Author: CCW

Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension Day

“The end of all things is at hand”

We have been living in apocalyptic times, it seems, times of certain uncertainties and of a kind of wariness and outright fear. Certainly, things as we have known them socially, economically, and politically have come to an end; things have changed and will have to change with respect to the global world. In what way remains unclear. We are, it seems, no longer “assured of certain certainties” and perhaps not so “impatient to assume the world”, as T.S. Eliot puts it in Preludes IV, written in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1911. That world would be shattered by the First World War and the Spanish Flu. How do we face this sense of the ending of all things?

Lady Juliet D’Orsey offers sage advice to the narrator and to us as readers in Timothy Findley’s classic novel, The Wars: “You have to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived”. That requires thoughtfulness and reflection, a kind of active waiting. Ascensiontide Sunday is very much about a sense of ending but with a kind of joyful expectancy. The ending of all things is not always negative and fearful. It is not static and inert. It is not death. It is both ending and beginning, a return to a principle in which we find life and meaning.

Ascensiontide helps us think about the end-times which is really about our end in God and with God. “I go”, Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you” that “where I am there you may be also”. These are wonderfully comforting words, used not only in Burial Service (BCP, p. 591) but also in the Supplication for the Dying (BCP, p. 588). The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and it signals our home, our end with God. It is our spiritual home that embraces and orders all that belongs to our daily lives. It clarifies who we are in the sight of God. Ascension marks the ending of the story of Christ incarnate, having come forth from the Father, and come into the world and now having left the world and returned to the Father. It marks an ending in the sense of completion and fulfillment of purpose, consummatum est for us and for him (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon, 1614). His return to the Father is our joy and exultation, “the exultation of our humanity”, as the Fathers of the Church constantly emphasise. We are given a vision of our end in God, a vision of the homeland of the Spirit.

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Prayers and liturgy

Sunday After Ascension Day

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

O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Andrea del Sarto, Last SupperArtwork: Andrea del Sarto, Last Supper, 1520-25. Fresco, Church of San Michele a San Salvi, Florence.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 May

God is gone up with a merry noise

You can feel the sense of joy and exultation in Psalm 47 which the Headmaster read on Thursday. A psalm is a song. The Psalms are the hymn book of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and help illuminate our understanding of the major themes of God’s engagement with our humanity. Thursday, May 21st, is the fortieth day after Easter this year in the western Christian tradition and known as Ascension Day. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. “Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of Eastertide.

Home is where you belong, the place from which you come and to which you go. The idea of home speaks to the understanding of our humanity, to the sense of our place in the world and with God. The Ascension of Christ is the gathering up of all things to their source and end in God. In the comings and goings of God we learn about our abiding with God. The School is also your home, your intellectual and spiritual home and it is wonderful to be able to think about the possibilities of returning to this home in the Fall. For the ancient Greeks, gnothi seauton, “know thyself”, means knowing your place in the cosmos, the world as an ordered whole. For our humanity that means the polis, the city-state. But the concept of homecoming also relates to our schools as institutions of learning and living. Our schools and universities are your alma mater, your nursing mother, the places of intellectual and spiritual growth and maturity.

We are embodied beings and one of the constant emphasis in Chapel has been to eschew the false dichotomies of spirit and matter, of body and soul, and to consider their necessary interrelation. Christ’s Ascension shows that our humanity has its end in God. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father who is now Our Father. His homecoming is our homecoming in the realization that we have a place with God. The body is made adequate to the life of the Spirit. The truth and being of the Son is in his being with the Father and that embraces our humanity. This week we explored the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Prayer, better described as the ‘Our Father’, because, as Simone Weil in the 20th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century both observe, it contains all that we desire and orders our desires in the right way.

Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of other theologians note that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is there any direction to pray to God as Father. There are a few references that speak about God as father and a few about God as mother, but those are metaphors for God’s relation to us. The ‘Our Father’ is different. Why? Because it concerns God himself. It is Jesus who teaches us the most about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is the distinctive Christian way of speaking about the divine self-relation that is the basis of God’s relation to all else. Such is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Jan Matejko, The Ascension of ChristArtwork: Jan Matejko, The Ascension of Christ, 1884. Oil on oak panel, National Museum, Warsaw.

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Prayers and liturgy

Dunstan, Archbishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Dunstan (909-988), Archbishop of Canterbury, Restorer of Monastic Life (source):

Norwich Cathedral, St. DunstanAlmighty God,
who didst raise up Dunstan
to be a true shepherd of the flock,
a restorer of monastic life
and a faithful counsellor to kings:
grant, we beseech thee, to all pastors
the like gifts of thy Holy Spirit
that they may be true servants of Christ and of all his people;
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 44:1-7
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47

Artwork: Saint Dunstan, stained glass, Norwich Cathedral. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

Sermon for Rogation Sunday

Be of good cheer

Really? Is this some kind of cruel joke? Be happy in the midst of the uncertainties and fears of the current Covid-19 crisis? In the face of the fears of contagion and death, especially with respect to the elderly and to others who are vulnerable? And yet, what is signaled in the Gospel for the last Sunday of Eastertide (in its traditional reckoning), a Sunday commonly known as Rogation Sunday, speaks directly to the general question about how we face dark and difficult things. The Eastertide readings belong to a long and profound tradition of philosophical and ethical reflection about suffering and sorrow, about life and death. Tribulations ‘r us but they always have been. ‘All God’s children got problems’, as the old Gospel song says. At issue is how we face tribulations of whatever sort. This goes to the question of what it means to be human.

Far from being a cruel joke, what Jesus says here is deep wisdom. He bids us to be cheerful, not in flight from the world and its tribulations, but in the face of the things which confront us. It has entirely to do with how we see and think about things. That is why it is so significant that Jesus begins with what is really a kind of commonplace; “in the world ye have tribulation.” To be sure. How can he then say, “be of good cheer”? Because “I have overcome the world.”

This is the key point. Yet the very language of victory, of overcoming, suggests opposition and division, a ‘them versus us’ mentality, a conflict narrative. Is that what Jesus means? He means rather, I think, that he has overcome the separation of our humanity from the world and from one another because of our separation from God. Such are the radical teachings that belong to the idea of creation and the story of the Fall. The overcoming is human redemption accomplished by God in Christ through the humanity which he has assumed.

Nowhere is the deeper meaning of this shown than in the wonderful phrase which captures the whole logic of God’s engagement with our humanity and our world. Jesus says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” “Because I go to the Father” is the great mantra of Eastertide. It signals nothing less than our being gathered into the love of God through Christ’s death and resurrection. Rogation Sunday shows us that this is cosmic. The whole world is gathered into God and returned to its truth in God. Rogation refers to the fundamental sense of prayer as asking, to what we desire which is the good which we seek for ourselves and for the world in the truth and goodness of God himself. The Easter mantra connects to the Our Father. As Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and a host of others remind us, nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is God prayed to as Father. Here everything is gathered into the divine intimacy revealed through the words of the Son.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Master of the Housebook, Last SupperO LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Artwork: Master of the Housebook, Last Supper, c. 1475-80. Oil on panel, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 May

Jesus wept

It has the distinction of being the shortest verse in the New Testament, at least in English translations. It also has the distinction of being one of three passages in the Gospels where Jesus meets us mourners in the presence of the deaths of those who are dear to us, and as such, it seems, dear to God.

The Gospels only come to be written in the light of the resurrection and reveal the power of that idea at work on human minds. It changes us and changes how we face hard and difficult things such as sorrow and loss, such as suffering and death. Thus these three passages read in Chapel show us something of the pattern of death and resurrection as it pertains to human experience. In this way, these passages connect to other powerful works of literature and religious philosophy that equally concern how we look upon suffering and death.

Jesus raises the twelve year old daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, who has just died. Mark gives us the word in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke: Talitha cumi – “little girl, I say unto thee, arise”. Jesus raises the only son of the widow of Nain as he is being carried to the grave. “When the Lord saw her”, the widow, “he had compassion on her and said, ‘do not weep’”. It is an amazing and touching scene. Do not always be weeping, he is saying. Compassion is an exceptionally strong and significant word in the New Testament. At a time when we are worried about things on the surface, about contagion through touch and by way of proximity with one another, this word refers to the inner core of someone’s being, to the heart, lungs, liver, bowels, or the womb.

It is in the heart of Jesus that he holds converse with the Father and gathers us into that eternal love. Compassion is the deep care and concern which we have for one another. The conjunction of seeing and having compassion appears in several places. Jesus sees the multitude in the wilderness and has compassion on them. Jesus sees the crowd and has compassion on them for they are like sheep without a shepherd. In the great parable of the Good Samaritan, “a certain Samaritan” sees the man who was wounded and lying half dead and has compassion on him.

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Prayers and liturgy

Florence Nightingale, Nurse

Arthur George Walker, Florence Nightingale monumentThe collect for today, the commemoration of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Nurse, Social Reformer (source):

Life-giving God, who alone hast power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the example of thy servant Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them thy Presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:31-46

Artwork: Arthur George Walker, Florence Nightingale, Crimean War Memorial, 1910. Waterloo Place, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 August 2004.

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Prayers and liturgy

Cyril and Methodius, Missionaries

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Cyril (826-69) and Saint Methodius (c. 815-85), Apostles to the Slavs (source):

O Lord of all,
who gavest to thy servants Cyril and Methodius
the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavic people:
we pray that thy whole Church may be one as thou art one,
that all who confess thy name may honour one another,
and that from east and west all may acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
and thee, the God and Father of all;
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: Ephesians 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:15-20

Alphonse Mucha, Cyril and Methodius windowSt. Cyril and St. Methodius were brothers born in Thessalonica who went to Constantinople after being ordained priests. (Cyril was baptised Constantine and did not become known as Cyril until late in his life.) Around AD 863, Emperor Michael II and Patriarch Photius sent the brothers as missionaries to Moravia, where they translated into Slavonic the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. With his brother’s help, Cyril created an alphabet that later developed into Cyrillic, thus laying the foundation for Slavic literature.

German missionary bishops in the area celebrated the liturgy in Latin and opposed the brothers’ use of the vernacular. In 867, Cyril and Methodius participated in a debate in Venice over the use of Slavonic liturgy and were soon received with great honour in Rome by Pope Hadrian II, who authorised the use of Slavic tongues in the liturgy.

In 868, Cyril became a monk and entered a monastery in Rome, but died soon afterward and was buried in the church at San Clemente. Shortly after Cyril’s death, Methodius was consecrated archbishop of Sermium and returned to Moravia where he ministered for another fifteen years. He continued the work of translation and evangelisation, while continuing to face opposition from German bishops. Before his death in 885, he and his followers completed translations of the Bible, liturgical services, and collections of canon law.

St. Cyril and St. Methodius are honoured for evangelising the Slavs, organising the Slavic church, and pioneering the celebration of liturgy in the vernacular. For these reasons, in 1980 Pope John Paul II named them, together with St. Benedict, patron saints of all Europe.

Artwork: Alphonse Mucha, Cyril and Methodius window, installed 1931. Stained glass, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague. The window portrays the boy St. Wenceslas with his grandmother St. Ludmila in the centre, surrounded by episodes from the lives of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

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