and to us in the quiet of Christmas Morn. The sign of the birth of “a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” is the babe “wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” born this day in the city of David, Bethlehem.

Luke uses the word manger three times in this chapter. Along with the fact that “there was no room for them in the inn,” the word manger contributes to the classical and traditional imagery of the nativity scene. But there is a deeper theological point that we hear only on Christmas Eve from John’s Prologue: “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” It signals the theme of our rejection or denial of the good.

The story of Christ’s birth in the humble circumstances of a manger or stall, meaning “a long open box or trough in a stable for horses or cattle to eat from” (OED), makes no mention of a stable or barn nor any direct mention of animals. But the word manager, (οατνη), in contrast to an inn or lodging (καταλυμα), points to the humble and lowly circumstances of Christ’s birth and thus to the realities of our finite world of limitations and hardships, of sin and evil. His birth embraces the conditions of our humanity in its various forms of brokenness or incompleteness. He does not come in power and with great glory understood in terms of worldly expectations. He comes as Saviour to redeem our finite and fallen world.

The point is that Christ’s birth confounds all our human expectations even as it reveals the deeper wisdom of the Scriptures in their interplay and interconnection about God’s purpose for our humanity. The animals associated in holy imagination with the Bethlehem scene come from the Angelic message to the Shepherds who will make their way to “see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” From that will come a whole menagerie of animals and angels along with, finally, the Magi-Kings; all of which symbolize the whole of humanity and creation as gathered to God. What is that really all about except a profound sense of Bethlehem as paradise restored, an image of the hope of heaven, of salvation which is not a flight from the world or creation but its redemption and restoration? We make the mistake, as Flannery O’Connor has put it, of “domesticating divinity,” conforming God to ourselves and our comforts and expectations, as if Christ’s incarnation is little more than an affirmation of ourselves in our various identities and existential anxieties. We get it backwards. “Be ye not conformed to the world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” on the things of God revealed to us in the witness of the Scriptures and by our reasoning upon them. Christ comes to redeem us from ourselves and to restore us to the truth of ourselves as known in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us.

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The collect for today, the Nativity of our Lord, or the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 1:1-12
The Gospel: St. John 1:1-14

Artwork: Guido Reni, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1640. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men”

What does it mean to celebrate Christmas in a post-Christian culture? Is it simply nostalgia? Is it our longing for an imaginary golden age which, of course, never was? Is it our holding to traditions and customs simply out of sentiment and feeling? George Steiner’s 1974 Massey Lecture, Nostalgia for the Absolute, points to a deeper kind of longing, one which belongs more profoundly to the mystery of Christmas. It is the human longing for God in whom is the life and the light of our humanity.

He examines three nineteenth century substitutes for the Christian religion in terms of Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, and the social anthropology of Claude Leví-Strauss, all of which sought to take the place of religion, especially the Christian religion, as the overarching narrative or story that embraces and explains our lives. All failed, he notes, but left in their wake a vacuum into which all manner of fancies and fantasies have rushed in. Their legacy is very much with us in the various pseudo-religions of contemporary secular culture, even within and without the churches, despite the postmodernist claim of “incredulity towards all metanarratives”(Lyotard). They are all the parodies of true religion and liturgy, especially of the Christian liturgy, and belong to the competing claims and confusions about the self. But as parodies, they point us to the deeper mystery of Christmas which they presuppose.

Dame P.D. James, the great British mystery writer, in her novel The Children of Men, written in 1992, speaks with great insight about our current world. The novel is set in the future; 2021, in fact, and thus speaks very much to our present. “Western science has been our God,” she notes. This we know only too well in our techno-utopian optimism which thinks that salvation lies in technology and in our technocratic culture, utterly unaware of how this way of thinking is itself a problem. In the novel, this dominant scientific outlook finds itself utterly confounded by a barren world of universal infertility. There are no children, no prospect of life, only a world of the terminally ill. Such is the culture of death, a culture which is anti-life. Our culture.

The entire novel touches upon almost every moral and social issue of our time: from reproductive technology to euthanasia, from immigration to health care. The impotence of the human race humiliates “the very heart of our faith in ourselves.” Confidence in science and belief in the endless progress of humanity is shattered by the encounter with the stark reality of an absolute limit; mortality in the form of the empty womb. The womb has become a tomb. But the real barrenness is the emptiness of our souls.

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The collect for today, Christmas Eve (source):

Almighty God,
who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance
of the birth of thy only Son Jesus Christ:
grant that, as we joyfully receive him as our redeemer,
so we may with sure confidence behold him
when he shall come to be our judge;
who liveth and reigneth with thee
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Titus 2:11-15
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:1-14

Christmas Eve
(a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti)

Christmas hath darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Artwork: Fra Filippo Lippi, Adoration in the Forest, c. 1459. Oil on panel, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Fourth Sunday in Advent.

“I am not the Christ”

The season and doctrine of Advent reaches a crescendo of intensity and expectation on the Fourth Sunday in Advent and illumines already for us the radical meaning of the Advent of God coming to us in Christ. It does so by the dance of negation and affirmation at once about ourselves and about God.

The Epistle reading from Philippians is at once an affirmation of what comes to us: “the Lord is at hand;” but it is also a negation of our anxieties and fears and worries as we scuttle around busily trying to do more with less in our preparations for Christmas. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul bids us, calling us to moderation or temperance in a time of excess and to prayer with thanksgiving “in everything,” highlighting the radical meaning of Christ’s coming as “the peace of God which passeth all understanding,” for it is not and cannot be of our making, nor is it about what is coming so much as it is about what has already happened and which is the absolute cause and reason of our rejoicing, regardless of the circumstances and events in our world of darkness and despair, of the distress of nations and the sorrows of so many broken hearts. Here is the peace and the healing of God: “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice.” The Advent of God to us is the Lord himself; Christ Jesus is Saviour. That and that alone is the counter to our fears and anxieties. It is the greater affirmation that overthrows the empty nothingness of our hearts and world. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The Gospel makes this wonderfully clear in the dance of negation and affirmation in terms of the figure of John the Baptist. We don’t pay enough attention to this Gospel known as the witness of John. Yet it heightens the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas, transforming the emotions and sentiments of this time of year into a deeper understanding. “The Jews,” John the Evangelist, the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized and which we forget, tells us “sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?” It is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jerusalem is mentioned, alerting us already to the trajectory of Christian contemplation around the two centers of Bethlehem and Jerusalem in a kind of ellipse. There is, it seems, a questioning, a seeking among the world of Israel, that focuses here on the strange and compelling figure of John the Baptist. It is as if they have a sense of something important and impending that sends them out of the city and into the wilderness in a kind of holy questioning.

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Tuesday, December 24, Christmas Eve
7:00pm Children’s Creche Service
9:30pm Christmas Communion

Wednesday, December 25, Christmas Morn
10:00am Christmas Communion

Thursday, December 26, St. Stephen
10:00am Holy Communion

Friday, December 27, St. John the Evangelist
10:00am Holy Communion

Saturday, December 28, Holy Innocents
10:00am Holy Communion

Sunday, December 29th, Sunday After Christmas
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Christmas Lessons & Carols

We retreat to the Hall for services in January, February, March, & April 6th, returning to ‘Big’ Church for Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025!