Sermons

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity

“No-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”

“No-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.” It is the earliest creedal statement from within the Scriptures themselves, wonderfully and significantly highlighted by being passed on down to us in capital letters (though many of the earliest manuscripts were all in majuscules – capital letters). It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. Such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts … I would not have you ignorant,” says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts,” and he goes on to list them. They are gifts which arise, as it were, out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.”

The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives; in short, about the divine unity which is the ground of all true diversity. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am,” as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I AM WHO I AM” (also in capital letters!) is opened to view, explored and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost  and in the forms of our incorporation into that divine life through Jesus as way, truth, life, light, resurrection, door, shepherd, bread, and vine. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.

This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Tenth Sunday After Trinity

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

LET thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 19:41-47a

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Expulsion of the Money Changers from the TempleArtwork: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Expulsion of the Money Changers from the Temple, c. 1515. Oil on panel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Name of Jesus

The collect for today, the Feast of the Name of Jesus, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who by thy blessed Apostle hast taught us that there is none other name given among men whereby we must be saved, but only the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Grant, we beseech thee, that we may ever glory in this Name, and strive to make thy salvation known unto all mankind; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

For The Epistle: Acts 4:8-12
The Gospel: St Matthew 1:20-23

Baciccia, Triumph of the Name of JesusArtwork: Baciccia (Giovanni Battista Gaulli), Triumph of the Name of Jesus, 1679. Ceiling Fresco, Chiesa del Gesù, Rome. Photograph taken by admin, 28 April 2010.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Transfiguration of Our Lord

The Collect for today, the Holy Day of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who on the holy mount didst reveal to chosen witnesses thy well-beloved Son wonderfully transfigured: Mercifully grant unto us such a vision of his divine majesty, that we, being purified and strengthened by thy grace, may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 St. Peter 1:16-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 17:1-9

Peter Paul Rubens, The Transfiguration of ChristArtwork: Peter Paul Rubens, The Transfiguration of Christ, 1604-1605. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, France.

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Prayers and liturgy

Oswald, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Oswald (d. 642), King of Northumbria, Martyr (source):

O Lord God almighty,
who didst so kindle the faith of thy servant King Oswald with thy Spirit
that he set up the sign of the cross in his kingdom
and turned his people to the light of Christ:
grant that we, being fired by the same Spirit,
may ever bear our cross before the world
and be found faithful servants of the gospel;
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.

With the Epistle and Gospel for a Martyr from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Meister der Oswaldlegende, Martyrdom of St. Oswald in BattleIn AD 635, the army of Prince Oswald defeated the forces of pagan king Caedwalla of Gwynedd (north Wales) at the Battle of Heavenfield (near present-day Hexham, Northumberland). Oswald was a Christian and nephew of King Edwin, the man Caedwalla had defeated a few years earlier to conquer the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Heavenfield proved to be a key battle in English history for it marked the end of paganism as a religious and political force in England.

Knowing that the fate of his kingdom would be decided on the following day, Oswald had a wooden cross erected beside which he and his men knelt and prayed to the Lord for victory. The badly outnumbered Christian soldiers defeated their apparently over-confident adversaries, and Oswald became King of Northumbria.

After his victory, Oswald invited monks to come from Iona and establish a monastery at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island. This was to become one of England’s most important centres of Christian scholarship and evangelism.

King Oswald was killed in battle in 642 defending his land and people against the pagan king Penda of Mercia.

Artwork: Meister der Oswaldlegende, Martyrdom of St. Oswald in Battle, c. 1480-85. Oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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Events

Christ Church Book Club, 2021-22

The new list of discussion books for Christ Church Book Club is now available.. The next series will kick off on Tuesday, 21 September, at 7:00pm, when the featured books will be The Bookseller of Florence, by Ross King, and Burning the Books, by Richard Ovenden.

Click here for the full schedule of books and other information.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

“These things were our examples”

The Calendar in the Canadian Prayer Book designates August 1st as Lammas Day and as the commemoration of The Maccabean Martyrs. In doing so, it looks back to the calendars of festivals and commemorations of the European medieval developments particularly in their Anglo-Saxon form and the way they have been recalled at different times. St. Peter in the Chains was a third commemoration on August 1st as well,  looking back to the story of Peter in Acts being freed from his chains by an angel while in prison and to the subsequent building of a Cathedral in Rome dedicated to the breaking of his chains in the fifth century. The concept contributes to the centrality of Peter, the Petrine primacy, as it came to be asserted in Rome. It is, perhaps, no surprise that such a commemoration did not continue on in England post-reformation. But what about Lammas Day and The Maccabean Martyrs?

Lammas Day is associated with the harvest. It is one of the four ‘cross-quarter’ days which have to do with a profound sensibility about our connection to creation understood in terms of the celestial and the terrestrial, the heavenly and the earthly, captured artistically and arrestingly, for instance, in the many windows and sculpted stone work of the medieval churches and cathedrals of Europe that depict the labours of the months along with the signs of the zodiac. Such images place human labour in the world as ordered to God and as a form of participation in the life of God; something which we have largely lost in our technocratic world which presumes the mastery of human and non-human nature at the expense of both. August 1st is more or less halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox; likewise, November 1st stands half-way between the fall equinox and the winter solstice; February 2nd or Candlemas roughly half-way between that and the spring equinox; May 1st, May Day, between that and the summer solstice. Such things are reminders of the patterns of nature’s year and what that means for human life seen in terms of the created order.

In one of the wonderful stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral in north central France, August is associated with the labour of the threshing of the grain or wheat. July’s labour was the harvesting of the wheat; August marks the threshing of the wheat leading to its being transformed into bread; September marks the harvesting of grapes. Lammas derives from Old English, hlaf, loaf, and, maesse, mass, hence loaf-mass; it marks the first harvest and its fruit, as it were. The term, mass, in loaf-mass ties it to the Christian theme of our sacramental participation in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive work as suggested in today’s Epistle.

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