Prayers and liturgy

Charles Simeon, Pastor

The collect for today, the commemoration of Charles Simeon (1759-1836), Priest, Evangelical Divine (source):

O eternal God,
who didst raise up Charles Simeon
to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ
and inspire thy people in service and mission:
grant that we, with all thy Church, may worship the Saviour,
turn away in true repentance from our sins
and walk in the way of holiness;
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: Romans 10:8b-17
The Gospel: St. John 21:15-19

Charles SimeonCharles Simeon served as vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, from 1782 until his death. His zealous evangelical preaching was bitterly opposed by parish leaders, but proved immensely popular and influential among Cambridge undergraduates. He supported the British and Foreign Bible Society and helped to found the Church Missionary Society. His curate Henry Martyn became chaplain of the East India Company and one of India’s best-known missionaries.

Historian Lord Macaulay wrote of him, “If you knew what his authority and influence were, and how they extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, you would allow that his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any primate.”

A meditation on the life of Charles Simeon, by John Piper, is posted here.

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Sermons

Sermon for Remembrance Day / Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity

“I have called you friends”

It is one of the most extraordinary passages in the Scriptures and perhaps in the history of religious philosophy. It belongs especially, it seems to me, to the rich tradition of the literature of consolation. It teaches us something profound and wonderful about the real meaning of the ethical principle upon which our lives radically depend.

Against a utilitarian or consequentialist view of ethics which merely looks at the consequences real or imagined that arise from certain actions, the outcomes, as it were, we have with the words of Jesus the very principle that shapes and informs our actions. This passage is read on The Feast of St. Barnabas (BCP, p.227) who is sometimes called the son of consolation. Here is our real consolation and comfort in the face of the great evils of our world and day. Jesus’s words reveal to us the great ethic of sacrificial love as the real defining principle in our lives. It can only be about that principle in usas this passage makes clear. “Ye are my friends,” Jesus says, an outstanding claim. The very idea of a friendship between God and man is almost unthinkable for ancient philosophy and religion, the distance between God and man far too incommensurate. And yet, Jesus says, “I have called you friends.”

But only if we do whatsoever he commands us. Our friendship with God in Christ depends upon his Word being alive in us. And that means our knowing, each according to our own capacities, what God seeks for us in our lives. Somehow this passage strengthens us in the face of the great evils of the world, particularly the evils of war.

Today we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ending of the First World War. We are only beginning to begin to understand and to come to terms with the evil of our humanity. Remembrance Day marks the ending of the First World War; yet the significance of this is so great that it is on this day that we also remember the Second World War, itself an extension of the first, as well as remembering a multitude of other wars and their human cost. Somehow we remember them through this remembrance. We contemplate the dark horrors of the twentieth century unleashed by our humanity upon our humanity in unprecedented ways. We confront the deadly and destructive capacities of our technocratic world. That we try to remember, that we can remember at all, is the signal virtue of this day.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 12 – 18 November

Monday, November 12th
4:45-5:15 World Religions Class – KES

Tuesday, November 13th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Wednesday, November 14th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, November 16th
Preparation for Ham Supper

Saturday, November 17th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Parish Ham Supper – Parish Hall

Sunday, November 18th, Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
7:00pm Mass – KES

Upcoming Events:

Sunday, December 2nd
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols with KES (Gr. 7-11)

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Concert ($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

Remembrance Day

A prayer of The Very Rev. Eric Milner-White (1884-1963), Dean of York:

Lest We ForgetO Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Source: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.

Charles Bosseron Chambers, The ReturnArtwork: Charles Bosseron Chambers, The Return, 1917. Holy Innocents’ Church, New York City.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:3-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:18-26

George Percy Jacomb-Hood, The Raising of Jairus’ DaughterArtwork: George Percy Jacomb-Hood, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1885. Oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 November

Ye are my friends

This week brings us to Remembrance Day, always a remarkable part of the educational programme of the School. The largest team that any of you will ever be on is the Cadet Corps. It is the School as a corps, a body, a living body, and not a corpse, a dead body, I hasten to add! Though, to be honest, that partly depends on all of you stepping up and keeping in step with one another; in short, honouring and respecting one another as part of something bigger than yourselves, a community defined by certain principles and ideals. In a way, the corps is the School on parade.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that finally ended the Great War. It is so significant that November 11th marks our remembrance of the Second World War as well, itself a continuation in many ways of the first. There is something powerful and arresting about the First World War that remains with us and rightly disturbs us as imparting the legacy of something profoundly disquieting about ourselves. We are only beginning to begin to come to terms with the horror and the evil of our humanity. There was something cataclysmic about the First World War which I fear we still struggle to comprehend and have yet to understand fully let alone from which to begin to learn.

Remembrance Day is not about the glorification of war. The Great War, after all, unleashed a wealth of literature, poem after poem, novel after novel, that is profoundly anti-war, opposed in a deep and fundamental sense to the glorification of war. That we should have to be reminded of this points to a deep forgetting and a profound literary ignorance if not insouciance in our contemporary culture, as if we were above and beyond such things, superior and better than those who have gone before us. I fear the arrogance of a progressivism that is so convinced of its own self-righteousness and so oblivious of its own hypocrisy especially in the face of the atrocities of our own times.

Remembrance Day is a sober remembrance of the senselessness and the madness that our humanity in its disarray and evil is capable of unleashing against one another and against our world. It forces us to look within, to look at the evil of our own hearts and to realize with a fall of own hearts that we are not very different from those who have gone before us. Even more, it should provide some critical self-reflection about our technocratic exuberance that instead of providing the solution are simply part of the problem. It is that possibility of a deeper thoughtfulness that is the most necessary and significant feature of our Remembrance Day observances.

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Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, LuxembourgO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: St. Willibrord statue, Echternach, Luxembourg.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

No one talks as much about money as Jesus and there is nothing that Jesus talks quite so much about as money. He knows us only too well, our weaknesses and our temptations. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, he teaches us. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”, he warns us. And in today’s Gospel, “Show me the tribute-money”, Jesus demands of the Pharisees, who sought to “entangle him in his talk”.

“Whose is this image and superscription?”he asks about the coin. It bears the image of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor, the highest power on earth, humanly speaking, at that time, much as we used to have and still do have currency that bears the image of the Queen here in Canada and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. The point is that money is the concrete symbol of power, of worldly and political power. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is a true statement, after all, which reflects the political order to which economic matters are subordinate. But can money be the image of who we are in the truth of our being? Can it be the image of us? Are we simply and entirely by definition, homo economicus, economic man?

In my view, money cannot capture who we essentially are. If we think that it can, then we forget and deceive ourselves. We give it a power over ourselves. The question “whose is this image and superscription?” recalls us to ourselves and recalls us and all things to God. More to the point, ‘Whose image and superscription are we?’

The coin may bear the image of Caesar and thus symbolize his worldly power, but as Jesus will say to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above”. Even the power of Caesar ultimately derives from and belongs to God, and so too, for every power and every kingdom.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 5 – 11 November

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

Wednesday, November 7th
6:30-8:00pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, November 9th
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, November 11th, Remembrance Day/Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:00am Holy Communion (Shortened and said Service)
11:00am Windsor Cenotaph Service followed by the Service of Remembrance at the KES Cenotaph
5:00pm Ringing of the Bell (100 peals) to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 17th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Ham Supper

Sunday, December 2nd
4:00pm Advent Lessons & Carols with KES

Wednesday, December 19th
7:00pm Capella Regalis Concert ($15.00 – concert; $ 20.00, pulled-pork supper & concert).

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22

Salomon Koninck, The Tribute MoneyArtwork: Salomon Koninck, The Tribute Money, 1640. Oil on panel, Private collection.

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