KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 September

Imago Dei

The stories of creation in Genesis are a poetic and philosophical tour-de-force that present the concept of creation as a pageant or litany of distinguishing one thing from another within the unity of creation as a whole. Several things are particularly significant about Genesis 1 which ends with the work of the sixth day. Classically, this is called the Hexameron, referring to the work of the six days which culminates with the idea of the seventh day as the Sabbath, a day of rest and contemplation. The first chapters of Genesis offer a remarkable and profound way of thinking about reality and the place of our humanity within its order. Some, like Thomas Cahill, have called it “the gift of the Jews.” Why?

Because we begin absolutely with order. Creation is an orderly affair owing to the clear distinction between the Creator and the created. This contrasts with other early cosmogonies – stories of the coming to be of the world – which begin with chaos out of which emerges some sort of order. Here we begin with order that derives from an ordering principle, God as the source and end of all things created. That makes all the difference. It is the counter to the fearful uncertainty in things both ancient and modern culture where one fears that chaos might somehow be greater than order.

It is not a ‘scientific’ account though it provides the metaphysical basis for the possibility of science. Why? Because it assumes that reality is intelligible, a premise of science itself. Here the emphasis is on distinguishing one thing from another: heaven and earth, light and darkness, sun and moon, and so forth. Like science, this rhythmic and poetic account does not divinize the natural world. This is especially clear with respect to the greater light and the lesser light, referring to the sun and the moon in terms of physical light. They are in this account emphatically not deities, not gods, not divine. This is a remarkable counter to other early and later cultures. The Creator/created distinction is altogether crucial.

But de-divinizing nature does not mean denying or diminishing the sense of the beauty and wonder of creation and its life-force. It does not mean reducing nature to merely dead stuff for us to manipulate and use according to an instrumental reason that often leads to destruction. The wonder of creation lies in its intelligibility and essential goodness; the whole is said to be “very good”; this is a strong affirmation of the world. It is to be respected and honoured in its very being as created by the goodness of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund J. Peck, Missionary

The collect for today, the commemoration of Edmund J. Peck (1850-1924), Priest, Missionary to the Inuit, Translator (source):

Edmund J. PeckGod of our salvation, whose servant Edmund James Peck made the testimony of the Spirit his own and gladly proclaimed the riches of Christ among the Inuit people, give the joy of your gospel to us also, that we may exalt you in the congregation of all peoples and praise you in the abundance of your mercies; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:6-12
The Gospel: St. Matthew 28:16-20

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Events

Calendar of Services and Events, September through December 2024

The Calendar of Services and Events for the period September through December 2024 (tentative) can be downloaded here as a pdf document.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

“Be not anxious – Behold, Consider, Seek”

I can think of no better antidote to the anxieties of our “anxious generation” than what this day has set before us, first in Alec’s baptism, itself the result of a long gestation and period of questing, and, secondly, in the readings for this Sunday which speak so directly to the contemporary disorders of our lives and our institutions. Both recall us to the things which matter most, the things which belong to God and to our life in the body of Christ.

Paul makes a point of calling attention to the “large letters” that he himself writes in his own hand to the Galatians. This is similar to what Alec’s baptism makes visible for us, namely, “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” Such is the meaning of dying to ourselves and living to God in Christ, to our being incorporated sacramentally into the life and death of Christ. We are “a new creation” not at the expense of the body but through its redemption. Like Paul, we bear in our bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus”, the signs of sacrifice, literally, the sign of the Cross.

This is the true meaning of being born again. It is about being born upward into the things of God but only through Christ’s sacrifice and love for us. This is exactly what Jesus explains to Nicodemus in the Gospel reading for “those of Riper Years” as the Prayer Book so quaintly puts it. Yet the context of that expression is crucial for it is about hardships and sufferings that are part and parcel of our lives and, indeed, of the history of our institutions in their folly and disarray; they are nothing without the principles for which they stand.

Why ‘Riper Years’? Because it refers to adult baptism, the baptism of those who can answer for themselves as distinct from infant baptism which for fifteen years or more had been banned during the English Civil War and the reign of Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century. And yet, somehow the principles of the Christian Faith survived and were revived in their classical forms.

What I want to emphasize is that the principles which define and shape our spiritual lives are the things worth living for and are always there to be reclaimed despite the ravages of sin and folly and the ruins of institutions. With the restoration of the English Church in its reformed catholic nature, there was a need for a service for those who did not receive baptism as infants, hence “those of Riper Years” who could answer for themselves the questions which otherwise would have been answered on their behalf by parents and godparents. Those who are baptized as infants, those who are literally without speech (in-fans), are meant to grow into the understanding of the vows made on their behalf and to own them for themselves.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, September

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

Sunday, September 15th, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, September 22nd, Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(7:00pm Mass at KES Chapel)

Sunday, September 29th, St. Michael & All Angels / Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

The Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

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

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Dominicus Smouts, The Miser and DeathArtwork: Dominicus Smouts, The Miser and Death, between 1683 and 1733. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

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Events

Christ Church Book Club, 2024-25

The new list of discussion books for Christ Church Book Club is now available.. The next series will kick off on Tuesday, 22 October, at 7:00pm, when the featured books will be At The End of An Age, John Lukacs (2002), and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Jason A. Josephson-Storm, 2017.

Click here for the full schedule of books and other information.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 September

The Beauty and Wonder that Begins and Never Ends

At the first Chapel services each year the Head Girl and Head Boy read passages from Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. “In the beginning God”, as Genesis says, and “In the beginning was the Word”, as John says. In both readings there are the powerful and suggestive ideas of ‘word’, ‘light’, and ‘life’. God speaks creation into being and God is Word or logos. It highlights from the outset the idea of a Creator who is the author of creation, a theme which Jews and Christians and Muslims and others hold in common. As the Qur’an puts it, The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is”.

These readings are among the most powerful and the most commented upon theologically as belonging to the intersection of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic culture as shaped by Greek thought. They complement one another and belong to an intellectual and spiritual way of thinking about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. They contribute to a long tradition of philosophical reflection about reality. One cannot read the passage from John, for example, without being aware of how it is commenting on Genesis.

The beauty and wonder of the order of creation reflects the everlasting beauty and wonder of God. The Creator/creation distinction is paramount. It marks the idea of distinction within unity. The idea of creation, not as chaos but as an orderly affair in which one thing is distinct from another while yet connected to everything else in creation, is essential to intellectual inquiry. It emphasizes that the world as intelligible is also ethical. It is not evil. It is good. But it is not divine. It is the product of the goodness and love of God. Think of how radical that idea is in our disordered and confusing world of conflict and violence, a world of profound disconnect and unease.

Thomas Aquinas wonderfully observes that God is “the beginning and ending of all things, especially rational creatures”. In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is. God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things and of human consciousness, too. Hans Georg Gadamer, commenting on Hegel by way of Aristotle, notes that “the highest degree of self-consciousness must be ascribed to the highest divine being”, the God who thinks himself thinks all things. Our own limited thinking participates at best in that divine self-knowing through the intelligible and ethical order of creation. Think of how this contributes to the biblical insight of our humanity as made in the image of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

Robert Wolfall, Presbyter

The collect for bishops and other pastors, in commemoration of Robert Wolfall, Priest (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who didst call thy servant Robert Wolfall to proclaim thy glory
by a life of prayer and the zeal of a true pastor:
keep constant in faith the leaders of thy Church
and so bless thy people through their ministry
that the Church may grow into the full stature
of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Rev. Robert Wolfall was vicar of the Parish of West Harptree, Somerset, when he became chaplain to Martin Frobisher’s third Arctic expedition to Canada. On 3 September 1578, Rev’d Wolfall presided at the first recorded Holy Eucharist in what is now Canadian territory: Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island.

The service was held on the ship Anne Francis, whose captain later wrote:

Master Wolfall …. preached a godly sermon, which being ended he celebrated also a Communion upon the land …. The celebration of the divine mystery was the first sign, seal and confirmation of Christ’s name, death and passion ever known in these quarters. Master Wolfall made sermons and celebrated the Communion at sundry other times in several and sundry ships, because the whole company could never meet together at anyone place.

A few weeks later, Frobisher abandoned the hope of establishing a permanent settlement on Baffin Island and the expeditionary fleet returned home to England. Anglicans would not celebrate Holy Communion in Canada again for almost a century.

A commemoration of Robert Wolfall, written by Dr. William Cooke, Vice-President of the Toronto branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, is posted here. (See page 5 of pdf document.)

The Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “The First Thanksgiving in North America” is posted here.

Parish of West Hartree, Robert Wolfall Commemorative PlaqueA plaque commemorating Rev. Wolfall was recently placed on the inside wall of his parish church. The photograph was kindly sent to us by former Royal Navy Chaplain The Rev. Anthony Marks.

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