Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, First Sunday after Epiphany
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the First Sunday after Epiphany.
Author: CCW
Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”
The Magi-Kings, having come to Bethlehem, complete the Christmas mystery and launch us into another journey, the journey of the understanding. It is Epiphany, not just as event, but as doctrine. It means manifestation, the idea of the making known, of things coming to light. This speaks to the meaning of ourselves as knowers, as intellectual and spiritual beings, embodied in the particularities of culture and circumstance but not fundamentally defined or limited to such things. Epiphany signals the idea of the true universality of our humanity. We enter into the greater journey of learning, a learning which is entirely about what God wants us to know, and thus about what is, in principle, knowable. We cannot be knowers without a kind of faith that there are things to be known. At issue is our wanting or seeking to know, our desire to learn, what Plato calls the eros, the passionate desire to know.
This is transforming. The true transformation of our humanity happens by our being changed by what we have been given to see. The Magi-Kings, about whom we know next to nothing empirically or factually, are those who teach us that we are more though not less than sensual, material creatures; we are knowers and lovers. They go together, they are inseparable. We are launched on the journey of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, as Anselm famously put it, echoing Plato and Augustine. This journey belongs to the dignity of our humanity because it is about becoming “partakers of the divine nature”. That is the true transformation of our humanity. We don’t become other or less than what we are; we become who we are in the knowing love of God; knowing even as we are known.
God’s purpose for our humanity is about the truth and perfection of our humanity. It is a true universal over and against the false universals of our times in the endless illusions of the self in its own projects and fantasies; on the one hand, fleeing the determinisms of technocratic and material culture, and, on the other hand, completely beholden to them, lost in the false sense of our own completeness and sense of perfection. Epiphany as feast and doctrine recalls us to the truth of our humanity as grounded in the will and purpose of God. Our seeking what God seeks for us.
It is not found in our conformity to the deceits of the world materially and technologically, but “by the renewing of our minds”. This is the true transformation because it speaks to what is most true about our humanity. That renewing of our minds is not about becoming machines, or thinking like machines, being transformed into bots which serve the interests of technocratic power and domination. Nor is it about a fantasy flight into some imagined view of ourselves in the illusions of liberalism, freed to be whatever we think we want to be. Epiphany teaches us about what transforms us in and through the world and not in a gnostic flight from the world.
Week at a Glance, 9 – 15 January
Tuesday, January 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, January 15th, Second Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Tuesday, January 17th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow & A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam by Thomas Bauer (2011, tr. 2021)
All services held in Parish Hall, January through March.
The First Sunday After The Epiphany
The collect for today, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people which call upon thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 12:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:41-52
Artwork: Konstantin Makovsky, Christ Among the Teachers, 1860s. Oil on canvas, Private collection.
The Baptism of Our Lord
The collect for today, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O HEAVENLY Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ did take our nature upon him, and was baptized for our sakes in the river Jordan: Mercifully grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may also be partakers of thy Holy Spirit; through him whom thou didst send to be our Saviour and Redeemer, even the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson Isaiah 42:1-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 1:1-11
Artwork: Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ, c. 1580. Oil on panel, San Silvestro, Venice.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 January
Epiphany!
Such a wonderful word! It means manifestation. It is the idea of something made known. What that presupposes is ourselves as knowers. And no knowers without the idea of things that can be known. (All rather ToKish, I must confess!). But it is true and belongs to the meaning of a School as a place of learning about things which can be known. Not that we can know everything. It is really about the quest for wisdom; to know even as we are known in the infinite love and wisdom of God. This is far more than an assemblage of facts and figures, of information and technical know-how. It belongs to a deeper understanding of our humanity than what reduces us to bots or cogs in the machine of technocratic society; in short, things to be manipulated and used, even diminished and destroyed.
Epiphany in the Christian understanding marks at once the end or completion of Christmas and the beginning of the unfolding of its wonder. With the coming in of the Magi-Kings of Anatolia, the proverbial wise ones, the Christmas scene at Bethlehem is complete. Epiphany, however, signals a new emphasis, the making known of the Christmas mystery for all people, omni populo. It is something universal. God cannot be contained to a particular culture and time. We are opened out to the deeper mysteries that belong to our humanity in its desire to know. The love of learning and the love of God are intimately connected.
Once again, as with Advent, the dominant image of the understanding is that of light, a light which now shines out from within the world. Not only is Christ in this way of thinking, “the life” which is “the light of the world”, but he is “the true light, which lighteth every one that cometh into the world”. The light and the wisdom of God is manifest in the world, even in and through the experiences of our own lives. It is not about collapsing God into the world but about our being drawn more and more fully into the mystery of God, first and foremost, and into the mystery of ourselves as knowers and lovers of knowledge.
Thus Epiphany illustrates wonderfully the journey of understanding. It is not just the journey of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem in all of their exotic qualities which has excited the imagination of poets and artists over the centuries. How many? Who are they? Where did they come from? Such things become part of the work of holy imagination which is about our thinking upon what is shown. This appears, too, in the Huron Carol which imaginatively places the Epiphany story in the context of the indigenous culture of the Wendat (or Huron) here in Canada. Thus it belongs to another journey, a journey of reflection that leads away from Bethlehem to engage the wider world of our humanity. The journey has to do with how we are transformed by what we see and know, by what we learn and seek to know more deeply. For what we seek as knowers is always something greater than ourselves.
The Epiphany of Our Lord
The collect for today, The Epiphany of Our Lord, or The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles: Mercifully grant, that we, who know thee now by faith, may be led onward through this earthly life, until we see the vision of thy heavenly glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3:1-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 2:1-12
Artwork: Paolo Veronese, Adoration of the Magi, 1573. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Octave Day of Christmas
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave Day of Christmas.
Sermon for the Octave Day of Christmas
“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass
which the Lord hath made known unto us.”
They are the words of the shepherds to one another after the angels had departed from them into heaven. And so begins the Shepherds’ Christmas as they make their way to Bethlehem and “[find] Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”. Everything converges on Bethlehem, it seems. Such was the Angels’ Christmas on Christmas morning in the angel’s announcement to the shepherds that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord”. It is the occasion of great joy in heaven and on earth. For “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men”.
The Angel’s word launches the shepherds on their journey to Bethlehem. And while Luke tells us that Mary’s first-born son was “laid in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”, in the Christian imaginary, the stable of Bethlehem, too, is a most crowded scene. And we are drawn to that scene to do like the Angels, like the Shepherds, and like Joseph and Mary; in short to behold and wonder “at those things which were told them by the shepherds”. The lowly shepherds have become, it seems, angelic messengers of the mystery of Christ’s birth. For “when [the shepherds] had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.”
Everything converges on Bethlehem and yet everything is concentrated on the child Christ. Everything circles around the child, the center of wonder and worship. As the great mystical and theological definition of God puts it, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. At Christmas that center is the babe of Bethlehem around whom the whole of creation gathers in wonderment and joy. The mystery enfolds us in the divine love which cannot be constrained and contained by us. Rather it envelops us.
“High and low, rich and poor, one with another,” Palestrina’s great Advent Matin Responsory begins. That crowded scene is not a jumble of indiscriminate things. It is not like Holy Week, the madness of crowds. Rather like Pentecost, it opens to us a wonderful vision of creation restored into unity and wholeness. It sets before us the true vision of the universality and unity of our humanity at one with God and with the good order of God’s creation. Matthew’s account of the Nativity will result in the coming in of the Magi-Kings which in some sense completes the tableau of creation restored. Thus both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of Christ’s Nativity complement the great Christmas Gospel from John which centers on “the Word made flesh”.
Week at a Glance, 2 – 8 January
Sunday, January 8th, First Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Services to be held in the Parish Hall, 8 January through March.