The Island Parson

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 23/12 – (25) My Own, Personal, Apocalypse

Posted on December 23, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the next to last of twenty-six short reflections.

Me in July 2014. Short hair, no beard, and a few more pounds than now. Original caption: The Rev. Bruce Bryant-Scott, rector at the Parish of St.Matthias Anglican Church in Victoria, B.C. Tuesday July 15, 2014. Reverend Scott joins other faith leaders in Victoria and across the country who are speaking out against a federal prostitution bill which recently passed and say it will increase potential dangers for sex workers. Credit: Chad Hipolito/Maclean’s

I have a new spiritual director. Like my doctor and dentist, she is younger than me, but that is what happens when you get into your late fifties – the people who minister to one’s needs are always younger. We have only met by Skype, but perhaps someday we’ll meet in person.

I was baptised 58 years ago today. I was just over six months, having survived operations at six weeks for pyloric stenosis and a resulting hernia.

I seem to be spending much of my time with her discussing my calling and my vocation. I was baptised fifty-eight years ago this very day, so I continue with that calling. I do not know what the service looked like in Bethel United Church in Grand-Mère, Quebec in 1962, but I assume some promises were made on my behalf. The whole sense of “baptismal calling” really only came into prominence in theological circles after that time. It was always there, but there was a sense that the clergy were the professional Christians. As an adult in university I started hearing about baptism as our primordial calling, that we were a royal priesthood. The services of baptism in The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada (1985), based on those in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer (1979), what it called the Baptismal Covenant, which was an explication of what was implied in the propositions of the Apostles Creed:

Celebrant Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you persevere in resisting evil and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People I will, with God’s help.

A few years ago a further question was added by the General Synod (one I was at, I think, perhaps 2013?):

Celebrant Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation and respect, sustain, and renew the life of the earth?
People I will, with God’s help.

Where did the words of the covenant come from? I asked a liturgist and was surprised to hear that it had come from a lay person in the Episcopal Church. It came to her, she said, as a revelation – an unveiling, or an apocalypse of what baptism actually does.

In the first promise we commit ourselves to being part of the church, where we continue in the apostles’ teaching (symbolized by the apostolic succession, and the use of the Apostles’ Creed), participation in communion, and prayer in private and community.
In the second we commit to resisting evil. While this may be read as simply personal, it may also be resistance against the forces and powers of society that divert us from the ways of God. Of course, we are in need of continual repentance, because we will always get something wrong.
In the third we commit to being evangelists by what we say and what we do. This is not just the preserve of clergy or special holy people, but the responsibility of every Christian. Each of us re-presents Christ in our daily life.
The fourth promise relates to Matthew 25, in which we are called to care for all around us, especially the hungry and thirsty, the sick and those in prison, the naked and the stranger. We are our brother’s keeper.
The fifth is something that could only have arisen in the era of the Universal Decalarion of Human Rights, but it again calls us to be on the side of those who are oppressed, whose dignity is not respected, and those who suffer from war and a lack of justice.
The new one, of course, arises in the growing sense that the unrestrained exploitation of the earth is causing damage to it, and that global warming will harm the most vulnerable.

I was ordained as a deacon in 1988, and a priest in 1989. Some people see ordination as something that comes down from God, and the paradigmatic order is that of the priest, who is an icon of Jesus the great high priest. Apostolic succession is important in this thinking – Jesus called the apostles, the apostles consecrated bishops, and bishops ordained other bishops, as well as priests and deacons. A deacon is often seen as merely a preliminary step to being a priest, and a bishop is kind of like a bigger, more authoritative version of a priest.

Well, no. As venerable as this caricature of ordination is, I adhere to a theology which argues that the three orders of deacon, priest, and bishop arise out of the laity, and are called to empower the laity to fulfill their baptismal calling. A deacon is an icon of servanthood, and is active in the world. The bishop has oversight over a part of the church, and the priest or presbyter is her or his designate in a smaller unit of the church. My calling as an ordained minister is not so much as to minister to the laity, or on behalf of the laity, but to provide the leadership necessary so that they can live out those six promises made in the Baptismal Covenant.

I have spent twenty-two of the past thirty-two years as a parish priest. I have been an assistant curate, a priest assistant, an honorary assistant, and an incumbent, as well as priest-in-charge for four parishes in transition. I have never quite felt that I have done everything that I should have done in the various congregations, especially the ones where I was the incumbent. The congregations did not grow, did not turn into mega-churches. I did not damage them either, which is always an accomplishment given the way some clergy behave, but at best they remained stable. I seemed to be more effective in crisis situations, as my time as priest-in-charge demonstrated.

I also spent nine of the years as a diocesan archdeacon and executive officer, working closely with the bishop and diocesan structures to accomplish their goals and objectives. This was where I seemed to be effective as well, surprising myself with my organizational abilities, especially in the midst of chaos. I developed a strange set of skills for a priest, becoming well versed in employment law and how to terminate and hire individuals, as well as issues in sexual misconduct and schisms. I was an honorary member of the Chapter of Deacons in the Diocese of BC, seemingly because I was one of the few priests who “got” what the real diaconate was about.

However rewarding this was, after nine years it was time to move on. After advertising the same parish for the third time over nine years, I was getting tired of that kind of routine. So I took an unpaid leave of absence to start reading in preparation for doing some PhD work (which, eight years later, is still ongoing . . . ). I was restless, and when the opportunity to do something really different – work in the Diocese in Europe, in the Church of England, living in Greece – I jumped at it with alacrity. God was telling me that what I was supposed to do in the Diocese of British Columbia had come to an end.

But looking back on those first thirty years, what stands out is not what happened in the parishes, but the work I did off the side.

As an assistant in St Catharines, Ontario, I helped set up something called the RAFT (“Resource Association For Teens”). I am pleased to say that more than twenty-five years later it is still going strong, working to help youth at risk.
On Pender Island I helped facilitate the move of the food bank into the attic of the church hall. Twenty years later, it is still there.
My friend Marion Little got me involved in 2014 in advocating for sex workers. The Supreme Court of Canada in 2013 threw out legislation criminalizing sex work. The following year the Harper government introduced legislation that effective re-criminalized it again. As I researched the issue I realized that, while I did not personally approve of sex work as such, it made no point to criminalize it, thus driving the industry into the streets and shadows where they could be attacked and abused, and, in several notorious cases, become the objects of murder by serial killers. I came to the conclusion that sex workers were less likely to be underage or trafficked if it was decriminalized and unregulated, and simply treated as any other type of labour. So, I wrote up a petition, and got some thirty-some colleagues to sign on (including some nuns in Toronto). Clergy supporting the rights of sex workers was a little unusual, and I wound up in an article in Macleans, Canada’s news magazine. the act went through anyway, and I am waiting more than six years later, for the Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau to abolish the law.
Most important of all is the work I did with the Refugee Committee of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia. In September 2015 three members of a family died trying to cross over a channel between Turkey and Greece; the photograph of one one of them dead on a beach, the toddler Alan Kurdi, went around the world and opened up the borders for a year or two to compassionate Europeans and others. There was a Canadian connection – the Kurdi family had tried to go to Canada, and arrangements were being made by a sponsorship group in Vancouver, but the paperwork was complex and the application was rejected on a technicality. In response to this Canadians decided to also open up their borders and their wallets to privately sponsor refugees. Subsequently some 60,000 came in the following year, and it became a major issue in the Fall 2015 election. I devoted myself to creating new sponsorship groups on Vancouver Island, and ultimately there were over 50 groups with something like 500-600 volunteers, all of whom need to be screened and trained. Some two million dollars Canadian were raised, and perhaps 250 people came to Canada because of the work of the Refugee Committee. This was probably the most important work I’ve ever done.
As Archdeacon and Executive Officer in the Diocese of BC between 2004 and 2012 I was involved in administering the Sexual Misconduct Policy – and thus advocating for the protection of the most vulnerable within our churches.
My PhD dissertation looks at the theologies that justified the taking of land from Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent attempts at assimilation and genocide under the guise of education in the Indian Residential Schools.

Do you see a common theme? Without intending to, a major trajectory of my journey in faith has been attending to the issues of the oppressed and marginalized in society. It is partly charity (an exchange where relationships of power are unchanged), but more directed towards justice (where people are empowered and relationships are transformed). As much as I sometimes wish I could just be an academic, the reality is that I really want to be part of something that changes peoples lives.

So now I am on Crete, in a half-time job that pays about a sixth of what a vicar would get in England. Obviously I am not here for the money. Part of the reason for moving here was the challenge of learning Greek and living in a foreign country. Another part was the hope of being able to travel, some of which has been realized, although the past ten months has really not allowed for that. Yet another reason was to have the time to write – to finish off that dissertation, and maybe write more popular works, of the type that is showing up here in my blog. I have had encouragement to collect the blogs into a book on Revelation, and my Lent 2019 series on the poems of George Herbert has been well received.

But what else does God want me to do here? We have generated a vision statement and mission plan for the chaplaincy here, and the implementation of this is slowly happening. But I cannot help but think that God is going to unveil something new for me to do in Crete, my own personal ἀποκάλυψις. And, perhaps, it will be found in kenosis, the self-emptying of God the Word into the person of Jesus Christ. Which will bring us to the last reflection tomorrow, on the last day of Advent, Christmas Eve.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | 1 Comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 22/12 – (24) Living through an Apocalypse

Posted on December 22, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the twenty-fourth of twenty-six short reflections.

St Michael the Archangel over Death, a detail from the Last Judgement, part of a diptych by Jan van Eyck (Netherlandish, Maaseik ca. 1390–1441 Bruges) and Workshop Assistant. Date: ca. 1440–41

When we read Revelation we have a choice about how we read it.

One way to read it is from the perspective of people who are similar to those to whom it is addressed – people who are genuinely oppressed. This means that it calls into question the powers that generate and sustain that oppression. For John the Divine and his readers the Roman Empire, principally in the person of the the Emperor, was that power. In contrast to that power John holds up the Lamb of God, who died but has been raised from the dead, and in whom the victory has already been won.

Radical Christians such as Berrigan and Stringfellow read Revelation and see the American State as Babylon, because its military and economic power is like that of ancient Rome. The American Empire, controlled by what Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex,” creates tax policies that favour the already wealthy, and disadvantages the poor and marginalized in the United States and abroad. In what Chomsky calls the “manufacture of consent” we accept uncritically the propaganda that “This is for the common good”, whereas the stagnant income of the middle and lower classes since the early ‘seventies and the growing inequities suggest otherwise (I should say that I am rarely in agreement in Chomsky’s actual political views, but the mechanism for the manufacturing of consent sounds accurate to me). In reaction to this kind of unveiling populists seize on conspiracy theories and latent racism to come up with simple explanations to the problems of the masses, solutions that distract the voters from their actual self-interests, and allow the ruling elite to continue regressive policies. So today we see several “apocalypses” – 1) the economic disparity of wealth, leading us to greater discontent, 2) the emergence of a global pandemic that could have been controlled by decisive government action (as was done by New Zealand and Taiwan, and, initially, also here in Greece) but was not,leading to disastrous results, and 3) the looming environmental crisis of global warming, which as Pope Francis has pointed out, will affect the dramatically poor the most.

Alternatively, we can read it from our position, a position of privilege, only denying that we have any privilege. I may be a “white,” upper middle-class, well educated, male, but there are forces that oppose me, deny me free action, and so, in my mind, oppress me. And so, I might choose to map Revelation on current forces that question me, even if they emerge from the poor and disenfranchised. This is the position of American fundamentalist evangelicalism, as manifested in the support for the Trump presidency. In their reading the forces that threaten me include the immigrant, the person of a different colour, the secularized liberal who wishes to tax me and give the money to the undeserving, and those who would call into question my age old customs, such as prayer in school, the right of the state to regulate women’s bodies, and the maintenance of “equal but separate” statuses for men and women. The whore of Babylon, then, is the Democratic Party, or Republicans In Name Only (“RINOs”), and the Deep State that supports these causes.

This second approach, very popular in parts of the United States, puts American evangelicalism in the position of being the second beast, the one that persuades the world to worship the first beast. Instead of submitting to the true God who has compassion for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, supporters of this kind of demagoguery see compassion as an individual option, and worship power and wealth, success and fame, the promise of power in the judiciary, and the rights of an individual to use deadly force and bad legal arguments in the furtherance of its goals. It is an idolatry.

Of course, the new president, Joe Biden, will not establish the kingdom. He will probably not accomplish the hopes of radical Christians in the United States any more than Obama did. I will be surprised if the borders become dramatically more open, if the sick receive a just medical system in the form of universal healthcare, and I doubt that the military will be downsized significantly. Prisons will still be full of minorities, functioning as the new Jim Crow. The new president will need to be challenged to do more. That said, Biden, unlike Trump, is a Christian, a Catholic of the Vatican II era, and he may be more persuadable than the narrow-minded narcissist who has sat in the White House for the past four years.

I am just as critical of my own country, Canada. I am disappointed by Justin Trudeau. The hopes created by his election in 2015 have not been fulfilled. Many of us looked forward to real progress on Indigenous justice issues, but we are increasingly seeing more of the same. He broke his promise on creating anew electoral system. After five years he is only now beginning to act on a Green agenda. It is not clear if the recent net-zero pledge for 2050 is merely aspirational, or something that will become as entrenched in the political consensus as universal healthcare and the multiculturalism.

This is what unveiling the beast looks like in 2020 and 2021. We are not, as John was, mere subjects of the Empire – we are citizens of our countries, and we have the opportunity of using any number of tools to advocate on behalf of Jesus Christ. We are called not to stand aside but to challenge and question power, and not to stop just because a party we voted for became the government. God breaks into the present day, for the time being, through us.

It is not an accident that the strongest statement of responsibility for social justice was placed in the context of the coming of the Son of Man:

³¹“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³²All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

³⁴Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ ⁴⁰And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

⁴¹Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴²for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

⁴⁴Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ ⁴⁵Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Matthew 25.31-46

Read synoptically with Revelation, this parable about the Son of Man in judgement should strike fear into the hearts of those collaborating with the forces of oppression. We do not see “faith alone” held up as a criterion for salvation, but how one acts (just what did Martin Luther do with this passage, eh?). Faith without good works is dead, says the Letter of James, and so, if we see ourselves as faithful Christians, our actions must be directed towards the least of Christ’s family.

Tomorrow I will talk more personally about how I think I have acted in my own ministry around these things – not so much to boast, but to challenge my own complacency.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged Faith and Works, What does one do in the midst of an apocalypse? | 2 Comments

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 21/12 – (23) The Meaning of What John Sees In The New Jerusalem

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the twenty-third of twenty-six short reflections.

Remember this song? Remember hair in the ’80s?

Carly Simon is anything but a gospel singer, but in this Oscar and Grammy award winning song she is channeling some of Chapters 21 and 22 from the Book of Revelation, via William Blake and “Jerusalem”, Walt Whitman, and the city of New York:

Let the river run
Let all the dreamers wake the nation
Come, the New Jerusalem.
Silver cities rise . . .

There are two images here that seem to be inspired from Revelation – flowing rivers and the New Jerusalem. Those of us who know New York City a bit would never confuse it with the city described by John, which is why it is, perhaps, a silver city, whereas John’s city is gold. Despite all that is so wrong with the place, it is still a wondrous place, unlike anywhere else in the world. Even its poor and working class have a loyalty to it that seems justified, somehow. Seeing this video after thirty years is all the more poignant for seeing the two towers of the World Trade Center. I know I was a much more naive and sentimental optimist back then.

But yesterday I suggested that we should not take the New Jerusalem literally. This is not to say that we should not look forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises, and some sort of coming of Christ in glory, but John’s visions are visions, spiritual representations of a reality that is past, present and future. Then how shall we read it? Perhaps this way:

a new heaven and a new earth God is changing the whole of the cosmos, beginning with Jesus in the resurrection (heck, might as well say beginning with the Incarnation, when the human is joined to the divine).
the sea was no more Chaos is gone. At least, the kind of chaos that destroys. I still like fractals, so I am hoping they are still around.
the holy city, the new Jerusalem In the Hebrew Bible Jerusalem is the designated dwelling place of God. This is still the case, only instead of it being a city made by humans, this is a city given to us to be with God. It is the reverse of Babel, the city human beings tried to build in order to be gods. It is a reimagining of the Garden of Eden, but it is not the same as the Garden, for humanity cannot exactly go back to where it began, there’s been too much water under the bridge – but, like the Garden of Eden, it is a gift from God.
coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband The other time in Revelation that John uses marriage imagery is in chapter 19:9: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. The New Jerusalem in 20:9 is described as the bride. So, while John does not describe eating at the feast as such, we are looking at a vision of the bride at a marriage, and the feast will come, and we are the guests. There are allusions here to The Song of Songs, which is a book of erotic love poetry that was included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible because the love of the man and woman in it was read by the Rabbis as the love of God for Israel; Christians, building on this passage, have read it as the love of Christ for his followers. Ecclesiastics in subsequent centuries read it as Christ’s love for the institution of the Church. That would make the New Jerusalem the Church, then. The closest we can get to the New Jerusalem is the Church.
“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” How does God dwell with us? Arguably in several ways (as Rowan Williams suggests in a recent book). One of those ways in in the Incarnation – God is with us in the person of Jesus Christ. That presence is made real among us in the Incarnation. And by the power of the Holy Spirit Christ dwells among us, and transforms us.
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In his own death and resurrection Christ defeated death. This victory over death is made present to us and memorialized at every celebration of the Holy Eucharist. It is a foretaste of what we hope for: that what Christ is, we will become.
“the holy city Jerusalem . . . has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.” Here is another clue that this cannot be taken literally – jasper is not clear, but opaque, typically red, although it is also yellow, brown, green, and occasionally blue. The point is the simile, in that it radiates God’s glory.
“on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites . . . the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” The city is a place for the twelve tribes of Israel. John the Divine does not address the issue of gentile Christians being followers of Jesus, which was the calling of Paul, but he does not exclude them either. As Christianity and Judaism had not yet really emerged from the varieties of Fisrt Century Judaisms, he probably sees them all as one, where Gentile Christians are grafted onto the vine of Israel.
“The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. ¹⁷He also measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubit” Even by modern standards the city is huge. Why so large? As I have suggested before, to accommodate the large numbers redeemed by the Lamb. God’s redemption is inclusive.
“And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass.” Again, suggestions not to read the description literally, as it is not clear how a pearl can be a gate (think of the size of the oyster!), nor how gold can be transparent. These images speak to the wondrous glory of the city, and should not be read literally.
^“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” By the time John wrote his visions the Temple in Jerusalem may well have been destroyed, and the city itself devastated. By describing the New Jerusalem John suggests that God would be/has been/is the one to act by giving the new city from heaven as a gift, and the human inclination to rebuild a temple is unnecessary.
“And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” I do not think that John says there is no sun or moon, only that their light is unnecessary, because God and the Lamb are the light. The nations and those nation’s kings come to it, in an echo of Isaiah 2, and again we have the notion of an inclusive establishment. Perhaps this is one of those few places where John refers to Gentile followers of Christ.

From the Yates Thompson MS 10 in the British Library.
c 1370-c 1390, A manuscript of the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) with commentary, in French.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.” The river is an image John took from the New Jerusalem described in Ezekiel 47:

Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. ²Then he brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me around on the outside to the outer gate that faces toward the east; and the water was coming out on the south side.
³Going on eastward with a cord in his hand, the man measured one thousand cubits, and then led me through the water; and it was ankle-deep. ⁴Again he measured one thousand, and led me through the water; and it was knee-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and led me through the water; and it was up to the waist. ⁵Again he measured one thousand, and it was a river that I could not cross, for the water had risen; it was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed. ⁶He said to me, “Mortal, have you seen this? Ezekiel 47.1-6

The waters represent a refreshing of Judea, a reversal of the judgement upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The water flows from God, and transforms the land, and thus, the people. In Revelation this is God’s transforming power which “to the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” (Revelation 21.6b).

“On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” The tree of life is last seen in Genesis in the garden of Eden. There are two trees described in Genesis 3 – one is the tree of life, which presumably keeps one alive. It is a symbol for eternal life, that is, life with God. The other is the tree of the knowledge of good and eveil, which, of course, is forbidden to the primordial humans, Adam and Eve. This tree is no longer present, for the the inhabitants of the city presumably already know more than enough about good and evil. The leaves are for healing, for the people of God’s city are wounded, from the oppressions which they have suffered.
“they will reign forever and ever” The tradition that Christ’s disciples would reign with him predates Revelation, and can be found in some of the gospels. The martyred Christians in heaven reign with Christ in the thousand years, and this seems to pick up on a more eternal reign – or perhaps John is just using “reign” as a word that suggests participation in the Christ who reigns.

Having parsed and deconstructed the description of God’s new creation in these two chapters I trust it is obvious that a) this is a vision that is not to be taken literally and b) that it refers to a reality that is variously past, present, and future. A Christian lives in time and out of it, both in the present and eternally, transformed by the past victory accomplished by Jesus Christ and looking forward to a full transformation in the future. The main issue for the Christian is not what will be, but how to act now. So I guess we will have to discuss this tomorrow.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged New Jerusalem, The river flowing from the throne | 1 Comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 20/12 – (22) A Timetable For The End?

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the twenty-second of twenty-six short reflections.

The Seven Trumpets, from the Bamberg Apocalypse (southern Germany 1000-1020)

As we saw a couple of days ago, Paul had a definite structure for God’s time and the salvation of the world, as described in 1 Corinthians 15:

Christ is raised from the dead.
Christ returns in glory as God’s anointed ruler.
1. Christ’s own are raised from the dead.
He destroys every ruler and every authority and power and thus puts all his enemies under his feet.
1. Death is destroyed. The general resurrection.
Christ hands over the kingdom to God the Father,
God is all in all.

It would seem that John the Divine has a similar schedule in Revelation, with some variations. Here it is in detail:

Jesus dies (5.6).
Jesus rise from the dead (1.18)
Jesus is in heaven
The time of John the Divine.
The Vision in Heaven
1. Seven seals
  1. White horse and rider, to conquer
  2. Red horse and rider, for war
  3. Black horse and rider, for famine
  4. Pale green horse and ride, Death, followed by Hades
  5. The heavenly altar with martyred saints
  6. Cosmic earthquake
  7. The Seven Trumpets
    1. Hail, fire and blood – 1/3rd of the earth is burned up.
    2. A fiery mountain falls in the sea – 1/3 of the sea destroyed.
    3. A star falls of rivers & springs – 1/3 of waters poisoned.
    4. Heavenly bodies struck – 1/3 of light cut off.
    5. The First Woe: A star falls and releases locust-like creatures from the bottomless pit – they torture those without the seal of God for five months. They are led by Abbadon/Apollyon – “Doom”.
    6. The Second Woe:
      1. The Four Angels are released and kill 1/3 of humanity by fire, smoke, and sulfur.
      1. The Seven Thunders. Seen, but not revealed by John.
      2. Testimony of the Two Witnesses.
      3. The Two Witnesses are killed by Abbadon, and exposed in Rome.
      4. The Two Witnesses are raised from the dead, and ascend into heaven.
      5. A great earthquake in Rome. 7000 die.
    7. The Third Woe. The Seventh Trumpet
      1. The woman with the crown of stars appears, and she is pregnant.The red dragon with seven horns and ten crowns appears (Rome/Satan).
      2. The dragon makes war on the woman.
      3. The woman gives birth to a son who is to rule the earth.
      4. The child is taken to heaven, and the women hides in the wilderness.
      5. War in heaven. Michael an his angels throws down Satan and his angels.
      6. The dragon seeks to destroy the woman, but the earth itself fights for her.
      7. The dragon makes war on her other children, the followers of Jesus.
    8. The Beasts
      1. The First Beast from the Sea has ten horns and seven heads.
      2. The Second Beast, that worships the first, with two horns like a lamb but speaks like a dragon.
    9. Seven plagues
      1. Babylon (Rome) falls. The Beasts are defeated and thrown into the lake of fire.
      2. Satan is bound in a pit.
      3. Jesus and the martyred saints rule for a thousand years.
      4. Satan is release and causes havoc.
      5. Satan is thrown into the lake of fire.
      6. Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. The dead are given up – the resurrection.
      7. Those whose names are not in the Book are thrown into the lake of fire.
2. The New Heaven and the New Earth, with the New Jerusalem. God makes all things new.

But it is not so straightforward. This is what I mean a couple of weeks ago when I said that time in Revelation is “wonky” – time past is also time future, and time present can also be the past represented now, and the future also made present. Thus:

In 5.5 the Lamb of God – Jesus – is described as already having conquered. The First Beast is all mixed up temporally, describing the kings who have been, the one who is now, and shall be. Identified as the Roman Empire, it is partially the past.
The pregnant woman of chapter 12 (g.a. in the schema above) has sometimes been identified as Mary, the mother of Jesus, but she seems to be more than that – perhaps the church? She gives birth to a child, who is immediately taken into heaven – and this seems to be a radical telescoping of Jesus’s life into birth followed by glorification. So, again, John the Divine sees past and future all together.
When is the war in heaven? If Jesus, the Lamb who has been slain but has been resurrected and is in heaven, has already conquered, why is Satan in heaven? So this war in heaven cannot be read as following on the birth of Jesus. John Milton in Paradise Lost, following developed Christian tradition, sees it as having happened before the foundation of the world – but when was that? What does it mean to say that there was a time before the creation of the material world? Is there time, strictly speaking, in heaven? Is the eternal, strictly speaking, atemporal?
Why does Jesus reign for a thousand years, followed by the reemergence of Satan, only for him to be thrown into the lake of fire?
Finally, we read in the beginning of chapter 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

The reason the sea is no more is not because it is the literal sea, but because it represents chaos to the landlubbers from the highlands of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. So it serves a symbolic function, not a literal one. If that is the case, then we need to read the rest of the description of the new creation as symbolic. And if that is the case, do we then read most of Revelation as mostly symbolic as well? Are we misreading the book if we try to relieve the tensions of temporal descriptions? Perhaps we should be read the book as multiple reiterations of the victory of Jesus – a victory manifested in his death and resurrection, a victory that is seen in the lives of Christ’s followers, and a victory to come fully.

This brings us back to symbolism and meaning. As one commentator said, “Too many people take literally what should be taken metaphorically, and regard as metaphors that which should be taken literally.”

So tomorrow I will look at the New Jerusalem, and the meaning behind its symbolism.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged How does time work in Revelation?, Literal interpretation and metaphorical interpretation in the Book of Revelation, What is the timetable for the end of the world? | 1 Comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 19/12 – (21) Apocalyptic Literature and Hope

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the twenty-first of twenty-six short reflections.

A coin depicting Antiochus IV Epiphanes, minted ca. 173/2-164 B.C.E. On the obverse (front) side, he is shown wearing a diadem. On the reverse (back) side, we see an unnamed goddess seated on a throne while holding Nike (victory) in her right hand, and the words *Basileus Antiochos*–meaning emperor/king.
credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. From an article here.

It is a common statement in academic considerations of ancient apocalyptic literature that it is produced by communities in crisis and trauma. They are invariably powerless, and so they call upon God to make things right. In many cases they do not trust their supposed religious or political leaders because they are hopelessly compromised with collaboration with imperial overseers, or corrupt, or both.

This is different from ordinary prophecy, as practiced by the historical Isaiah or Jeremiah. Isaiah prophesied to the kings and people of Israel to turn from their ways. He was a priest, already a member of the religious elite, and he had hope that Hezekiah might listen to him and act in accordance. Likewise, Jeremiah preached about the coming of the Babylonians, and he was a true prophet because the destruction he predicted came to pass.

The writers of Apocalyptic do not think to change or transform the political and religious leadership. As far as John the Divine is concerned, Rome and the Empire is beyond redemption, and is fit only for destruction. He never discusses the religious leadership of Judea in Revelation, probably because he was writing and editing after the Jewish Revolution was over and the Temple was no more, but most likely because, in his mind, they were irrelevant. His conflict is with the individuals influencing the churches in the seven cities to whom Revelation is addressed, and those who persecute the followers of Jesus there.

This is true of the book of Daniel. While it purports to be the experiences and visions of a Jewish man who alternately suffers and prospers in exile under Babylon, Medea, and Persia in the Sixth Century BCE, most scholars not wedded to biblical fundamentalism see it as having been written anonymously in the middle of the Second Century BCE, about a century and a half before Jesus.

In 175 BCE Antiochus IV Epiphanes came to the throne of the Selucid Empire, one of the four Hellenistic Empires that took over from Alexander the Great when he died without an heir in 323 BCE. It had been founded by one of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, Seleucus I Nicator. Based in Babylon, it encompassed Syria and Palestine, what is now Iran and the eastern part of Turkey, as well Afghanistan and the Indus valley. Its regular competitors were the equally Hellenistic empires of Ptolomaic Egypt, Phrygia in Asia, and Macedon and Greece, as well as the Maurya empire of India. By Jesus’s time the Selucid Empire had been swallowed by the Parthians from the East (an Iranian people) and the Romans from the East, establishing a boundary that moved back and forth across what is now the modern border between Iraq and Syria.

That downfall was not envisaged in the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, although he did much to weaken the realm. He invaded Ptolomaic Egypt, and the author of the First Book of Maccabees writes,

²⁰After subduing Egypt, Antiochus returned in the one hundred forty-third year. He went up against Israel and came to Jerusalem with a strong force. ²¹He arrogantly entered the sanctuary and took the golden altar, the lampstand for the light, and all its utensils. ²²He took also the table for the bread of the Presence, the cups for drink offerings, the bowls, the golden censers, the curtain, the crowns, and the gold decoration on the front of the temple; he stripped it all off. ²³He took the silver and the gold, and the costly vessels; he took also the hidden treasures that he found. ²⁴Taking them all, he went into his own land. 1 Maccabees 1.20-24

In order to strengthen the Empire he enacted a policy of Hellenization:

⁴¹Then the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, ⁴²and that all should give up their particular customs. ⁴³All the Gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many even from Israel gladly adopted his religion; they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath. ⁴⁴And the king sent letters by messengers to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah; he directed them to follow customs strange to the land, ⁴⁵to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary, to profane sabbaths and festivals, ⁴⁶to defile the sanctuary and the priests, ⁴⁷to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols, to sacrifice swine and other unclean animals, ⁴⁸and to leave their sons uncircumcised. They were to make themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane, ⁴⁹so that they would forget the law and change all the ordinances. ⁵⁰He added, “And whoever does not obey the command of the king shall die.” . . .
⁵⁴Now on the fifteenth day of Chislev, in the one hundred forty-fifth year, they erected a desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering. They also built altars in the surrounding towns of Judah, ⁵⁵and offered incense at the doors of the houses and in the streets. ⁵⁶The books of the law that they found they tore to pieces and burned with fire. ⁵⁷Anyone found possessing the book of the covenant, or anyone who adhered to the law, was condemned to death by decree of the king. ⁵⁸They kept using violence against Israel, against those who were found month after month in the towns. ⁵⁹On the twenty-fifth day of the month they offered sacrifice on the altar that was on top of the altar of burnt offering. ⁶⁰According to the decree, they put to death the women who had their children circumcised, ⁶¹and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers’ necks.

The First Book of Maccabees describes how the Judas Maccabeus (Judas the “Hammer”) and his brothers led a revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes and established a renewed Jewish kingdom, reconquering Jerusalem in 164 BCE, and cleansing the Temple. Indeed, Hannukah, which ended just yesterday, commemorates this event.

All of this was in the future for the author of Daniel – all he knew was that the emperor wanted to wipe out and assimilate the stubborn Jews, who appeared to prefer death to abandoning the ways of their forebears. So Daniel envisions a beast arising who is arrogant and “made war with the holy ones and was prevailing over them” (Daniel 7.21). However, one like a Son of Man is sent by the Ancient of Days to the world and

¹⁴To him was given dominion
    and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
    should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
    that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
    that shall never be destroyed. Daniel 7.14

How this happens is not absolutely clear, but later Daniel hears:

There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. ²Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12.1-2)

The author felt powerless, so that only a direct intervention from God could save him and other faithful Jews from the genocidal depredations of the Selucid Empire. As part of that intervention, along with the coming of the Son of Man, was the day of resurrection and judgement. This was a radical hope in the face of extreme violence and anguish. As it turns out, the Maccabees took history down another course, but the lessons of the Book of Daniel were so salutary that it made its way into the collection of Sacred Writings known as the “Writings” or Kethubim, the third division of the Hebrew Bible. When it was translated into the Greek of the Septuagint some 100 years before the time of Jesus it had already received some additions. When the technology of books moved from scrolls to codices, Daniel was placed among the older prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve.

It is obvious that John the Divine knew Daniel, and he picked up multiple themes, including the beasts, the book of life, the resurrection, the day of judgement, the coming of the Son of Man, and so forth. John reinterpreted it to his context, which may have been that of the persecutions under the short-term successors of Nero in the Year of the Four Emperors, although a case has been made for Revelation being written in the reign of Domitian (81-96). Regardless, John also picked up on the apocalyptic hope. The Roman Empire was so powerful and so contrary to the values and beliefs of the followers of Jesus that he could only imagine it being destroyed by a direct breaking in of the divine. For John, this had already been accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ, in his death and resurrection. In the thought of Paul, the return of Jesus to establish the kingdom had been delayed, so that he, Paul, and the other apostles would be able to proclaim the good news to the gentiles. Paul, essentially, was on an extraordinary mission to help save as many as he could from damnation. John the Divine does not get into that part of things, but perhaps he had an inclusive understanding of God’s mercies.

How might we understand this? I think there are at least three ways.

The first is to read it literally – that the kingdom is going to come, and all who do not belong to Jesus or are somehow saved by him (with or without faith in him, but by his faithfulness).
The second is to understand that the victory has already been won, and that in Christ we are already in the kingdom, that we are already living the resurrected life, and that the new heaven and the new earth is a goal to which we are moving. Thus, one does not read Revelation literally, but rather in mystical and symbolic terms for the lives we live now. This is what I understand is the Orthodox approach. The kingdom was established in the resurrection of Jesus, and has been manifested somewhat by the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire and such “saintly” rules as Constantine the Great.
The third is to combine the two, and to affirm the “already but not yet” aspect of Christ’s coming into the world and the transformation of the world.

Thus, we are not obliged to necessarily understand the world quite as either the unknown author of the Book of Daniel or John the Dive would have understood it, but we are to see their diagnosis of the world’s ills and to ask where we find ourselves in the present situation. Allan Boesak did this for South Africa in the era or apartheid, and Daniel Berrigan and William Stringfellow did it for the United States in the ’70s through to the ’00s. Chris Hedges does that now. I think I do it when, in my dissertation, I discern the genocidal theologies that justified the colonization of Canada, the United States, and other parts of the world. Christians do it when they challenge Trump, Putin, Johnson, and Xi to acknowledge their lies and the damage their policies have done to the weakest of the world. It seems like nothing can stop them (just as right-wing American Christians think people like me are complicit in destroying all that is good and holy about the USA), and so we struggle to maintain hope. In the face of global warming, global pandemics, the growth of inequality, the rolling back of democratic regimes, and the way in which politicians seem to act with impunity, what can we do? So the times feel rather apocalyptic.

Those of us who dare to call ourselves followers of Jesus are a people of hope. We believe that in Christ the victory has been won, that it will be won, and that we are winning it now. The struggle does not end – in this broken, fragile world we are called to take up our crosses and follow Christ, but, at the same time, because of our hope and faith with Christ, this yoke, this burden, is paradoxically light and easy.

Tomorrow I am going to return to the topic of time, and a major rule about how to read the Book of Revelation.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged Apocalyptic and Hope, Daniel and Revelation, Who was Antiochus Epiphanes? | 1 Comment

Resources for Worship – Christmas Day 2020, the Year of the Great Pandemic

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

These are worship resources for Christmas Day, December 25, 2020. The resources are gathered from a variety of sources and, while assembled mainly for The Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, on the island of Crete in Greece, others may find them useful.

The government of Greece is allowing services on Christmas Day, with a maximum of nine persons in attendance. We will have three services of Holy Communion on Christmas Day at the Tabernacle of St Thomas, Kefalas:

9:15 am Said Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion
10:00 Said Common Worship Holy Communion
11:00 Said Common Worship Holy Communion with Hymns (also on Zoom)

If you wish to attend you must register in advance. To register please contact Pat Worsley by phone at +30 28257 71001 or by email at peter.worsley@btinternet.com; registration is on a first come, first served basis. As of Thursday evening, December 16, we have two spaces available at the 9.15 service, one at the 10.00am service and the 11.00am service is full.

You can attend the 11:00 am virtually on Zoom, by clicking this link or by entering the following into your Zoom application: Meeting ID: 850 4483 9927 Passcode: 010209.

Read

There are different readings at the three services, more or less.

At 9:15 we will use the lessons prescribed by the BCP, namely Hebrews 1.1-12 and John 1.1-14, which is taken from the 1611 Authorized Version (King James Version) which can be found here.
At 10:00 we will use Isaiah 9.2-7, Psalm 96, Titus 2.11-14, and Luke 2.1-20.
At 11:00 we will use Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-12, Psalm 98, and John 1:1-14.

Reflect

An old sermon of mine is here: The Christmas You Need: Choose From Five.

Pray

Collect
Almighty God,
you have given us your only-begotten Son
to take our nature upon him
and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:
grant that we, who have been born again
and made your children by adoption and grace,
may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

(or)

Lord Jesus Christ,
your birth at Bethlehem
draws us to kneel in wonder at heaven touching earth:
accept our heartfelt praise
as we worship you,
our Saviour and our eternal God. Amen.

Biddings
I bid your prayers for the leaders and people of the nations; especially

Katerini Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece, and
- Kyriakos Mitsotakis the Prime Minister of Greece;
Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and her other realms, and also in her role as Governor of the Church of England;
- and Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of her British government;
In the European Union,
- Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission;
- Charles Michel, President of the European Council; and
- Josep Borrell, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy;
For the United Nations and its work, and its Secretary General, António Guterres;
for the closing negotiations around Brexit;
for the peoples of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland facing uncertainty over the fate of the Good Friday Accord;
the peoples of Belarus, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Peru, and Thailand as they continue to demonstrate for democracy and justice;
for the maintaining of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and between Russia and Ukraine, North and South Korea, and for a final, just resolution to their conflicts;
for the President-elect and peoples of the United States;
for peace and justice between Palestinians and Israelis;
for advocates of Indigenous rights and the adoption and implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
prisoners and captives, especially the over one million Uygers being held in detention in China;
the over 79.5 million refugees and nearly 4 million stateless person, remembering especially the crucial situation of Greece, and the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”);
for a lessening of tensions between Turkey and Greece; and
for peace in Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ethiopia.

I bid your prayers for the sick and suffering and all who minister to their needs;

remembering the 20.8 million active cases of the novel coronavirus, and mourning with the families of the 1.67 million who have died in the pandemic;
for the 1.97 million people in the UK who have had covid-19 or are recovering from it, the over 66,000 who have died of it there, and the over 115,000 active cases here in Greece, and the families of the over 4000 dead here;
remembering those ill with other diseases, and those whose operations have been postponed;
all those having issues with mental health;
those suffering from addiction, and those in recovery;
those who have been affected severely by the economic effects of the pandemic, especially in food services and tourism;
and giving thanks for the efforts of researchers in finding vaccines, and the rollout of vaccines across the world.

I bid your prayers for the Church:

for Robert Innes & David Hamid, our bishops;
for Justin Welby our archbishop, Stephen Cottrell the Archbishop of York, and the General Synod of the Church of England;
for our beloved in Christ in other denominations, especially the leadership in:
- The Orthodox Church: Bartholomaĩos, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; and Irinaios Athanasiadis, Archbishop of Crete; and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece in Athens;
- The Roman Catholic Church, especially Pope Francis, and the bishop for Crete, Petros Stefanou;
- the Greek Evangelical Church, the independent Greek Pentecostal churches, and the various Lutheran, Reformed, and other Protestant churches ministering to foreign populations;
we pray especially for congregations that have been obliged to cease in-person services;
for the churches and peoples of Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan (World Council of Churches Ecumenical Prayer Cycle);
in the Anglican Communion, we pray for the Peace of Jerusalem and the people of Bethlehem (Anglican Cycle of Prayer);
(from the Prayer Diary of the Diocese in Europe) give thanks for:
- the chaplaincy of Montreux: (Also serves Villars-sur-Ollon) and its chaplain, Paul Ormrod, and
- the chaplaincy of Vevey: (Also serves Château D’Oex, Neuchâtel) and its chaplain, Clive Atkinson; their Reader, Michael Cotton; and
- the Diocesan Environment Officer, Elizabeth Bussman.

Intercessions
Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.
Let us bring before God the needs of the world.

Wonderful counsellor,
give your wisdom to the rulers of the nations.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Mighty God,
make the whole world know
that the government is on your shoulders.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Everlasting Father,
establish your reign of justice and righteousness for ever.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Prince of peace,
bring in the endless kingdom of your peace.
Lord, in your mercy
hear our prayer.

Almighty Lord,
hear our prayer
and fulfil your purposes in us,
as you accomplished your will
in our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sing

On Christmas Day at the 11:00 am service we will sing four hymns from Mission Praise:

Opening Hymn 491: O Come, All You Faithful
Before the Gospel Reading, Hymn 749: What Child Is This?
As the Table is Prepared, Hymn 196: Good Christian Men, Rejoice!
At the end, Hymn 114: Ding, Dong, Merrily On High

If you cannot remember how these carols go, here are some past occasions when they were sung.

If you don’t know Puddles Pity Party, you might want to. He’s a sad clown in the big city with an amazing voice.

While this is the CBC Choir, it is not the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Choir (if such a thing ever existed) but the Canada Bay Community Choir in Sydney, Australia (hence the green grass and shirt sleeves weather). Canada Bay, part of the city of Sydney, is named after French Canadians rebels deported to Australia by British authorities after the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837-1838.

Posted in Christmas, Resources for Worship | Tagged Christmas Carols, Christmas Prayers | Leave a comment

Resources for Worship – A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

These are resources for a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, which we will have on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 20, 2020 at 11:00 am. The resources are gathered from a variety of sources and, while assembled mainly for The Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, on the island of Crete in Greece, others may find them useful.

The Mystical Nativity, 1500-1501, by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

This coming Sunday at 11:00 am we can meet online only, in accordance with the government restrictions. We will still have our annual Festival of Lessons and Carols, though, just online. You can join us by clicking this link or by entering the following into your Zoom application: Meeting ID: 850 4483 9927 Passcode: 010209. The order of service is below, and can also be downloaded (including the lyrics of the hymns as sung in the videos) as a PDF from here:

2020-a-festival-of-nine-lessons-and-carols-for-christmas Download

We will have three services of Holy Communion on Christmas Day at the Tabernacle of St Thomas, Kefalas:

9:15 am Said Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion
10:00 Said Common Worship Holy Communion
11:00 Said Common Worship Holy Communion with Hymns (also on Zoom)

If you wish to attend you must register in advance. To register please contact Pat Worsley by phone at +30 28257 71001 or by email at peter.worsley@btinternet.com; registration will be on a first come, first served basis. As of Thursday evening, December 16, we have two spaces available at the 9.15 service , one at the 10.00am service and the 11.00am service is full. You can attend the 11:00 am virtually on Zoom, and the Zoom link above will get you there.

Read & Reflect

Most parishes will not be having services of Lessons and Carols, but instead will be using the readings appointed for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, which can be found here. If you would like to listen to a sermon on the readings for Advent IV, Fr Leonard Doolan of St Paul’s Anglican Church in Athens has sent us a prerecorded one here:

As we are holding our service of Lessons and Carols for Christmas, our readings are below.

A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas

Opening Hymn: Once in Royal David’s City

Welcome, Bidding, and the Lord’s Prayer

Hymn: Joy to the World

The First Lesson

Genesis 3.8-14: The Disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Following the lesson (and after every lesson) the reader will say,
“This is the word of the Lord” Please respond, “Thanks be to God.”

Hymn: God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen

The Second Lesson

Genesis 22.1-19: God tests Abraham, and promises that in him all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.

Hymn: The First Nowell

The Third Lesson

Isaiah 9.2,6,7: Isaiah foresees the coming Messiah.

Hymn: Unto Us a Boy is Born

The Fourth Lesson

Isaiah 11.1-9 – The prophecy of the Messiah’s kingdom of peace

Hymn: O Little Town of Bethlehem

The Fifth Lesson

Isaiah 60.1-6, 19 – The coming of the glory of the Lord

Hymn: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

The Sixth Lesson

Matthew 1.18-23: The birth of Emmanuel.

Hymn: Away in a Manger

The Seventh Lesson

Luke 2.8-16: Jesus is born in Bethlehem.

Hymn: While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks By Night

The Eighth Lesson

Matthew 2.1-11: Wise men come from the east seeking Jesus.

Hymn 740: We Three Kings

The Ninth Lesson (Please stand, as you are able)

John 1.1-14: The Incarnation of the Word of God

Hymn: Adeste Fideles (O Come, All Ye Faithful)

The Blessing

May the Father, who has loved the eternal Son from before the foundation of the world, shed that love upon you his children. Amen.

May Christ, who by his incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with joy and peace. Amen.

May the Holy Spirit, by whose overshadowing Mary became the God-bearer, give you grace to carry the good news of Christ. Amen.

And the blessing of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be amongst you, and remain with you always. Amen.

Closing Hymn: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Posted in Christmas, Liturgy, Music, Resources for Worship | Tagged A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas, A Service of Lessons and Carols for Advent, Lessons and Carols for Christmas, Nine Lessons and Carols | Leave a comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 18/12 – (20) Paul and John, Eschatological Freaks

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the twentieth of twenty-six short reflections.

Jean Paul Lemieux (1904-1990) *Lazare* (Lazarus), 1941, from the Art Gallery of Ontario

How do the writings of Paul relate to the Revelation of John the Divine?

The answer is that in they are similar in their broad strokes, but they differ in details. Let’s start with Paul in First Corinthians.

In chapter 15 of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (which is actually his second letter, at least – we just don’t have the earlier correspondence) Paul castigates some of the members of the church in Corinth for not believing in the resurrection of the dead. By this he means the general resurrection of all who have died, but he adds some details (capital letters added):

²⁰But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. ^.23But each in his own order:

A Christ the first fruits,
B then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
E ²⁴Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father,
C after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.
D ²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.”
F ^28bso that God may be all in all.

We have here a structure of time. Christ has been raised from the dead (A) – that has already happened. Paul believes that Jesus will return, so that is the next step, or B. When Jesus comes the people “who belong to Christ” are raised. That has not happened yet, so the Corinthians would have known that they lived between A and B. The phrasing of the clauses in verse 24 can be confusing, but it seems that the sequence is that after Jesus comes (B) he judges and destroys “every ruler and every authority and power.” These are his enemies, and are not merely human powers but also the demonic powers. The last one is “death.” (D) What happens when death is defeated? All the dead are raised – the ones who were not raised when Jesus first came in glory – so this completes the general resurrection. Then the Son hands his kingdom over to the Father (E) and, in the obscure mystical language of verse 28, God is “all in all.”

In Revelation Jesus has already been raised from the dead. He has won the victory already, but it has not yet been implemented on earth. Where John differs from Paul is in the detailing of how Christ destroys “all his enemies”. And so we get the seven seals and the seven trumpets, the two beasts. Also, there appear to be two stages in the defeat. In the conclusion of chapter 19 the beast (a returned Nero) and the false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, Jesus reigns, and you’d think that would be the end of things. However, in chapter 20 the dragon, Satan, is thrown into a pit for a thousand years, and Christ reigns with his saints during that time. Then Satan and his minions arise, besieges the beloved city (the New Jerusalem, not yet described), but fire consumes them, and then Satan gets tossed into the lake. Death and Hades are defeated, thrown into the lake of fire with the others, and the dead arise to be judged.

The structure of time in Revelation 19-20 (and other chapters) is more than a little confusing. What I think should be clear is that both Paul and John had an expectation that the end involved a battle between Christ and evil, and that there would be two resurrections.

This might strike us as a bit bizarre – Paul the Apostle and John the Divine both appear to be eschatological freaks. What we are to do with this is what I will examine tomorrow.

Posted in Advent, Revelation | Tagged Paul and John, Paul the Apostle and John the Divine | 1 Comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 17/12 – (19) Praise and Triumph in Messiah

Posted on December 17, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the nineteenth of twenty-six short reflections.

The Foundling Hospital Chapel, in London, where *Messiah* was regularly performed from 1750 to 1759 under the direction of Handel himself, and subsequently, after his death, from the manuscript score which the composer bequeathed to the Hospital.

Yesterday I said I would look at how G. F. Handel (1685-1759) uses Revelation in his Messiah. I wrote that thinking that there were all kinds of passages from the Apocalypse in there, but when I actually looked at the libretto I found that, actually, there are only two of the 53 movements (recitatives, aria, and chorales) in it that are actually Revelation.

But look where they are, and what they are! The Messiah is divided into three parts; parts two and three both conclude with lines from Revelation, namely the Hallelujah Chorus, and Worthy is the Lamb.

44. Chorus
Hallelujah! for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.
(Revelation 19 : 6)
The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ; and He shall reign for ever and ever.
(Revelation 11 : 15)
King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.
(Revelation 19 : 16)
Hallelujah!

53. Chorus
Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen.
(Revelation 5 : 12-13)

The videos above are both recent, the first being from a Austrian staged production in Vienna in 2009, and the latter from a concert in King’s College Chapel Cambridge sung by VOCES8 (I’m not sure how to pronounce that, either), with the VOCES8 Scholars and Apollo5, and the instruments of the Academy of Ancient Music.

Handel did not choose the texts, but rather, set a text to music. The English gentleman Charles Jennens (1700-1773) had previously worked with Handel, having supplied a libretto for Saul and possibly Israel in Egypt. Astonishingly, Handel set the whole thing to music in just twenty-four days – but apparently the musician always wrote that fast. That said, the speed concerned Jennens (pronounced “Jennings”) so much that he wrote Handel about the quality of the writing, and did not hesitate to suggest improvements. This led to a breach between the two for a short period, which was eventually patched up.

Jennens was an odd duck. While an active member of the Church of England, he was part of the Nonjurors, a group which felt that the Glorious Revolution of 1689 was nothing less than a repudiation of the oaths the political and ecclesiastical leadership had sworn to James II. Thus, despite the Stuarts being Catholic and pretenders to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland, the Nonjurors supported them, feeling that the Divine Right of Kings had been challenged with James II overthrow. As he could not pledge fealty to the House of Hanover, Jennens could neither take a university degree or political office.

He was wealthy and theologically astute, having a large library of divinity at Gopsal Hall, his residence. He was also one of the most musically literate men in Britain, and his collection of musical texts was unparalleled. He patronized composers such as Handel, and became quite active in some of the works, as we have seen.

Messiah is in three parts. The Wikipedia article has a useful summary:

The oratorio’s structure follows the liturgical year:

Part I corresponding with Advent, Christmas, and the life of Jesus;

Part II with Lent, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost; and

Part III with the end of the church year—dealing with the end of time.

Revelation, then, is used to mark the triumph of Christ over death, and the quotations are not the apocalyptic passages about war in heaven or the beasts on earth, nor the fantastic images, but of the Lamb enthroned in heaven. They are doxological – praise choruses, if you will.

In the libretto Jennens’ agenda is the forceful assertion of Jesus as divine and as the Messiah, the Christ. He did this because of the rise in his day of Deism – the belief that there may be a God, who is indeed the Creator, but denies that Jesus was divine or the Son of God, or that there is such things as divine revelation or miracles. Deism, obviously, is a challenge to Christian orthodoxy, and both Handel and Jennens being orthodox Christians, felt the appropriateness of the fervent affirmations of Jesus as Christ in the piece. Jennens did not respond to Deism with logical arguments – that he left to theologians – but with the persuasion of familiar texts set to majestic music.

How does Revelation relate to other texts in the New Testament, and the whole idea of the end times? I’ll take that up tomorrow.

Posted in Advent, Music, Revelation | Tagged Charles Jennens, Handel's Messiah, Revelation in The Messiah | 1 Comment

Through Advent With The Apocalypse: 16/12 – (18) Radical Left-Wing Apocalyptic Christians

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

This Advent, in the Year of the Great Pandemic 2020, it seems appropriate to look at The Apocalypse – that is, The Revelation of John. This is the eighteenth of twenty-six short reflections.

The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, when it was only twelve novels. It is now up to sixteen. Then there are the forty short novels for children, a bunch of graphic novels, four motion pictures, and a video game.

In modern times the Book of Revelation has inspired certain kinds of evangelicals to embrace dispensationalism, a 19th century theology orginally propagated among the Plymouth Brethren, in which God carves up time into various eras or dispensations. In one of the last dispensations Christians are “raptured” or sucked up into the sky by a sacred vacuum cleaner, and those left behind deal with the “Beast” and the “false prophets” as they wreak all kinds of violence and evil on the Earth. Indeed, that’s the whole premise of the “Left Behind” series of books. If all of this is new to you, that’s because you haven’t been inside the bubble of Premillennial Evangelicalism. Tribulation sells really well, especially when it is turned into thriller fiction where new converts to the Christian faith are battling it out with the Antichrist and his new world order.

However, you do not have to be a Christian of this sort to be influenced by Revelation. In the middle of the 19th century, in the middle of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe, the wife of a radical abolitionist – an American physician who fought in the Greek War of Independence, had sheltered runaway slaves in his home in Boston, and had helped fund John Brown in his raid upon Harpers Ferry – saw the campfires of Union troops and and was inspired to write a poem that celebrated the great conflict in Apocalyptic terms.

You know this as the Battle Hymn of the Republic. These are the original words.

1 Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
(Chorus) Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
2 I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
(Chorus)
3 I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
(Chorus)
4 He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)
5 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,[16]
While God is marching on.
(Chorus)

6 He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)

If you’ve been reading through Revelation, it is pretty obvious that Julia Ward Howe had been, too, as well as other parts of the Bible. In just the first verse we sing:

the glory of the coming of the Lord Ward was describing the Second Coming, when Christ as the Son of Man would come to judge the world.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored is an image derived from Revelation 14:19-20: “So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.”
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. Revelation refers to a sword coming from the mouth of the judge in 19: 15: “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.” This seems to be derived from Isaiah 27: 1 “On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.”

Now, the abolition of slavery in the United States, before the Civil War, was thought to be a utopian dream, and was strongly challenged by slaveholders and racists. In fact, the opposition to it was so great that in reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln, a moderate opponent of slavery who would have been satisfied with the prevention of its extension into any new states, nine slave states rebelled against the authority of the federal state and attempted to secede. The war to preserve the Union forced the issue of slavery, and Lincoln concluded that if he emancipated the slaves he would have a better chance of winning the war, crushing the rebellion, and preserving the Union. And so it came to pass that the slaves were freed, and the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (as well as some other federal legislation) forced the South to accept African-Americans as equals. This came to an ugly end after the presidency of U. S. Grant, when the federal government withdrew federal troops from the South, and allowed segregation and Jim Crow to arise.

At the time, in the midst of the war, all of this seemed quite astonishing. The only way Ward could make sense of it was to draw on the apocalyptic language of Revelation and other parts of scripture, and the result was a remarkable hymn that reverberated then among the scripturally knowledgeable population of the States.

In contrast to Howe who saw Revelation being worked out in the violence of war, there are Christian radicals who read Revelation in a non-violent manner, and then apply it in their own activism. Nick Megoran, a geographer (!) at Newcastle University, in an article from 2012 entitled “Radical politics and the Apocalypse: activist readings of Revelation” noted this in the writings of contemporary New Testament scholars such as N.T (Tom) Wright, Ben Witherington, Patricia McDonald, as well as theologians such as Mark Bredin and John Yoder. Megoran looks at the work of two individuals, namely Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016) and William Stringfellow (1928–1985).

Berrigan was a major anti-war activist and Jesuit priest who, with his brother Philip, also a priest, came to the notice of the US population and the FBI when he denounced US involvement in the Vietnam War. Megoran writes:

Using the imagery of Revelation, Berrigan adds that in [the CIA and the Pentagon] ‘A chief principality is horridly, boldly on display: obscene, unashamed, up front, the cosmic whore of Revelation bedizened with her resources and wares’. Berrigan thus reads Revelation as the unveiling of imperial power. This power is unveiled not only as violent, but also as arrogant in deluding itself that it plays a beneficent, even divine, role in human history. In terrorising the world’s poor by its foreign policy, and in claiming an exceptional role as a divine agent in spreading liberty, it is the USA par excellence that represents Revelation’s Babylon today.

This argument is developed in Berrigan’s 1983 book about Revelation, The Nightmare of God. A core theme is how the American empire remains oblivious to its identity as Babylon. He draws out how Revelation depicts the continued inability, the refusal, of Babylon to learn from the judgments of God:
“Babylon’s moral life is not a passage from crime to repentance, but only from crime to crime. Ourselves? From no-one do we hear, after Vietnam, ‘Remember, and repent.’ Only, ‘forget and forget.’ Thus our history becomes a progressive breakaway from all restraint. The empire rides and flogs the four horses: death, plague, famine, war in her wake. And we call it civilisation, sanity.”

William Stringfellow was a lay Episcopalian, a lawyer, active in the Sojourners community, and involved in the World Council of Churches. Megoran writes that Stringfellow elucidated his position in

the 1973 text An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Here he writes that he wants to understand America Biblically, not construe the Bible ‘Americanly’, as has been the norm. The text majors on the Babylon passages in the book of Revelation, reading them as a parable of the operation of principalities and powers, primarily states, in any place in human history. Revelation reveals death as the social purpose behind such powers, and represents their traits. For Stringfellow, the conceit that America is the New Jerusalem is Biblical illiteracy: rather, America today stands in the place of Babylon in Revelation.

‘Stringfellow’s work was not commentary on Revelation, but the reverse: Revelation commenting on “us”’, write activists Howard-Brook and Gwyther. Stringfellow elucidates many aspects of contemporary American politics through appeals to the Babylon parable. Crises of foreign war, ecological corruption, racism, urban chaos, unemployment and deception make victims of the poor. But these forces also make victims of elites like Presidents who become pathetically dehumanised as captives to the power of death in the principalities that they work for. For Stringfellow, Revelation does not give ‘policy answers’: rather, it shows how to live ethically, how to hope and to celebrate human life, knowing that God has ultimately defeated death. This entails resisting the cultures of death, for resistance is the only way to live humanly. But, against much contemporary revolutionism, it is to resist without recourse back to death-dealing.

In his conclusion Megoran notes that Apocalypticism is a means of resistance to the powers of Empire. He gives the example of Allan Boesak, the South African anti-apartheid activist:

Boesak’s book, Comfort and protest (1987), is a commentary on Revelation, or, perhaps more accurately, a commentary on the Apartheid regime performed through a reading of the book of Revelation. He identifies specific Apartheid policies and official proclamations, comparing them to the Rome/Babylon of Revelation.

I suspect that it is tempting for many to abandon Revelation to the American right-wing evangelicals, with their incredibly profitable multimedia franchises which frame the judgement of God in speculative, poorly grounded fantasies of violence on liberals and the peoples of the world. However, the book is too important and powerful for responsible Christians to do that. We need to read it as John intended, as a critique of oppressive Empires, and as hope in the midst of much suffering.

Tomorrow I will look at how Handel used Revelation in The Messiah – a non-radical, non-left wing use of Apocalyptic.

Posted in Advent, Music, Revelation | Tagged Daniel Berrigan, Left Behind Franchise, The battle Hymn of the Republic, William Stringfellow | 1 Comment

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	Vikings reached Nort… on First Contact: Skraelings and…
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	Bruce Bryant-Scott on You are the Coin in this …
	David Phillip Jones,… on You are the Coin in this …
	You are the Coin in… on An Anxious, Desperate God