Prayers and liturgy

Advent Antiphons and Prose

The Great ‘O’ Antiphons of Advent

December 16: O Sapientia

O Wisdom, which comes out of the mouth of the Most High, and reaches from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordereing all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

December 17: O Adonai

O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, who appeared in the bush to Moses in a flame of fire, and gave him the law in Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

December 18: O Radix Jesse

O Root of Jesse, which stands for an ensign of the people, at whom the kings shall shut their mouths, unto whom the Gentiles shall seek: Come and deliver us, and tarry not.

December 19: O Clavis David

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel; that opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens: Come and bring the prisoners out of the prison-house, them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 20: O Oriens

O Dayspring, Brightness of the Light Everlasting, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 21: O Rex Gentium

O King of Nations, and their Desire; the Cornerstone who makes both one: Came and save mankind, whom thou didst make of clay.

December 22: O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all ‚nations and their salvation: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

December 23: O Virgo Virginum

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any seen like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? The thing which ye behold is divine.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

It is known as the witness of John. In answer to the questions about who he is, John the Baptist instead proclaims his mission as vox clamantis in deserto, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord”. He humbles himself in order to point to the one who comes after him, “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. Only at the end of the passage is it revealed who that is who comes after him and yet is ever prior to him. Jesus. Thus what John says is particularly arresting. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. His witness is really a confession, confession in its truest sense, a confession of the truth which is greater than oneself.

We need the strong objectivity of the Advent Gospels. They point us to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming. The image of the Lamb of God is particularly telling. It counters all of the false sentimentalities of the Advent and Christmas season which are often more about ourselves in the quest for a sense of coziness and comfort, hyggelig, as the Danish call it, but only, it seems, for some and not for all. The humility of John in pointing to Jesus and not to himself points to the greater humility of God. God comes in the lowliness of our humanity as sacrifice. Only so is he Lord and Saviour. Only so is God revealed to us. This is not exactly hyggelig, however much we may seek it for ourselves. It belongs to a deeper consolation of the soul but only through confession.

Christ as the Lamb of God turns the world on its head. John’s witness convicts us far more than we realize because it is a standing rebuke to our humanity in all ages but especially our own. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. This is a different kind of triumph and glory because it happens through the encounter with sin and evil; in short, through suffering, a counter to the illusions of the self in claiming to be whatever one chooses to be and in denial of the givenness of things. We are not autonomous, self-complete beings. That Christ comes as the Lamb of God, as Sacrifice and Saviour points to the nature of our mutual interdependence with God and one another, and, even more, to the forms of our co-inherence with God and creation. This reveals the true meaning of God as love. Love gives of itself but without losing anything of itself. Christ’s Advent seeks to embrace us in that all-enfolding and never-ending love of God in contrast to our empty illusions and narcissism.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 19 December – 1 January 2023

Wednesday, December 21st, St. Thomas
7:00pm Holy Communion

Thursday, December 22nd
3:15pm Holy Communion at Windsor Elms

Christmas at Christ Church 2022

Saturday, December 24th, Christmas Eve
7:00pm Children’s Crèche Service
9:30pm Christmas Communion Service

Sunday, December 25th
10:00am Christmas Communion Service

Monday, December 26th
10:00am Mass of the Feast of Stephen

Tuesday, December 27th
10:00am Mass of St. John the Evangelist

Wednesday, December 28th
10:00am Mass of the Holy Innocents

Sunday, January 1st, 2023, Circumcision, New Year’s Day & Octave Day of Christmas
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Christmas Lessons & Carols

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourth Sunday in Advent

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

RAISE up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:4-7
The Gospel: St John 1:19-29

Alexander Ivanov, The Appearance of Christ before the PeopleArtwork: Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov, The Appearance of Christ before the People, 1837-57. Oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Prayers and liturgy

Ignatius, Bishop & Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Ignatius (d. c. 107), Bishop of Antioch, Martyr (source):

Feed us, O Lord, with the living bread
and make us drink deep of the cup of salvation
that, following the teaching of thy bishop Ignatius,
and rejoicing in the faith
with which he embraced the death of a martyr,
we may be nourished for that eternal life
which he ever desired;
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: Romans 8:35-39
The Gospel: St. John 12:23-26

Francisco Rizi, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of AntiochIgnatius, who became Bishop of Antioch c. 69, is a key witness of the early church in the era immediately following the apostles.

Nothing certain is known of his episcopate before his journey from Antioch to Rome as a prisoner condemned to death in the arena. Arrested during the persecution of the emperor Trajan, he was received in Smyrna by Bishop (later Saint) Polycarp and delegates from several other churches in Asia Minor.

While at Smyrna, Ignatius wrote letters to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, and Rome. Later, at Troas, he wrote to the churches at Philadelphia and Smyrna, and to Polycarp.

In his letters, Ignatius clearly affirmed Christ’s divinity and his resurrection from the dead. He encouraged all Christians to maintain church unity in and through the Eucharist and the authority of the local bishop, and he wrote against a heresy that contained elements of Docetism, Judaism, and possibly Gnosticism.

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Sermons

2022 Advent Programme 2: “And she was troubled at this saying”

“And she was troubled at this saying”

The Ember Days are a special spiritual reminder of the primacy of the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of the Church’s life in each of the seasons of nature’s year. As Lancelot Andrewes observes, the sending of the Holy Spirit is really the alpha and omega of all our celebrations. Along with being special times for ordinations, they recall us to the purpose and meaning of the ministry: in the spring of Lent, in the summer of Whitsunday, in the Autumn, and now in winter, in Advent. For each, too, there is a special focus of spiritual intention. For Advent, it is Peace in the World which relates to the reading from Micah as the lesson along with the story of the Annunciation at the Gospel.

The lesson from Micah highlights the very powerful concept of “beat[ing] swords into ploughshares” and “spears into pruning hooks”, images of the transformation of the city at war into the city of peace, a peace which is ultimately found in our “go[ing] up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob” where “he shall teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” These are images which have their Homeric counterpart in the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad which depicts the city at peace and the city at war. The images here in Micah belong to the redemption of our humanity in our being restored to fellowship and life with God. It is very much about our learning the ways of God in whom alone we may find peace and joy.

It cannot be found simply in ourselves. We need these spiritual reminders precisely in the face of catastrophes and tragedies that we confront in our current war-torn world, a world of ‘the endless wars’, it seems, as the sad legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially. We confront the endless spectacle of humanitarian disasters and the horrors of war that is simply mind-numbing at the same time as we talk about world peace. How to think about such things? Only through prayer. Only through the sober and sombre reminder of the complexities and confusions of human sin and wickedness. Only through the radical message of Advent which counters all human presumption. The Advent Embertide calls to mind the message of Pentecost, namely that the human community and city has no unity in itself. Peace and unity can only be found in God and in God with us. Only through the co-inherence of our humanity with God and so with one another. Such is the burden of the story of the Annunciation tonight. For we, like Mary, are surely troubled in our hearts about the words we hear in the face of the world we experience.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 December

Journeys

Exams end the school term, or so it seems. Yet they are really a feature of the continuing and, we hope, never-ending journey of learning; in short, they are a basic feature of education and life.

In the Christian understanding, Christmas brings us to Bethlehem. But it is not just a destination, an ending. The pageant of Lessons and Carols as well as the Christmas crèche scenes concentrate a great crowd of images in Bethlehem: shepherds and kings, men and angels, a man and a woman, a woman and a child, God and Man, heaven and earth, and, at the very least in the biblical accounts, sheep, to which holy imagination has added a whole menagerie of animals! Bethlehem is paradise restored, we might say, with the idea of the harmony and unity of the objective diversities of creation. “High and low, rich and poor, one with another”, as the Advent Matin Responsory suggests. This contrasts with the subjective categories of radical indeterminacy in our contemporary confusions.

But Bethlehem is not an end-point but the beginning of a greater journey that encompasses within the Christmas mystery the flight into Egypt and then the journeys to Jerusalem. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin poles of the Christian imaginary around which everything moves as in an ellipse. They are inseparably connected. As the poet/preacher John Donne nicely notes: Christ’s “Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”.

As has been noted on occasion in Chapel, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all religions of the logos, of the Word, albeit in different registers of understanding. For Judaism that is captured in the TANAKH, an acronym of Hebrew consonants representative of the Torah (Lawa), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) emphasizing the centrality of the Word as Law; for Islam, the Word is concentrated in the recitation of Allah to Muhammed, the Qur’an, the Word as Will; for Christians, it is the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament understood as witnessing to the concept of the Word made Flesh. Along with other world religions and philosophies there is an abiding focus on things written, on texts. One of the meanings of the word, religion, is re-reading (re-legere). The other is the idea of a bond (re-ligare) between God and humanity.

Bethlehem in both these senses marks the beginning of the longer journey of the understanding. The metaphysical light which comes into the darkness of the world in Advent becomes the light of God within the world which teaches and illuminates our understanding in the midst of the complexities and confusions of human experience. Like exams, it is all part of the journey of education that belongs to a deepening of the understanding of our humanity.

A blessed Christmas break to all.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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Events

Christmas at Christ Church 2022

Saturday, December 24th, Christmas Eve
7:00pm Children’s Crèche Service
9:30pm Christmas Communion Service

Sunday, December 25th
10:00am Christmas Communion Service

Monday, December 26th
10:00am Mass of the Feast of Stephen

Tuesday, December 27th
10:00am Mass of St. John the Evangelist

Wednesday, December 28th
10:00am Mass of the Holy Innocents

Sunday, January 1st, 2023, Octave Day of Christmas, Circumcision, & New Year’s Day
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Christmas Lessons & Carols

O God, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of thy only Son Jesus Christ: Grant that as we joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, we may with sure confidence behold him when he shall come again to be our Judge; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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