Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity.
Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am Holy Baptism
“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious”
Perhaps no words of Jesus in the Gospels speak more directly to us. We live in a world of fears and anxieties. Angst ‘r us, to borrow from the deeper sense of dread named by Kierkegaard in the 19th century at feeling rudderless and without direction in a world of choices and possibilities, on the one hand, and a world which seems to be falling apart all around us, on the other hand. This sense of ‘endism’ is crippling and paralyzing. But the point, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, is that the problem is not with the world “for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors,” our fears, our anxieties.
It is really all about us, something which the initial chapters of Genesis go to great lengths to remind us. The world as opposed to God is evil but that is not the truth of creation; it is, after all, very good. We turn the world and ourselves as creatures within the good order of creation against God. The problem is with us but God is greater than our folly and confusion, greater than our fears and worries, greater than our sin and folly.
This gospel provides the antidote to our anxieties and fears about our life, about the things that worry us. It offers us a wee bit more than Bobby McFerrin’s famous lyrical song, “Don’t worry, be happy/In every life we have some trouble/ But when you worry you make it double” (1988). Which is true enough. But what Jesus says here is something deeper, something more profound. It speaks exactly to the meaning of Reece’s baptism, itself a reminder to us of our own baptisms, and as such a poignant reminder of the grace and goodness of God.
In our fears and anxieties, we pit the world against ourselves and God. We forget that this is God’s world and that we are his children, his dearly beloved. So much so that God gave his only-begotten son for us. The gospel recalls us to the wondrous pageant of creation and to the truth of ourselves as made in God’s image and called to act out of that image in terms of our care and respect for the created world and for one another. Jesus strongly suggests that we can learn from the birds of the air and from the lilies of the field; in short, from beholding the providence of God at work in nature and in human affairs.
Week at a Glance, 26 September – 2 October
Tuesday, September 27th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray (2019) and The Madness of Crowds (2021) by Louise Penny.
Thursday, September 29, St. Michael & All Angels
7:00pm Holy Communion
Sunday, October 2nd, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Sunday, October 9th, Harvest Thanksgiving / Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
Thanksgiving for the 140th Anniversary of the building of Christ Church, 1882-2022!
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34
Artwork: James Tissot, The Man Who Hoards, 1866-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 September
Dust
Genesis 2 complements rather than contradicts Genesis 1 but in an altogether different register. It offers a kind of check upon any notion of presumption about our humanity. In short, it humbles us by recalling us precisely to the dust of the ground and thus to our place within the order of creation. As such it complements, too, the efforts of the Indigenous peoples of Canada to recall our connection to creation and to honour and respect it rather than to presume to dominate and destroy it.
‘Adam, as yet not a proper name, refers to our humanity generically speaking. “The Lord God,” Genesis 2 tells us, “formed the ‘Adam of dust from the ground.” We are dust. Yet we are the dust into which God breathes his spirit and only so did “‘Adam became a living being.” Such is the dignified dust of our humanity, a complement to our being made in the image of God.
The passage read in Chapel this week serves as a further commentary on the question about who we are as human beings and about an educational programme which emphasizes character. ‘Adam is placed in a garden, the proverbial Garden of Eden, later known as paradise, drawing upon an ancient Persian word for a pleasure garden. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”. This garden in Genesis 2 is the source of four rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. But the commentary tradition from very early on sees the rivers as symbolic of the classical virtues that belong to human perfection and character, the virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and courage. This connects the Genesis accounts of creation to the poetic and philosophical teachings of ancient Greece and contributes to the idea of the education of the whole person and to the primacy of the ethical.
Genesis 2 introduces us to two important concepts by way of the imagery of trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Living and knowing are somehow closely connected with respect to what it means to be rational and spiritual creatures. Importantly and in relation to our being made in the image of God, ‘Adam is given a commandment in the garden not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Bearing in mind that creation in its parts and as a whole is good, indeed very good, then this commandment has to be taken as good for us as well. The underlying question is about how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. That will be the story of the Fall.
Why are things so bad if everything is so good? The problem can’t be with the world or with God in this view of things. It has more to do with the form of our relationship to God. This will launch us into the long, long story of human redemption understood in its different modalities, not the least of which is learning through suffering and hardship, learning about the good even in and through our separation from it in the experience of sin and death.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Honouring Queen Elizabeth II
Honouring Queen Elizabeth II
On Monday, September 19th, a short memorial service to honour the passing of Queen Elizabeth II was held in the Chapel, as was fitting for a School whose history and life is grounded in the principles of constitutional monarchy which she so graciously embodied. That sensibility is captured in the School’s mottoes: Deo Legi Regi Gregi and Fideliter, For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People, and, Faithfulness, the latter being the motto brought to King’s-Edgehill School by Edgehill at the time of the amalgamation of the Schools in 1976. Faithfulness to her Office as Sovereign was one of the outstanding features of Elizabeth’s life and reign.
The service drew upon the spiritual riches of the Book of Common Prayer, especially from the Burial Office, used at the official services held at Westminster Abbey in London and at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England. Her long reign of seventy years was distinguished by her strong commitment to the Office of Sovereign and never about herself, by her Christian faith and devotion to duty and service in the divided and tumultuous times in which she reigned, and by the way in which she was a symbol of unity not only for England and for the nations of the Commonwealth but for the world.
One of the prayers, which is perhaps better known in England than in Canada, is taken from A Sermon Preached at White-hall, February 29, 1628 by the poet-preacher John Donne (1572-1631) as revised and edited by Dean Eric Milner-White (1884-1964). Milner-White was also largely responsible for the shaping and promotion of the great Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge in December 1918 which offered hope and peace to a world devastated by the First World War. Donne’s words as shaped into prayer speak to the deeper spiritual truths of the human condition and to our prayers for Queen Elizabeth II.
Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter that gate and dwell in that house,
Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
World without end, Amen.
Governments come and go but the Sovereign as Head of State remains now with her son, Charles III, our King and Governor. Long live the King.
(Rev’d) David Curry
School Chaplain, Head of English, ToK Teacher
Saint Matthew the Apostle
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Matthew, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O ALMIGHTY God, who by thy blessed Son didst call Matthew from the receipt of custom to be an Apostle and Evangelist: Grant us grace to forsake all covetous desires and inordinate love of riches, and to follow the same thy Son Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:9-13
Artwork: Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1661. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.
John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop and Martyr
The collect for today, the commemoration of John Coleridge Patteson (1827-71), Missionary, First Bishop of Melanesia, Martyr (source):
O God of all tribes and peoples and tongues,
who didst call thy servant John Coleridge Patteson
to witness in life and death to the gospel of Christ
amongst the peoples of Melanesia:
grant us to hear thy call to service
and to respond with trust and joy
to Jesus Christ our redeemer,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Mark 8:34-38
John Coleridge Patteson was a curate in Devon when Bishop of New Zealand George A. Selwyn persuaded him to go out to the South Pacific as a missionary. In 1856 he journeyed to Melanesia. He encouraged boys to study at a school Selwyn had founded in New Zealand and later set up a school in Melanesia. He was very proficient in languages and eventually learned twenty-three different languages and dialects spoken in Melanesia and Polynesia.
In 1861 Patteson was consecrated Bishop of Melanesia; he travelled across his diocese constantly, preaching, teaching, baptising, confirming, building churches, and living among the people. On the main island of Mota most of the population were converted.
Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), Archbishop of Canterbury (source):
Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray thee, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-5,10
The Gospel: St. Matthew 8:23-27
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity.