Prayers and liturgy

Clement, Bishop of Rome

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Clement (c. 30-c. 100), Bishop of Rome, Martyr (source):

Eternal Father, creator of all,
whose martyr Clement bore witness with his blood
to the love that he proclaimed and the gospel that he preached:
give us thankful hearts as we celebrate thy faithfulness,
revealed to us in the lives of thy saints,
and strengthen us in our pilgrimage as we follow 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 Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:37-45

Giovanni Francesco Penni, Portrait of Pope Clement ISaint Clement was one of the first leaders of the church in the period immediately after the apostles. Some commentators believe that he is the Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3. If so, he was a companion and fellow-worker of Paul. The Roman Catholic Church regards him as the fourth pope.

St Clement is best known for his Epistle to the Corinthians, dated to about 95. Clement addressed some of the same issues that Paul had addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians. The church at Corinth apparently still had problems with internal dissension and challenges to those in authority. Clement reminds them of the importance of Christian unity and love, and that church leaders serve for the good of the whole body.

Although the letter was written in the name of the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth, St. Clement’s authorship is attested by early church writers. This epistle was held in very high regard in the early church; some even placed it on a par with the canonical writings of the New Testament.

Artwork: Giovanni Francesco Penni, Portrait of Pope Clement I (with the features of Pope Leo X), 1520-21. Fresco, Sala di Constantino, Vatican Museums.

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Sermons

Advent Meditation

“This will be a time for you to bear testimony”

Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent fast approaches and with Advent, we begin anew.

But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin anew? Are we simply trapped in a never-ending cycle, like squirrels on a fly-wheel? Is the cycle of the Church Year but another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives?

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives. But it means, too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed, the idea of God making known to us things that compel our attention.

In the greyness of the year, comes Christ the King (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness” (Jer. 23.6), our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great (330-379 AD) shows us something of what this means:

As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in
summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.      (Letters)

Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had enough talk, too much talk in fact, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evenings, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings?

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Prayers and liturgy

Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cecilia (3rd century), Virgin, Martyr (source):

Gracious God, whose servant Cecilia didst serve thee in song: Grant us to join her hymn of praise to thee in the face of all adversity, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 15:1-4
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

Simon Glücklich, Saint Cecilia Accompanied by AngelsArtwork: Simon Glücklich, Saint Cecilia Accompanied by Angels, 1886. Oil on canvas, Private Collection.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sunday Next Before Advent

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“The end of the matter; all has been heard”

“The end of the matter” is this, it seems, “all has been heard”. There is, after all, “nothing new under the sun”. Everything comes to nothing, to a sense of emptiness, of futility and meaninglessness, captured in the arresting phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, says the Preacher. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” It challenges all the forms of human presumption.

What kind of an ending is this? A strange and fearful ending, an ending that is despair? Why do anything if everything is nothing? Our lives are nothing. All our struggle, our labour, our desires and ambitions, our hopes and dreams, are they all an empty nothingness? Yes, at least in and of themselves. That is the stern message of this challenging and remarkable book, The Book of Ecclesiastes. Everything that we are, everything that we do, everything that we seek, all comes to nothing, to the nothing that is vanity. “All is vanity”, says the Preacher, empty of meaning. This recurring refrain phrase frames the entire book.

Yet this is actually the great wisdom of ancient Israel at the height of its philosophical understanding. But it challenges us as well. In fact, it speaks to our modernity like no other book of the Bible, for it raises the question without which the Bible and philosophical theology make little if any sense. What are we here for?

In the grey of late November, what does the Church give us to read when nature herself seems most desolate? The Book of the Preacher, Ecclesiastes, a church book, as it were, at least in its Greek and Latin title, which proclaims the barren emptiness of all human endeavour, the vanity of every enterprise of men and women upon the earth; in short, the barren emptiness of everything. “Vanity of vanities … All is vanity and a striving after wind”, or,  as the King James Version puts it, a “vexation of spirit”, that speaks to our modern day angst, our anxieties. All is nothing.

This is the preacher’s constant refrain as he explores all the avenues of human existence. What is the vanity of humanity’s social, political, material, and philosophical aspirations, which Ecclesiastes uncovers and proclaims? Namely this, that everything under the sun has limits and cannot explain its purpose or ours and therefore cannot satisfy the deep and true desire of our humanity. Instead, we confront the boring sameness to all things finite. Everything under the sun is nothing in and of itself and cannot explain what anything is for. Everything is nothing, it seems.

Yet, to know this is wisdom and the beginnings of the possibilities of grace. “God has put eternity into the mind of man”, as Ecclesiastes also reminds us, and though human wisdom is unable to find out the reason for anything in the things that are “under the sun”, at least it stands open to the one who is the answer. “Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer” as the philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft aptly puts it. Christ is the eternal one who has entered time. In him, time has its meaning. He turns to us and bids us “come and see”. Such is revelation which in turn engages our minds.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 22 – 28 November

Tuesday, November 23rd
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Jonathan Sacks’ Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (2020).

Sunday, November 28th, First Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, November 30th, St. Andrew’s Day
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday Next Before Advent

Oleg Supereco, Christ PantocratorThe collect for today, the Sunday Next before Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45

Artwork: Oleg Supereco, Christ Pantocrator, Oil on canvas, 21st century (source).

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edmund (841-869), King of the East Angles, Martyr (source):

O eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
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. Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:16-22

Brian Whelan, Martyrdom of St. EdmundEdmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St. Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St. Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St. Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

Click here to read Fr. David Curry’s sermon for the Feast of St. Edmund.

Artwork: Brian Whelan, Martyrdom of St. Edmund, 2003. Acrylic on board, Lady Chapel, St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St. Edmunds, England. (Source) This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 18 November

I am who I am

Does God exist? How do we know and how do we think about this question, if we even think about it at all? The story of the burning bush, read this week in Chapel, sets before us a profound image of Revelation. The bush is burning and yet is not consumed; out of it God speaks to Moses. It belongs to the ways in which things are made known to us, even things that go beyond human thinking and yet engage our minds.

An arresting scene, it gets Moses’ attention and, perhaps, ours, too, but it belongs to an understanding that is part of our world. Here the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding is at one with modern ‘science’ in denying the divinity of the natural world, despite the viewpoint of the English Romantics, though even Wordswoth admitted that “The world is too much with us; late and soon, /Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; – /Little we see in Nature that is ours; /We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Yet this was but a way of returning to nature as divine as something lost in the rationalism of the enlightenment and in the later material progress of the 19th century. It has its counterparts in various moments in the environmental movement, caught in the conflict between humanity and nature.

The story of the burning bush, burnt but not consumed or destroyed, is an image of Revelation, the idea of things made known to us which are not the constructs of our minds but which engage our minds. A bush that burns but is not consumed is not natural. Exactly. It is about what is beyond nature as that upon which the natural itself depends both for its being and its intelligibility. And yet communicated to us through the medium of the natural. In that way, it is sacramental.

Things are made known to us in various ways. The idea of Revelation does not override and contradict other ways of knowing; rather, it complements them and gathers them into the underlying premise of all our knowing. We can’t know without the assumption that things are knowable and that turns upon an intellectual principle. It is articulated here in the Moses story from Exodus.

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Prayers and liturgy

Hilda, Abbess

St. Augustine Kilburn, Saint HildaThe collect for today, the Feast of Saint Hilda (614-680), Abbess of Whitby (source):

O eternal God,
who madest the abbess Hilda to shine as a jewel in England
and through her holiness and leadership
didst bless thy Church with newness of life and unity:
so assist us by thy grace
that we, like her, may yearn for the gospel of Christ
and bring reconciliation to those who are divided;
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: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Matthew 19:27-29

Artwork: St. Hilda, stained glass, St. Augustine Kilburn, London. Photograph taken by admin, 26 September 2015.

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