O GOD Most High, who didst endue with wonderful virtue and grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Grant that we, who now call her blessed, may be made very members of the heavenly family of him who was pleased to be called the first-born among many brethren; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:12-14
The Gospel: St Luke 1:39-49

Artwork: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Madonna and Child, 13th century. Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi, Montepulciano. Photo taken by admin, 27 May 2010.

In returning and giving thanks we are made whole. Such is salvation. It is also our freedom. The burden of thanksgiving, we might say, is precisely our freedom. It is our freedom in Christ.

The giving of thanks cannot be coerced. In the story of the ten lepers, one, and only one, as Luke is at pains to remind us, “returned to give thanks”. All were healed but only the one who returned and gave thanks is said to be made whole. His returning is a free act by which he signals that he is more than just the recipient of an healing act. He acknowledges the God who heals and restores, the God who has mercy and saves. But even more, his action brings him into the presence of God.

His returning and giving thanks puts him in the presence of Christ in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Thus he enters into the radical meaning of his healing. Its radical meaning is that our ultimate good for both soul and body is found in the presence of Christ in his will for us.

In returning and giving thanks, he enters into the very motions of God’s love towards us in Christ Jesus. The reciprocity of divine love is the life of the Trinity opened to view in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. In giving thanks, he wills what God wills for us. Salvation is not otherwise.

His returning and giving thanks is not something commanded. It is not coerced. Thanksgiving is not thanksgiving at all if it is forced. It is freely given or it is not thanksgiving at all. And there is a further paradox. Thanksgiving is at once totally our doing and yet totally God’s doing in us. God’s grace in us is our freedom. It is our freedom to will what God wills for us. God will not have it any other way, it seems.

Our thanks to God and to one another for whatever we have received is a free act. And yet we also think of it as an obligation, something we owe to one another. It has the quality of necessity about it. And so it is. Our freedom lies in the necessity, in our accepting that necessity as what is proper to us, as true to whom we properly are, as belonging, in fact, to the God-given dignity of our humanity.

That we can return and give thanks is the free acknowledgement that there is someone to whom we can return and give thanks. Pity the poor atheist. So much to be thankful for and no one to thank! Yet our act of thanksgiving participates in something more wonderful and more profound. Our giving thanks to God participates in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit of their mutual and perfect love. Thanksgiving is at the heart of the Christian gospel and so it is at the heart of the Christian life, to what St. Paul calls “walking in the spirit”. Our hearts are to be eucharistic hearts; in other words, hearts of thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving captures something of the meaning of the Son whose whole life, eternal and incarnate, is oriented towards the Father. In our returning and giving thanks, we participate in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

Last Sunday the Gospel was The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Here in this Gospel the one who returns and gave thanks is, once again, a Samaritan. The simple point is that the Samaritans were outsiders – the despised and the rejected of the Jewish culture. They become in the Gospel the very examples of the divine love which has reached beyond our human barriers and divisions and has come near to us and which becomes actual in us, moving our hearts and souls whither they would not be moved before. There is no inside track to God. Salvation is not genetically possessed nor is it a denominational possession. No. It can only be what is freely entered upon because of what has been freely given. The task for us as members of the body of Christ is to will what we have been given to see and know; in short, to return and give thanks.

The Samaritan’s actions may seem a trifle excessive and yet his actions belong to the very character of our patterns of worship. Our liturgy would have us fall on our knees and call out for mercy in the free acknowledgement of the mercy that has been shown to us in Christ Jesus. In Jesus we see the most excessive love of all, the love that is more than love. His love is the love that reaches down and enters in that we may be raised up, healed, restored, forgiven and set in motion, the same motions of love compelling us. In his love we are being made whole.

In the free act of thanksgiving we do not and cannot “presume upon ourselves” but only upon the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. He seeks not only our healing but our wholeness – our being truly and wholly in him and he in us. This is what we pray for before Communion in The Prayer of Humble Access. After receiving the Sacrament, we don’t simply rush out the door. No. Like the Samaritan in today’s Gospel we return to our pews to give thanks in Thanksgiving Prayer which follows The Lord’s Prayer, and then we stand “to give glory to God” in the Gloria. Such is the burden of thanksgiving. Such is our freedom. We enter into the glory that has been revealed.

We are caught up, as Jeremy Taylor puts it, in “the amiable captivity of the Spirit”. It is our freedom to be so caught up. We are called to “walk in the spirit” at once “bearing one another’s burdens” and so fulfilling the law of Christ – his life forming the pattern of our lives – but also “bearing our own burdens”, the burdens of thanksgiving, it seems to me.

That seeming paradox is the quality of the Son’s thanksgiving at work in us in our loving service towards one another through our love towards God. Our labour is the labour of love. We are set in motion by the love that has been shown to us – in motion towards the stranger and the friend and in motion towards God. Such is the love of God at work in us. It belongs to our freedom and our dignity; the freedom to return and give thanks to the God who has turned to us. Thanksgiving is our freedom and our salvation.

“And one…turned back… giving him thanks”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIV, 2010

Sunday, September 12th, Trinity XV
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club Breakfast)
9:30am Holy Communion at KES
10:30am Morning Prayer
4:30pm Evening Prayer at Christ Church

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:25-6:5
The Gospel: St Luke 17:11-19

Artwork: Christ heals ten lepers, 12th-century mosaic, Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily.

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.

Church of England priest Robert Wolfall was chaplain to the third Arctic expedition led by Martin Frobisher. 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.

O God, by whose grace the blessed Abbot Giles, enkindled with the fire of thy love, became a burning and a shining light in thy Church: Grant that we may be inflamed with the same spirit of discipline and love, and ever walk before thee as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St John 2:15-17
The Gospel: St Luke 6:20-23a

All that is known for certain about this saint is that he was born in the early 7th century and that he founded a monastery in what is now the town of Saint-Gilles, southern France. The monastery became a renowned stopping place in medieval times for pilgrims journeying to Compostela, Rome, or the Holy Land.

A 10th-century Legend attributed important miracles to Saint Giles, which helped make him one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Hundreds of churches and monasteries across Europe are dedicated to him. As well, because he is the patron saint of lepers, cripples, and nursing mothers, many hospitals were built in his name. Saint Giles is also the patron saint of Edinburgh, where his memory is honoured by the Church of Scotland High Kirk: St Giles’ Cathedral.

Artwork: Hans Memling, Saint Giles (detail of the central panel of the Moreel Triptych), 1484. Oil on wood, Groeningemuseum, Bruges.

O loving God, who didst call thy servant Aidan from the Peace of a cloister to re-establish the Christian mission in northern England, and didst endow him with gentleness, simplicity, and strength: Grant, we beseech thee, that we, following his example, may use what thou hast given us for the relief of human need, and may persevere in commending the saving Gospel of our Redeemer Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
The Gospel: St Matthew 19:27-30

The Saint Aidan stained glass was made by the firm of C.E. Kempe of London and installed in the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, St John’s, Newfoundland, in 1913. Photo taken by admin, 7 September 2009.

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service: Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 5:16-24
The Gospel: St Luke 10:25-37

Artwork: Gustave Moreau, The Good Samaritan, c. 1870. Oil on canvas.

O GOD, our heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst call thy blessed Apostles and send them forth to preach thy Gospel of salvation unto all the nations: We bless thy holy Name for thy servant Robert McDonald, whose labours we commemorate this day, and we pray thee, according to thy holy Word, to send forth many labourers into thy harvest; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 12:24-13:5
The Gospel: St Matthew 4:13-24a

Robert McDonald was born in Point Douglas, Red River Colony (in present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba). He was the second of ten children born to a Scottish immigrant and his Ojibway wife. Ordained a Church of England priest in 1852, he ministered among the Ojibway people for almost ten years, mastering the Ojibway language and translating parts of the Bible.

He was chosen to establish a Church Missionary Society mission at Fort Yukon, a settlement then believed to be in British territory but now located within Alaska. Reaching Yukon in October 1862, Robert McDonald was the first Protestant missionary designated for mission work in that territory. He ministered to the Gwitch’in and other aboriginal peoples in northwestern parts of North America for over forty years, during which time he baptised 2000 adults and children.

In 1870, he worked among peoples along the Porcupine River (Old Crow) and later settled in Fort MacPherson on the Peel River, in present-day Northwest Territories. He married Julia Kutuq, a local Gwitch’in woman, in 1876; together they had nine children. He was appointed Archdeacon of the Mackenzie Diocese in 1875.

Archdeacon McDonald developed the first writing system for the Gwitch’in language. (The Gwitch’in Athapaskan language is also known as Tukudh). With the help of Gwitch’in people, including his wife Julia, he translated the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and compiled a Tukudh hymnal. Finally, in 1911, he published a dictionary and grammar of Tukudh.

Soon after retiring in 1904, he returned to Winnipeg where he died in 1913. He is buried in the cemetery of St John’s Cathedral.

McDonald’s translation of the Book of Common Prayer is posted online here and his grammar and dictionary here.

More biographical information on The Ven. Robert McDonald may be found online at these sites:

• Virtual Museum Canada
• Anglican History: Leaders of the Canadian Church
• Manitoba Historical Society

O merciful Lord,
who didst turn Augustine from his sins to be a faithful bishop and teacher:
grant that we may follow him in penitence and godly discipline,
till our restless hearts find their rest in thee;
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: Hebrews 12:22-24, 28-29
The Gospel: St John 14:6-15

Artwork: Sandro Botticelli, Saint Augustine, 1480. Fresco, Ognissanti, Florence. Photo taken by admin, 16 May 2010.