Behold the Lamb is a series of meditations from a variety of Canadian Anglicans on the Morning Prayer New Testament lessons in the Prayer Book for Lent. (Fr. David Curry is one of the contributors.)
Click here to download the book of devotionals as a pdf document.
This devotional resource is offered to the glory of God and in thanksgiving for the faithful that call The Anglican Church of Canada home. Deo gratias!
The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21
![Luigi Nono, Preghiera [Prayer]](https://i0.wp.com/christchurchwindsor.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Nono_Preghiera.jpg?ssl=1 "Luigi Nono, Preghiera [Prayer]")
Artwork: Luigi Nono, Preghiera [Prayer], 1882. Oil on canvas, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint David (c. 520-589), Bishop of Menevia, Patron Saint of Wales (source):
Almighty God,
who didst call thy servant David
to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries
for the people of Wales:
in thy mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal
for the gospel of Christ,
we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit
be all honour and glory,
world without end.
The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-29
Artwork: Saint David, stained glass, late 19th century, Jesus College Chapel, Oxford.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Quinquagesima Sunday.
Quinquagesima Sunday makes explicit the logic which underlies the ‘gesima’ Sundays and which runs through the whole pageant of Lent which begins with Ash Wednesday this week. “We go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus says to the disciples, and explains exactly what that means. Yet, the disciples, as Luke points out, “understood none of these things”. This captures what Paul means by saying that “now we see in a glass darkly”. The hope of Lent as the journey of the soul to God is that “then” we may see “face to face”, that beyond “know[ing] in part”, we shall “know even as also [we] are known”. It gives a deeper meaning to the strong petition of the blind man on the wayside who simply wants to “receive [his] sight”.
The deeper significance of this is that we might see ourselves as God sees us, to see ourselves in Christ; in short, to know even as we are known in God. This highlights Lent as the season of the mystical journey of our souls to God. It emphasizes two themes which stand in complete opposition in our dystopian world: knowledge and will or power.
The great lesson of 1st Corinthians is about wisdom in love, the counter to the delusions of our technocratic culture which is utterly and entirely bereft of wisdom, of virtue, and is anti-life and anti-intellect. Know-how skills do not provide us with the knowledge of what belongs to character, to the virtues of the soul, which concern ends and purposes; in short, meaning which goes beyond techne or technique. Knowing what something is or knowing that it exists for a purpose extends far beyond the know-how skills of our digital devices which reduce us to machine-like things who think like our devices. We make the machines that make and unmake us. To know even as we are known is to reclaim our humanity from the disastrous projects of its being re-engineered, as Brett Frischmann & Evan Selinger pointed out in Re-engineering Humanity (2018).
Such is the paradox and the perversion of the famous Turing-test devised to see if a computer is capable of thinking like a human; now it is about whether humans can be made to think like computers. “I am not a robot,” we are sometimes asked to check but that only confirms how conditioned we are to being essentially technobots, mere cogs in the machinery of algorithms which work for purposes that are entirely remote and hidden from us but serve the interests of the technocratic elites. Such examples serve only to highlight the divide between power and knowledge.
Wednesday, March 2nd, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Services & Ashes
12:00noon Holy Communion & Ashes
2:35-2:50pm Imposition of Ashes at KES Chapel
Sunday, March 6th, First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through April 5th. Return to the Church for Holy Week & Easter.
The collect for today, the Sunday called Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43
Artwork: Francesco de Mura, Christ Healing the Blind Man, c. 1740. Oil on canvas, National Trust, Basildon Park, Berkshire.
Last week in the return to Chapel we read Paul’s powerful hymn to love in First Corinthians 13 and its counterpart in Isaiah’s Song of the Beloved about his vineyard (Is. 5). This week we embark upon a brief consideration of the story of David, one of the greatest narrative moments in antiquity, a story which extends over the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel and into 1st Kings. Central to that narrative arc is the story of David, a story which has a remarkable power of truth and eloquence. “The story of David”, as the literary and Jewish biblical scholar and translator, Robert Alter, notes “is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.”
What is it all about? About the truth of our humanity in all its disarray and about the return of our humanity to God. Alter’s observations are complemented by those of the 17th century poet/preacher John Donne. “David”, he says, “shows us the slippery ways into sin and the penitential ways out of sin”; in short, David is a kind of everyman. Yet he is a figure whose story is brilliantly told precisely because of the insights and careful observations of the anonymous narrator into the ambiguities and uncertainties of our humanity, especially about knowledge and power explored by way of Samuel, Saul, David, and others that belong to this outstanding literary narrative.
The dynamic between prophecy and kingship is one of the underlying themes and questions. Samuel is a prophet, one who by definition speaks on behalf of God and has an insight into God’s will for his people. “A prophet was formerly called a seer”(1 Sam. 9.9); literally, one who sees into the truth of things. Yet Samuel is also moved by self-interest and worldly ambition. He has chosen Saul to be king yet Saul is an uncertain quantity in terms of ambition and knowledge. Saul has been chosen, it seems, more on the basis of outward appearance and assumptions about power; someone whom Samuel thinks he can control.
The story of David begins with his being anointed king by Samuel in place of Saul. The story in its simple eloquence complements Paul’s great hymn to love which ends with the cryptic statement that “now I see through a glass darkly but then face to face; then shall I know even as I am known.” Such is the desire for wisdom in love, to know even as we are known by God. Samuel comes to Bethlehem as directed by God to choose a king from among the eight sons of Jesse. The first to come before him is Eliab whom Samuel wants to anoint, seeing him much as he had seen Saul but, in a brilliant phrase, he is told by God not to look on his appearance, “for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Matthias the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O ALMIGHTY God, who into the place of the traitor Judas didst choose thy faithful servant Matthias to be of the number of the twelve Apostles: Grant that thy Church, being alway preserved from false Apostles, may be ordered and guided by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Acts 1:15-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:1-11
The name of this saint is probably an abbreviation of Mattathias, meaning “gift of Yahweh”.
Matthias was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas had betrayed Jesus and then committed suicide. In the time between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost, the small band of disciples, numbering about 120, gathered together and Peter spoke of the necessity of selecting a twelfth apostle to replace Judas. Peter enunciated two criteria for the office of apostle: He must have been a follower of Jesus from the Baptism to the Ascension, and he must be a witness to the resurrected Lord. This meant that he had to be able to proclaim Jesus as Lord from first-hand personal experience. Two of the brothers were found to fulfill these qualifications: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas also called the Just. Matthias was chosen by lot. Neither of these two men is referred to by name in the four Gospels, although several early church witnesses, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, report that Matthias was one of the seventy-two disciples.
Like the other apostles and disciples, St. Matthias received the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Since he is not mentioned later in the New Testament, nothing else is known for certain about his activities. He is said to have preached in Judaea for some time and then traveled elsewhere. Various contradictory stories about his apostolate have existed since early in church history. The tradition held by the Greek Church is that he went to Cappadocia and the area near the Caspian Sea where he was crucified at Colchis. Some also say he went to Ethiopia before Cappadocia. Another tradition holds that he was stoned to death and then beheaded at Jerusalem.
The Empress St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have brought St Matthias’s relics to Rome c. 324, some of which were moved to the Benedictine Abbey of St Matthias, Trier, Germany, in the 11th century.
Artwork: Anthony van Dyck, Saint Matthias, c. 1619. Oil on wood, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
The collect for today, the commemoration of Lindel Tsen (1885-1946), Bishop in China, consecrated 1929, and Paul Sasaki (1885-1954), Bishop in Japan, consecrated 1935 (source):
Almighty God, we offer thanks for the faith and witness of Paul Sasaki, bishop in the Nippon Sei Ko Kai [Anglican Church in Japan], tortured and imprisoned by his government, and Philip [Lindel] Tsen, leader of the Chinese Anglican Church, arrested for his faith. We pray that all Church leaders oppressed by hostile governments may be delivered by thy mercy, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit we may be faithful to the Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-32
