APRIL 2007

Kalendar
Agenda
From the Desk of Father Fraser

KALENDAR: The Month of the Resurrection

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AGENDA
Services and Events in addition to our regular Sunday schedule.

April 1st: PALM SUNDAY.  Blessing of Palms & Sung Eucharist at 10.30 a.m.  ECW Cookie Sale follows the Service.  Choir Rehearsal after the Service.

April 2nd - 4th: Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday in Holy Week.  Holy Eucharist will be at 12.10 Noon each day.  Each day has special Lessons appointed; also, you will hear the Passion of Our Lord according to SS. Mark and Luke during these days.

April 5th: MAUNDY THURSDAY.  Sung Eucharist, Procession to the Altar of Repose & Stripping of the Altar at 7.00 p.m.  There will be about one hour after the Service in which you may pray before the Sacrament Reposed in accordance with Our Lord's exhortation "Could you not watch with me one hour?", in the Garden of Gethsemane.

April 6th: GOOD FRIDAY.  The Good Friday Liturgy will begin at 12 Noon.  This consists of the Reading of the Passion according to St John, Veneration of the Cross & Mass of the Pre-Sanctified.

April 7th: HOLY SATURDAY.  Matins & Ante-Communion at 10.30 a.m.  This is a quiet meditative service no longer than 20 minutes, suggesting the repose of the Lord in the tomb before his Resurrection.  The Easter Vigil will be celebrated at a number of churches in our area.  The Cathedral Church of St Paul and St John's, Detroit are just two such.  Please call these churches for times.

April 8th: EASTER DAY.  Men's Fellowship Easter Breakfast begins at 9.00 a.m.  PROCESSION & SUNG EUCHARIST AT 10.30 A.M.

April 15th: LOW SUNDAY.  Procession & Sung Eucharist at 10.30 a.m.  Monthly Meeting of Vestry in the Parish Lounge at 9.00 a.m.

April 19th - 21st: Fr Fraser will be at the Spring Diocesan Clergy Conference in Troy.  No weekday services on Friday and Saturday.

April 22nd: EASTER II.  Regular Sunday Service at 10.30 a.m.

April 24th: Men's Fellowship Meeting at 7.00 p.m. at the home of Robert Sherman.

April 25th - May 1st: Fr Fraser at the National Guild of All Souls Easter Fiesta & Annual Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.

April 29th: EASTER III.  Choral Matins & Holy Eucharist at 10.30 a.m.

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FROM THE DESK OF FATHER FRASER

My Dear People:
     T.S. Eliot, in The Burial of the Dead, the first poem of The Wasteland, suggested that "April is the cruellest month".  This was written during Eliot's most cynical and dark period on the cusp of a complete and utter conversion to the Christian Faith.  In fact Eliot, who was born in the Midwest of Unitarian parents, later emigrating to England, becoming a raconteur extraordinaire, was about to experience something only slightly short of the kind of conversion St Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.  In 1927, just five years after this poem was written, Eliot was Baptized and subsequently declared himself to be "a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion."  If you want to see his religious quest leading to this spectacular conversion you have only to read a selection of his poetry, notably Ash Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi and Four Quartets.  For the rest of his life, Eliot was an active Churchman; and, together with Sir John Betjeman, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein made for a strong 20th Century witness to the power of our Christian Faith, most significantly, with the exception of the Roman Catholic Tolkein, within the Church of England.

     Eliot is an excellent example of the way in which God can transform our lives, turning them around completely so that we are no longer cynical, deluded materialists without hope; but hopeful, faithful and happy people whose life is dedicated to following our Master through the grave and gate of death to the new life of the Resurrection.  In that tone, we begin our month repeating the opening lines of Eliot's poem; but, it is in the context of the events we are about to commemorate and partake in, that we say those words.  The very first day of April is Palm Sunday, the opening act, if you will, of the supreme drama surrounding all that the Son of God did for us to save us from ourselves.  This week, we run the gamut of emotions from joy to anger to horror to crushing sorrow and, ultimately of course, ecstatic joy.  Just enumerating those words evokes them; and, it is no wonder that a great many clergy and not a few laity find themselves exhausted by Easter Day afternoon!  Our shouts of "Hosanna to the Son of David!" quickly give way to "Crucify him!" and cheers turn to jeers as we say with the scribes and Pharisees: "Save yourself if you can.  You say that God is your Father; prove it, come down from the Cross and we will believe you."  Such hateful things we say, such vile sentiments.  Yet the Lord of All, hanging dying on the Rood merely looks on us with love and pity and says: "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."  When we stand at the foot of the Cross with Our Lady and St John we usually see ourselves sharing in their anguish; yet, we are more likely to be the soldiers lounging about, casting lots to see who will get Our Lord's vesture, bloody and filthy, reeking with the dust and sweat of that first horrific Good Friday.  Our sins and negligence, our petty cruelties and savage grudges bring us to this scene.  Still, despite all this, Jesus looks with love on us and asks the Father to pardon us.  The Lord of All suffers the reward of our sins, the just for the unjust, in order to reconcile us to God and one another.

     In the midst of all this sorrow is, of course, joy.  We rejoice in the founding of the Priesthood, and the giving of the Blessed Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood to feed his people on Maundy Thursday.  We receive the commandment: "Love one another as I have loved you."  Then we are shown what that new commandment will demand of us in the following events of Good Friday; and, the reward of those who follow Jesus to the Cross, on that Blessed Easter morning.  There is so much joy that day that it bursts forth upon us with, I hope, the same surprise and excitement now as it did almost two thousand years ago.  Timeless and unbounded joy is what the Resurrection is for us.  The shackles of death are broken and the seeming victory of the Devil is shown to be his lasting defeat.  Immortality is restored to humanity in the Resurrection of the Son of God.  What can we do but rejoice in that day of Resurrection and say with all the redeemed, "Alleluia!"

     Below you will find the Service times for Holy Week.  I remind you that the bare minimum for Christians is attendance on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday & Easter Day.  This time is, as it says on invitations to certain Royal Functions in the United Kingdom, when "all excuses [are] set aside."  I look forward to seeing you at these services; and, I take this space to wish you and yours a blessed Holy Week and Easter.

Affectionately, your Friend & Pastor,

Father Trent Fraser

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A READING FROM RESURRECTION BY ROWAN WILLIAMS

When we read the Gospels it is hard to dismiss the consistent echo of disorientation and surprise concerning the resurrection.  A chronicle of Easter Day would be a hopeless enterprise.  Perhaps all we can recover across the centuries is the piercing note of shock; and that says a great deal.

     Even in the Gospels, one thing is never described.  There is a central silence, not broken until the second century, about the event of resurrection.  Even Matthew, with his elaborate mythological scenery, leaves us with the strange impression that the stone is rolled away from a tomb that is empty.  Jesus is not released by an angel (like Luke's Peter in Acts), but raised by the Father.  It is an event which is not describable, because it is precisely there that the there occurs the transfiguring expansion of Jesus' humanity which is the heart of the resurrection encounters.  It is an event on the frontier of any possible language, because it is the moment in which our speech is both left behind and opened to new possibilities.  It is as indescribable as the process of imaginative fusion which produces any metaphor; and the evangelists withdraw, as well they might.

     Jesus' life is historical, describable; the encounters with Jesus risen are historical and (after a fashion) describable, with whatever ambiguities and unclarities.  But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus, the hinge between two histories, the act which brings the latter out of the former, does not and cannot belong to history: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday.  God's act in uniting Jesus' life with his eludes us: we can speak of it only as the necessary condition for our living as we live.  And as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way.  It is , indeed, an 'eternal' act: it is an aspect of the eternal will by which God determines how he shall be, his will to be the Father of the Son.  These are abstract words, they describe nothing.  They can only point to the truth that God's being and will are always and necessarily prior to ours.  The event of resurrection, then, cannot but be hidden in God's eternal act, his eternal being himself; however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us.  Once again, he decisively evades our grasp, our definition and our projection.

 AN EXCERPT FROM Love of Religion, a New Nature, FROM THE PAROCHIAL & PLAIN SERMONS of John Henry Newman.  This comes from Volume VII of the Sermons, which were published between 1825 & 1843.

"If we be dead with Christ, we believe we shall also live with Him." Rom. vi. 8.

To be dead with Christ, is to hate and turn from sin; and to live with Him, is to have our hearts and minds turned towards God and Heaven....  The Christian life is but a shadow of heaven.  Its festal and holy days are but shadows of eternity.  But hereafter it will be otherwise.  In heaven, sin will be utterly destroyed in every elect soul.  We shall have no earthly wishes, no tendencies to disobedience or irreligion, no love of the world or the flesh, to draw us off from supreme devotion to God.  We shall have our Saviour's holiness fulfilled in us, and be able to love God without drawback or infirmity.

     That indeed will be a full reward of all our longings here.  To praise and serve God eternally with a single and perfect heart in the midst of His Temple.  What a time will that be, when all will be perfected in us which at present is but feebly begun!  Then we shall see how the Angels worship God.  We shall see the calmness, the intenseness, the purity, of their worship.  We shall see that awful sight, the Throne of God, and the Seraphim before and around it, crying, "Holy!"  We attempt now to imitate in church what there is performed, as in the beginning, and ever shall be.  In the Te Deum, day by day we say, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth."  In the Creed, we recount God's mercies to us sinners.  And we say and sing Psalms and Hymns, to come as near heaven as we can.  May these attempts of ours be blest by Almighty God, to prepare us for Him!  May they be, not dead forms, but living services, living with life from God the Holy Ghost, in those who are dead to sin and who live with Christ!  I dare say some of you have heard persons, who dissent from the Church, say (at any rate, they do say), that our Prayers and Services, and Holy Days, are only forms, dead forms, which can do us no good.  Yes, they are dead forms to those who are dead, but they are living forms to those who are living.  If you come here in a dead way, not in faith, not coming for a blessing, without your hearts being in the service, you will get no benefit from it.  But if you come in a living way, in faith, and hope, and reverence, and with holy expectant hearts, then all that takes place will be a living service and full of heaven.

     Make use, then, of this Holy Easter Season, which lasts forty to fifty days, to become more like Him who died for you, and who now liveth for evermore.  He promises us, "Because I live, ye shall live also."  He, by dying on the Cross, opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.  He first died, and then He opened heaven.  We, therefore, first commemorate His death, and then, for some weeks in succession, we commemorate and show forth the joys of heaven.  They who do not rejoice in the weeks after Easter, would not rejoice in heaven itself.  These weeks are a beginning of heaven.  Pray God to enable you to rejoice; to enable you to keep the Feast duly.  Pray God to make you better Christians.  This world is a dream, - you will get no good from it.  Perhaps you find this difficult to believe; but be sure so it is.  Depend upon it, at the last, you will confess it.  Young people expect good from the world, and people of middle age devote themselves to it, and even old people do not like to give it up.  But the world is your enemy, and the flesh is your enemy.  Come to God, and beg of Him grace to devote yourselves to Him.  Beg of Him the will to follow Him; beg of Him the power to obey Him.  O how comfortable, pleasant, sweet, soothing and satisfying is it to lead a holy life, - the life of Angels!  It is difficult at first; but with God's grace, all things are possible.  O how pleasant to have done with sin!  How good and joyful to flee temptation and to resist evil!  How meet and worthy, and fitting, and right, to die unto sin, and to live unto righteousness!