Thursday, June 27th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
Friday, June 28th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall
Sunday, June 30th, Second Sunday after Trinity/Octave of SS. Peter & Paul
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31
Artwork: Franz Josef Dobiaschofsky, The Rich Man and Lazarus, 1847. Oil on canvas, Private collection.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Alban, First Martyr of Britain, d. c. 250 (source):
Almighty God, by whose grace and power thy holy martyr Alban triumphed over suffering and was faithful even unto death: Grant to us, who now remember him with thanksgiving, to be so faithful in our witness to thee in this world, that we may receive with him the crown of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:13-16
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:34-42
Artwork: St. Alban, first Martyr of Britain, stained glass, Church of St. Mary, East Bilney, Norfolk, England.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Barnabas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD God Almighty, who didst endue thy holy Apostle Barnabas with singular gifts of the Holy Spirit: Leave us not, we beseech thee, destitute of thy manifold gifts, nor yet of grace to use them alway to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Acts 11:22-26
The Gospel: St. John 15:12-16
Artwork: Barent Fabritius, Stoning of St. Paul and St. Barnabas at Lystra, 1672. Oil on canvas, Private collection.
(This commemoration ha been transferred from 11 June.)
Sunday, 7th July -Trinity 3 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 14th July – Trinity 4 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 21st July – Trinity 5 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 28th July – Trinity 6 (Fr. Curry)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 4th August – Trinity 7 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Thomas’ Church, Three Mile Plains
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 11th August – Trinity 8 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Andrew’s Church, Hantsport
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 18th August – Trinity 9 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. Michael’s Church, Windsor Forks
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Sunday, 25th August – Trinity 10 (Fr. Henderson)
8 a.m. Christ Church
9 a.m. St. George’s Church, Upper Falmouth
10:30 a.m. Christ Church
Fr. David Curry will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Avon Valley and the Parish of St. Andrew’s, Hantsport for the month of July (1-902-790-6173); Fr. Tom Henderson will be Priest-in-Charge for the Parish of Christ Church for the month of August (1-902-798-8921).
Nicodemus’s question highlights the mystery and the wonder of this day. It is complemented by Mary’s question. “How can this be seeing I know not a man?” she asks the Angel Gabriel. We are in the midst of great mysteries, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. The mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation are just so intimately and inescapably connected.
Trinity Sunday is the speculative Sunday of all Sundays, a day when we, quite literally, it seems, are walking on our heads. The Athanasian Creed wonderfully captures the mystical wonder of this day in the dialectical dance of affirmation and negation. To put it in other words, “This is Thou and neither is this Thou.” God is more unlike than like anything created. Think the Trinity in this way, the Creed advises. We cannot take God captive to our minds but our minds can be taken captive by God, by what we are given to see and hear; in short, to think, and in which we are privileged to participate.
“Behold a door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine tells us. Revelation is not a window out of which or into which we might peek and peer, but a door through which we enter into the mystery of the understanding. To think God as Trinity is to praise him.
The Trinity is the central and great teaching of the Christian faith. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” as the 1st article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Article begins, articulating in a concise and clear way the classical understanding of the idea of God common to ancient philosophy and to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike. Today’s readings are about the making known of the mystery of God in himself and for us, a mystery which we can only think. To think it is to be born again, literally to be born upwards into what is revealed and belongs to thought. God in thinking and loving himself thinks and loves all else; everything is gathered into the mystery of God, the mystery here revealed to us. The 1st Article goes on to express the specific Christian understanding of the mystery of God, gathering up the triplets of everlasting unity, life and truth, and of infinitepower, wisdom and goodness, into the Trinity. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”.
Tuesday, June 18th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
Wednesday, June 19th
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
Friday, June 21st
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall
Sunday, June 23rd, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(Fr. Tom Henderson -celebrant & preacher; Fr. Curry away for a wedding in Fredericton, NB).
The Creed of St. Athanasius (commonly called) is one of the three great catholic creeds of the Universal Church. At one time it was appointed to be used thirteen times a year – once a month plus on Trinity Sunday. A wee bit awkward for liturgical use, perhaps, it is nonetheless (a) a complement to the Apostles’ & Nicene Creed, (b) scripturally grounded, and (c) a marvellously mystical way of thinking God – God as Trinity – in the dance of negative and positive theology. Think and feel! Believe and love! God’s self-relation is the ground of his relation to everything else. All is in God and God is all in Himself.
The collect for today, the Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that this holy faith may evermore be our defence against all adversities; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Lesson: Revelation 4:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 3:1-15
Artwork: Jusepe de Ribera, Holy Trinity, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, Prado, Madrid.
What? It’s all over? “How can this be?” you might ask like Nicodemus in the lesson Nick read. High School no more?! IB no more?! “Hit the road Jack and don’t cha come back, no more no more no more no more”! Really? It’s all over and I have to go? Hooray! Or perhaps not! Do I have to leave? Can’t I come back?
“How can this be?” your parents, too, might be asking? My dear little one is graduating from High School?! It seems it was only “yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away”. Now it’s all over? Well enough of the old geezer tunes from the remote past with apologies to Ray Charles and the Beatles. But you get the point. There is a question. “How can this be?”
Nicodemus’ question to Jesus conveys a sense of wonder as well as perplexity that belongs to the special qualities of this day. Today you step up and step out no longer as students but shortly as graduates and alumni of King’s-Edgehill School. As such today is an ending and a beginning, a looking back and a looking ahead but as well a looking inward.
This service is called Encaenia, which is a Greek word – ‘Oh no, not another Rev kind of word. You mean I have to think in the morning? Isn’t it all over?’! Well, duh! No. Encaenia refers to a renewal of purpose and identity. Originally an annual dedication of holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and, by extension, to academic institutions derived from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world; such as King’s-Edgehill. Encaenia recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideals belonging to the life of the School and to the nature of education. Endings and beginnings, as it were.
Those things are embodied in the Edgehill motto, fideliter, meaning ‘faithfulness’, as married to the motto of King’s, Deo Legi, Regi, Gregi, which means ‘for God, for the Law, for the King, and for the People’. Such things signify an approach to education that connects learning and living, a turning of our hearts and minds to the things that belong to service and sacrifice, to things worth doing and worth doing well, especially academically speaking, but with the intention of seeking the good of the human community. These mottos express an enlightenment sensibility about an education that contributes to lives of service whether in church, law, government or social, economic, and domestic life wherever you are and wherever you go in the world. It has very much to do with the education of the whole person within a community of persons.
The school year runs out in the week of Pentecost. Pentecost marks at once the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a harvest festival and a celebration of the giving of the Law, and in the Christian understanding, a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church. Wind and fire and the speaking in tongues are the distinctive and outward signs of the Pentecostal event. And yet for all of the emphasis upon the ecstatic and the experiential, the whole point of Pentecost is on teaching. Jesus explains that the Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” There is a clear sense of the interplay of Word and Spirit.
Peace and order and unity are the defining themes of Pentecost but they are all about God’s peace, God’s order, and the unity of God in whom we alone find peace, order, and unity. The point is that we can find none of these things simply in and of ourselves. In that sense, Pentecost is about the redemption of our humanity.
It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal; in short, in God. This is enormously suggestive and speaks, I think, to the diversities of culture and language at our School.
For in the story of Pentecost, one thing is heard in and through the diverse tongues of the peoples of the world. That one thing is the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost celebrates the unity of God in whom true diversity is found and is redeemed. Instead of separation and opposition, there is unity and truth found in and through the diversities of tongues and cultures. This is profoundly counter-culture because the emphasis is on what is understood as one in and through the differences of culture and language. We are reminded of our humanity as one, as universal not in spite of its diversity but through it. The insight of Pentecost is that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God.
