Author: CCW

Prayers and liturgy

The Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1-8

Ivor Williams, Christ Healing the Sick Man of PalsyArtwork: Ivor Williams, Christ Healing the Sick Man of Palsy, c. 1951-54. Oil on canvas, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries, Wales.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 20 October

Law and Love

We have gone this week in Chapel from the radical ethical teaching to “love your enemies” to the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code of our humanity. The idea of loving your enemies has to do with seeking the good rather than the harm of others. That idea turns upon the knowledge of being part of an intelligible and moral universe, something grasped both by natural reason and by way of revelation. In either case, it is about something known by all according to their capacity to know. It is fundamentally about the knowledge of good and evil in each of us. The law of nature, as Thomas Aquinas suggests, is nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.

All law is grounded in the law of God. “Thou shalt have none other gods” is the First Commandment which contains all the rest. In a way, the Ten Commandments stand between the first word of Genesis and the first word of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word”. The Law is given first on tablets of stone but then, in the prophetic tradition, as written on our hearts. In the Christian understanding, Christ is “the Word made flesh”.

But the commandments begin and end with God. God is God, not some fiction of our minds in this view. We are made in the image of God, not God in our image. Aristotle famously said of Anaxagoras, who grasped that intellect or reason (νους – mind) was the ordering principle of reality rather than the material elements, that he was like “a sober man in the company of drunks”. This emphasis upon reason as that which grasps the nature of things is contrary to our current solipsisms in which the mind is the only reality, the only existent. But that is to live a fiction.

Because God is God, the First Commandment, there can be no confusion between Creator and created, hence the Second Commandment against “any graven images” that confuse and conflate image and reality. It is not by accident that the proscription against idolatry features so prominently in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding, albeit in different registers of emphasis. Something similar might be said about our fixation with images in ‘the culture of selfies’. They are images of you but not the whole truth of you. The distinction is crucial.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Luke the Evangelist

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

ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52

Michelino Molinari da Besozzo, St. Luke Painting the VirginLuke was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.

It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.

St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.

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Prayers and liturgy

Etheldreda, Queen and Abbess

St. Augustine Kilburn, St. EtheldredaThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (source):

O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
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.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34

Artwork: St. Etheldreda, stained glass, St. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy, and quite intense. It always is in matters of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides; yet it is only through the divisions of our hearts that a deeper unity may sometimes be grasped. Only when our hearts are broken and opened to view may we discover what truly matters, what is truly to be believed and looked for; in short, what belongs to the truth of ourselves. Sometimes it takes controversy to move us beyond our limited and partial perspectives and dogmatic attachments to a larger and more comprehensive understanding, to the truth which is greater than ourselves.

This is to say that we learn through controversy. “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God”, perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” in the context of reasoning and disputing with others. Who are they and about what? Well, first, there are “the chief priests and the scribes and the elders” (Mk.11. 27) who challenge his authority about what he is saying. This leads to the parable about the tenants or, as the King James version puts it more accurately, the husbandmen of the vineyard, the farmers (literally, ‘earthworkers’) who are supposed to be taking care of the vineyard for the Lord but instead beat up and kill those sent by the Lord including “his beloved son” (Mk. 12. 1-11). A kind of foreshadowing of Christ’s crucifixion as well as a commentary on Creation and the Fall, they see the parable as being told against themselves and so try to arrest him (Mk. 12. 12).

There are, secondly, “the Pharisees and some of the Herodians” (Mk. 12. 13), a curious coincidence of opposites – the Pharisees as the strict sect of Jewish law in its fullness and separateness from political life, and the Herodians, Jews who collaborated with the Roman authorities. They conspire “to entrap him in his talk” about whether “it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Mk. 12. 14), a question about our fundamental loyalties. Jesus replies with the famous “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk. 12. 17), thus cutting through the false dichotomy or divide which they both assume to the principle of God himself from whom all authority ultimately derives and which is delegated even to Caesar. As Jesus will say to Caesar’s man, Pilate, at his trial, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn.19.11).

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 17 – 23 October

Monday, October 17th, Eve of St. Luke
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, October 18th
7:00pm Coronation Room
Christ Church Book Club: Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, Ron Deibert (2019) & The Anthropocene Revisited: Essays on A Human-Centered Planet, John Greene (2021).

Sunday, October 23rd, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Thursday, October 28th, Saint Simon and Saint Jude the Apostles
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
11:00am Service at Windsor Cenotaph
12noon Service at KES Cenotaph

Saturday, November 19th
4:30-6:00pm Parish Hall: Ham Supper

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Prayers and liturgy

The Eighteenth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

LORD, we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 1:4-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:28-37

El Greco, Christ as SaviourArtwork: El Greco, Christ as Saviour, c. 1612. Oil on canvas, El Greco Museum, Toledo, Spain.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 October

Love your enemies

This powerful passage, read in Chapel this week, from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain complements Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. The latter begins with The Beatitudes. In the last Beatitude, Jesus says “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and, as if to drive the lesson home, he adds “blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” Or, as Luke more simply puts it, “blessed are you when men shall hate you.” Wow. Yet how is this even remotely possible to think let alone do?

How do we deal not only with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) but with slander, with character assassination, with those who seek to harm us? In short, with enmity? Well, it is, to be sure, not at all easy especially when you are such a target. Yet here is one of the most radical of all ethical teachings. We are bidden not to be indifferent, not to ignore the enemy, as if they did not exist, nor to succumb to the pressures of subservience by giving in to bullies and cowards. Neither are we to retaliate in the spirit of revenge, the false justice of ‘getting even’, as it were. We are bidden instead to love our enemies. Why?

It is not just that we are to see a blessing for ourselves in being persecuted, itself a troubling concept. It is much more radical. The command to love our enemies bids us seek the good of those who seek our harm. This is a complete reversal and completely counter-culture though it belongs to the wisdom of other spiritual traditions. There is, for instance, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindu tradition, caught in an ethical dilemma about fighting those who are his own relatives, and there is Plato, in The Republic, arguing that justice cannot mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. Doing harm to any ‘other’ negates justice and truth. You remain caught in the binaries of contradiction, of them versus us.

The American writer and social, gender, and anti-racist activist, Roxanne Gay, notes that we have made “a fetish of forgiveness.” She has in mind, I think, apologies that are not really apologies. What does it mean, after all, to apologize for the faults of others while ignoring your own? We don’t need to worship “at the altar of forgiveness,” she says, “to live full lives”. Yet this is the opposite of what Jesus is saying. He counters the phenomenon of nemesis, the idea of retribution. In its place is the radical meaning of forgiveness. Instead of seeking the harm of another we are bidden to seek their good even in the face of their enmity towards us: “to do good to those who hate you.” Wow.

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Prayers and liturgy

King Edward the Confessor

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edward the Confessor (c. 1003-1066), King of England (source):

St. Walburge’s Church, St. Edward the ConfessorO Sovereign God,
who didst set thy servant Edward upon the throne of an earthly kingdom
and didst inspire him with zeal for the kingdom of heaven:
grant that we may so confess the faith of Christ by word and deed,
that we may, with all thy saints, inherit thine eternal glory;
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.

The Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 31:8-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:35-40

Artwork: St. Edward the Confessor, stained glass, St. Walburge’s Church, Preston, England.

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