Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday June 28, 2026
I’m sure you have had the same experience as me. It’s really strange how things, how places, how people well known and oh so familiar to us can suddenly come alive—come alive in a way that we have never known before. We know and we experience them as if for the very first time. It could be somebody that you’ve just met and known over a short period of time, or it could be a member of your family who you’ve known since birth.
Take a song, for example, or a piece of music. Music that we have heard and that we recognize note by note suddenly becomes wonderfully fresh and exciting, as if we are hearing it for the first time. Or a place—somewhere we have visited many, many times in our lives. A building, a house, a church, perhaps a park, a beach, or even a shopping mall. A place we could find our way around with our eyes shut suddenly becomes surprisingly brand new, as if we were there for the very first time.
And another person—a friend, a relative, someone at work, a fellow parishioner, someone who is part of our daily lives, someone that we take for granted. Suddenly, they come alive and we see them in a new and unexpected light, with talents and qualities and a grace we’ve never appreciated before. What I’m talking about doesn’t come our way a lot of the time, but when it does, it’s wonderful. Whatever triggers the experience usually remains difficult to pinpoint and hidden from defining, but when it happens, it has a powerful effect on our lives and on our relationships.
Well, in preparing for today’s Mass, I did what I always do: I read the propers for the day. Now, if you are unfamiliar with the word “propers,” it is a catchword for the entrance antiphon (also called the introit sentence), the collect (the prayer specific to the day), the scripture readings assigned in the lectionary, the offertory prayer said over the bread and wine just before the Great Thanksgiving, and the prayers said after communion. All of them are very familiar and well known to me. But for whatever reason, the wording of the collect jumped out at me as if I was reading the prayer for the very first time: “Almighty God, you have taught us through your Son that love fulfills the law.”
Of course, the prayer reflects the summary of the law read at the beginning of Mass. Both take us to Jesus’ answer to the lawyer who asked him in the Gospel of Matthew, “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?” And Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.” Jesus continued, “And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
As the wording of the collect jumped out at me as if for the very first time, a long-forgotten memory came back to me—a memory that I cherish. I was back in the sanctuary of Holy Blossom Temple, a Jewish synagogue on Bathurst Street in Toronto. If you have ever seen Holy Blossom Temple, it is the most beautiful and stately building that just rises high up. Built in 1937 of steel and concrete, not brick, it is one of the very first concrete structures built for worship without interior columns supporting the roofline. Its concrete facade features a large, rounded arched window of stained glass which catches your eye and draws you up when you’re outside the building and entering it.
The congregation is a Reform congregation that has taken outreach to the wider community seriously for decades. Its longtime rabbi and scholar, Gunther Plaut—whom some of you, I’m sure, have heard of—was active in the life of Toronto, Ontario, and Canada for decades. He contributed many articles to The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star newspapers and was well known, liked, and admired.
It was an autumn Saturday morning, the regular Shabbat service, and I was with a group of young people from my parish of St. Luke, East York. We had taken advantage of an invitation extended by the synagogue to Christian churches throughout Toronto to come, attend services, and get to know the Jewish community. I was taken by that, so I contacted the synagogue and a date was set for our visit. We had some adults with us in our group—probably 15 to 20 of us in total—but most were in their mid-teens, between 14 and 16 years old. I wanted them to learn firsthand from attending a Shabbat service, especially since we were having discussions as a group back at the parish about the Jewish roots of Christianity.
I remember when we arrived that day, members of the congregation gave us a warm welcome and seated us, unexpectedly, up in the front pews. From there, we had a good view of the synagogue’s magnificent interior and the Ark, right in the center in prominence, containing the scrolls of the Torah and the Prophets. One of the rabbis welcomed us at the beginning of the service, naming our parish and where we were from. Some of us, me included, were a little bit embarrassed, yet we were happy and felt very welcome. Following the service, we gathered in a meeting room where we were treated to a great lunch, and we spent at least an hour and a half asking questions of our host. He took pains and time answering each question with kind grace and good humor.
But there is one moment in the Shabbat liturgy that stands out for me above all. It was when the Cantor proclaimed the Shema: “Shema Yisrael”—”Hear, O Israel.” For Jews, the Shema is the closest statement of faith comparable to what you and I might call a creed. Besides its recitation at services, it is said daily in prayer by faithful Jews morning and night. The Shema itself comes from the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, and it begins: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
As those words were sung by the Cantor, the entire congregation just rose to their feet, almost as if a fire was lit. And, of course, we visitors from St. Luke did likewise. As we did, the boy sitting on my right, whose name was Mark—a really great kid—punched me in the arm. I almost fell over! With excitement and wide-open eyes, he looked at me and said, “Father, you say those words every Sunday at Mass!”
Suddenly, at that moment, the words had come to life for Mark. A connection, a link, had been made with the scriptures, with the faith, and with believing—a connection that stayed with him for the rest of his life. I remember speaking to him when he was in his twenties, long after I left St. Luke’s, and he said, “You know, I still remember that moment. I’m sorry if I punched you in the arm, but I was just so taken by it and it was so exciting.” It remains a very fond memory.
You know, faith, believing, and the well-known and familiar can easily become things we take for granted. From practice and experience, we can recite our prayers while paying little attention to the flow and the meaning of the words. The form and the formula can take over, and that’s good in a way—it guides us through. Comfortable familiarity can generally get us through the challenges of the day. But when those challenges gain momentum and strength, and seem to be getting the better of us, we may find that familiarity lacking that extra something we need. We may say the prayers that we know off by heart, but we might still feel a bit cold. We want something more from God, from ourselves, and from our relationship with the Lord.
There is a thread which can knit together today’s scripture readings, and it is the idea of faithfulness. We see it first in the improbable story of Abraham preparing the sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, in the reading from Genesis 22. Abraham, we know, remained faithful to what he felt God wanted him to do. As odd as it sounds to our 21st-century ears, in addition to illustrating Abraham’s faithfulness, the story affirms that God does not desire human sacrifice, as was practiced by the peoples and cultures of Abraham’s day. God desires his people to love him; he wants to be in a relationship with them.
Next, it is easy to get lost in the Apostle Paul’s arcane language and thinking in the portion of the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, our second reading. You can read it and be left scratching your head, wondering just what Paul is talking about and what it means to us today. But again, faithfulness is the thread throughout what Paul is saying, and it connects directly back to the Old Testament reading.
Jesus’ words for today’s short reading from Matthew chapter 10 stand on the long-held Jewish belief that welcoming another person’s messenger was the same as receiving and honoring the person who sent them. It is much like the tradition of one country sending an ambassador to another; the ambassador is received with grace and security as if the host country were receiving the king, the president, or the people themselves. So again, acceptance in the Gospel reading today is deeply rooted in faithfulness.
I want you to keep that thread of faithfulness in mind as I now shift focus. Available today on the counter near the doors is a brochure we hope to have on hand for people who are new to our liturgy on Sunday, or who are visiting this place for the very first time. It is designed to help someone new make sense of how we worship and what is happening. Because if you come into an Anglican parish—let alone an Anglo-Catholic worship service—it can throw you a bit. You wonder, what is happening? What is going on?
The guide is called A Short Guide to the Liturgy of the Anglican Church of Canada. To give you a quick history, this came about in the late 1990s at St. Luke’s in the east end of Toronto. There was a real shift taking place in the neighborhood demographics. While we weren’t experiencing a massive flood of new people, there were new residents moving in, and a few found their way to Sunday worship. We realized that even though we tried to make it easy by providing a service booklet that contained only what was needed for that specific day and season, people were still confused.
So, I put together a guide that could be given gracefully to a newcomer. We told our greeters and sidespeople, “If you see somebody struggling and they’re new, just tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘This might be a help.'” It takes you through the liturgy in a very straightforward way and opens up like an accordion, so someone can follow the service while holding the guide in one hand, moving from page to page.
I see some of you already have a copy of it, and I encourage the rest of you to please pick one up when you leave Mass this morning. It begins with the gathering of the community and explains what’s happening. It’s like when a family gets together—you gather in the living room, exchange hugs, kisses, and greetings, and then you sit down and your meeting begins. The guide explains this, noting that there is an entrance hymn and telling you exactly where the hymns are found. Often, someone might hear the organ start and wonder what happens next; this lets them know it’s in that blue book in the pew.
It then goes on to simply explain the proclamation of the Word and what scripture is, and I made sure it explicitly mentions our Jewish roots. It talks about the Old Testament reading, the New Testament reading, the psalm, and the Gospel reading. As you look through it, it is very straightforward. I tried to use as little technical or liturgical language as possible. You can’t escape it completely—there are some words a person will encounter, like “absolution,” where they might think, I don’t know what that is. But for the most part, I tried to use basic English for a newcomer who is searching.
You and I don’t know the story of someone who shows up in a pew here on a Sunday morning. We don’t know what’s going on in their life. I’m sure it’s rarely a case of them just sitting in their living room thinking, I’d like to go to church today. There might be a deep issue in their life that is really troubling them, and they are reaching out for God. They are reaching out for community, and they think, I’m going to go to that church I see close to me.
The guide works its way through the prayers of the people, explains what happens at the altar for the preparation of the gifts, the Great Thanksgiving, the breaking of the bread, and communion. It explicitly welcomes what the Anglican Church of Canada affirms: if you are a baptized Christian, you are welcome to receive the sacrament at an Anglican altar. You will not be turned away.
It also lets people know that if they are sitting in a pew—perhaps for the first time, or even as a long-time member—and they physically cannot get up to go to the altar rail, they just need to let someone know. A message can easily be passed to the priest and those ministering the sacrament. I find that very helpful. Sometimes I might not notice someone from the front, but while ministering communion, someone will pull my vestments or grab my arm and say, “You know, there’s a gentleman right at the back who would really like to receive communion.” It is a vital, welcoming gesture. The guide also explains that if you choose not to receive the sacrament, you can come forward, cross your arms over your chest, and you will receive a blessing.
I will let you go through and read it yourself, and I hope you find it helpful. It includes additional practical information about our music, the Sunday bulletin, and the reservation of the sacrament, which is very important to us as Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics. The tabernacle is not just a beautiful-looking red door that sits above the altar; our Lord is present there. The consecrated sacrament is reserved within it. We know when we walk through that door and see the light burning that Jesus himself is present in a very real, true, and special way. Because of that, we show respect. If we need to come and pray, we should be able to kneel here in the sanctuary and pray to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The guide explains all of this, alongside Mass times and information regarding children and communion.
I want to take just a moment on that last point, because in 1976, the Anglican Church of Canada changed its understanding of Christian initiation. Our church decided—and this is what it teaches and believes—that you no longer have to wait to receive communion until you’ve been confirmed as a teenager or adult. As a baptized Christian, you are a communicant member of the church and are welcome at the altar to receive the sacrament. Of course, it is up to families to determine the right age for their children to begin receiving. You can speak to the priest, instructions are given, and then they come forward to begin their communicant life.
I have also included a short note in there about personal piety and Anglo-Catholicism. Again, it doesn’t cover absolutely everything, but my intention now—just as it was back in the ’90s when I first did this—is for it to serve as a guide. It’s a tool to help someone who is with us for the first time, or perhaps someone returning to the Anglican liturgy who has been away for a very long time.
It is a tool, and there are so many tools that we need, use, and create to help others and ourselves grow in faith. They help us feel comfortable at liturgy, share in the liturgy, and pray the liturgy together—because that is exactly what you and I are doing here today. We pray the liturgy together. It is not just me standing at the altar doing it alone. We pray the liturgy as God’s people, the church, offering up this sacrament and this sacrifice to God, trusting that God is with us and will come to us in the bread, the wine, and the community.
So, I commend this guide to you today, and I do hope it will be a help. Thinking back to St. Luke’s in Toronto, there were several folks who made a point of saying afterward, “Thank you for that. It really helped me understand what was going on, and I felt so much more comfortable.”
To circle back to where I began: faithfulness is truly the ultimate theme of what we do and the foundation of the tools we use in being God’s people in the world. It is about faithfulness to the Gospel and the Good News, faithfulness to our tradition, and faithfulness as we claim to reach out to the wider community around us. May God bless us, keep us, and inspire us always to proclaim the faith with truth and with love. Amen.
Father Ted Hales