Christ Church - (Anglican) Windsor, Nova Scotia

8 December 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The collect for today, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (source):

Almighty and everlasting God,
who stooped to raise fallen humanity
through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:
grant that we, who have seen thy glory
revealed in our human nature
and thy love made perfect in our weakness,
may daily be renewed in thine image
and conformed to the pattern 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 Lesson: Proverbs 8:22-35
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:26-28

Artwork: Raphael, Madonna of Loreto, 1509-10. Oil on panel, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

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6 December 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

St. Nicholas, Bishop

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Nicholas (d. c. 326), Bishop of Myra (source):

Almighty Father, lover of souls,
who didst choose thy servant Nicholas
to be a bishop in the Church,
that he might give freely out of the treasures of thy grace:
make us mindful of the needs of others
and, as we have received, so teach us also to give;
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 St. John 4:7-14
The Gospel: St. Mark 10:13-16

Artwork: Giovanni Gasparro, St. Nicholas of Bari slaps the Heresiarch Arius at the Council of Nicea, 2016. Oil on canvas, Private collection.

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4 December 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Clement of Alexandria, Doctor

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 155-c. 215), Priest, Apologist, Doctor (source):

O Lord, who didst call thy servant Clement of Alexandria from the errors of ancient philosophy that he might learn and teach the saving Gospel of Christ: Turn thy Church from the conceits of worldly wisdom and, by the Spirit of truth, guide it into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: Colossians 1:11-20
The Gospel: St. John 6:57-63

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3 December 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

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

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

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3 December 202330 March 2026Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“All the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”

Advent is the season of questions, questions that awaken us to the radical meaning of God’s Word coming to us in law and prophecy, in mind and in flesh. Without the questions of Advent, Christmas is only tinsel and wrap that conceal the illusions of our hearts and leave us in the darkness, desolate and in despair. The great questions of Advent illuminate the Word of God as the Light which overcomes the darkness of disillusion and despair.

The questions are at once our questions in all of their confusion and uncertainty and the questions of God that redeem our desires. Our questions are really about the deeper desires of our hearts and minds for wholeness, for what is absolute and true, however misguided we may be in what we think we want. God’s questions belong to the redemption of our desires; in short, to the redemption of our humanity. But how? By confronting us with the wilderness and the darkness of our hearts and world.

The great Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent is about Christ’s coming to Jerusalem in triumph but also in judgement. The triumphal entry of Christ, in images that fulfill the prophetic expectation of the Messiah, is full of the sense of joy and delight in the one who comes. HIs royal procession is greeted with branches of palms strewn in the way and with the exultant cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.” We know this from Palm Sunday. There is the sense of joyous expectancy, of hope, that speaks directly and clearly to the world of darkness and uncertainty both then and now; to our world, to be sure. It is a moving spectacle. “All the city was moved,” Matthew tells us, “saying, Who is this?” At once named as the Son of David, referring to the Messiah and to the hopes for justice and peace, and yet unknown, it seems. The first question of Advent is about our unknowing, about the darkness of our minds and hearts. We know and do not know in equal measure.

And so we must begin again to attend to the radical pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness. We “know in part,” as Paul puts it, “in a glass darkly,” but we long to know and to be known more fully, more completely. That can only happen by confronting the darkness. We learn from the darkness about the light which is greater than all the forms of suffering and evil that belong to the darkness of the world and our hearts. Without that we can really make no sense of the one who comes and who will be called Emmanuel, which by interpretation, as Matthew tells us, is “God with us.”

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3 December 202330 March 2026Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 4 – 10 December

Monday, December 4th
2:30pm Advent/Xmas Lessons & Carols
Gr. 10 & 11: Hensley Memorial Chapel, KES

Thursday, December 7th, Eve of the Conception of the BVM
7:00pm Advent Programme I

Saturday, December 9th
Advent Quiet Day – Fr. Curry at St. George’s, Halifax, 9am – 1:30pm

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

Upcoming Event:

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

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3 December 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday in Advent

The collect for today, the First Sunday in Advent, being the Fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 13:8-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 21:1-13

Artwork: Bernardo Bellotto, Jesus Cleansing the Temple, c. 1765. Oil on canvas, National Museum, Warsaw.

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30 November 202330 March 2026KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 30 November

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain

Isaiah is the great prophet of Advent. Advent, from the Latin, adventus, which means coming, is about the motions of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of the wilderness of our hearts and world. This is concentrated for us in the great pageant of the Advent and Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols. An important feature of that pageant are readings from Isaiah. This week in Chapel, one of those readings was highlighted and commented upon, Isaiah 11.1-3a, 4a, 6-9.

It provides a twofold reflection upon the Messianic King and the idea of Paradise Restored. The passage has had an enormous influence upon the theological understanding of our humanity and upon the idea of Creation as Paradise as well as contributing to the Christian understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. The idea of the Messianic King is associated with King David. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,” it begins, recalling us to the family tree or lineage of King David, the King who united the unruly tribes of Israel in the worship of God centered in Jerusalem, Zion.

In Isaiah’s vision, “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” The Holy Spirit of God conveys the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit upon the Messiah, the anointed one who is thought of as the saviour of the world. The gifts are spiritual principles which speak to the integrity of our humanity, to the unity of heart and mind and which are properties or qualities of the Messiah in us. The Hebrew text as we have it from a much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint, names six gifts but the Septuagint itself speaks of the seven gifts of the Spirit.

But what are these so-called gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” The Septuagint, probably out of sense of the rhetorical patterns of the Greek language, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to honouring or worshipping God.

They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts which come from God and speak to heart and mind. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God. Critical to that theological understanding is the idea of the integration of heart and mind, suggested in the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit. That these gifts are directly associated with the Messiah signify that these gifts ultimately derive from the Word and the Spirit of God and unite us with God. In other words, these spiritual gifts are principles that come from God to us and that speak to the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as seen in the sight of God.

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30 November 202330 March 2026Prayers and liturgy

Saint Andrew the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY God, who didst give such grace unto thy holy Apostle Saint Andrew, that he readily obeyed the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and followed him without delay: Grant unto us all, that we, being called by thy holy word, may forthwith give up ourselves obediently to fulfil thy holy commandments; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 10:8-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 4:18-22

A native of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, Andrew was a fisherman, the son of the fisherman John, and the brother of the fisherman Simon Peter. He was at first, along with John the Evangelist, a disciple of John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus was the Christ led the two to follow Jesus. Andrew then took his brother Simon Peter to meet Jesus. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Andrew is called the Protokletos (the First Called) because he is named as the first disciple summoned by Jesus into his service.

At first Andrew and Simon Peter continued to carry on their fishing trade, but the Lord later called them to stay with him all the time. He promised to make them fishers of men and, this time, they left their nets for good.

The only other specific reference to Andrew in the New Testament is at St. Mark 13:3, where he is one of those asking the questions that lead our Lord into his great eschatological discourse.

In the lists of the apostles that appear in the gospels, Andrew is always numbered among the first four. He is named individually three times in the Gospel of St. John. In addition to the story of his calling (John 1:35-42), he, together with Philip, presented the Gentiles to Christ (John 12:20-22), and he pointed out the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8).

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