Book of Common Prayer Sunday Eucharistic Lectionary Propers

Appointed for the Week of

Pentecost - “Whitsunday”

THE COLLECTS.

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.

WHEN the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind,

and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire, and it rested upon each of them:

and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit,

and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

Now when this sound was heard, the multitude came together, and were bewildered,

because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

And they were all amazed, and marvelled, saying one to another,

Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?

And how hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were born?

Parthians,

and Medes,

and Elamites,

and the dwellers in Mesopotamia,

and in Judaea,

and Cappadocia,

in Pontus,

and Asia,

Phrygia,

and Pamphylia,

in Egypt,

and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene,

and strangers from Rome, both Jews and proselytes,

Cretes and Arabians,

we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.

THE GOSPEL. St John 14. 5.

JESUS said unto his disciples,

If ye love me, keep my commandments.

and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter,

that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth,

whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.

Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.

At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me;

and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. Judas saith unto him, (not Iscariot,)

Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?

Jesus answered and said unto him,

If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him,

and we will come unto him,

and make our abode with him.

He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings:

and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.

These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you.

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,

he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,

whatsoever I have said unto you.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

BCP Online - Table of Propers

Book of Common Prayer Sunday Eucharistic Lectionary Message

A Sermon for

Pentecost - “Whitsunday”

By: Fr. David Curry

(8th June 2025, Christ Church, Windsor, NS)

“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pentecost is the alpha and omega of all the festivals of the Church year, the life-force, if you will, of their essential meaning. In every liturgy we are gathered and taken up in the Spirit. It would be hard to say which is greater,, the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, or inspiratio hominis, the mystery of our inspiration, the inspiration of man. They are intimately bound together. Pentecost is not simply an add-on, one more item in a list of things, but brings out the essential unity of all that pertains to our life in the mystery of God. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire … Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee, of both, to be but One”. Who, not what is the Holy Spirit? Nothing less than the love-knot of the Father and the Son, binding God with God; the love-knot too that unites the two natures, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, God with man, and the love-knot that gathers and unites us to God and to one another, making us “partakers of the divine nature”.

For this day marks a royal exchange: “whereby, as before He of ours [our nature], so now we of His are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with His Spirit”. In Christ, God partakes our human nature so that we should be partakers of his divine nature. As Tertullian puts it, the coming of Christ was the fulfilling of the Law, the Old Testament, while the coming of the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of the Gospel, the New Testament.

This is not abstract talk but the truth of the images of Scripture, especially on this day, the Feast of Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday. The very names point to the paradoxes of spiritual life, of unity expressed through difference. Pentecost refers to the fiftieth day, looking back to the Jewish Passover (now the Christian Easter), on the one hand, and Whitsunday, meaning White Sunday, even though the liturgical colour is red, symbolic of the tongues of fire resting upon the Apostles of the New Testament, on the other hand. Why white? Because of baptism; our incorporation into the life of God through Word and Spirit, our being incorporated into Christ’s death and life. We are like those, as Revelation puts it, who have “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The paradoxes of revelation require our thinking through the images and grasping their unity in understanding. Pentecost signals the constant necessity of sticking close to the images and thus to their meaning as opposed to the modern tendency to fly from images into various forms of abstraction or the problem of reification, turning metaphors and images and behaviours into things, or objects but only through abstract categories of indeterminacy. This is a failure of thinking and a negation of the power of language and the importance of metaphor.

TBA