Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the commemoration of St. Perpetua, St. 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

Perpetua, 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 appears 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.

Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Saints Perpetua and FelicityArtwork: Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Mosaic, Saints Perpetua and Felicity Chapel, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C.

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Sermons

Meditation for Ash Wednesday

Return to me with all your heart … return to the Lord, your God

The words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.

The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.

Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.

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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):

Joseph Noel Paton, Christian at the Foot of the CrossALMIGHTY 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: Joseph Noel Paton, Christian at the Foot of the Cross, 1873. Oil on canvas, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, U.K.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Quinquagesima

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Quinquagesima Sunday.

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Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?

It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.

But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.

Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, March 2025

(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)

Wednesday, March 5th, Ash Wednesday
12:15pm Communion & Ashes

Thursday, March 6th, Comm. of Thomas Aquinas
5:00pm King’s College Chapel: Fr. Curry preaching

Sunday, March 9th, First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 11th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, March 16th, Second Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, March 23rd, Third Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, March 30th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

Quinquagesima

The collect for today, the Sunday called Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Healing the Blind ManArtwork: Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Healing the Blind Man, c. 1712-16. Oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint David of Wales

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint David (c. 520-589), Bishop of Menevia, Patron Saint of Wales (source):

Holy Trinity Sloane Square, St. David of WalesAlmighty God,
who didst call thy servant David
to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries
for the people of Wales:
in thy mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal
for the gospel of Christ,
we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit
be all honour and glory,
world without end.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-29

Artwork: Saint David, stained glass, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photograph taken by admin 20 October 2014.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 February

Joseph and his brothers

The story of Joseph and his brothers ends the Book of Genesis on the poignant and moving idea of reconciliation. It is in that sense a wonderful illustration of what the poet George Herbert calls “the two vast and spacious things” which are most needed to be pondered and known, “sin and love.”

Joseph, as we saw last week, was hated by his brothers because he was the favourite son of their father, the problem of sibling rivalry, on the one hand, and the limitations of human love, on the other hand. How to love our children in ways that respect each in their own particularity? How to avoid the temptation to quantify our loves, our likes and our dislikes, about who loves who more than others? Do we need to let the love of one for another consume us with resentment and envy? Yet it so often does when love becomes a matter of competing for attention either on the part of children or for that matter, of parents, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. “Which of you,” he says, using the royal ‘we’, to his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, “shall we say doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend?”

Joseph, who was not killed by his brothers despite their intent, was thrown into a waterless pit, his coat taken by his brothers and smeared with the blood of a lamb to deceive their father, Jacob, about his death. Unbeknownst to them, he is sold into slavery in Egypt where he rises after various adventures to a position of authority in Pharaoh’s government where he stores up food in anticipation of a period of famine. Years later during the time of famine, his brothers came to Egypt seeking food. Joseph sees them but they do not know him. What will happen in that encounter? Will it be an occasion for Joseph’s revenge on them for their evil intent?

Marilynne Robinson notes that the Book of Genesis “is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” Cain who killed Abel is protected from being killed himself. Out of his lineage will come Enoch and Jubal, the one who will, like Elijah, be taken up into heaven, and the other, who is the father of musical instruments. While the concept of a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a kind of measured revenge as a form of human justice, appears in Genesis, it is constantly questioned. As Robinson nicely puts it, “Whoever kills a man will be killed by a man. Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God,” suggesting that this is “the fundamental absurdity even of punishment limited by strict equivalence.” It is a human way of looking at things which contrasts with the sense of divine restraint that operates in so much of Genesis and which qualifies the simplistic view of divine retribution. Even the story of the flood ends not with the complete annihilation of the human world which has so abused creation but with a renewal of creation and the setting of bounds to human behaviour in the form of covenant and law. In this sense, Genesis as a whole acts as a check on revenge and violence.

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Prayers and liturgy

George Herbert, Priest and Poet

The collect for today, the commemoration of George Herbert (1593-1633), Priest, Poet (source):

George HerbertKing of glory, king of peace,
who didst call thy servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and king:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to thy service;
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.
Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:1-4
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:1-10

The hymn, “Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing”, was originally a poem by George Herbert, published in The Temple.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

The church with psalms must shout,
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
My God and King.

George Herbert was born to a wealthy family in Montgomery, Wales. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he appeared headed for a prominent public career, but the deaths of King James I and two patrons ended that possibility.

He chose to pursue holy orders in the Church of England and became rector at Bemerton, near Salisbury, in 1629, where he died four years later of tuberculosis. His preaching and service to church and parishioners contributed to his reputation as an exemplary pastor. He did not become known as a poet until shortly after he died, when his poetry collection The Temple was published.

He is buried in Saint Andrew Bemerton Churchyard.

William Dyce, George Herbert at BemertonArtwork: William Dyce, George Herbert at Bemerton, Salisbury, 1860. Oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.

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