Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima, 10:30am service

“Set love in order in me”

It is a wonderful phrase from that great love-song of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs. It serves as a governing principle for the season of Lent. Today is Quinquagesima Sunday. We have already had occasion to talk about these curious names which adorn the three Sundays before Lent. Quinquagesima Sunday, is also commonly known as Love Sunday. It brings us to the very threshold of the season of Lent, to that concentration of the pilgrimage of our lives into the space of forty days. Lent, above all else, is the pilgrimage of love. Love’s journeying ways shape us in love and bring us to love’s end, to the peace and joy and blessedness of Jerusalem redeemed.

Quinquagesima is called Love Sunday principally because of today’s Epistle reading at Communion. It is St. Paul’s great love-song: “If I have not love I am nothing worth…and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”, love. The theme is captured wonderfully in the Collect, but its profounder meaning is presented in the Eucharistic Gospel in the words of Jesus to the disciples that “we go up to Jerusalem.”

This day illustrates the business of Lent; the business, if you will, of setting love in order in us, both individually and collectively. All the readings on this day illuminate the path of our Lenten journey. It is the pilgrimage of love.

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Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima, 8:00am service

“If I have not love, I am nothing”

Love is everything and without it we are nothing. Tough love, it seems. What is this love? Quite simply, it is the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves.

But isn’t love, love? 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, “the still more excellent way” that transcends and transforms our human attempts at justice and right.

Divine charity perfects human charity. In the divine fellowship, the true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded. Such love cannot be an indifferent love, a love that is indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of others around us. Love indifferent is not love. The love that is sung in this Hymn of Love is the divine love which seeks our good, individually and collectively.

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Anglican issues

Motions passed at Annual Parish Meeting

Several motions were presented at today’s Annual Meeting of the Parish of Christ Church, Windsor, including two motions, posted below, that may be of interest to Anglicans beyond our Parish.  Both of these motions passed unanimously.

Motion # 4

Preamble:  Parishes have been asked to send to the Diocese [of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island] a parochial Mission Statement. The following expresses the intent and purpose for the continuing existence of the Parish, captures the intent and purpose of the Covenant in Ministry between the Rector and Parish, and establishes the principles that define an Anglican identity and witness.

Re: Mission Statement of the Parish of Christ Church:

To be a visible witness, in the community of Windsor and beyond, to the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as faithful stewards of the mysteries of God in Christ and in his body, the Church, according to the principles of our Anglican spiritual identity expressed in the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Solemn Declaration of 1893.

Motion # 5

Preamble: In the current distresses of the Anglican Communion and in the attempts to find a mechanism to hold the communion together, the Archbishop of Canterbury has sponsored an ‘Anglican Communion Covenant’.  The Covenant is attached in Appendix # 2 [and is posted online here].  The motion affirms the ‘Anglican Communion Covenant’ as consistent with the understanding of our identity, polity and life that the Parish has articulated from time-to-time as well as signaling our continued commitment tot eh Anglican Communion via the Archbishop of Canterbury regardless of the actions of local and national synods.

Re: Endorsement of the ‘Anglican Communion Covenant’

The Parish of Christ Church endorses the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘Anglican Communion Covenant’ as a mechanism for maintaining the unity of the Anglican Communion, in accord with the foundational principles of our Anglican identity expressed in the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, and the Thirty-nine Articles and as consistent with the Solemn Declaration of 1893 in Canada.

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2009

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2009 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2008 can be accessed via this page.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 15-21 February

Monday, February 15th
4:45-5:15 Confirmation Class – Rm. 204, KES

Tuesday, February 16th, Shrove Tuesday
3:30pm Holy Communion – Windsor Elms
4:30-6:00pm Pancake Super – Parish Hall

Wednesday, February 17th, Ash Wednesday
7:00am Penitential Service with Ashes
1:00pm Holy Communion with Ashes
2:30pm Imposition of Ashes at KES Chapel

Thursday, February 18th
1:30-3:00pm Seniors’ Drop-In

Sunday, February 21st, First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Family Service – Holy Communion
4:30pm Evening Prayer at KES

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Prayers and liturgy

Quinquagesima

The collect for today, 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

Leyden, Healing of the Blind Man of JerichoArtwork: Lucas van Leyden, The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho, 1531. Oil on canvas, transferred from panel, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Sermons

Dust and Ashes: Meditation for Ash Wednesday

Dust and ashes

Ash Wednesday reminds us with words that we are dust while ashes are placed on our foreheads. The dust recalls us to our creation as the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. The ashes are the ashes of repentance because of our having turned away from God in sin. They turn us to redemption.

The ashes are made from burning last years’ palm crosses. Fire ends in ashes. But these ashes mark a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes.

We are called to repentance. This requires an awareness of our imperfect loves. The ashes mark a beginning with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but God’s love is the greater fire which makes something out of the ashes of our lives. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.

It is the joy of renewing love. There is the joy of knowing that we have a gracious God to whom we may return, yet again. Repentance is the gracious stirring of his love in us recalling us to the truth of ourselves as found in him.

The ashes placed on our foreheads signify at once the rational faculty by which we are made in God’s image and the misuse of that divine image in us by our willful disobedience. The ashes are placed on our foreheads with the words that recall the dust of our origins but also our end, namely, dust dignified with divinity.

Lent is the season of renewal in love. The fire of Christ’s love is “that most burning love for the crucified” (St. Bonaventure). It does not end in ashes.

Fr. David Curry

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Events

West Hants Historical Society Heritage Banquet

Dr. Henry Roper on ‘Haliburton: Complexities and Contradictions’
West Hants Historical Society Heritage Banquet
Saturday, February 20th at 6:00pm, Windsor Legion Hall

Windsor, of course, is not the home of Sam Slick, road signs notwithstanding, anymore than the Valley is the Land of Evangeline. Sam Slick and Evangeline are the fictional creations of two authors, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), both writing in the middle of the 19th century, albeit with different sensibilities and interests. Windsor, however, is the home of Haliburton.

Longfellow’s romantic and imaginative telling of the story of the expulsion of the Acadians from these lands, which he never visited, may or may not be to our modern tastes and liking, but it is part of our legacy. His poem, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), has left an indelible mark upon the sense of our history and our sense of the landscape, however awkward the descendents of the displacers, whether they were Planters or Loyalists, might feel about those whom they displaced. But, then, the Maritime and Canadian story is the story of displaced peoples.

It is, perhaps, nice to think of this area as once being “the forest primeval” with “murmuring pines and hemlocks” as well as recalling the remarkable enterprises of the Acadian settlers whose “hands … had raised with labour incessant”, the “dikes” that continue to define the land, “the happy valley” that Blomidon overlooks, as Longfellow imagined. The land he evokes is a kind of Arcadia, an ancient image of the harmony of man and nature imaginatively realised in the idyllic Acadian culture he describes but which, after the “grand dérangement”, remains only as a memory, a story told “by the evening fire” by the remnants of the Acadians, and by Longfellow for us in his poem.

Longfellow got his story from another American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he drew on Haliburton’s remarkable 1829 History of Nova Scotia, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, for a sense of the land and for some of the political background.

There may be features of the personality and perspective of Thomas Chandler Haliburton that are not to our liking and that even disquiet and disturb us greatly. A lawyer, judge and statesman who played an important role in the establishment of responsible government in Nova Scotia, an historian and a novelist of popular note, especially in England, he was not without his faults. Not altogether unlike Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), perhaps. Jefferson was the third President of the United States of America, and the main architect of the American Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. A strong proponent of the rights of man against all forms of tyranny, he yet had slaves and fathered children through them, namely, the Hemingses of Monticello. There are the contradictions of character in Haliburton, too, with respect to the black people, free and slave, who were part of the post-Acadian settlements in these parts. It is simply part of the story.

The West Hants Historical Society is committed to the preservation, presentation and promotion of the rich heritage of our area in all of its moments and in connection with the larger features of Maritime and Canadian history. It is very much a work in progress. On Saturday, February 20th, at 6:00pm, the Society will hold its Annual Heritage Banquet at the Windsor Legion Hall. This year’s banquet will feature as the guest speaker, Dr. Henry Roper, President of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. He will speak on Haliburton: Complexities and Contradictions.

Henry Roper is a retired professor of humanities at the University of King’s College, Halifax, where he also served as vice-president, registrar and director of the King’s Foundation Year Programme. In 2009 King’s awarded him an honorary doctorate of canon law.  He has written numerous articles on the intellectual and religious history of Nova Scotia and is the co-editor of The Collected Works of George Grant, Vols. 3 and 4 (University of Toronto Press, 2005 and 2009).

The Heritage Banquet has itself become an event of historical significance. For over twenty-five years, the banquet has been held as a way of celebrating the rich history of our area and as an important fund-raiser for the work of the Society. The cost of the banquet is $ 20.00 and includes hot cider, a full hot meal with juice and dessert. There will also be a door prize. Please contact Veronica Connelly (798-5212), Elliott Daniels (798-1065), or Don & Betty Sheehan (798-2659) for tickets or purchase them at Daniel’s Flower Shop on Water Street or the Apple Blossom Shop on Water Street or at the West Hants Historical Museum, 281 King Street, Windsor on Wednesdays, 10:00-3:00pm (798-4706).

(Rev’d) David Curry
President of the West Hants Historical Society
February 1st, 2010

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Caedmon

The collect for a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar, in commemoration of Saint Caedmon (d. 680), Monk of Whitby, first English poet, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Caedmon, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:9-17

geograph-263793-by-RichTeaSaint Caedmon is the first English poet whose name is known. Saint Bede the Venerable tells Caedmon’s story in Book IV, Chapter 24, of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede records that Caedmon was a herdsman who at an advanced age suddenly received the gift of poetry and song. Someone appeared to Caedmon in a dream one night and asked him to sing.  In response, he spontaneously sang verses in praise of the God the Creator. When he awoke, he remembered the words of his song and added more lines.

He went to speak with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. She and several learned men examined Caedmon and affirmed that his gift was from God.

Caedmon became a monk at Whitby and composed a large body of poetry and song on many Christian subjects, including the Creation story, the Exodus, the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles.

Unfortunately, almost none of Caedmon’s work survives. Only his Hymn, recorded by Bede in Latin and Old English, is known to us. Here is a modern English translation:

Praise we the Fashioner now of Heaven’s fabric,
The majesty of his might and his mind’s wisdom,
Work of the world-warden, worker of all wonders,
How he the Lord of Glory everlasting,
Wrought first for the race of men Heaven as a rooftree,
Then made he Middle Earth to be their mansion.

Source: Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, rev. ed. 1968, Penguin, p. 251.

A humble and holy monk, Caedmon died in perfect charity with his fellow servants of God.

Photograph: Memorial to Caedmon, St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The inscription reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English Sacred Song. Fell asleep hard by, 680”.  © Copyright RichTea and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Sermons

Sermon for Sexagesima

“Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God”

Dust and dirt? Not again?! These are hardly appealing images for thinking about the nature of our humanity in its relation to God. But that is exactly what we are being asked to consider this morning, learning to trust not “in any thing that we do” or in our own power and strength but actually learning to “glory even in the things which concern [our] infirmities,” as Paul says, and thinking about what kind of ground we are, in which God’s word is being sown, as the parable from Luke’s Gospel suggests. Somehow the turn to dust and dirt on this Sexagesima Sunday is critical for our understanding of the redemption of our humanity in Jesus Christ. Hardly appealing, it might seem, but divinely necessary.

Apparently, it takes courage and humility. Apparently, it takes prudence and humility. What Paul is talking about in his Second Letter to the Corinthians takes courage and is courage, one of the four cardinal virtues. It is about standing fast and firm inwardly in the face of every imaginable form of hardship, both natural disasters and human violence, in perils and in prisons; not to mention that other burden, “the care of all the churches.” And it is also about the virtue of prudence, another one of the four cardinal virtues, as shown in the parable of the sower and the seed. What kind of ground we are has to do with how we order our lives with respect to God’s word; “the good ground” is the metaphor for “the good heart” that “hearing the word, keep[s] it, and bring[s] forth fruit with patience.” That is prudence, practical wisdom with respect to the things of God.

Humility provides the connection. It connects us to the ground at the same time as it signals our openness to God. Only by virtue of the first, our connection to the ground, can there be the second, our openness to God. Once again, this is why the story of Creation is so important and so necessary for our thinking about human redemption. Redemption, after all, completes and perfects our creation out of the wandering ways of our waywardness in the wilderness of the world. The word humility, too, connects us directly to the humus, to the ground of our createdness. Adam, referring to humanity, literally means formed from the ground.

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