Christ Church

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

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”

He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.

The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.

These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.

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(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)

Sunday, March 30th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, April 3rd
7:00pm Evening Prayer & Lenten Programme III: The Deadly Three: Envy

Sunday, April 6th, Fifth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, April 10th
7:00pm Evening Prayer & Lenten Programme IV: The Deadly Three: Anger

Back to Big Church for Holy Week & Easter!

Sunday, April 13th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Palms & Holy Communion
10:30am Palms & Holy Communion

Monday, April 14th, Monday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Passion

Tuesday, April 15th, Tuesday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Passion

Wednesday April 16th, Tenebrae
3:30pm Church Parade

Thursday, April 17th, Maundy Thursday
7:00pm Solemn Liturgy

Friday, April 18th, Good Friday
7:00pm Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday

Saturday, April 19th, Holy Saturday / Easter Eve
10:00am Matins & Ante-Communion
7:00pm Easter Vigil

Sunday, April 20th, Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Baptism & Communion

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

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1
The Gospel: St. John 6:5-14

Artwork: Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fish, second quarter 16th century. Oil on wood, National Museum, Stockholm.

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Keble (1792-1866), Priest, Tractarian, Poet (source):

Father of the eternal Word,
in whose encompassing love
all things in peace and order move:
grant that, as thy servant John Keble
adored thee in all creation,
so we may have a humble heart of love
for the mysteries of thy Church
and know thy love to be new every morning,
in 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.

The Epistle: Romans 12:9-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 5:1-12

John Keble’s Assize Sermon entitled “National Apostasy“, delivered at Oxford on 14 July 1833, is regarded as the beginning of the renewal movement known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement. In that sermon, preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Rev. Keble condemned the growth of liberalism in the Church of England and took the nation to task for turning away from God and ignoring the prophetic calling of the church. The sermon caused a sensation across Britain.

Between 1833 and 1841, Rev. Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others issued a series of 90 pamphlets called Tracts For The Times (hence Tractarian Movement), in which they presented their views on ecclesiology and theology. Tractarianism emphasised the importance of the ministry and the sacraments as God-given ordinances and ultimately developed into Anglo-Catholicism, which has been highly influential in the Anglican Communion as well as other Christian traditions.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in his memory in 1870. The College was designed by William Butterfield, a leading exponent of Victorian Gothic who had been raised in a Nonconformist family but later became a convinced High-Church Anglican. He and other architects influenced by the Oxford Movement looked to medieval cathedrals for inspiration and designed churches full of colour as a celebration of God’s creation. The walls of Keble College Chapel are lined with brilliant mosaics showing scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Christ, and patristic and medieval saints. Some see Keble College and Chapel as the high point of Butterfield’s architectural achievements.

John Keble’s page at Hymnary.org lists dozens of hymns. Some of Rev. Keble’s writings, including “National Apostasy” and seven Tracts For The Times, are posted here. All of the tracts are posted here.

The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them.

Thus Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.

Thomas Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.

Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.

Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.

Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.

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Be it unto me according to thy word

I know. You did not hear those words in the Scripture reading this week. You heard the parable of the prodigal son, the one who wasted his inheritance only to come to himself in a far-off country, poor and destitute, where he “comes to himself” and returns. It is a powerful story of homecoming.

It is captured in what is probably the last painting by Rembrandt called the Return of the Prodigal Son and which hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, having been acquired almost a century later by Catherine the Great. The Return of the Prodigal Son is the title, too, of a wonderful meditation by Henri Nouwen about the painting and the parable as a story of homecoming. It is really all about the journey of our lives as embraced in God’s providential love.

You have all just returned from the March break. Some of you have, perhaps, gone to far-off places. I hope you weren’t left poor and destitute! You have now returned to the school, your alma mater or nursing mother with respect to intellectual and spiritual matters. We left just at the early beginnings of Lent and now return to find ourselves in mid-Lent in the patterns of spirituality and prayer that belong to the Christian understanding. In the Islamic world, this is the last week of Ramadan, equally a special time of prayer, fasting, reflection and responsibilities towards one’s community in the Islamic understanding. These religious themes contribute to our lives in community in our commitment to the ethical ideas of love and service.

But why this text, “be it unto me according to thy word”? Some of you will recognise that these are the words of Mary, the blessed Mother of our Lord, the theotokos or mother of God in the Christian teaching. What does it have to do with the idea of homecoming? What does homecoming mean? At the very least, it suggests a sense of purpose and connection about who we essentially are in our common humanity. But as the story of the prodigal son shows, homecoming belongs to who we are in the embrace of God’s love. The son who has rejected his father’s home and thus his father himself in going off to a distant country has forgotten who he is but “comes to himself” in a beautiful image of repentance.

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The collect for today, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canada, 1962):

WE beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Isaiah 7:10-15
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-38

Artwork: Alesso Baldovinetti, Annunciation, 1447. Tempera on panel, Uffizi, Florence.

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

“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it seems so stark and dark and not a little foreboding and threatening. Yet the readings for the Third Sunday in Lent mark a crucial and critical moment in the journey of the soul to God. If Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of love setting our loves in order, then it must consider in a serious manner the nature of sin and evil as it appears in the negation of the goodness of our created being and thus the denial of the end or purpose of our humanity as ordered to God. Such is the darkness in the Epistle from Ephesians, on the one hand, and the compelling image of “the unclean spirit” in the Gospel reading from Luke, on the other hand, the one who takes to himself “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” and whose state “is worse than the first.” What is the devil except the explicit image of self-contradiction? Lucifer created to be the bearer of light contradicts his own being by claiming to be God. But God is God, not Lucifer. This kind of fixation upon ourselves as absolute is mere fantasy; it means willing a lie. Self-contradiction is self-deceit.

In other words, these readings require us to take seriously the destructive nature of sin and evil as belonging to self-contradiction and the spiritual emptiness that results. This is powerfully shown in the Gospel without which we cannot really understand Paul’s exhortation for us to “walk in love as dear children of light,” rejecting “the unfruitful works of darkness,” since light makes manifest or known the things of darkness. The light is greater than the darkness of human sin and evil. The psalmist’s words that “the right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass,” alluded to in the Collect, is further intensified by Jesus’s words that “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” The light is the light of the Gospel, the light of Christ, the good news of the Word of God which alone overcomes the darkness of sin and evil.

What is this all about except a strong argument for the absolute goodness of God which sin and evil negate and deny? Like last Sunday, we have a healing of the soul. Jesus casts out a devil and the one who was dumb or mute, meaning unable to speak, is now able to speak. “The people wondered,” we are told. But in what way? There is a division among the people but even more there is a division in our hearts and minds that goes to the very nature of sin and evil. It is about calling what is good evil. That is to will a lie. Every lie is nothing in itself. It depends utterly and completely upon the truth which it negates but renders us paralyzed and obsessed with what is only partial and incomplete. This is what is meant by demonic possession however differently we might want to speak about it in the language of mental health.

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