Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 8:00am Holy Communion

“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve”

The story of the temptations of Christ read on the First Sunday in Lent follows upon the baptism of Christ. The baptism of Christ is an epiphany – a making known of his essential divine identity: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased”. What immediately follows is that Christ is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The temptations belong to the pageant of the passion.

What are the temptations of Christ? They are our temptations brought to a certain kind of clarity in Jesus Christ. We are apt to have a negative view of temptation. But in truth, there is something altogether positive about the fact of temptations. They are a necessary feature of our humanity. Whether or not we are tempted is not at issue, but how we understand and respond to the temptations in our souls is altogether crucial. The story of the temptations of Christ is about two things: the naming of the three forms of temptation; and the threefold overcoming of temptation. The critical lesson for us is that temptation is properly named and only overcome by Christ and only by Christ in us.

The wilderness is the place of spiritual combat. It is also the place of spiritual refreshment and renewal. There is a struggle, a conflict. The conflict is within. It is the conflict of wills within us. We are divided against ourselves in every temptation. It is a question about our fundamental identity. What really defines us?

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 10 – 16 March

Monday, March 10th
6:00-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, March 11th
6:00 ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, March 13th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Sunday, March 16th, Lent II
8:00am Holy Communion – Parish Hall
10:30am Holy Communion – Parish Hall

Upcoming events:

On Tuesday evenings throughout Lent, there will be Lenten Services of Holy Communion with reflections on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The services are at 7:00pm on the following Tuesday evenings:

Tuesday, March 18th, 7:00pm
Tuesday, March 25th, 7:00pm
Tuesday, April 1st, 7:00pm

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who for our sake didst fast forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence, that, our flesh being subdued to the Spirit, we may ever obey thy godly motions in righteousness and true holiness, to thy honour and glory; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
The Gospel: St Matthew 4:1-11

Rubens, Temptation of ChristArtwork: Peter Paul Rubens, Temptation of Christ, 1620. Oil on panel, Courtauld Gallery, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Priest, Friar, Poet, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
who didst enrich thy Church with the learning and holiness
of thy servant Thomas Aquinas:
grant to all who seek thee
a humble mind and a pure heart
that they may know thy Son Jesus Christ
to be the way, the truth and the life;
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Born into a noble family near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, St. Thomas was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino until age thirteen, and then at the University of Naples. When he decided to join the Dominican Order, his family were dismayed because the Dominicans were mendicants and regarded as socially inferior to the Benedictines. Thomas’s brothers kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year in the family’s castle, but he finally escaped and became a Dominican friar in 1244.

The rest of Thomas’s life was spent studying, teaching, preaching, and writing. Initially, he studied philosophy and theology with Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. Albert was said to prophesy that, although Thomas was called the dumb ox (probably referring to his physical size), “his lowing would soon be heard all over the world”.

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Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Perpetua, Saint Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):

O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
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: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14

St. Perpetua, Euphrasian Basilica, PorecPerpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appear to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Artwork: Unknown Venetian artist, St. Perpetua, c. 1280. Mosaic, Euphrasian Basilica, Porec, Croatia.

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Sermons

Meditation for Ash Wednesday

“Remember, O man that thou art dust and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Dust and ashes. These are the symbols that mark the beginning of the pilgrimage of love. For that is the deep meaning of Lent. It is all about the renewal of love in our souls and lives, a renewing in us of the divine image in which we are made. That there can be a journey, a pilgrimage, is itself the great good news for our world, weary and in disarray.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, explores the ambiguities of our modern world, our uncertainties and hesitations, the ambiguities and the confusions of our desires.  “Because I do not hope to turn again,” it begins, a phrase which functions as a kind of mantra, and one which captures so much of the despair and uncertainty of our world and day. The despair and uncertainty is in ourselves. And yet, hope against hope constantly breaks through as counter to our despair. There is a yearning, a desire for something more. There is prayer. “Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still,” echoing the psalm prayer, “be still and know that I am God,” (Psalm 46.10). Eliot’s poem ends with a prayer from the liturgy and which is included in the Penitential Service of our Prayer Book (BCP, p. 614). And let my cry come unto thee.” Hope breaks through and seeks its voice, the voice of prayer.

Dust and ashes. They are the profound symbols that recall us to the truth of our humanity. Dust recalls us to creation, specifically to our human creation as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit, the concrete expression of our uniqueness as being made in the image of God, but as well having a connection to everything else in the created order. We are not the authors of our own being. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 100). The dust is a strong reminder of our origins, of the truth of our being. “Remember, O man, that thou art dust.” It is something inescapable, something which can only be forgotten at our peril, for “unto dust shalt thou return.” We cannot escape our creatureliness. Denial is the folly of despair. No. The struggle must be to reclaim our being as made in the image of God.

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Sermons

Sermon for Ash Wednesday

“Repent ye”

It will not do, especially on Ash Wednesday, to begin with anything less than the Scriptures. Oh, I know, doesn’t every preacher begin with a text from Scripture? To ask the question is to beg the question, on the one hand, and, on the other, to suggest that there is a problem. What scripture text and for what purpose, we might ask? We may realize that there are often other purposes or agendas that have precious little to do with any sort of biblical wisdom.

Ah, biblical wisdom! What is that? Does it exist? Can we speak of the Bible in any meaningful sense at all? And what does it have to do with Ash Wednesday? Because everything about this day and the season to which it invites makes no sense apart from the pageant of Scripture and, to push the point out into the open more fully, the pageant of Scripture doctrinally, that is to say, creedally, understood. That’s a tall order and yet one of the greatest importance. It is about reclaiming the very nature of our life in Christ. It belongs, we might say, to the very purpose of Lent.

Repentance. Impossible without a sense of God, the one very thing that contemporary culture within and without the Church insists on denying. Ash Wednesday is the wake-up call to what cannot be denied. It is not about some masochistic (or sadistic) way of beating up upon ourselves and others. It is about our acknowledgement of the grace of God which truly defines, governs, and rules our lives, the God “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is [our] perfect freedom.” Not just any freedom but perfect freedom! This is the daily prayer of the praying Church and yet we are often oblivious to its power and truth.

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Events

Lent at Christ Church, 2014

Lenten Programmes & Events
at Christ Church

On Tuesday evenings throughout Lent, there will be special Lenten Services of Holy Communion with reflections on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The services are at 7:00pm on the following Tuesday evenings:

Tuesday, March 18th 7:00pm
Tuesday, March 25th 7:00pm
Tuesday, April 1st 7:00pm

The Lenten Journey

The season of Lent concentrates the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage to God and with God into a span of forty days (excluding Sundays!). It is really the journey of the soul in love; the love of God and that love as moving more and more within us.

We go up to Jerusalem, Jesus tells the disciples on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. We go up with Jesus and we go up in the increasing and growing awareness of what Jerusalem means. A journey in love, to be sure, but one in which we confront all the forms of our unloveliness. Ultimately, the divine love bears all our unloveliness on the Cross of Christ Crucified. What really is our unloveliness? Sin, in all its endless forms, to be sure, but there is more to the journey than just the unloveliness of our sins. There is also the transforming power of love which seeks to make us lovely. Dante’s Purgatorio presents the programme of grace perfecting our humanity, “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue” as the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it.

It will be our challenge this Lent to contemplate the Beatitudes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as employed by Dante in his Purgatorio and as illustrating the idea of grace perfecting nature.

It shall be for us, I pray, the occasions of the deepening of our penitential adoration; our love for God borne out of his deep love for us signaled so powerfully in the crucifixion of Christ, the place, as it were, where sin and love meet and where love triumphs and reigns.

It is really all a question about the direction of our loves and our lives. We begin, to be sure, with the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday, but only to embark upon the upward path of grace transforming and perfecting our hearts and souls.

“Lord, for thy tender mercies’ sake, lay not our sins to our charge; But forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives; To decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore” (BCP, p. 614).

Fr. Curry

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Prayers and liturgy

Ash Wednesday

The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

El Greco, St Peter in PenitenceALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21

Artwork: El Greco, St Peter in Penitence, c. 1605. Oil on canvas, Hospital Tavera, Toledo.

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Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima

“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

The idea of life as a journey is a common yet compelling metaphor. It signifies a sense of purpose and indicates a sense of direction. But not all journeys are the same. The differences lie in the conception of the end which conditions the means. Lent would remind us of the essential character of the Christian journey.

The journey is the pilgrimage of the soul to God and it is a pilgrimage with God. The end is union with God and God makes our way to him with us. We are apt to forget how remarkable this really is. There is our human desiring, on the one hand, our quest for God, the odyssey of the human soul, as it were, but there is, on the other hand, the divine desiring, that is to say, God’s will for us.

The journey is the way of sacrifice, to be sure, but it portends the greater accomplishment, the discovery of our part in the body of Christ. What has to be forsaken is our continual tendency to mistake the part for the whole or to deny everything else except our own self-will. Such are the disorders of sin which result in suffering and death. The journey does not deny the realities of sin and suffering but makes the way of pilgrimage through them. This is the marvel and the wonder of the Christian faith, the marvel and the wonder of redemptive love.

That is why the journey is the way of suffering. Our way to God passes through the ways of our rejection of God. Our way to God is the way of redemptive suffering in which the disorders of our souls – our disordered loves – are set in order. The disciplines of Lent are altogether about this. They don’t involve a flight from the world and the extinguishing of our desires so much as they intend “the setting of love in order”. They embrace the three essential characteristics of the Christian pilgrimage: the way of purgation; the way of illumination; and the way of union.

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