Week at a Glance, 26 October – 1 November
Sunday, November 1st, All Saints’ Day / Trinity 21
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Twentieth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O ALMIGHTY and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 5:15-21
The Gospel: St. Matthew 22:1-14
Artwork: Brunswick Monogrammist, Parable of the Great Banquet, c. 1525-35. Oil on wood, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig (Brunswick), Germany.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 October
The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground
Somehow the morning miracle of Chapel continues albeit under the constraints of these ‘covidious’ times. Many thanks to the Chapel Prefects under the leadership of Sarah Hilborn for helping to get readers and servers organized and ready to go all in the flurry of ten minutes before we actually begin. The challenges are particularly great for the Junior School in having at present only one service a week and for the Grade Tens caught in the transition from Junior School to Senior School and needing to be with more than just their own peer cohort. The whole experience reveals the importance of what was one of the special features of the School, namely, the degree of interaction and connection between students not only of different cultures and languages but of different ages.
The challenges are about the teaching of a programme that focuses, through the lenses of Scripture and in the context of worship, on matters intellectual, spiritual and, especially, ethical. Chapel provides a counter to the mere moralizing of contemporary culture by grounding us in the traditions of spiritual reflection about the human condition. Such is the significance of thinking about the concept of creation and about sin and evil. I have taken the time to ponder the kinds of questions that the proverbial story of the Fall raises since it speaks so profoundly to the questions about what it means to be a self; in short, to be self-aware. That has meant reading Genesis 3 in all four of the Chapel services for the 11s, 12s, 10s and Juniors though with different points of emphasis.
For instance, why do we wear clothes? “Their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked.” We become self-aware, self-conscious. We are made conscious of ourselves as selves through the awakening to sexual difference. These are remarkable images that speak to our current anxieties about the self and bring out the realization that we can only know ourselves as selves through our relation to one another within the created order and with God. We learn this negatively but God’s questions bring us to account. That is the great positive. It is found in the very idea that we are brought to account. It means that we are responsible for our thoughts and actions. This speaks to the idea of human agency and responsibility. It counters completely the idea of being a victim and blaming others.
Sermon for the Feast of St. Luke / Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for St. Luke/Trinity 19
Then opened he their understanding
St. Luke is the Church’s spiritual director especially during the Trinity season, it seems to me, at least in terms of the quantity of readings from his Gospel appointed for the Holy Eucharist. But more than just the quantity of readings, there is the quality of these readings, captured best, perhaps, in Dante’s lovely phrase about St. Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This captures wonderfully something about the quality of the man and his writings. Today is the Feast of St. Luke.
In the Gospel reading, we are told that: “He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” As with the Epistle and Gospel for Trinity 19, the emphasis is one what Jesus wants us to know; “that ye may know,” in the context of the healing of the paralytic in the face of animosity and skepticism. But then, what is that understanding? The Gospel is emphatic: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among all nations.” Powerful words which provide us with a sense of the tenor of his Gospel. Death and resurrection, repentance and forgiveness. Could anything be more concise, more clear, and more complete?
We know very little about St. Luke. His “praise is in the Gospel,” the Collect tells us, meaning that St. Luke is mentioned in the Scriptures of the New Testament, quite apart from the traditional attribution of the Third Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles to his mind and pen. The Epistle reading specifically places him in the company of Paul. “Only Luke is with me,” he says in the context of a discourse about evangelism. Elsewhere Paul identifies him as “the beloved Physician” (Col. 4.14).
The Collect, drawing upon these Scriptural hints, identifies St. Luke as both “an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul”. A healer, to be sure, but by way of something which must strike us as rather strange. The healing is by way of “the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him”. Healing is by way of teaching.
Health care and education are two critical areas of concern in our contemporary culture. The traditions of medicine and education have been strongly and profoundly shaped by Christianity. Hospitals and schools in our western world have their roots and being in explicitly religious institutions arising out of the medieval European world, however much they have become secularised.
Week at a Glance, 19 – 25 October
Tuesday, October 20th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found and Justin Marozzi’s Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities That Define A Civilization.
Sunday, October 25th, Trinity 20
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Litany & Holy Communion
St. Luke the Evangelist
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52
Luke was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.
It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.
St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.
The Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1-8
Artwork: The Paralytic lowered through the roof, 6th-century mosaic, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.
Etheldreda, Queen and Abbess
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (source):
O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
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: Philippians 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34
Artwork: St. Etheldreda, 1910, Embroidered Processional Banner, Ely Cathedral.
Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Bishops and Martyrs
The collect for today, the commemoration of Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500-1555), Bishop of London, Reformation Martyrs (source):
Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like thy servants Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, we may live in thy fear, die in thy favor, and rest in thy peace; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 3:9-14
The Gospel: St. John 15:20-16:1
Two leaders of the English Reformation were burned at the stake in Oxford on this day in 1555. Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from their positions and imprisoned after Queen Mary ascended the throne in 1553. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, was deposed and taken to Oxford with Latimer and Ridley.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 October
Now the serpent was more subtle
Perhaps you are familiar with the ‘rod of Ascelpius,’ the symbol for the healing arts of medicine and health care associated with the ancient Greek God of healing. The rod of Ascelpius is still used as the modern symbol for medicine. It depicts a rod which is entwined with a serpent, a snake. Here in Genesis 3 we have a snake, a most unusual snake, we might say, a talking snake, and a creature said to be “more subtle than any other creature which the Lord God had made”; in short, cunning or crafty, deceitful.
We have already encountered this story in its later development in the story of St. Michael and All Angels, the story of the cosmic battle between good and evil and the overcoming of evil by good. Why? Because sin and evil are nothing in themselves. They are entirely derivative and dependent upon that which they reject and deny. But in the Michaelmas story, allusion is made directly to this story, the originating story of human sin and evil which later takes on a cosmic dimension. Whence does evil arise? From rational creatures, men and angels, in their denial of the conditions of their very being.
And yet, there is paradoxically something positive in this story. What is it? It is about the awakening to self-consciousness albeit through deceit and disobedience. This account of the awakening to self-consciousness happens through the power of questions, five questions to be exact. First, there is the question of the serpent. “Did God say?” he asks ‘the Adam’, our humanity now distinguished in terms of man and woman, Adam and Eve. But we ‘know’ what God said. Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To be given such a command belongs to the essential goodness of the created order in which we are placed as in a garden, a paradise, but conditional upon our relation to the Creator in whose image we are made. We have heard and read that but how do we become self-aware? This story provides a way of thinking about human self-consciousness, about ourselves as selves.