CCW - Christ Church

4 May 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Monnica, Matron

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Monnica (c. 331-387), mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo (source):

O Lord, who through spiritual discipline didst strengthen thy servant Monnica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we beseech thee, and use us in accordance with thy will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 1:10-11,20
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Artwork: Pedro Berruguette, Saint Augustine and Saint Monica, second half of 15th century. Oil on panel, Private collection.

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2 May 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Athanasius, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Athanasius (c. 293-373), Bishop of Alexandria, Theologian, Apologist, Doctor of the Church (source):

Ever-living God,
whose servant Athanasius bore witness
to the mystery of the Word made flesh for our salvation:
give us grace, with all thy saints,
to contend for the truth
and to grow into the likeness of thy Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:5-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:23-28

Saint Athanasius is one of the most inspirational leaders of the early church. His dogged and uncompromising defence of the full divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arian heresy saved the unity and integrity of the Christian religion and church. He saw that Christ’s deity was foundational to the faith and that Arianism meant the end of Christianity.

Arius and his followers maintained that Christ the Logos was neither eternal nor uncreated, but a subordinate being—the first and finest of God’s creation, but a creature nonetheless. Despite being rejected at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which Athanasius attended as deacon under the orthodox Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Arianism remained popular and influential in the Eastern church for most of the fourth century.

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1 May 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Second Sunday after Easter / Feast of SS Philip & James

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

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1 May 202230 March 2026Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Easter / Feast of Sts. Philip & James

“For ye were as sheep going astray”

The Collect for Easter 2 captures beautifully the deep truth of these Eastertide readings. Christ is both “a sacrifice for sin” and “an example of godly life”. They are two of the three tropes of the atonement, our being at one with God. Christ is the victor – the one who triumphs over sin and death – but Christ is the atoning sacrifice for us and Christ is the example for us in our lives. Today is also the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the Apostles, and those Apostles, the readings for which equally complement the idea of the interplay of the Passion and the Resurrection particularly in terms of the Farewell Discourse of Jesus. But the image of the Good Shepherd is especially rich and poignant.

The earliest images of the crucifixion depict Christ as King, robed in royal garments and wearing a crown of gold. It is known as the Christus Rex, Christ the King who “reigns and triumphs from the tree” as the great Passiontide hymn of Venantius Fortunatus says (Vexilla Regis prodeum, c. 569). But Christ is “a sacrifice for sin,” as the Collect puts it, the sacrificial victim, the one who bears our sins in his body on the Cross in his Passion. That then leads to the images of the crucifixion that emphasize Christ’s suffering on the Cross, Christ as sacrifice who identifies with human suffering, and as such he is “an example of godly life.” Christ the Victor, Christ the atoning Sacrifice, Christ the holy example. These three images of the doctrine of the atonement are inescapably united and intertwined, inseparable from each other, in all the various images of the crucifixion. But they also belong to the image of the Good Shepherd. The images of the crucifixion and Christ the Good Shepherd go together.

In their interrelation they provide a strong counter to the fragmentation of our world, which is the true meaning of the Babel of our times. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd offers a true and great corrective to our brokenness, our fragmentation and divisiveness because it is the great image of our being gathered to God. For it is at once an image of the Passion as well as the Resurrection. We forget this since the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is so familiar, so comforting, so common that we take it for granted. We forget its radical meaning which Peter’s Epistle, which is part of what was read at the Matins of Holy Saturday, already hints at and which the Gospel so completely shows.

What does it all mean? Simply this. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is at once an image of the Passion and the Resurrection that gathers us into the life of God. We overlook the significance of this story being read on the Second Sunday after Easter in conjunction with SS. Philip & James with its Gospel reading which highlights the Eastertide theme “because I go to the Father” and which connects to the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is inescapably a Resurrection image and story; that is its truth and its comfort. But it is centered inescapably on the Passion. “The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep,” Jesus tells us. In other words, the Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God who lays down his life for the sheep.

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1 May 202230 March 2026Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 2 – 8 May

Sunday, May 8th, Third Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Friday, May 13th
3:00pm KES Cadet Church Parade

Thursday, May 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis concert
Tickets: $25 – door; $20 – advance; $10 – students. Details to come.

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1 May 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles

The Collect for today, The Feast of Saint Philip and Saint James the Apostles, with Saint James the Brother of the Lord, Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us perfectly to know thy Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life; that, following the steps of thy holy Apostles, Saint Philip and Saint James, we may stedfastly walk in the way that leadeth to eternal life; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Additional Collect, of the Brethren of the Lord:

O HEAVENLY Father, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning: We bless thy holy Name for the witness of James and Jude, the kinsmen of the Lord, and pray that we may be made true members of thy heavenly family; through him who willed to be the firstborn among many brethren, even the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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

Artwork: Giovanni Battista Crespi (called il Cerano), Crucifixion with Saints James, Philip and Francis, c. 1625. Oil on canvas, Cappella del Seminario, Seveso, Italy.

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1 May 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Second Sunday After Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 2:19-25
The Gospel: St. John 10:11-16

Artwork: Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd, c. 1914. Oil on canvas, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans.

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28 April 202230 March 2026KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 28 April

Did not our heart burn within us?

This week in Chapel, the second part of Luke’s story of The Road to Emmaus was read. It is a powerful story about how we come to know things; in this case, it reveals the way in which the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us through the interplay of words and deeds. The story illustrates what will become a distinct feature of the Christian religion, along with other religions, namely, Word and Sacrament, something proclaimed and heard and something seen and touched, ideas which are received in our hearts and minds. “Did not our heart burn within us?”

The Resurrection is an important doctrine of the Christian Faith but not a concept which is exclusive to Christians. The concept and idea appears in late Judaism and is an important feature of Islam as well. The idea of the Resurrection connects as well to other traditions of philosophical questions about what it means to be ‘you’, a self, a person, an individual, that involves the idea of the immortality of the soul, on the one hand, and the place of the body and nature in relation to the soul, on the other hand, in such things as reincarnation. The Resurrection affirms the idea of the individual as soul and body; the body matters in a radical way and belongs to your individuality.

The story of the Road to Emmaus is profoundly counter-culture in several ways. It affirms the individual as embodied and as an integral part of a community as distinct from being isolated and separate from others and in flight from the world and the body. It is the Christian event that opens us out to the universal event of God as essential life. As such it shows how death and sin are not ultimate but neither are they denied. The past is not eclipsed in some techno-fantasy flight to an imaginary future of our own devising. The Resurrection never lets us ignore or forget the Passion.

Last week we read about Jesus coming alongside the two disciples who were fleeing from Jerusalem in fear and uncertainty. Jesus engages them unawares; “their eyes were holden.” They didn’t recognise him since they had assumed he was dead. Our assumptions quite often constrain and limit our understanding. We often only see and hear what we want to see and hear. But in true Socratic fashion, Jesus draws out of them their fears and uncertainties and their expectations. That is part of the teaching.

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25 April 202230 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Saint Mark the Evangelist

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

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:11-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 13:1-10

The author of the second gospel, Saint Mark is generally identified with John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was a meeting place for the disciples (Acts 12:12,25). John Mark accompanied his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journey to Cyprus, but Mark’s early departure to Jerusalem caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas, following which Barnabas took Mark on the next mission to Cyprus while Paul and Silas traveled through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:37-41).

Paul later changed his mind about Mark, who helped him during his imprisonment in Rome (Col. 4:10). Just before his martyrdom, Paul urged Timothy: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

Also, Peter affectionately calls Mark “my son” and says that Mark is with him at “Babylon”—almost certainly Rome—as he writes his first epistle (1 Pet. 5:13). This accords with church tradition that Mark’s Gospel represents the teaching of Peter.

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