Author: CCW

Prayers and liturgy

The Day of Pentecost

The collects for today, The Day of Pentecost, being the fiftieth day after Easter, commonly called Whitsunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

O GOD, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon thy disciples in Jerusalem: Grant that we who celebrate before thee the Feast of Pentecost may continue thine for ever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, until we come to thine eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 2:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-27

Mikhail Vrubel, Descent of the Holy Spirit on the ApostlesArtwork: Mikhail Vrubel, Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, 1885. Fresco, St. Cyril’s Monastery, Kyiv, Ukraine.

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Prayers and liturgy

Dunstan, Archbishop

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Dunstan (909-988), Archbishop of Canterbury, Restorer of Monastic Life (source):

Cloisters Collection, Roundel with Saint Dunstan of CanterburyAlmighty God,
who didst raise up Dunstan
to be a true shepherd of the flock,
a restorer of monastic life
and a faithful counsellor to kings:
grant, we beseech thee, to all pastors
the like gifts of thy Holy Spirit
that they may be true servants of Christ and of all his people;
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 Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 44:1-7
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47

Artwork: Roundel with Saint Dunstan of Canterbury, 1501-20. Colorless glass, vitreous paint and silver stain, The Cloisters Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sunday after Ascension Day

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sunday after Ascension Day.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension Day

“God has gone up with a merry noise,/The Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

The creedal mysteries of the Ascension and the Session of Christ are clearly and unambiguously set before us today, the Sunday after the Ascension. We celebrate the Ascension and the Session of Jesus Christ to “[sit] on the right hand of the Father”. Often overlooked and passed over, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.

“The end of all things is at hand,” says Peter. That “ending of all things” is celebrated in the Ascension and the Sessionof Christ. It is an ending in the sense of mission accomplished, an ending that recalls Christ’s last word from John’s Passion: “It is finished”. Human redemption accomplished or ended is achieved through the sacrifice of Christ and in the gathering of all things into unity in God through that sacrifice.  From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been done by Christ Jesus for us and which ever and always remains to be more fully realised in us. The Son goes to the Father having accomplished “the will of him who sent him.” He returns to glory and enters into glory. What does it signify for us? Simply the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise; our lives in faith, hope, and charity.

If the Resurrection is the fullest possible vindication of the true nature of our human individuality, soul and body, as it were, then the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of all reality. This has enormous consequences for how we look upon every aspect of our lives. The Session of Christ signifies that all things – all forms of natural and human endeavour, all forms of social and political life, whether it be the family, the state, our schools, or our churches – ultimately have their ground in God and participate in one way or another in the work of redemption. In other words, they find their correction and their perfection, their fulfillment and meaning, in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. All authority and order belongs to God; all is gathered back to God.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, May – June 2026

Tuesday, May 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Wild Thought (1962), trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavin (2021) & Adam Shoalts’s The Whisper on the Night Wind: The True History of a Wilderness Legend (2021).

Saturday, May 23rd
4:00pm King’s College Chapel, Halifax: Marriage of Kyran Williams & Katrena Thomas

Sunday, May 24th, Pentecost (Whitsunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Baptism & Holy Communion
(Followed by Time of Fellowship & Refreshment – Parish Hall)

Monday, May 25th, Monday after Pentecost
10:00am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 26th, Tuesday after Pentecost / Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 31st, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Thursday, June 4th, Corpus Christi
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, June 7th, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, June 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, June 11th, St. Barnabas
7:00pm Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

Sunday After Ascension Day

The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Oleg Supereco, The Last SupperArtwork: Oleg Supereco, The Last Supper, 2018. Oil on canvas, Artist’s studio, Treviso, Italy (source).

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Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension

“And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up,
and a cloud received him out of their sight”

It is called the sursum corda – “Lift up your hearts.” It signals an essential feature of the liturgy. It is about the lifting up of our hearts in Christ. It is prayer: our seeking from God what God seeks for us. The Feast of the Ascension, so often overlooked and under appreciated, is the culmination of the Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives of prayer and service. Luke, in Acts, gives us a profound image of the ‘event’, as it were, of the Ascension which complements Mark’s equally explicit account of his being “received up into heaven.”

Throughout Eastertide, as we have seen, Jesus has been preparing us for his twofold departure  from us, first, in his Passion and Death and, second, in his Resurrection and Ascension. These motions, we have suggested, signal the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all things come; in short, the redemption and restoration of creation and of our humanity. It is not something static but shows the dynamic of God towards us and the direction of the motions of our hearts and minds towards God. The images of hearing and seeing are instructive about the classical faculties of human character. Both Luke and Mark call attention to what is spoken and heard and to what is seen and behold. Hearing and seeing are the two most spiritual and intellectual of the human senses that open us out to what is known and grasped in thought; essentially, we are spiritual creatures defined by the faculties of knowing and willing or loving.

“A cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. That cloud is the shekinah of God, an image of the overarching cloud of God’s glory that embraces the whole of creation within itself. It, too, is an image of the radical gathering of all things to God, namely the idea of the whole of creation as embraced in the dynamic of the life of God as Trinity. It is not about a flight from the world as if it were something evil in its materiality and being. Heaven, after all, is not a place, but rather, to use a Jewish expression, the place of all places, in short, God.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Gebhard Fugel, Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension of Christ)Artwork: Gebhard Fugel, Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension of Christ), c. 1893. Fresco, Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Obereschach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Tuesday

“Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of heaven?”

Nothing better reinforces the Rogation idea of the interrelationship of our humanity, the created order, and God than these readings for The Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men. They ground us in the logic of creation – good in each of its parts and very good in its unity as a whole. As the Gospel suggests, our relation to God’s creation provides a key analogy or metaphor for our spiritual lives. The kingdom of heaven is likened to “a grain of mustard seed” which when sown and grown “becomes greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the birds of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.”

This offers a different way of thinking about our relation to nature than what belongs to the Darwinian world of endless competition. It emphasizes instead a sense of co-operation and interdependence and one that mirrors the life of God as Trinity. Creation, in the Jewish and Christian understanding, insists on our connection to everything in the created order and our being made in the image of God. “In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” The pronoun “him” refers to Adam – meaning our humanity generically speaking; the pronoun “them” to the fundamental distinction between male and female that belongs to the reality of our humanity within the distinctive order of all things created. Creation is really about a relation to the Creator through a world where each thing has a distinctive quality and is good in itself and good for us in the forms of its distinctive being. Creation in this sense is providential care for what is created and in its relation with every other thing in creation. Genesis teaches that God has “given every herb bearing seed” to Adam, our humanity, for food, for our good within the goodness of creation as a whole.

This analogy belongs to many such parables with which, as Mark puts it, Jesus “spake the word unto them, as they were able to hear it.” Through the visible things of creation we learn to think about the invisible things of God. It is a powerful way of thinking known as kataphatic theology which argues for a positive relationship between God and the world; thinking through images, through parables and likenesses.

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Prayers and liturgy

Florence Nightingale, Nurse

The collect for today, the commemoration of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Nurse, Social Reformer (source):

Sir John Robert Steell, Florence NightingaleLife-giving God, who alone hast power over life and death, over health and sickness: Give power, wisdom, and gentleness to those who follow the example of thy servant Florence Nightingale, that they, bearing with them thy Presence, may not only heal but bless, and shine as lanterns of hope in the darkest hours of pain and fear; through Jesus Christ, the healer of body and soul, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 58:6-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:31-46

Artwork: Sir John Robert Steell, Florence Nightingale, 1862. Bronze, Florence Nightingale Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London. Photograph taken by CCW, 25 August 2004.

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