Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Second Sunday after Epiphany
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Second Sunday after Epiphany.
Author: CCW
Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us”
The Epiphany event of the Magi-Kings coming to Bethlehem focuses on the gifts they bring. The gifts manifest the meaning of the one whom they seek and find in Bethlehem. The gifts they present belong to the nature and meaning of adoration. Adoration is a kind of focused wonder. It belongs to the highest feature of our humanity as contemplative beings. Adoration speaks to the greatest dignity of our humanity in the contemplation of the greatest good in itself and for us. The gifts they bring belong more profoundly to the gift that has brought them to Bethlehem. The greater and greatest gift is Christ. Our finding him is really about our being found in him.
The Magi-Kings found him in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph found him in the Temple. But all because we are found in him. Christ is the gift through whom all gifts are given, the gifts that adorn and dignify our humanity as found in God’s love for us. This is truly astounding, an astonishment that should awaken in us philosophical wonder. It is what we see in the readings both today and last Sunday.
To be recalled to the God who is the giver of every good gift is the deeper meaning of Epiphany. God makes himself known to us and makes known the qualities of our life in Christ by virtue of the gifts that are given to us. The gifts differ according to the grace that is given to us, gifts that vary with the differences in our created being. Yet the gifts belong to the restoration and perfection of our humanity.
Epiphany signifies the manifestation of God in Christ but also in the world as creation. It is not by accident that the Second Sunday after Epiphany presents us with the first miracle of Christ. “This beginning of signs,” John tells us, “did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.” It is an epiphany which makes known the divinity of Christ as the Lord of Creation who seeks the greater good of our humanity. There is in these readings a sense of cosmic consciousness, of creation itself as partaking of the divine nature. Our good is inseparable from the good of creation itself. In this way, we might begin to make sense of the idea of miracles as essentially making known the greater miracle of life itself, the greater miracle of creation as given by God.
January – February 2025
(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)
Sunday, January 26th, Third Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Tuesday, January 28th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Pekka Hämäläinen, 2022.
Sunday, February 2nd, Candlemas/ Epiphany 4
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, February 9th, Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, February 16th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Followed by Pot-luck Luncheon and Annual Parish Meeting
Sunday, February 23rd, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Second Sunday After The Epiphany
The collect for today, The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who dost govern all things in heaven and earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of thy people, and grant us thy peace all the days of our life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 12:6-16
The Gospel: St. John 2:1-11
Artwork: Denys Calvaert, The Marriage at Cana, 1592. Oil on copper, Private collection.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 16 January
Transformed by the renewing of your mind
It is a wonderful phrase from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” It complements Luke’s story of Jesus as a boy of twelve being “found in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and, and asking questions,” read in Chapel this week. These passages are traditionally read on The First Sunday after Epiphany and highlight the epiphany theme.
They reveal what belongs to the educational project, namely, the manifestation or making known of the things of God which complement, correct, perfect, and certainly challenge the things of our humanity; in short, epiphany (or education!) as transformative. Paul is suggesting the deeper meaning of the quest of the Magi-Kings who make the long hard journey to Bethlehem seeking the truth of God. They are transformed by what they see and adore, changed into something better we might say. As T.S. Eliot intuited, they are “no longer at ease” in their former places.
Being conformed to this world contrasts with being transformed by the renewing of our minds. The idea of renewal suggests something that has been lost and is to be recovered, a deeper sense of what belongs to the truth of our humanity. The Magi-Kings found Jesus in Bethlehem. Here, in the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Scriptures, he is found in the Temple engaged with the doctors of the Law. What does it mean? What is the epiphany here for us that just might signal a change for us? As Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better” – in melius renovabimur.
There is something universal in that sensibility. We seek for something more and better than what belongs to our worldly pursuits which ultimately cannot satisfy the restlessness of our hearts because the goods of this world pass away. “Our hearts are restless,” Augustine famously says, “until they find their rest in thee,” in our abiding in God’s eternal love. It launches his Confessions which is about the universal journey of the soul and its conversion to the abiding truth of God. But only because of two things that complement one another: our seeking or desiring and the epiphany of God to us.
Hilary, Doctor and Bishop
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Hilary (c. 315-368), Bishop of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church (source):
Everlasting God,
whose servant Hilary
steadfastly confessed thy Son Jesus Christ
to be both human and divine:
grant us his gentle courtesy
to bring to all the message of redemption
in the incarnate Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 2:18-25
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:8-12
Hilary was born in Poitiers, Gaul, of wealthy pagan parents. After receiving a thorough education in Latin classics, he became an orator. He also married and had a daughter. At the age of about 35, he rejected his former paganism and became a Christian through a long process of study and thought. Robert Louis Wilken describes his path to conversion in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (p. 86):
[Hilary] found himself turning to more spiritual pursuits. In his words he wished to pursue a life that was “worthy of the understanding that had been given us by God.” Like Justin [Martyr] he began to read the Bible, and one passage that touched his soul was Exodus 3:14, where God the creator, “testifying about himself,” said, “I am who I am.” For Hilary this brief utterance penetrated more deeply into the mystery of the divine nature than anything he had heard or read from the philosophers. Shortly thereafter he was baptized and received into the church.
Around 353 he was chosen bishop of Poitiers and became an outspoken champion of orthodoxy against the Arians. St. Augustine praised him as “the illustrious teacher of the churches”. St. Jerome wrote that Hilary was “a most eloquent man, and the trumpet of the Latins against the Arians”. Hilary became known as “Athanasius of the West”.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, First Sunday after Epiphany
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the First Sunday after Epiphany.
Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Epiphany is a Greek word that has carried over into other languages such as English. It is derived from a word that refers to what appears; in other words, to what is manifest or made known. In the Christian understanding, it also refers to the festival of Epiphany understood, as the Epiphany Collect makes clear, to the idea of “the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” That remarkable story is wonderfully complemented by the readings for The First Sunday after the Epiphany.
This is challenging to our culture and world. Why? Because the whole idea of Epiphany, both the concept and the event, is so emphatically and primarily intellectual and spiritual. The emphasis, as today’s Collect makes clear, is on the primacy of knowing: Grant that we “may both perceive and know what things we ought to do” and “may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same.” The Epistle and Gospel both turn on the primacy or centrality of knowing as essential to our life in Christ, captured most fully in Paul’s words, “be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
It is a significant phrase. “The renewing of your mind” was one of the favourite and most frequent passages of Scripture used by Fr. Crouse in many of his sermons and papers. It speaks powerfully to a fundamental and essential feature of our humanity as indicated by Aristotle and Augustine, to name but two figures in the history of thought and spirituality. “All human beings by nature desire to know,” Aristotle notes. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” Augustine famously begins his Confessions, launching the journey of the human soul to its patria or end in God’s eternal loving and knowing of all things. As Aquinas observes, “God is the beginning and end of all created things, especially rational beings.” Knowing and our desire to know are essential to the understanding of what it means to be human. “Know thyself,” the Delphic Oracle proclaims. It means to know who we are within the order of the Cosmos or, to put it in Christian terms, Creation, and thus to know ourselves through our relation to God, the beginning and end of all things.
January – February 2025
(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)
Tuesday, January 14th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, January 19th, Second Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, January 26th, Third Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Tuesday, January 28th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club
Sunday, February 2nd, Candlemas/ Epiphany 4
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, February 9th, Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, February 16th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Followed by Pot-luck Luncheon and Annual Parish Meeting
Sunday, February 23rd, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The First Sunday After The Epiphany
The collect for today, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people which call upon thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 12:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:41-52
Artwork: Claude Vignon, Christ Among the Doctors, 1623. Oil on canvas, Musée de Grenoble.