Author: CCW

Prayers and liturgy

Nine Lessons for Christmas

The First Lesson
God announces in the Garden of Eden that the
seed of woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.
(Genesis 3.8-15)

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

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Prayers and liturgy

Christmas Bidding Prayer

Christmas Bidding Prayer

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the Angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore, let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious redemption brought us by this Holy Child: and let us make this place glad with our carols of praise.

But first, let us pray for the needs of his whole world; for peace and goodwill over all the earth; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in the dominions of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was ever in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us;

Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done; in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 29 December – 4 January

Thursday, January 1st 2015, Octave Day of Christmas/Circumcision of Christ/ New Year’s Day
10:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall

Sunday, January 4th, Second Sunday after Christmas
8:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
10:30am Holy Communion – Parish Hall

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Prayers and liturgy

The Innocents

The collect for today, The Feast of the Holy Innocents, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths: Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith, even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 14:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 2:13-18

When wise men from the East visited King Herod in Jerusalem to ask where the king of the Jews had been born, Herod felt his throne was in jeopardy. So, he ordered all the boys of Bethlehem aged two and under to be killed. On this day, the church remembers those children.

The Massacre of the Innocents is recorded only in St Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said to be fulfillment of a prophecy of Jeremiah.

The church has kept this feast day since the fifth century. The Western churches commemorate the innocents on 28 December; the Eastern Orthodox Church on 29 December. Medieval authors spoke of up to 144,000 murdered boys, in accordance with Revelation 14:3. More recent estimates, however, recognising that Bethlehem was a very small town, place the number between ten and thirty.

This episode has been challenged as a fabrication with no basis in actual historic events. James Kiefer has a point-by-point presentation of the objections with replies in defence of biblical historicity.

This is an appropriate day to remember the victims of abortion.

van Aelst workshop, Massacre of the InnocentsArtwork: Workshop of Pieter van Aelst, The Massacre of the Innocents (“Scuola Nuova” series: episodes of The Life of Christ, from a cartoon by Raphael), 1524-31. Tapestry, Vatican Museums. Photograph taken by admin, 26 April 2010.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday After Christmas Day

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

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us thy only begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:1-7
The Gospel: St Matthew 1:18-25

Champaigne, Dream of St. JosephArtwork: Philippe de Champaigne, The Dream of Saint Joseph, c. 1642-3. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist

“We have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life,
which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us”

So much in a parenthesis! It is not by accident that the great Gospel of Christmas is from the Prologue of John’s Gospel and I think that it is most fitting and providential that The Feast of St. John the Evangelist is a Christmas feast. For with John we are provided with a royal feast of words that have deep spiritual meaning. His Gospel and his Epistles offer a profound insight into the theological meaning of Christmas.

He bears eloquent testimony to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” his Gospel begins, locating the Christian understanding already within an intellectual and spiritual milieu that our rather prosaic and materialistic culture finds hard to comprehend. Such wisdom, Augustine notes, for instance, is found already in the philosophical cultures of pagan antiquity and he would probably allow in the wisdom of the Hebrews. He could not know that it would also be regarded as the received wisdom of Islam. But the point of Christian emphasis lies in what is not to be found in the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists, but which lies at the heart of the Christian understanding, namely, “and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” It is the great Christmas mystery articulated so profoundly in the words of John.

John’s First Epistle bears strong testimony to that insight and truth, echoing the theme of the great Christmas Gospel. “That which was from the beginning which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life,” he says, that is what he declares unto us. “These things,” moreover, “write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” There is a kind of intellectual intensity to his argument, and a sense of something new and wonderful, the intensity of truth.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint John the Evangelist

The collect for today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

MERCIFUL Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 1:1-5
The Gospel: St. John 21:19-25

de Smet, St. JohnJohn and his brother James (St. James the Greater) were Galilean fishermen and sons of Zebedee. Jesus called the two brothers Boanerges (“sons of thunder”), apparently because of their zealous character; for example, they wanted to call down fire from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritans. John and James, together with Peter, belonged to the inner group of the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. It was John and Peter whom Jesus sent to prepare the final Passover meal.

In the lists of disciples, John always appears among the first four, but usually after his brother, which may indicate that John was the younger of the two.

According to ancient church tradition, St. John the Evangelist was the author of the New Testament documents that bear his name: the fourth gospel, the three epistles of John, and Revelation. John’s name is not mentioned in the fourth gospel (but 21:2 refers to “the sons of Zebedee”), but he is usually if not always identified as the beloved disciple. It is also generally believed that John was the “other disciple” who, with Peter, followed Jesus after his arrest. John was the only disciple at the foot of the cross and was entrusted by Christ with the care of his mother Mary.

After Christ’s resurrection and ascension, John, together with Peter, took a leading role in the formation and guidance of the early church. John was present when Peter healed the lame beggar, following which both apostles were arrested. After reports reached Jerusalem that Samaria was receiving the word of God, the apostles sent Peter and John to visit the new Samaritan converts. Presumably, John was at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). He is not mentioned later in the Acts of the Apostles, so he appears to have left Palestine.

Christian writers of the second and third centuries say that St. John lived in Asia Minor in the last decades of the first century, acting as a kind of patriarch to the churches there. Both Justin Martyr (c. 100-165) and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-200) say that John lived in Ephesus and wrote his gospel there. It is believed that he died a natural death at a very old age around the end of the first century. That would make St. John the only apostle who did not die a martyr.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

The words are familiar to us from the Benedictus in the liturgy just before The Prayer of Consecration at Mass. A phrase from Psalm 118 (v.26), it is also familiar to us from the story of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday also read as the Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent. Perhaps less familiar to us is Matthew and Luke’s use of the phrase in the context of judgment and warning by Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. Not Bethlehem and yet the mystery of Christmas in Bethlehem is incomprehensible without reference to Jerusalem. The Feast of Stephen illumines the deeper meaning of Christ’s Nativity. It has altogether to do with service and sacrifice, things perhaps that we don’t really want to hear and yet these are the things that belong to the greatest truth and dignity of our humanity. They belong to the Christmas mystery.

What, if anything, is known popularly about St. Stephen is known by way of a nineteenth century carol by John Mason Neale, Good King Wenceslaus, that refers to a touching medieval legend and one which captures certainly the theme of service and even the idea of the imitation of Christ which is certainly at the heart of The Feast of Stephen. The lesson from The Book of The Acts of The Apostles concludes the story of Stephen with his martyrdom; he was stoned to death for his testimony to Christ and in the moment of his dying he, like Christ on the Cross, prays for the forgiveness of his executioners, not the least of which is Saul who will become Paul the Apostle. “Lord Jesus,” Stephen says, “receive my Spirit,” an echo of the last word of Christ from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit” and then, echoing the first word, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” Stephen’s last word is his prayer, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” The words of the dying, it seems, are often the beginning of something profound and deeply moving.

Stephen is the proto-martyr in the Christian understanding of things and what makes his feast so important is the way it illumines the deeper meaning of human redemption. His feast signals the idea of redemptive suffering and the nature of Christian witness as participation in the sufferings of Christ. We probably forget certain aspects of the larger story of Stephen.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Stephen the Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that in all our sufferings here upon earth, for the testimony of thy truth, we may stedfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Spirit, may learn to love and bless our persecutors, by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those that suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 7:55-60
The Gospel: St. Matthew 23:34-39

Rembrandt, Martyrdom of St. StephenAll that is known of St. Stephen’s life is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 6 and 7. He is reckoned as the first Christian martyr–the proto-martyr. Although his name is Greek for “crown”, he was a Jew by birth; he would have been born outside Palestine and raised as a Greek-speaking Jew. The New Testament does not record the circumstances of his conversion to Christianity.

Stephen first appears as one of the seven deacons chosen in response to protests by Hellenist (Greek-speaking) Christians that their widows were being neglected in the distribution of alms. The apostles were too busy preaching the word of God to deal with this problem, so they commissioned seven men from among the Hellenists “of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom”, then prayed and laid hands on them. Stephen, the first among the seven, is described as “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit”. A few verses later, Stephen is said to be “full of grace and power [and] doing great wonders and signs among the people”.

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Sermons

Sermon for Christmas Morning

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

In the gentle quiet of Christmas morn, heedless of the wind and weather, we hear of the simple birth of Christ, laid in manger in Bethlehem “because there was no room for them in the inn,” where Mary, like so many mothers over so many millennia, “brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes”. So common, so touching. Yet, the real meaning and significance of this birth is not first made known in Bethlehem and not by man or woman. No. It is an Angel’s word to “shepherds abiding in the field” in the surrounding countryside.

The symbolism is profound and speaks, I think, to the question about what it means to be Christian in a post-Christian and a post-secular world. It does not mean huddling in the ghettoes of our minds or in the various conventicles of self-righteous sanctity. Such are really only other forms of nihilism in a world that refuses to address the wonder of Christmas. The wonder of Christmas is about the mystery of God, on the one hand, and the mystery of our humanity embraced by God, on the other hand; in short, the mystery of the Incarnation.

We can make little sense of Christmas beyond the acquisitive madness of consumer culture and the syrupy sentimentalism that attends it and manipulates us. We can make little sense of Christmas because we are busy about everything except the mystery of God. And without that, the mystery of the Word made flesh, the mystery of God with us, makes little sense. How, then, to recapture for our hearts and minds the mystery of Christmas?

Theology is a wilderness affair. Advent has been very much about the wilderness of human darkness and sin to which comes the redeeming Word of God. But on Christmas morn, in what is sometimes known as the Christmas Mass of the Angels, we are, at least in the imaginative power of the Gospel, in the wilderness with Shepherds. Only with Angels and Shepherds can we make our journey to Bethlehem. Only by way of an Angel’s word.

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