WEYBURN (Qu’A) — The last day of the 2024-2025 church year was marked with an Advent retreat at All Saints Anglican Church.
Twelve people from Regina and Weyburn gathered to learn more about St. Matthew and his gospel. This gospel is the primary source of readings in Year A, which began on Nov. 30, 2025. The group read through the gospel using a range of versions of the Bible.
Together, the group discussed how lessons in this message to First Century Jews applied to us in the 21st century.
It was noted that St. Matthew starts with a lengthy genealogy of Jesus that would have been of great interest to the Jewish people, as it linked Jesus to the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Bible (also called the Old or First Testament). This was to demonstrate that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies, and was therefore legitimately the Messiah.
Jesus’ genealogy tends to be less important to modern readers, particularly as we work to avoid a Christian-centric ‘supercessionism’ view (using Hebrew scripture as a tool to interpret Jesus as superseding, and thus potentially negating God’s eternal promise to the Jewish people).
Current readers may, though, be interested in the fact that the genealogy includes several women, including some non-Jews, and some outside the bounds of “polite” society — plus St. Matthew, who was himself originally a “despised” and ostracised tax collector.
This was seen as reflecting God’s ability and desire to collaborate with those who have been marginalized, and calling on us to embrace and collaborate with those marginalized in our society.
St. Matthew includes many similes of “the kingdom of God.” Retreat leader, Rev. Christine Burton, encouraged the group to consider what some modern descriptions might be. Her suggestion was: “The kingdom of God is like a winter coat that you put on again for the first time in ages, discovering a $20 bill in the pocket!
“The coat keeps you safe and warm, and the money is a wonderful surprise — unexpected and unearned, essentially a gift, that you can spend on yourself, or, even better, on others … just like God’s love keeps us safe and warm, and is an unearned gift that we can share with others.”
In addition to videos and readings of Scripture, the participants used angels and angel wings to make necklaces, bracelets, bookmarks, or rearview mirror ornaments. St. Matthew is often represented as a winged man, an angel, or as accompanied by an angel, and the participants were encouraged to put their item where they would encounter it often, and to use it as a tool to recall what they had learned in the session.
