Author: CCW

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 May

That you may know

The Resurrection culminates in the Ascension. It complements an essential insight common to a number of different intellectual and spiritual traditions about the priority of an eternal and everlasting principle that underlies all reality. “Never that which is shall die,” as a fragment from a lost play by Euripides puts it.

The Ascension is the exact opposite to some of our contemporary assumptions. It is emphatically not about a flight from the world. It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, as Jesus makes clear. And that, in turn, is our homecoming, the making known of the end and purpose of our humanity as found not in the world itself but the world in God. As Thomas Traherne cogently remarks, “You never learn to love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension is the gathering of all things back to God through the going forth and return of the Son to the Father. “We ascend,” as Augustine puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.”

John Lukacs’ The Question of Scientific Knowledge in At the End of An Age quotes Ludwig Feuerbach, the German radical theologian who influenced Karl Marx: “The old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit.” This is, Lukacs suggests, “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any.” He goes on to show rather convincingly that “matter … is increasingly dependent on spirit … that the human mind … both precedes and defines the characteristics of matter.” In his view this is one of the important features of quantum physics. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation about knowing and thinking nature. Or as Neil Postman puts it about the forms of technological determinism, “there is no escaping ourselves.”

The reading from Psalm 47.5 about “God going up with a merry noise” locates the Ascension in the eternal and divine motions of God himself. It is, as the theologians of the Church in the Patristic period put it, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Prayer is really about the lifting up of heart and mind in the lifting up of all things to their end and source in God. It does not negate the physical and material world but signals its redemption in God. This way of looking at reality contrasts with our increasingly virtual world in flight from the real world and ourselves.

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Sermons

Meditation for the Feast of the Ascension

“God has gone up with a merry noise”

The Psalms, more often than not, strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).

The Ascension of Christ, as Acts suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching about the priority of things spiritual into which is gathered all things material and physical. In other words, the world finds its meaning in God and not the other way around.

What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and thus it is our homecoming too. Jesus on Rogation Sunday just past told us: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is the sense of ‘mission accomplished!’ And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.

“God’s going up with a merry noise” is the lovely and exaltant metaphor that opens us out to the reality of God’s eternal life into which we are gathered. It is literally about our lives spiritually that embraces the physical and natural world without collapsing the spiritual into it. The Ascension signals the radical meaning of the redemption of the world and our humanity.

This is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears, and worries. The Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit, or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you,” as Jesus says. It is the counter to all of the forms of material determinism, to the “dialectical materialism” of Marxism and of capitalist consumer culture which reduces everything to material production and consumption. It changes how we see things.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

Andrea Mantegna, Ascension of ChristThe 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

Artwork: Andrea Mantegna, Ascension of Christ (detail from Uffizi Triptych), c. 1460-64. Tempera on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Rogation Sunday

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

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday

“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

All our comings and goings find their meaning and truth in the comings and goings of God made visible in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. Prayer is our life as ordered to God and with God. The pilgrimage of our souls is gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God in the going forth and return of God in creation and redemption; this makes visible the eternal love of God in himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in today’s Gospel for Rogation Sunday.

Rogation means asking. Prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is asking. Asking for what? For this or that commodity or thing? For privilege and prestige, power and domination over others? No. Prayer is our participation in God’s own gathering of all things to himself. It is our seeking or desiring but seeking and desiring what? It is not our seeking and desiring this or that thing in the false infinity of things which never satisfies. It is our seeking and desiring what is the absolute good and our seeking and desiring to do what is right; ultimately the justice of God. That presupposes a world that is not random and arbitrary, chaotic and aimless; it presupposes the goodness of creation as God’s creation and our place within that world as ordered to God. Prayer is nothing less than that complete orientation of ourselves to the will and truth of God. In the Christian understanding, as shown to us in this Gospel, prayer is nothing less than our asking the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit of their mutual love. It is Trinitarian.

Richard Hooker notes that “prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God.” It is our seeking and desiring what God seeks and desires and as such, in God, as Peter Abelard’s great hymn, O Quanta Qualia, puts it, “wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er, /Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.” It is a commentary on what Jesus means when he tells us that “the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” Prayer “testifies,” as Hooker says, “that we acknowledge him as our sovereign good.” But up to now, “hitherto,” as Jesus says, “have you asked nothing in my name.” Prayer in the Christian sense is about asking the Father in the name of the Son in the Spirit of their eternal love: “ask,” Jesus says, “and ye shall receive that your joy may be full.” Peace and joy flow out of the Resurrection of Christ which makes visible what is present in the Passion; the “vision of peace, that brings joy evermore.”

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, May

Thursday, May 9th, Ascension Day
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, May 12th, Sunday After Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, May 14th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, May 19th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Michael Damaskinos, The Last SupperArtwork: Michael Damaskinos, The Last Supper, c. 1591. Egg tempera on wood, Monastery of Agia Aikaterini, Heraklion, Crete.

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Prayers and liturgy

Monnica, Matron

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Monnica (c. 331-387), mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo (source):

O Lord, who through spiritual discipline didst strengthen thy servant Monnica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we beseech thee, and use us in accordance with thy will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 1:10-11,20
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

John Nava, Saint MonicaArtwork: John Nava, Saint Monica, 2003. Jacquard tapestry, Church of Saint Monica, Trenton, N.J.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 May

Comings and goings

This week in Chapel we had two sets of readings: one from Luke’s Gospel about the widow of Nain for the Junior School and Grade Ten services on Monday and Tuesday; and one from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel read on Thursday and Friday. Each in their own way helps us to think about the radical teaching of the Resurrection that makes visible what is present in the Passion of Christ. It reveals what underlies and gives meaning to the comings and goings of our own lives. Ultimately, the comings and goings of our own lives find their purpose and meaning in the comings and goings of God in the motions of the divine life itself.

The story of Christ’s compassion towards the widow of Nain is quite powerful and moving. It follows immediately upon the story read last week about the healing of the Centurion’s servant by the word of Christ. “Say the word.” God’s word in Christ heals and restores; such is the power of the Word of God in creation and redemption which, unlike our words, creates and restores. In the story of the widow of Nain, we see the power of the Word and Son of the Father who when he “saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is an expression used several times by Luke.

Everything turns on how we see one another. Do we look at one another with hostility and fear? In hatred and envy? As enemies and opponents to be beaten and conquered? The conflict narratives of our world and day diminish the sense of our common humanity. It is the failure to respect one another and ourselves because we have lost sight of who we are in the eyes of God.

Respect is one of those big little words that mean so much more. We forget that respect has very much to do with how we look at things. Looking at things is contained in the word respect itself. In this story, it leads to compassion, another interesting word which refers to the inner being of a person understood in terms of the liver, or the womb or the heart. To have compassion is to take the other into the very being of oneself; in short, to see yourself in the other and the other in you. It means to grasp the essential nature of our humanity. In Christ, compassion means placing the experiences of sorrow and grief, of sin and suffering, in the very heart of God. For that is what the Passion and Resurrection ultimately make visible.

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Prayers and liturgy

Athanasius, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Athanasius (c. 293-373), Bishop of Alexandria, Theologian, Apologist, Doctor of the Church (source):

Ever-living God,
whose servant Athanasius bore witness
to the mystery of the Word made flesh for our salvation:
give us grace, with all thy saints,
to contend for the truth
and to grow into the likeness of thy Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:5-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:23-28

Lichfield Cathedral, Saint AthanasiusSaint Athanasius is one of the most inspirational figures of the early church. His dogged and uncompromising defence of the full divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arian heresy saved the unity and integrity of the Christian religion and church. He saw that Christ’s deity was foundational to the faith and that Arianism meant the end of Christianity.

Arius and his followers maintained that Christ the Logos was neither eternal nor uncreated, but a subordinate being—the first and finest of God’s creation, but a creature nonetheless. Despite being rejected at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, which Athanasius attended as deacon under the orthodox Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Arianism remained popular and influential in the Eastern church for most of the fourth century.

Athanasius became bishop in 328 at age 33 and spent the next five decades fighting for Nicene orthodoxy. For his troubles, he was deposed and exiled five times, spending a total of seventeen years in flight and hiding, often shielded by the people of Alexandria. Six years of exile were spent in Rome, where he gained the strong support of the Western church, and another six years were spent under the protection of monks in the Egyptian desert.

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