Question of the Week

“My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 

a light for revelation” 

The ancient church was adept both at piggy-backing on already established pagan festivals to create new Christian festivals, as well as lining their festivals up with the rhythms and seasons of the natural world. Which is why the “Christmas season” — a season that is obviously well past in the secular world — continues in the church until February 2nd. Candlemas is the Christian Festival of Lights, and this celebration marks the end of Christmas. Forty days after we tell of the birth of Jesus, we encounter the story of his presentation in the temple, and Simeon and Anna’s recognition that the light of God is revealed in this baby boy. It falls at the mid-point of winter and also became a practical celebration — during the “candle” Mass, candles used in the church and in homes are blessed for the upcoming year. (Interestingly, the secular world has used the same maneuvers of the early church, claiming February 2nd away from its Christian connotations and marking it instead as Groundhog Day).

Although we no longer rely on candles to light our homes and churches, Candlemas nonetheless invites a simple and meaningful expression of faith in our modern world. This year, Anglican churches in St. Catharines are gathering on the evening of February 2nd in the centre of town, the Market Square, to ask for God’s blessing upon our light, allowing it to shine in the heart of our city for the year to come.

The format of the evening is simple. If you use candles in your home or your church, bring them with you this evening to share in a blessing. With that sign of light and blessing as a physical reminder, we can reflect together on what it means to be called into darkness, to be present ‘here in this place’ as bearing witness to, inhabiting, God’s light. We conclude our evening with fellowship and refreshment, wine, cheese and hot chocolate, as we enjoy a tangible sign of the joy that we receive in God’s life.

Place: Market Square, St. Catharines 

Time: 7:00pm

Leader: The Lord is with you;

All: And also with you.

Leader: Peace be to this house

All: and to all who live, work, and visit here.

Leader: The Magi came to Bethlehem in search of the Lord. They brought to him precious gifts: gold to honor the newborn king, incense to the true God in human form, and myrrh to anoint his body, which one day would die like our own.

Leader: Let us pray. O God, you once used a star to show to all the world that Jesus is your Son. May the light of that star that once guided the magi to honor his birth, now guide us to recognize him also, to know you by faith, and to see you in the epiphanies of the daily experiences of our lives.

Leader: Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord — Jesus born of Mary — shall be revealed.

All: And all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.

Leader: As the Wise Men once sought your brilliant light, O Lord,

All: so may we seek to live and work in your splendor.

Leader: O God of Light, bless this (our) house and this (our) family. May this be a place of peace and health. May each member of this family cultivate the gifts and graces you have bestowed, dedicating our talents and works for the good of all.

Leader: Make this house a shelter in the storm and a haven of rest for all in need of your warmth and care. And when we go out from this place, may we never lose sight of that Epiphany star.

All: As we go about our work, our study, our play, keep us in its light and in your love.

A Blessing of the Chalk for Marking the Door: Lord Jesus, through your Incarnation and birth in true human form, you have made all the earth holy. We now ask your blessing upon this simple gift of your creation — chalk. We use it as a tool to teach our children, and they use it as a tool in their play and games. Now, with your blessing, may it become a tool for us to mark the doors of our home with the symbols of your wise servants who, so long ago, came to worship and adore you in your first home.

People in turn mark the doorway with one or more of the symbols:

20 + C + M + B + 15 

The magi of old, known as

C Caspar

M Melchior

B Balthasar

Followed the star of God’s Son who came to dwell among us

20 two thousand

15 and fifteen years ago.

+ Christ, bless this house,

+ And remain with us throughout the year.

Leader: O God, you revealed your Son to all people by the shining light of a star. We pray that you bless this home, and all who live and visit here, with your gracious presence. May your love be our inspiration, your wisdom our guide, your truth our light, and your peace our benediction;

All: May we be Christ’s light in the world. Amen 

Throughout history and across cultures, music has been recognized as a powerful vehicle for, or form of, prayer. “Those who sing pray twice,” Augustine (one of the church’s most influential saints) wrote in the fourth century. The psalms are the most ancient hymns, or songs, of our faith tradition, passed along over hundreds and thousands of years, the original music long lost, new tunes emerging over time, bearing witness to the most exalted, as well as the most despairing, possibilities of human experience. Even without words, even with words that ultimately fall short of expressing the encounter we wish to name, the right music can lift our spirits to articulate the deepest of truths.

Which is all by way of introducing what is ultimately quite a simple answer: congregations can sing whatever they want. Although music has always played a central part in Christian worship,as well as the worship of our Jewish brothers and sisters, you will find that there is enormous variety across denominations, across the Anglican church even, or across services offered in one congregation (note: at St. George’s that our 8am service is entirely said, whereas the 10am service is liberally peppered with music) in what and how much is sung.

Consider these various possibilities:

-Some of the most famous composers of previous generations received their bread and butter salary as church musicians and were expected to set the various parts of the Mass to music (Kyrie/Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei). Many great works of music resulted from this work, stunning four part harmonies which would have been led by well-trained choirs. When I used to sing in the cathedral choir in London, Ontario, we learned a different mass setting each week.

-In some churches, usually of a more Anglo-catholic bent, not only will there be hymns andservice music, but even the Scripture readings will be sung. The modus operandi is that as much of the worship that can be set to music, should be set to music.

-A current trend in church music is called ‘paperless’ music. It uses short, repetitive pieces of music which can be easily learned without written music and can be woven through worship as a means of prayer, to open our hearts to what we are about to hear, to accompany us in our rituals, to allow meditation, contemplation, reflection.

Here at St. George’s, we have some traditions and priorities in how we choose what to sing:

-we are very blessed to have a first class Director of Music, John Butler, who not only directs our choir and leads the music in our worship, but also composes. There are parts of our worship which I’ve already mentioned, which are used week by week as the consistent parts of our communal prayer (Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, as well as the responses sung at the time of the Gospel reading), which John has set to music for us. He has two different versions that he has created, and we use one or the other every week.

-traditionally the psalm is led by the choir at St. George’s and is done in the form of “Anglican chant,” which allows the words to be sung in phrasing that is similar to spoken word, but which is set in four part harmony. The choir, each week, also offers an anthem, which reflects on the themes of the day and allows time of reflection, to be lifted in prayer through the voices of others.

-and we know that St. George’s is a ‘singing congregation’! We are always developing the hymns and musical opportunities in worship with an ear for how the music we choose – lots of favourites, with some new pieces to keep us fresh — allow us all to lift our voices and pray together through the gift of music.

It is often assumed that Advent is little more than a prologue to Christmas. But preparation for the Church’s celebrations of Christ’s nativity is really only the season’s secondary purpose. Advent is a season that calls Christians to a posture of readiness for Christ’s return, for the world’s final Advent, when all of time and history will be drawn to its culmination. The words and phrases that appear in the opening weeks of the season – ‘be awake,’ ‘be alert,’ ‘watch,’ ‘prepare,’ – are anything but reminders to get our shopping done and the Christmas baking underway. They call us into a place of fundamental openness to what God is ever and always about to do in us and in our world.

In the Western Christian tradition there has been some version of Advent in place for almost as long as there has been a mid-winter celebration of the birth of Christ. In some times and contexts it has been observed with an almost Lenten sense of penitence. What the season was most often meant to do, though, was to set the celebrations of the nativity in a larger context, saying, in effect, “For all of its glory, Christmas is but the first chapter in a much longer story, and one that remains as-of-yet unfinished.” In taking hold of Advent in this spirit, we not only facilitate a posture of openness to God’s ongoing and re-creative work and purpose for the world, but we also begin to free Christmas from some of the heavy baggage with which it has been laden in our current cultural context.

Following the three-year cycle of Sunday readings set out by the wider church in what is known as the Lectionary, Advent always begins with a reading from one of Jesus’ apocalyptic teachings, set late in his ministry. Over the next three Sundays, the congregation moves through readings dealing with John the Baptist and his role in heralding the arrival of an adult Jesus, on toward the story of the Annunciation (The angel’s invitation to Mary to become the mother of God’s Son). In this way, the community more or less backs its way toward Christmas, slowing down the pace at which that great feast is approached. While all around us the culture is declaring that these December days are the ‘holiday season’ to be filled with parties, shopping and indulgence, in the pulse of the liturgical calendar we are challenged to keep a different rhythm. The feast will come soon enough – and we’ll keep it for a full twelve days, thank you very much – but in the meantime we have other stories to attend to.

*This was the focus question for Synod (the decision-making body of the wider Anglican church) which met on November 8th, so I have been using the Question of the Week for the past five weeks to examine different aspects of how we might answer. This is the last week in this Question series. This does not represent an exhaustive answer to the question, but it has hopefully sparked some further reflection and conversation. 

Anglicans have a particularly unflattering myth of origin. Anglicanism was created when King Henry VIII, a rather spoiled monarch, wanted to get a divorce from Queen Catherine of Aragon. The pope wouldn’t grant him his wish, so he broke with Rome, named himself the head of the Church of England, gave himself the divorce, and Anglicanism was born.

Except, that’s not exactly how the Anglican church came to be. What happened in the Church of England actually started in Germany. Martin Luther, an ordained priest and professor of theology in Wittenberg Germany, came into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over a scholarly paper in which he objected to the church’s practices of selling indulgences (Indulgences could be bought in order to lessen the amount of time a departed soul would spend in purgatory). He lived and worked at a particularly fortuitous point in history: the printing press was just developing, which meant a great sea change in the number of ‘common’ people suddenly able to read and write, and therefore promote and discuss ideas for themselves. Luther’s paper, now known as the Ninety-five Theses, was translated from Latin into German and published in 1518; his argument spread rapidly throughout Europe, one of the first controversies to be ‘blown up’ by aid of the printing press. Luther was excommunicated by Rome in 1521.

England was watching the movement unfold. King Henry VIII was very critical of Luther and wrote a paper condemning his actions and supporting the Roman church, which gained Henry the title of Defender of the Faith. But the energy and ideas coming out of Germany were inspiring an underground movement of thoughtful and intelligent people in England, along with a number of power-hungry social and political climbers looking for an opportunity to make their move into England’s leadership. When Henry began to have marital troubles, these underground forces began to command the ear of the King, convincing him that the way out of his dilemma would be to follow Germany’s suit, to break with Rome, to set the King up as the final authority in the leadership of the church (rather than the Pope), and then to grant himself the annulment of his marriage which he so desired.

King Henry, despite being married five more times after that first divorce, produced very few heirs, and the ones he did produce tended to be sickly. After he died, England waffled back and forth between returning to the Roman Catholic church under one leader and then breaking again with the next. It was a bloody and uncertain time in England’s history, Catholics gaining power and persecuting Protestants, then vice versa. Many leaders, on each side of the divide, went to the stake as the factions battled it out for power in the wake of the King’s death.

It was under Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of King Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, who was able to bring stability to England, and she was able to do so primarily by bringing the two religious sides into one common expression of the faith – hence, the Anglican church’s identity as The Middle Way.

What does that mean for us today? It means that Anglicans have a close relationship with the Roman Catholic church, sharing much in common with how we worship and the basic principles of faith to which we have held throughout our two thousand year history. The dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics in our world today is open and respectful and shows promise for future collaboration and mutual support in accomplishing God’s work. It also means that Anglicans very much honour and uphold the tenets of Reformation. The Anglican church in Canada is now, since 2001, in full Communion with

our Lutheran brothers and sisters, recognizing how much we share in common and bearing witness to the unity we find in God. Living out this Middle Way, honouring tradition and celebrating reformation, results in some strongly Anglican characteristics: a firm grounding in Biblical study, a commitment to expressing the faith of our ancestors in ways that are current for Here and Now, an ease with the conversation and questions that arise as we journey in faith, an acceptance of our need as God’s people to be open to the renewing power of God’s Spirit calling us out of complacency, ready to be guided by the One who challenges and re-makes us until such time that God’s justice and peace and love is known to all.

*This is the focus question for Synod (the decision-making body of the wider Anglican church) which met on November 8th, so I have been using the Question of the Week for the past four weeks to examine different aspects of how we might answer. Next week will be the last part of this series of Questions. This is not an exhaustive answer to the question, but it has hopefully sparked some further reflection and conversation. 

One of the primary concerns of the newly-forming Anglican church in the 16th century was that worship be in the vernacular, the people’s language. Furthermore, the Bible was being translated into English for the first time, and this initiative coincided with the development of the printing press and therefore the first time that the Bible could be made widely available for people to own and read for themselves. The Anglican church is founded on a history, then, which understands our faith as a living, breathing thing, responding to the HERE and the NOW, for our faith to be expressed in the language of the people, to be participatory, reflecting the contributions, not just of a few educated in the field of theology, but of us all. It can very much be said that the Anglican church, wherever and whenever it exists, understands itself as a Contemporary faith expression.

At the same time, the Anglican church has always sought to honour and uphold the core faith that has been passed along to us, the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We have never been in the business of ‘reinventing the wheel.’ We understand that the Scriptures are the basis of our faith, and we proclaim that the Old and New Testaments are ‘the word of God, and contain all things necessary to our salvation.’ Our worship service is not a constantly changing expression of a particular congregation’s understanding of the faith, but is patterned on worship that goes back all the way to the ancient church and the earliest followers of Christ. We form our common life, not on the changing whims of society, but on the principles which have always been upheld in our baptism: growing in faith through Scripture, worship, the Eucharist; practising forgiveness; inviting others to share with us in faith; striving for justice and peace; caring for God’s good creation; and serving our neighbours, believing that in doing so, we are serving Jesus himself.

We sometimes refer to St. George’s 8am service as the ‘traditional’ service, and then labelling our 10am worship as ‘contemporary.’ In fact, these titles are misleading. Like our community, our Anglican worship is always Contemporary and always Traditional. It is contemporary because it is happening now, rooted in the prayers, concerns, language, music, hopes and worries of real people, living right here and right now. Our worship is traditional because we mine the rich resources of prayer, story, and song that have been faithfully passed from one generation to another over hundreds and even thousands of years.

*This is the focus question for Synod (this decision-making body of the wider Anglican church) which met yesterday, November 8th, so I am using the Question of the Week for the coming weeks to examine different aspects of how we might answer. 

Anglicans believe that we can’t say everything with words. We honour the power of symbols, art, music, and ritual in order to express the inexpressible realities of our human experience in God. To understand more fully what this means and why this is important, let’s talk about marriage. Marriage is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary. The law provides for just and proper division of property ownership and care of children, whether or not a marriage has taken place. For most of society, marriage is no longer considered the gateway to adult sexual relationships. And yet, people continue to want to get married, to have their relationship celebrated and marked in an intentional way, using symbols like rings, flowers, gowns, banquets, champagne, to express what this next step of committed relationship means. When talking to people who have been married, particularly after having lived together before their marriage, I often ask, ‘does if feel different?’ More often than not — although a marriage no longer involves the dramatic change of beginning to share a household — the answer is ‘yes, I feel different.’

A sacrament is an outward and physical sign of an inward and invisible grace. It is an action, usually using ordinary physical objects as symbols, by which we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives in an intentional way and believe that we are changed by doing so. Baptism and Eucharist (Communion) are our two central sacraments. Water, oil, light, bread, wine, are the ordinary, everyday items that are used in these two rites to try and express our belief that in the waters of baptism and the meal at God’s table, God becomes joined to us in a special way. Baptism and Eucharist keep us connected to God, connected with our identity as followers of Jesus and children of God, particularly because Jesus himself gave us the model for these two sacraments in his own life.

Confession, Ordination, Marriage, Anointing of the Sick, and Confirmation are also considered sacraments, although Anglicans hold them as secondary to Baptism and Eucharist. Each of these rites involves our prayer that the Holy Spirit be present to us and our belief that we are in some way changed by God’s grace through the combination of prayer and symbol.

However, it is actually the Orthodox tradition that gives insight into the approach Anglicans have to worship, as well as to life in general. The Orthodox church refrains from making a list of sacraments, from too narrowly defining what a sacrament is, or when and how it works. Instead, there is a recognition of the sacredness of created matter — that the people of God, the Body of Christ, can use objects of God’s good creation – candles, art, music, bread, wine, water, ashes, altars, icons, etc – to open our prayer, to express the inexpressible mysteries of God, to invite God’s presence in our lives, to open our eyes and hearts, to be touched by God in new and powerful ways. To that end, I invite you to notice how sensual our worship is, how it engages our senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound, and how this opening of our senses then invites us to go out into

God’s world with an attentiveness to the presence of God in and through the everyday – miraculous! – world around us.

*This is the focus question for Synod (this decision-making body of the wider Anglican church) which meets this November, so I am using the Question of the Week for the coming weeks to examine different aspects of how we might answer. 

To be Anglican is to be a follower of Christ. Last week’s Answer began with there. But to be Anglican is also to be part of a particular expression, culture, history of following Christ. Common Prayer has played a huge part in that expression.

For many generations “Common Prayer” meant something very specific. It meant that our Anglican worship was formed around the prayers and liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer, a prayer resource created out of the English Reformation, crafted into language of poetry and grace by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and used –with only minor revisions – throughout our Anglican history (first published 1949) following the split from Rome and the translation of the worship services into the vernacular (rather than the Latin which had been used previously). I can echo the sentiments of many long-time Anglicans in noting the way in which these BCP prayers seemed to become part of the fabric of, not just our memories, but our very bones. I can go for years without participating in an Anglican BCP service, and yet the second that I hear those old prayers again, I am instantly immersed in their familiarity and warmth. It was with considerable difficulty and consternation that the new prayer book, the Book of Alternative Services, was introduced into usage in Canada in 1985. For many, it wasn’t just that change was difficult, it was that it felt like what makes us Anglicans was at stake.

Since then, most parts of the Anglican communion have introduced revisions, new prayer books, and alternative services. Whereas at one time, one could be assured when walking into an Anglican worship service, in Canada, in New Zealand, in Nigeria, of exactly what one would find as the liturgical source, now the possibilities have been blown wide open.

And yet, Anglicanism still defines itself as grounded in Common Prayer. Just because it is no longer typical to use the BCP doesn’t mean that this changes. In fact, Thomas Cranmer when creating the Book of Common Prayer, intended that this first English prayer book would continue to evolve along with the normal evolutions of the people’s language.

Rather, our understanding of common prayer has expanded. Common Prayer is about:

–Shape: our worship follows a standard pattern and order, and this pattern and order is not self-created, but links us to the earliest followers of Christ, as well as to Christians around the globe and from a variety of Christian denominations. The shape of our worship is catholic (not Roman Catholic, but small ‘c’ catholic meaning ‘universal’)

–Authority: The words of our worship are shared and are created by means of collaboration. Technically this means that Anglican worship should be crafted from texts that have been authorized by the wider Anglican church, by the church’s governing bodies.

Perhaps this more modern understanding of Common Prayer is actually truer to the reality of what Anglicanism has always been. Despite sharing a prayer book across the global Anglican

communion, variation between congregations has always existed, and in fact, the wide variety of acceptable expression is something else that has always been recognized in what it means to be Anglican (just look at our three downtown Anglican churches, St. Thomas, St. Barnabas and St. George, each one honouring a particular branch of Anglicanism). Our Common Prayer has never made us all the same, but rather has helped us to remember to look outward – beyond our own individual expression of Christianity, to seek communion and authority in a more global, more timeless, body.

*This is the focus question for Synod (this decision-making body of the wider Anglican church) which meets this November, so I will be using the Question of the Week for the coming weeks to examine different aspects of how we might answer. 

To be Anglican is, first and foremost, to be a follower of Jesus, joined into his life, which is lived out as the church, the Body of Christ. Before we talk about anything distinct about the Anglican culture or the Anglican characteristics, it is fundamental that we start here, with the common ground that we share with countless other Christian denominations seeking to follow Jesus.

Related to this most central identifier is that the Anglican church looks to apostolic succession. We see a consistent connection from the earliest followers of Jesus all the way to our faith and community as it is lived out today. Although our faith is living, and is therefore responsive to the Time and Place in which we are currently located, it is also understood as having a core set of practice and belief that is traditio, a Latin word which means ‘passed along.’ Each successive generation of Christians bears responsibility for receiving the faith from those who went before us, living the faith in the context in which we find ourselves, and then passing it along to our next generations.

Although there are numerous other touchstones for the core of the faith, one of the basic outlines to which Anglicans have always referred – along with many other Christian denominations – is the Apostles’ Creed. In recent generations, it has been quite fashionable, and certainly permissible, for faithful Christians to raise questions around particular pieces of the Apostles’ Creed, and the yet the Creed continues to give a fair picture of the backbone of the Christian faith:

-God the Creator – God is Lord and ruler of our lives. All that has its being was created

by God.

-Jesus – We pattern our lives on Jesus, a historical person who also reveals to us the face of God. Among other things, Jesus shows us that death does not lead to ending, but Resurrection; that God marks our human lives as holy, as holding the potential of revealing and participating in the Divine; that by Jesus’ cross we see a God who journeys with us in our human lives, even into suffering and death.

-Holy Spirit – The power of God is at work in our lives and in the life of the world,

forming us into the church, acting as an agent of forgiveness, reconciliation and Resurrection.

-Trinitarian – We believe in One God who we experience in three distinct ways. Within the life of God is a relationship of love. When we live in the image of God, we recognize that our lives too are designed for relationship: with one another, with God.

From this baptismal proclamation of faith, we are then given a template, a series of practices for how we are to live, outlined in the Baptismal Covenant: we live in the community of faith, the church; we share our faith with others in how we speak and what we do; we act as agents

of reconciliation in our world; we live lives of compassionate service; we strive for justice and peace and dignity in our world; we care for God’s creation.