Week at a Glance, 14 – 20 December
Tuesday, December 15th, Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme 2: St. Augustine’s Confessions
Sunday, December 20th, Fourth Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Third Sunday in Advent
The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:2-10
Artwork: Massimo Stanzione, John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 December
How shall this be?
Advent is the season of holy questions that belong to the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light opening us out to hope, joy, and peace. Nowhere is that concentrated more profoundly than in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, a service first instituted at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. It spoke to a world in darkness and despair and in the agony of loss. So, too, it speaks to us at King’s-Edgehill in these challenging times. Like Mary’s question, it opens us out to a kind of miracle.
We were unable to have the ‘big’ service of Grades 6 through 11 at Christ Church this year or to be allowed to have congregational singing but we were able to find creative ways to have services for all the School within certain groupings; in short, four services involving a wonderful range of readers, musicians, and servers, and all in the Chapel. While not all together as one, we were nonetheless together in the hearing of the same powerful lessons of Scripture. The service was structured around the great Advent Matin Responsory (arranged by Palestrina, 16th century) and by way of the traditional verses of the Veni Emmanuel which is built around the Great ‘O’ Antiphons. Those antiphons highlight various scriptural names and titles associated with Jesus Christ such as O Emmanuel (God with us), O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai(Lord), O Jesse Virgula (Rod of Jesse), O Clavis Davidica (Key of David), O Oriens (Day-spring or star), and O Rex Gentium (King of the Gentiles). The initial worlds of the antiphons more or less in their reverse order form an acrostic: O Emmanuel, O Rex, O Oriens, O Clavis, O Radix (‘virgula” in the hymn), O Adonai, O Sapientia, forming ERO CRASwhich can be loosely translated as “I will be there tomorrow”, in anticipation of the advent of Christ.
The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The collect for today, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (source):
Almighty and everlasting God,
who stooped to raise fallen humanity
through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:
grant that we, who have seen thy glory
revealed in our human nature
and thy love made perfect in our weakness,
may daily be renewed in thine image
and conformed to the pattern of 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 Lesson: Proverbs 8:22-35
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-28
Artwork: Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, Madonna of the Rose, 1885. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Service of Lessons and Carols 2020
On Sunday, 6 December, the annual Service of Lessons and Carols was held at Hensley Memorial Chapel, King’s-Edgehill School, Windsor. Due to Covid-19, congregational singing is not permitted, so Fr. David Curry re-arranged the order of service to include congregational responsorial readings from the Book of Psalms, based on the great Advent Matins Responsory as arranged by Palestrina.
The Order of Service is posted here.
Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 2
“My words shall not pass away”
Today’s strong and rather disturbing words seem to complement the apocalyptic nature of our current times. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring”. They seem to speak to our fears and worries, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, to our anxieties on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. How, we might ask, is this comforting? How is this good news if even “the powers of heaven shall be shaken”? Such things must surely unsettle us. They seem to convey the opposite of hyggelig, the Danish word for coziness and material comfort, the cuddle and huddle of the sentimental and the sensual that seems to define our age.
There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present. Yet these disturbing warnings about judgement are intended to provide us with patience and comfort and, even more, with hope. Such is the burden of Cranmer’s Collect which derives from the Epistle and from Jesus’s claim in the Gospel that “my words shall not pass away”.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logos-centric. They are all quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions which place a high value on the Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Quran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture means that which is written. What is revealed is for thought, for serious philosophical reflection.
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime”, St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” He is referring to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and not what will come to be the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, the greatest number of which will paradoxically come from him. He states an important principle about revealed religion. It is something written down for our learning. This grants a priority to reading, especially reading out loud such as in our liturgy because God, as Cranmer puts it, “has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning”.
Week at a Glance, 7 – 13 December
Tuesday, December 8th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, December 13th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Event:
Tuesday, December 15th, Eve of Ember Wednesday
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme 2: St. Augustine’s Confessions
The Second Sunday in Advent
The collect for today, the Second Sunday in Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33
Artwork: Edward Burne-Jones, Last Judgment, 1896-7. Stained glass, St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham.
Clement of Alexandria, Doctor
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):
O Lord, who didst call thy servant Clement of Alexandria from the errors of ancient philosophy that he might learn and teach the saving Gospel of Christ: Turn thy Church from the conceits of worldly wisdom and, by the Spirit of truth, guide it into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 December
And all the city was stirred, saying, Who is this?
Who is this who comes? Advent is about our awakening to Truth, at once ever present and yet ever coming towards us. As such it belongs to the philosophical insight that truth is primary and prior to us and to all our intellectual endeavours. Truth belongs to the Absolute Good which is God. It is ever coming towards us, we might say, in terms of our awareness (or lack thereof). It is high time to be awakened out of sleep, Paul tells us. Wachet auf, as Bach’s cantata so powerfully reminds us.
The readings in Chapel this week serve to prepare the School for the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the remarkable service of Nine Lessons and Carols. We may not be able to have congregational singing but we can be part of the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us and awakening us to what is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that is the great lesson for our day and the counter to all of the narcissisms and self-obsessions that surround us.
The reading from Matthew about Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem is not only read on Palm Sunday but on the First Sunday in Advent and has been for centuries upon centuries. It is a strong reminder to us about the serious nature of God’s turning to us and our turning to God. It signals at once a sense of joy and wonder but as well a sense of judgment. In short, we are being called to account about matters intellectual and ethical. In the 16th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer extended the reading to include what immediately follows in Matthew’s account, namely, the disturbing story of Christ’s anger in his cleansing of the temple of “all them that bought and sold therein”, a misuse of the sacred, of the things of God. We read as well from Psalm 85 which captures the twofold emphasis in the Gospel reading: the idea of God turning us and of his anger ceasing from us, on the one hand, and the idea of God turning us again and quickening or enlivening us so that “thy people may rejoice in thee”.
The anger of God? What does that mean? As the exegetical traditions understood, this is simply about how God speaks to us in human ways for the sake of our understanding. For us anger is usually a destructive and dangerous emotion though there is room for the phenomenon of righteous anger, such as in Juvenalian satire used by Voltaire to awaken us to the various forms of injustice in our world and day which cannot be ignored. In a deeper sense, God’s anger or wrath is the love of his own truth and righteousness against all that denies it.