Author: CCW

Sermons

Sermon for the Octave Day of All Saints’

“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly one… for [God] hath prepared for them a city”

Fall, the season of harvest, the time of gathering, is also the time of barrenness, of the stark and grey emptiness of nature’s year. After the fruits of creation have been gathered in, the fields and gardens lie barren, desolate and emptied of their summer glory. The glorious and colourful array of the autumn leaves quickly give place to the sombre greyness of the twilight of the year.

Yet beyond the gathering of the fruits of creation, there is the spiritual gathering of the fruit of our lives to Christ even if we are in “the twilight of such day,/As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by-and-by black night doth take away,/Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest,” the twilight days and years of our lives, as Shakespeare puts it. The point is that there is a gathering of our souls into a communion and a community. It is a community of spirit, of love. If in Shakespeare’s sonnet (Sonnet 73) our perception of the passage of time makes “thy love more strong, /To love that well which thou must leave ere long,” in the Communion of Saints we are being called to the community of spirit in which our loves are eternal.

Jesus gathers us into the barn and grace of his kingdom. King and Shepherd, city and country are joined in his kingdom. He makes something glorious out of the seeming barrenness of our lives, come what may. There is a gathering of the fruit of human lives unto life eternal.

The Octave of All Saints celebrates the great festival of spiritual harvest, the gathering of all who have gone forth in Christ’s name and in whom we see something of the light of Christ shining forth through them. It extends to an Octave and to this day, The Octave Day of All Saints, which is about a kind of homecoming of spirit realized in “a better country, that is, an heavenly one,” in fact, “a city,” which is nothing less than a spiritual community and one in which we remember with gratitude those who have gone before us and into whose labour we have entered. That idea extends to Remembrance Day this week which is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. We remember those who made the supreme sacrifice for their country in the defining conflicts of the twentieth century and now, too, the twenty-first century. We remember them to God in the Christian understanding.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s it all about? Can it be that we are defined, controlled and governed by money? Does everything comes down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” sings the chorus in Cabaret? Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

“The love of money” is proverbially and scripturally said to be “the root of all evil”. Not money itself, but the love of money. Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted from a medium of exchange to being a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others and the fact that money comes to dominate us. At issue are our loves, our desires.

The love of money causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more prevalent than in our day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are under a constant barrage of images that seek to persuade us that we are merely economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but destructive of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly” as Hebrews provocatively observes.

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the space in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends fail for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then we are but “bellies”, as it were, consumers (and, no doubt, “bellyachers” as well!). We are seduced into thinking that everything, including religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 9 – 15 November

Monday, November 9th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, November 10th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
11:00am Windsor Cenotaph, followed by Service at KES Cenotaph

Thursday, November 12th
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, November 15th, Trinity XXIV
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, November 17th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room, Parish Hall
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now (2015) and Paul Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014).

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

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

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

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity

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

O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22

Boulogne, Tribute to CaesarArtwork: Valentin de Boulogne, The Tribute to Caesar, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, Palace of Versailles.

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Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

Cornelis Bloemaert, Holy WillibrordO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: Cornelis Bloemaert, The Holy Willibrord, c. 1630, Copper Engraving.

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Sermons

Meditation for All Souls’ Day

“It was winter; and Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch”

It is a provocative and compelling image and the setting for the continuation of the radical meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. In other words, it belongs to the theme of gathering, to Christ’s gathering of our humanity to himself in truth and love. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give them eternal life.” Pretty powerful words that go to the answer to the question, “If thou be the Christ tell us plainly,” to which Jesus responded, “I told you and ye believed not.” Somehow our believing hinges upon our hearing the voice of Jesus. Only so can we discover that we are embraced in the Son’s love for the Father.

The Feast of All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls’. From the glory of the Saints we turn to the somber realities of our common mortality. The gathering of the Saints in glory does not simply eclipse the darkness of death, the common death that awaits us all. Such thoughts may seem to belong to the winter of our souls but they simply underline the point of the Burial Office that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing, not even death. Why? Because Christ goes through the valley of the shadow of death for us and with us. The golden thread of the life of Christ runs through the grave and gate of death.

We are tasked to remember and in so doing we discover yet another one of our failings. We cannot always remember even those who were once so close and dear to us. Names and faces fade from our minds and memories. They may or may not be stirred again to memory by some thought, word or action but they are not simply and readily always there in our minds. We confront our limitations. Our memories are fragile and fragmented.

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Prayers and liturgy

All Souls’ Day

The collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
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: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27

Saraceni, ParadiseArtwork: Carlo Saraceni, Paradise, c. 1598. Oil on copper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard Hooker

The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):

O God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
Richard Hookerafter the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
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: 1 Corinthians 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23

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Prayer Book Society, Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints, Choral Evensong

“And he opened his mouth and taught them”

It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare puts it. And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.

The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.

All Saints’ Day recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. We are not called to heroic pretension and presumption but to holiness. We are called to the Communion of Saints. An article of Faith, the lovely vision of the City of God imaged in the Book of Revelation is nothing less than a vision of our redeemed humanity. It signals what God seeks and wills for us and reminds us that our life in Faith always places us in a community. But what kind of community?

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints

“And he opened his mouth and taught them”

It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.

The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

(more…)

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