Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Candlemas/Epiphany 4
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Candlemas/Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.
Sermon for Candlemas/Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a woman,
made under the law”
Candlemas is the mid-winter festival of light and life at once looking back to Christ’s nativity and looking ahead to his Passion and Death. Intriguingly, it is both a feast of Christ and of Mary, combining two ancient precedents. For the Eastern Church it was a feast of Christ, “the Presentation of Christ in the Temple,” first noted in Etheria’s Peregrinatio to Jerusalem in the late 4th century. For the Western Church, it became a feast of Mary, “the Purification of Mary.” John Cosin, a 17th century Bishop of Durham, combined both titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Churches. All of this belongs, we might say, to the light of history. By the mid-fifth century, lighted candles were introduced to the festival, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas.
You have, no doubt, begun to notice the lengthening of days. Candlemas, too, is associated with the astronomical tradition of cross-quarter days, days which fall more or less midway between the days which mark the four quarters of the year; in this case, Christmas, December 25th, and the Annunciation, March 25th. Candlemas falls roughly between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox (March 20th this year; Easter being the Sunday after the first full moon post-equinox). All this belongs, we might say, to the light of nature, make what you will of rodents such as groundhogs and their shadows!
But as Luke makes clear, the story of the purification and presentation belongs to the light of law and prophecy. “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord; (as it is written in the law of the Lord, every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord).” Thus two customs of the Law meet in this story: Mary’s purification seven days after giving birth, and the presentation to the Lord forty days after his birth. in the wonderful paradox of the Lord being presented to the Lord! All belonging to the light of the Law, we might say. But then with Simeon and Anna, we see the light of prophecy at once fulfilled in Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, in his startling and prophetic words about the child Christ and Mary his mother, and in the wonderful words of Anna the prophetess. All this belongs, we might say, to the light of prophecy.
Month at a Glance, February 2025
(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)
Sunday, February 9th, Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, February 16th, Septuagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Followed by Pot-luck Luncheon and Annual Parish Meeting
Sunday, February 23rd, Sexagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple
The collect for today, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin (also traditionally called Candlemas), from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we humbly beseech thy Majesty, that, as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts, by the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Malachi 3:1-5
The Gospel: St. Luke 2:22-40
Artwork: Jacopo Torriti, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1296. Mosaic, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.
The Fourth Sunday After The Epiphany
The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, who knowest us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright: Grant to us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Romans 13:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:35-41
Artwork: James Ensor, Christ Calming the Storm, 1891. Oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 30 January
Something rich and strange
“Be still and know that I am God,” the psalmist says (Ps. 46. 11). It speaks to the life of the School in the recognition of the need to be still and quiet within ourselves in order to begin to think reflectively. Such is Chapel. Quiet moments that are not about this and that in the busyness of our daily lives, not about the competing concerns that stir up emotions and excite distress and discord, but a time of contemplation and quiet about the universal aspects of our humanity.
We have been considering, in the context of ‘epiphany,’ the idea of ‘complementary universalities’ as opposed to conflicting or ‘competing universalities’. One example is the universality of suffering common to the human condition in one way or another but differently addressed by the various world religions and in the competing social and therapeutic ideologies of contemporary culture. We have tried to connect “the gift of myrrh,” in the classic Epiphany story of the Magi-Kings, with Jesus in the Temple making known to us that he “must be about [his] Father’s business,” and with the first miracle, “the beginning of signs” which turns upon his “hour,” an explicit reference to his passion and death out of which comes resurrection and life. All three speak to the radical meaning of ‘epiphany’ as the making known of the essential divinity of Christ and the idea of God’s will and purpose for our humanity. God seeks the ultimate good for our humanity which is not found simply in the circumstances and actions of our lives but in our being found in God’s all embracing will manifest as love. This way of looking at things has parallels with other religions and philosophical traditions.
Diotima, the fictional female philosopher in Plato’s Symposium, argues that “the object of [our] love,” meaning our desires, “is that [we] should have the good” and to “have it forever.” “Love,” she says, “is the desire to have the good forever.” Good here is not simply something subjective and personal. It concerns the good of all within which we find the good of ourselves. But how to attain that ideal? That is another question and one which the Epiphany stories undertake to show by way of the motion of God towards us that complements our desires for something universal. Epiphany is miracle, the miracle of life itself in God who is the source and end of all life. In the Christian view, this focuses on Christ. “In him was life; and the life was the light of everyone.”
Charles Stuart, King and Martyr
The collect for today, the commemoration of Charles I (1600-1649), King of England, Martyr (source):
King of kings and Lord of lords,
whose faithful servant Charles
prayed for his persecutors
and died in the living hope of thine eternal kingdom:
grant us, by thy grace, so to follow his example
that we may love and bless our enemies,
through the intercession of thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
with the Epistle and Gospel for a Martyr:
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:12-19
The Gospel: St. Matthew 16:24-27
Artwork: Anthony van Dyck, Charles I at the Hunt, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris.
John Chrysostom, Doctor and Bishop
The collect for today, the Feast of St. John Chrysostom (347-407), Preacher, Doctor of the Church, Archbishop of Constantinople (source):
O God of truth and love,
who gavest to thy servant John Chrysostom
eloquence to declare thy righteousness in the great congregation
and courage to bear reproach for the honour of thy name:
mercifully grant to the ministers of thy word
such excellence in preaching
that all people may share with them
in the glory that shall be revealed;
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 Lesson: Jeremiah 1:4-10
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:12-15
Artwork: Jean-Paul Laurens, St. John Chrysostom confronting Aelia Eudoxia, Empress of Constantinople, 1894. Oil on canvas, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Third Sunday after Epiphany
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Third Sunday after Epiphany.
Sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany
“Overcome evil with good”
It is a strong statement about the power and nature of the good and a strong indictment of a form of false or incomplete justice that belongs to revenge. Revenge is about our wanting to get back at someone who has wronged or hurt us as we think or imagine. But if we are honest with ourselves it means recognizing that we do not simply want to get back, to do just as it has been done to us. No. What we really want is to annihilate or humiliate the other; to “nuke them till they glow,” as I recall some dyed in the wool theological liberals at Harvard saying at the time of the Iranians taking American hostages. Justice as getting ahead not getting even.
Paul suggests that is not the way to go. It is our way but not God’s way, quoting first, Deuteronomy on vengeance, and, then, Proverbs, about feeding and giving drink to your enemy. But what exactly is meant in saying that in so doing “thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” How is that good and just. It sounds more than a wee bit vindictive. But is it? Might it not rather suggest the conviction of conscience in countering evil with good and thus awakening that sense of the greater power of the good in the other, the enemy? It transcends the false and limited forms of human justice. The injunction at the beginning of the Epistle reading from Romans to “be not wise in [our] own conceits,” our own thinking, is complemented by the concluding injunction to “be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Such injunctions are far more than the chorus of empty platitudes that dominate our contemporary culture. Be kind, be nice, be good, be happy – all true but what do they mean? What does it mean to say to your children that you just want them to be happy without giving them any idea of what happiness is? That is to leave them alone and empty in themselves as if happiness is merely subjective. Aristotle, who uses the word eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness in his Nicomachean Ethics, means by it something far removed from our modern assumptions. It is a life of virtue lived in accord with reason; something substantial and more than simply something emotional and personal. As such the great traditions of ethical philosophy or theology provide us with something more and greater that shape and inform our lives in what is ultimately good even in the face of “our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities,” as the Collect wisely says. The good is the mercy of God who speaks to the truth of our desires and gathers us to himself, seeking our good and our wholeness; ultimately the healing of soul and body.