St Jerome. 30 September 2024.

Now here's a hell of a guy.

Let's start where I started, long ago in a galaxy far far away -- by which I mean, the preconciliar Roman Catholic Church.  There's been lots of councils to be pre- to, here and now it means the last one, pre-Vatican II.

The Jerome Of My Younger Days.

Here's what I recall from those days. We used an official Bible in Latin, and our English versions were made from the Latin, and that Latin Bible was the Latin translation of St Jerome, often called the Vulgate. Vulgate?  What's that, looks like vulgar, something dirty in it?  No, the name comes from the Latin word for ordinary people, vulgus, since the translation was into the language of ordinary people there and then, Latin. Protestants didn't use the Vulgate. They had the King James Bible, translated from Hebrew and Greek, not translated from a translation into Latin, therefore, they claimed, more accurate.

Not so, we were told, or at least I remember being told. St Jerome, for one thing, was a saint, a term not at least as yet applicable to modern Biblical scholars. And, he was much closer in time to the Biblical, particularly the New Testament, authors, which meant his understanding of the languages was more immediate and not from scholarly studies centuries later. And also, he worked from better sources than we have, including texts that no longer exist. Therefore, in using Jerome's Latin Bible, we are using a source altogether more trustworthy than the much later sources and scholarship of the Protestant Bible translations.

The Historical Jerome versus The Jerome Of Faith.

What's ironic is, while famous in our day for translating the Bible into the dominant language of the people of his place and time, in his own day Jerome was highly controversial not for translating but for the text from which he translated.  He used the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, but the Jewish translation into Greek called the Septuagint was considered the normative and inspired text for centuries, going back to the Greek-speaking early church.  The New Testament quotes the Old Testament from the Greek, and its longer canon (list of books) was the basis for the Old Testament canon.

We still have echoes of that controversy now, the so-called Apocrypha.  The Septuagint has books and parts of books in it that the Hebrew Bible doesn't.  Bibles of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox origin retain the use of the Septuagint as the basis of their Old Testament, Bibles of Protestant origin use the Hebrew Canon.  Nobody put anything in or took anything out, they just use different but related sources.  The Septuagint was accepted by the proverbial "early church" and Jerome was going against the grain to favour the Hebrew canon and text rather than the Greek.

Even so, the books in dispute were not rejected altogether, but placed in between an OT of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible and the 27 of the NT, and given the name Apocrypha, from the Latin aprocryphus which transliterated the Greek apokruphos, which means obscure or hidden.  In this context, obscure was not about being "lost books" or anything, it was about their canonicity and use for doctrine.  Those who accept their canonicity call them deuterocanonical, from the Greek for second canon, meaning added later to the canon.  But in neither case, not Jerome, not Luther, not the King James Version, were they discarded altogether and not published, as has been the innovation in recent times of non-Catholic Bibles.

Another enduring echo of that controversy is that while the Hebrew Bible is arranged in three distinct parts, namely Law, Prophets and Writings, the Septuagint is not, and though many Bibles now use the Hebrew Bible as the OT, the book order has the Prophets and Writings mixed to-gether as in the Septuagint rather than retaining the three-part division of the Hebrew Bible.

Actually though, Jerome was controversial for a hell of a lot more than that and was run out of Rome!  Holy crap, people jumped all over Jimmy Swaggart for getting caught with a prostitute, but that ain't nuttin compared to Jerome's story. Here it is.

Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia.   The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia.  As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul then, and ended up in Trier, which is about the most magnificent and enchanting place it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. But I digress.  Here in this most wonderful place he seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't good enough or news enough, gotta have works!

The Ladies' Ear Tickler Enters the Story.

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Now there's another hell of a guy. Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be.  Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and now the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful, sorta, because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

So when Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real "apostolic succession" there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Unsinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. During which time, we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus in Rome, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380, the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian, one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, the chief priest of traditional Roman religion, and the title then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the new Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

Back to the Historical Jerome.

So in 382, when Damasus calls Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up, what was being shaped up was the two-year-old Catholic Church, the new official state religion, which by Imperial edict was the only church entitled to the description "catholic"  (whole, complete, entire, universal), or even the name "church".  All others were defined as truly demented and insane, heretics and, since God's gonna kick their butt, deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict.

What, am I up to my usual Catholic bashing?  No, it's what the text says -- Hanc legem sequentes Christianorum catholicorum nomen iubemus amplecti, reliquos vero dementes vesanosque iudicantes haeretici dogmatis infamiam sustinere 'nec conciliabula eorum ecclesiarum nomen accipere', divina primum vindicta post etiam motus nostri quem ex caelesti arbitro sumpserimus ultione plectendos.  The Western Roman Empire at this time was starting to fall apart and was just decades away from totally falling apart, so a lot of this had to do with trying to prevent that.

Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back in Rome soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died of it! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really upset, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then Damasus dies, and with that support gone, Jerome is forced out of Rome.

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works-based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu.

Personally I like our Nebraska favourite Runza better, which also makes a helluva burger, and it's Wolgadeutsch too, but being a regional chain may not be available where you are.  But I digress.  Happens.  Part of the fun of reading this blog.  Back to the story.

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but is rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under both the tension within, its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without, in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East it did not collapse for another thousand years or so, and continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite the "Church".

Well, it would also be about a thousand years or so until THAT message got out, something called the Lutheran Reformation, by a fellow survivor of the remnants of all this nonsense, guy named Martin Luther. Sorry if this stuff isn't in the sanitised reductive biographical sketches that turn up in treasuries of prayer and stuff like that, but them's the facts. It's a disgusting pagan mess, massacres, murders, politics, scandals and all, and from the time of Jerome's life on, was the official religion of the state, held to be right from the Apostles, which remained in the East, and remained in the West after it reconstituted itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and remains to this day in the former state churches that survive these empires.

This is the world of Augustine, Jerome, Damasus, etc -- the Western Roman Empire, which contains Rome, once the centre of the whole thing, in utter turmoil between its classic philosophy, art, culture and religion and the new religion, in attendant civil turmoil, and under assault from Germanic forces outside it. The sack of Rome came in 410, 24 August to be exact, by Alaric, King of the Visigoths. The efforts to synthesise Rome's past and present failed utterly to preserve Rome. But it created a state religion which survived the death of the state that created it, and became the one remaining link upon which the new state would be built, the Holy Roman Empire.  It survives to this day: in the West as the Roman Catholic Church as well as other once-Catholic state churches, some of them with the word Lutheran in them, most having now severed or softened the once-mandatory connexion to their modern states, and in the East as the various Eastern Orthodox churches.

And all of it based entirely on the characteristics of that age, not in the least on the Gospel, as a dying empire tried to redefine itself for survival -- hence "true" churches, "apostolic succession", "bishops" who were as well state officials and political powers, and all the other nonsense by which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches try to justify themselves and their pagan accretions which would hold the catholic church in captivity until the Lutheran Reformation.  The need for such a reformation was so strong amid all this horse dung and bullroar that once it happened later "reforms" blew right past the Lutheran Reformation to an opposite but equally bad extreme, which to-day but not originally travels under the name Protestant or, in the US, Evangelical.

So we have a pope supported by the wealthy Roman class in their twilight who kills his opponents and becomes by edict of the Emperor the true recipient of the true faith, and a holy man whose "I'd better inflict all this on myself" asceticism is funded by more wealthy Roman class money, which kills the daughter of his main supporter and disgusts even the Romans.

So what do we do then, forget about all this as an unholy mess we can ignore and just get back to the Bible, the "New Testament" church? No. And hell no. Judas H Priest, the New Testament church did not have the New Testament as we have it, so how ya gonna do that? You ain't.

Because here's the thing, the Babylonian Captivity was just that, a captivity, not an extinction. The catholic church survived and continues to survive even the invention of the Catholic Church by the Roman Empire. And why is that? Because of the truth expressed in the motto of the Lutheran Reformation, which motto is simply Scripture itself, from both the New and Old Testament, specifically I Peter 1:25 which itself quotes Isaias 40:8.

VDMA. Verbum Domini manet in aeternum. The Word of the Lord endures forever. It cannot be overcome, and on its central truth about Jesus Christ is built the church against which the gates of hell itself cannot prevail, let alone the Roman Empire. It can survive power mongers like Damasus and pathological lunatics like Augustine and Jerome.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite Translators.

Particularly Jerome.  Even though it's the work of a nut case whose nuttiness was fatal and whose supposed self-denial was based on the wealth of others, Jerome's new Latin translation did do two major things.  1) It established a better text of the Bible in the most widely understood language of its time, which remained key in the availability of the Bible for centuries to come, as Latin became the language of learning.  2) It introduced to a thoroughly Gentilised Christianity, who had the barest of understanding of the Jewish faith that Christianity fulfills, and who had instead replaced such an understanding with reworkings in Christian dress of their own classic philosophy, a more Jewish understanding of the texts, admired to this day by Jews.  Not to mention the Hebrew itself.

Not only that, but Jerome set in motion a tradition of selections from Scripture for reading at the preaching part of the Divine Service which would continue for about 1,500 years, and still continues as what we now call the "historic" lectionary. And why is it "historic"?  Because it's, well, old, you know, historic?  Hell no. Because there's another one now, a product in the 1960s of part of the church still in Babylonian Captivity from its last council, Babylon II, er, Vatican II, and widely adapted by wannabes.

The Western Roman Empire, under its new Germanic leaders, managed after a few hundred years known as the Dark Ages to more or less reconstitute itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and the old state church of the old Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, was right there to take its place in the reconstituted Roman Empire. Some consider the HRE to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Charlemagne, Karl der Grosse, in 800, as Emperor of the Romans, and some consider it to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Otto on 2 February 962. But in any case it lasted for about another 1,000 years, and formally ended on 6 August 1806 at the hands of Napoleon.  The deposed last HRE, Francis II, however continued as Francis I, Emperor of Austria. That makes Francis (Franz actually) the only Doppelkaiser in history.  Huh?   Kaiser, that's a Germanisation of guess what, Caesar. Doppel is double.

But by about 100 years after that, the underpinnings of the Roman Catholic Church seemed even to many within it as wearing a bit thin, the Roman Empire being long gone and now the Holy Roman Empire being long gone too, and movements began in various circles, some Scriptural, some doctrinal, some liturgical, to re-express this whole deal in terms not so connected to things long gone.  So they set about coming up with something more attuned to the existentialism and phenomenology then all the rage.

A small example of that, but symptomatic of the large examples, is the Exultet prayer in the Easter Vigil liturgy.  It ends with a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor, which although that part had not been said since the last HRE, Franz II mentioned above, quit in 1806, it was not removed from the Exultet until 1955 as part of Pope Pius XII's massive revision of the Holy Week liturgy.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite "the Church".  Again. 

So once again, just as in the time of Jerome, Augustine, Damasus, et al, we have an entity trying to preserve itself by merging its past with its present and future of a different origin. But this time, that past was itself exactly the product of what was once the different origin the last time around. IOW, both that church's Empires, Roman and Holy Roman, were gone and now their church had to go it alone in another emerging new world, and once again it sought to reinvent itself as a synthesis, hybrid, reconciliation, something like that, of the two. This culminated at Vatican II, when the old Imperial church reinvented itself for a new post-Imperial age.

Problem is, as we saw, the old Imperial church was just that, the old Imperial church, not the catholic church or the church of Jesus Christ, so one of the two elements being synthesised into the new synthesis was itself a previous synthesis of Christianity and the old empire. The proponents of this movement thought Christianity, the catholic church, the church of Jesus Christ, to be re-emerging after centuries of being obscured, jumping over centuries to before Constantine, but in fact it was being yet further obscured; the Babylonian Captivity in which they were still captive deepened, only re-expressed in terms of the new Babylon that no longer had it as its church, or had a church at all, so it seemed new.

We shall see in our post for 11 October, from an address by one of its architects and champions, this overriding essential idea of a reversal of corrupting influences since Constantine.  It sounds good, very good.  Almost sounds like us talking about the Babylonian Captivity!  It isn't.  Why?  For one thing, all its points were made, prior to the council and with no need for a council to be called, by Pope Pius XII, particularly in his encyclicals Mystici corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ, 29 June 1943), Mediator Dei (Mediator of God, on liturgical reform, 20 November 1947) and Humani generis (Of the human race, 12 August 1950).

While RC apologists love to proclaim Vatican II as in harmony with these and bringing them to fruition, this is false.  As if that were not clear enough in the documents themselves, in which the things against which Pius warned as threats to and dissension from Catholicism became normative Catholicism, it is quite clear in the many theologians censured in the wake of these encyclicals (de Lubac, Congar et al.) who became the movers and shakers at Vatican II.

For another, the notion that before Constantine there was some sort of pure unified church from which we deviated and to which we can return is nothing more than a Romantic fiction akin to Rousseau's "noble savage".  This pure early church was in fact a bleeding mess, as is evident from St Paul's epistles through the Patristics (the "fathers"; theologians from roughly 100 to 450 or to 787, the year of the Second Council of Nicaea, the last council recognized by both the Eastern and Western Church).  One sees an amazing spectrum of widely divergent ideas of who Christ is and what Christianity is, which only appears pure and unified through the self-selective lens they think they are discarding of the very Trinitarian Christianity toward whose triumph over the others Constantine contributed.

For yet another, a body grows.  It is not the same at 70 years as it is at 7 years or 7 months, and if it has gotten off course in its later years, correction from that does not consist in returning to what it was in earlier years.  A 70 year old does not become a 7 year old again, discarding everything.  As regards the contributions of Jerome, a reform based on this is simply nothing more than the "exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism", which has since come to be called "liturgical archaeology", against which Pius XII warned (Mediator Dei 64) as he encouraged lay participation. 

In this way it only superficially resembled, with such things as vernacular languages and free standing altars, the real reformation of the church, which had happened nearly five centuries before!  They think they addressed what we did in the Babylonian Captivity but missed entirely the nature of what we did.  And so the Whore of Babylon thoroughly remodelled the brothel, with a new order of liturgy (yeah, literally, a novus ordo) complete with new calendar of observances and new lectionary of readings, replacing the one that had grown for centuries.

Now that's not surprising, that's what you do when you're the Whore of Babylon, and the Babylon that formed you and kept you as its whore is gone and there is a new Babylon.

But these "reforms" came about on an entirely different basis than the reforms of the Lutheran Reformation, which did not run from the march of history nor wish to discard or disparage it, for all its warts and blemishes, did not seek to reverse or jump back over centuries of development, as if the Holy Ghost took a nap for some 1,600 years, did not engage in liturgical archaeology, but instead accepted it and moved on, not reinventing anything but consciously maintaining continuity, as the Augsburg Confession takes great pains to point out, discarding only that which contradicted Scripture but otherwise retaining the ceremonies and readings previously in use.

The difference between, and essential incompatibility between, Lutheran liturgical reform and Catholic liturgical reform is more fully treated in our post for 25 June on the presentation of the Augsburg Confession.

What is surprising now is that the churches of the Reformation generally, and even those of the Lutheran Reformation, jumped on board with this Roman insanity, took the novus ordo and revised and reworked their own versions of it! So now we have an "historic" lectionary right alongside a Vatican II For Lutherans Lutheranised version of this novus ordo.  We even lead the Whore herself in this regard, because we didn't have to wait a generation or so for a Roman Imperial official with only the church of the former state left -- a "pope", in case you were wondering -- to say it's OK with a motu proprio! And then his immediate successor reverses it.  Utter madness.

Conclusion.

So on this feast of St Jerome, let us remember that, you know what, he really was closer to the authors and sources of the Bible than our vaunted modern scholars working removed by centuries, and really did, nut case and all, contribute to the church, which even he and his contemporaries and times and subsequent times could put in captivity but not extinction, a thing of great value in the Vulgate Bible and the tradition of the historic lectionary.

And let us remember that the Reformation has already happened and not at all on the basis that fuelled Babylon II, er, Vatican II.  We continue as the catholic church where the Word is rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered, no new faith, no new doctrine, no new anything, and sure as hell no new orders of worship based on the scholarship emerging from the dissolution, not just politically but in every way, of the Holy Roman Empire, in which Roman effort there is no "hermeneutic of continuity" whatever but a pathetic old whore trying to still work the streets.  With us it is rather the organic continuity of the catholic church normed by its very own book, the Bible, rejecting only what contradicts it.

St Michael's Day / Michaelmas / Michaelistag 29 September 2024.

This was a pretty big day for centuries.  So why was that and why don't we hear much about it now?  That's what this post is about, and in finding out we'll see lots of ways the feast has impacted modern life.  

It's not completely lost.  It's still contained in our LCMS calendar. Phillip Melanchthon even wrote a poem for the day which became a hymn, "Lord God, To Thee We Give All Praise", which is "Dicimus grates tibi summe rerum" in his Latin original --  yes, Latin.  We still have that too.  It's hymn 254 in The Lutheran Hymnal, or, I suppose it won't hurt to say, 522 in LSB.

Here's why the big deal.  

Michael in the Bible.

Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse. His name means in Hebrew "Who is like God?"

In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10).  That return (and much else) is covered earlier this month in the post Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now.  Later in the Book of Daniel (chapter 12) Michael is identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time Michael is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.

It is not the only time he appears, depending on to whom you listen. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So then some say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and then some others say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references to God himself, out of piety so Man can withstand the interaction.

Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel 1) who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, 2) who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, 3) who told Sarah she would have a son, 4) who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, 5) who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, 6) who was the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, also including references in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.

This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, and not just in these stories, he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.

In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship, something which crept into that church anyway as saint veneration and relics. In the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.

Michael in Later Stories.

There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, the angel being Michael, and is still there to-day with a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it.

It was later connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.

Now there's a story!  Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them if we're not going to get paid, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.

Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power over the Holy Roman Empire, with a lot of money and land changing hands. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, or at least a great irony, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.

The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum.  Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angels and Demons", a recent movie by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame.

St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.

The Feast of St Michael the Archangel, and All Angels.

Why is that? Not to mention, how is that? For feast days, the custom in the church is to take the date of a saint's death, that being the day he was born to eternity as it were, as his feast day, or if that is unknown, the date of something else he did or is associated with him. Now Michael being an angel and all, didn't die, so it can't be his date of death, so what is that something else?

Here's what. The feast isn't actually the Feast of St Michael, but the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael. The Leonine Sacramentary, from the Sixth Century (the 500s) gives a Feast of the Birth of the Basilica of the Angel on the way to Salaria.  The Gelesian Sacramentary, from the Seventh Century, gives a Feast of St Michael the Archangel, but both of these were on 30 September. Then in the Eighth Century, the Gregorian Sacramentary gives a Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael the Archangel, but puts it on 29 September, which is when they had a vigil for the dedication.

That's just as well -- gonna need 30 September for the Feast of St Jerome, who died on that day in 420. So we have a feast on 29 September of the dedication of a church to St Michael, howdya like that? Two things about that. For one thing, "church", didn't it say basilica, what the hell is a basilica? A basilica originally was not a church at all, but a meeting place for merchants and mercantile justice, but as they were pretty nice big buildings, they got taken over as churches, with the state Catholic Church and all, and later such churches were called basilica from the get-go.

For another, the specific basilica whose dedication established the feast on 29 September hasn't existed for over a thousand years! One thing's for sure though. 29 September sure in the hell ain't what Vatican II made of it in the novus ordo, where it's now the Feast of Michael, Gabriel and Rafael.  Utter revisionist bullroar. 29 September has been about Michael, and the whole company of angels by extension, since it started, and even if the basilica disappeared a thousand years ago, why in the hell a thousand years later does the Whore of Babylon mess with it?

Because that's what the Whore of Babylon does, mess with things. Gabriel has his own feast day, which is 24 March, and in the Eastern church his day is 8 November in the Julian Calendar, which is 21 November in the Gregorian Calendar, and he has two other days as well (26 March and 13 July if you wanna know, the first for his role in the Annunciation and the other for all his other stuff). Rafael has his own feast day too, which is 24 October.

It's interesting the both these feasts were only put in the General Roman Calendar in 1921, however, in the sanctoral calendars at lexorandi.org, the 1731 Lutheran Almanac, on the 200th Anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, has Gabe's but not Rafe's, and "The Calendar", which I believe is Loehe's, has Rafe's but not Gabe's.  My "Manual of Prayers", ordered prepared by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore with Imprimatur 17 May 1889 by James Cardinal Gibbons no less (it was my dad's, I'm old but not that old), has Rafe on 24 October and Gabe but on 18 March, so 1921 didn't start anything but standardised it for Rome.

To its credit, among the many things to its credit, The Lutheran Hymnal -- you know, THE Lutheran Hymnal -- doesn't jack around with any of that, but simply retains The Feast of St Michael and All Angels, and to its credit, Lutheran Service Book, while it does often follow the novus ordo model of jacking around with stuff, doesn't jack around with this one. And given that the dedication thing has kind of lost its significance, the basilica being dedicated being gone a millennium now, it's still worth mentioning since originally that is why 29 September.

And yes, it's kind of like an All Angels Day too. Which is just fine. St Michael being the commander of the angelic forces, like any good commander, he doesn't forget his men.

Michaelmas the Quarter Day.

We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For one thing, Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.

What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.

Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, like a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.

Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.  "Old"?  Read on; there's an "old" Michaelmas too.

Btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that if she consented she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December. And re calendars, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.

"Old" Michaelmas and New Calendars. 

In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar the date became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.

A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope. It was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius.  Whozat?  An Italian mathematician and astronomer who did the essential work of correcting the drift of the Julian calendar.  The year in the Julian calendar is 11 minutes shorter than a year actually is, so over the centuries the date of the March equinox isn't on the March equinox, for example, which throws off when Easter is along with everything else.  Christmas in July indeed!  The church needed to fix this.

Lilius' work, with some tweaking by Christopher Clavius, a German Jesuit mathematician, was proposed to the papal commission in charge of calendar reform in 1575.  Gregory made it official on 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas". It's named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious", and changing to the new calendar was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.

More musty stuff from me that can be left in the must?  Yeah well it's why we have the calendar in world-wide use now.  And also, in computer science there is the Lilian Date, named after Lilius, which is used to calculate the number of days between any two dates since the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar on 15 October 1582.  The Lilian Date was invented at IBM by Bruce G. Ohms in 1986 and is used in the date conversion routines in IBM's LE (language environment) software.

And Clavius is quite a guy, twice over.  He started out thoroughly in the thinking of his time, the geocentric model of the universe, along with the theological addendum that since the Bible presents the universe in those terms, if it isn't in those terms then what can you believe the Bible about anyway and the faith falls apart (the issue another post here in September takes up).  Nonetheless, he saw there are problems with the Ptolemaic model though he opposed Copernicus.  Galileo respected him for that, and the two met in 1611 going over the observations now (then) possible with a telescope, and guess what, he changed his mind, and, didn't lose his faith.

Also, in logic, there is Clavius' Law, lex clavia in Latin, aka consequentia mirabilis, the admirable consequence.  So what's that?  It establishes that a proposition is true if its negation (opposite) is inconsistent.  There's two aspects to this.  If a statement is inconsistent then its opposite must be true, so, if a statement is inferred from its opposite being inconsistent that's the consequentia mirabilis, and if a statement itself is inconsistent then the inferred opposite will be true is the lex clavis.  Huh, gimme an example, never heard of it!

OK, heard of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum (that's pronounced KO-jee-to btw), I think therefore I am?  There you go.  You might think the thinking is all messed up but there's no denying there was thinking itself, therefore a thinker.  Actually Aristotle said this long ago, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1170a25) and in the Protrepticus, which survives in fragments.  (Judas H, what's a protrepticus?  A protrepsis is a rhetorical exhortation to get you to think or live differently than you are, another word for which is paraenesis, though sometimes paraenesis is used to mean exhortation to continue thinking or living the way you are.)

Or how about this.  Someone says, there are no truth statements.  But for that to be true there must be truth statements.

Here's the consequentia mirabilis (lex clavia, Clavius' Law) in formal notation:
 is equivalent to .

Michaelmas, Curfews, Goose Dinners and Sheriffs.

We still ain't done!  For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day.  

Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours (that's 9pm) to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.

Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, because goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.

It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!

It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called in Mother England before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve, and why your county isn't called a shire.

Now.

So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!

Which in our digital age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?

Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- and a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.

Happy Michaelmas! And have some goose, but before 2100. And touch up that resume, if you're looking for a job. Been there and it's tough. Put your trust in God, in this and in all things; I mean who is like God, just like Michael's name means.  And, you got people -- and angels. 

A Season, Two Names, Two Starts and What Happened to the High Holydays and Sukkoth? 2024.

OK what's up with this?  Whyrya posting about Fall and Jewish stuff, arnchu supposed to post Lutheran stuff?  Here's why.  Past Elder, my original blog, started 22 February 2007 and its Blogoral Cycle (a joke on the term "sanctoral calendar" from the church calendar) takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has NOTHING.  Yet this is precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!

Not to mention (I like to say that before I mention something) that in the world this season has two names and two official start times, and some unofficial start times too, and the church calendar has nothing special.

So what's up with that? Here's the 2024 version of my post about it.

I. About Fall.

The official start of Fall happens on 23 or 24 September.  Huh?

Well actually, that's just one of the official starts of Fall. Holy crap, what's up with that -- two official starts?  And we said there's unofficial ones too? And to a season with two names! What's up with THAT?  And that's before we even get to this post's actual What's Up With That?  Here's the deal.

A. About the Two Starts.

The first thing is, there's two Falls, the astronomical one and the meteorological one.  We just went over the astronomical one.  Astronomical Fall is determined by the relative amount of light and dark in a day, in turn determined by the relative position of the Earth and the Sun. Just like the word Man, which can mean either all human beings or just the male ones, the word Day is used sometimes for the whole 24 hour period or just the light part of it.

Astronomical Fall starts on the day, as in 24 hour period, with equal amounts of light and dark in it.  They're not exactly equal but pretty damn close.  That day is called the autumnal equinox, equal night in Latin.  The day when they are exactly equal is called the equilux, equal light in Latin. It happens a couple days later.  Howzat?  Because the equinox is not determined by a single point but the top of a sphere, the sun.

Fall goes to the day with the least amount of day light in it, called the winter solstice ("sun stand still", solstitium, sol or sun and sistere or to stand still in Latin). And some think Latin is not still with us! But we all note these daylight changes do not align exactly with the air temperature changes. That is because of the thermal latency of land and sea.

Judas H Priest, what is thermal latency? How many what's up with thats can we have in one post? Don't freak. "Thermal latency" are simply more Latin derived words for the phenomenon that while as the earth rotates toward and then away from the sun, thereby giving more and then less heat, it takes both land and water a while to warm up or cool off.

Meteorological Fall is determined by the changes in air temperature. Huh, if it's meteorology why ain't it about meteors? Holy crap another What's Up With That! Now ain't you glad you read my blog so you can know all this stuff? Meteorology comes from the Greek meteoros or "up in the sky",  and -ology or the study of something. Matter of fact, although weather forecasters take flak for having the only job where you get paid to be wrong, meteorology was started by Aristotle in a book by that name he wrote in 350 BC in which, with no modern instruments whatever but just being a keen observer and smarter than all hell, he described what is now called the hydrologic cycle.

Don't freak, more Greek derived words, here meaning water cycle, in which water is not just distinct from land but interacts with land in changing cycles in various forms; liquid, otherwise known as rain, vapour, otherwise known as fog, and solid, otherwise known as ice. Think that's just some musty ancient stuff, who cares? Think again, because our planet, though we call it Earth, is actually mostly water, and a planet with a lot of water over long periods of time loses hydrogen, which is part of water (H2O, remember?), which in turn leads to what is called the "greenhouse effect", which leads to more hydrogen loss, which leads to more greenhouse effect, and that is an entirely natural cycle.  Climate is going to change.  But, that change can be accelerated by what Man's activities put in the air.  Now, while we don't know exactly how these two affect each other, and while various points on the political spectrum act as if we do, they DO interact, and everybody is concerned as hell about that now or damned well ought to be.

Sound musty now? Old Ari was sharp as a tack, wish we had more like him now with modern instruments. Which is why, besides Blogoral Calendars and stuff like that, this blog goes on about musty ancient stuff -- because it helps us understand where in the hell we are right now and what "where we are right now" even is.

So, meteorological seasons are determined by average air temperatures, which lag behind the astronomical events of solstices and equinoxes that determine astronomical seasons, due to thermal water latency. Fall in this definition is from 1 September to 30 November. Well, in the northern hemisphere that is. Our planet being a sphere, when one side rotates toward the sun the other rotates away, so Fall in the southern hemisphere happens when our Spring does, and vice versa.

There's your two official starts, but in the US there's two unofficial starts also.  One of them is Labor Day, which became a federal holiday in 1894 and happens on the first Monday in September.  The other is set by your local school board, who as any kid or parent knows, is God, and determines when Summer ends by when school starts. When I grew up school started after Labor Day, the unofficial start of Fall, and after 1 September, the official start of meteorological Fall.  Now it starts in August sometime when you oughta still be swimming in the city pool and stuff like that, probably because they don't want any lawsuits so they have room for "snow days" in the Winter.  When I grew up a snow day meant you got up earlier, shovelled the crap outta the way and went about your business, leaving early because you drive slower, or should.

B. About the Two Names.

Oh yeah, about the two names for the same season thing, so we can clear up all the What's Up With Thats before we get on to the main What's Up With That. Guess what? More Latin. The original name was the Latin autumnus, and the modern languages derived from Latin, like French, all have similar words for it. But English isn't totally Latin derived, the Latin and Greek stuff is an overlay from the French-speaking Normans and their conquest of England in 1066 onto basically a form of German.  In German itself autumn is Der Herbst, which means harvest, and that is what the season was called in English too, Harvest.  It wasn't until the 1500s, when people were tending to live more in towns than in the country, that "harvest" in English became more the activity of harvesting and the season when it happens began to be called Autumn and Fall.

OK we saw the derivation of "autumn" from autumnus but where did this fall thing come from? Because the leaves are falling, and the amount of daylight is falling, and the year is drawing to its close. In the 1600s English colonisation of the Americas was in full swing, and both terms came over, but back in Mother England by the 1700s "fall" fell to "autumn" in usage, and that is why now Autumn is used in both places but Fall in mostly heard in the US.

Sukkoth is the easy part of this Fall stuff. It begins at sunset, the start of the Biblical day, on 15 Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. Expressing this date in the secular calendar, it will be somewhere from late September to mid October.  Ironically, the secular Gregorian calendar is religious in origin, being commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct the drift of the Julian calendar so Easter would happen about when the first one did.  More about calendars in the next post, on Michaelmas.  Remember the Jewish calendar is a lunar one so things move when expressed in our calendar, and, the "day" starts at sundown.  In 2020 Sukkoth started sunset of 2 October.  It was sunset of 23 September in 2018, 4 October in 2017, 16 October in 2016, 27 September in 2015, 8 October in 2014, 18 September in 2013, 30 September in 2012, of 12 October in 2011, and of 22 September in 2010. The date being fixed in the Jewish calendar it will move in the Gregorian one.

God's pretty straight up about what he wants. Speaking of which, let's see what the real God, not the school board, wants regarding observances through the year and what all this stuff in Fall is.

II. Here's What God Wants For A Festival Calendar.

In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.

And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe.  These are the Ten Days of Repentance, from Rosh Hashanah, the so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses.  Then comes Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days.  Then comes the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors resumes (huh, what's up with that; hang on, we'll get to it below, or as we say, vide infra, Latin for "see below", a term once common in the scholarly apparatus -- you know, footnotes and stuff -- of scholarly works and which I for sure would use if I ever resume writing like a PhD).  We're not done yet; then comes Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again, and dancing that often goes on for hours.  LOTS of stuff in the Fall.  Or Autumn.

In some of the other posts, we saw the first festival, Passover, transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Then we saw with the second festival God himself counts the commanded Omer and transforms the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.

Then, for the third festival, what -- the whole thing seems to, uh, fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? And where's the dancing?

Nowhere.

The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all?

No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.

But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?

III. Here's The Christian Sukkoth.

Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgrimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening, as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.

Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.

While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgiving at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, which happen in Fall, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.

Before the Conclusion, a word or two on Eastern Orthodox observance, in which some consider the feast of the Transfiguration takes the place of Sukkot, fruits are blessed to commemorate Peter's suggestion to build three booths, one for Christ, Moses and Elijah each.  Well, in the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration Jesus turns down Peter's suggestion.  No booths.  Instead we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.

Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August, not at all the time of Sukkoth. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.

We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle.

In our times however, 6 August has found two significances that relate to the Transfiguration, one of which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.

6 August is the anniversary of the World Wide Web, when in 1991 the first server with the first browser and the first website went online, at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research; the acronym is from the name in French, it's in suburban Geneva), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (an Englishman!) making his ideas proposed 12 March 1989 a reality.  A reality which allows us to not build booths but go into the Jerusalem, so to speak, of life as never before.

6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.

IV. Conclusion.

At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!