The Catechetic Converter

In my recent series on the commemorations for the week between Christmas Day and the Feast of the Holy Name, I managed to generate some small degree of controversy and discussion when I mentioned that the Massacre of the Innocents as recorded in Matthew’s gospel likely did not actually happen. As I said in that piece, there is no extra-biblical historical evidence that the event occurred. Even one of the most important historians we rely on, Josephus, did not include any mention of Herod killing scores of infants—and Josephus does not hold back on his criticisms of the Herodians.

Now, I am willing to admit one caveat, and that is there’s a theory that maybe the massacre happened, but it wasn’t a large-scale event involving thousands of children. Given the limitations of the information supplied by Magi, how many kids could have been born in the narrow window of a) when the star appeared and, b) in Bethlehem? If this was the case, then Herod ordering the murder of a small number of kids would hardly register among all the horrible things he was known for and might not garner a mention from historians and scribes of the time.

However, I still hold to the contention that Matthew is not interested in recording precise, “accurate” (as we understand the term) history so much so as writing a story that he feels is true in regards to Jesus. Perhaps the causes that lead to the Holy Family taking flight to Egypt were more of a slow-burn situation, where young kids were likely to die and so, inspired by God, Joseph takes Jesus and Mary (in an event that echoes also another Joseph—one who managed to shelter the patriarchs in Egypt during a time of famine). Matthew wants to express the dire situation to the Church and so telling a story about Herod murdering kids communicates that truth. It’s a story that feels true to who Herod is and is a kind of short-hand way of helping Christians born years, even decades, after the event understand what a monster the man was.

But this all serves as a way to address an important elephant when it comes to reading the Bible: it isn’t always historically accurate. This provides grounds for a kind of crisis of faith when we treat the whole “divine inspiration” thing in terms of what we call today “biblical inerrancy.” In other words, if the Bible is a book that God basically dictated to various writers and is, therefore, God’s actual words on paper, then what are we to make of things when the Bible and facts don’t line up? Is God lying to us? Does God get His facts mixed up? Or is there some demonic plot being enacted by historians and scholars to try and discredit the Bible? (This latter thing was basically the view of my church growing up; if the Bible and facts didn’t agree, then it was facts that needed to change—we can see such thinking happening in certain political circles today, but I digress).

In order to discuss this, we’ll need to break a few things down—namely, what we mean by “history” and what is meant by “divine inspiration.”

WHAT IS HISTORY?

History seems like a straightforward thing. It is the discipline of chronicling past events so that we can keep posterity and revisit what has come before, right? Yes. But our modern conception of history is something a bit different from what our ancestors thought of when they conceived of history. See, our current understanding of history is shaped by the scientific method, which came about in the 1700s. Prior to this, the phenomena of our world were seen in terms of analogy. Take, for instance, reproduction. We continue to use vestigial language from our agrarian past to speak of how organisms reproduce, language like “seed” and “fertility.” The word sperm comes from the Greek sperma which means “seed.” So, for much of human history, we saw all forms of reproduction as analogous to agriculture: a seed is planted in a fertile space where new life emerges. It wasn’t until the invention of the microscope and the advent of the scientific method that we began to challenge this analogy and see if there’s something else going on. What emerged during this time was the concept of facts.

Prior to the mid-16th century, the Latin term factum referred simply to “a thing done or performed.” This usage is still common in the legal realm. Those of us who grew up with Dragnet recall Joe Friday regularly saying to witnesses, “just the facts.” In other words, recall the events without commentary or elucidation. Deborah went to the store at 5:15 in the evening. But, with the emergence of modern science, facts began to take on greater precedence. Facts were considered pure and superior, a distillation of the essence of a thing. Facts represent something that is observable and repeatable. Deborah can go to the store at 5:15 and so can I. What I can’t do is inhabit Deborah’s frame of mind. I can’t know what she was thinking as she walked to the store, how happy or unhappy she might have been. The fleeting thoughts and emotions she felt during that stroll. These are all unique to her, making them not reproducible and, therefore, useless in terms of data. They are extraneous, important to Deborah perhaps, but not important for finding out if Deborah saw James fleeing the scene of Jesse’s murder, which happened across from the store at around 5:25.

Thomas Jefferson famously applied such thinking to the Gospels. Since miracles and other supernatural events are not reproducible, repeating and measurable phenomena, Jefferson stripped the gospels of any reference to them. Jefferson believed this made for a more “true” Gospel because it was a gospel of facts. The bias of the scientific method is that facts are truth. If something is not factual then it isn’t true. And something is only factual if it is an observable, repeatable event free from extraneous conditions. Deborah can go to the store at 5:15 regardless of whether she’s happy or sad or praying or thinking about the baseball game. Those things are ancillary to facts. What is personal to her is not, objectively, true according to modern science.

So when we record history, we now aim to be as factual as possible. I used to be a journalist and journalism is a key resource for historians. The discipline of journalism is to write things as dispassionately as possible, removing your own feelings and commentary and presenting things as “factually” as one can, leaving the reader to decide how to think and feel about those things.

Now, I’m not here to argue against facts. Facts are important. I’m simply attempting to demonstrate that, one, the prioritizing of facts is a relatively recent event in human history and, two, perhaps to suggest that facts leave a lot of things out of a story.

When I was a journalist I was also a creative writer, working on a novel, and getting short fiction and poems published in TINY journals and publications (I did manage to get once piece of fairly unhinged “fan mail” for a five-line poem that was picked up by a publication that was simply photo copied sheets of paper to be stuck onto bulletin boards and whatnot). Creative writing gives texture to facts. That’s where we dwell on Deborah’s frustration that the short-stop dropped the ball in the bottom of the ninth, causing the other team to get two runners to home plate, costing her team the game—and that this frustration mirrors the frustration she feels that her husband is always working too late to go to the store and grab a gallon milk for the house, leaving her to have to do it and making her feel like the center-fielder who had to make up for the short-stop’s mistake. Indeed, the creative writer will say that the real story is found in spots like these and not the facts. Facts make for poor story-telling.

The ancients knew this. When they wrote histories, they weren’t simply recording dispassionate facts. They were telling stories, stories full of texture and meaning. Their goal was to get readers to feel the story being told. In order to do this, elements might be told out of order, or hyperbole was employed, or even, at times, what we call “fiction” was used. The facts of the story might not be straight, but the Truth absolutely was.

Here’s an example from the gospels: Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. In the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) it serves as a kind of crescendo to Jesus’ story. The Synoptics all depict Jesus moving from Galilee and making His way to Jerusalem to where He enters in triumph, chases out the money-changers from the temple, which makes Him a more serious target of the religious authorities. But in John, Jesus cleanses the temple right at the beginning of His ministry, right after coming out of the desert and His 40-day-long bout with Satan. Further, John depicts Jesus going to and from Jerusalem on a regular basis. If all four gospels are true, how do we reconcile their conflicting facts? Do we say, as some have, that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice? If that’s the case, why don’t all four gospels testify to that?

Perhaps we’re thinking of this incorrectly. We need to get back to that ancient way of thinking and consider that Truth is something that cannot be reduced down to simple facts. As Ian Markham, the dean and president of Virginia Theological Seminary, is know to say, we Christians do not read a book, we read a life; the book is important because the book testifies to the life. Given this, no true story of a life can be told only in fact. Truth moves beyond fact. And so, as a result, it doesn’t really matter when Jesus cleansed the temple. What matters is that Jesus is someone who cleanses the temple, whether as the culmination of His earthly ministry or resulting from being in the power of the Spirit after overcoming the devil in the wilderness. The facts of the story are in service to the Truth.

WHAT IS DIVINE INSPIRATION?

There are, of course, many many misunderstood passages in the Bible. Many of them are found in the writings of Saint Paul. This shouldn’t surprise us because even the Bible itself tells us that Paul is hard to understand, with Saint Peter writing:

Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation, just as our dear friend and brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, speaking of these things in all his letters. Some of his remarks are hard to understand, and people who are ignorant and whose faith is weak twist them to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures. (2 Peter 3:15-16 CEB)

This is an important passage for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that the Church received Paul’s writings as scripture fairly early on. Second, it gives us a fun little insight into the lives of the early saints: even one of Paul’s friends—the one considered to be the first pope—has a hard time understanding what the heck he’s saying.

But one of the most broadly (and, I’d argue, dangerously) misunderstood things Paul wrote comes from a letter he wrote to his young protege named Timothy:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: (2 Timothy 3:16 KJV)

And let’s also use the NIV version, since that’s arguably the one most people would know these days:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV)

So, here Saint Paul teaches that “all scripture” is “inspired,” which is translated as “God-breathed” in newer English versions. This leads us to the conclusion that “scripture” is something breathed from God, thus God’s very words, transcribed by holy writers. Or is it?

Before we begin to look at what it means that something is “God-breathed,” we need to take a look at the word “scripture.” We use the word exclusively for religious writings, but in its original sense “scripture” simply means “a thing written.” So, “writings.”

To put the passage literally, it would read “All writings are God-breathed.” Is this what Saint Paul is saying? That all writing is breathed out by God? Not only the Bible, but the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Book of Mormon? Not only “religious” books but also The Catcher in the Rye, the Godzilla collectibles guide on my shelf, and the instruction manual to my TV? I don’t think this is what Saint Paul is teaching Saint Timothy.

The word “scripture” (graphe in Greek) is used exclusively in the Bible to refer to the writings of the Bible. We saw this a bit earlier with Saint Peter using the term to refer to Saint Paul’s letters. Elsewhere, it is used in reference to the books of the Old Testament. So the term seems to be applied to certain writings in this context.

Now, a lot of Christians will say that in this case “the scriptures” is simply short-hand for “the Bible.” But things are not that simple. For one, there was no such thing as “the Bible” when Paul was writing Timothy this letter. You might say “well, okay, sure; the New Testament wasn’t all written yet, but there was the Old Testament.”

It may surprise you to learn that what we think of as the Old Testament did not exist until around the 600s at the earliest. That’s 600 AD (or CE nowadays). As in, 600 years after the time of Jesus.

Now before you start writing me emails or replies on Mastodon, let me finish. I’m not saying that the writings themselves didn’t exist until then. I’m saying that the writings that make up the Old Testament as we know it were not put together into a definitive collection of 39 books (24 in rabbinic Judaism because a few of the books are consolidated and treated as a single book, notably the minor prophets) until that time. Yes there were translations of these books into Greek (called the Septuagint) and for many Christians those translations were treated as “the Bible” of their time, but given that some of the books are never referenced in the New Testament and they did not exist in a single volume, there is some question over what books were considered “official” back then. The group of rabbis known as the Masoretes were the ones who assembled the Old Testament as we know it in the 600-900s. Their list of books is what is used by Protestant Christians for the Old Testament.

This is all to say that the term “scripture” was something coming into form at the time of Saint Paul’s writing. And his use of the phrase “God-breathed” is likely a mechanism to help Saint Timothy know what writings are truly Christian and which ones to avoid. This is especially crucial given the preponderance of gnostic and anti-Gentile writings making the rounds at the time.

Perhaps seeing the passage in some wider context will help us. I am fan of the Common English Bible, so I tend to use that:

But you must continue with the things you have learned and found convincing. You know who taught you. Since childhood you have known the holy scriptures that help you to be wise in a way that leads to salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good. (2 Timothy 3:14-18 CEB)

It might be bad scholarship on my part, but I tend to read the passage like this: “Every scripture that is inspired by God is useful for teaching,” etc. In other words, Saint Paul is reminding Saint Timothy that he is able to discern which writings are “God-breathed” and which ones aren’t. This isn’t so much a working definition on the doctrine of scripture as much as it is a piece of practical wisdom: if it doesn’t sound like scripture, then it isn’t. It’s one of the reasons that we can say that something like the Gospel of Thomas doesn’t bear the aroma of God’s breath—it ends with Jesus telling Saint Peter that Saint Mary of Magdala will need to be reincarnated as a man in order to enter heaven. And those “God-breathed” writings serve the purpose of instruction and formation to make for good Christians.

So the Bible itself does not define itself as being the result of God dictating His words into the ears of particular people. Rather, God breathes through the words that have been written, giving those of us who know Him through prayer and devotion the means to recognize Him in particular writings. Those writings are valuable because they evoke the very breath of God—like us!—and therefore have something to say about the sort of people God wants us to be.

TRUTH IN FICTION

This brings us back to the question of fiction and the Bible. Can the Bible contain fictional material and yet remain true? Yes.

Let’s ask this question a slightly different way: can God’s breath be detected through fiction? If we say no then we risk limiting God… Given that God is sovereign and gets what He wants because He is God, it is very much the case that God can use fiction as means for declaring His truth. Indeed, the book of Job is pretty much accepted as being an intentional work of fiction, but is held dearly as a source of beauty and truth—especially for those broken-hearted and desperate for God. Aside from that, we have entire books of poetry in the Bible and poetry is a medium that is not tied to mere fact, given to expansive and hyperbolic language in order to express Truth, God’s Truth.

So, the Bible isn’t always factual. That’s okay. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. God can use fiction to express His Truth to us. Fact or fiction doesn’t matter as much as whether or not we can detect the presence of God’s breath in the story, whether or not the story is useful for teaching us and forming us into the sort of humans He has redeemed us to become.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

It is New Year’s Eve as I write this. Tomorrow not only marks the start of the Year of our Lord, 2026, it also marks the end of the first week of Christmas. The feast for that is one that we call the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but this is a more recent name. For much of Christian history, this has been known as the Feast of the Circumcision.

The readings for the day reflect this: “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21 NRSV). Matthew keeps thing brief by simply noting that Joseph names Jesus (indeed, the actual birth of Jesus more or less happens “off camera” in Matthew’s gospel). In Jewish custom, a male child is circumcised on the eighth day after birth, the number eight being significant as a marker of a new beginning. It was also the custom to declare the child’s name for the first time.

It is curious to me that we in the Episcopal Church opt to ignore the circumcision aspects of the feast day, especially given the fact that we’ve begun addressing areas prone to anti-Semitic interpretation in our liturgical calendar (with a lot of focus on how various readings from John’s gospel have been misconstrued for anti-Semitic purposes over the centuries). That Jesus was incarnate as a Jew is central to understanding Him. His being circumcised is what denotes Him as a Jew.

The scholar Susannah Heschel, the daughter of the great Abraham Heschel, wrote an excellent-though-disturbing book entitled Aryan Jesus that traces the development of Nazi theology and the anti-Semitic threads that ran through German theology going back at least as far as Martin Luther (who was famously anti-Semitic). She places a degree of importance on the liberal theological developments of the late 1800s and early 1900s and how much work was done to distance Jesus from His Jewish identity. Many of the scholars and theologians from this time managed to survive WWII and wound up working in American universities and seminaries. Since the US did not treat such academics as Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, they were able to operate fairly unnoticed, continuing to articulate a Jesus quite divorced from His Jewish heritage.

We see two lasting legacies of this work. The first is the continued treatment of gnosticism as a kind of suppressed “true” version of Christianity that the Church felt threatened by. One of the hallmarks of Christian gnostic ideas is that the God of Judaism is an evil being called the “Demiurge” who wants to enslave humanity in our material existence (with Jesus representing a true God of light that wants to free us from the corruptions of our flesh and materiality). Such gnostic ideas find a degree of resonance with schools of Buddhism, and this is the other legacy of the volkish, Nazi-adjacent theologies of early-20th Century German theology: the attempts to connect Jesus with Buddha. Putting Jesus closer to Buddhism takes Him further away from His Jewishness. Ironically, some of the most avowedly “progressive” people I know unwittingly subscribe to a theological line that was created by vile anti-Semites, but do so out of some desire to be inclusive.

The much-celebrated theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that Christians cannot be properly Christian without understanding themselves as Jewish first. In that same vein he would argue that Jesus cannot be properly understood without knowing Him as a Jew. Which means that we should be talking about the Feast of the Circumcision, even if the topic is uncomfortable. It is the only right and proper thing to do if we are serious about resisting anti-Semitism in our religion.

I spent the majority of my ordained ministry in Southeast Florida, the last six of which in Boca Raton before being called to Saint Mary’s. If you don’t know, Boca Raton has a very large Jewish population. I was also the head chaplain of an Episcopal School, which tends to draw students from the Jewish community (some estimates said that our student population was somewhere around 40% Jewish). Ministering in this context was invaluable for me in my own theological development. There are things about Jesus and the New Testament that I would never have picked up on had I not spent a ton of time around Jews. For instance, the notorious story of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman (found in Mark and Luke) seems to most like a story of Jesus being a jerk to a woman in need, his reference to “throwing to dogs” what is meant for “the children” sounding like a racial slur. But this story is actually Jesus at His most rabbinical, teaching a lesson to His disciples in a manner quite consistent with the accounts of the rabbis in the Talmud and Mishna. I never would have caught this had I not been blessed with the opportunity to teach and lead worship with a large group of Jewish students.

In like manner, I would not have learned about the importance of names. Names in the Bible are not arbitrarily repeated because names in Judaism are not arbitrarily repeated. In some Jewish traditions, a child is only named after a dead relative—or after a hero of the faith, with the expectation that they will live according to the name given them.

Notice Joseph. We have two Josephs in our Bible: the child of Jacob/Israel, of technicolor-dream-coat fame and Mary’s husband, who helped raise Jesus. Both have parallel stories in that both are forced into Egypt for the express purpose of preserving God’s people. There’s also the fact that both Josephs are fathers to respective Jesuses.

New Testament Joseph is, of course, the “earthly” father of Jesus. Old Testament Joseph, Joseph ben Israel, went to Egypt. While there he married Asenath and had two children: Manasseh and Ephraim. For whatever reason, Joseph ben Israel does not get a tribe named after him. Instead, his two sons do. From Ephraim (after several generations) begets Nun, who begets Moses’ eventual second-in-command, Joshua. In Hebrew the name “Joshua” is rendered as Yeshua which is also translated in Greek as “Jesus.” This is cool for a couple of reasons.

First, the name means “God’s salvation/deliverer.” Joshua ben Nun is said to have delivered God’s people to their promised land and also liberated (saved) it from idolaters. Joshua/Jesus is, of course, the Savior or humanity and creation. Second, Judaism holds to an idea of two Messiahs, one from David’s lineage (the Mashiach ben David) and another from Joseph’s (the Mashiach ben Yosef), a Messiah that is destined to die in battle. The Gospels are more overt about Jesus’ connections to David, but these connections to Joseph ben Israel cannot be ignored. That God would want New Testament Joseph to name Mary’s son after the famed liberator Joshua helps to speak of the ways in which Jesus fulfills Jewish messianic prophecies—He’s both messiahs, one that dies and one that lives!

Again, these are the sorts of things we miss out on when ignore Jesus’ Jewishness. Indeed, an entire level of meaning of Jesus’ name is lost when we focus on the name at the expense of the circumcision. The two go together, as the scriptures attest.

We are told that Jesus’ name is the “name above all names,” a name at which “every knee shall bend.” That name is, inescapably, a Jewish name rife with Jewish meaning. This is a fact we ignore to our detriment.

In closing out this series on the week of post-Christmas commemorations, we return to the Child that started it all. And we consider once again the words of one the great hymns of this season:

What child is this, who, laid to rest, On Mary’s lap is sleeping, Whom angels greet with anthems sweet While shepherds watch are keeping? This, this is Christ the King, Whom shepherds guard and angels sing; Haste, haste to bring Him laud, The babe, the son of Mary!

This is Jesus, God’s salvation. This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. This is Jesus, the seed promised to Abraham, from which the entire world is blessed.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

For the past several years, I’ve maintained the discipline of listening to mostly Christian music during Advent, most of it Christmas music. Last year was the year I fell in love with “O, Holy Night,” particularly the version sung by Tracy Chapman. I’m also fond of the reggae version]() from Christafari (their Reggae Christmas compilation is on regular repeat during this time of year). It is this latter version that I first caught the words of the third verse:

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name; Christ is the Lord, Oh, praise His name forever! His powr and glory evermore proclaim! His powr and glory evermore proclaim!

For whatever reason, I did not know that this was an abolitionist hymn. This is probably due to the fact that the first verse is the most commonly sung (even Tracy Chapman doesn’t sing either of the other verses in her otherwise excellent rendition). Regardless, something about this line moves me to tears when I first hear it during the Advent season. It speaks powerfully to what Saint Mary sings in the Magnificat, what the birth of Jesus is intended by God to do: to usurp the power dynamics of our world and to proclaim freedom to the captive.

This is reflected in the saint commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s calendar today: Frances Joseph-Gaudet. Initially I was going to write about Saint Anysia of Thessaloniki. This was partly due to some confusion on my part over our calendar (Frances is listed as being commemorated on the 31st in our current edition of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, but was commemorated on the 30th in the previous editions). But Anysia is not recognized in our calendar (she’s remembered in the Orthodox Churches). Plus, she’s another martyr and—intending no disrespect to any of the Holy Martyrs—I imagine that some of us are a bit overwhelmed by reading about murdered saints day-after-day. What of someone who incarnated the gospel in a way that didn’t end with hurled rocks, or decades of exile, or political executions, or drawn swords in a cathedral? That brings us to Frances.

From what I can gather, Frances is held in high regard in the diocese of Louisiana, where she lived and ministered. She was not an ordained person, but nonetheless lived a life dedicated to the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly that part about breaking chains and having love as His law. She was dedicated to the work of prison reform, especially in regards to young Black men. Which she did in 1930s Louisiana. As a woman. Born of mixed race as Black and Native American.

No wonder she’s a saint.

There is one connection with Saint Anysia that is worth commenting on: both were committed to the work of the gospel during troublesome times as single women. Saint Anysia was a consecrated virgin active during the persecutions of Diocletian. Saint Frances was a divorced woman (seeking the divorce because her husband was an alcoholic—this also influenced her commitment to the Temperance movement), raising her three children as a seamstress, during the deep racism of pre-Civil-Rights America.

Frances began her ministerial work by holding prayer meetings for families with sons and daughters in prison. This then turned into prayer meetings with prisoners, making and proving clothes to prisoners, and the work of helping young men get back to some kind of normal life after being released from prison. She would take charge of young men after attending juvenile court (something that she also advocated for—previously, young men were tried as adults exclusively), eventually needing to acquire more land in order to house them and educate them. This evolved into the Gaudet Episcopal Home (after she donated the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana).

All of this as she remained a woman of meager means. She focused her efforts on her school and became its principal, but she was never a wealthy woman.

She serves as an example we all need: someone who did great things for the gospel using what she had in front of her. She heard the plight of her friends and neighbors, saw the injustice of the penal system (which perpetuates to this day, sadly), and did what she could, building on each development as the Lord provided.

One of my little maxims when it comes to parish ministry is that the most effective ministry is the one that a parish wants to do, not the one it feels obligated to do. We’ve seen this throughout Saint Mary’s history. In our story, we’ve been a Sunday School for Chinese and Japanese children, a medical dispensary, an orphanage, a school, and a parish (which actually is a fairly recent development for us, only really beginning in the 1960s). Each time we’ve made a change, it seems to be based on us discerning what we are both willing and able to do rather than taxing ourself with what we feel obligated to do.

But this philosophy is not limited to parish communities. It also applies to individuals. The first time I ever saw this, I was still in seminary. I had interned at Saint Paul’s in Newnan, Georgia for a summer. In one of my sermons I mentioned how we could use what we already have for the benefit of God’s work, referencing the model used by Toms Shoes as an illustration. Toms, which were immensely popular in the late 00s, have a one-for-one model: you buy a pair of their shoes and another pair is set aside for person in need, footwear being a significant preventative for lots of diseases and infections throughout most of the world. After that summer, I went back to seminary for a semester and then was home for Christmas, where the rector of Saint Paul’s invited me to serve at the Christmas services. After one of the services a parishioner came up to me very excitedly and handed me a gift bag. Inside were four hand-made wine glass charms (so you can identify your glass when at a party at someone’s house). She told me that she had been trying to think of ways to help people in need. Then the Spirit moved her during my sermon and she realized that she could use her beading hobby as means to foster God’s kingdom. So she partnered with a charity and used proceeds from her wine glass charms (which she sold at a local farmer’s market) to support their work.

When we think of saints and saintly work, we tend to think of people like Saint Stephen or Saint John or maybe even Saint Thomas—people who made giant gestures of faith that ultimately cost them their lives in a direct sense. Or we think of Saint Theresa of Calcutta, who became a nun and helped the poor in India die with dignity. But Saint Frances of New Orleans reminds us that saintly gestures begin simply and within our current means. We don’t need to be a nun or a deacon or the second-most-powerful-person in the English realm in order to effect great things for God’s kingdom. We can be a single mother working as a seamstress, sharing the pain of other mothers lamenting their children in jail and the unjust systems that put them there.

When I was a school chaplain I used to say to my students at the start of the school year: you are called to change the world; only the world you change might not be your own. Simply holding the hand of and praying with a mother whose son has been imprisoned for a petty charge can change her world in profound ways, even ways we might not know until all is revealed in God’s coming Kingdom.

Saint Frances of New Orleans heard the words of Jesus at the start of His ministry, when He picked up Isaiah’s scroll and read to the poor people of Nazareth:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19 CEB)

Or, as Charles Wesley would put it:

His law is love and His gospel is peace; Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, And in His name all oppression shall cease.

That is something we can also do, one small moment at a time.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I’m sorry to say that I was not very familiar with Saint Thomas Becket (also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury) until recently. He’s quite an important English saint with a famous memorial altar in Canterbury Cathedral that marks the spot of his martyrdom (seen in the header image). His shrine is also the place to which the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are traveling and sharing their stories. The liturgist Richard Giles feels that Saint Thomas should be the patron saint of England.

Thomas Becket (sometimes “Thomas a Becket”) was the archbishop of Canterbury in the late 1100s. He was the son of a Norman family and managed, with great ambition, to become a highly valued member of Henry II’s inner court. The king saw an opportunity when Archbishop Theobald Bec died. Henry figured he could appoint a kind of ringer in the senior office of the Church in England, and so he managed to get Thomas appointed—despite the fact that Thomas was not ordained to any clerical office at the time. Within days, Thomas was ordained deacon, priest, then bishop in order to take charge of the archbishopric. He came to this office in the midst of a time when the English monarchy was attempting to both exert further control over the church and gain further independence from Rome. But Thomas had a fairly dramatic conversion experience as a result of his impromptu ordinations and wound up eschewing the vainglory of the royal court in favor of faithfulness to the Church. Once Henry’s close friend, he became a thorn in the side of the king and was regularly opposing him on church-related issues, even threatening excommunication at one point.

The story goes that Henry II, in a fit of frustration (and after Becket had been allowed to return from a multi-year exile in France), exclaimed among some of his advisors and knights “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest” (or some variation of this). Four of his knights took this as an order and made plans to assassinate Saint Thomas in the Cathedral. He was stabbed multiple times while Vespers was being chanted, the events expressed in gory detail by one of the monks wounded in the attack.

There are complicated elements in Saint Thomas’ story that carry overtones we still deal with today. Becket wanted “secular” legal systems to have limited authority over the clergy, preferring that the Church handle its own affairs. Such a practice has come to a head in the early 21st century where we’ve seen that when the Church is left to its own devices in terms of addressing clerical crimes, justice becomes elusive. However, at the same time, we also see the dangers inherent in a system where a government exerts control and influence over the Church. Becket was a champion of the established models of medieval Christendom, where monarchs were understood to be under the authority of the Church, with bishops serving as a kind check on kingly power. Henry II did not want to be held in such check and his frustrations with this idea ultimately led to the death of a beloved archbishop.

Thomas’ assassination is of a piece with other notable Christian leaders who attempted to challenge worldly power with the power of the gospel. Oscar Romero is one example, assassinated during Mass by right-wing political figures. Martin Luther King Jr. is, of course, another—assassinated because he became a more vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam and was beginning to shift his advocacy toward the exploitation of the working poor. Both saw their stances as being rooted in the gospel.

Thomas is a worthy saint for our consideration and devotion in our time. There is much pressure put on the Church (in all her forms) to capitulate to worldly powers. The radical right movements like MAGA and their ilk are the most current (and perhaps most egregious), but I’ve seen such pressure come from the left-side of things as well. Having grown up in a church quite given to right-wing political and social evils, I’m loathe to see a similar thing happen with more “progressive” churches like the Episcopal Church, where subscription to partisan talking points becomes seen as synonymous with “the gospel.” Indeed, I am of the conviction that faithfulness to Jesus Christ and His gospel will result in frustration from all forms of political partisanship. Jesus is one who disturbs worldly power, not one who makes it feel comfortable. If the Venn Diagram of one’s partisan politics and their theology is a circle, there’s a problem.

It is said that Thomas was prayerful and pious even as he was being struck by the swords. When the knights entered the cathedral, the monks wanted to bolt themselves in the sacristy for safety but Thomas would not let them. “It is not right to make a house of prayer into a fortress,” he said. After the third blow with a sword, one of the survivors of the attack recalled Becket as saying: “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death.”

Saint Thomas of Canterbury was willing to face death rather than capitulate; choosing the assassin’s blade over easy comforts provided by temporal power. When his body was removed from the nave of the cathedral and his episcopal vestments removed, his fellow monks discovered that Thomas wore a hair shirt underneath it all—a garment of great discomfort and used for spiritual discipline and penance. It was a sign of the deep devotion this man had. Do I have the same level of devotion? Do you? How willing are we to hold to the gospel that’s been handed down to us in the face of pressure, coercion, even death? This is a challenging question.

Faithfulness is not always easy. Saint Thomas, like Saint John and Saint Stephen before him, testifies to this fact. The powers of this world are more than ready to execute anyone in service of their claims to power—the testimony of which Saint Thomas shares with the Holy Innocents.

Again, the Christmas season is not all garlands, tinsel, gifts, and lights. It is also blood and travail. This dichotomy is quite strikingly expressed in the hauntingly gorgeous Christmas hymn “A stable lamp is lighted.” I have us sing this hymn every Christmas Eve as a reminder that Christmas leads us to Easter, but we have Good Friday as an unavoidable stop along the way. The first verse of the hymn is a beautiful exposition on the Nativity story:

A stable lamp is lighted whose glow shall wake the sky; the stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, and straw like gold shall shine; a barn shall harbour heaven, a stall become a shrine.

But the third verse takes us to Calvary:

Yet he shall be forsaken, and yielded up to die; the sky shall groan and darken, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry for gifts of love abused; God's blood upon the spearhead, God's blood again refused.

The saints of the first week of Christmas embody this tragic element. The babe in the manger will ultimately, despite His dedicated following and popularity, be rejected because He usurps the status quo, overturns the way-things-are. Certain people will “come and adore Him” only to a point. So long as He stays in that manger, things are fine. It’s only when He grows and enters a house of prayer to drive out corruption that certain people begin to reconsider their love and commitment of Him.

The final verse of “A stable lamp is lighted” offers us a powerful closing word:

But now, as at the ending, the low is lifted high; the stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry in praises of the child by whose descent among us the worlds are reconciled.

In the end, as Saint John testified, the way-things-are will ultimately fall away to a world made as new. The sorts of powers that kill innocents and saints will be unmade and the world will be set as it was made to be.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Church #England #Episcopal #Anglican #Christian #Theology #History

I was first really exposed to the Christian commemorations of the Holy Innocents thanks to a church name. Holy Innocents Episcopal Church outside Atlanta, to be exact. I visited that church and liked the architecture and liturgy and it inspired me to learn more about a story I had known since childhood but seldom dwelt on—much less saw as a focus of devotion.

It’s a story that largely gets left out of our Christmas commemorations in the Episcopal Church, partly because it is such a horrible story (and likely partly due to the more modern doubt of the story’s historical accuracy, which we’ll talk about in a bit). No one wants to follow up Christmas morning with a service about the mass-murdering of children.

At the same time, especially this year, this is a highly relevant story. Tragically, all over the world, politicians are playing like Herod and systematically executing anyone they deem a threat—including children.

Holy Innocents, also known Childermas, commemorates an event that, in all likelihood, never happened. Josephus, an important Jewish historian, took great care to showcase the brutalities of the Herodians and never once mentioned a mass slaughter of children. Outside of the gospel of Matthew there are no other historical accounts of this story and it seems likely to be something meant by the evangelist as a means to make connections between Jesus and Moses, a common theme throughout that particular gospel. So what are we to make of this fact? That we not only have a day marked on our calendar but also name churches and schools for an event that probably never happened?

This is one of the tough parts of reading the Bible. It’s not always “factual” in the ways to which we are accustomed today. Nevertheless, elements that we deem “fictional” can have a huge impact on our faith and wind up speaking Truth despite their (in)accuracy.

Consider the typical Christmas pageant. Aside from Mary, Joseph, a baby, angels, and some shepherds most of the story we dramatize is completely fictional and not related to what is written in the Bible. We tend to think of the birth of Jesus as being an event that culminates after Mary and Joseph, alone on a donkey, have gone to every house or inn in Bethlehem and been told “no vacancy” and so set up shop in a nearby stable. But none of the gospels mention a donkey and we’re only told that there was no room in “the inn”—nothing at all about conversations with inn-keepers or a door-to-door journey. Further, given the nature of the census, there was probably a caravan of people traveling to Bethlehem and others taking residence among the livestock because Bethlehem was not prepared for such an influx of extra people. What we think of when we think of the Christmas story is largely fictional, but that doesn’t mean there’s not truth in those elements. We crafted those details over the centuries in order to “flesh out” the story a bit, to give it the sort of texture that it invites. And those added details speak much of the faith and mindset of the church that crafted them.

The same is true of the Massacre of the Innocents. It might not have happened, but it’s very telling that no one finds the story improbable. There might not be any records to back it up, but the story sounds like the sort of thing Herod would have done—indeed, the sort of thing that rulers all over the world and all over our history books have done.

The sort of government that gleefully cancels aid and assistance to poor countries is acting like Herod. The one that uses starvation, particularly of children, as a weapon of retaliation is acting like Herod. The political entities that travel throughout villages to murder women and children are the ones acting like Herod.

The actual Herod may not have ordered a campaign to murder the children of Bethlehem out of some fear of losing power, but Herod for sure murdered plenty of children and other innocents during his reign out of a sense that because he was in charge he could do so—without any fear of God. And in this, Herod is an archetype. Plenty of gilded so-called rulers kill innocents in the name of preserving their name on the side of buildings. If they were honest, they do so out of a desire to kill the God that they are not.

Yesterday’s saint records Jesus saying “If the world hates you, know that it hated me first.” The poet Dianne di Prima says in her poem, “Rant” that “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed by it.” I tend to think that it’s more the case that all hatred is subsumed in hatred for Jesus and, therefore, all wars are the Battle of Armageddon, the war against Christ Himself.

If the story behind Holy Innocents is fictional, then it is worth asking what it is we’re commemorating this day. I think the answer is simple: Holy Innocents commemorates all children sacrificed on the altar of expedience or inconvenience by those in power attempting to cast themselves as gods. Those killed by starvation from the abrupt end to programs like USAID or in Gaza by the Israeli government. Those killed by radicals in Somalia and Sudan. Those dying thanks to bombs dropped on Ukraine. And that’s only looking at what’s currently happened in the news in recent weeks. These are who we commemorate on Holy Innocents. The gospel story is subsumed in the stories we see right now, and is itself reflective of those stories. The gospel story helps us Christians see the shape of the story happening around us, helps us in remembering where our allegiance lies.

Herod is the one who oversees the death of innocents. Christ is the one who sees them as holy.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christmas #HolyInnocents #History #Theology #Church #Christianity #War #Gaza #Ukraine

I have no discernible reason for it, but I have always loved Saint John the Evangelist. Since childhood he has been my favorite apostle, and his gospel among my favorite books of the Bible (Revelation, sometimes purported to be written by him, is my absolute favorite, if you must know). I used to have these thoughts that maybe I was related to him in some way (I was in second grade and a very strange child). I think it’s because he was spoken of as Jesus’ closest friend and I wanted to be that too.

Saint John, according to both the Bible and the tradition that helps us understand it, was one of two brothers who were fisherman, working for their dad, Zebedee. His brother James and he were part of Jesus’ inner circle, which also included Saint Peter. If memory serves, they were among the first five disciples called by Jesus (Andrew and Nathaniel being the others). Among the famous stories involving John is one where he wants to call thunder and lightning down on Jesus’ opponents—which Jesus dismisses—and granting him and James the nickname “the Sons of Thunder.”

If you subscribe to the view that the gospel of John was written by this Saint John (and given that our feast day is called “the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist,” Episcopal tradition does hold to this view, despite the long-standing controversy around that gospel’s authorship), then you’ll know that John was the one entrusted to care for Mary, Jesus’ mother, after the crucifixion and that he was privy to some elements of Jesus’ life that other evangelists were not (further, since we don’t actually know where the quotes in John 3 end, John may have been the one to pen the words of the most famous verse of the Bible—John 3:16—despite most “red letter” Bibles treating them as Jesus’ words).

John’s gospel has long stood out among the other four canonical gospels.

The other three gospels are called the “Synoptics” and contain a lot of overlapping material, whereas John has a lot of unique material as well as stories told in different orders (Jesus cleanses the temple in Jerusalem at the very beginning of His ministry, rather than near His arrest, for instance; John also includes the foot-washing but not the institution of the Eucharist at the last supper). Why is this? Well, scholars have their ideas (of course), but the longer tradition of the Church has held that John penned his gospel while he was in exile.

See, John was the only apostle to not be martyred. This was not for lack of trying. My church growing up had this weird poster in the library that showed how all the apostles were martyred. I used to look at John’s story all the time: he was stoned to death, but survived; he was thrown in boiling oil, but came out unscathed; since the dude could not be killed, the authorities exiled him to an island called Patmos, where he managed to keep on living and grew old; the authorities eventually just gave up on the old man and let him back into Asia Minor where he lived until his 90s and then died of old age.

The tradition holds that it was during those years of exile that he wrote. He wrote three letters, and a gospel, and then recorded the holy visions he had and mailed them to the churches he’d overseen (the visions collected into a volume the author himself called the Revelation of Jesus Christ—or, “Apocalypse” in his own language). This view helps explain why John is so different from the Synoptics. He had the other gospels and wanted to fill in blanks, or shift events around to help the Church see things from a different perspective (remember, ancient histories were not as concerned with what today think of as “accuracy”). Further, he had a lifetime of prayer and reflection under his belt and so wrote the most extensive theology about Jesus being God that had been written by that point (found in the first chapter of his gospel).

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Saint Stephen, a key theme of the days between Christmas and the feast of the Holy Name is suffering. Stephensmas and Johnsmas (I have no idea if that’s an accurate term) provide a degree of juxtaposition: we have one of the shortest saint’s lives held alongside one of the longest. Both are equally dedicated in their faith, articulate in their view of who Jesus is.

John also teaches us a way to see turmoil as a blessing. Patmos was supposed to be a place of agony and slow death. Instead, John saw it as a chance to reflect, pray, and record. He was likely the last living person who’d actually seen Jesus with his own eyes. He wanted to give the world a deeper view of Jesus—the Jesus he knew, the Jesus he loved.

Saint John spent a lifetime seeing the horrors of humanity. He stood at the foot of Jesus’ cross, after having witnessed Him being scourged. He lived through the violent deaths of his closest friends, all monstrously killed because of their faith in Jesus, His forgiveness of sins, and His promise of resurrection. He also saw that things were going to get worse. He saw the writing on the wall, as it were (to employ language from another apocalyptic figure). But on the other side of that, he saw that God’s love stands victorious. A day is coming, he writes, where “mourning, crying, and pain are no more.” A day where all things have been made as though they are new.

John reminds us that the Incarnation never ended. That God has made His home with us and that, in the end, the day will come where we will see that fact plainly:

Then the angel showed me the river of life-giving water, shining like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the middle of the city’s main street. On each side of the river is the tree of life, which produces twelve crops of fruit, bearing its fruit each month. The tree’s leaves are for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. Night will be no more. They won’t need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will shine on them, and they will rule forever and always.

Then he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place. (Revelation 22:1-7 CEB)

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

By now my parishioners know that I love to share little historical anecdotes from time to time. Like my twice-annual explanation for why we might wear pink rose vestments in Advent and Lent. Or my contention that the conception of Jesus happened during the events celebrated during the Feast of the Visitation and not the Anunciation (the Magnificat being the outward sign that the Holy Spirit had filled Saint Mary). One such anecdote involves a beloved hymn heard during the Christmas shopping season: “Good King Wenceslas,” the brass melody an easy short-hand for demonstrating on film that it is Christmastime (the first shot of the toy store in Home Alone 2 comes to mind). And of course this.

“Good King Wenceslas” is, technically, not a Christmas hymn. It is, properly, a hymn for Stephensmas (to use the old English term for the Feast of Saint Stephen the Martyr). The hymn itself recounts the story of a beloved and saintly king who, on “the Feast of Stephen,” one bitterly cold and snow-laden, braved the elements to bring fuel and supplies to a poor man. The tune, which sounds like it was generated in a lab to be a Christmas carol, was actually written for a song meant to be sung at Easter.

Anyway, this is an overlong introduction to talk about Saint Stephen, whose feast day is today and marks the first of the daily commemorations for the first week of Christmas, through the Feast of the Holy Name (which coincides with our New Years celebrations in the Western Christian tradition). Saint Stephen is the “protomartyr,” the first Christian to be executed for the crime of being Christian. He was among the first deacons in the church (called alongside Saint Philip, among others) and was stoned to death after testifying about Jesus before the high council of Jewish religious leaders (also known as the Sanhedrin).

Different church traditions hold to different dates to commemorate Saint Stephen. In Western traditions (of which the Episcopal Church is part) the custom has been to commemorate him on the day after Christmas, perhaps as a means to mark that his death was a kind of birth itself, the Christian faith beginning to coalesce into a definable movement of its own and not simply a movement happening only within Judaism. Stephen’s death inspires a radicalized rabbi named Saul of Tarsus to begin a process of systemic elimination of “the Way” (as Christians were known back then), thus fostering closer ties among the nascent Christian movement as well as distance between them and their own people (remember, at this time all Christians were Jews). Further, the death of Saint Stephen elucidated our understanding of the Incarnation—not only is Christ enfleshed among and within us, but our flesh is subject to the same violence and suffering experienced by Jesus. The broken flesh and shed blood of the eucharistic bread and wine prefigure our own breaking and shedding-of-blood as well as that of Christ Jesus. As the old Augustinian fraction anthem puts it: “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out for you; behold what you are, become what you receive.”

This all sets a tone for us Christian that we are often quick to forget: a faith that holds to the Incarnation hardly results in a faith that has guarantees of wealth and comfort. Indeed, the Incarnation expects that we be willing to give up creature comforts and conveniences (said by a Christian who lives quite comfortably in comparison to much of the world).

To invite the Incarnate God into our midst is to invite suffering and rejection.

All of the saints commemorated during these next several days speak to that fact: Saint John the Evangelist, the Holy Innocents, Saint Thomas a Becket. We don’t have official commemorations on the 30th, but we will be exploring the life of Saint Anysia of Thessalonica, a saint in Eastern Christianity that is remembered on that day. These are all either martyrs or exiles, rejected and killed because they accepted that God was born in a manger and that He chose to save us from ourselves.

And much of this begins with Stephen. His testimony in Acts 7 is confrontational, but the major point he tries to make is that God is not relegated to a resplendent temple in Jerusalem. Rather, God has chosen His home among us, among the things He has made. We have God in our midst, but those who claim religious authority tend to miss that fact and use violence to silence those who make that point. These were, in effect, Stephen’s last words before irony was lost and he was killed with rocks.

As we live in the liminal time between Christmas and New Years, spending time with family and friends and perhaps even exchanging gifts still, we would do well to remember that there are those huddled together because bombs are dropping on them in Ukraine, or militants are hunting them in Nigeria or Sudan, or they are cold and starving in Gaza. They are hiding from ICE, or bound together in an internment facility. Such was Stephen, in a jail cell until his interrogation, the day after Christmas.

God came to us incarnate. That incarnation happened among those who suffer. And even in the midst of that suffering, seeing the faces of those who hate us, we might be able to join Saint Stephen and say:

Look! I can see heaven on display and the Human One standing at God’s right side! Lord Jesus, accept my life! Lord, don’t hold this sin against them!

... The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I've decided that I have been in need of a more disciplined life. Even though I surf, I don't really do much else in terms of exercise. Added to that, I've been in a kind of funk in regards to the priesthood—meaning that I have frequently found myself not as excited about the life of the priesthood as I otherwise have been. All “jobs” have their ups and downs and so I don't think this is something of which to be too concerned. At the same time, I have been seeking out ways in which to enliven my own sense of vocation.

Saitama of One Punch Man fame inspired me on the exercise front. I introduced my eldest son to the show while he was home sick recently and we both got really curious about the whole “100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats, 10 km run” daily regiment (if you've not seen the show, I dare not spoil anything and so I will offer no other context). While I was not about to go that extreme, I did give 50 squats a try and experienced probably my first ever exercise high. So I've taken on the discipline of doing 50 squats a day as an initial step toward better overall health.

When it comes to my spiritual exercise, I was reminded of the need to say the Daily Office. In the Church of England, clergy are required to say Morning and Evening Prayer every day. We Episcopalian clergy are not under the same requirements, probably to our detriment. When I was a rector and school chaplain, around half a decade ago, living on a school campus, I had a daily custom of sitting on a bench at the side of a pond and saying Morning Prayer with my prayer rope and a mug of coffee. These were spiritually rich experiences and I realized that I had neglected the habit, much to my detriment. So now I've begun getting back into the routine of saying Morning Prayer, straight from the Book of Common Prayer.

I'd argue that the Daily Office (that collection of services in the Prayer Book that mark the hours of the day: Morning Prayer, Noonday, Evening Prayer, and Compline) contains the most distinctly Anglican aspects of our religion. The Eucharist is absolutely presented in a particular, Anglican way. However, the nature of the Eucharist is truly “catholic” thus has moments that are common to many Christian traditions. The Daily Office, on the other hand, feels profoundly ours. At least it does for me.

The Office makes extensive use of the Psalms. It is frequently the case that appointed psalms are more lengthy than those of the Eucharistic services. For many years I had a distaste for the psalms, heartily agreeing with “God” as depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

*“...and those miserable psalms...”

But I've really come around on the Psalms the more I read them. The language is rich and I can see how much of an impact they have had not only on the wider scriptures, but on the liturgical language of our Church as well. Also, given how often they speak critically of the wealthy and upliftingly of the marginalized, I've begun to wonder if there's any correlation between those who pray regularly with the Psalms and those who deeply oppose what is happening in the current regime occupying (and demolishing) the White House. But that's a discussing for another time, perhaps.

This is all to say that Morning Prayer has reminded me of the richness and beauty of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and makes me lament a bit the direction in which we've gone—not only as Episcopalians, but as Anglicans globally. Because I can't help but notice that we Anglicans have, for the past fifty years, have been experiencing our most fracture-prone period of time in Anglican history and that this has coincided with a trend away from a Book of Common Prayer and more toward “common prayer” being an authorized library of resources. I also can't help but notice that such a shift is deeply “contra” to the Anglican ethos and has seemed to foster a chain reaction of trying to redefine anti-Anglican things as Anglican. And we happen to see this latter notion far more prominently from the “conservative” wing of global Anglicanism, those one would assume are more interested in being very Anglican.

***

A strange thing can happen in the Episcopal Church: one can live their lives in an Episcopal parish, even as a priest, and never engage with the Book of Common Prayer. There are so many authorized resources that one can make use of liturgies for every walk of life and never once put a hand on what we call the BCP. Now, a recent ruling of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (the main legislative body of our denomination) has passed a first-read resolution to change our canons to say that, in effect, the term “Book of Common Prayer” is inclusive of all authorized liturgies as they currently stand. This was done largely to address a problem presented by same-sex marriage being authorized in the Episcopal Church (see note at the end). If this passes the second reading at the next General Convention, then the Book of Common Prayer ceases to be a book and instead becomes something far more nebulous. The problem with this, from my perspective, is that such a thing runs counter to maybe the most foundational aspect of Anglican Christianity, what I call “elegant simplicity.”

See, the Book of Common Prayer is maybe the most impactful document to come out of the Reformation-era aside from vernacular translations of the Bible. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward I (and martyred by Mary Tudor) did something truly remarkable. As I once heard Bishop Neil Alexander put it, Cranmer took a look at all the various books of the Church at the time and saw a key problem: there were different books for different people. The monks had their breviaries, the priests had sacramentaries, and the laity had some devotional books. What Cranmer did was take all the books around the Church, simplify them, consolidate them, translate them from Latin into English, and then gave them to everyone. So that both laity and clergy had the same book from which to draw—and this fostered a degree of transparency. The laity could now read for themselves what the priests and bishops were saying at the altar. But the central idea was that all Christians in the Church of England would be shaped by this particular resource, which in turn would also streamline and simplify the excesses of late-Medieval Western Christianity, giving us all—whether lay or ordained—a language of prayer that was “common.”

This helps further shape a key aspect of what it means to be Anglican: we are a people who believe most deeply in the practice and enactment of our beliefs. The Book of Common Prayer is, in effect, an explicit interpretation/application of scripture. Whereas, if you want to know what a Catholic believes you read the Catechism, or any number of Protestant beliefs are found in Confessions, knowing what an Anglican believes is found in worshiping with us. Our liturgies serve as our statements of belief. And this fact gets muddled the more we add options to the mix. Because this then fosters a divided Church, an Anglican Church with no sense of what is in “common.”

***

I want to be clear: this is not a screed against revision. Rather, it is a call against expedience and in favor of the difficult work of faithful revision. An Anglican Church without an actual bound volume known as the Book of Common Prayer is not an Anglican Church. It is instead a Church with a sort of vague “ethos” termed “Anglican.” In an increasingly dis-incarnating world rife with constant revision for revision's sake, a digital world, an analog approach is a form of faithful resistance. We Anglicans are deeply incarnational Christians, which necessitates a practice of intermittent liturgical revision. But such a practice is done to better enflesh the Gospel in the current generation, not to provide “preferences.” Preferences give ground to schism and apathy. Common prayer is a treasury from which we draw, holding us accountable to both each other and the Gospel that we have received.

Further, this is not a call for a single, universal Book of Common Prayer. A key part of our Anglican tradition is the revising of the Prayer Book in each autonomous province. Again, this is not in service of creating preferences, but in fostering what Anglican “common” prayer looks and sounds like in different cultural contexts. Episcopalians making use of the New Zealand Prayer Book is a problem because New Zealand's Prayer Book is for New Zealand's Anglican Christians. We can learn from that book and make use of things as part of our revision. But adopting it because we “prefer” the language of it is a tricky thing that, in my experience, teeters on the edge of cultural appropriation.

***

Matthew SC Oliver has written an excellent and raw letter to the conservative movement known as the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). A conservative himself, he argues that what GAFCON is ultimately espousing is something decidedly not Anglican. He notes that both GAFCON's view of the Bible and its understanding of the governance of the Church are innovative and not grounded in historical Anglicanism. I think he is absolutely right here, and I am not in theological agreement with much of what Father Oliver believes (though I highly admire his thinking and approach to how he believes what he believes—he's more of a “classical” Christian than a conservative, this latter term tending to be defined more by so-called “culture war” issues than any actual conserving). And this presents the fact that both “conservatives” and “liberals” in the Anglican Communion are guilty of the same things: moving beyond what defines us as Anglicans in order to achieve some particular goal, while trying to redefine “Anglicanism” to suit those purposes.

For me, this is the inevitable result of providing options and preferences rather than a commitment to common prayer. We are breaking up as a global communion of churches because we began breaking up on a local level. We abandoned common language, which then gave rise to an abandonment of common belief. As the well-worn saying goes “praying shapes believing.” Prayer that is uncommon shapes uncommon beliefs, thus undercutting what makes us Anglican on a fundamental level.

***

In his own preface to the Book of Common Prayer that he himself translated into ka ʻolelo Hawaiʻi (the language of the Hawaiian people), his late majesty King Kamehameha IV draws from Saint Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth, noting that a resource such as the Prayer Book is in service of what the Apostle teaches about orderliness. He writes:

In many places in the Word of God we are shown how established a thing it is that the Lord is to be worshipped in this way [referring to “common prayer” -ed.], that is to say, by offering our praise in one voice, by singing hymns in common, by saying prayers already prepared that all may pray in concert. At midnight, Paul and Silas prayed and sang Psalms unto God within the prison, and the prisoners heard them. (Acts xvi. 25.) And how should they have heard had those two not prayed together and in an audible voice? And how could their prayer have been otherwise than confused had it not been prepared beforehand and got by heart, so that their prayers and their praises were as one? This also coincides with what the Apostle Paul taught the Corinthians in more places than a few in his Epistles to them. The fourteenth chapter of his first Epistle to that people is full of his teachings on this particular subject and of the way in which worship ought to be offered, and how he was astounded at the multiplicity of their prayers and confusion of their worship: “How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a Psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.” Furthermore at the end of the chapter he gives this particular injunction: “Let all things be done decently and in order.” Not only are praises and thanksgivings to God to be dutifully prepared beforehand, but prayers also.

He continues later:

We are commanded to join in public worship, and should we meet, each one of us to choose his own particular prayer, or some to sing Psalms, some to declare a doctrine, and some to prophesy, we should be very like those Corinthians satirized by Saint Paul.

His majesty is writing to commend this form of worship over and against the Congregationalists in Hawai'i, who were the first to establish churches in the Kingdom of Hawai'i and who his majesty held deep distrust (since they also held significant economic control). He saw how each congregation worshiped in their own ways (hence the name). He recognized that aforementioned axiom: “praying shapes believing.” He wanted a Church for his people that would give them their own common prayer, knowing that such a thing is of crucial importance. In his own words, imagining a worshipper at a church that holds no common prayer (emphasis mine):

Alas for this would-be supplicant who could not pray to God, because he did not know what turn the prayer would take! because his heart was not as the minister's heart, and his needs were not those which the man put up to pray expressed; because no use was made of prayers prepared beforehand by those who knew of old the common wants of man — of prayers bequeathed to us by those we rightly call the Fathers of the Church; and because prayers which satisfy every mind and find at every repetition a new birth in every heart were unemployed. The prayers having been prepared of old, the Psalms ordered, the hymns sanctioned, the rites and offices authoritatively established, then, indeed, we can worship with all our mind, and all our heart, and all our strength; none can get up and offer crude supplications for things of no common interest; but on the contrary, we go to church knowing what the prayers will be and that they will convey to Heaven all our desires, yet nothing more.

Later,

The Church has not left us to go by one step from darkness into the awful presence and brightness of God, but it has prepared for our use prayers to meet the necessities of every soul, whether they be used in public or in private.

Such is the general character of this Book of Common Prayer now offered to the people of Hawaii.

Again, uncommon prayer shapes uncommon belief. It abandons the sort of common life that the gospel calls us to live. Common prayer is a gift to be received, put to use, to shape us and hold us accountable even as we engage in the work of faithful revision. Common prayer is deeply Anglican. Preferential prayer is not.

In other words, say your prayers.

***

Note: The BCP's rubrics, the little italicized notes found throughout the book, are canonically binding statements and are meant to reflect the “official” teaching of the Church. The rubrics of the Marriage liturgy denote that marriage is reserved for a man and a woman. Changing that language is complicated and would require multiple meetings of General Convention. However, the resolution that recognized the blessing of same-sex marriages was accompanied by an alternative marriage liturgy. And so, in order to address the issue in a more timely manner (and all in the midst of a process toward an entirely new Book of Common Prayer) it was suggested that we broaden the definition of what the BCP is, rather than wrangle over a single page of the book. At least that's my understanding of this.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

This morning, I finally got around to reading 404Mediaʻs piece on Christians and AI slop, when I came across this curious line: “The fear among Christians is that if they don't immediately jump onto a technology they're going to be left behind.”

This is a true statement about (certain) Christians, but is curious when we theologize about the “left behind” part.

The phrase “left behind” is a loaded phrase in (certain) Christian circles. It largely entered the evangelical sphere in the 1970s as a result of a truly weird (and kinda great) evangelical horror film (you read that correctly) entitled A Thief In the Night. The film opens with a theme song entitled “I Wish Weʻd All Been Ready” by Larry Norman, an evangelical artist that Andrew Beaujon describes as “profoundly weird” in his book on Christian rock, Body Piercing Saved My Life. The song features a refrain well-known to my generation of evangelicals: “Thereʻs no time/ to change your mind/ the Son has come/ and youʻve been left behind.” This lyric, and its association with A Thief in the Night, eventually led to it inspiring the title of another series of books and films well-known to (certain) Christians: the infamous Left Behind series.

They even got Nic Cage in one of them!

The origin of the phrase “left behind” in this case originates from the Matthean Apocalypse, a small section of Matthewʻs gospel where Jesus reveals (what the term “apocalypse” actually means) a prophecy of the future:

At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. (Matthew 24:40-42, Common English Bible)

This passage is first thing one sees in the film A Thief in the Night and summarizes the gist of contemporary evangelical theology regarding the end-of-all-things: one day, without warning, Christ will appear in the heavens and in an instant call all Christians (first the dead, then those still living) into the clouds and take them off to heaven (an event known as the Rapture), leaving behind those who did not accept Jesus as savior to suffer through something known as the Great Tribulation, in a world ruled by a figure called the Antichrist. So, for a couple of generations now, evangelicals have been utterly terrified of the concept of being “left behind.”

The 404Media article rightly notes that evangelical Christians have consistently been at the cutting edge of new media technologies. This is because, owing to the immediacy of Rapture theology, there is an impetus for ensuring that the “gospel” gets proclaimed to as many people as possible in order to ensure that as many people as possible can escape the Great Tribulation. However, this immediacy cuts in a different direction as well, experienced also by the evangelical obsession with “relevance.” If the goal of being on the bleeding edge of technology is to “win” as many souls as possible, then this becomes a numbers game. The result recasts the church in the image of modern capitalistic businesses focused on growth for growth's sake. As such, the fear of being “left behind” is both a fear for one's own soul, but also a fear of losing influence in a capitalistic marketplace—which is perhaps why there's so much fear over the “decline” of the Church in the Western (read capitalistic) world.

But here's the thing: the entire notion is the result of a profound misreading of Matthew's gospel, one that is so painfully obvious to border on oblivious. You see, Jesus wants us to be “left behind.”

Take a look at the relevant passage in a bit wider context:

As it was in the time of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Human One. In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. The coming of the Human One will be like that. At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. Therefore, stay alert! You don’t know what day the Lord is coming. But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house. Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know. (Matthew 24:37-44, Common English Bible—note also that the title of A Theif in the Night comes from this passage)

So Jesus uses Noah as His reference point here. And what happened with Noah? Well, according to Genesis, he built a boat called an ark because God forewarned him that a global flood was coming. He gathered animals from all over the world and put them on the boat so that they would be preserved and then he and his family entered the boat and awaited the rain. Eventually the flood waters came and did what flood waters do: they swept everyone else away. And so, who was left behind? Noah, the righteous man, and his family.

Somewhere along the way, the image of this story was inverted in order to fit with Rapture theology. In the Rapture re-telling, the righteous believers are swept away and the wicked are left behind.

In some ways, elements of the evangelical view remain (someone is on the wrong side of event and so, as with fortifying a house to prevent a thief from stealing, the evangelical impulse to prevent calamity from befalling others is still valid). However, the thrust of the view drastically changes. It's less about keeping ahead of the floodwaters and more about riding out the storm.

The problem with the fear of being left behind, in both terms of salvation and society, is that it fosters numerous problems for Christianity. The constant need to be relevant and keeping up with societal innovation winds up leading the Church to easily abandon crucial traditions, traditions that make Christianity intelligible, as well as leaving room for dangerous heresies and abuses to take root. As I wrote recently, the abandoning of tradition frequently leads to monstrous behaviors on behalf of people.

Saint Paul writes to the church in Ephesus:

God’s goal is for us to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. As a result, we aren’t supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to deliberately mislead others. (Ephesians 4:13-14, Common English Bible)

I believe that the reason so many of us Christians wind up getting taken in by charlatans and swindlers is due to us allowing a fear of being left behind to define us. And so we wind up getting caught in the floodwaters of our contemporary chaos, being “tossed and blown around.” No, as the old hymn declares, “On Christ the solid rock I stand.” Our vocation as Christians is to be a steady presence that represents God through Christ to the world. We're not supposed to be chasing the latest trend, even if we dress it up in church-y language and saying that it is God's work.

I went through seminary and was ordained in the midst of social media's advent. I was taught, over and over, that I had a certain obligation to use sites like Facebook for the sake of saving the Church from decline because “that's where people are now.” Then it was Twitter, Snapchat, then Instagram, then TikTok... The irony is that I was being taught this by people who loathed the excesses of modern capitalism and declared the importance of environmental stewardship but who never once seemed bothered by the fact that telling every congregation and priest to have a Facebook account was doing little more than furthering the wealth addiction of people like Mark Zuckerberg—not to mention exhausting us with the constant need to keep up and guilting us with FOMO nonsense—while also leading to the obscene levels of resource consumption resulting from ever increasing data center construction.

For too long the Church has let itself be defined by fear. Fear of being left behind, and all the many ways that that idea can cut. But the scriptures remind us of a truth: “perfect love casts out fear.”

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. (I John 4:18, Common English Bible)

If we truly love God and want His love to extend through us to others, for the sake of the gospel and making new Christians, then we cannot be fearful—of being left behind or anything else. A first step for remembering this is accepting that we know the end: we're supposed to be left behind. Once we accept that, we're free.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

NOTE: This contains some spoiler material for the new Superman film.

I’ve loved Superman for as long as I can remember. My mom once speculated that he stood in as a kind of surrogate father for me (since I never met my biological father). Maybe. What I do know is that I carried a Superman action figure (from Kenner’s famous Super Powers line) with me everywhere for several years in my early childhood and insisted on having a red cape attached to my shirts. I even wore a red cape when I learned to swim, convinced that the cape gave me the power to do so.

Superman III and the Fleischer cartoons were among my favorite Superman things at the time. I’ve seen pretty much every iteration of Superman that has been committed to film and, in my late-twenties to mid-thirties, was an avid comic book reader (my favorite has since become the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, especially Geoff Johns’ excellent run with the character, but I digress). I adored Henry Cavill’s iteration of Superman, even if the scripts of his films were iffy (I maintain that the first trailer for Man of Steel is the best cinematic depiction of Superman—I still want to see the movie hinted at by that trailer, because the one we got was… well, complicated). Which is all to say that James Gunn’s new Superman is, in my estimation, a great Superman film. At times it feels a little bloated, but the earnestness and bold embrace of the corny Silver-Age aspects of Superman—not to mention the lived-in feel of the new DC universe—make up for its short-comings. I mean, any film that is willing to give me a bowl-cut Guy Gardner that dismisses scores of tanks with glowing green middle fingers is one that earns high marks in my book.

But The Catechetic Converter is not here to be a film review site. We’re here to theologize on the “odd bit(s) of pop-culture.” And a film that features 30’s-inspired “Superman Robots,” Metamorpho as a serious character, a rambunctious space-dog wearing a cape, and Nathan Fillion playing a Green Lantern with all the arrogance of a dude unapologetically sporting a platinum bowl-cut is for sure an odd bit of pop-culture.

***

Superman, as has been well-attested by now, was created by two Jewish kids during the Great Depression. Much ink has been shaped into words about the Jewish influence on Superman—even though he is canonically presented as a Methodist (the most Kansas of Christian denominations). Over the years, Superman has moved a bit from his more Golem-like characteristics and into a much more (Christian) messiah-like figure. This came to a particular apex with Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (where Superman literally dies and rises again) and, much more explicitly, with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (where Superman takes on the shape of the corpus Christi as he descends to Earth, right after his invisible, alien—that is, “lives in the heavens”—father tells him to be humanity’s hope and salvation and inspire them to be their best). This, of course, has prompted controversy, even suggesting that this smacks of the sort of “supersessionism” that sees Christianity as a kind of replacement for Judaism—and therefore an appropriation and redefining of Jewish symbols for Christian ends.

James Gunn tones down the “mythology” on Superman. By which I mean his Superman is a much more “human” figure and not the mythic being advanced by Zack Snyder’s vision for the character. Yes, his Superman is a character that feels the weight of responsibility toward humanity. But this weight is not cast as some form of divine calling. Rather, it comes more from within. Clark is simply an earnest and kind person, gifted with incredible powers, and feels it is his obligation to use those powers to keep people safe and stand for justice. Nevertheless, this is a Superman of faith.

Clark, or in this case, Kal-El, is seen as someone who treats a message from his Kryptonian parents as a kind of scripture. But there’s a catch: the message is incomplete. What Clark has of the message he interprets as instructions to be a source of help to the people of Earth. He believes that he was sent to Earth not only for his survival, but to be an inspiration. And so he intervenes in international conflicts above his pay-grade and without the guidance or permission of government entities. He also takes time to rescue squirrels during giant monster rampages and laments when other “metahumans” kill that same giant monster with impunity (preferring instead to either take it somewhere safe or to euthanize it as painlessly as possible). But the rest of his Kryptonian parents’ message is hidden, a mystery.

In word, apocryphal.

***

I don’t know if it was intentional, but there’s a sort of cheeky subversion of the “supersessionist” trope at play in Superman. For many who call themselves Christian, there’s an attitude that Jews live their life having only “half” the story. Given the Jewish roots of Superman, Clark defining his life based on only half of a message feels like a kind of “in-joke.” Of course, the film gives us the rest of the message and, rather than the “New Testament” of grace and mercy, we get a revelation of merciless autocratic rule, “be fruitful and multiply,” and “subdue the Earth”-type “Old Testament” messages (which, again, feels a bit like an intentional sub- or inversion of well-established religious tropes—the whole “Old vs. New Testament God” thing is a deeply antisemitic notion that goes far too frequently unchecked, a thing I discussed in a video I made not too long ago ).

It’s Lex Luthor who uncovers the rest of the message, using it as part of his long-game plan to destroy Superman. He goes on television to say that Superman’s altruism is all a ploy to groom humanity into trusting him so that he can eventually rule and exploit us.

The original title of this film was Superman: Legacy and the fingerprints of that title linger on the film we have. Superman sees himself as carrying the legacy of Krypton and his Kryptonian parents as he understands that legacy. Further, Luthor is convinced that humanity’s legacy will be lost to an alien in a bright costume. In the comics, this is often depicted as Luthor being either jealous of Superman’s popularity or incredulous that someone as powerful as Superman could be actually altruistic. But following some of the better depictions of Luthor in the comics (like Kingdom Come or Superman: Red Son), Gunn’s Luthor has a kind of deeply twisted sense of altruism. Killing Superman is not so much about feeding into Luthor’s ego for his ego’s sake. Rather, Luthor is convinced that killing Superman is crucial for humanity’s betterment, his ego making him think that he’s the only one able to actually do this. Luthor sees humanity as “human-kind,” a sort of depersonalized whole. Superman sees humanity as people.

Luthor can dehumanize individuals for the sake of “humanity” as a kind of abstraction. Superman, on the other hand, goes so far as to practically humanize a kaiju destroying the city. Both views are the result of conflicting interpretations of Superman’s “mission”—which, incidentally, is about interpreting humanity.

***

The collection of writings we call the “Apocrypha” (or the “Deuterocanonical books”) have a complicated position in global Christianity. Basically, Protestants reject them as being “scripture” while everyone else views them as part of the Bible. Regardless, they provide key connective tissue between the Old and New Testaments, helping us in interpreting the messages of both.

The word “apocryphal” has come to mean “maybe-not-really-true,” owing to the influence of Protestant Christianity on the English language. There is a kind of mysteriousness to things that are “apocryphal.” In nerd-circles, “apocryphal” stories are treated more akin to midrash—stories that are wholly “out of canon,” but still contain accurate notes of what is canon and help to round out or “flesh out” aspects of canonical stories. Actual “apocrypha” is something dependent on interpretation. Apocrypha fills-in-the-gaps, but the canonical quality of Apocrypha is still a matter of discussion.

(As an aside: “Apocrypha” is the term preferred by Protestant Christians. “Deuterocanonical” is preferred by others because the canonicity of these books is not in question—it’s that their canonicity was recognized after-the-fact (the meaning of the “deuter” there). For what it’s worth, I tend to hold to the idea of these books being “Deuterocanonical”—at least some of them.)

This is why I say that the corrupted/missing half of Jor-El’s and Lara Lor-Van’s message to Superman is “apocryphal.” Even before it is recovered, it is both a “gap” and a source of Truth. Superman lives his life based on what he believes that message contains, hopeful that the corrupted half is a continuation of the part he knows. Luthor, on the other hand, treats this other half (once he discovers it) as a sort of gospel. It not only serves his purposes for getting rid of Superman, but he also allows it to confirm what he believes about Superman: that his existence is not in humanity’s best interest as he himself understands it.

And the film itself, perhaps unknowingly, manages to draw from the Apocrypha in ways that speak to all of this, while also better situating Superman in his Jewish roots—in a way that also better informs the Christian embrace of the character.

During the film’s denouement (apparently I’m now the sort of guy who uses a phrase like denouement), Luthor lays out explicitly why he wants to take down Superman. And it isn’t personal jealousy or some personal vendetta (in certain versions, Luthor’s baldness is caused by Superman, which inspires his hatred). No, Luthor exclaims:

I'm aware envy consumes my every waking moment. I know when they mention Galileo or Einstein or one of these other twits in the same breath as me, I feel a tide of vomit burn the back of my throat! But at least Galileo did something. He wasn't some dopey Venusian catapulted onto this planet just to have the world fawn over him! Because his strength illuminates how WEAK we all really are! So, my envy is a calling! It is the sole hope for humanity, because it is what has driven me to annihilating you!

Being the sort of nerd that I am, I immediately recalled the words of the Apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon (also known as the Book of Wisdom):

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training.

He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord.

He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.

We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. (Wisdom 2:12-16, NRSV)

This is a Jewish book, written in Greek, and speaks of the sort of envy that is elicited whenever people living with a sort of status-quo, banal sort of evil are confronted by someone who is genuinely wise and good. Given that the book of Wisdom was likely written as a kind instruction manual for young, ruling-class men, these words are presented as a kind of caution. “Be prepared,” it seems to say, “that when you choose to be good and wise, the wicked of the world will come after you to stifle you.” This is because wisdom and goodness exposes the wickedness of the status quo and this unsettles those who are both accustomed to and benefit from such things. Very early on, Christians embraced this passage as a prophecy about Jesus, He being the “righteous man” who needs to be killed because His goodness is of such a quality as to be “strange” (that is, “alien”), and reveals through stark relief how “base” and sinful the lives of people can be—particularly those who are in positions of power and authority.

Luthor chooses to kill Superman for the same reasons. His earnestness and goodness, his treating of humanity as people and not an abstraction, stands in stark contrast to Luthor’s own arrogance and abstraction of humanity—both as a whole and for himself (because, remember, dehumanization cuts two ways).

***

Christians and Jews both agree that the Messiah is meant to be a figure that embodies/represents God’s chosen people as a whole. The word “Messiah” (Hebrew equivalent to “Christ”) means “chosen.” Israel is presented as God’s “chosen.” Christians, as Saint Paul laboriously argues, are grafted onto Israel, sharing in their story. Which means that there is a messianic quality to the life we all live. We are to live as God’s chosen—for us Christians, this is informed by Jesus and His life.

But this life is fraught. It exposes the wickedness and moral shortcomings (weaknesses) of the world—including our own. This often results in violent backlash. Some of us don’t like being reminded that we fail and need repentance and forgiveness. Such Truth, such Justice is inconvenient—especially to the American Way, it seems these days.

***

Superman is an apocryphal story about apocryphal truth. In keeping with the character’s Jewish roots, he is a man on a mission to embody humanity’s best qualities. And in our world, those qualities seem downright alien.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.