Events

Parish Picnic, September 20th

Parish ‘Potluck’ Picnic, Rain or Shine, Sunday, September 20th, 1:00-3:00pm, at 220 Grey Mountain Road, Falmouth! Bring something to share. You may also want to bring a lawn chair or a blanket. Come for a family time of fellowship as we “kick-off” another season and year at Christ Church! Directions below.

(Directions: (Hwy 101) Exit 7 – Falmouth, turn right at stop sign onto Rt. 1, then immediately left onto the Falmouth Back Road at Pothier Motors, continue along through the stop sign at the Falmouth Kwik Way, bear right onto the Town Road (extension), which upon crossing the Payzant Bog Road becomes Grey Mountain Road. About a half kilometre on your right, just past the little bridge is 220. Call 798-2454 if lost or check your GPS! Click here for map.)

Contact: (Rev’d) David or Marilyn Curry, 798-2454.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

“[He] fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”

This is actually a thanksgiving gospel story. It appears twice in our Prayer Book; once as the Gospel for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), and as the Gospel appointed for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). For us in Canada, Thanksgiving day and Harvest Thanksgiving are often observed at the same time; thanksgiving for the fruits of creation and human labour, on the one hand, and thanksgiving for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we have politically, on the other hand. When thanksgiving for the harvest is being emphasized then readings for Harvest Thanksgiving are often used that focus on the harvest gathering of the fruits of creation. But it is instructive to realize that this Gospel plays such an important role in our learning a very hard and necessary thing; the hard and necessary activity of thanksgiving itself.

We learn from this gospel that being grateful is both healthy for you and it makes you whole! Here is the gospel story, we might say, that teaches us most fully about the spiritual nature of the activity of thanksgiving. And once again, it is a Samaritan who provides the telling illustration.

Last week, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, so-called, and we commented on how what makes it possible to “go and do likewise”, going and doing good works and reaching out and helping others, is really nothing less than the grace of Christ in us. The grace which comes from God to our humanity is the meaning of our life in the body of Christ; left to ourselves, it seems, we can only “look and pass by,” conflicted and implicated in all of the confusions of our broken and wounded world. The parable, in its context of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour, points us strongly to the grace of Christ in his Incarnation. He has “c[o]me to where [we] are”, and the grace of human redemption is signaled in the healing and care of the one whom we have come to call the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan, I suggested, is Christ and Christ in us.

Here, too, it is a Samaritan, the one out of the ten lepers, outcasts and rejects standing afar off as Jesus enters a certain village, who returned and gave thanks. What moved him? It is at once the highest freedom of the human soul and the grace of God in him. “When he saw that he was healed, [he] turned back” and then does a most remarkable thing, a strange and extravagant thing. “With a loud voice [he] glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Only at this point does Luke add simply and pointedly, “and he was a Samaritan.” For us, hearing this story after last week’s gospel story of the Good Samaritan, there is a powerful echo effect. Once again, we are presented with the conjunction between the Samaritan, a kind of cultural outsider, and Christ, the God who is utterly other than us who has come near to us. And here, the context is about a further aspect of healing and salvation. It is found in the simple yet powerful activity of being thankful.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 14-20 September

Monday, September 14th, Holy Cross Day
7:00pm Holy Communion

Tuesday, September 15th
3:30pm Holy Communion -Windsor Elms
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30pm Registration for 2nd Windsor Brownies/Spark Group

Thursday, September 17th
1:30-3:00pm Seniors’ Drop-In

Sunday, September 20th, Trinity XV
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Family Service – Holy Communion
1:00-3:00pm Parish Picnic (Potluck), 220 Grey Mountain Road, Falmouth. (Click here for map.)
4:30pm Evening Prayer at KES

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fourteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:25-6:5
The Gospel: St Luke 17:11-19

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Events

Christ Church Book Club and Cinema Paradiso

Two new groups are planned for the coming year at Christ Church: a book club and a movie discussion group.  All are welcome.

Christ Church Cinema Paradiso will meet to view and discuss a film at 7:30 pm on the fourth Thursday of each month from September through May (except December). The first film will be Waking Ned Devine on 24 September. The complete schedule is posted here.

Christ Church Book Club will meet at 6:30 pm on the first Tuesday of most months from October through May. (No meetings are set for January, March, and April.) The first book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows. The full list of books and dates is posted here.

Both groups will meet in the Parish Hall.

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Statements and other writings

Christ Church Chronicles, Fall 2009

The Fall 2009 issue of Christ Church Chronicles can be downloaded here as a pdf document. (Previous issues can be downloaded via this page.)

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Sermons

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

“How readest thou?”

There are several great lines for homilies in this Gospel passage. “Who is my neighbour?” “When he saw him he had compassion on him.” “Go, and do thou likewise.” Powerful stuff and yet, in a way, they all hang upon this rather unique question, a question which Jesus asks, a question which illumines all of the great questions of the Scriptures, the great questions of religion itself. “How do you read?”

We might think that the real question is ‘what do you read?’ Certainly, that is an important question. What we read will, it goes without saying, influence how we think about things. It is not a matter of indifference about what students and children read; what the curriculum is, as it were. And there are, as well, the more disturbing issues of censorship and political correctness that attempt to circumscribe what we read, what we hear and what we say. These obscure the bigger question which is about how we read.

We are too familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A powerful story, to be sure, and one which impels us powerfully to good works, what we often overlook is the extraordinary significance of the context in which Jesus tells this story. As such, I think, we miss its deeper meaning. It ends with the precise and positive exhortation to “go and do thou likewise”, but the possibility of that actually depends not on ourselves, but on the movement of God’s grace in us accomplishing what we could not and cannot do on our own. This is the message that we do not want to hear.

We conveniently overlook the faith basis of the action that we bidden to do. The Gospel provides an amazingly radical faith statement. We know it in the Prayer Book liturgy as the Summary of the Law, proclaimed and heard at the beginning of the Communion Service. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” Here, Jesus draws this out of “a certain lawyer” who tempted him with a question. His question, raised not for the purposes of understanding but for sophistic entrapment, was “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response was, in perfect Socratic fashion, to ask two related questions, “what is written in the law?” and “how readest thou?” Beautiful. It is in response to ‘the what and the how’ that the Lawyer speaks about the love of God and the love of neighbour, concentrating in a marvelous fashion the whole of the Torah, the Law.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Thirteenth Sunday After Trinity

Hogarth, The Good SamaritanThe collect for today, the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service: Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:16-24
The Gospel: St Luke 10:25-37

Artwork: William Hogarth, The Good Samaritan, 1737.  Oil on canvas, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Aidan

St AidanThe collect for today, the Feast of Saint Aidan (d. 651), Monk of Iona, Missionary, first Bishop and Abbot of Lindisfarne (source):

O loving God, who didst call thy servant Aidan from the Peace of a cloister to re-establish the Christian mission in northern England, and didst endow him with gentleness, simplicity, and strength: Grant, we beseech thee, that we, following his example, may use what thou hast given us for the relief of human need, and may persevere in commending the saving Gospel of our Redeemer Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
The Gospel: St Matthew 19:27-30

Artwork: St Aidan, 19th-century stained glass, from the East window, North transept, Cartmel Priory, England.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”

Closed book, closed mind; open book, open mind. It seems simple and straightforward, almost obvious. But, of course, you might say that it depends on what you read; to which, I would add, and how you read.

We are only too well aware of the so-called fundamentalist approach to what are regarded as sacred texts that makes us altogether skeptical of religion in general and suspicious of sacred writings in particular. Sadly, we are largely ignorant of them as well. So open books seem to create closed minds while supposedly open minds are closed to those same books and ignorantly dismissive of them! Curious!

Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, brings out a further aspect of our paradoxical uncertainties. A cry against the moral and intellectual relativism then and now pervasive in the universities, he saw that the supposed openness of such relativism was really a closing of the mind to the formative and foundational texts of our intellectual culture. A closing of the mind to both the letter and the spirit.

St. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, points out the dilemma. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” What is at issue is what and how we read and, for the digito agitato culture, to coin a phrase, the culture of the digitally agitated that flits from one image to another with barely a pause to think, there is the further issue of whether we are really reading at all. The task, of course, lies in reading with the spirit, the spirit of understanding.

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