Prayers and liturgy

Willibrord, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Willibrord (658-739), Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle to the Frisians, Patron Saint of the Netherlands (source):

Abbey of Echternach, St. WillibrordO Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:1-9

Artwork: St. Willibrord, altarpiece, Abbey of Echternach, Luxembourg.

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Events

2024 Parish Ham Supper

The Annual Parish Ham Supper will be held at Christ Church from 4:30pm until 6:00pm on Saturday, 16 November.

Ham Supper Poster 2024Click here for a larger version suitable for downloading and printing.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity (in the Octave of All Saints’)

“For our citizenship is in heaven”

“For our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul writes. “Whose is this image and superscription?” Jesus asks the Pharisees who sought to “entangle him in his talk”. These readings complement wonderfully the readings for All Saints’, both the image of heaven from Revelation as “a great multitude” beyond all number of “all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God the Trinity and the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. How? Because they reveal the summum bonum, the highest good for our humanity as restored to our being in the image of God. They set before us what belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity.

Christ’s question to the Pharisees is really his question to us: in whose image are we and what is written over us? Questions and claims about the images of the self proliferate and abound in our culture. That we are imago dei or imago Christi or imago Trinitatis speak to the deeper reality of our being with God and in God, to our heavenly citizenship even in and through the tribulations of our lives. We are reminded of our blessedness. “His banner over me was love”, as the Song of Songs puts it.

The Beatitudes show us what it means to be in the image of God or Christ or the Trinity – they are all the same reality – and speak to the ultimate or highest good for our humanity. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics says that happiness is our greatest good. The word he uses is eudaemonia. What he means by happiness is not what we might assume. Happiness for us is mostly subjective and personal, passive and accidental; in short, something existential. For Aristotle happiness is objective and substantial; in short, living in accord with virtue. It is the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with the qualities of human excellence. While the treatise focuses on the moral practices that belong to that activity, in the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of practical life, he argues that the highest activity or form of happiness is contemplation; moral activities are secondary. Contemplation is about what is the highest in us, the life of the mind, because it seeks what is everlasting and complete as distinct from what is passing and incomplete. The highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us, in his view, is the mind.

He says that “we ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality”, words which sound like Paul, to “do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of the intellect. This kind of intellectualism may seem off-putting but it speaks, I think, to the deeper understanding that today’s readings in the context of All Saints’ provide. He says that “the life of the gods is altogether happy, and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The word he uses here is not eudaemonia but makarios, meaning blessed. It is the very word which Jesus uses nine times in the twelve verses of the Beatitudes.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance

Sunday, November 10th, Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Monday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
11:00am Remembrance Service, Windsor Cenotaph
12:15pm KES Cenotaph

Saturday, November 16th
4:30-6:00pm Annual Ham Supper – Parish Hall

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22

John Singleton Copley, The Tribute MoneyArtwork: John Singleton Copley, The Tribute Money, 1762. Oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Richard Hooker, Doctor of the Church of England

The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):

Exeter Cathedral, Richard Hooker StatueO God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people
thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
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 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23

The statue of Richard Hooker is situated outside Exeter Cathedral, England.

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Prayers and liturgy

All Souls’ Day

Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the BlessedThe collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
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 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27

Artwork: Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed (from Four Visions of the Hereafter), c. 1505-15. Oil on panel, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

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Prayers and liturgy

All Saints’ Day

The collect for today, All Saints’ Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 7:9-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:1-12

Johann König, Christ in Glory with All SaintsArtwork: Johann König, Christ in Glory with All Saints, 1632. Oil on copper, Deutsche Barockgalerie, Augsburg.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 31 October

Blessed are you

Eudaimonia is Aristotle’s word for happiness, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics. It means a great deal more than what we might mean by happiness which is usually subjective and personal as well as passive and accidental. For Aristotle it is much more objective and substantial. Simply put, happiness is a life lived in accord with virtue. It consists in the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with virtue or excellence. The highest or primary form of happiness is contemplation, an intellectual good, while politics is about moral actions and is secondary. That highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us is the mind. “We ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality, do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of intellect. “The life of the gods is altogether happy”, he says, “and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The idea is that the human good seeks what lasts and is complete rather than what passes away. But the word he uses here is makarios which means blessedness, the idea of a blessed life.

We go from the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code for our humanity, to the Beatitudes of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, the Summum Bonum, the highest good for our humanity. They are the blessednesses. The word in Greek is makarios and is used nine times in twelve verses by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus “opens his mouth” and teaches what belongs to the highest good for our humanity. While Aristotle recognizes pleasure as a feature of happiness, pleasure is indeterminate: it takes many different forms. He does not deny the place of sensual pleasures as contributing to our happiness but he doesn’t make them essential to happiness since they do not last.

The Beatitudes extend that thinking to a remarkable degree. They argue for a greater degree of inwardness: a blessedness in spite of and in the face of hardships and suffering. The first and last Beatitude illustrate this and frame the whole set of the Beatitudes. In other words, there is a structure here that revolves around the paradox of difference for most of the Beatitudes except for the paradox of the same in the fifth Beatitude. The first and last have the same ‘reward’: “the kingdom of heaven” is promised to “the poor in spirit” and to those who are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. The kingdom of heaven contrasts with both the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted. That promise belongs to the idea of a life of blessedness that transcends the world but without negating it.

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