Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity.
Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
“Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
Today’s Epistle reading sums up wonderfully the whole pageant of sanctification in what belongs to the qualities of Christ in us and what God seeks for the redemption and restoration of our humanity. It is very much about what we learn from Christ and about our life in Christ. The Gospel illustrates what God wants us to learn and know. “That ye may know”, Jesus says, “that the Son of man hath power to forgive sins.”
The healing miracle of the Gospel is about the radical nature of human redemption. Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. That is our restoration and the moving principle of our sanctification. It is something which has to be learned. How? By our being awakened to self-consciousness, to the awareness of who we are in God. In a way, these lessons concentrate for us the whole pageant of human redemption and restoration.
The question about self-consciousness is perhaps the defining question for modernity in and through all the confusions and contradictions about identity and freedom, in and through the various forms of our certainties and uncertainties, our fears and anxieties. And yet, it belongs to the much larger story of human redemption as revealed in the Scriptures and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the questions of God to our humanity that come to a kind of clarity in today’s Gospel. Here Jesus’s question – “wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?” – articulates a constant theme of God’s questions to us in the pageant of the Scriptures. They are questions that call us to account and to a deeper understanding of ourselves, questions that perhaps, just perhaps, speak to us in our current perplexities.
The first question in Genesis is the question of the serpent to the woman in the Garden of Eden. It follows directly upon the accounts of creation as an orderly whole and of our place within the order of creation that emphasise the inherent and absolute goodness of creation, and our humanity as made in the image of God and as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The story of the Fall undertakes two things: first, the question of sin and evil, and secondly, the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. As we saw last week at Michaelmas, sin and evil are only possible through the relation of intellectual and spiritual beings to God as their principle. Sin and evil belong to the contradiction and denial of the very conditions of our being and knowing; yet they also belong paradoxically to the awakening of ourselves as selves through our separation from God. But that is what launches the whole pageant of redemption through the questions of God to our humanity that recall us to the truth of ourselves in God.
Week at a Glance
Sunday, October 13th, Harvest Thanksgiving / Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Thursday, October 17th, Eve of St. Luke
7:00pm Holy Communion
Upcoming Events:
Saturday, October 19th
9-11am Church Clean-Up
Saturday, November 16th
4-6pm 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 Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 4:17-32
The Gospel: St. Matthew 9:1-8
Artwork: Anonymous Netherlandish painter, The Healing of the Paralytic, c. 1560/90. Oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 October
Where are you?
The story of the Fall in Genesis 3 confronts us with five compelling and intriguing questions which reverberate throughout the pageant of Scripture. They connect as well to the philosophical traditions about what it means to be human and about our relationship to the world. They especially concern what is, perhaps, the distinguishing feature of modernity, namely, the question and issue about self-consciousness. How do we come to know ourselves as selves?
The first question is the question of the serpent in the Garden. “Did God say?” it asks. The other four questions are the questions of God to our humanity, ‘Adamah, now distinguished as Adam and Eve. “Where are you?” God asks Adam. “Who told you that you were naked?” and “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” God asks him. To the woman, he then asks, “What is this that you have done?”
In the story of Cain and Abel that follows upon this chapter, the Lord asks Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” and, to his evasive response, then asks, “What have you done?” All the questions of God to our humanity in this mythological and poetic form serve to call us to account, to truth, and as such belong to our awakening to self-consciousness. The questions seek to make us aware of ourselves and of the radical nature of ourselves as rational creatures who are ultimately responsible for our thoughts and actions. In a way, these questions reach a kind of crescendo of intensity in God’s great question to suffering Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The question recalls us at once to creation and to our separation from the Creator and his creation and thus to the pageant of redemption. Job, too, is being called to account about the meaning of the Law in terms of the prior order of creation upon which the Law of Moses ultimately depends.
In Luke’s introduction to his famous parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks a questioning and cynical lawyer, “What is written in the Law? How do you read?” and, then, in the conclusion of the parable that illustrates the love of neighbour, a further question, “Which of these three, do you think, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” In every case, the questions of God seek to convict our consciences and in so doing awaken us to the greater truth of his creation of which we are a part but from which we have departed. Such is the radical meaning of the Fall.
St. Francis of Assisi
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), Friar, Deacon, Founder of the Friars Minor (source):
O God,
who ever delightest to reveal thyself
to the childlike and lowly of heart,
grant that, following the example of the blessed Francis,
we may count the wisdom of this world as foolishness
and know only Jesus Christ and him crucified,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: Galatians 6:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:25-30
Artwork: Francesco Francia, Saint Francis, c. 1495. Oil on poplar panel, Prado, Madrid.
Remigius, Bishop
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Remigius (c. 438-533), Bishop of Reims, 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 Reims, France, at age 22. The pagan Clovis I, who had married the Christian princess Clotilde, began his reign as king of the Franks about 20 years later, in 481.
Before entering combat against German tribes at Tolbiac, Clovis prayed to “Clotilde’s God” for victory. His soldiers won the battle, and Clotilde 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 Reims 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: Pierre Puget, Baptism of Clovis, 1653. Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille.
Jerome, Doctor and Priest
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint 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 much of his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from the original languages of 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 in Bethlehem for the 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: Ludovico Carracci, St. Jerome Translates the Bible, 1591. Oil on canvas, Chiesa di San Martino Maggiore, Bologna.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Michaelmas Sunday
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Michaelmas Sunday.
Sermon for Michaelmas
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
We dance in the company of angels today and always. “Prayer the churches banquet, Angels age”, as George Herbert puts it. This captures something of the meaning of the angels in the order of creation and their connection to us that God’s question to Job highlights so wonderfully about the joy of creation and redemption.
Michaelmas is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. It signals the larger dimensions of creation as spiritual and intellectual and of our humanity as spiritual creatures within that order. Our liturgy is emphatic on this point. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name”, we sing as we prepare to enter into the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ. We are in the company of angels.
We cannot see them. We can only think them. The most important things in life are the things we cannot see. The angels belong to the deeper sense of creation and redemption. They are pure, spiritual and intellectual beings, the very thoughts of God in motion, the thoughts that gather us to God. Angelic thinking offers an important corrective and critique to the confusions of our times.
Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th century German theologian, claimed that “the old world made spirit parent of matter; the new world makes matter parent of spirit.” This influenced Marx to a considerable extent, leading to dialectical materialism and the various forms of material determinism, the legacy of which still remains with us in the forms of technocratic determinism. The dominance of a kind of instrumental reason leads to the illusions of power and control over nature and ourselves and to the ideology of progress, the religion of science or scientism, on the one hand, and the reactions against this kind of reductionism in the flights of fantasy into the abstractions and confusions about the self, on the other hand, what Michel Henry called sociologism. Such are some of our current confusions.
Charles Taylor, Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher, in a recent book, Cosmic Connections, undertakes an intriguing survey of English and German romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries to show the strong desire for a deeper sense of connection to the larger dimensions of creation or the cosmos; reality, if you will. But this book like others is premised in part on the idea of disenchantment. The claim is that modernity for the last five hundred years is disconnected from the natural world. Our disenchantment is really about the dominance of a practical and instrumental relation to the world which is ultimately destructive of both the world and ourselves. This is certainly part of the story but is it the whole story or is this also part of ‘the myth of disenchantment’? The Angels, it seems to me, have always been with us and belong to the imaginary of our spiritual and intellectual culture in every age and period including modernity, whatever is meant by that term.