CCW - Christ Church

23 February 202630 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Lent Prose

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

To thee, Redeemer, on thy throne of glory:
lift we our weeping eyes in holy pleadings:
listen, O Jesu, to our supplications.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

O thou chief cornerstone, right hand of the Father: way of salvation, gate of life celestial:
cleanse thou our sinful souls from all defilement.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

God, we implore thee, in thy glory seated:
bow down and hearken to thy weeping children: pity and pardon all our grievous trespasses.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee:
with true contrition, now no more we veil them:
grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

Innocent captive, taken unresisting:
falsely accused, and for us sinners sentenced,
save us, we pray thee, Jesu, our Redeemer.

Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we have sinned against thee.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Psalm 51.17

Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, lay not our sins to our charge; But forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; To decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore. (BCP, Penitential Service, p. 614)

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 138)

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23 February 202630 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Lindel Tsen and Paul Sasaki, Bishops

The collect for today, the commemoration of Lindel Tsen (1885-1946), Bishop in China, consecrated 1929, and Paul Sasaki (1885-1954), Bishop in Japan, consecrated 1935 (source):

Almighty God, we offer thanks for the faith and witness of Paul Sasaki, bishop in the Nippon Sei Ko Kai [Anglican Church in Japan], tortured and imprisoned by his government, and Philip [Lindel] Tsen, leader of the Chinese Anglican Church, arrested for his faith. We pray that all Church leaders oppressed by hostile governments may be delivered by thy mercy, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit we may be faithful to the Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-32

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22 February 202630 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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22 February 202630 March 2026Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

“Forty years long was I grieved with that generation and said. “It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways” (Ps. 95, Venite)

The words of the Venite allude to the forty days of Lent in scriptural terms. Theologically, it raises the question about God grieving but identifies that rather anthropomorphic idea with our hearts and minds. What is the cause of this apparent ‘divine’ grief? It is captured in the previous two verses. “Today, O that ye would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works’.”

Wilderness, temptation, grieving. These are all interconnected. “Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” John Hackett’s formidable, exhaustive, and comprehensive 17th c. treatise of 21 sermons on “Christ’s Tentation”[sic] begins with the observation that the purpose of his going into the wilderness was not to fast but to be tempted; the fasting was secondary, just as Moses’ fasting for forty days on Mount Horeb was not an end in itself but for the purpose of receiving the Law.

What do we understand by wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns. The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, of chaos, as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, where it is not just the fear of the unknown but the fear of the unknowable. For others the wilderness is a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best seen in the 20th century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum or even denied. There is, too, the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the wilderness of the urban jungle.

In short, the wilderness as barren and desolate, empty and dangerous; the wilderness as a place of solitude; the wilderness of nature; the wilderness of man; the wilderness within; the wilderness without; the urban wilderness of inner city life; the suburban wilderness of empty boredom; the wilderness as an image of purposelessness, aimlessness, and of violence born out of that sense of meaninglessness; thus, the wilderness as an image of man’s destructiveness of himself and our world. Yet, in the story that begins the journey of Lent, there is another idea, the idea of the wilderness as the place of learning and understanding, the place of testing.

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22 February 202630 March 2026Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, February – March 2026

Tuesday, February 24th, St. Matthias / Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I: ‘Reading Augustine’

Thursday, February 26th, Eve of Ember Friday/Comm. of George Herbert
7:00pm Holy Communion
CXL owing to Fr. Curry assisting at King’s College Chapel

Sunday, March 1st, Lent II
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 3rd, Lenten Feria
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme II: ‘Reading Augustine’

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

Tuesday, March 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, March 15th, Lent IV (Refreshment Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Followed by a time of fellowship and refreshment

Tuesday, March 17th, St. Patrick
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme III: ‘Reading Augustine’

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22 February 202630 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Lent

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

O LORD, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
The Gospel: St Matthew 4:1-11

Artwork: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Temptation on the Mount, 1308-11. Tempera on wood, Frick Collection, New York City.

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18 February 202630 March 2026Sermons

Sermon for Ash Wednesday

“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

John Donne’s sonnet serves as a commentary on this verse from Psalm 51. “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/ As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seeke to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.”

The sonnet’s extravagant imagery, unlikely as it might seem, helps us to take Ash Wednesday seriously in the sense of our extreme separation from God, on the one hand, and the desire for restoration and renewal, on the other hand. Both belong to the project of Lent and to the dynamic of love, “love divine, all loves excelling,” as finishing, perfecting, and renewing our human loves and lives. In another poem, The Good Night, part of an epithalamion, a poem celebrating marriage, Donne notes that “fire ever doth aspire,/ And makes all like it self, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” only to note about the newly-weds that this is that “which these cannot do”. Ashes are not the end of love. Dust and ashes on this day mark the beginning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love renewing and restoring or setting in order our disordered selves.

That love is the divine love which, as Donne suggests, we seek in order to be made new. Nothing else will do. Our returning to the Lord, our God, with all our heart, as the prophet Joel exhorts us, is only possible through God turning us back to himself from whom we have turned away. Donne’s sonnet meditates on the radical meaning of what that turning means for us. It means being made new.

He asks God as Trinity to “batter” him, an image of violence and force. He suggests that something more extreme is necessary for our good beyond the milder, more gentle biblical images of piety about God “knocking” on the door of our hearts, “breathing” his spirit upon us, “shining” down benevolently upon us, and “seeking to mend” us. Donne says this is not enough. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” The alliteration of the ‘b’ sound in batter, bend, break, blow, burn reinforce these images of force. Overall, the poem makes the necessary but forceful point that God has to break us to make us. Yet the imagery of violence which is maintained throughout the sonnet really reflects the violence of sin and evil in all that opposes God, in the devil and us, that results in the violence that God suffers on the Cross for us.

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18 February 202630 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Ash Wednesday

The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21

Artwork: Alexander Popov, The Harlot Before Christ (Christ and the Sinner), 1879. Oil on canvas, National Art Museum of Latvia, Riga, Latvia.

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16 February 202630 March 2026Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2025

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2025 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2024 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2025
Fr. David Curry
Annual Parish Meeting, February 15th, 2026

“Charity endureth all things”

“Charity endureth all things,” Paul tells us in a remarkable sequence of encomia about charity. 1st Corinthians 13 is his great hymn to love read on Quinquagesima Sunday just before the formal beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday; this year on February 18th. The passage highlights the significance of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the greatest of which is charity. It complements the Gospel about “going up to Jerusalem” with Jesus. As the Gospel makes clear that has entirely to do with his Passion, about which we have to learn through the disciplines and journey of Lent. It is not enough just to be told about it: “they understood” after all, “none of these things.” There is the constant challenge to work at learning the meaning of what is revealed and made known to us that ultimately has to do with our participation in the disciplines that belong “to the observance of a holy Lent,” as the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it. How? “By self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” All pretty concise and concrete. Such practices have their counterpart in the spiritual disciplines of other religions and philosophies. They belong to a deeper sense of the spirituality of our humanity.

This year Quinquagesima Sunday comes right after Valentine’s Day, at once a minor religious observance commemorating a rather obscure Bishop and Martyr around whom swirl a host of legends and stories (see the Intro to the Calendar, BCP, p. ix) and a major commercial secular extravagance, it is fair to say, that somehow conflates chocolate, sex, flowers, and warm fuzzy feelings of being acknowledged and, perhaps, even appreciated but as focused on the erotic and the emotional aspects of human experience. Not exactly a complete account of ourselves or of love.

But it raises the question, ‘what is love?’ which Paul takes to a whole new level, a spiritual level that has to do with the end and purpose of our humanity as found in God. It is not a denial of the erotic and emotional, the cozy and the comfortable. Rather it places all our commonplace attitudes towards love on a new foundation, the divine love that redeems and elevates all our incomplete human loves. As such, the charity that endures all things is not simply stoicism, a kind of restraint and resilience in hanging on in the storms and tempests of nature and human hearts; keeping a stiff upper lip, and all that. As Paul says, almost as a kind of concluding coda, “charity never fails.” It is something ever present and everlasting upon which all things radically depend.

And along with charity goes faith and hope. They are all implied in each other and while charity is “the greatest of these”, it doesn’t eclipse or negate the other two. What Paul presents belongs to a profound understanding of human character and personality essential to the Christian understanding of what it means to be a person: our knowing even as we are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Faith speaks to a kind of knowing; hope to a kind of desiring or willing; but charity is what joins or unites both. Charity, as the Collect so concisely puts it, is “that most excellent gift, the very bond of peace and of all virtues.” Without charity “all our doings are nothing worth” and without charity “whosoever liveth is counted dead.”

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