Fresh, ancient words for a fractured age

Instructions for the End of the World. By Maggie Helwig, June 2026. ISBN 9781552455210, e-ISBN 9781770568969, 240 pp, $24.95.

I read most of this book on the bus and on the subway, after dropping my daughter off at kindergarten on spring mornings that stubbornly refused to be spring mornings. Was this the best environment to really delve into a collection of sermons? Possibly not. But when the text in question demands a reckoning with the world in its present state, crises and all, perhaps out-in-the-world is exactly the place to read it.

Instructions for the End of the World collects sermons preached by the Rev. Canon Maggie Helwig to the community of St. Stephen in-the-Fields, Toronto, over the course of five years, from March 2020 to November 2025. The events of the pandemic and the years that followed – the churchyard encampment and the repeated attempts to remove it, worsening income inequality, the rise of nationalism and a turn to fascism – are the backdrop for these texts, but the focus is the gospel.

What I found were sermons fresh and ancient, new and deeply timeless. Canon Helwig’s exegetical style is at once intellectual and deeply poetic, considering the nuances of New Testament Greek, the possibilities of literary imagery, and the realities of particular historical contexts. She hints at the personalities of the gospel writers, considers the specific way parables are introduced, and challenges simplistic interpretations. Her sermons bring a fresh perspective to familiar stories, often offering nuance I hadn’t considered before.

Canon Helwig’s literary prowess is evident, but her sermons are not literary exercises. She speaks to her congregation in moments of real calamity and uncertainty, both on its doorstep and in the broader world. As I read, I heard most clearly a priest faithfully caring for her flock, speaking words of comfort, providing consolation and encouragement. And now she writes these words to all of us, finding our footing in a world that seems more chaotic every day.

Rooted in the Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of scriptural readings used in many Christian churches, this collection positions us alongside biblical figures grappling with their own turbulent times. Like us, these people exist in a messy, complicated world full of messy, complicated humans whom we are called to love, just as God loves us and we must love ourselves. We see here the theology from which Encampment, Canon Helwig’s award-winning book, grew – a theology that compels love of neighbour and action in the face of injustice. Canon Helwig calls us to consider the ways we can love and serve our neighbours in any context. (And there is no one who is not included among our neighbours.) She exhorts us to do whatever we can, however we can, even if it doesn’t feel like enough. “We can heal, now and then, small moments of our times. We can make things better, not forever, but for a day, an hour, ten minutes – and those minutes matter eternally,” she writes.

The hope Canon Helwig provides is complex and nuanced. There are no empty platitudes to be found in these pages. She acknowledges the pain and suffering in the world, the ways in which our society is deeply wrong and deeply flawed, and she doesn’t minimize any of it. “Sorrow and suffering, limit and loss, are a part of this reality, and to take away those hard human limits would be to take away our human lives, our shattering, struggling, beautiful, painful lives,” she writes.

With evidence of such darkness, it would be easy to fall into despair, but instead these sermons are filled with relentless hope. The boundless, radical love of God through Jesus Christ breathes on every page, and it is that love that strengthens us as the Body of Christ to live in the world and send God’s love back into it. “Even if we cannot know it in the moment, we are held, we are cherished, we matter. We must take that love and try to bring it into the world, in our small kindness and our small resistance,” she writes.

Instructions also provides an antidote to the Christian nationalism that so often dominates the public conversation in North America. Canon Helwig returns to Christianity’s roots as an outsider movement – a faith found not in the halls of power, but in the margins. And it’s only as the Body of Christ, all of us working together, that we can hope to help God’s kingdom break in. This is not a faith of individual salvation, but of working and praying and loving as a community to bring peace into a troubled world.

As Canon Helwig speaks again and again of the radical love of a God who chooses to join us in our own frailty and brokenness, and thereby make sacred our broken world, I can’t help but come away with a deep sense of wonder and gratitude that we, together, are called to plant our gardens in Babylon, to celebrate that excessive, unreasonable love, and to do whatever we can to make that love known in the world.

“We are the body, and this is the time, for we have no other bodies, and no other times. This is the year of God’s favour, because we have no other year. This is the place of fulfillment, because we have no other place.”