Pentecost. God is believable and thinkable. I am not so sure about our contemporary institutional churches but Pentecost marks the birthday of the Church universal and makes Church and churches at once believable and thinkable.

There is a wonder to Pentecost. It marks the descent of the Holy  Ghost upon the disciples to form the Apostolic Church, the Church, if you will, of which Anglicans notionally lay claim to belonging. And rightly so.

But what is the wonder? After all of the comings and goings of Christ, we might wonder, what on earth is Pentecost really about? Simply the absolute spiritual reality of God. No greater message to our depressed, discouraged and despairing age. The whole point of the religions of the world, and, especially, the Christian religion, is the idea that we are incomplete without God. That bears repeating because the assumption of the Western cultures has been that we have matured and out-grown God. We have come of age! Sadly only to discover our adolescence!

Pentecost challenges us about the spiritual reality of God and about ourselves as spiritual beings. It marks the beginning of the Church as a spiritual society, a community defined by the clarity and the charity of Christ. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Pentecost.

It is not so much about what is seen and heard but about what is understood through things seen and heard. This is the especial importance of Pentecost. It reminds us of the spiritual reality of God revealed through the things of this world without being taken captive to them. “A spirit hath not flesh and blood, as ye see me have,” Jesus said to the disciples as he appeared to them after his resurrection. “Touch and see,” he said to Thomas, the proverbial doubter. Such things belong to the teaching of the Resurrection, the affirmation that our bodies are not nothing, but neither are they everything. Such things, too, speak to the different forms of human knowing, particularly about learning through the things of the world the things of God. What Pentecost reminds us is the spiritual teaching underlying the whole Incarnate life of Christ. Everything is gathered into the communion of God and finds its truth and being in him and his will.

Wind and fire. Who can catch the wind? Who can hold the fire? These images speak about the spiritual reality of God the Holy Spirit. They have an elusive and intangible quality to them that opens us out to the mystery of God, the mystery of the divine life and communion, at once believable and thinkable. And something, too, which we are meant to feel: to feel what we believe and think. It is in this way that Pentecost reminds us of the truth of our humanity as spiritual creatures, creatures who know and love. And yet our knowing and our loving are always incomplete and fraught with folly and sin. Pentecost calls us to be a community of faith. How can we be a community of faith given our failings and shortcomings, our sins and wickednesses? “The good that I would, I do not,” as Paul puts it, “the evil that I would not, that I do,” capturing the human dilemma. How then to be a people of faith who honour the truth of God and of one another? Through the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost celebrates God’s redemptive and sanctifying presence with us and in us. The human community has no unity in itself as a world of wars and tensions, destruction and mayhem constantly shows us. No. True unity and order is found in God and in communion with God. The lesson from Acts captures this truth and wonder. It is essentially a kind of retelling and reworking of the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, the biblical account, we might say, of the human attempt to create a brave, new world order, a story of presumption and pride that results in the division of peoples through language, cultures, and nations. But at Pentecost? Here is the wonder: many voices, the voices of the nations of the world united in and through the diversity of tongues, united in the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” No greater testimony, it seems to me, to the idea of redemption of creation. The languages of the world are not repudiated but have become the vessels and vehicles for the praise of God. It is a way of saying that our humanity in its diversity participates in the infinite life of God. That is the redemption of Babel. A unity is achieved in and through the diversities of tongues, cultures, and gifts.

Wind and fire. Things seen and heard. But even more things understood. And, as if to emphasize the point, John’s Gospel speaks directly to the intellectual and spiritual meaning of Pentecost. “He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,” Jesus says, adding, “whatsoever I have said unto you.” Word and Spirit go together. There cannot be one without the other. It becomes the struggle of the Church to find ways to bring the things of the world into the things of the Spirit, or, conversely, to find the things of the Spirit in the things of the world.

In 1662, at the time of the Restoration after the bitter English civil war which saw bishops and the Prayer Book outlawed for fifteen years, the Prayer Book was restored with a few small but important changes. Provision was made for a service for Adult Baptism, “For Those of Riper Years,” as it is quaintly expressed. There was also an addition made to the liturgy for The Ordination of Priests. It was the Bishop of Durham’s, John Cosin’s, translation of a medieval hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,/ And lighten with celestial fire./ Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart…” What are those gifts? The seven gifts of the Spirit taken from Isaiah, “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,” to which the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint had added piety or devotion. The concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit became part of the spirituality of the life of the Church. The seven-fold gifts have to do with ourselves as spiritual and intellectual beings, tasked with thinking and doing, knowing and loving, we might say. And all by the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost who keeps us in the communion of God himself.

This is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost. We do not need to be defined by the world or by our self-preoccupations and actions but by God whose love and grace are poured out upon the Church in the wonder of Pentecost. We are to know and feel that love and spirit even in the midst of a broken and troubled world where we are too much with the world and with ourselves.

Pentecost recalls us to “the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in a poem by that title. “The world,” he says, “is charged with the grandeur of God,” a world which he knows has ignored and denied God. “Why do men then now not reck his rod?”, acknowledge God’s power and truth, he asks, realizing that the world is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” and that it “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell”; knowing, too, our growing disconnect with nature. “The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” An evocative picture of our disordered world, we might say. And yet, he says, “for all this, nature is never spent; For there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” There is something more and something greater, something spiritual that redeems and sanctifies. “Oh, morning … springs.“ How? “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Beautiful. Such is the Pentecostal picture of redemption that ushers us into holy lives lived in the community of faith, the Church. The world is a bent world and we in our sins, too, are bent out of shape but “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” and all “because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

That is to feel and know the truth of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.

“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”

Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2013

Tuesday, May 21st, Tuesday after Pentecost
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Still Life by Louise Penny and The Lord God Bird by Tom Gallant

Thursday, May 23rd, Eve of Ember Friday
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, May 24th, Ember Friday
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge

Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
2:00pm AMD Service of the Deaf
4:00pm Choral Evensong – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, July 20th
7:30pm Christ Church Concert Series: Ensemble Seraphina

O GOD, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

O GOD, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon thy disciples in Jerusalem: Grant that we who celebrate before thee the Feast of Pentecost may continue thine for ever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, until we come to thine eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 2:1-11
The Gospel: St. John 14:15-27

Artwork: Joseph Ignaz Mildorfer, Pentecost, 1750s. Oil on canvas, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. (Originally on an altar in the Church of the Holy Spirit, Sopron, Hungary.)

The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two scriptural and creedal teachings. They are at once forgotten and assumed, I think, with respect to Christian thinking and faith. And yet, they speak profoundly to the confusions and complexities of contemporary culture. They point us to an understanding of the objective reality of God and to a larger view of our humanity. They recall us to who we are in the sight of God.

As such these doctrines or teachings provide a strong counter to our fatalisms, ancient and modern and to our existential despair. Either the world is too much with us or we are too much with ourselves.

The great religions of the world offer the profound insight, in one way or another, that our humanity is radically incomplete without God. For Christians that insight is captured in what we might call the comings and goings of God signaled in the story of Christ. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are important moments in that story; the story of God, we might say, in which we find our story.

The image is strong and wonderful. Christ ascends and sits on the right hand of the Father. What does it mean? It speaks at once of the transcendence of God – God as utterly beyond, as almighty and all knowing – and of the immanence of God, God as having engaged our humanity in the intimacy of Christ, God as being with us. Both these theological concepts – transcendence and immanence – are comprehended in the Christian idea of God as Trinity signaled in the revealed names of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, names which are largely made known to us by Jesus. It is especially in the story and in the season of Christ’s Death and Resurrection that Jesus teaches us about the Father, about himself as the Son and certainly about the Holy Ghost or Spirit. It is in this understanding that God is God and that God is also with us.

What is being opened out to us is the mystery of God and how that mystery speaks to us and to the human condition. Who are we? Turds that talk? Computers with meat? Or immortal souls with bodies? The insight of the Fathers is that the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity.” We have an end with God. “The end of all things is at hand,” Peter says in this morning’s epistle reading, an end which is not simply doom and gloom but a sense of purpose and direction, a sense of the truth of our being as being with God. That changes everything. It actually gives us a freedom in the world, a freedom, too, from the tyranny of ourselves. It allows us to see ourselves with God in Christ. We have a place with God.

In the facebook culture of our day, we are desperate to be seen by others, it seems, as if you don’t exist unless your image is constantly out there in the digital world. We know, too, of course how deadly and destructive that can be both in terms of narcissism and exploitation and abuse. What these doctrines provide us is something more and something greater. A way to see ourselves in Christ and to see Christ in one another. We have a place with God!

The image of Christ ascending and sitting on the right hand of the Father is about our place with God. The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, having accomplished the mission of redemption. The theme of homecoming is powerful. It connects with the story of Odysseus in his quest to get home after the Trojan War, a journey which is about learning through suffering who he truly is in the order of the cosmos, learning what that order is and learning to honour the principles, the Gods, as it were, of the ordered world. There is, too, the great Roman story of Aeneas fleeing burning Troy and embarking on a great journey to found Rome, the home of the Latin culture which shapes so much of the story of western Christendom. The idea of home is a powerful image, an image of security and belonging, of trust and identity. It is taken up in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ as well.

The image of sitting on the right hand of the Father is an image of power and order, God’s power and order over all things. Christ’s Ascension and Session is about his triumph over sin and death, his victory over all the evils of the world, past, present and future. And his homecoming reveals our home, our home with God. “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also,” Jesus says, reminding us to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither rust nor moth doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Heaven is where Christ is. Our hearts are to be with Christ. In the lifting up of our hearts and voices in prayer, we are with Jesus in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. As this Sunday makes clear, Christ’s Ascension and Session are the conditions of the coming of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, the Spirit of God who keeps us with God.

All these doctrines remind us of who we are in the sight of God. That is, I think, everything. We are not just our actions. We are more than our doings. Being reminded of who we are in the sight of God challenges us to act out of that reality rather than simply out of ourselves in our follies and ambitions. We are too preoccupied with the world and with ourselves. It is the wisdom of the poets. “The world is too much with us, late and soon,/ getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth puts it. Even more, there is the poetic insight of Gerard Manley Hopkins who challenges our existential preoccupations with ourselves as if we are only and simply our actions, as if “what I do is me”.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

We find our place in God’s eye in Christ.

We are to see ourselves in Christ and to see Christ in one another. Such are the great gifts of grace captured in these doctrines. These teachings are the living words of salvation, if we will let them live in us. To see the world and ourselves in Christ. This is grace and salvation; our joy and delight. They save us from ourselves and from the world.

In our secular culture, today is Mother’s Day. We give thanks to God for our mothers for everyone of us is born of woman. We honour our derivations but we also celebrate the vocation of motherhood, the care of mothers, and the care of Mother Church, too, we might say. That vocation and care also belongs to the Christian story in the figure of Mary, the Mother of God who “holds high motherhood/ Towards all our ghostly good/ and plays in grace her part/ About man’s beating heart.”

We place our mothers who have cared for us in the care of Christ, the one who sits at the right hand of the Father.

“Christ sits on the right hand of the Father”

Fr. David Curry
Sunday after Ascension Day
May 12^th, 2013

Tuesday, May 14th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, May 16th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, May 17th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Sunday, May 19th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer – Christ Church

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, May 21st, Tuesday after Pentecost
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Still Life by Louise Penny and The Lord God Bird by Tom Gallant

Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
4:00pm Choral Evensong

O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a

Artwork: Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, 1447. Fresco, Cenacle of Santa Apollonia, (formerly Refectory of the Benedictine monastic sisters of Saint Apollonia), Florence. Photograph taken by admin, 19 May 2010.

O Lord of all,
who gavest to thy servants Cyril and Methodius
the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavic people:
we pray that thy whole Church may be one as thou art one,
that all who confess thy name may honour one another,
and that from east and west all may acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
and thee, the God and Father of all;
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: Ephesians 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:15-20

St. Cyril and St. Methodius were brothers born in Thessalonica who went to Constantinople after being ordained priests. (Cyril was baptised Constantine and did not become known as Cyril until late in his life.) Around AD 863, Emperor Michael II and Patriarch Photius sent the brothers as missionaries to Moravia, where they translated into Slavonic the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. With his brother’s help, Cyril created an alphabet that later developed into Cyrillic, thus laying the foundation for Slavic literature.

German missionary bishops in the area celebrated the liturgy in Latin and opposed the brothers’ use of the vernacular. In 867, Cyril and Methodius participated in a debate in Venice over the use of Slavonic liturgy and were soon received with great honour in Rome by Pope Hadrian II, who authorised the use of Slavic tongues in the liturgy.

In 868, Cyril became a monk and entered a monastery in Rome, but died soon afterward and was buried in the church at San Clemente. Shortly after Cyril’s death, Methodius was consecrated archbishop of Sermium and returned to Moravia where he ministered for another fifteen years. He continued the work of translation and evangelisation, while continuing to face opposition from German bishops. Before his death in 885, he and his followers completed translations of the Bible, liturgical services, and collections of canon law.

St. Cyril and St. Methodius are honoured for evangelising the Slavs, organising the Slavic church, and pioneering the celebration of liturgy in the vernacular. For these reasons, in 1980 Pope John Paul II named them, together with St. Benedict, patron saints of all Europe.

Artwork: Vyacheslav Klykov, Saints Cyril and Methodius, 1992. Slavyanskaya Square, Moscow.

It is, it seems to me, the forgotten or at least an overlooked doctrine, the doctrine of the Ascension. Christ’s words from the Gospel of Rogation Sunday point us to the radical teaching of the Ascension. We have a home with God because Jesus has overcome the world.

The world no longer defines us. The Ascension of Christ frees us from our pragmatic frenzies and follies and from our fearful fatalisms. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection. Something of the fuller meaning and teaching of the Resurrection is presented to us in the Ascension of Christ. It bears eloquent testimony to the meaning of human and cosmic redemption. The world is God’s world; it exists for his will and purpose, not ours. We have an end, a home with God in Christ. “I go,” Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.” That sense of an end or purpose, especially for rational creatures, is really quite strong.

But what are we to make of the language of overcoming? It seems, dangerously, to be the language of technocratic exuberance whereby we think the world is simply there for us, a resource to be mined, fished, farmed, logged and generally exploited for the advantage and purposes of our devisings, the sad consequences of which are only too depressingly before us. But it is also the language of existentialism, (at least in its Nietzschean form) the language of the will to power which trumps the possibilities of a world of truth and meaning. Yet, Jesus means, I think, something quite different. His overcoming of the world has to do with God’s radical and wonderful redemption of the world without which the joy and delight of the Ascension make little sense.

He has overcome the world by reconciling the world with its origin and principle. We are allowed to think of knowing the world through our knowledge of Christ; in short, to know the world in God. Powerful stuff, really, because it speaks to the cosmic dimension of redemption, the redemption of all creation, and because, even more, it speaks to human freedom and dignity. The Ascension, as the Fathers repeatedly insist, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” That is not hubris but the honest realization of the meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. We are freed to God. God is our end and home and not the world. God is our end and home and the world, too, is part of that homeland of the spirit.

“We ascend,” Augustine says in one of the most powerful sentences about the Ascension, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Such is prayer. All prayer participates in the Ascension of Christ. All prayer and, especially, our liturgy is about the lifting up of our hearts to God, a lifting up which is at once our doing and desiring and the doings of the divine will moving and shaping our wills to his glory and to the good of his Church and people. It is the profound insight of most if not all of the great religions of the world to recognize that our humanity is radically incomplete without God.

In the Christian understanding, we are granted a vision of our end with God in Christ Jesus, that as he is so we shall be. We are granted on this feast day a glimpse of the heaven of God to which we belong and in which we share now through prayer and praise and through Word and Sacrament. We participate in the divine will for our good and redemption. He has made us for himself. We are his people and the sheep of his hand. He cares for us and has recalled us from the land of sin and destruction to the holy land of his love for the Father in the bond of the Spirit.

The world is overcome, not destroyed. The world is reconciled with God and we have an end with God. And all because of the Ascension of Christ.

“I have overcome the world”

Fr. David Curry
Ascension
May 9^th, 2013

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St Mark 16:14-20

Artwork: Tintoretto, The Ascension, 1579-81. Oil on canvas, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

ASSIST us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers, and dispose the way of thy servants towards the attainment of everlasting salvation; that, among all the changes and chances of this mortal life, they may ever be defended by thy most gracious and ready help; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 2:1-8
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:1-10

Collect for the Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men:

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift: Bless, we beseech thee, the labours of thy people, and cause the earth to bring forth her fruits abundantly in their season, that we may with grateful hearts give thanks to thee for the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Genesis 1:26-31a
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-33