The collect for today, the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
LORD, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St Luke 14:1-11
This collect for those working for the poor and underprivileged is posted in commemoration of Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885), 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Philanthropist, Social reformer, Evangelical (source):
O merciful God,
who hast compassion on all that thou hast made,
and hast enfolded thy whole creation in thy love:
help us to stand firm for thy truth,
to strive against poverty,
and to share thy love with our neighbour,
that with thy servant Lord Shaftesbury, we may be instruments of thy 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 13:1-3
The Gospel: St Matthew 25:31-45
An evangelical Christian and Tory MP in Victorian England, Lord Shaftesbury dedicated his life to improving the lives of the helpless and unfortunate. He championed legislation limiting hours of work, restricting child labour, and improving public health, and he supported from his personal wealth hundreds of missionary and educational projects.
Almost immediately upon entering parliament at age 25, he became a leader in the movement to protect the mentally ill and reform lunatic asylums. Between 1832 and 1850, his political concerns focused on the conditions of the working class that had come into being following the Industrial Revolution. He joined the fight for the Ten Hours Bill in the face of strong and determined opposition from factory owners and senior politicians. Progress was slow at first but, in 1842, publication of a Royal Commission report into conditions in the mines shocked the nation. Women and children worked in darkness and appalling conditions for twelve or fourteen hours a day. The Mines and Collieries Act was passed in 1842, prohibiting work underground by small boys and females. After numerous defeats, the Ten Hours Bill was finally carried in 1847. Factory Acts followed in 1847 and 1853.
Lord Shaftesbury also led social welfare efforts outside of Parliament. He was an early champion of the Ragged Schools, established to provide free education to working-class children, and became chairman of the Ragged Schools Union. He chaired the Lord’s Day Observance Society, supported the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the YMCA, and served as president of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
He regarded his parliamentary and social activities as his Christian duty. His journals and diaries show that he was also a great man of prayer. Here is one of his many written prayers:
God, the Father of the forsaken, the help of the weak, supplier of the needy; who hast diffused and proportioned thy gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform the joyous duty of mutual service, who teachest us that love towards the race of men is the bond of perfectness, and the imitation of thy blessed self; open our eyes and touch our hearts, that we may see and do, both for this world and for that which is to come, the things which belong to our peace. Strengthen us in the work which we have undertaken; give us counsel and wisdom, perseverance, faith, and zeal, and in thine own good time, and according to thy pleasure, prosper the issue. Pour into us a spirit of humility. Let nothing be done but in devout obedience to thy will, thankfulness for thine unspeakable mercies, and love to thine adorable Son Christ Jesus, who with thee, 0 Father, and the Holy Ghost, ever liveth one God, world without end. Amen.
His funeral was attended by the privileged and the poor, who lined the streets of London as his coffin passed.
Source of prayer: Give Us Grace: An Anthology of Anglican Prayers, compiled by Christopher L. Webber. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2004.
(This commemoration appears in the Church of England calendar, but not that of the 1962 Canadian BCP.)
The collect for today, the Feast of St Remigius (c. 438-533), Bishop of Rheims, Apostle to the Franks (source):
O God, who by the teaching of thy faithful servant and bishop Remigius didst turn the nation of the Franks from vain idolatry to the worship of thee, the true and living God, in the fullness of the catholic faith; Grant that we who glory in the name of Christian may show forth our faith in worthy deeds; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: 1 St John 4:1-6
The Gospel: St John 14:3-7
Remigius was consecrated bishop of Rheims at age 22. The pagan Clovis I, who had married the Christian princess Clothilde, began his reign as king of the Franks in 481.
Before entering combat against German tribes at Tolbiac, Clovis prayed to “Clothilde’s God” for victory. His soldiers won the battle, and Clothilde asked Remigius to teach the king about Christianity. Clovis was amazed by the story of “this unarmed God who was not of the race of Thor or Odin”. In the words of Remigius, the king came “to adore what he had burnt and to burn what he had adored”.
In 496, Remigius baptised Clovis in a public ceremony at Rheims Cathedral. Three thousand Franks also became Christians. Under the king’s protection, Remigius was able to spread the gospel and build churches throughout Gaul.
Artwork: Master of St Gilles, Saint Remigius baptises Clovis I, c. 1500. Oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
The collect for today, the Feast of St Jerome (c. 342-420), Priest, Monk, Translator of the Scriptures, Doctor of the Church (source):
O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 3:14-17
The Gospel: St Luke 24:44-48
One of the most scholarly and learned early church fathers, St Jerome devoted his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.
Born near Aquileia, northeast Italy, of Christian parents, Jerome travelled widely. He received a classical education at Rome and travelled to Gaul where he became a monk. He later moved to Palestine, spending five years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert. In 374, he was ordained a priest in Antioch. He then pursued biblical studies at Constantinople under Gregory Nazianzus and translated works by Eusebius, Origen, and others.
Travelling to Rome in 382, Jerome became secretary to the aged Pope Damasus. By the time the pope died three years later, Jerome had become involved in theological controversies in which he antagonised many church leaders and theologians. He left Rome under a cloud, returning to Palestine where he lived as a monk at Bethlehem for rest of his life.
Over several decades, Jerome wrote biblical commentaries and works promoting monasticism and asceticism. Most importantly, he produced fresh Latin translations of most of the Old and New Testaments, based on the original biblical languages. This work formed the basis of the Vulgate, which remained the standard Scriptural text of the western church for over a millennium.
Artwork: Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, 1614. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Vaticana.
The collect for today, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St Matthew 18:1-10
The name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”
The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.
Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.
Very early in church history, St Michael became associated with the care of the sick. The cult of Michael developed first in Eastern Christendom, where healing waters and hot springs at many locations in Greece and Asia Minor were dedicated to him. Michael is supposed to have appeared three times on Monte Gargano, southern Italy, in the 5th century. The local townspeople believed that Michael’s intercession gave them victory in battle over their enemies. These apparitions restored his biblical role as a strong protector of God’s people, and were also the basis for spreading his cult in the West.
The Feast of St Michael & All Angels is also known as Michaelmas. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates today as the Feast of Sts. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels.
Artwork: Luca Giordano, St Michael, c. 1663. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
Have you ever thought about the title of a book that you might like to write? You know, where you say, “I’d like to write a book with this title?” Sometimes certain phrases and ideas catch us that way and you say, “that would be a good title for a book.” Well, for me, one title of one book that strikes me that way would be “Dancing with Angels.”
Dancing with angels is, I think, a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives whether as students or teachers, priests or parishioners. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak, in a kind of way, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, or what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good.
In the year 1257, perhaps even what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, affectionately known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”
Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know?
The great poet, Dante, speaks of Luke as “scriba mansuetudinis Christi”, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase has always stayed with me. Luke is our primary spiritual director, if you will, during the long green season of the Church year, the Trinity season. By far and away, the largest number of gospel readings are taken from his gospel for what amounts to almost half of the Church year.
Dante, it seems to me, has grasped the signal note of St. Luke’s gospel and perhaps, nowhere is that idea of the gentleness of Christ more wonderfully signaled to us than in today’s gospel.
There are only three times in the New Testament when Christ meets us as mourners. There is the story about the raising of Jairus’ daughter who had just died. There is the story about the calling out of Lazarus’ who had been buried for four days. “Behold he stinketh”, Martha cries out, alerting us to the realities of death and decay and as well to how far gone we are in our sins. And there is this story, the story of the widow of Nain when her only son is being carried to the burying ground. In short, the encounter with the newly dead, the dead and buried and the just about to be buried. But here, in Luke’s gospel, the encounter is with the chief mourner, the widow of Nain, whose only son has died and is being carried out of the city to the place of burying.
In all three scenes, Christ meets us as mourners. We are in the presence of death, after all. He enters into our grief and into the intimacy of our sorrows. But the point of all these encounters is that Jesus is not just another sorry soul, not just another weeping mourner, not just another voice to add the cacophony of our sorrows. No. In each case, where he meets us as mourners, there is a word of saving grace and glory, a word of resurrection in the place and in the face of death.
Tuesday, September 29th, St. Michael & All Angels
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies’ Mtg. – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion
Thursday, October 1st
1:30-3:00pm Seniors’ Drop-In
Saturday, October 3rd
7:00-9:00pm – Parish Hall
Newfoundland & Country Evening of Musical Entertainment
Sunday, October 4th, Trinity XVII
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:30pm Evening Prayer at KES
The collect for today, the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3:13-21
The Gospel: St Luke 7:11-17
Artwork: Christ raises the son of the widow of Nain, 12th-century mosaic, Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily.
The collect for today, the commemoration of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester, scholar, spiritual writer (source):
O Lord God,
who didst give Lancelot Andrewes many gifts of thy Holy Spirit,
making him a man of prayer and a pastor of thy people:
perfect in us that which is lacking in thy gifts,
of faith, to increase it,
of hope, to establish it,
of love, to kindle it,
that we may live in the light of thy grace and glory;
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 Timothy 2:1-7a
The Gospel: St Luke 11:1-4