Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-First 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-First Sunday after Trinity.
Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am Morning Prayer
“With thee is wisdom”
Wisdom belongs to God. It is a strong statement which speaks to what belongs to the Scriptures and philosophy, a strong reminder of what comes from God as the principle of our being and knowing. Ultimately, it is the underlying principle that belongs to the healing and restoration of our humanity, too, as the eucharistic Gospel from John today shows us about the nobleman who comes to Jesus seeking the healing of his son “sick at Capernaum”.
“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”, Jesus says. “Come down, ere my child die,” the nobleman tehn says, to which Jesus replies, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken and he went his way” only to learn from his servants that his son “liveth” and “began to amend at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth.” As John tells us, it was “the second sign that Jesus did”; A sign which points to the real truth and meaning of what is signified, namely, the power and wisdom of God. “Both we are and our words are in his hand”, Wisdom tells us, “as are all understanding and skill in crafts” (Wisdom 7. 16,17).
This point is captured in the prayer for Universities, Colleges, and Schools: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding” (BCP, p. 45). We have, I think, forgotten this which is perhaps why it is good to hear Solomon’s prayer for wisdom this morning from The Book of Wisdom. There is a sense in which the long and profoundly reflective Trinity season runs out in the themes of wisdom and mercy. We begin today in the Sunday Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer to read from the Apocrypha, books which stand between the periods of the Old Testament and the New Testament. They have a special status, expressed in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The Articles belong themselves, I think, to the essential catholicism of the Anglican understanding, and so too with respect to the place of these books within that larger understanding.
The sixth article does not actually give a generic term for these books, such as ‘Apocrypha’, ‘Intertestamental’, or ‘Deuterocanonical’. It simply refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical. The term ‘apocrypha’ means that which is hidden away; yet becomes revealed or known. They contribute, I think, to a deeper understanding of the relation between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures, on the one hand, and to the profound relation between philosophy and religion, on the other hand, in terms of language and ideas.
Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am Holy Communion
“Go thy way, thy Son liveth”
The demand in the Gospel, it seems, is that Jesus should be physically present for an act of healing to be effective. “Come down ere my child die”, the nobleman asks Jesus, having already “besought him that we would come down and heal his son; for he was at the point of death”. Something divine is at once recognised and denied in the request. For where the Word is made captive to our desires and demands, then the sovereign freedom of the Word can have no play upon our understanding. To acknowledge the sovereign freedom of the Word, on the other hand, means that our understanding is made captive to the Word of God, not the Word to the immediacy of our desires. Such is faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” It has its play primarily upon our understanding and not upon our senses.
The captivity of our understanding to the Word gives meaning and purpose to our desires without which they are essentially nothing. For where our understanding is captive to the Word, there the Word is allowed to shape our desires. In contrast to the all-absorbing tyranny of the self, they are shaped “according to thy word”. It is “thy will be done” and my will only as it is found in God’s will. Our wills find their place in God’s will through the resonance of that Word in us, that Word taking shape in us according to its sovereign freedom. That means more than “signs and wonders”, namely, what they properly signify: the very nature and wisdom of God himself. “Go thy way, thy son liveth”, Jesus tells him in response to his request. What then? Here is the express interest of John’s Gospel: “The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.” What is that except his acting upon what he has heard? He gives his understanding over to the Word and places his desire under its power and truth.
“Thy son liveth” stands upon the condition of God having his way with us and not the other way around. The phrase is repeated in the Gospel when the nobleman learns that his son was alive and “began to amend” exactly “at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth”. God has his way with us through our wills finding their place in God’s will. It happens through the play of his Word upon our understanding. The desire for his son’s healing is simply placed with God.
Week at a Glance
Sunday, October 27th, Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Upcoming Events:
Christ Church Book Club postponed until Tuesday, Oct. 29th
7:00pm Coronation Room.
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
Also please take note of the annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2024. More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.
The Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace; that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 6:10-20
The Gospel: St. John 4:46-54
Artwork: Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Christ and the Captain of Capernaum, c. 1765. Engraving, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
St. Luke the Evangelist
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 2 Timothy 4:5-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-52
Luke was a physician, a disciple of St. Paul and his companion on some of his missionary journeys, and the author of both the third gospel and Acts.
It is believed that St. Luke was born a Greek and a Gentile. According to the early Church historian Eusebius, Luke was born at Antioch in Syria. In Colossians 4:10-14, St. Paul speaks of those friends who are with him. He first mentions all those “of the circumcision”–in other words, Jews–and he does not include Luke in this group. Luke’s gospel shows special sensitivity to evangelising Gentiles. It is only in his gospel that we hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we hear Jesus praising the faith of Gentiles such as the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, and that we hear the story of the one grateful leper who is a Samaritan.
St. Luke first appears in Acts, chapter 16, at Troas, where he meets St. Paul around the year 51, and crossed over with him to Europe as an Evangelist, landing at Neapolis and going on to Philippi, “concluding that God had called us to preach the Gospel to them” (note especially the transition into first person plural at verse 10). Thus, he was apparently already an Evangelist. He was present at the conversion of Lydia and her companions and lodged in her house. He, together with St. Paul and his companions, was recognised by the divining spirit: “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation’”.
Meditation for Eve of the Feast of St. Luke
“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”
The Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Luke is the very end of his Gospel. It ends not with the resurrection appearences of Jesus as in Matthew, Mark, and John, but with the Ascension, though that has been, at the very least, prepared for us in John’s Gospel, too. The ending of Luke’s Gospel is somewhat elaborated upon in the opening chapter of Acts, also attributed to Luke. Yet rather than emphasizing the problematic of Jesus’ going from us, as John in particular explains as ultimately being expedient or good for us, despite the sense of loss and grief, Luke sees the Ascension of Christ as the cause of great joy. The disciples, he says, “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Luke shows us that Christ’s going from us is the condition of his being with us and of our being with him.
Such is “the work of an evangelist”, Paul suggests in 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the Feast, already intuiting what the Church Fathers will say about the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity”. While the Collect speaks about the healing of “all the diseases of our souls” by the wholesome medicines of Luke’s doctrine or teaching, there is more to the good news of his Gospel than healing. He shows us our end in God, our ultimate restoration to unity with God in his eternity. The point is that we participate in this now because time has been gathered into eternity.
Luke’s feast day belongs to the autumnal pageant which will bring us to All Saints’. What we are given to think is the Ascension of Christ as signifying our end with God and in God now and forever. But how? It is, I think, by attending to what Luke and Luke alone has Jesus ask us. “What is written? How readest thou”. In a way, his Gospel is particularly emphatic about how Jesus opens our understanding by providing a way of interpreting the Scriptures about Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, about repentance and forgiveness of sins, about the promise of the Father in the coming of the Holy Spirit wonderfully presented in Acts, and here about Christ’s Ascension.
Luke points us to our end in Christ by way of attending to his Word and its radical meaning about the quality of our life in Christ. Luke is the spiritual director of the Church throughout the Trinity Season especially. More Gospel readings come from Luke than from any other Evangelist, readings that move our hearts and illuminate our minds. As Dante so concisely puts it, Luke is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the Scribe of the gentleness of Christ, and perhaps nowhere more wonderfully than in the readings for his feast day. Only Luke is with me, Paul says, with just a hint that this is almost enough though wanting the books and parchments that belong to the understanding of Christ. Luke shows us Jesus as opening our understanding about our end and life in Christ. This is our blessing and the reason for our gathering in the temple in great joy, “praising and blessing God”.
“While he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2024
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 17 October
Your brother’s blood is crying to me
There is something incredibly moving about the story of Cain and Abel. It belongs to the fall-out from the Fall, the fall from the harmony between our humanity and God and between our humanity and the created order. The fall-out also means division and animosity, envy and murder among ourselves. The story is the beginning of the long, sad story of our inhumanity towards one another.
The questions of God call us to account but only so as to awaken us to self-consciousness and understanding, and thus to the radical meaning of human freedom and dignity, albeit through the forms of negation. “Where is Abel, your brother?” God asks Cain. Cain lies, “I do not know”, he says, only to add the telling and dismissive rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This leads to God’s further question that echoes his question to Eve in the previous chapter. “What have you done?” Again, it is not that he doesn’t know, rather he wants Cain to acknowledge what he has done and to realize its significance. This comes out in the amazingly heart-felt statement of the Lord: “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. So simple and yet so profound. God knows and God cares. This underlines the whole meaning of the Creation stories and suggests the profound reciprocity between the Creator and the created as well as the ethical demands that belong to the truth of our humanity as part of that created order, indeed, an essential part.
God’s statement reminds us that our obligations towards one another in the human community belong to our relationship with God. To violate one is to violate the other. This underlies what will become the commandment to love God with the whole of ourselves and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It has come to be known as the Summary of the Law, in the Christian understanding and as building upon the Jewish Shema, the commandment to love God with the whole of one’s being. The story of Cain’s killing of Abel is precisely about the negation of what belongs to the truth of our humanity as made in God’s image. In killing Abel, Cain kills what belongs to his own being and truth. But it cannot be denied and dismissed. It is known by God and God cares because we are made in his image. The dialogue between the Lord and Cain highlights this truth which has been negated by Cain’s action.
In the face of our troubled world of war and destruction, with the mind-numbing number of deaths that come in its wake, this statement by God is particularly compelling. Why? Because it says that God knows and cares, that those who are killed are known and loved in God regardless; their blood cries out to him from the ground. There is no escaping this divine knowledge. Yet the God who knows all the secret desires of our hearts seeks to draw us into his goodness and love. This is the counter to all of the horrors of our hearts and world. It simply recalls us to the truth of ourselves in God which in turn convicts us about our relations with one another, each as made in the image of God, each as known and loved by God.
The point of the questions and statement by God is to awaken us to truth and to love. At the very least, it suggests the beginning of a way to transcend the divisions and hatreds in our hearts and our world. It challenges our thinking and changes our entire outlook. In this sense, the awakening to self-consciousness is also an awakening to ethical responsibility and genuine care for one another. A counter indeed to our culture of death and destruction, of division and animosity.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Etheldreda, Queen and Abbess
The collect for today, the Feast of St. Etheldreda (d. 679), Queen, Foundress and Abbess of Ely (source):
O eternal God,
who didst bestow such grace on thy servant Etheldreda
that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer
and to the service of thy true religion:
grant that we may in like manner
seek thy kingdom in our earthly lives,
that by thy guidance
we may be united in the glorious fellowship of thy saints;
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 3:7-14
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:29-34
Artwork: St. Etheldreda, stained glass. St. Peter’s Church, Walpole St. Peter, Norfolk, England. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.
Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Bishops and Martyrs
The collect for today, the commemoration of Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley (c. 1500-1555), Bishop of London, Reformation Martyrs (source):
Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like thy servants Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, we may live in thy fear, die in thy favor, and rest in thy peace; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 3:9-14
The Gospel: St. John 15:20-16:1
Two leaders of the English Reformation were burned at the stake in Oxford on this day in 1555. Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from their positions and imprisoned after Queen Mary ascended the throne in 1553. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, was deposed and taken to Oxford with Latimer and Ridley.