Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 24 February – 1 March

Monday, February 24th
4:45-5:15pm Confirmation-Inquirers’ – KES
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, February 25th, Shrove Tuesday
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-730pm Brownies – Parish Hall

Wednesday, February 26th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service with Ashes
12 noon Holy Communion with Ashes
2:35-2:45pm Imposition of Ashes – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

Thursday, February 27th
3:30pm Service – Windsor Elms

Friday, February 28th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 1st, The First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, March 3rd
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme I

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Prayers and liturgy

Quinquagesima

The collect for today, Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

Václav Mánes, Christ Healing the Blind ManArtwork: Václav Mánes, Christ Healing the Blind Man, 1832. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Prague.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 19 February

Why are ye so fearful?

Sturm und drang. I always associate February with this wonderful German phrase which belongs to a literary work but which in turn gives the name to a cultural phenomenon that was the precursor to the rich traditions of German romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturm und drang means storm and stress. How do we deal with the storms and stresses of our world and day?

There are, to be sure, no end of the storms of nature that beset us in the bleak midwinter of February, the stresses that belong to travel and even survival in the rather harsh winter conditions of the Maritimes, not to mention the winter bruising and beating that Newfoundland has endured. It is a wonderful part of the consolation literature to be reminded that things could be worse and that sometimes for others they are far worse than what we have to endure. It is a way of helping us to face the rigours of winter.

But there is something far greater and far more challenging than simply the storms of nature, the winter storms of snow and ice, of wind and cold. Beyond such storms of nature, there are the endless and never-ending storms of the human heart. How do we deal with those storms and stresses? They are the storms of anxiety and fear within us. In a way, they are far greater than the storms of nature.

In Chapel this week, we read a wonderful story about Jesus in the midst of a storm at sea and about his response to our fearfulness and anxiety. The story has influenced the tradition of consolation literature. Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, draws upon this image in suggesting that out of the tempest, out of the sturm und drang of human life in all its disarray, there can be “sea-change into something rich and strange.” There is something that can be learned in and  through the storms of life, whatever they may be, ranging from our fears and worries about the coronavirus 2019 outbreak, now mercifully shortened to CoVid19, to our worries and anxieties about the climate, the economy, about the interrelation of nations and peoples or the lack thereof, and of course, the endless anxiety of parents about their children which only adds to anxiety upon anxiety.  Lots of sturm und drang, we might say!

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Sermons

Sermon for Sexagesima

If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities

Courage and prudence are transformed into humility on this Sexagesima Sunday. We are turned not to the vineyard of creation but to something more basic and more humbling. We are turned to the dust and ground of creation with the parable of the sower and the seed. For courage can be at once unwise and destructive, brave but foolish, if it is not tempered by prudence, by practical wisdom; in short, if it is not aware of human limitations, of our own weakness and infirmity.  And prudence can be too cautious and timid unless tempered by courage. Both need justice and charity, love.

We are turned to the ground. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art.” God formed man from the dust of the ground breathing his spirit into us and so we become living beings. In being turned to the ground we are in effect being turned to God and to our connection with the created order. Only so can we begin to reclaim the dignified dust of our humanity. Only so can we be the good ground instead of the waste-ground of the wayside, the rocky ground, or the thorny ground, all of which signal something of the nature of our  falleness and our incompleteness, of folly and sin.

The parable is more than an image, more than an illustration. In Luke’s account, Jesus tells the parable but then provides the interpretation. This shows something of the radical meaning of the Gesima Sundays. They are about an awakening to the inner qualities of grace in us. That awakening means teaching and learning. Thus Paul provides a lesson about the correctives to courage and Luke about the deeper meaning of prudence. In both there is a kind of humility that recalls us to God in the very circumstances in which we find ourselves, a kind of awakening to ourselves in relation to God and creation.

Courage, in the sense of being bold and in calling attention to how well we have persevered in the face of animosities and persecution, can lead to an insidious pride which elevates us above others. We claim a particular identity which we then extol over others. It can easily become the kind of ‘look at me, look at me’ narcissism of our contemporary culture. This is the danger of incurvatus in se, our being turned in upon ourselves but not to the grace of God in us. Instead of self-awareness there is an ignorance of self in our shallow thoughtlessness, in our inconstancies and inconsistencies, and in our worldly preoccupations and distractions as presented in the images of the ground of the way-side, the rocky ground, and the thorny ground.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 17 – 23 February

Tuesday, February 18th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room: The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Traditions and the Post-Glacial World (2018) by Patrick Nunn, and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan.

Friday, February 21st
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders/Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, February 23rd, Quinquagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00pm Holy Communion – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

Upcoming Events:

Wednesday, February 26th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service
12 noon Holy Communion & Imposition of Ashes
2:35-2:45pm Imposition of Ashes – King’s-Edgehill Chapel

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Prayers and liturgy

Sexagesima

The collect for today, Sexagesima (or the Second Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do: Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 11:21b-31
The Gospel: St Luke 8:4-15

Marten van Valckenborch, Parable of the SowerArtwork: Marten van Valckenborch, Parable of the Sower, between 1580 and 1590. Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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Prayers and liturgy

Valentine, Bishop and Martyr

The collect for a Martyr, on the Feast of Saint Valentine (d. c. 269), Bishop, Martyr at Rome, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who didst bestow upon thy Saints such marvellous virtue, that they were able to stand fast, and have the victory against the world, the flesh, and the devil: Grant that we, who now commemorate thy Martyr Valentine, may ever rejoice in their fellowship, and also be enabled by thy grace to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold upon eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27

Bartholomeus Zeitblom, Scenes from the Life of Saint Valentine: St. Valentine in Prison; The Beheading of St. ValentineArtwork: Bartholomeus Zeitblom, Scenes from the Life of Saint Valentine: St. Valentine in Prison; The Beheading of St. Valentine, early 16th century. Oil on panel, State Gallery of Old German Masters, Augsburg.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 February

If I have not love, I am nothing

Love, it seems, is in the air, whatever that means. ‘Spirit Week’ at King’s-Edgehill School brings us to Valentine’s Day following upon the Headmaster’s Valentine Dinner and Dance on Thursday night. The challenge in Chapel has been to place the events of this week upon the foundation of divine love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves. This suggests that there is something radically incomplete about our human loves and that, no doubt, is a challenging concept to students and faculty alike.

On Monday and Tuesday, the reading in Chapel was St. Paul’s great encomium or praise of love from 1st Corinthians 13. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” Caritas. Charity, as the King James Version puts it, is love. In English the little word, love, has to bear a great weight of meaning. For the Greeks and the Latins, there are a host of words that express a sense of the different kinds of love, love as defined by its relation to the object of love. Therein lies the problem as Plato intuited in using, provocatively and deliberately, the word eros to speak about the movement of our souls to the truth. Eros which we associate with sexual passion and desire is used intentionally to highlight  “the passionate desire to know.” Brilliant.

So what do we mean by love? How do we think about love? For our culture, I suspect that the demand to think about love is exactly the problem whereas for earlier times not to think about love was precisely the problem. St. Paul’s great and profound praise of love is about the divine love which perfects our human loves. This recognizes the painful truth that our human loves are incomplete and even destructive. We often hurt those whom we love the most. So what Paul is saying here is quite important about the qualities of love. “Love is not boastful … love seeketh not her own …thinketh no evil … Love rejoices in the truth,” and so on. It is a powerful hymn of praise about the power of love which perfects our humanity and belongs to the building up of a community of love. 1st Corinthians 13 is “the still more excellent way” for the understanding of our lives together as a body, as a school, and for our self-understanding as well. “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues which perfect the cardinal virtues or qualities of human excellence, the ancient virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity or love is the greatest of the three.

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Prayers and liturgy

Caedmon, Poet

The collect for a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar, in commemoration of Saint Caedmon (d. 680), Monk of Whitby, first English poet, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Caedmon, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:9-17

geograph-263793-by-RichTeaSaint Caedmon is the first English poet whose name is known. Saint Bede the Venerable tells Caedmon’s story in Book IV, Chapter 24, of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede records that Caedmon was a herdsman who at an advanced age suddenly received the gift of poetry and song. Someone appeared to Caedmon in a dream one night and asked him to sing. In response, he spontaneously sang verses in praise of the God the Creator. When he awoke, he remembered the words of his song and added more lines.

He went to speak with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. She and several learned men examined Caedmon and affirmed that his gift was from God.

Caedmon became a monk at Whitby and composed a large body of poetry and song on many Christian subjects, including the Creation story, the Exodus, the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles.

Unfortunately, almost none of Caedmon’s work survives. Only his Hymn, recorded by Bede in Latin and Old English, is known to us. Here is a modern English translation:

Praise we the Fashioner now of Heaven’s fabric,
The majesty of his might and his mind’s wisdom,
Work of the world-warden, worker of all wonders,
How he the Lord of Glory everlasting,
Wrought first for the race of men Heaven as a rooftree,
Then made he Middle Earth to be their mansion.

Source: Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, rev. ed. 1968, Penguin, p. 251.

A humble and holy monk, Caedmon died in perfect charity with his fellow servants of God.

Photograph: Memorial to Caedmon, St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The inscription reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English Sacred Song. Fell asleep hard by, 680”. © Copyright RichTea and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2019

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2019 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2018 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2019
February 9th, 2020
“Go ye also into the vineyard”

The transitions from one season of the Church Year to another and even from one Sunday to the next are intriguing and instructive. They remind us of the necessity of the patterns and rhythms that belong to spiritual life and to the importance of regular worship, week in and week out. That sense of regularity and commitment has often been a challenge and a problem for the institutional churches, particularly in our rural parishes but also in our towns and cities. At issue is any sense of clarity and commitment to what the Church is and teaches. It remains the principal problem with respect to church attendance and, consequently, to the very existence of the institutional church in the form of parishes and dioceses.

For more than fifty years, parishes and dioceses have had to deal not only with that challenge but with a more modern problem, the re-defining of the churches as franchises of a centralized bureaucracy both at the diocesan level and in terms of the national churches. This ‘model’ replaces the idea of doctrinal unity grounded in the teachings embodied in liturgy and worship with conformity, first, to the ever-changing mantras and agendas of technocratic culture, and, secondly, to the excessive  burdens of a form of taxation that support centralized bureaucracies at the expense of the very existence of parishes themselves. Salvation by allotment alone is simply death by parochial suicide. In other words, faith is defined more in terms of belonging to the institutional structures and the finances required to maintain them than to the principles of Faith belonging to our history and theology. Belonging trumps believing.

While recognizing that polity – the order of the Church – is part of Christian identity since the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” is an article of Faith, the fatal subordination of parishes to the unrelenting financial demands of the centralized bureaucracies of the diocesan and national churches results in the unsurprising yet demoralizing collapse of Parishes and, by extension and consequence, to the diocesan and national structures themselves. This faux corporate model imitates the secular corporate culture of big business (i.e. Bishops as CEOs) but the model betrays the corporate life of faith centered on worship and service. And it is, quite simply, unsustainable. Having bled the Parishes to death, it is not surprising that the national church now forecasts that not much will be left of the Anglican Church by 2040. It is, sadly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Needless to say, at Christ Church we remain committed to the principles of the Faith that belong to our corporate identity as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ” united “in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” expressed so wonderfully in the Solemn Declaration of 1893 which references clearly the Scriptures, the Creeds, and the “undisputed Ecumenical Councils” as the ground and basis of doctrine and spiritual life. That includes as well our commitment to ‘Bishops’ and to the diocese and the national churches even in their confusions, knowing that “they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as Article XXI of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion pertinently puts it. In short, we recognize not the infallibility of the Church in its polity and structures but its fallibility, “wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture” (Art. XXI, BCP, p. 707).

As such we have tried to be faithful to what properly belongs to our corporate life without compromising the existence of the Parish to the demands of the diocesan and national churches and their agendas. What the Church is and teaches is not found in the pronouncements of Bishops and Synods both of which are properly subject to those same principles of the Faith that have been received in our Anglican polity.

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