Sermons

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.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance

Sunday, October 6th, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, October 8th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

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.

Please note the Turkey Fund-Raiser for St. Anne’s Camp, Sunday afternoon, September 29th at the Camp. Also please take note of the annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2024. More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Eighteenth Sunday After Trinity

Titian, Salvator Mundi (Christ Blessing)The collect for today, the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

LORD, we beseech thee, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow thee the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 1:4-8
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:28-37

Artwork: Titian, Salvator Mundi (Christ Blessing), c. 1570. Oil on canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Michael and All Angels

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

Albrecht Dürer, Saint Michael Fighting the DragonThe name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 September

Michaelmas Daisies: Dancing with Angels

Michaelmas daisies in all their varied hues dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They are asters, a Greek word meaning star, and are called ‘michaelmas daisies’, because their appearance here and elsewhere coincides with the great Fall festival of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29th. They serve as a reminder of the larger dimensions of creation and of the traditions of intellectual and spiritual life which are part of the life of academic institutions.

Angels are a strong reminder to us of our spiritual and intellectual nature. They, too, are creatures but purely intelligible beings, spiritual beings, in other words. As Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium spirits are intermediate between god and humans. She notes that “they interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans”. This ancient Greek view complements the angelic messengers in the scriptural traditions and belongs to the idea of good news that is shared and in which we participate. Evangelist means, literally, a good angel, a good messenger; hence, gospel or good news.

Angels are an inescapable feature of the scriptural and spiritual landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds. The ideas or forms of Plato have become the ideas or thoughts of God and have entered into the spiritual imaginary of the theological cultures of reflection and to a branch of theology known as angelology. They belong to our thinking about creation, spiritually and intellectually, and to ourselves as spiritual creatures, albeit not angels, because we are embodied beings. Angels are the great ‘celestial no-see ums’. The artistic traditions picture and imagine the angels in various ways but in truth they can only be thought. When we think and pray – itself a form of thinking in a Godward direction – we are in the company of angels.

Some of the most important things in life are the things which we cannot see but are known intellectually or spiritually. Such are the angels who contribute to our thinking about the intellectual principles that belong to the created order and to our lives in thought and prayer.

In the year 1257, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in his “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”. Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”. They belong to our life as intellectual beings. The feast of St. Michael and All Angels is the first major festival in the early Fall and thus marks the beginning of the first term at the great medieval universities such as Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge and the institutions which derive from them. At King’s-Edgehill, this term is historically and traditionally ‘Michaelmas Term’.

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Prayers and liturgy

Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop and Scholar

The collect for today, the commemoration of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester, scholar, spiritual writer (source):

Lancelot AndrewesO Lord God,
who didst give Lancelot Andrewes many gifts
of thy Holy Spirit,
making him a man of prayer and a pastor of thy people:
perfect in us that which is lacking in thy gifts,
of faith, to increase it,
of hope, to establish it,
of love, to kindle it,
that we may live in the light of thy grace and glory;
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: 1 Timothy 2:1-7a
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:1-4

A prayer of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes:

Thou, O Lord, art the Helper of the helpless,
The Hope of the hopeless,
The Saviour of them who are tossed with the tempests,
The Haven of them who sail; be thou all to all.
The glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us,
Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us,
Oh! prosper thou our handiwork
Lord, be thou within us, to strengthen us;
without us to keep us; above us to protect us;
beneath us to uphold us; before us to direct us;
behind us to keep us from straying;
round about us to defend us.
Blessed be Thou, O Lord our Father, for ever and ever. Amen.

Southwark Cathedral, Lancelot Andrewes TombGraphic: Tomb of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, Southwark Cathedral, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

“Friend, go up higher.”

In the ninth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Luke tells us that Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem”, but it won’t be for another ten chapters that he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. What happens between his intention to go up to Jerusalem and his getting there? And it is a “going up” to Jerusalem, as Jesus makes clear in the 18th chapter in a passage which is familiar to you from Quinquagesima Sunday on the cusp of Lent. The words from the parable which Jesus tells in this halfway point of his journey echoes both passages; “Friend, go up higher.”

The ‘going up’ is equally a ‘going down’. “Friend, go up higher” can only happen if you have first taken the lower seat. The parable is a check upon human presumption and self-promotion, on the one hand, and a testament to the divine intent and purpose for our humanity, on the other hand. This is captured in the concluding words which equally point us to the radical meaning of Christ’s Passion for us: “whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

What happens in between prepares us for the meaning of Jerusalem in terms of Christ’s Passion. It does so through a series of critical teachings by Jesus as he makes his way through the villages and towns and rural landscape of Israel. It is preparation by way of instruction to the disciples and us that entails at times a trenchant criticism of our humanity in general and of Israel in particular. And it is very much about the nature of our pilgrimage in terms of two seemingly opposed but complementary motions, ‘going up’ and ‘going down’.

The readings and Collect for today remind me of a wonderful aphorism that has come down to us (pardon the pun) in a fragment from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. “The way up and the way down are one and the same”. The movement of our souls to its principle, God, is the same in some sense as our movement from that principle, God, in the living out of our lives with God. Our going to or up and our going from or down is really about our being with God. The Collect prays that God’s grace “may always prevent” – meaning going or coming before us – “and follow us” – come after us in the activities of our lives which, by definition, are seen in terms of our being with God.

The Epistle reading from Ephesians exhorts us to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called” and to do so “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love”, not in pride and self-promotion which seeks to get ahead of others. Humility is seen as the condition of our vocation, our calling, and thus to our being awakened to a profound spiritual truth about our faith: God “is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 23 – 29 September

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

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, October 19th
9-11am Church Clean-Up

Saturday, November 16th
4-6pm Annual Ham Supper – Parish Hall.

Please note the Turkey Fund-Raiser for St. Anne’s Camp, Sunday afternoon, September 29th at the Camp. Also please take note of the annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2024. More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity

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

LORD, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 4:1-6
The Gospel: St. Luke 14:1-11

Healing the Man with Dropsy, Church of St. George, Reichenau IslandArtwork: Healing the Man with Dropsy, fresco, 10th century, Church of St. George, Oberzell, Reichenau Island, Germany.

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