Meeting the Episcopal Church again for the first time, week 3, 12/16/2018

Lord be with you.

Let's pray.

God, thank you for the treasure house of our Christian tradition.

We pray as we study and think through how it is the church got to where it is.

God, that you would guide us not only to a stronger sense of our past, but to a more hopeful, a more hopeful future with one another in the world.

Amen.

Okay, um, let me pause before we talk about the history of the church and see.

Well, last week we talked about the Bible, and I know it was probably one of the more exciting lectures you've ever heard.

Uh, did did I did I miss something for you in Scripture, or have you had, you know, a week to think, hey, like we talked about the Bible, but I've always wondered blank, and how about that?

Do you?

Apparently.

Let me just give you two minutes because you didn't ask.

I'm gonna give you two minutes anyway, just so we can draw this together.

Maybe you've wondered why are there so many different translations of the Bible?

Like, why is there the new revised Standard Version, and how is that different from the Revised Standard Version?

And what about the King James Bible?

Has anybody ever wondered that?

Yes.

And which one's the best?

Um the answer to why there are so many translations is because, as I mentioned to you, every translation is an interpretation, every single one, because idioms don't translate woodenly, and also because there's particular words, whether they be in Hebrew or Greek, that can actually mean multiple different things at the same time, just as there are in English, right?

And so translators really have to pick one, even though it could be the other.

Um part of the reason we have so, so many translations, again, is because there's these different issues.

Um, but another reason historically is because it depends on what documents are available.

So just really briefly, I'll tell you that the Vulgate is a very famous translation done by Saint Jerome.

Uh, and it really was world-class when he made it.

Saint Jerome translated into Latin from both Hebrew and Greek.

He didn't have to do that.

He could have gone all Greek.

He took time to meet rabbis who were an oppressed people group, mind you, and get Hebraic interpretations.

There were some oopses in the Vulgate.

If you know the story, Moshe goes up on top of Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, talks to God for a long time, comes down, and one of two things happens.

In English, he's got the glory of the Lord coming off of his head.

In the Vulgate, he's grown two horns.

Because Jerome mistranslated the word.

This is clear, he mistranslated Moses grew horns, not glory.

If you see Michelangelo's statue of Moshe, it's sitting in Rome.

Moses has horns.

Hard to know whether Michelangelo is representing the Vulgate or mocking it.

More likely the second, I want you to know, because Michelangelo was quite the child of the Reformation, it turns out.

These are the sorts of things that get embedded in tradition.

The King James Version in 1611 was arguably the best translation of the Bible ever taken before.

King James came in and said, we need not only a vernacular Bible, but we need to do great scholarship represented by Erasmus.

So they went and they consulted the oldest Greek and Hebrew manuscripts they had, which were 50 years old.

And they created this very fine translation of the Bible in 1611.

It had some weird bits in it, and this is another reason we have different translations.

One of the bits it had is that John is called the Baptist.

Well, Baptist is a Greek word and it has a meaning in English: immerser.

Like John the Dunker.

That's how the word should have been translated because that's what it means.

The translators did not do that, though, because you cannot immerse an infant without risking its life.

So many of you know this.

Infants were being baptized, which means they were being sprinkled.

And if they'd translated the Bible, John the immerser, it would have questioned the practice of infant baptism.

So they just, instead of translating the word, it's called transliterated it.

So the word is, the word, the Greek word baptized, sure enough starts with a beta, which is a B, and then an alpha, which is an A, and then pi, which is a P.

So they just went from Greek letters to English letters, and it's John the Baptist instead of John the Dunker.

It's a theological interpretation, it's not a real one.

Do you hear what I'm saying?

It doesn't mean that infant baptism shouldn't be done.

It does mean it's not biblical.

And this is a really important thing.

Introduction to history is to talk about tradition and reason.

Okay?

The reason the King James Bible is arguably among the worst translations available to us today is because, again, the oldest manuscript it used was from the 1450s.

When we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls 60 years ago, we discovered manuscripts more than 2,000 years older.

Remember, as I told you last week, what we have are not originals, we have copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies.

So we went way up the food chain when we got the Dead Sea Scroll.

If you like the King James Bible, don't despair.

Read the New King James Bible.

The New King James Bible has the same attention to words that you'd find in Shakespearean poetry, mostly from William Tyndale, but references the older manuscripts.

And that tells you why there's a King James and a New One.

You see?

That's the explanation right there.

Why is there an RSV and a new revised standard version?

Well, uh the RSV includes the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, but the new revised standard uh tries to make the words more gender inclusive.

I will tell you I prefer the RSV as a translator.

I just just I think it's much better.

A professor of mine said it's like they took the car in to give it a tune-up and they forgot to put the engine back in when they were done.

So up to you.

And lots of different people have their pet version.

I'll tell you, the NIV has got some theological slant to it, like every other one does.

It's a fine translation.

The people who did it have spent their lives studying Greek and Hebrew.

They're far superior translators to me.

Same with just about anything there is.

The only one not good is the Living Bible, and that's because it's an English to English.

If you've heard of the message, that's a new one, uh, newer.

Author translates idiomatically from Greek and Hebrew into English.

It's not a paraphrase, therefore, it's an idiomatic representation.

Very different from any other one you've read, I think, but but very fine.

Um that's why we have so many Bibles.

In worship, we use the NRSV, New Revised Standard Version.

That's what you hear read pretty much every Sunday.

This is again, it's not like one's better than the other.

They're all fine, but they're different, and part of it has to do with who translated it and how they chose to interpret words that don't come one-to-one.

Yes, sir.

Well, I'm just gonna observe that one thing the King James translators were careful about is its readability to be read aloud.

And for someone who reads the NRSB, it was not so designed.

Yeah.

And some of the others are better or worse at that.

It's really quite interesting to think about the difference between a private reading and a public one.

That's very astute.

And I would tell you, in some ways, many people who have grown up in church, when they hear the message, they say, I don't like it.

But I'll tell you the message is probably more written to be read aloud than most other versions.

You just don't like the language because you're not used to it.

It's jarring, but it's theatric.

I mean, the the message is very easy to hear orally.

Again, if you're like me, when I saw a new version of the Bible as a kid, I would turn to John 3.16 to decide how good it was.

And it better say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

If he didn't say that, it was a bad translation.

Because I memorized it that way.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

We often judge not from whether it's a faithful rendition of Greek to English, but whether or not it accords with our tradition.

Good news for us as Episcopalians, tradition is very important.

But reminder, there's other stuff.

Okay?

And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit today is tradition and the other stuff.

Okay?

How far back should we go?

Well, I want you to know when we think about denominations and how there's many different Christian groups, it's easy to get unsettled, but I will tell you the good news, or the news, I don't know that it's good, is that that's true of every religious group ever.

At the time of Jesus, there were at least five different major kinds of Judaism, and they didn't all like each other.

In fact, uh they often differed on just very small bits, and I'll just give you two groups you've heard of if you read the Bible, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, bitterly disagreed about how to be Jewish.

They had more in common than they had apart.

I want you to know that.

However, uh, it's often easier to fall out with someone you're related to than with somebody that you're not, which is why you hear this terrible rhetoric directed by the Pharisees against the Sadducees and by the Sadducees against the Pharisees, and the Essenes hated everybody.

I mean, this is what's going on at the time of Jesus.

It's true.

Jesus, of course, was Jewish.

Of course.

He sacrificed in the temple, he was dedicated at the temple.

Jesus was not a Christian.

Really important that you know this, because the word Christian doesn't come up for about 50 or 60 years after Jesus.

The first people who followed, those being the disciples, and of course, later the Apostle Paul, thought of themselves as kind of a reformed expression of Judaism.

And the earliest word was not Christian, they called themselves the way.

They called themselves the way.

Now they were confident that they represented not a new Judaism, but the fulfillment of everything Judaism was meant to be about.

So of course, what they did, the earliest things, but they wrote letters talking about what it meant to be a follower of the way, and particularly what it meant that Jesus, a Jewish person, said to be the Messiah, that means God's anointed one, had not become an emperor, but had been killed in a horrific way.

The Jewish scriptures say, cursed is anybody hanged upon a tree, and of course, Jesus was hanged upon, well, a tree, so to speak, a cross.

So the earliest letters are trying to make sense of something that's, well, nonsense.

If you're Jewish, the Messiah is not somebody publicly executed in a shameful way.

So how do you make sense of that?

If you read the letters of Paul, you'll be astounded by how rarely they say anything about Jesus, what he did, or what he said.

Mostly we think that's because people already knew the stories.

They passed on like campfire stories or quotable quotes, but they didn't know what they meant.

So I've got this great story.

What's it mean?

And this is what Paul was doing, is giving people options into what it means.

And given what it means, what should we do about it?

Those are the earliest New Testament scriptures.

They weren't understood as authoritative, like, oh, Paul wrote this, we'd better do it.

That didn't happen for a long time.

But people who were scrambling to figure out what the death of Jesus meant found Paul's understanding, well, ultimately, helpful enough, explicit you know, explanatory, that they did in fact hold on to it.

It wasn't that Paul was important as a person, so you had to do what he said, it was that they found his message compelling.

Enough people did that.

The Gospels, which are written some 20 years after Paul, at the earliest, and there's four, right?

Most people think Mark is first, and then Matthew or Luke, depending who you read, and then John the last one.

Those tell you about events of Jesus, but if you're a careful reader, they're not histories.

They're trying to tell you also what Jesus meant, but through the stories that were being circulated.

Every gospel writer puts the stories in a slightly different order and uses slightly different words and attributes their words to Jesus.

Like in Matthew, Jesus says, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

In Luke, Jesus says, Blessed are the poor.

You could say, well, that's the same thing, but I would tell you for the authors it is not.

Could Jesus mean that poor people and poor people in spirit are both blessed?

Probably.

But those are two different kinds of people, if that makes sense.

Well, I think so anyway.

And that's because each author is trying to tell you a different perspective about what Jesus meant.

So this is good to know.

Very early on, there are sharp differences about what Jesus meant.

And you can find this in the letters of Paul.

Paul is convinced that one thing Jesus meant is that all the laws of kosher Judaism have become relative.

They're not gone, but they're relative.

And so are entrance rights.

Entrance rites.

It's interesting because we're preparing confirmation.

That's a right.

But Paul says circumcision, that right, is now relative, not absolute.

You do not have to be circumcised to be part of the community.

That was really good news for Greek people, because Greek people didn't want to have that done to them as adults.

Can't blame them.

There wasn't any anesthesia really, and surgical implements were made out of mostly flint or bronze, maybe some sort of crude iron, but they didn't have steel.

That had not been discovered yet.

So just consider that, right?

The other thing that was really hard for Greek people at the time is that the male body was considered the epitome of universal harmony, beauty, and perfection.

So to alter that in any way was sort of the biggest sacrilege you could imagine.

It would have been like, well, killing a pig in a Jerusalem temple.

Which happened, by the way, and desecrated the temple.

That's why we have Hanukkah.

Anyway, um, so it's really hard for Jewish people who were very interested in Judaism.

The reason they were interested, by the way, Greek folk, is because religion at the time of Paul was pretty much just killing animals on holy days and having parades.

It was great, because that was when you got to eat meat.

But there was really, if you followed Zeus or Hermes, there was no day-to-day ethic.

You just did whatever you did, and then you fed the gods, and it was great, but there was no everyday piety.

In fact, if you were a Sadducee, the people who controlled the Jerusalem temple, your faith was all about high holy days and sacrifices.

That was it.

The Pharisees are the ones who said, listen, we we want our religion to be a way of life, not a way of just celebrating holy days.

The Pharisees are the ones who said, no, no, like there's there's rules for everyday living that will bring you closer to God and other people.

They're the ones, ultimately, who won out the day.

And if you ever heard about the bar mitzvah, you've heard about a bar mitzvah.

A boy can have this when he's 13, a girl can have it, bot mitzvah, and she's 12.

That's when you have memorized, you know, all 613 mitzvot, that means commands, for holy living.

Which include things like don't steal, you're supposed to do that every day, and wash your hands before you eat.

If you do these, says the Pharisees, and you do them every day, you'll get closer to God and each other and you'll have more joy in your life.

And Greek people, like all people, really wanted practices, practices, not just shows.

This is true.

In fact, throughout the Christian tradition, when things become just shows, the people demand the practices.

More on that in a second.

So then Paul, who we are convinced is a Pharisee, he even says that himself, is really interested in the Christian way of life, don't you see?

Not just belief, but the way.

How do we practice this faith?

A lot of different Christians.

In Jerusalem, the church goes to the temple to pray.

That's where you go.

Because it's the temple.

That changes when the Romans burn it to the ground.

Because then they don't have it anymore.

So what do you do?

I mean, this is one of those crises that really changes the Christian world.

When there's no temple, do you still have to practice Judaism to practice Christianity?

Jewish people say followers of the way are not Jews.

Followers of the way say, we're more Jewish than Jewish people.

Jewish people didn't buy that argument.

So a lot of contention on how this really should be practiced, particularly through the event of a crucified Messiah.

Turns out what you believed was probably most dependent on where you lived.

So people in Egypt had a very different practice of Christianity than people in modern-day Turkey.

They read different letters.

They didn't just read Paul's letters, they read other ones.

They didn't just read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

They read Thomas and the infancy gospel of Thomas and the infancy gospel of Mary.

And because they read different bits of information, you see, well, they had really different definitions about who Jesus was.

Is anybody familiar with this gesture?

You know who does this all the time.

The Pope does this all the time.

The Pope blesses people like this.

Do you know what it means?

It's not the peace sign.

This is a complicated thing.

So you've got five fingers, five wounds on Jesus.

Two in the wrist, two in the ankles, one on the side.

You got three together, three as one.

That's the Holy Trinity.

Three different entities, one.

And this is the real key, the two, the two natures of Jesus.

He was human and divine.

If you lived in Egypt, you believed in one nature of Jesus.

You see, so when the Pope does this, the Pope is telling people in Egypt, you're wrong.

By the way, if you do this in Europe, don't do that.

I can tell you where that comes from.

Actually, that has to do with the Hundred Years' War between England and France.

And the English discovered with longbows, with longbows, they could penetrate mail because they could really crank that thing back and the error would go through armor.

And so the French started cutting all the bow fingers off the English people.

And if the French didn't get you, you said, so this is very different from the papal gesture.

I just want to make sure you get that.

That little gesture, though, don't you see?

It's not just a sign, it's hundreds of years of tradition wrapped up in one little gesture, and it says the Christians in Egypt are wrong.

So are the Christians in Ethiopia.

The Christians in Ethiopia are called monophysites, one nature.

They say Jesus is completely divine.

He was in a body, but he was just pretend.

He wasn't really invested in that body.

He's like putting on a garment and taking it off.

The Roman church said, no, no, 100% in the body and 100% divine.

Paradox.

Makes no sense.

Sense, right?

But that's what they they picked.

Lots of disagreements.

Sometime around 90 is when the word Christian gets used for the first time.

Christian.

It means little Christ.

So it's actually used in a negative way to describe this group.

It's mentioned by Pliny the Younger.

And he calls it says, What do we do with these Christians, with these little Christs?

And that becomes the normative phrase.

Christians get into some contention in and out of different places.

You know, back in the Middle Ages, of course, if water in a well got poisoned, you had to blame it on somebody, so it must have been the Christians.

Or in Christian Europe, it was the Jews that did it.

You see, there's no evidence for that, but they're not like us, so it must have been them.

So that sort of comes in and out.

Some Christians get persecuted locally.

The biggest persecution we hear about, the biggest one, happens under the Emperor Diocletian.

It begins in 298 and goes until about 310.

And this was throughout the Roman Empire, people looked for Christians and persecuted them.

The test was if you sacrifice to the emperor's spirit, you live.

If you don't, you die.

Surely enough, when people are scared for their lives, they will make decisions they didn't think they would make.

There were a number of priests and bishops during the great persecution who decided it was better that they live than die, and they could repent later, and they sacrificed to the emperor's genius, his spirit, recognizing the emperor as a god.

Then came to the throne eventually the emperor uh who became the emperor of emperors.

He united four different kingdoms into one.

That is, of course, Constantine.

We call him now the Great.

Constantine's mother was a Christian.

Constantine grew up in a pagan home up in what's now Great Britain.

And he had a famous vision in the year 312 when he was fighting to unite two pieces of the four-piece empire.

He saw a sign and heard this.

Oh man.

I'm not going to do this right in Latin.

This looks like IHS, right?

But it's in Htosigno S.

And it means in this sign you will conquer.

Constantine saw a vision that looked like this.

That's not a P and an X.

That's the Greek letter chi and the Greek letter.

Those are the first two letters of the word Christ in Greek.

K-R.

K-R, like Christ.

Constantine saw this vision and heard a voice from heaven say, In this sign you'll conquer.

And that night he point he painted that on all the standards and the shields, the Cairo.

And sure enough, his forces were successful the next day at the Battle of the Milvin Bridge.

And Constantine grew in power, and about five years later he conquered the other half of the empire.

So he was the Caesar of everything.

Constantine converted to Christianity really slowly.

And like he got baptized on his deathbed.

He did that because he thought baptism forgave you all your sins.

So he didn't want to waste that.

You see.

If he did it as a young person, he could still mess up.

It's not because he didn't really believe, it's because he believed in the wrong thing.

Don't you see?

And that's why he waited, waited, waited, waited, waited.

Constantine is the one who took Christianity from being an outlawed religion, where people were meeting in caves and literally under the ground.

They dug underground cities in modern-day Turkey in a place called Cappadocia, and said Christianity is to be tolerated, and then eventually gave them the same rights as pagan religions, so priests were no longer taxable, and gave them some favored status by giving Christians public places to meet.

Now this was brand new under Constantine.

For the first 300 years almost of Christianity, there were no public churches.

None.

People met in homes.

Constantine probably changed Christianity more than anything since, including the Reformation, because he took a small private way of meeting and made it public.

And what he did particularly was took courthouses called basilicas, which are shaped like this, and gave those to Christian people.

And then the building had these little add-ons so that it was in the shape of the cross.

And just like the judge sat here in the basilica, that became now the seat of the bishop, who Constantine used as a magistrate.

Interestingly enough, early bishops under Constantine decided criminal and civil cases.

And they sat in the bishop's seat, the seat of the judge, and guess what they had?

An altar rail to keep the plebeians away from the judge.

Later that was to keep the animals away from the chancel, but initially that functioned just like a rail in a courthouse does.

And the bishop, the bishop's seat was really important because it was the seat in the rotunda.

And when the bishop sat in his seat, he could speak ex cathedra from the seat of magnitude.

Can you hear?

That's what the Pope does.

When the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he is infallible.

But all of this goes back to Constantine.

This is when Christian folk, priests, and bishops started wearing fancy clothes.

Where did they get the clothes from?

It's clothes pagan people were wearing, or clothes people in Rome were wearing.

So everything we wear, stoles, albs, chasubles, all that stuff was just regular Roman gentry stuff.

And for the first time, don't you see, Christians could dress like that publicly because they were tolerated and even got some Constantinian favors given to them.

Constantine was a little worried because, you know, he was trying to rule four discrete empires.

He did that by conquering them.

But the problem with these Christian people is they had a lot of different ideas.

You know, Christians in Egypt were way different from Christians in Turkey.

And Constantine said, wow, that does not really look good for the empire and for Christianity.

So he decided he would call an ecumenical council of the church.

That's where representatives from all these different areas, bishops, priests, even some lay people were given safe passage to come to a little place called Nicaea in modern-day Turkey and sort of have a theological round table and come up with some statement of uniformity.

People were literally fighting over this.

I mean, like punching each other out.

The primary dispute ended up, by the way, at the Council of Nicaea, everyone got in a building like this.

And guess who sat in that chair?

Constantine himself.

People came from the desert wearing rags.

People came who had literally been persecuted almost to death during that great persecution.

People came who had sacrificed to the emperor and then repented.

They had this really long discourse about what they were going to do.

And the principal argument you'll often hear, and this is probably right, is over the nature of Jesus.

There were two people, one led by Arius of Alexandria, a very tall black priest, musically gifted.

He took modern songs like ones by, well, this isn't even modern.

Pretend, 10 years ago, by Britney Spears and Kesha and all these people, and just changed the lyrics to represent his own theological opinion.

They were super catchy, and he had a lot of authority, and he was tall and imposing.

And the other figure was uh Bishop Alexander from Alexandria, who had like a little clerk, this guy called Athanasius.

And the two of them, Athanasius didn't actually do much at the Council of Nicaea.

He was important later.

The two of them really argued.

Arius said Jesus was a created being.

God's first act of creation was Jesus.

And Alexander of Alexandria said, no, Jesus is co-eternal with the Father.

Ultimately, what happened is they wrote the Nicene Creed.

That's what came out of Nicaea.

And Constantine actually agreed with Arius.

But he consented to a creed he didn't believe in so that there could be a greater sense of unity.

Once the creed came out, if you believed with Arius, you were a heretic and you could be persecuted.

So those people ran away to the desert.

That changed Christianity big time because now there was correct Christianity, Orthodox, and then there was the other kind called heterodox or heretics, blasphemers, all that business.

That was new.

Changed the church more probably than anything since.

Okay.

Church power structures became like Roman ones.

So instead of a bishop overseeing a house church of 20 people, that's what bishops used to do, now they were like governors.

They had a lot of authority and they wore fancy governor clothes.

And they had titles and they had privileges.

That was new.

Changed the church a lot.

The thing they didn't figure out back in 325 at the Council of Nicaea was what are the holy books?

They took that on in 381 at the Council of Chalcedon because they said, hey, there's people reading books we don't read.

That must be wrong.

And this is when they set the Bible we now have.

381, Council of Chalcedon, the New Testament, Old Testament, as it's often called, the Hebrew Bible, was set at that council.

The book of James barely made it.

I mean, on a wing and a prayer, it made it.

Do you know who didn't like the book of James?

Martin Luther.

He put it at the end of his translation.

He didn't put it after Hebrews.

He put it at the end.

Put it in the appendix.

You know what almost made it, but didn't?

The pseudopigry book of one Enoch.

You've never heard of it.

It's because it didn't make it.

You can read it online.

Thank God that book didn't make it.

It's like Moulin Rouge.

Seems like it's got a lot of absinthe and fairies in it.

Same with the book called The Shepherd of Hermes.

You may say, I've never heard of that.

It's because it didn't make it.

But it almost made it.

Again, if you read that book, you'll say, thank God that didn't make it.

We have a hard enough time with Revelation.

We didn't need those.

They are super wacky.

Christian groups continued to use them even though their books lost.

You know, the Roman Empire faded.

Constantine moved the capital out to Byzantium, Constantinople.

That became the most important religious person because the emperor was there, the bishop of Constantinople.

Within Rome started to get important again, and there was the Bishop of Rome, who was really more powerful.

That became the next really big problem.

The Bishop of Rome decided he would show the people in Constantinople in about 1052 who was more important.

So he changed the Nicene Creed by himself.

He added two words to it.

You know, we say today, we believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

In Constantinople, you didn't say that.

You said, we believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, period.

The Bishop of Rome said, I didn't need your permission to do this.

I've just changed the creed.

It's called the Filio Key.

That's the word in Latin that means and the Son.

He changed the creed, and for a few other reasons.

The Bishop of Constantinople excommunicated the Pope.

The Pope excommunicated the Bishop of Constantinople, and that was the division between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

Hithertofore they were just the Catholic Church.

Big division.

Yes, ma'am.

What happened to the heretics?

Well, they got burned alive or they didn't become the Romans.

Uh no.

Okay.

The heretics, interestingly enough, I'll tell you a little bit.

Well, interestingly enough about heretics.

Maybe you've heard of Charlemagne before, the first Holy Roman Empire.

He comes a little bit later than this.

Charlemagne was definitely a Nicene creedal Christian, but he conquered the Goths, who were Arian Christians.

They believed in one nature, he believed in two.

And Charlemagne is the one who put the Nicene Creed into the Eucharist.

And he did it before the Eucharist to subdue those darn Goths who were heretics because they had to say Jesus was worshipped and glorified from the Father.

It wasn't because of the beauty, it was to subdue them theologically.

I mean, this is part of our tradition.

So the Nicene Creed was not used in worship for more than 500 years.

Important to know this.

Charlemagne did it again to say, you heretics had better get this right.

Okay, so told you about the schism, right?

Crusades happened pretty soon after that.

That's when the Pope decided, one of the popes decided that the Holy Lands needed to be taken.

And they really needed to be taken really because a crazy Imam in Jerusalem burned down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, supposed to be the place where Jesus was crucified and buried.

He burned it down.

His own people said he was crazy.

The Muslims rebuilt the church.

But in Europe, they decided they needed this campaign against these terrible people.

So what they did is they uh they sort of said, if you go on crusade, then whatever you do is forgiven.

And what that did, right, is it took people who were crazy and bloodthirsty and said, be as bloodthirsty as you want.

Now, this was the biggest disaster between Christian Muslim relations ever, because the crusaders were coming from Europe to the Holy Land, and along the way they said, if we're going to kill the infidels in Jerusalem, we may as well kill them in Germany.

And this became a huge pogrom in towns like Spire, where Jewish people were men, women, children, publicly tortured and killed and looted.

The crusaders did this in God's name because the Pope had given them dispensation to do this in the Holy Land.

So they arrived and, you know, miraculously took the Holy Land.

It's a minor miracle because it sort of was the weakest moment in the Muslim Empire of all.

Didn't take long, frankly, for the Muslims to retake it.

When the Christians got to Jerusalem, they got this famous cry, kill them all, God will know God's own.

So they liquidated the city, literally.

The blood supposedly ran to their knees.

They killed Jewish people, Muslim people, Christian people.

They killed everybody.

They built some fortifications.

This is really a time of terrible, terrible, terrible things going on in the Christian world.

Back in Europe, there's a few other Christian people who are not doing the orthodox thing.

They're called the Albigensians.

And well, they just got different beliefs.

They believe in the equality of all human beings.

So it was really important in the Roman Catholic Church to kill all those people because that was fundamentally wrong.

They dispatched the Dominicans to do this, and sure enough, all the Albigensians, also called the Catars, were killed.

That was the first inquisition, if you've heard that word before, Inquisition.

Began with the Albigensians.

Then a couple other weird things happened.

Like, as I mentioned to you two weeks ago, lots of priests were, well, illiterate.

And lots of people who wanted to be bishop but didn't deserve to be had enough money where they could buy that favor.

That's called simony.

They bought the office of bishop from the Pope.

Popes themselves were elected on, well, not the most pious grounds.

I mean, one of the Medicifs was elected Pope probably because he bought it.

So this is a strange scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

I mentioned to you that practices became important.

So this is where people took to the rosary.

They got that from Muslims.

They wanted something to do in church because they couldn't understand Latin.

They couldn't even see the Latin, uh the Mass, because there was that rude screen in front of everything.

We got the Reformation from Martin Luther, the beginning of Reformations, right?

People really wanted to read the scriptures in their own language because they couldn't understand it in Latin, and many priests couldn't read it anyway.

I mean, this is sort of what's going on.

Further scandal is that one of the popes decided that Rome was not the city, the holy city, Avignon, France was.

So they moved the Holy See to Avignon.

This is called the Babylonian captivity.

Well, that seems wrong.

So another group elected another pope to be the Pope in Rome.

So there were two popes.

So they elected a third pope to be like the real pope.

Which one was the real Pope?

Lots of scandals.

We got through the Reformations, arguably the bloodiest time in European history.

I mean, more Christians killed Christians in uh the wars following the Reformation, like the Thirty Years' War, than died in World War II, World War I combined.

Martin Luther was an advocate of anti-Semitism, believed in killing Jewish people because they were wrong and had killed Jesus.

I mean, these are the sorts of things that are in our tradition.

Of course, the big thing is Henry VIII, which we talked about loosely a couple of weeks ago.

Henry VIII, theologian, really uh thought he was going to be a bishop.

His brother died, and then he became king.

Needed a divorce, they wouldn't give it to him for lots of reasons.

Catherine of Aragon was related to the Pope.

Henry VIII had asked for papal dispensation to marry Catherine because that was his brother's wife.

Henry said, according to the Bible, I need to because my brother died without producing an heir, so it's my job to do something called lever-right marriage.

The Pope gave this very, very special dispensation.

And then Henry was saying, no, no, no, that wasn't right.

I never should have asked for that.

The other problem with the Pope was surrounded by the forces of Catherine's brother Philip II of Spain, like he was literally surrounded with an army.

So it was going to be really hard for him to give an annulment that Philip didn't want.

Hence, Henry did, well, the Act of Supremacy and made himself, with parliamentary ratification, the head of the English church.

He appointed Thomas Cranmer, who made the prayer book.

Thomas decided if they were going to really do something different in England, they were going to do something different.

He went around the continent and collected all kinds of prayers, many of which were more than a thousand years old, and put them in the first Book of Common Prayer.

So that people could pray not just their own words, but could join Christians for really more than a thousand years in praying some of the same words.

It was extremely unique and extremely, of course, a product of the Reformation.

As I mentioned to you, there were Henry was succeeded by Edward, very, very Protestant, and then came, well, Bloody Mary, and Bloy decided to burn Thomas Cranmer at the stake.

This is the first Archbisbishop of Canterbury.

She insisted that he recant his whole life.

Oddly enough, he chose to do it.

I mean, he was an old man, and I don't think he wanted to burn at the stake.

So he recanted, and she said, Thank you for doing that.

I'm going to burn you anyway.

And Thomas Cranmer was going to read his recantation before being burned.

And there was a huge audience.

I mean, this is like watching the Pope get burned at the stake, honestly.

Like people are going to see that.

So he went up to the fire, and the first thing he did was put his hand with the recantation in the fire and burned it as his penance.

And then he said, All this Catholic business is from hell itself.

And talked about the glories of Protestantism.

And boy, Bloody Mary was not suspecting that was going to happen.

So he turned his execution into the most public denouncement of Catholicism, really, hithertofore.

And then he got burned.

This was what Christianity was doing then.

You see, extremely contentious.

Elizabeth is the one who sort of said, keep the Catholic clothes, keep the Protestant meaning.

The Eucharist.

Well, it is somehow full of the real presence of Jesus, but to say much more about that would be saying more than really we understand.

So let's not talk about transubstantiation or the wine becoming blood, because that's probably inadequate to describe how present Jesus really is.

Very shrewd, right?

This is what she did.

We inherited that.

Sort of.

Because, you know, uh, we had this little thing, and many people came over.

You know, the Puritans were not really interested in religious toleration.

I hate to break your bubble.

I was taught they believed in religious freedom.

No, they didn't.

They believed in their version of religion, and the rest of England didn't, so they had to leave.

They did not have any toleration of the Anglican church.

They believed it was corrupt and it had to be purified, hence the word Puritans.

So they came over here.

How interesting, isn't it, that the Native Americans, who they viewed as heathens, saved them.

Really kind of a lovely chapter from our history, isn't it?

Thanksgiving is when our the people we denounce save our lives.

They came here, and sure enough, that became the real birth of Anglicanism.

Of course, it was really small groups like Baptists who came up with the idea that church and state should be separate.

That came because Baptists had no power, don't you see?

So they needed that separation to protect them.

How interesting now that Baptists really want actually a unification of church and state.

I can say that because I grew up one.

There was this thing that happened in 1776, you know, uh that was called the Declaration of Independence.

And this became a major problem for the Anglican churches in America because they'd said we don't have a king anymore.

And in the Book of Common Prayer, you pray for the king.

So they said we can't do that.

Well, as you know, the upstart little country won the war.

And here they were in 1783 when the dust finally settled with a church that needed bishops.

Because according to the doctrine of the church, we have we need bishops.

Bishops, remind you, I remind you, are people who are in the apostolic succession, which means when you're made a bishop, a bishop lays hands on your head.

Well, a bishop laid hands on that one's head.

Back, back, back, back, back, back, all the way to the disciples, all the way to Jesus.

That way there's this unbroken chain of hands on head laying, goes all the way to Jesus.

They needed one of those people.

So they went to England.

And they said, Would you make Samuel Seabury bishop?

And they said, No, I don't think so.

Well, this was a major crisis.

There were no bishops in America.

Now, once you had a bishop, they can make other bishops.

You see, you only need one bishop to make another bishop.

But the Church of England wasn't going to do it.

So Samuel Seaberry went up to Scotland.

And the Scottish said, We will make you, the Scottish bishop said, we will make you a bishop.

If instead of using the Anglican prayer, you use the Scottish Rite.

The Scottish Rite.

Now, those aren't just people with green fezes that ride around in little cars.

The Scottish Rite is the service of the Eucharist.

Interestingly enough, the Scottish Rite calls it an altar, not a table, and highlights the sacrifice of Jesus.

The Scottish Rite is much more Roman Catholic than the Anglican Rite that talks about it being the Lord's table.

So this was a huge theological change for the Anglican Church to use the Scottish Rite.

It was no longer the Lord's table, now it was the altar.

And you'll notice even in our own language, the more memorial of our sac of your sacrifice.

That's from the Scottish Rite.

That does not show up in the Anglican Rite.

Of course, the country grew, you know, and this is when we became the Episcopal Church, not the Church of England, right?

A church governed by bishops.

A lot of variety in the Episcopal Church, and I'll tell you, interestingly enough, about 130 years ago, not even that long.

A hundred years ago, yeah, 130 years ago.

A lot of Episcopal churches looked a lot like a lot of Roman churches.

The altar, not the Lord's table.

Remember the Scottish Rite dictated that, was up against the wall.

The priest had his back to the congregation at the Eucharist because the priest was making atonement on behalf of the people.

You see?

So the priest was doing something for you you couldn't do.

This is where we get some of the Catholic terms like father.

But then there became this interesting thing called the Oxford movement that sort of said, listen, people want to practice spirituality.

People want to be involved.

They don't want to just have the priest do everything for them, like what was happening between the Sadducees and the Pharisees and during the Middle Ages.

And this is when ultimately there was this culmination that the Lord's table was moved from the wall.

That happened for sure by 1976.

This is really interesting because now instead of the priest doing something you couldn't do, the priest is sort of like, well, I don't want to say the butler, but sort of the chief steward at the Lord's table.

See, now there's a shift in language, right?

Not everybody's caught it yet.

Still, a lot of people say altar, but Lord's table starts to become an okay moniker, and the priest then is not doing something you can't do.

The priest is serving serving you from God's table.

If that makes sense.

That's because of the Oxford movement.

And that's part of the reason the prayer book changes.

Interestingly enough, if you go to write one service, we say, the Lord be with you and with thy spirit.

That sounds very antiquated, thy spirit.

Curiously enough, there used to be two things in English, two different ways to refer to you.

One was with the word you and one was with the word the.

If you speak another language, I mean particularly in German, there is the U formal and the U intimate.

So in German, if I don't know you or if you're my professor, I will call you Z.

And if I do, I will call you do.

How curious that this is the intimate word.

So to say with thy spirit is actually less formal than saying, and also with you.

The and thy and thou art words of intimacy, not words of formality.

Why'd that change?

Curiously enough, because there was a Christian group called the Quakers.

And the Quakers decided everybody was fundamentally equal, and so they called everyone the thou thy, including their teachers and their ministers and the president.

They got rid of all formality, and everybody else said, oh, we don't want to be thought of as a Quaker, so they just switched to you.

And that's when we lost thee thou die from our vocabulary.

Interestingly enough, right one keeps it as a testimony to our intimacy with God.

You probably thought it was the other way.

Isn't that fine?

I mean, isn't that fine to discover?

Um hence prayer books change as well as Christian groups change, sort of with history and context.

And this was a big change in our prayer book.

Notice we've kept right one.

We've decided we don't use that anymore because it's not common parlance.

However, it's a critical part of our tradition.

And I think, especially if you understand this, I have actually a lot more love for right one than I did before understanding that.

So, what else is there to tell you about all of this?

Well, um, interestingly enough, uh, there are many, many, many different kinds of Episcopal Church.

We started with this at the beginning.

We're not necessarily united in doctrine, but we are in worship.

My first church was an Anglo-Catholic church, and what that means usually is we had incense and we had bells.

Or smells and bells.

Uh, you'll find today I am wearing a rose chasuble that is very Anglo-Catholic.

I just think it's beautiful, to be honest with you.

Uh, and I think when you understand where it comes from, it actually gives good meaning.

Sometimes churches say, oh my gosh, this has become so showy, let's get rid of all of it, and we throw out the baby with the bathwater.

So back in the Reformation, churches that had stained glass windows, a lot of them found their windows broken because people thought those were graven images.

We have them now because we think they give us a greater understanding of beauty and holiness.

So things kind of swing back and forth, as it were.

Wow, I you know, it's really hard to give you 2,000 years of history in 50 minutes because I feel like I left a lot of really cool things out.

I guess I did.

But these then are some of the differences already between the Episcopal Church and Roman Catholic Church.

We decided clergy can marry.

Uh we decided that we're not going to use the word transubstantiation.

We're not going to say that the wine turns into the blood of Jesus.

We're going to say it has the real presence.

Now, by the way, if you're Catholic, you don't think that wine really turns completely into blood because it doesn't taste like blood.

And it doesn't look like blood.

We all know that.

Um Aristotle had two categories.

He said there are the essence of things and the accidents of things.

The essence means their true inner nature, like their chemical formula.

The accidents is how they look or how they taste, touch, sensory stuff.

So the Catholic Church has never said that it tastes like the flesh of Jesus.

It doesn't have the accidents, it has the essence.

You see.

Transubstance.

The essence changes.

The substance.

Doesn't taste like blood, never has.

Martin Luther said consubstantiation is in it done do that, but it has the real presence.

So, to be honest with you, they were saying the same thing.

Martin Luther says the accidents don't change, but the essence is somehow changed.

That is, once we say that prayer, it's not ordinary bread anymore.

We're not sure how, but it's not ordinary.

That's the episcopal position.

And really, you can believe whatever you want.

After that.

And many people do.

But that's one of the ways we keep it the same.

Just because I have to tell you this, um, I grew up, you can tell how old an Episcopal church is based on whether or not it has an ombre.

An ombre is like a fake arch in the back of the chancel.

The chancel, you know, that's the area in the rail where the priests and the choir sometimes sit.

Our church does not have an ombre.

There's no arch back there.

That's from when the Lord's table was up against the wall as the altar.

Our church was built since 1976.

By the way, this is gonna be kind of funny.

Oh, geez, we didn't have an ombre here either.

That's so strange.

I wonder why we didn't have an ombre.

That's strange.

I ombres are rare.

They seem to be rare.

Um I don't I wouldn't dispute, but I don't remember having seen.

I would say that ombres are very noticeable in former Anglo-Catholic parishes.

If it's an Anglo-Catholic parish, you will see an ombre.

And and my first church was one of those built before 76.

Sure enough, it had an ombre, like a like a lower arch.

Lord's table was up against there as an altar.

Um now we've pulled that out.

There are churches that were designed with the Lord's table way up against that wall, and they're either so big or the chancel's so small.

Literally, the priest has about that much room between the Lord's table and the back wall.

They weren't designed to have room.

So I've gone and celebrated the Eucharist and had, and I'm not a big guy, right?

And I had to be like.

Oh! This is one of those things about architecture and theological change.

If you're wondering what that box that we put the reserve in, it's called the tabernacle.

And curiously enough, people will sometimes call it the ombre, and that's wrong.

I used to call it the tablets.

Yeah, it's not an ombre, it's a tabernacle.

It used to be in the ombre in many churches, but we don't have an ombre, it's a tabernacle.

That's where you put God's gifts, like in the ark.

Anyway, um, okay.

I don't know why I had to conclude with that.

But I have to conclude.

Thank you for your attention, and we'll pick up, not next week, but in three weeks.

Three weeks again.

Yeah, because it's happy new year right?

December thirtieth, we're not?

No.

It's happy new year.

It's Merry Christmas.

Oh, are we only meeting next week or not?

Evie, is it on the page?

Are we meeting the tempt December twenty third?

No, you're the decorating decorating.

Shucks, we're doing some decorating.

Okay.

Well, I hope you have a holy wrist of Advent and thanks for your attention today.