Author: CCW

Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 11 – 17 December

Tuesday, December 12th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, December 14th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II

Sunday, December 17th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday in Advent

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

BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33

Stefan Lochner, Last JudgmentArtwork: Stefan Lochner, Last Judgment, c. 1435. Tempera on oak, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 December

Rejoice! Rejoice!

The three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols brought to an end the Chapel programme for Michaelmas, ending the term on a reflective and yet celebratory note, nicely captured in the stirring refrain of the great Advent Hymn, Veni Emmanuel. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” Despite the paradox of having the ‘Christmas Dinner and Dance’ before these services, they nonetheless helped in appreciating more deeply something of the “true meaning” of Christmas, as the lovely Bidding Prayer from the original service of 1918 puts it. That sense of its true meaning emphasizes the vision of the redemption of our humanity as opposed to a world of war and conflict, a vision signaled in different registers in the nine lessons from Scripture and which speaks to our world and day.

Framed by the sixteenth century Italian composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Matin Responsory and shaped by traditional verses of the 12th century Veni Emmanuel that punctuated the reading of the lessons, the service is a moving pageant of Word and Song. The Choir, in its various configurations under the direction of Stephanie Fillman, not only led the singing of the Advent Carol, Hark a Herald Voice is Sounding, the Huron Carol, Canada’s first Christmas Carol originally written in the Wendat language (Huron) by the Jesuit missionary Jean Brébeuf, Silent Night, and Shepherds in the Field Abiding, but different choir members sang as solos the verses of the Veni Emmanuel with everyone joining in on the refrain. Many thanks to Steven Roe, organist, for his professionalism and flexibility, and for providing such fine preludes and postludes appropriate to the occasion.

The Choir performed as well a lovely anthem Once upon a December Evening by Stephen Flaherty. This was complemented at the Grade 12 service on Sunday night and at the Grade 10 and 11 service on Tuesday by the vocal and instrumental duet of Ann MacQuarrie (guitar) and Sophie Ning (keyboard) in a beautiful rendition of Matt Anderson’s My Little Country Church at Christmas Time. All three services were greatly enhanced by the meditative classical guitar piece El Noi de la Mare, a traditional Catalonian composition, performed with great precision and care by Harvey Hadley. All quite remarkable and rather special.

My thanks to the teams of readers and servers and to the Chapel Prefects who assisted in the preparations for the services in lighting the window candles in the Chapel. The readers at the Junior Service on Friday, December 1st performed very well. They were Willoughby Larder (Gr. 8), Ollie Boyle (Gr. 6), Nathaelle Etou (Gr. 9), Max Proctor (Gr. 9), Chelsea James (Gr. 7), Kelsea Griffiths (Gr. 9), and Lillian Blois (Gr. 9). Mrs. Taya Shields, Head of the Junior School, read the eight lesson and the Chaplain sang the ninth lesson, the Prologue of John’s Gospel which is traditionally read at Christmas. The servers at the Junior Service were Rowan Francis, Sokha Ebert, Spencer Armstrong and Farrah Webber.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Commemoration of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

We will hear these words in the mystery of Christmas. What things does Mary keep and ponder in her heart? All the things that are said about the child Christ. By extension we, too, are bidden to ponder all the things that belong to the mystery of Christ. Such is part of the meaning of tonight’s commemoration. We can’t think about Christ apart from Mary. She is an essential part of the mystery and meaning of the Incarnation.

Pondus meum amor meus. My love is my weight. A powerful phrase from Augustine, it has shaped the patristic, medieval, and reformation churches’ understanding of human redemption. Augustine’s image captures a significant theological theme which speaks to a culture which has abandoned God and finds itself adrift and isolated. Such is our wilderness.

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. What defines Mary is her waiting upon the will of God. Far from a kind of passive acquiescence, Mary’s waiting is an holy activity, a kind of attentiveness to the pageant of God’s Word revealed in the Law and the Prophets and now, on Angel’s wings, it seems, opening us out to the wonder and the marvel of God’s coming to us through her. To what extent are we in her? For Mary, in Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”

It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ; she is quietly and patiently with us in our meditations and thoughts. For the Church in prayer is essentially Marian. Mary is an inescapable feature of the landscape of Advent. She plays a critical and crucial role in our understanding of Christ’s coming to us as Emmanuel, God with us. Through Mary we begin to discover how our humanity is totally and inescapably bound up with the will of God towards us; in short, his advent.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The collect for today, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who stooped to raise fallen humanity
through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:
grant that we, who have seen thy glory
revealed in our human nature
and thy love made perfect in our weakness,
may daily be renewed in thine image
and conformed to the pattern 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 Lesson: Proverbs 8:22-35
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-28

Raphael, Madonna of LoretoArtwork: Raphael, Madonna of Loreto, 1509-10. Oil on panel, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Nicholas, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Nicholas (d. c. 326), Bishop of Myra (source):

Almighty Father, lover of souls,
who didst choose thy servant Nicholas
to be a bishop in the Church,
that he might give freely out of the treasures of thy grace:
make us mindful of the needs of others
and, as we have received, so teach us also to give;
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 Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-14
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:13-16

Giovanni Gasparro, St. Nicholas of Bari slaps the Heresiarch Arius at the Council of NiceaArtwork: Giovanni Gasparro, St. Nicholas of Bari slaps the Heresiarch Arius at the Council of Nicea, 2016. Oil on canvas, Private collection.

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Prayers and liturgy

Clement of Alexandria, Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):

St. Clement of AlexandriaO Lord, who didst call thy servant Clement of Alexandria from the errors of ancient philosophy that he might learn and teach the saving Gospel of Christ: Turn thy Church from the conceits of worldly wisdom and, by the Spirit of truth, guide it into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“All the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”

Advent is the season of questions, questions that awaken us to the radical meaning of God’s Word coming to us in law and prophecy, in mind and in flesh. Without the questions of Advent, Christmas is only tinsel and wrap that conceal the illusions of our hearts and leave us in the darkness, desolate and in despair. The great questions of Advent illuminate the Word of God as the Light which overcomes the darkness of disillusion and despair.

The questions are at once our questions in all of their confusion and uncertainty and the questions of God that redeem our desires. Our questions are really about the deeper desires of our hearts and minds for wholeness, for what is absolute and true, however misguided we may be in what we think we want. God’s questions belong to the redemption of our desires; in short, to the redemption of our humanity. But how? By confronting us with the wilderness and the darkness of our hearts and world.

The great Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent is about Christ’s coming to Jerusalem in triumph but also in judgement. The triumphal entry of Christ, in images that fulfill the prophetic expectation of the Messiah, is full of the sense of joy and delight in the one who comes. HIs royal procession is greeted with branches of palms strewn in the way and with the exultant cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.” We know this from Palm Sunday. There is the sense of joyous expectancy, of hope, that speaks directly and clearly to the world of darkness and uncertainty both then and now; to our world, to be sure. It is a moving spectacle. “All the city was moved,” Matthew tells us, “saying, Who is this?” At once named as the Son of David, referring to the Messiah and to the hopes for justice and peace, and yet unknown, it seems. The first question of Advent is about our unknowing, about the darkness of our minds and hearts. We know and do not know in equal measure.

And so we must begin again to attend to the radical pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness. We “know in part,” as Paul puts it, “in a glass darkly,” but we long to know and to be known more fully, more completely. That can only happen by confronting the darkness. We learn from the darkness about the light which is greater than all the forms of suffering and evil that belong to the darkness of the world and our hearts. Without that we can really make no sense of the one who comes and who will be called Emmanuel, which by interpretation, as Matthew tells us, is “God with us.”

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 4 – 10 December

Monday, December 4th
2:30pm Advent/Xmas Lessons & Carols
Gr. 10 & 11: Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Thursday, December 7th, Eve of the Conception of the BVM
7:00pm Advent Programme I

Saturday, December 9th
Advent Quiet Day – Fr. Curry at St. George’s, Halifax, 9am – 1:30pm

Sunday, December 10th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Thursday, December 14th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II

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