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very year during February, we hold an open congregational meeting aimed at any and all who consider themselves a part of saint benedict’s table.  The past year is reviewed, the finances are considered, and a bit of dreaming and goal-setting is put on the table for wider consideration and discernment.  This year’s meeting takes place on Sunday February 21 at 4:00pm, followed by a supper at 5:30 and worship at 7:00.  This really is an open meeting, so if you’re interested in joining us, just contact us so that we can add you to the list for the meal.

If you keep reading here, you’ll find my refection for the year, followed by one from our music leader, Larry Campbell, and one from John Berard, our part-time ministry coordinator.  Later in the week, we’ll add a bit of a financial summary for the year.  Even if you can’t attend the meeting, these reports will give you a good sense of what all makes us tick.

Jamie Howison

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An invitation to our Wednesday evening Lenten series

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he Claim Upon Us: Learning Lent with Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Five Wednesdays in Lent:  February 24 and March 3, 10, 17 and 24, presented by saint benedict’s table in cooperation with the congregation of All Saints’ Church.

Each of the gatherings will be built around a simple service of Compline, into which will be set a reflection by Dr Christopher Holmes about what we might learn from the thought, faith, and witness of the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. With so much of his life and work carried out under the shadow of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer essentially embodies a Lenten and wilderness Christianity.

We will meet at All Saints Church, located at the corner of Broadway and Osborne, with each session beginning at 7:00pm.

You are also welcome to join us for our Ash Wednesday Liturgy on February 17 at 7:00pm.

Dr Christopher Holmes is associate professor of Theology and Ethics at Providence Seminary, and is currently serving as a transitional deacon at saint benedict’s table. In the spring of 2010 Chris will assume the position of senior lecturer in Theology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

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A reflection on how and why we might observe Lent

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s of February 17, we’ll be in the  season of Lent, so it is time to do a little reflecting on the nature of this liturgical season, and why we’d bother worrying about it in the first place.  In case you were wondering, the season starts on Ash Wednesday, February 17, which we mark with a liturgy at the church at 7:00pm.

What exactly is Lent?

Lent is the forty day liturgical season stretching from Ash Wednesday through to Easter Eve. This year Ash Wednesday falls on February 17, with Easter Day coming on April 4. The forty days, however, are interrupted by the six Sundays that come within this period, because Sundays are always resurrection days or “little Easters.”  Still, in our Sunday worship during Lent, we actually “fast” from singing or saying the word “Alleluia,” as a steady reminder of the larger season in which those Sundays fall.

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n Sunday January 10, 2010, our community marked the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord by celebrating the baptism of two people, one an infant girl named Maddie and the other an adult candidate named Byron O’Donnell.  In the sermon that day, I remarked that while these two persons were at very, very different stages of life, we would use the same words, the same water, and the same prayers to mark them both as “Christ’s own forever.”  ”In this action,” I said, “we will proclaim that for all of their difference, by grace these two persons are two parts of a larger whole, two members of the Body of Christ, two beloved children of God.”

There was this moment when, just after saying that little Maddie had “never in her life said an unkind word to anyone, much less done anything hurtful, violent or self-destructive”, I turned to where Byron was seated, paused, and said, “now, I don’t think I’m telling tales out of class here…”  After the liturgy, one of Byron’s friends told me that at this point, that whole pew of friends took a collective deep breath, wondering just what it was I was going to say.

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Here are the details on our upcoming retreat weekend

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o why would you want to sign up to spend a weekend of relatively free and unstructured time, hanging around at a monastery? Well, maybe because every now and then it is a really good thing to leave behind the television, phone, computer and everything else that distracts us and ties us down, to spend a few days just being… breathing, sleeping, walking, reading, praying, maybe having a conversation or two, and in the midst of that getting back a bit of focus in life.

Maybe the real question is “why wouldn’t you want to spend the weekend of February 12-14 on our retreat at St Benedict’s Monastery?”

We have 20 spaces reserved for this retreat, which begins at 7:00pm on Friday February 12, and finishes up in the afternoon of Sunday February 14.  There will be a bit of structure provided, but not so much as to overwhelm a big part of going on retreat… which is to actually retreat from a whole lot of obligations.

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t has become an almost predictable thing, that I end up writing something for the website built around Auden’s poem at some point over the seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.  Last year these same verses appeared in the Epiphany sermon, while early in Advent  of 2008 there was a post about reading the poem as a meditative discipline.  You’d think that maybe I could find something else as a poetic starting point?

Well sure; and in fact I have.  T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and Madeleine L’Engle’s “After Annunciation” have both made appearances in seasonal sermons over the past couple of years, as have bits from Luci Shaw and Eugene Peterson.  Yet there is something extraordinarily poignant in Auden’s words, something that catches both the season’s hopes and its inevitable disappointments.

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a sermon by Chris Holmes for the first Sunday in Christmas

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his is a time to celebrate.  It is Christmastide. The Saviour of the world has come. Light is the order of the day. Darkness’s defeat is imminent. “Joy to the World, the Saviour reigns. Let earth receive her King.” Such is the good news of Christmas. God come among us to save us and make all things right in Jesus Christ. But do we really get it? Can we grasp this? Not really. I love the way our Gospel reading for tonight indicates just how difficult it is to understand the Christ. Even Mary does not comprehend “what he [i.e., Jesus] said.” (vs. 50) But, you know, I don’t blame her for not understanding. After all, how many 12-year Jewish boys are, after a three day long frantic search by parents, friends, and family, found “in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” (vs. 46)

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n 1943, during the days leading up to Christmas Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his parents from his jail cell.  He’d been incarcerated some eight months earlier for taking part in the resistance movement against Nazism, and while he’d had some hope that he would have been released by December, it had become increasingly clear that his future was very uncertain.  In that letter, he observed how much he would miss his family over Christmas, and commented how his parents had given to him a good and strong theology of this great Christian feast.  Then he continued,

For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell.  I daresay it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name.  That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man, that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn – these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else.  For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense.  And that faith gives him a part in the communion of saints, a fellowship transcending the bounds of time and space and reducing the months of confinement here to insignificance. (Letters and Papers from Prison)

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Sermon by Jamie Howison, on the 4th Sunday in Advent

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etween my first and second years at theological college, I had a summer job at a church-run storefront ministry called Stop 103, located in an increasingly depressed neighborhood in Toronto.  Part food bank, part drop-in, part refugee resettlement program, my job was to run what we called an “internship to urban ministry” for four high school students.  The idea was for me to spend an hour every morning with this group, guiding them in a sustained theological reflection on the nature of poverty and social justice, and then to spend the better part of each day working together on the front-line in the ministry.  It was a great job, with a fairly steep learning curve for all of us.

On the day I was hired, the priest who ran the centre said to me, “You’ll need to explore  of the biblical material on poverty and justice: the idea of Jubilee, the writings of the prophets, the teachings of Jesus.  And of course, the Magnificat”.  “Of course,” I said, wondering just exactly what he meant.

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A sermon for Advent  2 | Jamie Howison

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ear again these words from the prophet Malachi:  “The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.  But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver…”

Come on, preacher; we’re into December, the city streets are lit up with strings of lights and stylized angels.  My work-place or college dorm is just about to hold its annual gift exchange, and the tree has been up for a week… can’t we have something a bit more festive?  Who can endure?  Who can stand?  He is refining fire… Couldn’t we have a little bit of  O little town of Bethlehem already?

If we imagine that this season of Advent is primarily about getting ready for Christmas – that it is a kind of lead up to the telling of the Nativity story – then we will find these words from Malachi a bit puzzling.  After all, who needs fire and brimstone during the season of good cheer? (more…)

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