Tuesday, June 7th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies’ Mtg. – Parish Hall
Sunday, June 12th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
9:30am Holy Communion – KES
10:30am Holy Communion
4:30pm Evening Prayer at Christ Church
7:00pm “An Inspirational Concert with Rachel MacLean”. No admission cost but a food donation for Harvest House is requested.
The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St John 15:26-16:4a
Artwork: The Last Supper, 6th-century mosaic, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. This is the oldest known representation of the Last Supper.
A creedal teaching, the Ascension of Christ is one of the most overlooked feasts in the life of the Christian Church. Its meaning, however, is quite radical. In a way, it brings to a kind of completion the radical meaning of Christ’s resurrection.
Death and resurrection constitute the fundamental pattern of Christian life but without the Ascension to say that is to say very little. What the Ascension reminds us is our home with God. The Ascension of Christ is about the homecoming of the Son to the Father which establishes our homeland of the spirit. The Fathers of the early Church grasped this point ever so strongly. The Ascension, as Leo the Great puts it, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” In Christ’s Ascension, the heaven of God becomes our homeland.
The Ascension marks the culmination of the Easter Season. It inaugurates a new spiritual outlook, but one which forever remains grounded in the pattern of death and resurrection. We have an end with God and that homeland of the spirit is something which we participate in now through prayer and praise and through the sacraments.
We ascend in the Ascension of Christ. Somehow we are caught up into that heavenly motion. How? Through prayer, the very thing that has brought us to the Ascension of Christ. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,“ as Augustine remarks. The Ascension signals the purpose and meaning of Christ’s being with us. Nothing need stand between us and God except the barriers which we create ourselves. Prayer as the lifting up of our hearts places us in the divine will for our humanity and world. He has the whole world in his hands; never more so than at the Ascension when the Son returns to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world.
It is in prayer and praise that participate in that work of cosmic redemption and are gathered into the heavenly community. We ascend in the Ascension of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2011
The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St Mark 16:14-20
Artwork: Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Ascension: Christ with angels and apostles, 13th century mosaic, Facade, Basilica di San Frediano, Lucca. Photograph taken by admin, 22 May 2010.
The collect for today, the commemoration of Justin (c. 100 – 165), Philosopher, Apologist, Martyr at Rome (source):
O God our redeemer,
who through the folly of the cross
didst teach thy martyr Justin
the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ:
free us, we beseech thee, from every kind of error,
that we, like him, may be firmly grounded in the faith,
and make thy name known to all peoples;
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: 1 Corinthians 1:18-30
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:1-8
Jesus’ words are strong and wonderful words. They capture an important feature of the Christian understanding, one which, perhaps, we have forgotten. The Resurrection changes how we look on the world and on our experiences in the world. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. The celebration of human redemption equally embraces the idea of the redemption of the world. That is really what is meant by the term ‘overcoming’.
Today is, or was, commonly called Rogation Sunday. Rogation is about asking. Prayer, in its most basic sense, is about asking. To ask for something recognizes that you don’t have something which you need or would like to have. The idea of asking is itself a kind of reality check on the human situation. It recognizes that we are incomplete. Asking means looking to another for what we do not have but want and need. The ultimate Other is God. Asking is a fundamental feature of prayer. And of the possibilities of education, of learning, too. The passionate desire (eros) to know means recognising that you do not know.
Asking is complemented by another fundamental feature of prayer, namely, praise. Prayer and praise are important features of Rogationtide. Prayer is to be understood in a much bigger and broader sense than what we might ordinarily think. Prayer is large in its scope. As Richard Hooker puts it, “prayer signifies all the service we ever do unto God.” In other words, prayer in its largest sense embraces the whole of our lives. Our lives are to be understood as lives of prayer and praise.
The liberating factor is that prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing need stand between us and God. Why not? Because of Christ’s death and resurrection. We are, you might say, freed to God. Prayer and praise are about that freedom.
Monday, May 30th, Rogation Monday
7:30pm King’s Chorale Rehearsal – Christ Church
Tuesday, May 31st, Rogation Tuesday
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies’ Mtg. – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion
Thursday, June 2nd, Ascension Day
7:00pm Holy Communion
Saturday, June 4th
7:30pm King’s Chorale Concert
Sunday, June 5th, Sunday after Ascension
8:00am Holy Communion
9:30am Holy Communion – KES
10:30am Holy Communion
4:30pm Evening Prayer at Christ Church
Upcoming events:
Sunday, June 12th, 7:00pm
As part of the Relay for Life, Christ Church will host “An Inspirational Concert with Rachel MacLean”. No admission cost but a food donation for Harvest House is requested.
The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: St James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St John 16:23-33
Artwork: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Last Supper, 1745-47. Oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris.
The collect for today, the Feast of The Venerable Bede (673-735), Monk, Historian, Doctor of the Church (source):
Almighty God, maker of all things,
whose Son Jesus Christ gave to thy servant Bede
grace to drink in with joy
the word which leadeth us to know thee and to love thee:
in thy goodness
grant that we also may come at length to thee,
the source of all wisdom,
and stand before thy face;
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.
For The Epistle: Wisdom 7:15-22
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:47-52
Click here to read more on The Venerable Bede.
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Augustine (d. c. 605), first Archbishop of Canterbury (source):
O Lord our God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thine apostles and send them forth to preach the Gospel to the nations: We bless thy holy name for thy servant Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, whose labors in propagating thy Church among the English people we commemorate today; and we pray that all whom thou dost call and send may do thy will, and bide thy time, and see thy glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20a
The Gospel: St Luke 5:1-11
Celtic Christianity had taken root in Britain and Ireland by the end of the third century. In the fifth century, however, Britain was overrun by non-Christian invaders from northern Europe: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
In 596, Pope Gregory the Great chose Augustine, prior of a monastery at Rome, to head a mission to convert the pagan English. After Gregory consecrated Augustine bishop, the missionary party landed in Kent in 597. The dominant ruler of Anglo-Saxon England was the heathen King Ethelbert of Kent, whose wife Bertha was a Christian princess of the Franks. The king, although initially uninterested in Christianity, allowed Augustine and his companions to live in his territory and freely preach the gospel. Within four years, the king and several thousand of his people had been converted and baptised.
After his consecration as archbishop, Augustine built the first cathedral at Canterbury. Pope Gregory had initially planned to organise the church in England with metropolitan sees at the old Roman centres of London and York. London, however, was in the hands of a hostile king, and Canterbury was therefore chosen as Augustine’s seat. The people of London were later brought to the faith through the preaching of Augustine’s companion Mellitus.
Augustine established a monastery just outside Canterbury’s city walls, originally dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul and later known as St. Augustine’s.
Augustine tried but failed to secure the co-operation of Celtic bishops in evangelisation of the Anglo-Saxons. Beyond south-east England, missionary efforts unrelated to Augustine’s were successful in converting the English. The most important of these was the Celtic mission from Iona.
Augustine also helped Ethelbert to write the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon laws.
Click here for St Augustine’s page at the website of The Archbishop of Canterbury.
