Happy Epiphany / Theophany / Los Tres Reyes, 2013!

Huh? Ain't The Holidays Over?

Gee whiz. Everyone took down their Christmas trees already because everyone knows Christmas is over. So what's an Epiphany, what's a Theophany, and who are these three kings, or los tres reyes as one says if one has the good fortune to speak Spanish.

Well, guess what, we're not sure they were kings and we don't know for sure that there were three of them -- that's inferred from there having been three gifts in the Biblical story. All we know is the Christian Church has for over 1,500 years celebrated a major feast on 6 January, but not always celebrating the same things. Man, sounds like one of those things we can just leave to the dustbin of history and stick to the Gospel, just preach Jesus, deeds not creeds, huh?

What's An Epiphany?

Maybe not. Consider. The word epiphany is an English form of a Greek word meaning appearance or manifestation. The word theophany is more specific, coming from the Greek for an appearance or manifestation of God. The former is more common in the Western Church, and the latter in the Eastern. The earliest known reference to the feast comes from a non Christian source, the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman of Greek descent, who in his later years wrote a history of the Roman empire to continue the work of Tacitus.

His Res Gestae Libri XXXI covers the years we know as 96 to 378, but, of the thirty one books only the last eighteen, covering 353 to 378, are still around, or extant, as they say. His reference in the year 361, which was still in his lifetime, is the earliest known reference to a Christian feast celebrated on 6 January. OK, so we've nailed down that from at least the fourth century Christians were celebrating something that had to do with the manifestation of God, which, being Christians, would have to do with Jesus, on 6 January.

The original feast on 6 January was a combination of all the events of the young Jesus, from his birth, to his circumcision, the visit from whoever it was that visited from the East, his naming, his baptism, and his first public miracle changing water to wine at the wedding in Cana. From there, various local churches in various places spun off some of these events, or didn't, on to their own days, resulting in celebrations on 6 January but not of the same things. So we can nail this down too, that 6 January is among the oldest and most important of the Christian church's celebrations, which over time took on varying significance in various places.

Unfortunately, we can also nail down that, in the West anyway, even among those who have a liturgical calendar, 6 January now passes relatively unnoticed. Even more unfortunately, if one follows the Roman Church, ever ready to act like the state religion of the Roman Empire that it is, and even yet more unfortunately willingly followed into the abyss by other Christian bodies even with no state forcing it to do so, 6 January isn't even the feast day any more, after over a millennium and one half of observance!!!

The mitred monkeys changed it all up.  They made a fixed into a moveable feast, having it fall on the Sunday after the first Saturday in January, which in turn eliminates what was the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus on either that day or, in years where there was no Sunday between the Circumcision on the 1st and Epiphany on the 6th, on 2 January.  Poor old Jesus and his holy name.  This was a part of the 1970 novus ordo, a new mass with a new calendar and lectionary to fit, all in the service of the new religion re-invented from the old at Vatican II.

Well, I guess when you're the Whore of Babylon you can pretty well do what you want, you will pretty well do what you want, but why those of us out here in the ecclesial unions -- Rome's term for churches Rome says aren't really churches, not being in union with the one church, themselves of course, but preserve some truth along with their respective errors in churchy associations -- would have the slightest inclination to follow this Roman madness, either exactly or in adaptations for own use, defies all explanation since it makes us brothelial unions following the Whore in its further retreat from the Gospel of Christ.

Who Are These Three Kings Or Magi Or Whatever?

Now, back to Epiphany, in the Western Church, not to be confused with the Roman Church, 6 January has come to celebrate the arrival of the Magi. OK, so what's a Magi and where did they arrive. Well, we don't know for sure. Great -- after all the above, we actually do find more dustbin of history stuff, let's just preach Jesus?

Maybe not. Consider. What's a Magi? The word Magi -- did you notice it's pretty close to the word magic? -- comes from a Latin version of the Greek plural of a word they derived from the Persian word for the priests of Zoroaster. These guys are sometimes called astrologers, but that can be misleading because then the term had no reference at all to storefront fortune tellers and the like, but rather to the application of astronomy and mathematics to phenomena in the best science of the time, which later lead to the term being applied to all sorts of occult religion and what came to be called magic.

Now, Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels that records the visit of the Magi. Interesting that he does not record the birth of Jesus itself, where Luke does but does not record the Magi, and Mark doesn't bother with any of it, starting with Jesus' Baptism. In my scripture classes at a Catholic university, also attended by pre-seminarians, we learned that this of course shows the evolution of the story by writers of the Christian community as a pious expression of their faith rather than anything to be taken literally or written as some kind of accurate record as we now understand accurate.

Yeah, well, getting back to the Christian faith and church, Matthew only says they were from the East, which means they weren't Jews, unlike the Jewish shepherds in nearby fields who also came. So here is the next thing we can nail down. The Magi represent the manifestation of Jesus the incarnation of God to the Gentiles, non Jews, for the first time. These men, whatever their origin, were not followers of the religion God revealed to the the Jews, but of the best wisdom and science of their own place. So in the visit of the Magi we see two things: one is that God became Man in Jesus for all people, not only his own, and the other is that the wisdom of all people, even apart from the revelations of the Law and the Prophets, both leads to Jesus and is completed in Jesus.

St Paul would later preach accordingly to Gentiles, not first instructing them in the Law and the Prophets, but taking their own religious ideas and pointing out how it both leads to Christ, but is not able to be complete without Christ, and is fulfilled and made complete in Christ. Being a Gentile, that Jesus' birth from the outset showed that this is from God for Jews and Gentiles alike is a pretty big deal to me, certainly on that alone worth celebrating in a major way.

Where Did They Come From?

In the West, the names of the Magi are traditionally given as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. Not Biblical but fairly well settled on by the eighth century. The Eastern Church has other names for them, not the same ones in all places, and with the exception of the Syrian ones none of them show any clear Persian derivation. Here's something I find fascinating: among some Chinese Christians, it is believed that one of the Magi was Chinese. Liu Shang was an astrologer (in the sense above) in the Han dynasty at the time of Jesus' birth and discovered a star that was supposed to indicate the birth of a king, whereupon he was absent from the imperial court for about two years -- about enough time to follow the Silk Road (man, I gotta post about the Silk Road some time) and make it to Palestine and back!

On the other hand, Marco Polo said he was shown the tombs of the three Magi about 1270 south of modern Tehran. On the other hand (yeah, I know, that makes three hands) St Helena supposedly found the remains of the Magi on her trip to Palestine -- Helena being the mother of Constantine, and 80 at the time of this trip -- and took them to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which were later taken to Milan, then by order of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I in 1164, before Marco Polo, taken to the cathedral at Cologne, where they are, or something is, to-day.

Interesting indeed, but not something to get all caught up in, because the significance of the Magi isn't their names or where their remains are, but the manifestation of God to all people, of which they were the first example.

Where Did They Go To?

One interesting custom follows from the Western names for them. At the New Year there is the custom of writing the initials of the three, CMB, above the door to one's house to ask for blessings in the new year. Now, this follows the idea of the Magi coming to Jesus' home, but we represent them usually at the manger, not his home, and this custom probably reflects the tradition that they arrived some time later, after the Holy Family had either returned home or were staying elsewhere around Jerusalem after the birth itself. So there is some variation in just where they arrived, as well as when they arrived and who they were.

But again, the point isn't in the details, it's in that they visited the Holy Family where they were living at the time. CMB, their initials, is then an acronym for Christus mansionem benedicat, may Christ bless this house. This is done by Sternsinger, German for star singers, a reference to the star which guided the Magi, children who carry a star and dress like the Magi, who write the initials and collect donations for charitable work. The custom of house blessings continues to this day with some of our LCMS pastors.

Got Your Epiphany Shopping Done?

Also, in many places, especially those of Spanish derived culture, Epiphany is the gift giving day, after the example of the gifts of the Magi. This is Los Tres Reyes, the three kings. You put your shoes out, and if you're smart put a little hay in there for the camels, in some places (like PR) it's a box of hay under the bed, and you can leave a little note for the present you'd like, and on Epiphany you wake up and there's your presents, brought by the three kings! How about that, no clown in a red suit jumping down the fireplace, but the Magi coming by with presents for you just like they did for Christ.

I read in Spain there have been demonstrations against Santa Claus, a McWorld displacement of bringing gifts to children by the Magi. Jolly good show, I say! The whole world doesn't have to follow the secular Christmas customs of the United States, and, the Magi are considerably less removed from their Biblical character than Santa Claus is from the actual St Nicholas.

But apart from these customs in other places, Epiphany isn't going to be much of a deal here in the US. However, there are signs of hope! Epiphany may be saved from cultural invisibility by the same commercialisation that has saved Christmas. Yes, you read it right, saved Christmas -- think how Christmas would disappear entirely in the secular "politically correct" world were if not for the revenue it generates for the economy and business. And, as the Latin presence in the US continues to expand, many retailers are finding that by making more of Epiphany with its gift giving traditions they can extend the harvest of the season besides the "white sales" and such!

Yes, that will come at the expense, so to speak, of the "real meaning of Epiphany" just as with Christmas, but it keeps it visible in a world that doesn't really want to hear the meaning of any of this, and that's where the church can come in, you know, preaching the Word and stuff like that. Myself, though of English descent, and later culturally adopted by the Puerto Rican contingent at university, I was adopted by a couple of Irish descent, and Dad always called Epiphany "Little Christmas" following Irish custom, and there was one more present on Epiphany.

I continued that with my own boys, though we didn't do the whole box of hay thing -- they don't even speak any Spanish! But the idea was to tie it to the Magi, the manifestation of God to all people, the giving of what one has to Christ, the giving to each other as he gave to us, and most of all, his giving himself to us and for us. On 6 January.

What's A Theophany?

Finally, what's this Theophany stuff? In the Eastern Church, while in some places it is still along the multifaceted lines of its original observance, 6 January is not associated with the Magi at all but usually a celebration with focus on the Baptism of the Lord in the River Jordan by John. Theophany is a wonderful name for this feast, being as we saw more specific than Epiphany -- specifying who is being manifest here, God. And on the event of Jesus' Baptism, we have the only time when all three Persons of the Trinity were manifest to Man at the same time: God the Father speaking from the heavens, God the Son in Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending from the heavens.

The West has come to celebrate the Baptism separately from the coming of the Magi, but this beautiful celebration of the Eastern Church has much to show us about the Baptism of Jesus, whether we celebrate it this day or separately.Theophany and Epiphany both celebrate manifestations of God, though different ones, and both are on 6 January. However, the Eastern Church liturgically uses the older Julian calendar, in which 6 January falls on what is 19 January in the Gregorian calendar in secular use pretty much everywhere now.

So, between the Great Schism of 1054 and Vatican II, equally disastrous splitting events in Christianity, ain't nobody gonna be in church for nothin on Gregorian 6 January unlike hundreds and hundreds of years of those who came before us in faith and thought they were passing it on -- except for the years when it falls on a Sunday anyway, or if you're a red-hymnal-or-die type (I raise my hand here), or if you follow that part of the LSB that follows the Christian Church rather than Vatican II, or if you belong to groups in other churches attempting to maintain the faith amid the onslaught of revisionism and Vatican II wannabeism.

Conclusion.

Whatever their names, wherever they came from, whoever they were, whenever they got there, and wherever that was, and whether it's the coming of the Magi or the Baptism of the Lord, let us celebrate and rejoice in the appearance of God, the manifestation of God to Man in Jesus Christ, 6 January and every other day too!!

Wilhelm Löhe, 2 January 2013.

Pastor Loehe died on 2 January 1872 at age 63. Following the traditional custom of the church of regarding what the world calls the date of death as the date of birth to eternity (dies natalis) and commemorating its great models on those dates, our beloved synod commemorates him to-day.

I don't have a single profound thing to say about him. But he's right up there with Robert Barnes and CFW Walther on my list of Lutheran heroes. From what I can tell, I just gotta like this guy.

For one thing, his wife died after six years of marriage and he had four kids to raise by himself. I get that. Same thing happened to me after four years of marriage and two kids. Check.

But that's not all. Like me, he was a convert. Check.

He was real taken with our Confessions, and, like people like that tend to be, was real taken with Lutheran liturgy, especially the mass, and making it central to parish life. Check.

He had a real concern to get this message out, not just get a message out, get this message out. Check. To the extent that some saw him as a little too rough, too combative, and too conservative. Check, double check, and a hell yes.

This also seems to have run him afoul of church trends. Check.

Yet he also had a concrete concern for physical as well as spiritual needs, not always found along with "conservatives". Check.

He was Bavarian. Well, sorta kinda. He was actually Franconian, however, Franconia (Franken) has been part of Bavaria since 1803 as Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire, and King Ludwig of Bavaria re-established the old name in 1837, yet it remains a distinct cultural entity from historic Bavaria (Atlbayern). Loehe was born in Fuerth, Middle Franconia (Mittelfranken) and was stuck by his church body in the little town of Neuendettelsau in the same region. Check -- hell, I'm not even German however I grew up in Minnesota and ended up at a university sponsored by a Benedictine abbey founded out of Abtei Metten in Bavaria with money from King Ludwig himself, with German still commonly heard at the time I was there.

But the big deal about him is not at all just that I like him. Confessional Lutheranism is always under threat of being watered down, and often from church bodies with "Lutheran" in the name or history. Happened to Loehe, happens to us. But when this guy's church body headed down a revisionist, unionist path, and banished him to the hinterlands for not being with it, he promoted liturgy and works of service with such a passion that its results endure over a century later on every inhabited continent. Which is encouragement to those in his position now, even in the very synod he helped start here. And yeah, I just gotta like the guy and it encourages me to find people like him, confessionally regardless of background, behind our beloved synod and makes me feel at home.

And since it's only the second day of the new calendar year, and, in the interest of spreading confessional Lutheranism, unmodified by earlier errors of Rome or later errors of Protestantism and of Rome, here is my list of essential Lutheran reading:

"MELL" My Essential Lutheran Library

1. Holy Bible. The Lutheran Study Bible (2009)
2. Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, 2 ed. (2006)
3. The Lutheran Hymnal (1941)
4. God Grant It. Daily Devotions from CFW Walther (2006)
5. Luther's Small Catechism with Explanation (1991, 2005, with ESV 2008)
6. Law and Gospel. A Reader's Edition. CFW Walther (2010)
7. The Augsburg Confession (booklet of AC from #2, 2006)
8. Portals of Prayer (quarterly periodical)

All available from Concordia Publishing House.

A little footnote: Past Elder began -- none of this not by design, I wasn't thinking of it -- in blue and white, the colours of Bavaria, and is now red and white, the colours of Franconia.

Happy Whatever Day This Is, 2013!

Huh? Ain't It New Years?

In the world, it's simple -- Happy New Years!

The Gregorian Calendar, the Western calendar that is pretty much the conventional standard the world over now even when alongside traditional calendars, counts this the first day of the new year. It wasn't always so, even in earlier Western calendars.

How New Years Went From 15 March To 1 January.

New Years Day was 15 March in ancient Rome. But in 153 B.C., the date of the new year was changed to 1 January, that being the date when the two ruling consuls were chosen. "Were chosen", passive voice, indicates an agent, someone who did it, so who did it? Originally they were elected. Passive voice again, who's the agent, who elected them? The Comitia Centuriata, that's who, made up of all Roman citizens and divided into centuries, which are theoretically voting groups of 100 though not in practice, which voted first within itself and then as a unit in the election.

But, the consuls did not assume office until being ratified by election by the Comitia Curiata, which was made up only of members of elite families. There were two other assemblies in old Rome, the Comitia Calata and the Comitia Tributa, the former under the leadership of the pontifex maximus and concerned mostly with ceremonies and the latter administrative and judicial. There were two consuls, not one, and they ruled to-gether. The plural of consul, consules, literally means walking to-gether. However, as the Roman Republic waned and the Roman Empire emerged, while the facade of the republic remained, power moved from the people to the Emperor.

In fact, the word "calendar" comes from all this. The first day of each month was called out by the pontifex, pontiff of the state religion, at a place called the Curia Calabra where the pontiff called the Comitia Calata. Hence the first days of the months were called Kalendae, the called, and the rest of the days of the month called from them.

Gee, curia, pontifex maximus, what was once the real deal becoming a facade with real power in a single man, elected officials giving way to appointed ones -- does that course of events in Rome sound like Church as well as Empire? Well, that's another story. Or maybe it isn't. BIG post on that coming right here in a couple of weeks. Now, back to New Years.

How New Years Went From 1 January Back To 25 March.

Dionysius Exiguus -- Dennis the Short, in the sense of humble -- in his tables for the dates of Easter in 525 A.D. (anno domini, year of our lord, A.D. being his invention too!) came up with a new system for numbering years to replace naming them after consuls and the system of the Emperor Diocletian, who had been a major persecutor of Christians. He set the start of the new year in the Julian (as in Julius Caesar) calendar at 25 March to co-incide with the Feast of the Annunciation. Annunciation of what? The announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would bear Christ, count 'em, nine months, the period of human gestation, before the celebration of Christ's birth on 25 December. The years themselves though continued to be lined up from January to December Roman style.

(Dennis was not a Benedictine, he was one of the so-called Scythian Monks, named after the region where they were, where the Danube meets the Black Sea, the modern Dobrogea region mostly in Romania.  But apart from that there is only good to say about him, and on 8 July 2008 was he canonised a saint by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church.)

Why New Years Day three months into the list of months of the year? Because years of Our Lord do not begin from his birth but from his conception, which is the beginning of a life. Thus God's entry into human history in the Incarnation as Jesus begins with the conception, not the birth, and therefore dating the years since his coming into humanity starts, as does all life, from conception, not birth. How's that for a "pro-life" witness!

We English call The Annunciation Lady Day, and it was New Years Day too until 1752 when the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was official. In fact, the tax year in the UK still begins on 6 April, which is 25 March in the Julian Calendar adjusted to the Gregorian one.

How New Years Went Back To 1 January.

Well, that's the way it was until the Gregorian Calendar we use now came about. Who's Gregory? It's Pope Gregory XIII, who on 24 February 1582 decreed it in the papal bull "inter gravissimas", which means "among the most serious". Ancient practice in Rome and many other places was to name a document after its first word or two (the names of the books in the Hebrew Bible are this way) and the bull starts "Among the most serious duties of our pastoral office ... ". A papal bull, btw, doesn't mean what you might be thinking, chucklesome as that is. It's a formal charter by a pope, taking its name from the bulla, a cord encased in clay and stamped with a seal, used to prevent tampering and thus ensure authenticity. Call it a low tech anti hacking device.

The new calendar, a revision of the old calendar of Julius Caesar, wasn't immediately adopted in the civil realm, although it was during this period that adoption of 1 January as the start of the new year really took hold. Not without controversy though, which has a remnant to this day. The original "April Fools" were those who, in the minds of Gregorian calendar advocates, still foolishly insisted New Years was 25 March, which falls in April in the Gregorian calendar, or were confused about it, and tricks were sometimes played on them.

The new calendar corrected the drift of the Julian calendar, but the original motivation had nothing to do with changing New Years but with establishing a common date for Easter throughout the Christian Church, following what it took to be the provisions of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. It met with resistance from non Catholic countries, Protestant and Orthodox alike, seeing it as a Catholic power play, and of course had no relevance to the traditional calendars outside the Christian world of the time. In fact even in Europe the last country to adopt the Gregorian calendar, Greece, only did so in 1923, even after Japan (1873), China (1912) and the newly Communist Russia (1918)!

One thing that didn't change, we still start numbering things with 1. So it's 2012 because it's the 12th year of the 21st century, just like 2000 was the 100th and last year of the 20th century and the 1000th and last year of the last millennium, and 2001 was the first year of both the first decade of this millennium and the millennium itself.

So the story's over, the world now has one calendar functionally, while other traditional ones can continue to be used locally. Well, almost.

What 1 January Is In The Church Calendar (None Of The Above)!

What a hoot -- the "secular" calendar is of religious origin in the Christian Church! And the church has a calendar too, which isn't really a calendar! It's better called the church year, and the new year starts with the First Sunday of Advent. Some things have a fixed date taken from the secular calendar and fall on that date every year. This is the proprium sanctorum, so named because they are usually but not always about a saint, like the Annunciation is always 25 March. Other things do not have a fixed date from year to year because they are seasons or times in the life of Christ with reference to Easter which does not have a fixed date. This is the proprium de tempore, of time, like Ash Wednesday, which is 22 February in 2012, but was 9 March in 2011, 17 February in 2010, and 25 February in 2009. Calendars put out by churches are generally like secular calendars, with the de tempore given on the date they fall that year.

1 January falls eight days after the celebration of the birth of Jesus. OK, it's the eighth day of Christmas, let's continue our Christmas celebration as we saw in the previous post. But guess what? In the Law -- Law of Moses -- on the eighth day after birth a male child is to be circumcised, according to the Law, to put him within the Law, and is also given his name. So on what we call 1 January now, the Church celebrates the Circumcision of Jesus, wherein he is under the Law that he will fulfill, and his blood is first shed for us as he is put under the Law as it will be shed in his Crucifixion as he redeems us from the condemnation of the Law -- the good news, the Gospel!

And with it, is celebrated his naming, either on the same day, or the day after, or the Sunday after but before Epiphany if there is one. Jesus, a form of Joshua, who, as Joshua took over from Moses and completed the journey to the Promised Land, so this Joshua takes over to complete the journey for us, that due to sin we cannot make, to the promised land of eternal life with God.

And also, the maternity of Mary as mother of this fully human and fully divine child who would do this for us is honoured too, originally stemming from the claim of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, the Mary was the mother of Jesus as a human only. The Maternity of Mary was to emphasise that Jesus born of Mary is fully human and fully divine.

So for the Christian, it's Happy Feast of the Circumcision (and Naming) of Jesus!! So the story's over, there you have it! Well, uh, just one more thing.

Rome, be it Empire or Church, is ever at the ready to tinker with stuff, and tinker they did. First, in 1931 Pope Pius XI moved the Maternity of Mary itself to 11 October. Then, at Vatican II, in replacing the church calendar and lectionary in its various forms for centuries with a whole new one with three different versions of the year, guess what -- they ash canned the Circumcision altogether too! And put in a local Roman practice from about 1500 years ago, the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God! Which is not exactly the old Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and, to top off the tinkering. to be celebrated the same day, in 1967 began the brand new World Day of Peace. I'm sure she loved that one! It ain't about me, you clowns, it's about him, and by the way, he said the peace he leaves is his peace, not as the world gives peace but the Holy Spirit sent from God after he returns to the Father. Or, as she had to say to those serving the wedding at Cana, Do whatever he tells you.

And that is her message, for which we honour her this day, but above all listen to her. Happy Feast of the Circumcision -- even amid our infatuation in some circles with reworking the novus ordo, we still got it! -- and whether you include it this day, to-morrow, or next Sunday, the Name of Jesus!!

And do whatever he tells you, like his mother said.

Apologia pro vita sua 2013.

As soon as I quit retching from appropriating something from the ridiculous buffoon John Henry Cardinal Newman, I'll explain what in all revisionist Judas I mean.

OK.  The first two posts on Past Elder for 2013 are late, but here they are.  Life apart from blogging has been unusually demanding lately and I just didn't get them posted.  But, there's a lot of interesting stuff relating to the whole business of what is new years, including that a lot of why our calendar is as it is now comes from regarding life beginning at conception, and what is the right time to celebrate the feast of the resurrection of Christ.  Two things that our world denies for the former and could not care less for the latter, so maybe it behooves us to know this stuff.  And Loehe -- man, that guy was fabulous, and you know what, he stood for what we stand for against exactly the same pressures we encounter now, which far from being just a pious figure to thank God for in the past is a model for action right bloody now.  And part of his legacy is our beloved synod, of which Walther himself said he is really the "father".

So here are these two posts, a few days late but I hope (which is not the same thing as "hopefully") not a dollar short, so zu sagen.

The Twelve Days Of Christmas, 2012.

If you, like good king Wenceslaus in the song, look out on the Feast of Stephen -- that's 26 December, but we'll get back to that -- you might think Christmas is over. Already on the evening news on Christmas day the local stations are posting Christmas tree pick up sites and times. Some hang around for a week to give a festive atmosphere to New Year's Eve and Day, then come down. On 2 January, Valentine's Day candy is in the stores.

That fits with the world's Christmas season. The church has a little different season going on. December is largely taken up with Advent. The idea is preparation there too, but not as in buying presents and food. It's about a preparation of repentance for celebrating the coming in the flesh of God as Jesus who will die to save us from our sins, for the coming of faith in him into our hearts, and for the coming of Jesus again in glory to judge the living and the dead on the Last Day.

For which reason the colour of Advent is purple, the colour of royalty and also of repentance. Not his coming in history or our hearts or his return is prepared for by buying stuff.

Christmas Is Not Just One Day!

The church's celebration of Christmas does not begin with December and end on Christmas with New Year's tacked on. It begins on Christmas and continues for several days! Our Christmas manger scenes often have the "humble" shepherds and the "important" visitors -- called Magi, Wise Men, or Kings most often -- all there. But as the story reads, the Three Kings were not there at Christmas! They arrived twelve days later, 6 January, which we celebrate as Epiphany. These twelve days from Christmas through Epiphany are the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now how did that happen? No-body knows. The thing is, Epiphany is a much older feast than Christmas, yet is now largely forgotten by most, lost in the shuffle by many, and celebrated by a few. Now how did THAT happen?

The Original Christmas.

Well, to me it looks like this. By the late fourth century after Christ, 6 January as the Epiphany existed. The earliest known reference dates from 361, and in those days the references indicate not just the appearance of the Three Kings -- epiphany is an English form of a Greek word meaning "appearance" or "manifestation" -- but rather the appearance or manifestation, the epiphany, of God, including his birth!

It's not that there wasn't Christmas, it's that this is "Christmas" as well as a celebration all the other events of the young Jesus up to and including his Baptism and his first public miracle at the wedding in Cana. A very big day!

Developments In The Western Church.

In the Western Church, these events began to be spun off from Epiphany. By the sixth century 25 December had become the celebration of his birth. His baptism began to be celebrated after Epiphany, so Epiphany itself in the West fairly early on narrowed its focus to the arrival of the Three Kings (Magi, etc.), who, not being Jews but Gentiles, give it the significance of the appearance or manifestation of the Messiah to the Gentiles.

I'm of English descent, but I was adopted by people of Irish descent, and my Dad, growing up pre-conciliar RC, always referred to Epiphany as "Little Christmas", an Irish custom from when 6 January in the pre-Gregorian calendar was also Christmas. In later life I was to find out this is one echo of all the stuff mentioned above. Growing up, decorations were always left up through Epiphany, and there was one more "Christmas" gift. I did the same in my house now. And I'll post about Los Tres Reyes (Spanish for The Three Kings) on 6 January, having been culturally adopted by the Puerto Rican contingent at university.

Developments In The Eastern Church.

This did not happen in the Eastern Church, where it retained its original character much longer, with many places much later adopting 25 December as the feast of his birth but keeping the celebration of his baptism on Epiphany, and in a few places yet keeping the Nativity on this day. And there's the added complication that 6 January in the older (Julian, as in Julius Caesar) calendar still used liturgically by the Eastern Church is 19 January in the Gregorian (as in Pope Gregory) calendar used in the West and now pretty much world wide as a convention.

In the Eastern Church the day is more commonly called the Theophany -- divine appearance or divine manifestation -- and is considered the third most important feast in the church's observance, Easter (Pascha) being first and Pentecost second. There ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas for our brethren in the Eastern Church, it's a Western thing, but on the other hand Theophany is more in line with the original of what we in the West call Epiphany, if we remember it to call it anything at all.

And Then Came Vatican II, Oy.

And to complicate it further, after a millennium and one half of usage, Rome, ever at the ready to tinker with the very tradition it says it conserves, decided at its last council, Vatican II in the 1960s, to make it a moveable feast, not on 6 January but on the Sunday after the first Saturday in January. So, if you listen to Rome (and if you listen to Rome, quit!) there ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas in the West now either! Nice going, guys.

For us confessional Lutherans -- those who seek to hold to the catholic, as distinct from the Catholic, faith and church -- while our latest service book, Lutheran Service Book, is infected with the latest Roman virus (please support research that a cure may be found in our time!) it appears that Epiphany has survived as 6 January.

So What's This Feast of Stephen Thing?

"Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen". Getting back to that, you think Epiphany got lost in the shuffle, what about this Feast of Stephen? It's 26 December, the day after Christmas. Why? Well, the Stephen remembered on this day is the first recorded martyr for the Christian faith, in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.  It is the custom in the church to commemorate someone not on the day of his earthly birth but the day of his birth to eternal life -- generally called death in the world -- but in a case like Stephen the date is not known.  When that happens a date will be chosen for some other reason associated with the person.  For Stephen, the first person known to have been born to eternal life by martyrdom for his faith is celebrated right after the earthly birth of him who came to make eternal life available to us.

So Who's This Wenceslaus, Why Is He Good and Why Is He Looking Out?

Wow, has this guy got a story. Right here, call it ironic, coincidence, or one of those divine consistencies that look like loose ends until you know what they are, but he ended up being a martyr for the Christian faith just like the first one, Stephen, on whose feast he looked out.

Here's a short version of the rest. Wenceslaus, also Wenceslas, is English for his name Vaclav. He was functionally king of Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. But, as he was backed by the German Holy Roman Empire, his title was not actually king but duke, which is just below a king.

This was first via the Duke of Saxony and King of the Germans Henry the Fowler/Heinrich der Vogler. But then via his son Otto I, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on 2 February 962 by Pope, aka bishop of Rome, John XII -- who, btw, then turned on Otto. So Otto went back to Rome and had a layman elected pope instead as Leo VII -- Otto being used to naming bishops and abbots. Then, when John staged a comeback but died and left Benedict V on the papal throne, Otto went back to Rome yet again to get rid of Benedict and make them promise to quit electing popes without the Emperor's (his) OK! There's some hermeneutic of continuity for ya, to paraphrase another Pope Benedict, XVI. Otto was the first clear Holy Roman Emperor since Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, Karl der Grosse), who was crowned by the bishop of Rome Leo III on Christmas in 800 the first Imperator Augustus in the West since the Fall of Rome on 4 September 476 .

Wenceslaus being backed by such a power did not sit well with some Bohemians, including in his own family, all of them caught between changing religions along with their entire social order.

He's called "good" because he stayed with the Christian faith of his grandmother who raised him, St Ludmilla, who was herself converted by Saints Cyril and Methodius no less, the "Apostles to the Slavs". His brother Boleslaus (Boleslav) though stayed with the native Bohemian religion of their mother Drahomira, who had Ludmilla killed. Boleslav didn't like the Germans or their state-run Christian church. The martyrdom happened when Boleslav arranged to have Vaclav killed, then took the throne. But, he ended up having to work with the Germans anyway and then his son, also named Boleslav, became Christian and took over from him and established the bishop's seat in Prague!

The irony, coincidence, or divine consistency continues to our time. This man Vaclav who in his own time was killed for selling out to the Germans and their power and new religion is now the patron saint of the Czech Republic, which in 2000 established his feast day of 28 September as Czech Statehood Day, a national holiday.

Yeah, that's a short version. Oh, and what was he doing looking out on the Feast of Stephen? Checking things out after he woke up. But the rest of the story isn't told in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song. That was first published in England in 1780. Despite recent speculation, there is no evidence the gifts were code words for Catholic catechesis under persecution. Lyrical peculiarities come from its being an adaptation of a French song. It was introduced in the US in 1910, as part of the Christmas programme at Downer in Milwaukee, now part of Lawrence University.

The rest of the story is told in the carol by John Mason Neale, same guy who wrote O Come, O Come Emmanuel based on the O Antiphons posted about earlier. Small world, huh? Or another of those consistencies. Ain't it great when loose ends become consistencies!

Anyway, good duke Vaclav spotted a guy scrounging for food and asked his page where the guy lived. He then set out with his page to bring the man and his family some aid. The page started faltering due to the cold and snow, but when he followed in Vaclav's footsteps found the ground warm to his feet. Now how's that for being, uh, ablaze!

We Still Got 'em, The Twelve Days of Christmas!!

Guess what, you can still follow in the good king's footsteps. Neale's carol concludes:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

So let's get on with the Twelve Days of Christmas like, give him his due, Good King Wenceslaus!

NOW is when all the fun and festivities are supposed to happen! LEAVE those decorations up, right on up through Twelfth Night! That's the night of 5-6 January, in case you weren't counting, and yes, it's that from which the title of Shakespeare's great play is taken. So far, Twelfth Night has not been retitled First Sunday After The First Saturday In January Eve, though who knows, sillier revisionism happens all the time. Maybe even GIVE A GIFT to someone special for Epiphany, which in some places is the gift giving day, not Christmas, just as God gave himself to us and the Three Kings brought gifts to him. BAKE A CAKE; that's how Kings Cake started and still is done in some places. HAVE FRIENDS OVER -- you get the idea!

And like good king Wenceslaus, DO SOMETHING TO HELP SOMEONE IN NEED! If you don't know someone in need, ask your pastor, he will.  You don't have to live in a country that has Boxing Day to box up something helpful and give it to someone in need.  This custom began because boxes for collection of stuff for the poor were collected in mediaeval times at churches for distribution on the feast of Stephen, inspired by good Duke Vaclav's act of charity.

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

The appearance or manifestation of God is just too big to contain in one day!!

And therefore the church doesn't, but extends the celebration of God's coming among us over twelve days, so don't let the world, or, sadly, some entities called church, take a bit of it away from you!

Textual Note: I am most honoured that The Lutheran Witness asked if they could print this post as an article in the December 2010 issue. That article is not the same as this post, but was based on the 2009 blog version of this post by their excellent editorial staff. The print version was approved by me, and you can read it online. Generally I revise the annual posts in my Blogoral Calendar somewhat from year to year, so this year's post is not the exact text of the printed version either.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten 2012!

Here is the 2012 edition of my Christmas post.

In addition to the many other things remarkable about Christmas, it is so rich in significance for the Christian faith that over time the church has evolved, unlike any other feast in the church calendar, three distinct masses, or divine services, at three distinct times of the day to contain it all.

That's exactly what the word Christmas is, a contraction of Christ's Mass. The first appearance of the word in English, Old English, to be exact, that survives is from 1038, Cristes maesse, which became Christemasse in Middle English, and now Christmas.

25 December is not Jesus' date of birth. The actual date is unknown. Scripture does not record it according to any calendar, although context clues would suggest sometime in about what we call October. But we just don't know, though many theories abound. From which I think it is safe to conclude that the exact and actual date of Jesus' birth is not important since if it were God would have seen that it got recorded in Scripture.

So why 25 December? Well, in the larger culture around the Hebrews in which Christianity first took hold, both the day and the general time of year already had religious significance. In a world ruled by Rome, every year at the time of the winter solstice was the Saturnalia. What's a Saturnalia? Originally it was held on 17 December and later expanded to one week. Saturn, known as Cronus to the Greeks, was the son of Heaven, Uranus, and Earth, Gaia. Saturn took power from his father Uranus/Heaven and castrated him. But a prophecy arose that a child of Saturn's would one day overthrow him, so to prevent this Saturn ate his children.

That's right, ate his children. But Saturn's wife, Opis, known to the Greeks as Rhea, hid their sixth child Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus, on Crete and gave Saturn a big rock in a blanket instead. Yeah, he ate it. Jupiter/Zeus thus survived and, with his five brothers and six sisters, all called Olympians from their hang out Mount Olympus, did indeed overthrow Saturn/Cronus and his own five brothers and six sisters, all twelve called Titans. (If you're hearing modern words like Titanic and Olympics in here, you're right.)

Now in the Greek version of this story the losing Titans got sent to Hell, well, Tartarus actually, meaning a deep place. But in the Roman version Saturn escaped the rule of Jupiter/Zeus and the Olympians and went to Rome where he established a rule of perfect peace called the Golden Age. In memory of this perfect age, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, when no war could be fought, no business conducted, slaves ate with their masters, and everybody set aside the usual rules of propriety for eating, drinking, gift giving and even getting naked in public.

Right after this came Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, The Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on 25 December, which in the calendar of the time was winter solstice, the day with the shortest daylight hours of the year, demonstrating that darkness cannot completely overcome light. A number of the early Christian Fathers, St Cyprian among them, spoke of the parallel that Jesus the Son of God and Light of the World was born on the same day as the physical sun and light of the world, neither to be overcome by the forces of darkness.

In addition, other religions in the Roman world had a god's birthday on 25 December, for example the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar, and the Persian mediator god Mithras, whose mystery cult was popular in the Roman army and carried throughout the Empire. On top of that, the barbarians living to the north of the formal boundaries of the Roman world (sorry, Germanic types) where Winter is harsher had their own winter solstice observances.

So it can look like the whole Christmas thing originated with the Christian Church adopting and adapting familiar material from the world around them, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Saturnalia, and the widespread observance of Winter Solstice, to create a time of celebration for the birth of Jesus. Is that it then? Is Christmas and the observances that go with it simply another step in the evolution of stories about the sun and light not going away but coming back, gods getting born and golden ages, another recasting of universal human themes -- maybe just like Christianity itself?

Don't think so. But also I don't think it is at all necessary to become defensive about the fact that other new life and new light stories pre-existed it, or to insist that Christmas was entirely independent of them, or (yeah, I know, too many ors) to fasten on to one or the other of the many attempts to theologise, like Cyprian, the date of 25 December.

Consider. What did Saturn do? Here's a god who had kids all right -- then ate them to prevent them from doing to him what he did to his own father. In contrast to the stories Man makes up about gods, the story God reveals to Man is just the opposite!  Man is a creation, not a child, of God, lost in his own nonsense, some of which he encapsulates in mythology and some of which he considers the latest of enlightened thinking, Man who will thus destroy himself, to avoid which God becomes Man in Jesus, whose body and blood will be given for our salvation on the Cross that the creation of God may become children of God, and in the mass as the pledge of that salvation.

A child of God who does not overthrow his father but lives in perfect submission to his will;`who does not banish his father's rule but proclaims his kingdom; a God who does not eat his child in fear but gives him to us in love so we could eat his body and blood as the food of eternal life, a real golden age to come; a mother who has to hide her newborn son not from God but Man for his survival. And the imagery of light, not validating all sun gods but demonstrating that even in its fallen and broken state Creation still shows that the Creator will not be overcome no matter how the darkness gathers.

These pre-Christian observances are not the real roots and story of Christmas, but rather aspects of God's truth written into both Man and Nature even in its fallen state, which we now see in retrospect point to the truth we could not see in prospect, looking forward and trying to make sense of our situation, so God reveals it to us. Which the liturgy will exactly sum up in the Introit, the introductory Scripture passages, for the first mass of Christmas: Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things? -- The Lord has said to me, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee (Psalm 2:1,7. See below, or with my fellow geeks and wannabes, vide infra).

We call this coming of God into Man's flesh the Incarnation, from the Latin that means exactly that, to become in the flesh. To be born. For which another word is Nativity, from the Latin to be born. Christ comes into Creation, into the flesh, is born into our world, on three levels: his historical birth in the flesh as a human baby, his spiritual birth in the hearts and souls of those justified by faith because of Christ, and his eternal birth or generation from the Father in the Godhead.

Consequently, the church celebrates a mass for each of these three, as it prepared for them in Advent.

The First Mass of Christ's Mass, at midnight.
The Historical Birth in Bethlehem.
Introit Psalm 2:7. Psalm verse 2:1.
Collect
O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine forth with the brightness of the true Light, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may enjoy His happiness in heaven, the mystery of whose light we have known upon earth.
Epistle Titus 2:11-15.
Gospel Luke 2:1-14.

The Second Mass of Christ's Mass, at dawn.
The Spiritual Birth in the Believer.
Introit Isaiah 9:2,6. Psalm verse 92:1 Septuagint, 93:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we, who are filled with the new light of Thy Incarnate Word, may show forth in our works that which by faith shineth in our minds.
Epistle Titus 3:4-7.
Gospel Luke 2:15-20.


The Third Mass of Christ's Mass, during the day.
The Eternal Generation in the Trinity.
Introit Isaiah 9:6. Psalm verse 97:1 Septuagint, 98:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new birth of Thine only begotten Son in the flesh may deliver us who are held by the old bondage under the yoke of sin.
Epistle Hebrews 1:1-12.
Gospel John 1:1-14

May I take this opportunity to wish all who visit this blog Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten!

O What's An Antiphon, 2012.

Antiphon is a word transliterated from Greek words that mean "opposite voice". What does this mean? Or for you non-Lutherans, what does that mean?

The Original Antiphon.

Well, originally, which is to say in ancient Greek music theory, it means something sung on both a given pitch and also an octave higher, like C and the next C on a piano. That's antiphonia, as distinct from symphonia, singing in unison, or paraphonia, singing on a pitch and a fifth higher, like C to G on a piano.

Doesn't seem to describe what we mean by antiphon, does it? So how did we get from what the word actually meant to what we mean by it now?

What Happened Next.

It all starts with the Psalms.  They aren't just texts, they're lyrics, all that survives of musical compositions whose music is lost. They have a parallelism in structure that suggests they may well have been performed by alternating singers or groups of singers. As Christian worship emerged from the synagogue, that's exactly what how they were done, performance of the Psalms by alternating choruses. Oh well then there you go, alternating choruses so they called them antiphons, right?

Not right.  They were not called antiphons from alternating choruses, but because the adult males were joined by boys, hence it was called antiphonia, because the boys sang an octave higher than the adult males, just like the term means.

Then, by about the 300s, they started adding another verse, generally a related Scripture verse to the Psalm, sung by all before, and generally after, each Psalm verse or two. Before you know it, antiphon doesn't have a bloody thing to do with octaves which is what it really means, but is associated with the idea of two alternating choruses singing back and forth, and also with the added prefatory text and tune which was called antiphon all by itself.

Confused? It gets worse, or better, as you may see it. Books containing the texts to the sung parts of the Mass came to be called antiphonales, and books containing texts to the spoken part of the Mass were called lectionaries, literally, stuff that is read, not sung. Then, antiphonale came to mean a book of chants for the Divine Office (Matins, Vespers, Compline etc) as distinct from a graduale, a book of the chants for Mass.

Enough to drive you nuts, or reach for the St Louis Jesuit stuff, huh? A word that means at the octave means alternating choruses except when it means added prefatory verses unless you mean the book of chants for Divine Office. Don't worry, took me a while to catch on too -- and I was a music major in the pre-conciliar Roman church.

Some say antiphonal singing of the Psalms started with St Ignatius of Antioch, who was an Apostolic Father and traditionally is said to have been a student of St John the Apostle. It really only caught on in the Western Church with St Ambrose, who compiled an antiphonale, yeah that word again and here with a different meaning yet, that being a collection of stuff suitable for antiphonal, as in alternating choruses, singing.

The "O" Antiphons.

OK. Now to the "O" antiphons -- antiphon here in the sense of the prefatory text itself. There are various versions in various places going back centuries, so far that my man Boethius mentions the practice.

I say my man because the title of my doctoral dissertation is "On a Contemporary Boethian Musical Theory". Boethius was born the same year as St Benedict, founder of the grand and glorious Order of St Benedict, the SOBs, I mean OSBs, as well as of the wider even grander and gloriouser "Benedictine tradition" found cited in all the recruiting material of universities sponsored by the Benedictines, like the one I graduated from. (A false comparative and a dangling participle in the same sentence: we Benedictines may not always follow the rules but we know what the hell they are.) That would be 480 or thereabouts, in case you got lost there.

Boethius died in 524 or 525, depending on who's counting. It would have been later except the Western Roman Emperor, Theodoric the Great, who was an Arian, had him executed on grounds of treason for conspiring with the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justin I, who was orthodox and catholic, as distinct from Orthodox and Catholic because we all know he'd be Missouri Synod Lutheran to-day. While he was awaiting execution he wrote his most famous work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. You can read a lot more about all this in a post I added in 2011, called Boethius, Terence, Wheel of Fortune, posted a little before 23 October, the feast of St Boethius in some places. Why is my namesake Terence, who'd be my patron saint except he ain't a saint or even Christian, in there? Because he had a lot to say about Fortuna, the goddess who is the "fortune" in Rota Fortuna, or Wheel of Fortune, that Boethius takes up.

OK Now the "O" Antiphons.

But I digress. Some form or another of "O" antiphons have been around for almost the entire history of the church.  The Biblical basis is Isaiah 7:14, but the Benedictines arranged what has become the standard, one each at Vespers each day from 17 through 23 December, right up to Christmas Eve. Each one starts with a salutation of Christ by "O" and one of his Biblical attributes. In order, they are: O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai (Lord), O Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), O Clavis David (Key of David), O Oriens (Morning Star), O Rex gentium (King of the Nations), O Emmanuel (God With Us).

Now, it's Advent, right, and late in it, and about to be Christmas. So looky here -- starting with the last antiphon, from the day before Christmas Eve, go back each day and put the first letter of each attribute of Christ to-gether and what do you get? Ero cras, that's what. Latin, and guess what that means in English -- I will come to-morrow! Benedictines man, are we good or WHAT! The whole series sums up the Advent preparation then concludes it, right down to a Psalm-like acrostic in the titles!

Never heard of such a thing? Sure you have. We sing it all the time! No monks or Vespers needed (though if you're fortunate enough to be in a parish that has Vespers, don't miss it!).  The popular Advent/Christmas hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is a composite of the whole series!

Hell Yes There's A Santa Claus, 6 December 2012.

6 December is the feast of Bishop St Nicholas of Myra. Yeah, jolly old St Nick, except Myra is not at the North Pole, but a town in Lycia which was in what is now the southwestern coast of Turkey.

OK "everybody knows" that "Santa Claus" has his origins in the stories about St Nicholas, "St Nick" or -- nicknames in some languages coming from the last rather than the first part of a given name -- Santa Klaus morphing into Santa Claus, and he went around giving anonymous gifts to kids tossing them over the transom into their shoes, which is where putting the shoes out or hanging stockings comes from.

Now what was his point in doing that, so there's be kids like you see in the commercials waking up in nice homes and being all happy with their yet more stuff for Christmas?

Hell no. St Nicholas came from a wealthy family, and as a pastor gave pretty much all his inheritance away to help poor children and families. And particularly, in those days, poor girls without a dowry would likely not end up wives and mothers in nice households, and likely would end up as prostitutes. So the gifts had a real rough practical edge to them, to help turn a life around by giving them a start their circumstances couldn't.

And the same guy who did this -- whaddya wanna call it, outreach, winning souls, meeting needs -- also was at the Council of Nicaea at a time when it seemed the whole church was heading into heresy of Arianism. And what did they do, say wow look at how those Arians connect with people, maybe we should quit worrying about all these doctrinal barriers we put up and preach and worship more like they do but with our content?

No, St Nick was among the most vocal standing for the catholic faith against Arianism and Arius himself, which led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed we confess at mass. So next time someone says we gotta get rid of all this hang up on doctrine and liturgy and get with the mission field and outreach, take a bloody clue from St Nick.

Or Wilhelm Löhe, whose half-fast Lutheran church body found him just not quite with it and stuck him in a little town in Bavaria, from which he arranged spiritual and temporal missionaries all over the world and worked mightily for authentic Lutheran liturgy and doctrine, whose good effects are bearing fruit to this day.

Funny thing is, there's about as much myth and stories about St Nicholas himself as there is about Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, if you will.

On the gifts thing, some versions of the story say it was at one time, for a poor man with three daughters, some say it was three times as each daughter grew up, some say it was through an opened window, and some say the third time the dad was waiting to see who was doing this so Nick tossed it down the chimney and it fell in the girl's stockings hung by the fire to dry, but other versions say the dad found out who it was only to be told by him to be grateful to God, not him personally.

On the Arius thing, some say he slapped Arius and was thrown in jail for it, whereupon Jesus and Mary appeared to him, loosened his chains, gave him a copy of the Gospels and a bishop's stole (omophorion) respectively, and when the Emperor (Constantine, no less) heard of it released him and reinstated him, but others say this was a vision to Constantine directly, and some say to all the "bishops" at the Council.

Not to mention after his death, when even the real St Nick got caught up in commercialism. He was buried in Myra, and it is said that every year his remains exude what is called myrrh, a rose-smelling watery liquid, to which miracles are attributed. In 1087 Myra was overtaken by Muslim powers -- the Eastern Roman Empire was pretty much losing control of Asia Minor generally at this time -- and his remains were removed to Bari, in Italy on the southern Adriatic coast, which had been under Byzantine control but had been taken by the Lombards and Normans. Stories disagree whether these were pious sailors to whom St Nick himself appeared telling them to keep the saint's remains under Christian control, or pirates.

Good for the local pilgrimage industry though. The Venetians started saying his remains were actually brought there, with only an arm left in Bari, and built a big church about it. An examination in the 1950s revealed the skeleton in Bari is intact. And the myrrh secretions continue there. Not to mention, on 28 December 2009 the Turkish government announced it will seek the return of the remains from the Italian government, to Demre, the modern town near Myra's ruins. While St Nick's stated wish to be buried there is noted, and the questionable removal of his remains, it has been noted too that it would be good for that descendant of the pilgrimage industry, tourism. Indeed there is both a statue of St Nicholas and "Santa Claus" in town!

What does this mean, a Lutheran might ask. A bunch of saint stuff coming out of the decadence and corruption against which the Reformation stood? Or does it show that be it St Nicholas or Santa Claus, the whole thing is simply story and myth, elaborated by a culture as a means of transmitting certain values, with religion being culture and myth taking itself way too seriously?

Or is it that the stories and myths are taken way too seriously and the values lose their point? We can get all caught up in whether it was three daughters on three times, or three daughters on one time, through a window opening or down the chimney into stockings, whether Jesus and Mary came with the Gospel book and the omophorion to Nick himself or in a vision to the Emperor or came anywhere to anyone, whether he struck Arius or was even at the Council at all.

Point is, none of that is the point. Somewhere in there is a pastor from a wealthy background who was a steward of the gifts God had given him as a response to the gift of salvation through faith in the merits of Christ God had given him -- good works because we are saved, not in order to be saved -- and who directed gratitude for the gifts through him to Christ who is the gift of God who saves, and not to an abstract "value" or himself which don't. And somewhere in there is a pastor, call him "bishop" or whatever you want, who stood fast for the truth of Jesus as God and Man by faith in whose merits in his death and resurrection we are saved (the Gospel).

Hell yes there's a Santa Claus. It's you, me, us, St Nick and the whole communion of saints. So get out there because you're saved and do something for somebody in a tight spot, and stand for the pure Christian faith and worship confessed in our Confessions, among which is the Nicene Creed btw, instead of all the bogus feel-good happy-clappy crap and Vatican II wannabeism.

Advent 2012. Away in a Feeding Trough.

Here's the 2012 version of my Advent post.

Why Have An Advent?

Scripture records the birth of Jesus, but it records no direction to celebrate either it or a preparation for it. But it records no prohibition of doing so either. The Christian Church has evolved various practices to commemorate one of its most outrageous claims, that God became Man in Jesus, the Incarnation, and, considering the magnitude of what is celebrated, has evolved a season of preparation for it universally, both Eastern and Western church. These celebrations have taken on various forms in various places, and even various forms over time in the same place. But they all have the same idea, for Christ's church to celebrate to-gether and proclaim one of the world and life changing events of Christ. Which is the idea of all of the church's liturgy.

What Is Advent?

Advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means a turning toward, a coming, and translates the Greek word parousia, which designates not the coming of Jesus at his birth but his coming again to judge the world on the Last Day. Advent is in fact a preparation for three comings of, or turnings toward, Christ and the three will culminate in three distinct liturgies for Christmas, Christ's Mass. No other season or celebration in the church year is like this.

Here are the three. Our Advent preparation for the historical coming or birth of Jesus culminates in the celebration of that event in the mass in the night, Midnight Mass. Our Advent preparation for the coming or birth of Jesus in the heart of believers, in us, culminates in the mass at dawn, as evidenced in the first believers, the shepherds who went to the manger. Our Advent preparation for his second historical coming, in judgement and in glory, which has been the subject of the final Sundays of the church year before Advent, culminates in the mass during the day, which celebrates the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity in the being of God in which redeemed Man will fully participate after the end of time.

Advent then precedes Christmas as Lent precedes Easter, a time of repentance and preparation. For both seasons, church vestments etc are purple, the colour associated both with penance, our part, and royalty, his part as King of kings. However, the purple is the darker royal purple rather than the Roman purple of Lent, the colours like the seasons they reflect being both similar yet distinct in kind of event to which they lead.

The rite of Salisbury, called Sarum in Latin, England, has a hybrid liturgy of English and French influences following the Norman Conquest in 1066. Duke William II of Normandy, aka the "Conqueror" and King William I of England, the first of the Norman kings of England, created the diocese out of two earlier ones and appointed a fellow Norman its bishop, "Saint" Osmund, the Count of Seez and Earl of Dorset and his Lord Chancellor, with the approval of Pope Gregory VII. Well sort of approval. This was part of the Normans' rather systematic assertion of control over everything -- more on that below.

Meanwhile, old Pope Greg was having a hard sell on his championship of clerical celibacy and the supremacy of church, meaning the Roman Church under the pope, over state among the Germans -- hell, he excommunicated Heinrich (Henry) IV, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, not once but twice -- and so as not to spread his efforts too thin he cut the Normans some slack. How's that for "apostolic succession"! And oh yeah, Greg's a "saint" too in the Roman church.

William being a duke in Normandy was still under the French king, Phillip I, (duke ranks just below king) but now as king of England, which he was crowned on Christmas 1066, he was not, but on an equal basis. William also messed up our good Germanic language English by making French the language of the ruling class, which it remained for about 300 years, and by the end of his reign (1087) about 90% of England was under a French-born aristocracy with which he replaced the native English one, forever changing English culture. Yeah, the Anglo-Saxon culture was an import too, but hey, we Angles were ASKED by the original English to come over from Germany, and gave the place its name, Angle-land, England. The Saxons and Jutes can speak for themselves. But I digress.

The Sarum rite Scripture readings and other prayers proper to the day are different than the Roman rite, as is the colour of vestments, not purple but blue. This use of blue as the colour for Advent has had a more general usage in the West in recent years, though with the Roman propers. Well, the new Roman propers, from its new three year cycle from the 1960s, the basis of the common new lectionary for all heterodox liturgical churches, which will not be considered here -- one can look them up and put on a little Simon and Garfunkle or other holdovers of the time if one is so inclined.

This is not the first time the Sarum rite has influenced Western usage, generally through its appropriation into the Church of England. The traditional Lutheran practice of counting Sundays in the rest of the church year from Trinity Sunday rather than Pentecost is a Sarum influence too.

The Old Advent, "St Martin's Fast".

In fact, Advent in the West used to be even more like Lent. From the fourth or fifth century or so there was, and as we shall shortly see still is in the Eastern church under the name Nativity Fast, a 40 day time of fasting and penance much like Lent. In the Western church it started on 11 November, the feast of St Martin of Tours, Martin Luther's baptismal namesake, with the day being something like Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in Lent. The fast started the day after. This "quadragesima sancti Martini", the forty days of St Martin, died out by the late Middle Ages, and Advent as it is generally known in the West took shape and is what we use to-day.

To this day, in some places the traditional main dish for Christmas is goose. In fact, one of my favourite phrases in English, not suitable for reproduction here, derives from this custom, let the reader understand. The Christmas goose may derive from Advent when it was St Martin's Fast. Martin didn't really want to be a bishop, and is said to have hidden himself in a flock of geese from those seeking him to persuade him to accept the post, whose noise nonetheless gave his location away. So goose became the main food for St Martin's Day kicking off Advent.

The Eastern Church follows to this day a similar, but not the same, 40 day pattern of a season of preparation and penitence before Easter and Christmas, and our former Western "St Martin's Fast" was closer to it. In the Eastern Church, it isn't called Advent, but the Nativity Fast, and lasts 40 days, just like the St Martin's Fast, but they count them consecutively, from 15 November to 24 December. That's why it also has a similar but not the same nickname: 15 November is the day after the feast, East or West, of St Philip the Apostle, so it is sometimes called "St Philip's Fast". The liturgical colour is neither purple nor blue, but red, and, where in the Western church the liturgical year begins with the First Sunday in Advent, in the Eastern church the liturgical year begins 1 September.

The Current Advent.

Anyway, each Sunday emphasises a different aspect of the preparation and the comings noted above. Below are listed the Scripture passages used for the Introits and Scripture readings. Roman usage (which Rome ditched at Vatican II) has the same Introits but varies as noted from ours in the Epistles and Gospels for the Western Advent.

I had never understood this variation and mentioned that once in the combox on a blog. Pastor Benjamin Mayes responded citing Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy, p.438, which states our usage follows the Comes attributed to St Jerome and its final version, The Lectionary of Charlemagne, which Rome later modified to accommodate its new feasts.

What's a comes (pronounced KO-mays)? It's a Latin word meaning companion, here, a companion book of readings for mass to the rite's service book itself. Now we more commonly call such a book a Lectionary, from the Latin for "readings". The list of the readings is still often called by its Greek name, pericope, meaning section, here, the sections of Scripture appointed to be read.

In Latin and Hebrew, the title of a text is usually the first word or two of the text, called the incipit, which means "it begins" in Latin, rather than a separate title. Accordingly, some of the Sundays of the church year are called from the first word of the first proper text to them, the Introit. The Sundays of Advent, Lent, and after Easter are nicknamed from their Introits. This practice has fallen into disuse with many churches following Rome's 1960s revisionism of the lectionary. Or one can as my former synod did abolish Introits altogether!

Another similarity between Advent and Lent is that a little over halfway through these preparation/penitential seasons, the coming joy peeks through in the readings, starting with the Introit, and so the liturgical colours reflect that with the purple yielding for that Sunday to rose or pink, which is also why the so-called Advent wreath has a rose or pink candle among the rest. It's for the third Sunday in Advent, which is called Gaudete Sunday from the incipit of the Introit for it, which means "rejoice" and quotes Philippians 4:4-6. The Lenten parallel with rose vestments is Laetare Sunday, from the incipit of the Introit, Laetare Jerusalem, which means "Be joyful Jerusalem" and quotes Isaiah 66:10-11.

Psalm numbers in the old Roman usage followed the Septuagint, whereas we follow the numbering of the Hebrew Bible. That usage counts what we call Psalms 9 and 10 as one psalm, likewise 114 and 115, and divides both 116 and 147 in two, so between 10 to 148 the numbering is different by one. Since Vatican II Rome generally uses the Hebrew Bible numbering too, but below both will be given in the format: Hebrew numbering (Septuagint numbering).

Here are the names and readings of the Sundays in Advent, with this year's dates.

Ad te levavi. The First Sunday of Advent. 2 December 2012.

Introit Psalms 25 (24):1-3 psalm verse 25 (24):4, Epistle Romans 13:11-15, Gospel Matthew 21:1-9.

(Roman usage Gospel Luke 21:25-33, our second Sunday Gospel.)

Populus Sion. The Second Sunday of Advent. 9 December 2012.

Introit Isaiah 30:30 psalm verse 80 (79):1, Epistle Romans 15:4-13, Gospel Luke 21:25-36.

(Roman usage Gospel Matthew 11:2-10, our third Sunday Gospel.)

Gaudete. The Third Sunday of Advent. 16 December 2012.

Introit Philippians 4:4-6 psalm verse 85 (84):1, Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5, Gospel Matthew 11:2-10.

(Roman usage Epistle Philippians 4:4-7 Gospel John 1:19-28, our fourth Sunday readings.)

Rorate coeli. The Fourth Sunday of Advent. 23 December 2012.

Introit Isaiah 45:8 psalm verse 19 (18):1, Epistle Philippians 4:4-7, Gospel John 1:19-28.

(Roman usage Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5 Gospel Luke 3:1-6, our third Sunday Epistle, the Luke passage not used by us.)

Away in an Animal Feeding Trough, or, The Real Meaning of Christmas.

Christmas is a warm time filled with comfort, family, presents, good food, along with our religious sentiments, for many of us. Christmas as in the event we celebrate was nothing like that. It was rough. Joseph wasn't the glowing saint of paintings and icons, he was a working guy with a pregnant wife about to give birth -- I've been there twice and that ain't easy under any circumstances, and my observation would be it ain't easy being the about to deliver wife either -- in town to follow the law and get counted in the census with all the hotels full and no place to put his family up but a stable for animals, and after the baby was born they had to put him in a feeding trough for animals. That's what "away in a manger" was. A manger is a feeding trough for animals, the word coming into English from the French to eat, in turn from the Latin to chew (mandere). Fact is, our word "munch" has the same root.

So the King of kings is put in a feeding trough for animals in a cold stable. You don't make up this kind of stuff. Humans who are gods in myth are emperors and such, not working class kids born in a barn. Top it all off, this child "away in a feeding trough" will one day give himself to be the food of eternal life, giving his body and blood for us to eat and drink at mass as the pledge and promise of our salvation through the merits of his death and resurrection. Guess it kind of fits then.

For those of you whose Christmas isn't going to be all warm and cozy and filled with cheer, guess what, you're right in there with those at the first Christmas. That was a little rough too. Born in a stable, a feeding trough for a crib, and pretty soon his family having to high tail it out of town into political exile too. So you're not excluded at all, and you can take it right to him, because he knows all about when Christmas isn't so merry. And he also knows all about how merry doesn't really get determined by what happens in this life, on Christmas or any other day!

To Thee have I lifted up my soul, in Thee, O my God, I put my trust. Let me not be ashamed, neither let my enemies laugh at me, for none of those that wait on Thee shall be confounded.

Psalm 25 (24):1-3 as used in the Introit for the First Sunday in Advent.

A Thanksgiving That Lasts An Eternity.

I remember things better by the day than the date.

For example, to me my wife Nancy died the night before Thanksgiving, 2140 hours, 1997, rather than 26 November 1997. Dates fall on different days in different years, and the night before Thanksgiving always seems more like the anniversary of it rather than 26 November, which this year (2012) is the Monday after Thanksgiving.

In addition to the obvious, what amazes me about it, then, now, and all points in between, is that it has not produced a crisis of faith in me, let alone a loss of faith. Now, if you haven't gleaned it from some of my posts, crises of faith and loss of faith were pretty much constant for me from Vatican II in the 1960s to professing the faith of the evangelical Lutheran church in 1996.

Vatican II tore up and stomped on pretty much everything that was the basis of my life back then. However, the death of your wife and mother of your children, toss in that their ages were fifteen months and three months at the time, is a tearing up and a stomping on at a whole different level and place.

I've been me for a while now, and "me" no doubt about it would take that as the final insult after all the rest from a god who probably doesn't exist anyway so forget the whole thing, it's a cruel joke that ain't funny.

But it didn't happen. Not Thanksgiving Eve when she died, not the next day when I spent Thanksgiving afternoon at the funeral home picking out caskets and stuff like that before arriving late for some turkey at the family dinner like everyone else. Not in the first few weeks of not having a clue how this single working dad with two babies will work beyond just getting through each day. Not later as routines emerged that worked but obviously aren't the ones we hoped and planned for. And not later as other difficulties and challenges emerged and still emerge.

That's not me. No way I can be like that, guaranteed, take that to the bank, I cannot do that. But it happened. Since other spiritual forces and powers do not bolster faith in Jesus Christ, I think we're going to chalk this up to the Holy Spirit. When they say faith is entirely the gift and work of the Holy Spirit, believe it, they ain't kidding.

Her funeral was the following Saturday. It was right by the service book at the time, all about faith in Jesus Christ for the salvation from sins unto eternal life. You couldn't have been there without getting the message that the only dead people present aren't in caskets but dead in sin unjustified by faith in Jesus Christ through whose merits alone they are counted saved unto eternal life, a promise He extends to all including right here and now.

The sermon concluded as follows, which I hear fifteen years later as clearly as the moment the pastor said it:

A few days ago, most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

Amen.

May your Thanksgiving be a prequel to a Thanksgiving that lasts an eternity!

Thanksgiving 2012.

As a counterpart to my post on what became of Sukkot as the Christian liturgical calendar emerged out of the Jewish one, here's a little something on the secular Sukkot here in the US called Thanksgiving.

The "first" Thanksgiving -- several of them. 

Guess what! There were two "first" Thanksgivings before the "first" Thanksgiving in 1621 at Plymouth, Massachusetts!

The second first Thanksgiving before the first Thanksgiving was two years earlier. On 4 December 1619, English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, roughly 20 miles up the James River from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, begun 14 May 1607. The ship's captain, John Woodleaf, led a service of thanksgiving and the settlement charter directed the date to be observed thereafter. Thereafter lasted until 1622 when the native population, not so grateful for their arrival, forced their retreat to Jamestown.

The first first Thanksgiving before the first Thanksgiving was 54 years earlier. Spanish settlers celebrated thanksgiving for their safe arrival 8 September 1565 at what is now St Augustine, Florida. This the first recorded thanksgiving in America, but, as this was Spaniards in a Spanish colony, La Florida, which didn't pass to English control until 1763 or become a state until 1845, it doesn't get much airplay.

Thanksgivings were held at various times and places in the English colonies, after the harvest, but as days of prayer, not eating! The Continental Congress proclaimed the first national thanksgiving, which was Thursday 18 December 1777.

The United States Day of Thanksgiving. 

The first national day of Thanksgiving in the United States as such was proclaimed by President Washington for Thursday 26 November 1789. Presidents and governors proclaimed thanksgivings off and on after that.  Then starting with President Lincoln's designation in 1863 of the last Thursday of November that year as a day of national thanksgiving, all presidents since had year by year designated the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. Until FDR. In 1939 the last Thursday in November would be the 30th, and President Roosevelt was persuaded by business leaders that a longer Christmas shopping season -- once upon a time it was considered inappropriate to start the Christmas season before Thanksgiving -- would help the economy out of the Depression with more sales. So he declared Thanksgiving the next to last Thursday in November that year.

The new Thanksgiving was widely derided as "Franksgiving" -- Roosevelt's first name being Franklin -- and had no force of law, some states observing the new "Democrat" Thanksgiving and some the old "Republican" Thanksgiving. A Commerce Department report in 1941 found no significant difference in sales from the change, but, Congress passed a law designating the fourth Thursday in November, which some years is the last and some the next to last Thursday, as Thanksgiving Day every year. 1942 was the first Thanksgiving under the current law -- by which time a new world war had maybe redirected things away from retail sales to graver matters.

You know what, Washington didn't have a thing to say about sales, Christmas, Christmas sales, food or football regarding Thanksgiving when "Washington" referred to a man and not a city. Neither did President Lincoln, whose example had been followed since. Below is the original proclamation of the original United States Thanksgiving Day by President George Washington. Amazing stuff. Beautiful stuff. Our stuff.

But where now among our stuff does one find that of which Washington spoke?  Such as:
- a duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of, to be grateful for the benefits of, and humbly to implore the protection of, Almighty God;
- a duty to observe a day of public thanksgiving and prayer for his favour, particularly in being able to form our kind of government;
- service of a great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all good;
- joining in prayers to the great Ruler and Lord Of Nations to pardon our wrongs, to enable us to perform our duties, to make our government a blessing of wise, just and constitutional law, to guide all Sovereigns and Nations in good government, to promote true religion and virtue, to increase science and such prosperity as he knows best among all mankind.

This is what Thanksgiving is meant to be. This is what Thanksgiving was proclaimed to be. And not as a matter of Lutheran belief, or any other belief, but as just being American, our stuff. Yet one does not find such specific talk in the public discourse now. On the one hand are those who think such talk has no place in our stuff, and on the other those who think this is a specifically Christian nation, and both equally miss what our stuff is all about.  Not to mention making Thanksgiving about a big meal, football on TV, and heading to the stores to buy stuff for Christmas, er, "holiday" presents.

May we find something of President Washington in our national celebration in 2012 as we did 223 years ago at the first one in 1789.

President Washington's Proclamation of the First U.S. Thanksgiving.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

What's An Armistice? Veterans Day / St Martin's Day 2012.

Here is what the world knows about it, I hope. 11 November was originally Armistice Day, from the armistice that ended hostilities in the First World War on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, GMT (or UTC), in 1918. Later, with another and even worse World War having been fought despite a War to End All Wars, in 1954 Congress changed the observance to include all veterans, hence Veterans Day.

What's An Armistice?

The English word armistice is transliterated from the Latin armistitium, which literally means a stopping of arms. It's a truce, a cessation of hostilities. Now, if you're one of those getting shot at, that's a good thing -- but, it's not a comprehensive social and political solution to what led to the hostilities, and not even necessarily permanent, let alone that universal aspiration of beauty pageant contestants, world peace. Which means, hostilities may well resume at some point. And always have.

Here is what the world probably does not know or care about. 11 November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, who is the patron saint of, guess what, soldiers! Hmm.

Who Is St Martin of Tours and Why Is He Patron Of Soldiers?

Martin was born a pagan around 316 in what is now Hungary, and was what is now called a military brat. Then as now, military families move a lot, and Martin grew up where his father was stationed, at Ticinum, which is now Pavia, Italy. His father was a tribune, which is roughly equivalent to a modern colonel, in the crack Roman unit the Imperial Horse Guard (equites singulari Augusti). Being a military kid, he was named Martin, from Mars, the Roman god of war.

The year of his birth, 316, was also the year it became legal to be a Christian in the Roman Empire, but it was a decidedly minority religion, and in the army the cult of Mithras was common. When Martin was ten, he ticked off his parents by starting to go to church and taking instruction as a catechumen (you know, the Sunday School, mid-week, etc of the time). However in 331 at 15 he joined the army, as sons of senior officers did, in a provincial cavalry unit (ala, or wing) and about 334 was stationed at Samarobriva, the Roman name for Amiens, in northern France.

One day, by the city gate of Amiens, he passed a man freezing on the road, tore his military issue cloak in half and gave half to him. That night, he had a dream seeing Jesus wearing the half a cloak. This shook him up, and he got baptised that year, 334, at 18. He remained in the army, but in 336 when it looked like the army and the local Gauls were about to engage at Worms, he declared he was a soldier of Christ and could not fight. He was thrown in the brig (military jail) and charged with cowardice. He offered to be in the front lines but unarmed, and the army was going to do just that with him, but the Gauls made peace with Rome and the battle did not happen.

After that Martin was discharged from the service. He went to Tours, and began to study with the renowned, even in his own time, St Hilary. Hilary was a convert too. who vigourously opposed the Arian "Christianity" of the Visigoths and was elected by the faithful of Poitiers as their first bishop (they did that then), married with a daughter and all (they did that then too). Martin set about combating the Arian heresy too, which about did the church in at the time, thinking he was God's soldier now.

He and Hilary were both forced into exile by persecution. Martin lived as a hermit but when Hilary was restored in 361 Martin joined him. He started a monastery in nearby Liguge, which is still there as the now Benedictine (of course) St Martin's Abbey, from which he preached Christianity all around the area. Later, the people of Tours made him their third bishop when the old one died in 371 and he was finally persuaded to accept. From there he soldiered on to preach the true Gospel in Gaul, and, to get away from the attention of his office, he established another monastery, Marmoutier, which also later became Benedictine, on the other side of the River Loire in Tours, about 372, which lasted until the French Revolution in 1799 and is largely in ruins now.

A good insight into Martin is this: uncompromising as he was in preaching the true doctrine, when Priscillian, bishop of Avila in Spain, and his followers were brought before the Emperor on charges of false doctrine, heresy, stemming from their severe asceticism, the penalty was beheading, but Martin, though he was quite opposed to Priscillian, hurried to Trier, where the Imperial court held forth at the time, not Rome, to protest the sentence as both unjust and an unjust imposition of civil power in a church matter. The Emperor relented, then beheaded them in 385 after Martin left. This was the first time ever that a Christian executed another Christian for heresy, and Martin was absolutely disconsolate after he heard the news.

We should remember that 385 is just five years since the Imperial Edict of Thessalonica defined what is and is not the Catholic Church and made the Catholic Church the state religion. Hence, heresy is a state offence punishable by the Empire.

Martin died 8 November 397 and was buried 11 November, which became his feast day, though the date of death is the usual practice. He was widely venerated for centuries, which I will not go into except for this, soon after his death it became the custom to begin a 40 day fast in preparation for Christmas, the quadragesima sancti Martini or St Martin's Fast, with his feast day being the last non-fasting day until Christmas. This eventually shortened into what we know as Advent now. More on that in the "Advent" post coming up.

An Armistice on St Martin's Day 1918.

So, 11 November, feast of the patron of soldiers for centuries, date of Armistice Day, now Veterans Day? Hmm. Coincidence, or one of those little things that pokes through from what is beyond the surface? Wanna know something else just a little too co-incidental? The military campaign that led to the armistice is the Hundred Days Offensive, aka the Grand Offensive, from 8 August to 11 November 1918. Guess where the Hundred Days Offensive started. With the Battle of Amiens, where the Roman officer Martin had given the freezing beggar the cloak. Hmm.

The armistice of 11 November 1918 turned out to be just that, a cessation of hostilities. What was fought as The War to End All Wars would become World War One, as hostilities resumed in an even worse World War Two. Along with the millions of lives lost, millions more lives were forever changed, and, something changed in what might be called the spirit of Man too. The great sense in the age leading into these cataclysms that Man was on an upward spiral of progress toward an enlightened future lay rotting like the wreck of that great expression of the age the RMS (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic.

The "Titans" had lost, but unlike the mythological battle, who the victorious Olympians were, or if there even were victors or Olympians, was not clear. The old world order, and its certainties both temporal and eternal, were gone. Man began to speak of life as absurd, and the search for "meaning" was on, amid an apparently essentially meaningless existence. One could simply accept that life is absurd and meaningless; one could understand that meaning is something Man, or each man, creates for himself; one could deny the whole thing and remain irrelevant and inauthentic in either a religious faith or, equally, in holding on to the secular faith in the progress and perfectibility of Man.

The resolution? Well, 94 years later in 2012 hostilities continue amid the arrangements worked out nearly a century ago following the War to End All Wars in Southeast Europe, the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

So the Twelve Titans. So the Twelve Olympians, who this time apparently aren't going to show up. If Genesis isn't witness to Man as fallen, the world history of Man surely is. A history filled with the universal intuition that Man is less than he is meant to be or can be, filled with however many religious, philosophical, social and political programmes to accomplish his fulfillment -- and filled with the dashing of all of them.

There's twelve something else who had something to say about that. The Twelve Apostles. They got told to go into the world with the message that Man just isn't going to get himself out of his self-constructed mess, that God has seen that and became Man in Jesus to die to pay for all that and rise again, so that Man can by the gift and power of God repent of his own self-destructive efforts and start over, be reborn in faith in the One God has sent, that because of Him one can be washed clean by being covered in his sacrificial blood, and even amid the brokenness of this world live in partial experience of that which is beyond it, dying with him to rise with him. That message continues to-day as God calls and feeds Man in the church wherever his Word is properly preached and his Sacraments properly administered.

Interesting that in that context, 11 November, St Martin's Day, in 1483 was the day that Mr and Mrs Luther brought their day old baby boy to be baptised, and following the traditional custom he was given the name of the saint of the day -- Martin Luther, who too would devote his life to preaching the true Gospel against false doctrine and corruption from state control of the church.

Conclusion.

So on 11 November, Armistice Day now Veterans Day and also St Martin's Day, as we rightly remember and celebrate in gratitude those who have served to preserve and defend our temporal freedom, let us also remember that armistice is the best we can do, the hostilities cease for a while only to resume, and let us remember and celebrate in gratitude Him who gained our true spiritual freedom for now and all eternity, who gives peace not as the world gives peace, but for real and for ever.

Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis. Peace I leave thee, my peace I give thee. (John 14:27, used in the liturgy after the Agnus Dei before Communion)

Here is the Collect from the mass propers for the feast of St Martin of Tours:

Lord God of hosts, who clothed Your servant Martin the soldier with the spirit of sacrifice, and set him as a bishop in Your Church to be a defender of the catholic faith: Give us grace to follow in his holy steps, that at the last we may be found clothed with righteousness in the dwellings of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.

Election Day 2012 -- is 17 December.

That's when the Electoral College votes for president this election. The first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, in each state's capitol.  The Electoral College elects the president. We elect the electors. We do not directly elect the head of the executive branch of government. That's on purpose.  That purpose does not, unlike selecting Tuesday as voting day, derive from originally being mostly rural and without modern means of travel and communication (Monday to get to the poll, Tuesday to vote, Wednesday to get home, not disturbing religious observances, after harvest but before bad Winter weather). To know what that purpose of the Electoral College is, and why our nation's founders considered it one of the safeguards of our liberty and of our identity as a federal republic, is also, IMHO, to know why neither political party -- parties being neither mandated nor even assumed by the Constitution -- will really serve the vision according to which our country was constituted or greatly help or hinder in the ongoing working out of that vision over the long run.

Washington was dead set against political parties. The man, not the city! Ironic.