Week at a Glance, 6 – 12 December
Sunday, December 12th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Tuesday December 21st, St. Thomas
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II
Author: CCW
The Second Sunday in Advent
The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33
Artwork: John Martin, The Last Judgment, 1853. Oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.
Clement of Alexandria, Doctor
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):
O Lord, who didst call thy servant Clement of Alexandria from the errors of ancient philosophy that he might learn and teach the saving Gospel of Christ: Turn thy Church from the conceits of worldly wisdom and, by the Spirit of truth, guide it into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 December
A Pageant of Chapels
The last Chapel services this term are three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons & Carols. They are a pageant of word and song, of music and light, coming to us in the darkness of the year both literally and metaphorically. In a way, the Services of Nine Lessons and Carols sum up the intellectual and spiritual journey of Chapel this term.
It is impossible to imagine the impact of this service when it was originally devised for Advent in 1918 at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “The war to end all wars” was finally over but the sombre realities of the immensity of the destruction and devastation of the First World War were only beginning to be felt. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922), captured something of the ambiguities of modernity and the sense of the catastrophic collapse of European civilization. All that remained were “fragments that I have shored up against my ruin”, he says, having observed by way of Dante’s vision of the vestibule of Hell, that “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Advent service of Nine Lessons and Carols undertook to speak to this sense of overwhelming loss and sorrow.
The readings and the carols proclaim hope and peace. They form a tableaux of scriptural revelation and weave a tapestry of spiritual understanding but perhaps the stronger metaphor is that of a pageant of word and song in which we are not simply spectators but actors engaged with what is being heard and said. The readings offer hope and peace to a fearful and dark world of uncertainty and despair.
The first lesson from Genesis 3 highlights the four questions of God to our wayward humanity but ends on the note of the proto-evangelium, the idea of the overcoming of sin and evil through the seed of the new Eve, Mary, later understood by Christians to refer to Christ. Yet the emphasis is on the questions of God which call us all to account. “What hast thou done?” The question reverberates down through the ages and speaks to human conscience then and now. The second lesson, also from Genesis, offers the promise of God which, through the seed of Abraham, grants a blessing for the nations of the earth. The context, alluded to in the reading, is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac preempted by God providing himself the sacrifice. (For Islam the story will be reimaged as the intended sacrifice of Ishmael.) But the idea of a universal blessing for all humanity is particularly moving and reminds us of the significant connections between religious and spiritual cultures in and through their differences.
Advent Programme 1: “Their sound went out into all the earth, and their words unto the end of the world.”
“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”
What are we to make of the saints? Where do they fit into the picture of Christian life? And how are we to understand the various commemorations of the saints in relation to the liturgical pattern of the Christian year? These are important questions which turn upon a number of different theological and ecclesiological concerns. At issue is the relationship between justification, sanctification, and glorification. The saints belong to that sense of our humanity as having an end in glory. “The glory of God is man fully alive,” as Irenaeus puts it, a powerful and arresting thought. The saints somehow speak to that idea of being “fully alive” which is nothing more than being alive to God, the fullness of life and glory. But the saints are by definition “the holy ones”. This connects to sanctification and thus to justification since their holiness and end in glory cannot be understood apart from God in Christ and Christ in them.
In the reformed traditions, illustrated, for example, in the calendar of the Anglican Canadian Prayer Book, and in the provisions for Saints’ Days, it is the figures from the New Testament who bear the sobriquet ‘Saint’. The only exceptions are St. David of Wales, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. George of England, St. Denys of France, and in brackets, signifying its historical obscurity, St. Anne the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The exceptions bear witness to the emergence of the national states and churches in the post-medieval period and to the popular devotion to St. Anne, looking back to the Patristic period and subsequent medieval developments associated with Mary. The calendar distinguishes between what are known as “red letter days” and “black letter days”, the former commemorating New Testament figures and certain festivals of Christ such as the Transfiguration or Candlemas, at once The Presentation of Christ in the Temple and The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. Red letter refers to their being written in red in both manuscript and early print books.
The reformed churches draw upon two things, the general New Testament view which sees the saints as belonging to the faithful community of believers, and the idea that holiness is our Christian vocation. They accept the idea of the New Testament saints as well as the common use of the term ‘saints’ for a great number of figures that belong to the pageant of the faith down to the reformed period and beyond but without an ecclesiastical process for the canonization of later figures in the life of the Church such as was developed in Roman Catholicism. There is in this a certain reticence about the application of the sobriquet ‘saint’. In English, for instance, one never speaks of Jesus as ‘Saint Jesus’ apart from some hymns and devotions which call upon “Holy Jesus”. Instead the term ‘saint’ refers to those who in some way or another embody certain aspects of our life in Christ.
The Communion of Saints is the company of prayer and praise in which we participate and to which we belong in our prayer and praise to God, with God, and in God. In short, we are never alone in our prayers. The saints are integral to our life in the body of Christ which they embody in an exemplary manner such that we remember them as one with us in Christ. They embody the different qualities of spiritual perfection which have their fullness and unity in Christ.
Saint Andrew the Apostle
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, who didst give such grace unto thy holy Apostle Saint Andrew, that he readily obeyed the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him without delay: Grant unto us all, that we, being called by thy holy word, may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 10:8-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:18-22
A native of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, Andrew was a fisherman, the son of the fisherman John, and the brother of the fisherman Simon Peter. He was at first, along with John the Evangelist, a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus was the Christ led the two to follow Jesus. Andrew then took his brother Simon Peter to meet Jesus. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Andrew is called the Protokletos (the First Called) because he is named as the first disciple summoned by Jesus into his service.
At first Andrew and Simon Peter continued to carry on their fishing trade, but the Lord later called them to stay with him all the time. He promised to make them fishers of men and, this time, they left their nets for good.
The only other specific reference to Andrew in the New Testament is at St. Mark 13:3, where he is one of those asking the questions that lead our Lord into his great eschatological discourse.
In the lists of the apostles that appear in the gospels, Andrew is always numbered among the first four. He is named individually three times in the Gospel of St. John. In addition to the story of his calling (John 1:35-42), he, together with Philip, presented the Gentiles to Christ (John 12:20-22), and he pointed out the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8).
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, First Sunday in Advent
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the First Sunday in Advent.
Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent
“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”
Advent signals the motion of God’s Word and Son coming to us. It is Revelation, something made known to us which is not simply a product of human reason but which is nonetheless given for thought and life. On the First Sunday of Advent we encounter the interplay of strong negatives and positives, the strong negatives and positives of God’s Word as Law and Light, the positive in the negative and the negative in the positive.
The Collect concentrates this for us in the complementary actions of “casting off” and “putting on”, echoing explicitly the Epistle reading from St. Paul, a movement from the ‘negatives’ of the Law to the “put[ting] on the armour of light”. Such are the positives of “walk[ing] honestly as in the day”, walking in the light of the Law understood in its fullness in Christ. “Put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ” is about us in Christ and Christ in us, the alpha and omega of our lives. This, in turn, is complemented by the Gospel but in the reverse order: going from the positives of Christ’s joyous and triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the negatives of his “cast[ing] out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and over[throwing] the tables of the money-changers”. Love here appears as the wrath of Christ.
Such images belong to the dialectical nature of Revelation where the negatives are equally positive and vice-versa. What is revealed comes to us as light into the darkness of the world of human sin not simply as condemnation but as illumination and, as such, restoration; in short, as both negative and positive. Advent awakens us to the idea of embracing the coming of the light of God which does not extinguish and annihilate human reason and will but seeks their perfection in truth in its fullness. The Ten Commandments have as their end and purpose the charity or love which establishes friendship between one another in the human community and with God.
Aquinas, following Paul, argues that “the whole law is comprised in this one commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, as expressing the end of all commandments: because love of one’s neighbour includes love of God, when we love our neighbour for God’s sake”. This essentially captures “the summary of the Law”, on the one hand, and recognizes the priority of the ground of each of the Ten Commandments in the first commandment, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me”, on the other hand. “For the love of God”, Aquinas says, “is the reason for the love of neighbour. Hence the precepts ordaining man to God take precedence over the others” (ST. I-II, 100). There is a complete order of thought to the Ten Commandments; yet in a way they are an explication of the radical meaning of the first commandment about God. They have their unity in the God who reveals himself to Moses out of the burning bush not just in terms of tribal, cultural, ethnic and religious identities, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but as the universal principle of all reality, I AM WHO I AM.
Week at a Glance, 29 November – 5 December
Tuesday, November 30th, St. Andrew’s Day
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I
Sunday, December 5th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The First Sunday in Advent
The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13
Artwork: Valentin de Boulogne, Expulsion of the Money-changers, c. 1620-25. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.