Author: CCW

Prayers and liturgy

Cedd, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for a Bishop or Archbishop, on the Feast of St. Cedd (c. 620-664), Abbot of Lastingham, Bishop of the East Saxons, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

St. Cedd, BishopO GOD, our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Cedd to be a Bishop in thy Church and to feed thy flock: We beseech thee to send down upon all thy Bishops, the Pastors of thy Church, the abundant gift of thy Holy Spirit, that they, being endued with power from on high, and ever walking in the footsteps of thy holy Apostles, may minister before thee in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 17:22-31
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-16

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 2:00pm service of Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”

The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which,” as Paul tells us, “passeth knowledge,” which goes beyond what we can know and do simply on our own. Without the love of God, we are utterly incomplete, bereft and empty. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

Compassion is the operative word in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. That compassion is ultimately the love of Christ, the Son of God who became man for us and who engages us in our brokenness and hurt to heal and restore and to set us in motion towards one another. Christ’s compassion, too, is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan.” Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.

We just heard the powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It is one of three stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and each time something happens that is transformative. The operative word is compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion is deep love, the deep love of God in Jesus Christ which reaches out to our humanity, at once to the sorrow and loss of the widow and to the death of her only son. We are meant to empathise with her loss and to feel its depth. She is utterly bereft – a widow who has lost her husband and now a mother who has lost her only son. We sense her desolation, the utter emptiness of her being.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God creates and now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and only answer is love, the love which manifests love. And that love is so powerful, so great, that it extends to the restoration and redemption of all that is broken and dead, empty and bereft.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity

“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”

In one way, it is a curious criticism. After all, the concept of Revelation begins with signs and wonders. God reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush, a sign and a wonder, to be sure, and one that catches our attention, a bush burns and is not consumed out of which God speaks his Name, “I am who I am.” It initiates the Exodus, the journey into the understanding of God’s will for our humanity. But there is a further question.

What is the effect of God’s Word on our minds? His Word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle, which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? It is Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s Word on human minds.

God’s Word causes delight. God’s Word causes healing. God’s Word creates new life and new birth. Such are the desired effects of God’s Word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in this place of signs, Cana of Galilee? It was at the Wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee that Jesus turned the water into wine, a story which we hear every year during Epiphany. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. They who heard the word “receive[d] the word with joy”. Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. That most excellent wine belongs to the abundant life which he would give us – our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s Word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s Word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 26 October – 1 November

Monday, October 26th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, October 27th, Eve of SS. Simon & Jude
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Thursday, October 29th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, November 1st, All Saints’ Day
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Choral Evensong at St. Peter’s Cathedral, Charlottetown, PEI (Fr. Curry preaching)

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 21st
4:30-6:00pm Annual Parish Ham Supper – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 6th
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols with KES at 4:00pm

Sunday, December 20th
7:00pm Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 6:10-20
The Gospel: St. John 4:46-54

Tissot, Healing of the Officer's SonArtwork: James Tissot, The Healing of the Officer’s Son, 1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.

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Administrative, Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Luke

“Only Luke is with me.”

I have always loved this simple yet poignant remark of Paul. There is a compelling kind of elegance and simplicity to it. It captures something of the nature of the loneliness of the ministry in its deep truth and meaning. Even more, it captures something of the spiritual significance of Luke, “Evangelist and Physician of the soul,” as the Collect puts it, for the life of the Christian Church. There is, it seems, something profoundly comforting about the presence of Luke with Paul. And so, too, with us.

Luke is the Church’s great and primary spiritual director, as it were, especially in the long Trinity season. There is a certain felt quality to his writings, both in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, generally attributed to him. Dante captures the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption, in a phrase. Luke, he says, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. I have often been struck by that phrase. It seems to capture the real meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment; a counter to our despair and our anxieties.

We have been pondering the powerful teachings of the Trinity season, emphasising, in our own poor way, the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion. Not surprisingly, Luke has been our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and lunacies of our day where either Profit or the Self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse, and even on the eve of a federal election here in Canada, there is really only the tyranny of global corporatism or the subjective tyranny of the self. Yet here in this feast, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. It seems somehow to make a difference to our thinking and our doing.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 19 – 25 October

Monday, October 19th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, October 20th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ –Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies – Parish Hall
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Parish Hall
Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014) and Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014)

Thursday, October 22nd
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, October 23rd
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Sunday, October 25th, Trinity XXI
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
2:00pm AMD Service of the Deaf
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 21st
4:30-6:00pm Annual Parish Ham Supper – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 6th
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols with KES at 4:00pm

Sunday, December 20th
7:00pm Capella Regalis presents “To Bethlehem with Kings”.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Luke the Evangelist

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

ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52

St. Paul's Knightsbridge, Luke the beloved physicianVirtually all that we know of Saint Luke comes from the New Testament. He was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.

It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.

St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twentieth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Millais, The Marriage FeastO ALMIGHTY and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 5:15-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22:1-14

Artwork: John Everett Millais, The Marriage Feast, from Illustrations to `The Parables of Our Lord’, 1864. Wood engraving on paper, Tate Collections, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Etheldreda, Queen and Abbess

Walpole St. Peter, St. EtheldredaThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (source):

O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
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: Philippians 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34

Artwork: St. Etheldreda, stained glass. St. Peter’s Church, Walpole St. Peter, Norfolk, England. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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