Prayers and liturgy

Sunday After Ascension Day

The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Bernaert van Orley, The Last Supper (from the Alba Passion)Artwork: Bernaert van Orley, The Last Supper (from The Alba Passion), c. 1525-28. Tapestry, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Statements and other writings

Letter to the Parish, June 2019

Dear Friends,

“Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The familiar words of the Sursum Corda, as it is known, capture an essential feature of the liturgical and sacramental life of our Parish. It is very much about our being gathered into the motions of the Ascension. “We ascend,” as Augustine beautifully puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Ascensiontide signals that profound gathering of all things to God in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. His homecoming opens out to us our true homeland of the Spirit, the Trinity.

Bev Morash has been the sexton of the Parish for many years but for reasons of health is stepping down officially as of the end of June. He and Jacoba wish to continue to help out with the sanctuary guild when and to what extent they can. Wonderful. On behalf of the Parish, I want to thank Bev and Jacoba for their many labours. We will be putting into place various ways of ensuring the continuing maintenance of the Parish and its operations. We have established a reasonable protocol about garbage which, thanks in part to Scotty and Kathy, will go to curbside when needed in accord with the stipulations of the Town of Windsor. Please note the directions in the Hall about garbage (clear bags), compost (small bin to big bin to green bin), and recyclables (blue bags in blue bin).

At the Annual Meeting of the Parish, ideas were raised about the possibility of replacing the siding of the Church with newer and improved vinyl including insulation, repairing the sills of the windows, and replacing the lexan protective panels. We are still endeavouring to get estimates about cost. This would be a major, major undertaking. I want to be clear about the financials of the Parish with respect to capital plans.

The operation of the Parish depends in part, indeed, a large part, upon contributions from the Christ Church Foundation. We have been able to maintain operations and some capital improvements from funds generated from the interest on its investment portfolio; we have not touched capital. We also depend upon the offerings of all of you. Like many small institutions, it is a constant struggle but one which I am pleased to say we have managed rather successfully in terms of our mission, thanks to so many of you.

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Prayers and liturgy

Justin Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Justin (c. 100 – 165), Philosopher, Apologist, Martyr at Rome (source):

St. Justin MartyrO God our redeemer,
who through the folly of the cross
didst teach thy martyr Justin
the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ:
free us, we beseech thee, from every kind of error,
that we, like him, may be firmly grounded in the faith,
and make thy name known to all peoples;
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 Corinthians 1:18-30
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-8

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Sermons

Sermon for Ascension Day

Lift up your hearts

“We ascend,” St. Augustine says,“in the ascension of our hearts”. It is an essential feature of our liturgy. We might even suggest that the Prayer Book liturgy is all “sursum corda,” all about the lifting up our hearts unto the Lord. Such motions are the motions of grace in us, the motions of Christ’s Ascension moving in us.

The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection and belongs to its essential logic. In a way, it is all about our being and dwelling with God who in Christ has dwelt among us, literally “tented among us,” itself a suggestive image, but only in order to bring us to the true homeland of the Spirit. “We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It is such a powerful and suggestive image: being like eagles “fly[ing] up to heaven in our hearts where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It speaks to our hearts and minds.

Homer’s great epic poem, The Odyssey, is all about homecoming. It chronicles the struggles of Odysseus in his ten year quest to achieve his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan War. That struggle is about knowing who you are which means overcoming all of the forms of our forgetting and the unknowing of ourselves. Home is a powerful image of the sense of place as belonging to identity. It is at once local and particular but also cosmic and universal. To know yourself is to know your place in a cosmic order. It is to know your relation to others and to God.

Christ’s Ascension is altogether about who he truly is, the eternal Son of the Father who always sits at the right hand of the Father, which is to say, that “there was not when he was not;” in other words,  that he is always God. His Ascension signals the gathering up of our humanity to its end and truth in God. His homecoming is “the exaltation of our humanity,” as the Fathers of the early Church argue, the lifting up of us to God in whom we truly live and move and have our being. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

All Saints Margaret Street, This same Jesus which is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come in like mannerArtwork: This same Jesus which is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come in like manner, All Saints Margaret Street, London. Photograph taken by admin, 25 September 2015.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 29 May

She reacheth from one end to the other mightily and sweetly ordereth all things

Strongly and sweetly. Fortiter et sauviter. Who is this ‘she’? In Chapel this week we read from the eighth chapter of the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It is a most famous passage. It is what I like to call a connector passage, writings which connect to many other  cultures and patterns of thinking. Students and faculty, for the most part, have perhaps never heard this passage but that doesn’t make it any less famous. The ‘she’ here is wisdom; sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin. The passage is a wonderful paean of praise to wisdom and as such speaks to the educational project of the School in terms of understanding and cultural literacy. Wisdom, not knowledge simply, and certainly not mere information is what is looked for and sought. Wisdom is about maturity of character, about a way of understanding that shapes a way of living ethically and responsibly.

Written in Greek probably in the first century BC, Wisdom connects directly to the forms of discourse and thinking that belong to Greek or Hellenistic philosophy. The created wisdom of God shows us that wisdom is to be sought above all other things. “If riches are a desirable possession in life, what is richer than wisdom who effects all things?” Wisdom teaches temperance, prudence, justice and courage, the four classical virtues of Greek and Latin antiquity which in turn contribute to the moral and ethical discourse of Christianity and Islam. Wisdom here is about an understanding of the created world and thus about ourselves. The influence of this text is altogether remarkable. It continues to speak to us even in the arrogance of our unwisdom.

Some seven centuries after the Book of Wisdom was written, Boethius wrote a most influential treatise known as the Consolation of Philosophy. Sometimes called the last of the Romans, Boethius was actually a Christian philosopher whose life ambition, largely unfulfilled, was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. The only explicit Scriptural reference in the Consolatio is this passage about wisdom strongly and sweetly ordering and moving all things. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas” – O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason, Boethius says. Wisdom is what is looked for in our lives.

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Sermons

Sermon for Rogation Sunday

“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.

Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” …  “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “where we mean/ To mend her we end her,/ When we hew or delve” … “Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.

Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 27 May – 2 June

Tuesday, May 28th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, May 30th, Ascension Day
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, May 31st
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, June 2nd, The Sunday after Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club breakfast with Ladies invited)
10:30am Holy Communion

Seeing that we have a great high priest that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Rogation

Rogationtide brings us to the Ascension as the culmination or end of the Easter Season. It reminds us of two important themes that are quite radical in their extent. Rogation means asking, from the Latin, rogo, rogare. It appears in English in the word, interrogation. Rogation days are days of prayer, a kind of asking; an active acknowledgment or recognition that all and every good comes from God to us. Prayer places us and keeps us in the presence of God. This is the astounding truth and power of the Resurrection. Prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing stands in the way except our own hearts and wills.

The other theme that Rogation presents to us is the idea that redemption is cosmic in scope. The world is God’s world and participates in the redemptive love of God for the whole of his creation, including the natural world and world of human labour and endeavour.

The days of Rogation embrace the world in prayer. They remind us that wherever we are is a kind of holy land. How? By being the places in which we praise and honour God and pray to God.

To think on these things is the counter to our utilitarian exploitation of the natural world for our own immediate ends and the counter to our despair and anxiety about suffering and hardship. “In the world,” Jesus says, “you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” Wherever we are is to be a place of prayer and praise. Whatever we do is to be a work of prayer and praise.

Fr. David Curry

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifth Sunday After Easter

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Artwork: Fritz von Uhde, The Last Supper, 1886. Oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

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Prayers and liturgy

Aldhelm, Bishop and Scholar

The collect for a Bishop or Archbishop, on the Feast of Saint Aldhelm (c. 639-709), Abbot of Malmesbury, Bishop of Sherborne, Poet, Scholar, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Sherborne Abbey, St. AldhelmO GOD, our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Aldhelmto be a Bishop in thy Church and to feed thy flock: We beseech thee to send down upon all thy Bishops, the Pastors of thy Church, the abundant gift of thy Holy Spirit, that they, being endued with power from on high, and ever walking in the footsteps of thy holy Apostles, may minister before thee in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Aldhelm became the first Bishop of Sherborne in AD 705. Before then he had been Abbot of Malmesbury for some thirty years. He was born in about AD 639 and died in 709 in Doulting, Somerset. St Aldhelm is buried at Malmesbury. His name translated from the old English means “Old Helmet”. For more information, click here.

Photograph: St. Aldhelm, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset, U.K.
© Copyright Sarah Smith and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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