Prayers and liturgy

Ambrose, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast Day of St. Ambrose (339-397), Doctor of the Church, Poet, Bishop of Milan (source):

Lord God of hosts,
who didst call Ambrose from the governor’s throne
to be a bishop in thy Church
and a courageous champion of thy faithful people:
mercifully grant that, as he fearlessly rebuked rulers,
so we may with like courage
contend for the faith which we have received;
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: 2 Timothy 4:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:13-20

Antonio Vivarini, St. Ambrose Baptises St. AugustineArtwork: Antonio Vivarini, St. Ambrose Baptises St. Augustine, c. 1440. Tempera on panel, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Passion Sunday

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

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Sermons

Sermon for Passion Sunday

“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”

The Letter to the Hebrews is a very rich and demanding theological text. It is intriguing to see when passages from Hebrews are read in the classical lectionary. Hebrews is read at Christmas – the thundering words about the pageant of God’s word culminating in the Word and Son of God (Heb.1.1-12; BCP, p. 105). It is read today on Passion Sunday, the beginning of deep Lent, and, indeed, the end of the Epistle reading this morning (and our text) is the beginning of the Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week (Heb. 9.15-28; BCP, p. 163). Hebrews is read on Good Friday (Heb. 10.1-25; BCP, p. 174). Hebrews is read in the Octave of All Saints for the commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (Heb. 11.13-16; 12.1-2, BCP, p. 302), reminding us of our heavenly citizenship, at once “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” and “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”  It is read on Ascension Day at Evening Prayer and throughout the Daily Offices of Ascensiontide, thus informing our understanding of the Ascension as the culmination of the Resurrection. Such things suggest the theological significance of Hebrews.

And it is not by accident that Hebrews 9.11-15 is read today just after a thematic selection of readings from Leviticus on Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening just past. In a way, Hebrews is the Christian re-working of the forms of reciprocity in worship that belongs to Leviticus and especially in terms of the ethical demands that the worship of God entails with respect to our dealings with one another and the land; in short, the love of neighbour, which includes the stranger and the sojourner, and our  respect and care for the land. Such considerations speak to the idea of atonement, to our being at one with God and through God with one another in God’s creation. This is the significance of Jesus as “the Mediator of the new covenant.”

The idea of mediation assumes conflict, a division between parties. But the Mediator here is not about seeking some sort of compromise between competition over partial goods, trying to find some sort of consensus which we agree upon and make. The issue of mediation here is about the yawning and unbridgeable gap between God and man owing to human sin and evil. The divide or opposition which we have caused cannot be overcome or mediated by us. The Book of Leviticus, with all of the rigour of its proscriptions about ritual and sacrifice, takes seriously the relation between Israel and God as grounded in God’s own holiness. “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19.2). “I am the Lord your God” is a constantly repeated refrain in Leviticus, a constant reminder of the holy otherness of God as the ground for our actions towards one another and towards the created order. But such things presuppose our separation from both God and nature and from God and one another.  What Leviticus seeks is atonement, actions commanded by God that seek the reconciliation of our humanity with God and with one another and with the created order.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 4 – 10 April

Tuesday, April 5th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme IV

Sunday, April 10th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through April 5th. Return to the Church for Holy Week & Easter.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, commonly called Passion Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

WE beseech thee, Almighty God, mercifully to look upon thy people; that by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore, both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15
The Gospel: St. Matthew 20:20-28

Sandro Botticelli, Man of Sorrows, c. 1500Artwork: Sandro Botticelli, Man of Sorrows, c. 1500. Tempera and oil on panel, Private collection.

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Prayers and liturgy

Henry Budd, Priest

The collect for today, the commemoration of Henry Budd (1814-75), first North American Indian to be ordained to the ministry in the Church of England, Missionary to the Cree nation (source):

The Rev. Henry BuddCreator of light, we offer thanks for thy priest Henry Budd, who carried the great treasure of Scripture to his people the Cree nation, earning their trust and love. Grant that his example may call us to reverence, orderliness and love, that we may give thee glory in word and action; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 5:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-21

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 31 March

It happened late one afternoon

And so begins the story of the sin of David. A powerful narrative wonderfully told, it ends with the classic understatement, that what “David had done displeased the Lord.” No kidding!

The story of David is the story of a kind of everyman. Just before the March reading break, we saw David as a hero though not simply in the usual characteristics of physical size and strength. The point was the contrast between how “man looks on the outward appearance but God looks on the heart.” We saw what God sees in the heart of David in terms of his courage – literally, what is in the heart – and his insight and commitment to the truth and power of God. It was that which allowed him to stand up against the formidable figure of Goliath, the champion of the Philistines. What is bigger than Goliath’s physical stature was his ego and presumption in defying God as the author of all creation.

But here, too, in the story of David’s sin, we see the heart which God sees, the heart in its darkness and deceit, the heart in its contradiction and denial of its own truth. David shows us, as John Donne concisely says, “the slippery ways into sin.” This, too, is part of our reality, the reality of our sinfulness, of our doing what in some sense we know is wrong. If I were to ask whether anyone here in Chapel has ever done something wrong or has made serious mistakes, we would all have to raise our hands, at least if we are being honest with ourselves. I would have to raise two hands. We deceive ourselves and one another in claiming to be perfect and good, in protesting that we never lie or fudge the truth. This story awakens us to ourselves in the sad but true fact of our sinfulness; not just mistakes but mistakes which we know to be wrong yet have done anyway.

So what happened “late one afternoon”? First, David sees a beautiful woman bathing. He conceives a lust for her in his heart. He inquires and finds out that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a non-Israelite, but a soldier fighting for David. In other words, he knows that she is the wife of a loyal soldier. But here is the first moment of the slippery slope argument about how sin begets sin begets sin. It provides a wonderful commentary on the logic of the Ten Commandments and of the movement and connection between the commandments. It begins “late one afternoon” with the last of the commandments: “thou shalt not covet.” David covets in his heart another man’s wife. The lust of the eyes leads to the lust in his heart to possess another for himself. It leads to adultery. He takes Bathsheba and has sex with her. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

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Sermons

Lenten Meditation #3 on Leviticus

This is the third of four Lenten meditations on Leviticus. The first is posted here and the second is posted here.

“You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy”

The Holiness Code of Leviticus (ch. 17-26) is particularly significant since it sets before us the conditions of holiness – not just of being set apart but of wholeness – which is to be found in terms of our relation to God and his grace moving in us. The Holiness Code is repeatedly punctuated by recurring refrains about God as the I AM, the principle of our liberation and sanctification. That important spiritual idea is complemented by the ethical demands which belong to that sense of our identity with God.

In other words, holiness is necessarily connected to our identity with God which, in the Christian understanding, is about our identity and life together in the body of Christ. It is not accidental, then, that the second half of the Summary of the Law is based on Leviticus where the principle of loving your neighbour as yourself is first expressed (Lev. 19.18) and then later joined to the Deuteronomic principle of loving God. Love of God and love of neighbour belong together. If nothing else, the Christian understanding simply intensifies that way of thinking and acting.

As such, the ethical demands in Leviticus are grounded in the identity of God who identifies himself to us as the fruition and perfection of our humanity. In these chapters which seem to be forbiddingly particular and restricted to the limits of a tribal culture, we see the aspects of something more universal: an ethical understanding about the stranger in our midst, about the sabbath of the land, about the concept of jubilee, and about how one deals with the inequalities of wealth. Though Leviticus seems to point to older tribal forms of identity, the text makes clear that it also points forward to ‘the gestalt of the spirit,’ to our openness to the grandeur and grace of God; in short, to our wholeness as holiness in Christ.

This does not take away from some of the troubling forms of worship in its injunctions and prohibitions that we find in Leviticus. There is a rigour to the Holiness Code precisely about the holiness of God and thus about any disdain and dismissal of God’s holiness. The latter constitutes a form of blasphemy not just from within Israel but for all of humanity. The penalty is severe – being put to death for blasphemy whether one is of Israel or not! This challenges our contemporary viewpoint which, since it sees all religious conviction as essentially a personal matter, cannot help but regard the idea of blasphemy resulting in death as something utterly abhorrent and inhuman, primitive and barbaric. Yet the point in Leviticus is, I think, fairly clear. We only live when we are alive to God and his word. Those who do not are ‘the already dead,’ we might say, dead to God and to his word as Law. Like the deaths of Aaron’s own sons in Leviticus because of their presumption about ritual – namely, acting independently of the order, as it were – the stoning of the blasphemers, both Jew and non-Jew, is about their presumption in the denial of God, effectively making themselves God, but violating the conditions of life itself.

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Prayers and liturgy

John Keble, Scholar and Poet

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Keble (1792-1866), Priest, Tractarian, Poet (source):

Father of the eternal Word,
in whose encompassing love
all things in peace and order move:
grant that, as thy servant John Keble
adored thee in all creation,
so we may have a humble heart of love
for the mysteries of thy Church
and know thy love to be new every morning,
in 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 12:9-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 5:1-12

John KebleJohn Keble’s Assize Sermon entitled “National Apostasy“, delivered at Oxford on 14 July 1833, is regarded as the beginning of the renewal movement known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarian Movement. In that sermon, preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Rev. Keble condemned the growth of liberalism in the Church of England and took the nation to task for turning away from God and ignoring the prophetic calling of the church. The sermon caused a sensation across Britain.

Between 1833 and 1841, Rev. Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and others issued a series of 90 pamphlets called Tracts For The Times (hence Tractarian Movement), in which they presented their views on ecclesiology and theology. Tractarianism emphasised the importance of the ministry and the sacraments as God-given ordinances and ultimately developed into Anglo-Catholicism, which has been highly influential in the Anglican Communion as well as other Christian traditions.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in his memory in 1870. The College was designed by William Butterfield, a leading exponent of Victorian Gothic who had been raised in a Nonconformist family but later became a convinced High-Church Anglican. He and other architects influenced by the Oxford Movement looked to medieval cathedrals for inspiration and designed churches full of colour as a celebration of God’s creation. The walls of Keble College Chapel are lined with brilliant mosaics showing scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Christ, and patristic and medieval saints. Some see Keble College and Chapel as the high point of Butterfield’s architectural achievements.

John Keble’s page at Hymnary.org lists dozens of hymns. Some of Rev. Keble’s writings, including “National Apostasy” and seven Tracts For The Times, are posted here. All of the tracts are posted here.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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