Philippi was an inland city in northern Greece, founded in the fourth century before the Christian Era. The Battle of Philippi fought on the plains west of the city is where Mark Antony and Julius Caesar’s, heir Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, defeated the assassins Brutus and Cassius’s army in the year forty-two Before the Christian Era. After the battle, the city became a Roman colony where soldiers were settled. It was governed under Roman law. It was a place of commerce. Greek and Latin were spoken. Here, Paul, accompanied by Silas and Timothy, gathered the first church community in Europe.[1]

James Hannington was consecrated to be a missionary bishop for Eastern Equatorial Africa of the Church of England. Learning of his arrival on Buganda’s border, a region of the country we know as Uganda, they were captured when they arrived on October 21, 1885.[1] He was killed by spear eight days later.[2]

Lesser Feasts and Fasts is the name of the book the church uses to celebrate optional weekday commemorations; it also has material about the non-optional “Fixed Holy Days.”[1] Since the beginning of the pandemic and the advent of live-streaming, I have been writing out sermons for weekdays. Many biographical and historical sketches in Lesser Feasts and Fasts are substandard in terms of content and accuracy.

Last Sunday, the question for Jesus was, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”[1] Today, the story continues. Jesus and his disciples are still in the temple. The crowds include scribes, Pharisees, and Jesus’ disciples. The next question for Jesus is, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”[2] The law in question, of course, is the Torah, the Law of Moses. In it are 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions.[3]Of course, there have been discussions for thousands of years about understanding and the relative importance of 613 different commandments.

In January 1981, I had an internship for six weeks at the parish where I would end up serving for two years after graduation from seminary, the Church of the Incarnation in Dallas. The 1928 Prayer Book was still in use at the main Sunday service. Holy Communion was celebrated on the first Sunday of the month. The other Sundays were Morning Prayer and Sermon.

This comment in the entry for Saint Luke the Evangelist in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church caught my attention: Origen [the theologian who lived c. 185 to c. 254] is the first to identify Luke with the ‘brother’ of 2 Cor. 8:18, a view followed by the Anglican Collect for this feast.”[1] But the name Luke is not found in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. There is only one mention of a man named Luke in Paul’s seven letters whose authorship by Paul himself is widely undisputed, where Paul lists Luke as a “fellow worker.”[2]

In the Spanish language there are two entirely different verbs used to say that something “is.” “Maria is from New York.” “Maria is in New York”: same verb in English, two different verbs in Spanish. And Spanish speakers know the difference, and they look at you strangely when you don’t.

Henry Martyn and Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky shared gifts for missionary work. They were also gifted linguists and translators. On October 16, 1831, Martyn died in Tokat, now in Armenia, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Schereschewsky died on October 15, 1906, in Tokyo.

On Friday after the noonday Mass, I was in my office gathering my things together, still in a post-Eucharistic state of bliss. I looked out the window at a pair of pigeons that had been there all morning. Before the Mass, I had watched them groom each other’s feathers. Now, some other pigeons stopped by for what appeared to be a bit of a pigeon party. But, there was no social distancing.

Adolph Adam was a German scholar. He died in 2005.[1] For many years he was professor of practical theology, liturgy, and homiletics at the University of Mainz.[2] I’ve had a copy of his book, The Liturgical Year: its history & its meaning after the reform of the liturgy[3] since it came out in 1981, while I was in seminary. This morning I got it out to remind myself about the tradition of remembering the Virgin Mary on Saturdays when there were no other celebrations. But first I looked up, may I say, a snarky, disrespectful reference about the color of vestments for these Saturday celebrations here at Saint Mary’s. It’s in Newbury Halsted Frost Read’s 1931 book, The Story of St. Mary’s. Frost became a member of the board of trustees in 1929. When he died in February 1950, he was secretary and treasurer of Saint Mary’s.

Sometimes what is omitted by the church’s lectionaries is interesting. Among the passages not appointed to be read from Paul’s second earliest letter, Galatians, are the verses that follow Paul’s words, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”[1]

The first section—four chapters—of Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson’s book, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity,[1] is called “Sabbath and Sunday.” They begin by pointing out that it is all too easy to presume that the only three possible references to a weekly assembly on Sunday may well not have been on Sunday. If you are a Jewish Christian in Galatia in the year 54 or 55—the years most scholars now assign to its writing[2]—the first day of the week starts when night falls on Saturday.

The book of Job is not a short book in the Hebrew Bible. In The Jerome Bible Commentary, the late Jesuit scholar Robert MacKenzie, wrote, “The greater part of [Job] is in poetic form; in fact, it is the longest ancient [Hebrew] poem that has survived (perhaps that was ever composed).[1] Its subject is the suffering of a person who is morally and religiously faithful. “Theodicy,” from the Greek words for God and justice, is often the term name given to this discussion, a discussion that has occupied philosophy and theology since ancient times and across different faith traditions.[2]

Sometime in the year 496, the metropolitan bishop of Rheims, Remigius, in what is now France, baptized Clovis, the king of the Germanic tribe of the Franks and 3,000 of his soldiers. The Christian world was living through the struggle with Arianism, a doctrine that maintained that God the Son was subordinate to God the Father. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 defined how to speak faithfully about the “Union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of Christ.”[1] It isn’t the only way to speak about God. Our words can’t limit in any way the power of God.

I’ve started another non-fiction book by the British writer Andrew Wilson, London: A History.[1] I was surprised by his assertion that it was in the reign of the first Queen that torture was first used in England.” Clearly wrong. It was easy to find that the terrible rack was introduced around the year 1420 by the-then duke of Exeter.[2] That said, I like reading Wilson’s take on things.

The 1967 General Convention, the Episcopal Church’s governing body, authorized a “Plan for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer.”[1] There were 14 drafting committees. One committee was charged with the revision of what it called “Pastoral Offices.” These included Marriage, Reconciliation, Ministration to the Sick, and the Burial of the Dead. It published its work in 1970, Prayer Book Studies 24.[2] This was not the first work on these rites. In 1959, Prayer Book Studies XIII described its work on the Burial Office this way, “It attempts to provide appropriately for the departed, the bereaved, and for the total congregation.”[3] In 1967, the Standing Liturgical Commission quoted these words as guidance for the new committee’s work.[4]

On Thursday, I decided to ride my bike down to Chelsea to run some errands. As I left the apartment, I was reminded to be careful and not to come back all bent out of shape because I’d encountered taxi drivers parking in the bike lane or pedestrians crossing the street against the light. I promised I would do my best.

Today we commemorate the lives and witness of Sergius, an esteemed Russian Orthodox abbot who died on this day in 1392, and Lancelot Andrewes, who died in 1626, and who was among the ablest and most influential of English theologians and preachers in his lifetime. Andrewes was a leading translator of the King James Version of the Bible. He served in important positions, among them dean of Westminster Abbey and later bishop of Westminster. T.S. Elliot famously adapted the beginning of Andrewes’ sermon on the Visit of the Magi for his poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” These are Andrewes’ words from 1622:

Ecclesiastes is one of the very few wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible. The others are Job, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs. There are also a few examples among the psalms.[1] For us, the name of this book, “Ecclesiastes,” is a Latin form of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word used to name the author, Qoheleth.[2] The Hebrew root means assembly or congregation.