Author: CCW

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 April

Striving with God

When we hear the word ‘Israel’, we probably think of a place or a country in the Middle East. We forget that it is actually, first and foremost, a name and one that belongs to religion and theology. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Gen. 32.28). Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel. All the promises of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob become the promises to Israel, the people of God who will be known as ‘Israelites’. Not the same thing as ‘Israelis’ which is a modern term for citizens of the state of Israel.

Jacob changes from being a figure of deceit and cunning – tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright and deceiving his father Isaac – to becoming the figure of faith and insight into the truth of God. His vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder extending from the earth to heaven is complemented with his wrestling with God and being renamed Israel, meaning “one who strives with God.”

This is more than simply a matter of tribalism. Through Israel – as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – all nations of the earth shall be blessed. God is not simply the property or possession of any one group or identity. Perhaps nowhere is that more profoundly seen than in the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus in the lesson read this week in Chapel. As I like to say, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us.

The Canaanite woman is from outside Israel, a non-Israelite. Yet the encounter will reveal her as a true Israelite because she strives with God, not against God. She has a powerful hold on the truth which she perceives in Jesus which she will not let go. She comes seeking him and seeking from him the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” Not a healing of the body but of the mind or soul. It may not be the language of the therapeutic culture in terms of mental health, but it speaks to the ways in which we in our minds can be obsessed, even possessed with thoughts that are destructive of human personality. She senses in Jesus the power of God that alone can heal her daughter; an insight into the nature of God himself as Creator and Redeemer, of Jesus as Lord and Saviour. One who knows us better than we do ourselves.

She will not be put off in her quest. She is the image of humble perseverance and faith. But the encounter is quite disturbing because the scene is equally a critique of Israel, meaning the people of Israel pictured here in the disciples. The dialogue with the Canaanite woman reveals a distorted or mistaken view of the vocation of Israel. To put it bluntly, the dialogue criticizes the idea that God can be owned by any one group or another. In other words, the insight of the Canaanite woman is that God is the God of all human beings, not just some. Her insight is about the universality of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard of Chichester, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Richard (1197-1253), Bishop of Chichester (source):

St. Richard of ChichesterMost merciful redeemer,
who gavest to thy bishop Richard
a love of learning, a zeal for souls
and a devotion to the poor:
grant that, encouraged by his example,
we may know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly,
day by day;
who livest and reignest with the Father,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
ever one God, world without end.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:10-13
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25: 31-40

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Prayers and liturgy

Reginald Heber, Bishop and Poet

The collect for today, the commemoration of Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Bishop of Calcutta, Missionary, Hymn writer (source):

Reginald Heber, Bishop of CalcuttaAlmighty God,
you granted to Reginald Heber
a manifold life of service,
to shepherd a rural parish in England
and to preach in the cities of India.
Give to your people such faithfulness,
that in every place and circumstance
they may sing of your power
and minister your gifts
for the glory of your Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

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Prayers and liturgy

Henry Budd, Priest

The collect for today, the commemoration of Henry Budd (1814-75), first ordained Indigenous Church of England minister in North America, Missionary to the Cree nation (source):

The Rev. Henry BuddCreator of light, we offer thanks for thy priest Henry Budd, who carried the great treasure of Scripture to his people the Cree nation, earning their trust and love. Grant that his example may call us to reverence, orderliness and love, that we may give thee glory in word and action; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 5:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-21

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Fourth Sunday in Lent

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”

He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.

The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.

These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, March – April 2025

(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)

Sunday, March 30th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, April 3rd
7:00pm Evening Prayer & Lenten Programme III: The Deadly Three: Envy

Sunday, April 6th, Fifth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, April 10th
7:00pm Evening Prayer & Lenten Programme IV: The Deadly Three: Anger

Back to Big Church for Holy Week & Easter!

Sunday, April 13th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Palms & Holy Communion
10:30am Palms & Holy Communion

Monday, April 14th, Monday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Passion

Tuesday, April 15th, Tuesday in Holy Week
7:00pm Vespers & Passion

Wednesday April 16th, Tenebrae
3:30pm Church Parade

Thursday, April 17th, Maundy Thursday
7:00pm Solemn Liturgy

Friday, April 18th, Good Friday
7:00pm Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday

Saturday, April 19th, Holy Saturday / Easter Eve
10:00am Matins & Ante-Communion
7:00pm Easter Vigil

Sunday, April 20th, Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Baptism & Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished, by the comfort of thy grace may mercifully be relieved; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 4:26-5:1
The Gospel: St. John 6:5-14

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two FishArtwork: Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fish, second quarter 16th century. Oil on wood, National Museum, Stockholm.

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Prayers and liturgy

John Keble, Scholar and Poet

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Keble (1792-1866), Priest, Tractarian, Poet (source):

Father of the eternal Word,
in whose encompassing love
all things in peace and order move:
grant that, as thy servant John Keble
adored thee in all creation,
so we may have a humble heart of love
for the mysteries of thy Church
and know thy love to be new every morning,
in 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: Romans 12:9-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 5:1-12

John KebleJohn Keble’s Assize Sermon entitled “National Apostasy“, delivered at Oxford on 14 July 1833, is regarded as the beginning of the renewal movement known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement. In that sermon, preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Rev. Keble condemned the growth of liberalism in the Church of England and took the nation to task for turning away from God and ignoring the prophetic calling of the church. The sermon caused a sensation across Britain.

Between 1833 and 1841, Rev. Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others issued a series of 90 pamphlets called Tracts For The Times (hence Tractarian Movement), in which they presented their views on ecclesiology and theology. Tractarianism emphasised the importance of the ministry and the sacraments as God-given ordinances and ultimately developed into Anglo-Catholicism, which has been highly influential in the Anglican Communion as well as other Christian traditions.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in his memory in 1870. The College was designed by William Butterfield, a leading exponent of Victorian Gothic who had been raised in a Nonconformist family but later became a convinced High-Church Anglican. He and other architects influenced by the Oxford Movement looked to medieval cathedrals for inspiration and designed churches full of colour as a celebration of God’s creation. The walls of Keble College Chapel are lined with brilliant mosaics showing scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Christ, and patristic and medieval saints. Some see Keble College and Chapel as the high point of Butterfield’s architectural achievements.

John Keble’s page at Hymnary.org lists dozens of hymns. Some of Rev. Keble’s writings, including “National Apostasy” and seven Tracts For The Times, are posted here. All of the tracts are posted here.

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Sermons

Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme II: Pride – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Be it unto me according to thy word,” Mary says. It is the perfect and, really, the only counter to pride; it is humility in all of its strength and beauty. It complements the Beatitudes especially the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.“ Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes as taken from Proverbs 16.18. It reads in full: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Only too true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But in a way, it is worse than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them.

Thus Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self, clinging to ourselves rather than to God the author of our very being.

Thomas Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin.

Pride is in our envy, making us think that we deserve better than what we have or are and, consequently, to pull down and destroy anything that seems to stand above us and which others have. With pride there is no above, only below. There is only what stands below us and yet it consumes us in our revolt against the good or joy of others. It is the deadliest poison for our life together in the various forms of our communal and social life, our life in community, whether it is family, school, or church.

Pride is in our anger, making us adopt a position of superiority from which nothing can make us swerve. Even more, anger blinds us like smoke to the legitimate motives that move people. Anger is the smoke-screen that hides reality. Anger raises our fist to God because things are not as we think they should be for us. The all-consuming character of wrath or anger means that others sometimes see it better for what it is than we do. This is different from the category of righteous anger but even that runs the risk of overkill and overreach. Once again, our anger is about ourselves and often as not the penalty of anger is ourselves bringing harm upon ourselves in one way or another.

Pride is in our sloth, making us think that we may get by with a minimum of effort while obtaining the maximum result. Again, it signals a profound form of self-conceit and self-importance. It contributes to a kind of complacency and sense of entitlement based upon nothing more than our sense of ourselves and what is ‘owed’ to us without having to lift a finger.

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