Prayers and liturgy

William Tyndale, Translator and Martyr

Embankment Statue, William TyndaleThe collect for today, the commemoration of William Tyndale (c. 1495-1536), Priest, Translator of the Scriptures, Reformation Martyr (source):

O Lord, grant to thy people
grace to hear and keep thy word
that, after the example of thy servant William Tyndale,
we may both profess thy gospel
and also be ready to suffer and die for it,
to the honour of thy name;
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: St. James 1:21-25
The Gospel: St. John 12:44-50

Artwork: Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, William Tyndale statue, 1884, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London. Photograph taken by admin, 30 September 2015.

Inscription on bronze plaque:
William Tyndale
First translator of the New Testament into English from the Greek.
Born A.D. 1484, died a martyr at Vilvorde in Belgium, A.D. 1536.
“Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path” – “the entrance of thy words giveth light.” Psalm CXIX. 105.130.
“And this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his son.” I. John V.II.
The last words of William Tyndale were “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes”. Within a year afterwards, a bible was placed in every parish church by the King’s command.

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Prayers and liturgy

St. Francis of Assisi

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), Friar, Deacon, Founder of the Friars Minor (source):

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the StigmataO God,
who ever delightest to reveal thyself
to the childlike and lowly of heart,
grant that, following the example of the blessed Francis,
we may count the wisdom of this world as foolishness
and know only Jesus Christ and him crucified,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:25-30

Artwork: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, 1767-69. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity (in the Octave of Michaelmas)

“Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called”

So Paul bids us and so Luke shows us. What is that vocation? It is about our life in Christ. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling,” we are told. And what is that calling? That there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Paul in Ephesians gives us a clear and objective statement of faith. But how does it become our faith? That too is stated: “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

This counters all of the empty assertions and personal faith or identity claims that beset an anxious and fearful world in which we are increasingly isolated and alone, separated and divided from all that makes us human. This is the antithesis of the culture of “look at me looking at you looking at me,’ a culture which is essentially narcissistic and empty, in other words, nihilistic, even as it seeks for meaning in belonging to whatever seems to offer self-affirmation. Belonging not believing. Paul is talking about both. And believing, not as some form of personal assertion or opinion, but as holding onto what is transcendent, true, and God-given, is the condition of our belonging. We belong to what is greater than ourselves. To know that is the saving grace which counters our self-pretension and self-righteousness. We are known in the loving embrace of God.

“Friend, go up higher.” This too is our calling in Christ. Not on the basis of our presumption and claims to greatness. Based on what? Our sense of self-importance which is really about our claims to entitlement and privilege over others? That is to miss the whole point of our calling. The Gospel shows us the great misreading and misunderstanding about the Law, particularly the fourth commandment about the Sabbath. As Jesus famously says, drawing upon the example of King David, “the sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath,” for the sabbath is given not as burden but as a blessing. It belongs to what God seeks for our humanity; our wholeness and completeness as found in Him, signaled in Paul’s words about our life in Christ.

The sabbath is given as a time for prayerful reflection and meditation upon the truth of God and his creation and our place within it without which our thoughts and actions become deceptive, delusional, self-seeking and thus divisive and destructive. “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?”, Jesus asks rhetorically to the Lawyers and Pharisees who have watched him with critical and judgemental eyes. He names their hypocrisy. For if is not lawful then we would be justified in ignoring the needs of one another; holding to the letter of the law while denying its truth and spirit. Such is the evil of self-righteousness and hypocrisy as Jesus shows. “Which of you shall have an ass, or an ox, fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?” One cannot miss the irony of his question in preferring our animal possessions to the care of human beings. “And they could not answer him again to these things.” They are convicted in their consciences and so are we.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 2 – 8 October

Sunday, October 8th, Trinity 18 / Harvest Thanksgiving
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

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

Tuesday, October 17th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003); and Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, David George Haskell (2021).

Saturday, November 18th
4:00-6:00pm Annual Ham Supper – Parish Hall

Also please take note of the annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2023.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

LORD, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:1-11

Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Wedding Feast with the Archduke in AttendanceArtwork: Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Wedding Feast with the Archduke in Attendance, 1612-13. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.

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Prayers and liturgy

Jerome, Doctor and Priest

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), Priest, Monk, Translator of the Scriptures, Doctor of the Church (source):

O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 3:14-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-48

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. JeromeOne of the most scholarly and learned early church fathers, St. Jerome devoted much of his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek into Latin.

Born near Aquileia, northeast Italy, of Christian parents, Jerome travelled widely. He received a classical education at Rome and travelled to Gaul where he became a monk. He later moved to Palestine, spending five years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert. In 374, he was ordained a priest in Antioch. He then pursued biblical studies at Constantinople under Gregory Nazianzus and translated works by Eusebius, Origen, and others.

Travelling to Rome in 382, Jerome became secretary to the aged Pope Damasus. By the time the pope died three years later, Jerome had become involved in theological controversies in which he antagonised many church leaders and theologians. He left Rome under a cloud, returning to Palestine where he lived as a monk in Bethlehem for the rest of his life.

Over several decades, Jerome wrote biblical commentaries and works promoting monasticism and asceticism. Most importantly, he produced fresh Latin translations of most of the Old and New Testaments, based on the original biblical languages. This work formed the basis of the Vulgate, which remained the standard Scriptural text of the western church for over a millennium.

Artwork: Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. Jerome, 1516-17. Oil on panel, Prado, Madrid.

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Sermons

Meditation for Michaelmas

“They overcame him”

We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.

Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Michael and All Angels

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

Viktor Vasnetsov, Archangel MichaelThe name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

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Sermons

Address to Society of Holy Cross Synod, 13 September 2023

Fr. David Curry delivered this address to the Society of Holy Cross Synod, Church of St. Anthony of Padua, Hackensack, New Jersey, on 13 September. It is a reworking and an expansion of the meditation he gave on August 4th here in Windsor.

To download a pdf version of this address, complete with footnotes, click here.

Unum necessarium: The Mercy that has no End

Fr. Brian Laffler of the St. John Vianney branch and our host priest for this SSC Synod of the Province of Our Lady of Sorrows tells me that “people speak funny here.” Now whether he means at St. Anthony of Padua in the polyglot nature of the Parish with its liturgies in Italian, Spanish, and some form of English or whether he means New York where every language in the world is spoken, it seems, except Hittite, Canaanite, Perrizite and all of the other ‘ites’, I am not sure. But I hope that it means some consideration and tolerance for the speech of a Canadian from Nova Scotia! We are a diverse group ethnically and linguistically but united in the catholicity of the sacred priesthood that defines the Society of the Holy Cross.

I want to thank the Master, Fr. Chris Cantrell, for the privilege and honour of addressing the fratres of our society. I would like us to reflect on the story of Martha and Mary which bookends the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, the classic Christian ethic of compassion and service, and to do so in relation to the Feast of the Holy Cross. The point is to highlight the centrality of the Passion for the understanding of the life and purpose of the Society. It is what we pray: “We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” who “opened his arms on the Cross” and “has commanded us to love one another” that “through the saving power of the Cross + impressed inwardly and revealed outwardly … others may come to know the love and truth of God.” The love of God and the love of neighbour, of one another, are inescapably and intimately connected. Martha and Mary represent action and contemplation respectively in what is a long and rich tradition about the forms of spiritual life which are critical for the life and fellowship of the Society of the Holy Cross implicit in the Society Prayer.”

“One thing is needful”. It is unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, Jesus says. One of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century in all its disarray, the legacy of which is our own disordered world, is the philosopher and social activist, Simone Weil. Her essay, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’, begins with the astute observation that “prayer consists of attention,” and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God”. This complements Richard Hooker’s observation that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God”. For him, as for Simone Weil, the connection between learning and prayer was ever so obvious. They belong to our relation to God’s truth and goodness.

As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.

God, too, is for us ‘most beautiful’ and so completes the triad of Plato’s transcendentals, ‘the true, the beautiful, and the good’, which belong to the intellectual and ethical structure of reality. The good, αγαθος, and the beautiful, καλος, are virtually interchangeable in Greek. Beauty belongs to our seeking truth and the good. That sense of beauty is not simply about smoke and bells in rituals “merrily on high” but paradoxically and primarily concentrates our thinking on Christ crucified; “this beauteous form assures a piteous mind” as John Donne puts it in one of his holy sonnets, with which we will conclude.

Following Plato and Aristotle, contemplation is the highest form of human activity, an inner activity of spiritual and intellectual reflection, but not at the expense of outward activity which belongs to our lives physically and socially with one another. There is, after all, something spiritual, intellectual, and ethical about our interactions with one another, even necessary. At issue is the interplay between action and contemplation; in short, between Martha and Mary.

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