Prayers and liturgy

Gregory the Great, Doctor and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (540-604), Bishop of Rome, Doctor of the Church (source):

Titian, St. Gregory the GreatO merciful Father,
who didst choose thy bishop Gregory
to be a servant of the servants of God:
grant that, like him, we may ever desire to serve thee
by proclaiming thy gospel to the nations,
and may ever rejoice to sing thy praises;
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 Lesson: 1 Chronicles 25: 1a, 6-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:42-45

Artwork: Titian, St. Gregory the Great, first half of 16th century, Oil on panel, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Third Sunday in Lent

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Third Sunday in Lent.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt, the kingdom of God hath come upon you”

It is not enough, as this Sunday shows us, simply to be “delivered from evil,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. The purpose of Lent as the Penitential Service says is “To decline from sin and incline to virtue; that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore.” “Walk in love,” as Paul puts it, means to act in ways that “becometh saints,” in the pursuit of holiness. That is the love of Christ for us in his sacrifice and his love active in us. But that requires the overcoming of all sin and evil.

But what is it that overcomes sin and evil? What are we to make of the language of devils and Beelzebul, the prince of the devils, of Satan and his kingdom in the Gospel and the language of darkness and light, of all uncleanness and covetousness in the Epistle? Such language may seem strange and foreign to us but speaks profoundly, I think, to the experience of devils in our times and, perhaps, nowhere more clearly than in these readings that confront us with the reality of sin and evil.

They bring to a certain clarity what we have already seen in the story of The Temptations of Christ by the devil, the tempter, Satan, on the 1st Sunday in Lent and to the story of the woman of Canaan whose daughter is “grievously vexed with a devil” last Sunday. “Ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul rather gently but firmly reminds us this morning about our thoughts and actions that are contrary to “all goodness, and righteousness and truth,” all the things that run counter to the love of Christ and his sacrifice for us.

We know only too well in our own world the problem and power of obsessions and addictions, of the disorders of hearts and minds, that can sadly lead to extreme pathological states of dysfunction, and of being imprisoned in ourselves. What are such things except tendencies, in varying degrees, of the fixations of the will upon some finite thing or person, whether ourselves or some agenda, as if it were absolute? Treating finite things as if they were God is why Paul can speak of idolatry as the underlying principle of all the forms of attachment to the lesser things of the world. False absolutes, as it were, treated as if they were divine.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, March 2026

Sunday, March 8th, Lent III
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 10th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, March 15th, Lent IV (Refreshment Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Followed by a time of fellowship and refreshment

Tuesday, March 17th, St. Patrick
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme III: ‘Reading Augustine’ – “Enchiridion”

Sunday, March 22nd, Lent V (Passion Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 24th, Eve of the Annunciation
7:00pm Holy Communion & Lenten Programme IV: ‘Reading Augustine’ – “Enchiridion”

(Return to ‘Big Church!’)

Sunday, March 29th, Palm Sunday
8:00am Palms & Holy Communion
10:30am Palms & Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday in Lent

The collect for today, the Third Sunday in Lent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Hans Schäufelein, Christ Healing the PossessedWE beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 5:1-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:14-26

Artwork: Hans Schäufelein, Christ Healing the Possessed, from Das Plenarium, 1517. Woodcut, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

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Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Priest, Friar, Poet, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
who didst enrich thy Church with the learning and holiness
of thy servant Thomas Aquinas:
grant to all who seek thee
a humble mind and a pure heart
that they may know thy Son Jesus Christ
to be the way, the truth and the life;
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Antoine Nicolas, Saint Thomas, Fountain of WisdomBorn into a noble family near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, St. Thomas was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino until age thirteen, and then at the University of Naples. When he decided to join the Dominican Order, his family were dismayed because the Dominicans were mendicants and regarded as socially inferior to the Benedictines. Thomas’s brothers kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year in the family’s castle, but he finally escaped and became a Dominican friar in 1244.

The rest of Thomas’s life was spent studying, teaching, preaching, and writing. Initially, he studied philosophy and theology with Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. Albert was said to prophesy that, although Thomas was called the dumb ox (probably referring to his physical size), “his lowing would soon be heard all over the world”.

His two greatest works are Summa Contra Gentiles, begun c. 1259 and completed in 1264, and Summa Theologica, begun c. 1266 but uncompleted at his death.

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Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Perpetua, St. Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):

Antonio Ridolfi, St. Perpetua Comforting her Father Before Her MartyrdomO holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of 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 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14

Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appears to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Artwork: Antonio Ridolfi, St. Perpetua Comforting her Father Before Her Martyrdom, 1857. Oil on canvas, Museo Cassioli, Asciano, Italy.

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Sermons

Lenten Programme I: Reading Augustine

“All men are seeking for thee”: A brief digest of Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana
Lenten Programme 2026: Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry

Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, is fundamentally a treatise on teaching the Christian Faith as revealed in the Scriptures. Doctrine is teaching and that presupposes two things right from the outset: first, a kind of faith that there are things to be known, and, second, a capacity, willingness or desire, to learn. Thus the preface touches on the problem of the unteachable for various reasons: 1) those who just don’t get or understand the teaching, it seems, 2) those who are unable to apply the teaching to obtain the meaning of obscure parts of Scripture, and 3) those who think they know and understand the Scriptures without any need of instruction or rules about learning.

He employs the language of signs and things. Those who don’t get it fail to see the finger which is pointing to what is to be known while those who can’t apply the instruction fail to see that to which the finger is pointing; in short, one can’t see the signpost, the other to what it is pointing. Those who think they know without the need for any aid or instruction forget that they know only because others have taught them at least how to read or they have remembered what has been spoken and heard, an important point about the oral traditions which historically precede writing. Augustine commends, for instance, Anthony the Great of Egypt, the illiterate desert father who “committed the Scriptures to memory through hearing them read by others” and by “wise meditation arrived at a thorough understanding of them.” That is testament to the strong desire to know and to love the truth.

From the outset Augustine highlights the primacy of Scripture in terms of what it teaches and in what ways but without negating or denying other disciplines of knowing and learning that belong to human experience. They too have their use and, to be sure, their abuse. “All men are seeking for thee,” the disciples say to Jesus who in turn says “I preach … for therefore came I forth.” As Austin Farrer notes, preaching and teaching are necessarily rhetorical; they have to do with making ideas, concepts, and things known, a sharing of things learned.

The structure of the argument is clearly stated and reiterated throughout the treatise. It is divided into two parts: first, “the mode of ascertaining (or discovering) the proper meaning of Scripture,” secondly, “the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained” (modus inveniendi quae intelligenda sunt, et modus proferendi quae intellecta sunt). Composed of four books, the first three written in 327 AD deal with what the Scriptures teach, and the fourth, written in 426 AD (four years before his death in 430), treats the mode of making the meaning known. He says that the second is the more difficult part but it is really about the necessity of sharing with others what has been learned. Such is teaching really.

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Prayers and liturgy

Chad, Missionary and Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Chad (d. 672), Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary (source):

Cartmel Priory, Saint ChadAlmighty God,
who, from the first fruits of the English nation
that turned to Christ,
didst call thy servant Chad
to be an evangelist and bishop of his own people:
grant us grace so to follow his peaceable nature,
humble spirit and prayerful life,
that we may truly commend to others
the faith which we ourselves profess;
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: Philippians 4:10-13
The Gospel: St Luke 14:1,7-14

Artwork: St Chad of Lichfield, 19th-century stained glass, from the East window, North transept, Cartmel Priory, England. Photograph taken by admin, 9 August 2004.

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Prayers and liturgy

John and Charles Wesley

The collect for today, the commemoration of John Wesley (1703-91) and Charles Wesley (1708-88), Evangelists, Hymn Writers, Leaders of the Methodist Revival (source):

Merciful God,
who didst inspire John and Charles Wesley with zeal for thy gospel:
grant to all people boldness to proclaim thy word
and a heart ever to rejoice in singing thy praises;
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 Lesson: Isaiah 49:5-6
The Gospel: St. Luke 9:2-6

Frank O. Salisbury, John Wesley as an Old ManThomas Hudson, Reverend Charles Wesley

Artwork:
(left) Frank O. Salisbury, John Wesley as an Old Man, 1932. Oil on canvas, John Wesley’s House & The Museum of Methodism, London.
(right) Thomas Hudson, Reverend Charles Wesley, 1749. Oil on canvas, Epworth Old Rectory, Epworth, Lincolnshire.

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