Prayers and liturgy

The Third Sunday in Advent

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

O LORD Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
The Gospel: St. Matthew 11:2-10

Moretto da Brescia, Christ in the wilderness blesses His cousin, St. John the BaptistArtwork: Moretto da Brescia, Christ in the wilderness blesses His cousin, St. John the Baptist, c. 1540. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 December

Waiting in the wilderness

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness. We are, perhaps, not so good about waiting, wanting instead the immediacy and intensity of ‘celebratory’ events. That is to forget the meaning of waiting. What is our waiting? It is at once human desire and the divine gift that redeems our desires. Our human desires for this and that thing are radically incomplete and unable to be fulfilled. Our waiting is really prayer; the desire for wholeness and completeness which by definition cannot be fulfilled in ourselves.

What is the wilderness? It is not the external world or a world without us. The wilderness is us. This is the strong message of Isaiah, the most ‘evangelical’ of all the prophets, as some have noted. Looking back and reflecting on the great themes of Creation and the Fall, Isaiah movingly highlights the wilderness within us. “Let me sing a love song for my beloved, … a love song concerning his vineyard,” Isaiah 5 begins. “My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is the wildness in us that makes the wilderness both within us and in our world. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” The question, like so many of the biblical questions, simply calls us to account and bids us reflect upon ourselves in our yearnings and desires. Ultimately what we seek is the absolute goodness of God which is more than what we can completely imagine and yet belongs to all our seeking and desiring.

But Isaiah, as we heard in the Advent Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols, shows us another view of ourselves and our world that stands in complete contrast to the sad and disturbing divisions and polarities of our divided and violent world. Isaiah offers us a picture of Paradise Restored, of the harmony between God and our humanity, the harmony of creation itself as grounded in the Creator. Instead of Nietzche’s will to power which supplants Darwin’s struggle for survival, the wolf and the lamb are envisioned as lying down together, an image of the interplay and interdependence of the natural world that transcends the binaries of distinction but without negating them. That image of Paradise Restored is the symbolic meaning of Bethlehem.

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Sermons

“The Lord Is At Hand”: Advent Programme

“The Lord is at hand”

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the Advent refrain for the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We wait upon the motions of God’s word coming to us but that waiting is about our active attention to God’s constant and eternal presence. His coming is really about our coming into a deeper understanding and meaning of our lives with the God who is always at hand, always near, and always with us. As we heard last Sunday in the thundering words of Luke’s apocalyptic gospel, “look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” And on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we will hear Paul’s words that “the Lord is at hand” even as that day will bring us to Christmas Eve and to the celebration of Christ’s holy nativity.

The kingdom of heaven, the Lord, your redemption. What does it mean to speak about these things that are “at hand,” that are “nigh”, or near us? Our Advent meditation tonight will focus on something of their meaning by way of Mark Frank, a seventeenth century Anglican preacher and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1613-1664), in ways which, I hope, will deepen our understanding of the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. It is really all about his eternal being and presence into which we come.

He notes that the Lord is said to be at hand or near us in several ways. First and foremost, “he is at hand, or near us, by his Divine essence,” by virtue of being God. For God, as the traditions of mystical theology and philosophy suggest, is “like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As Mark Frank says, “He is everywhere; we therefore nowhere, but that he is near us,” drawing upon Paul’s observation that God is “not far from every one of us” since we have no being, no life apart from him. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17. 27,28).

This highlights the primacy of God with respect to all our thinking and being and recalls us to the mystery which embraces our very being. The mystical traditions of thought are all about a constant redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of reality, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches. That mystery underlies all of the different forms of the kingdom of heaven, the Lord, and your redemption being at hand or nigh to us.

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Sermons

Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah, Advent Quiet Day, St. George’s Halifax

Fr. David Curry delivered this Advent Quiet Day address and homily at St. George’s Round Church, Halifax, on 9 December 2023. Click here to download a pdf version of this post, complete with footnotes.

Waiting in the Wilderness: Poets & the Prophet Isaiah
Advent Quiet Day , St. George’s Halifax
9 December 2023
(Fr. David Curry)

Part One

Our Advent Quiet Day is a time of prayerful attention to what certain poets have to say about the mystery of God’s coming to us and our coming to God as informed in some fashion by Isaiah, the great prophet of Advent. My hope is that these texts will deepen our understanding and strengthen our wills. Some passages from Isaiah and a selection of poems are offered for your quiet meditation and reflection.

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness upon the motions of God coming to us. What is that waiting? It is our watching and wanting, our looking and desiring; in short, it is prayer. What is the wilderness? It is, as Isaiah will show us, very much about ourselves, the wilderness of our hearts which contributes to various other forms of wilderness. The simple point is that the wilderness is not a place without humans; it is about a kind of wildness within us, the wilderness of sin.

The images of the wilderness in Isaiah look back to the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis but with a wonderful kind of poignancy that moves our hearts and minds. “Let me sing for my beloved,” Isaiah 5 begins, “a love song concerning his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.”

What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I shall do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold a cry!

The wilderness in us turns the paradise of God’s creation into a wilderness outside us, the waste land of T.S.Eliot’s poem by that name, itself shaped by the imagery of Isaiah. Yet the wilderness, too, is the place of prayer.

Prayer at once acknowledges what we want but as such do not have. Yet it assumes and anticipates that there is an ultimate good in which we participate now. Prayer is both human desire and divine gift, as Fr. Robert Crouse so concisely put it, the divine gift which alone redeems our desires without which they are incomplete and partial, essentially dead and empty. “My soul is athirst for God, yea, even the living God,” the psalmist reminds us. Our sojourning in the wilderness is about our desire for wholeness, “like as the hart desires the water-brooks.” Prayer and wilderness belong to our yearning for something absolute, for “here have we no continuing city” but “desire a better country, that is an heavenly,” as Hebrews puts it. We are, as it were, sojourners in the wilderness longing and seeking for the true homeland of the spirit.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Second Sunday in Advent

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

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Sermons

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

There are things which, perhaps, we would rather not think about that belong to the wisdom of the Advent season. What are those things? They are things like death, judgment, heaven and hell, the proverbial four last things or eschatology which for centuries were served up as the basic preaching fare during the Advent season. They are things which we would rather ignore or forget. We do so at our peril because such things really belong to hope, the great advent teaching of the Second Sunday in Advent.

Scripture speaks to Scripture, opening out the Word to us that carries hope in its breath. The Holy Scriptures are “written for our learning,” St. Paul exclaims, and Archbishop Cranmer prays the same in the wonderful Collect that adorns this day and this week, a Collect that embodies a whole attitude of mind and approach to the Scriptures. It encapsulates a way of understanding the Scriptures. They are writings that teach us “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Comfort here is not simply hygge suggesting a quality of coziness and material comfort making us hyggelig. Comfort here is much stronger and deeper; it relates entirely to our life with God in his word coming to us that challenges us and redeems us from ourselves.

Hope is one of the great lessons of the Scriptures. Why? Because hope is precisely something which is not dependent upon us. The hope to which the Scriptures awaken us is real hope, the hope that has realized the utter limitations of human endeavour, the hope that has faced the empty abyss of ourselves and the vanity of our actions, the hope that has considered the reality of sin and death. Looking into the things of judgment and condemnation, hope also looks up to God and to the coming of God into our midst.

The coming is hope itself. We look for what we do not see. We wait for it. In the coming of Christ we look for what we do not see in ourselves but see in him, namely, the redemption of our wounded and weary humanity. But it takes the Word proclaimed and celebrated to awaken us and to sustain us in the hope of the Gospel and in the hope that we might begin to see this even in ourselves.

For what do we hope? Simply for the accomplishing of the good will and purpose of God in our lives. Big deal, you might be thinking. What will be will be. Que sera, sera. Yes, but why assume that that will be good? Why not assume misery and suffering? Plenty of that to go around, after all. Such an attitude is fatalistic. It leaves the individual completely and conveniently out of the equation – what will be will be whether I act or don’t act, whether I do something or nothing. That is sheer hopelessness. Fatalism is ultimately our despair of anything good; it is, really, a denial of hope. The denial of hope is our despair of God and his love. We consign ourselves to victimhood. It belongs to the culture of depression and dependency; the culture of despair. It is ultimately anti-human and negates the truth of our humanity as found in God.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 11 – 17 December

Tuesday, December 12th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, December 14th
7:00pm Holy Communion & Advent Programme II

Sunday, December 17th, Third Sunday in Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Second Sunday in Advent

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

BLESSED Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 15:4-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 21:25-33

Stefan Lochner, Last JudgmentArtwork: Stefan Lochner, Last Judgment, c. 1435. Tempera on oak, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 December

Rejoice! Rejoice!

The three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols brought to an end the Chapel programme for Michaelmas, ending the term on a reflective and yet celebratory note, nicely captured in the stirring refrain of the great Advent Hymn, Veni Emmanuel. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” Despite the paradox of having the ‘Christmas Dinner and Dance’ before these services, they nonetheless helped in appreciating more deeply something of the “true meaning” of Christmas, as the lovely Bidding Prayer from the original service of 1918 puts it. That sense of its true meaning emphasizes the vision of the redemption of our humanity as opposed to a world of war and conflict, a vision signaled in different registers in the nine lessons from Scripture and which speaks to our world and day.

Framed by the sixteenth century Italian composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Matin Responsory and shaped by traditional verses of the 12th century Veni Emmanuel that punctuated the reading of the lessons, the service is a moving pageant of Word and Song. The Choir, in its various configurations under the direction of Stephanie Fillman, not only led the singing of the Advent Carol, Hark a Herald Voice is Sounding, the Huron Carol, Canada’s first Christmas Carol originally written in the Wendat language (Huron) by the Jesuit missionary Jean Brébeuf, Silent Night, and Shepherds in the Field Abiding, but different choir members sang as solos the verses of the Veni Emmanuel with everyone joining in on the refrain. Many thanks to Steven Roe, organist, for his professionalism and flexibility, and for providing such fine preludes and postludes appropriate to the occasion.

The Choir performed as well a lovely anthem Once upon a December Evening by Stephen Flaherty. This was complemented at the Grade 12 service on Sunday night and at the Grade 10 and 11 service on Tuesday by the vocal and instrumental duet of Ann MacQuarrie (guitar) and Sophie Ning (keyboard) in a beautiful rendition of Matt Anderson’s My Little Country Church at Christmas Time. All three services were greatly enhanced by the meditative classical guitar piece El Noi de la Mare, a traditional Catalonian composition, performed with great precision and care by Harvey Hadley. All quite remarkable and rather special.

My thanks to the teams of readers and servers and to the Chapel Prefects who assisted in the preparations for the services in lighting the window candles in the Chapel. The readers at the Junior Service on Friday, December 1st performed very well. They were Willoughby Larder (Gr. 8), Ollie Boyle (Gr. 6), Nathaelle Etou (Gr. 9), Max Proctor (Gr. 9), Chelsea James (Gr. 7), Kelsea Griffiths (Gr. 9), and Lillian Blois (Gr. 9). Mrs. Taya Shields, Head of the Junior School, read the eight lesson and the Chaplain sang the ninth lesson, the Prologue of John’s Gospel which is traditionally read at Christmas. The servers at the Junior Service were Rowan Francis, Sokha Ebert, Spencer Armstrong and Farrah Webber.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Commemoration of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

We will hear these words in the mystery of Christmas. What things does Mary keep and ponder in her heart? All the things that are said about the child Christ. By extension we, too, are bidden to ponder all the things that belong to the mystery of Christ. Such is part of the meaning of tonight’s commemoration. We can’t think about Christ apart from Mary. She is an essential part of the mystery and meaning of the Incarnation.

Pondus meum amor meus. My love is my weight. A powerful phrase from Augustine, it has shaped the patristic, medieval, and reformation churches’ understanding of human redemption. Augustine’s image captures a significant theological theme which speaks to a culture which has abandoned God and finds itself adrift and isolated. Such is our wilderness.

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. What defines Mary is her waiting upon the will of God. Far from a kind of passive acquiescence, Mary’s waiting is an holy activity, a kind of attentiveness to the pageant of God’s Word revealed in the Law and the Prophets and now, on Angel’s wings, it seems, opening us out to the wonder and the marvel of God’s coming to us through her. To what extent are we in her? For Mary, in Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”

It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ; she is quietly and patiently with us in our meditations and thoughts. For the Church in prayer is essentially Marian. Mary is an inescapable feature of the landscape of Advent. She plays a critical and crucial role in our understanding of Christ’s coming to us as Emmanuel, God with us. Through Mary we begin to discover how our humanity is totally and inescapably bound up with the will of God towards us; in short, his advent.

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