Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“Love is the fulfilling of the law”

Today’s Collect draws explicitly upon the rich imagery of the Epistle reading from Romans, the images of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light.” The Gospel reading from Matthew complements and illustrates this teaching. We are awakened to the necessity of an ethical principle and to its presence in our lives. That is the meaning of the Advent of Christ, the coming of Christ.

The Epistle opens with a commentary on the law as fulfilled in the love of neighbour. “Love,” Paul argues, “is the fulfilling of the law.” Law is love? That must seem rather strange yet it goes to the heart of the matter of God as the ethical principle for our lives. The law proclaims God’s will for our humanity and as such illumines the darkness of our lives. Left to ourselves, to “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” we are deadly and destructive, harmful to ourselves and to one another. The biblical story of Cain and Abel, the first murder, inaugurates the long bloody tale of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Thus it serves to highlight the need for an ethical principle which by definition cannot come from us; it is not a human construct, but something divine through which we learn the true worth and dignity of our humanity.

The story of Cain and Abel is followed by the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, and, then, the Mosaic covenant in an ascending order of completeness and universality, the meaning of which is summarized in Paul’s statement that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable.

We often misunderstand the Ten Commandments and confuse the ethical teaching they present with our more ordinary assumptions about laws and legislation, about rules and customs as something constraining and limiting. To the contrary, we are presented with something much more radical and much more freeing. We forget that the Ten Commandments are about our freedom, our liberation, and that they are grounded in the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am,” as the universal principle upon which the being and knowing of all reality depends. “I am has sent you,” God says to Moses. The Ten Commandments begin with God as “I am”: “I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The law is the charter of our freedom, our freedom to God. That freedom is love in its truest sense

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 3 – 9 December

Tuesday, December 4th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme I: Christ: Light of the World

Wednesday, December 5th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, December 7th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 9th, Second Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, December 4th and Wednesday, December 12th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis – ‘To Bethlehem with Kings’
($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple, c. 1724Artwork: Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Expulsion of the Moneychangers from the Temple, c. 1724. Oil on canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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Uncategorized

‘The Far-spent Night’: Advent Meditation 2018

“The night is far spent”

There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilizations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion: distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.

In one way or another, they are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful, of what is true and good.

In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship and mortality. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limitations of our knowing.

He undertakes the first of the great spiritual journeys of our humanity in terms of literature, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found. He journeys to find Utnapishtim to ask him“concerning life and death.” Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the much older story of the flood contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He has been granted everlasting life and has survived the flood, the flood which was intended to wipe out the human nuisance and yet threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” beside the wall of the city of Uruk. But where is Utnapishtim? At the end of the world and beyond the end of the world, we might say, all alone except for his wife, unnamed and unknown. We may ask what kind of immortality this is.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Andrew the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who didst give such grace unto thy holy Apostle Saint Andrew, that he readily obeyed the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him without delay: Grant unto us all, that we, being called by thy holy word, may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 10:8-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:18-22

Peter Howson, Crucifixion of Saint AndrewA native of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, Andrew was a fisherman, the son of the fisherman John, and the brother of the fisherman Simon Peter. He was at first, along with John the Evangelist, a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus was the Christ led the two to follow Jesus. Andrew then took his brother Simon Peter to meet Jesus. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Andrew is called the Protokletos (the First Called) because he is named as the first disciple summoned by Jesus into his service.

At first Andrew and Simon Peter continued to carry on their fishing trade, but the Lord later called them to stay with him all the time. He promised to make them fishers of men and, this time, they left their nets for good.

The only other specific reference to Andrew in the New Testament is at St. Mark 13:3, where he is one of those asking the questions that lead our Lord into his great eschatological discourse.

In the lists of the apostles that appear in the gospels, Andrew is always numbered among the first four. He is named individually three times in the Gospel of St. John. In addition to the story of his calling (John 1:35-42), he, together with Philip, presented the Gentiles to Christ (John 12:20-22), and he pointed out the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8).

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 28 November

Written for our learning

A defining feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that they are more or less explicitly logocentric, word-centered. For all three of these religions of ethical monotheism, God is understood largely in terms of Logos, the Greek word for reason or word. Thus the Word as Law defines Judaism; the Word made Flesh is central to the Christian understanding; and the Word as the Will of Allah is a major feature of Islam. All of the world’s great religions to one extent or another give priority to written texts: the Vedas and the Upanishads of Hinduism; the various Buddhist texts in pali or sanskrit, the commentary traditions in philosophy, to give but a few instances. There is something inescapably significant about written texts, the scriptures and the writings of religion and philosophy.

This calls attention to the mystery and the wonder of reading and writing, one of the most profound of all human abilities and one which speaks to the idea of civilisation. The ancient Sumerians were among the first to do so many things practically speaking in terms of technology that gave them a power over nature: such things as sailing – using wind and therefore not necessarily determined by the flow of water; irrigation – being able to redirect water to where it can be used for agriculture; and a host of other practical inventions. But perhaps the most important invention was writing: cuneiform script, wedge-shaped marks in clay, that probably originated in a warehouse. Why? There is a necessary connection between numbering and naming things which then leads on to stories and ideas. Reading and writing signify civilisation.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul famously says. He is referring to the Hebrew Scriptures but paradoxically his remark will extend to the inclusion of his own writings which comprise the greatest part of the Christian Scripture, the New Testament. What is written is written for our learning. This speaks to the prominence and the significance of reading and writing, to the significance of books.

This is a particular concern and challenge for our age as Maryanne Wolf wonderfully explains in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018). Following upon the success of Proust and the Squid (2008), she has written an engaging book about what has transpired in the last ten years in terms of neuroscience and the impact of the digital culture on our reading. Far from being a technophobe, she nonetheless seeks to alert us to the dangers of losing the capacity for “deep reading,” for a kind of collectedness, “a place of stillness,” that belongs to Aristotle’s idea of contemplation as the highest form of human life. This complements the theme of our attention to ethical principles which alone can properly shape our lives. Sitting and listening like Mary is necessary for Martha’s activity, too. Without it, we are the endlessly distracted in a culture of distraction, unable to focus and at the mercy of digital overstimulation and manipulation. The theologian John Dunne notes that wisdom is “but contemplation in action.” Wolf wants to show this in part through literature and philosophy and in part through neuroscience.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“Jesus turned”

It is all about the turning but what kind of turning? Head over heels? Like a rolling stone? Or a November snowball? No. It is about God’s turning to us and our being turned to God. That is the especial wonder of this Sunday. I love the collocation of prepositions: “next” and “before” that signal an ending and a beginning. This Sunday speaks so profoundly to the double movement of the spirit: God coming to us and our coming to God, to the principle of justification in the first and the principle of sanctification in the second, and to the way in which those necessarily intersect.

We have in today’s lesson from Jeremiah a kind of summa of the pageant of sanctification. It is really all about “the Lord our Righteousness” living in us and we in him. In the textus receptus of the New Testament, this is one of the few but important passages that are re-printed in majuscules, in capital letters. It is a kind of shout-out, a way of calling attention to the whole pageant of sanctifying grace as being about the realisation, bit by bit, of justifying grace dwelling in us. It recalls us to a new beginning, a beginning again in the pageant of that justifying grace towards us and its dwelling in us. It is all about the forms of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ. That belongs and marks the apocalyptic nature of Advent and of all that follows right through to Trinity Sunday. Something has to be made known to us even as we recognise our need for an ethical and spiritual principle. Left to ourselves we are dead and deadly. Such is the darkness of Advent into which comes the light of Christ.

To speak this way about the pattern of the church year may seem linear, a step-by-step kind of thinking but really this Sunday shows us that is not so. It is more about a kind of circular reasoning (understood positively and essentially), a way of returning and turning back again upon the very principle of life and thought and being. A way of being of gathered into what is eternal. “Never that which is shall die,” a fragment from the ancient Greek Tragic poet, Euripides, states. What truly is truly remains. What is that? It is about Christ and about Christ in us, about how our lives participate in the life of God.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 26 November – 2 December

Monday, November 26th
4:45-5:15 Religious Inquirers’ Class – KES

Tuesday, November 27th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Wednesday, November 28th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Thursday, November 29th, Eve of St. Andrew
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, November 30th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, December 2nd, First Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Advent Service of Lessons & Carols with KES (Gr. 7-11 at Christ Church)
7:00pm Advent Service of Lessons & Carols – KES Chapel (Gr. 12s)

Upcoming Event:

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis – ‘To Bethlehem with Kings’
($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday Next Before Advent

The collect for today, the Sunday Next before Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45

Quentin Matsys, Salvator Mundi (Antwerp)Artwork: Quentin Matsys, Salvator Mundi, c. 1510. Oil on panel, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

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Prayers and liturgy

Clement, Bishop of Rome

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Clement (c. 30-c. 100), Bishop of Rome, Martyr (source):

Eternal Father, creator of all,
whose martyr Clement bore witness with his blood
to the love that he proclaimed and the gospel that he preached:
give us thankful hearts as we celebrate thy faithfulness,
revealed to us in the lives of thy saints,
and strengthen us in our pilgrimage as we follow 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 Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-7
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:37-45

Saint Clement was one of the first leaders of the church in the period immediately after the apostles. Some commentators believe that he is the Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3. If so, he was a companion and fellow-worker of Paul. The Roman Catholic Church regards him as the fourth pope.

St Clement is best known for his Epistle to the Corinthians, dated to about 95. Clement addressed some of the same issues that Paul had addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians. The church at Corinth apparently still had problems with internal dissension and challenges to those in authority. Clement reminds them of the importance of Christian unity and love, and that church leaders serve for the good of the whole body.

Although the letter was written in the name of the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth, St. Clement’s authorship is attested by early church writers. This epistle was held in very high regard in the early church; some even placed it on a par with the canonical writings of the New Testament.

Artwork: Pier Leone Ghezzi, Martyrdom of St. Clement, 1726. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Vaticana.

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