Advent 2022. 27 November 2022

Here's the 2022 version of my Advent post.  We'll look at why we even have an Advent, what it is, the various ways it has been and is observed, and what it shows about the proverbial "real" meaning of Christmas.

Why Have An Advent?

Scripture records the birth of Jesus, but it records no direction to celebrate either it or a preparation for it. But it records no prohibition of doing so either. The Christian Church has evolved various practices to commemorate one of its most outrageous claims, that God became Man in Jesus, the Incarnation, and, considering the magnitude of what is celebrated, has evolved a season of preparation for it universally, in both the Eastern and Western church. These celebrations have taken on various forms in various places, and even various forms over time in the same place. But they all have the same idea, for Christ's church to celebrate to-gether and proclaim one of the world- and life-changing events of Christ. Which is the idea of all of the church's liturgy.

What Is Advent?

Advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means a turning toward, a coming, and translates the Greek word parousia, which designates not the coming of Jesus at his birth but his coming again to judge the world on the Last Day. Advent is in fact a preparation for three comings of, or turnings toward, Christ, and the three will culminate in three distinct liturgies for Christmas, Christ's Mass. No other season or celebration in the church year is like this.

Here are the three: 

1) Our Advent preparation for the historical coming or birth of Jesus culminates in the celebration of that event in the mass in the night, Midnight Mass. 

2) Our Advent preparation for the coming or birth of Jesus in the heart of believers, in us, culminates in the mass at dawn, as evidenced in the first believers, the shepherds who went to the manger. 

3) Our Advent preparation for his second historical coming, in judgement and in glory, which has been the subject of the final Sundays of the church year before Advent, culminates in the mass during the day, which celebrates the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity in the being of God, in which redeemed Man will fully participate after the end of time.

Advent then precedes Christmas as Lent precedes Easter, a time of repentance and preparation. For both seasons, church vestments etc are purple, the colour associated both with penance, our part, and royalty, his part, as King of kings. However, the purple is the darker royal purple rather than the Roman purple of Lent, the colours like the seasons they reflect being both similar yet distinct in kind of event to which they lead.

In some places recent usage has varied, derived from the rite of Salisbury in England. Salisbury is called Sarum in Latin, and the Sarum Rite has a hybrid liturgy of English and French influences following the Norman Conquest in 1066. It's part of a massive change in history.  Duke William II of Normandy, aka the "Conqueror" and King William I of England, the first of the Norman kings of England, created that diocese out of two earlier ones and appointed a fellow Norman its bishop, "Saint" Osmund, the Count of Seez (in Normandy) and Earl of Dorset and his Lord Chancellor, with the approval of Pope Gregory VII. Well sort of approval. This was part of the Normans' rather systematic assertion of control over everything English-- more on that below.

Old Pope Greg was having a hard sell on his championship of clerical celibacy and the supremacy of the church, meaning the Roman Church under the pope, over the state among the Germans.  He even  excommunicated Heinrich (Henry) IV, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, and not once but twice!  So, as not to spread his efforts too thin he cut the Normans some slack. How's that for "apostolic succession"! And oh yeah, Greg's a "saint" too in the Roman church.

William as a duke in Normandy was still under the French king, Phillip I, (duke ranks just below king) but now as king of England he was on an equal basis.  He was crowned king of England on Christmas 1066 by Aldred, archbishop of York and presented to the people by him in English, and then in French by bishop Geoffrey of Coutances in Normandy.  This is typical of how William also messed up our good Germanic language English by making French the language of the ruling class, which it remained for about 300 years, and by the end of his reign (1087) about 90% of England was under a French-born aristocracy with which he replaced the native English one, forever changing English culture. Yeah, the Anglo-Saxon culture was an import too, but hey, we Angles were ASKED by the original English to come over from Germany, and gave the place its name, Angle-land, England. The Saxons and Jutes can speak for themselves. But I digress.

The Sarum rite Scripture readings and other prayers proper to the day are different to the Roman rite, as is the colour of vestments, not purple but blue. This use of blue as the colour for Advent has had a more general usage in the West in recent years, though with the Roman propers. Well, not the traditional Roman propers, but the new ones from its three year cycle from the 1960s, which is the basis of the common new lectionary for all heterodox liturgical churches and which will not be considered here.  One can look them up and put on a little Simon and Garfunkle or other holdovers of the time if one is so inclined.

So, several problems with the use of Sarum blue.  

One, yes it does have an historical precedent, but that precedent is not a happy one.

Two, the use is inconsistent, being Sarum colour but Roman readings, and not the traditional Roman ones but the ones from the 1970 novus ordo. 

Three, being inconsistent, it is not historical either but rather a modern pastiche, as post-Vatican II liturgy generally is, of something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, in this case literally, so it's contemporary worship with a traditional look that isn't traditional at all.  

Four, the blue with its symbolism of the sky unduly weights the symbolism of the liturgical colour toward the second coming, the parousia, which is a theme of Advent but one of three, whereas the penitence and preparation symbolised by purple is common to all three themes of Advent.

The Old Advent, "St Martin's Fast".

In fact, Advent in the West used to be even more like Lent. From the fourth or fifth century or so there was, and as we shall shortly see still is in the Eastern church under the name Nativity Fast, a 40 day time of fasting and penance much like Lent. In the Western church it started on 11 November, the feast of St Martin of Tours, Martin Luther's baptismal namesake, with the day being something like Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in Lent. The fast started the day after.  This "quadragesima sancti Martini", the forty days of St Martin, died out by the late Middle Ages, and Advent as it is generally known now in the West took shape.

To this day, in some places the traditional main dish for Christmas is goose. In fact, one of my favourite phrases in English, not suitable for reproduction here, derives from this custom, let the reader understand. The Christmas goose may derive from Advent when it was St Martin's Fast. Martin didn't really want to be a bishop, and is said to have hidden himself in a flock of geese from those seeking him to persuade him to accept the post, whose noise nonetheless gave his location away. So goose became the main food for St Martin's Day kicking off Advent.

There is still an echo of the original Advent in the "last Sundays of the church year" in November, which have the general theme of looking forward to end of times and the second coming.

The Eastern Church follows to this day a similar, but not the same, 40 day pattern of a season of preparation and penitence before Easter and Christmas, and our former Western "St Martin's Fast" was closer to it. In the Eastern Church, it isn't called Advent, but the Nativity Fast, and lasts 40 days, just like the St Martin's Fast, but they count them consecutively, from 15 November to 24 December. That's why it also has a similar but not the same nickname: 15 November is the day after the feast, East or West, of St Philip the Apostle, so it is sometimes called "St Philip's Fast". The liturgical colour is neither purple nor blue, but red.  Also, where in the Western church the liturgical year begins with the First Sunday in Advent, in the Eastern church the liturgical year begins 1 September.

The Current Advent.

Anyway, each Sunday emphasises a different aspect of the preparation and the comings noted above. Below are listed the Scripture passages used for the Introits and Scripture readings. Roman usage (which Rome ditched at Vatican II) has the same Introits but varies as noted from ours in the Epistles and Gospels for the Western Advent.

I had never understood this variation and mentioned that once in the combox on a blog. Pastor Benjamin Mayes responded citing Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy, p.438, which states our usage follows the Comes attributed to St Jerome and its final version, The Lectionary of Charlemagne, which Rome later modified to accommodate its new feasts.

What's a comes (pronounced KO-mays)? It's a Latin word meaning companion, here, a companion book of readings for mass to the rite's service book itself. Now we more commonly call such a book a Lectionary, from the Latin for "readings". The list of the readings is still often called by its Greek name, pericope, meaning section, here, the sections of Scripture appointed to be read.

In Latin and Hebrew, the title of a text is usually the first word or two of the text, called the incipit, (inCHIPit) which means "it begins" in Latin, rather than a separate title. Accordingly, some of the Sundays of the church year are called from the first word of the first proper text to them, the Introit. The Sundays of Advent, Lent, and after Easter are nicknamed from their Introits. This practice has fallen into disuse with many churches following Rome's 1960s revisionism of the lectionary. Or one can as my former synod did abolish Introits altogether!

Another similarity between Advent and Lent is that a little over halfway through these preparation/penitential seasons, the coming joy peeks through in the readings, starting with the Introit, and so the liturgical colours reflect that with the purple yielding for that Sunday to rose or pink, which is also why the so-called Advent wreath has a rose or pink candle among the rest. It's for the third Sunday in Advent, which is called Gaudete Sunday from the incipit of the Introit for it, which means "rejoice" and quotes Philippians 4:4-6. The Lenten parallel with rose vestments is Laetare Sunday, from the incipit of the Introit, Laetare Jerusalem, which means "Be joyful Jerusalem" and quotes Isaiah 66:10-11.

Psalm numbers in the old Roman usage followed the Septuagint, whereas we follow the numbering of the Hebrew Bible. That usage counts what we call Psalms 9 and 10 as one psalm, likewise 114 and 115, and divides both 116 and 147 in two, so between 10 to 148 the numbering is different by one. Since Vatican II Rome generally uses the Hebrew Bible numbering too, but below both will be given in the format: Hebrew numbering (Septuagint numbering).

Here are the names and readings of the Sundays in Advent, with this year's dates.

Ad te levavi. The First Sunday of Advent. 27 November 2022.

Introit Psalms 25 (24):1-3 psalm verse 25 (24):4, Epistle Romans 13:11-15, Gospel Matthew 21:1-9.

(Roman usage Gospel Luke 21:25-33, our second Sunday Gospel.)

Populus Sion. The Second Sunday of Advent. 4 December 2022.

Introit Isaiah 30:30 psalm verse 80 (79):1, Epistle Romans 15:4-13, Gospel Luke 21:25-36.

(Roman usage Gospel Matthew 11:2-10, our third Sunday Gospel.)

Gaudete. The Third Sunday of Advent. 11 December 2022.

Introit Philippians 4:4-6 psalm verse 85 (84):1, Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5, Gospel Matthew 11:2-10.

(Roman usage Epistle Philippians 4:4-7 Gospel John 1:19-28, our fourth Sunday readings.)

Rorate coeli. The Fourth Sunday of Advent. 18 December 2022.

Introit Isaiah 45:8 psalm verse 19 (18):1, Epistle Philippians 4:4-7, Gospel John 1:19-28.

(Roman usage Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5 Gospel Luke 3:1-6, our third Sunday Epistle, the Luke passage not used by us.)

Away in an Animal Feeding Trough, or, The Real Meaning of Christmas.

Christmas is a warm time filled with comfort, family, presents, good food, along with our religious sentiments, for many of us. Christmas as in the event we celebrate was nothing like that. It was rough. Joseph wasn't the glowing saint of paintings and icons, he was a working guy with a pregnant wife about to give birth -- I've been there twice and that ain't easy under any circumstances, and my observation would be it's even less easy for the about-to-deliver wife.  He was in town to follow the law of foreign rulers and get counted in the census, with all the hotels full and no place to put his family up but a stable for animals, and after the baby was born they had to put him in a feeding trough for animals. That's what "away in a manger" was. A manger is a feeding trough for animals, the word coming into English from the French to eat, in turn from the Latin to chew (mandere). Fact is, our word "munch" has the same root.

So the King of kings is put in a feeding trough for animals in a cold stable. You don't make up this kind of stuff. Humans who are gods in myth are emperors and such, not working class kids born in a barn. Top it all off, this child "away in a feeding trough" will one day say "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." Ego sum panis vitae: qui venit ad me, non euriet, et qui credit in me, non sitiet umquam (John 6:35) and give himself to be the food of eternal life, giving his body and blood for us to eat and drink at mass as the pledge and promise of our salvation through the merits of his death and resurrection. Guess it kind of fits then.

For those of you whose Christmas isn't going to be all warm and cozy and filled with cheer, guess what, you're right in there with those at the first Christmas. That was a little rough too. Born in a stable, a feeding trough for a crib, and pretty soon his family will have to having to high tail it out of town. So you're not excluded at all, and you can take it right to him, because he knows all about when Christmas isn't so merry, or happy, as the English say. And he also knows all about how merry and happy don't really get determined by what happens in this life, on Christmas or any other day!

To Thee have I lifted up my soul, in Thee, O my God, I put my trust. Let me not be ashamed, neither let my enemies laugh at me, for none of those that wait on Thee shall be confounded.

Psalm 25 (24):1-3 as used in the Introit for the First Sunday in Advent.  Ad te levavi, to Thee have I lifted up.

The Dormitory of Mary, 15 August 2022.

Yeah I know, it's the Dormition of Mary, aka the Assumption.

Dormition, dormitory -- all from the Latin for "to sleep". One of the dormitories where I went to university was called St Mary Hall, formally. It was just "Mary Hall" otherwise. Everyone went there whether they had a room there (I didn't) or friends there (I did) or not. Reason being, St Mary Cafeteria, or "Mary Caf" as we called it (the culture may include tendencies which may strike those unfamiliar with it as unduly familiar, even slightly irreverent). Thing is, it wasn't a cafeteria at all but an on-campus restaurant and gathering place.

What's up with that? Mary Caf was not the regular school cafeteria where those with a meal plan ate, which being a rural campus not in any town was just about everyone. Rather, it was where one ordered burgers and fries and stuff like that on one's own time, and dime. So why is a restaurant called a cafeteria when it really isn't? Well, the regular cafeteria wasn't called a cafeteria either, but a refectory, so the word was available. And the restaurant did have trays and a line.

Holy crap, what's a refectory? Comes from the Latin reficere, to restore, which gave rise to the word refectorium, a room where you get restored, ie eat. It's a monk thing, and being a Benedictine institution we were all about that. Now, in a real refectory, according to the Rule -- yeah I know, what's "the Rule", ok without modifiers that's the Rule of St Benedict for monasteries, geez do I have to explain everything? -- meals are eaten in silence, one guy reads from Scripture or writings of the saints (that's called lectio divina, or divine reading) and no meat from mammals except if you're sick.

However, true to the very heart of the most venerable tradition, Benedictine in particular and Catholic in general, that's how it is but it ain't really like that. As more and more "feasts" came in to the church calendar, the meals got better, and, by the time it took four digits to write the year, aka 1000 AD, the obvious solution was to eat the other, better, food in another room, and keep up appearances in the refectory.  So, not have your cake in one room, then eat it in another. Perfect.

And in a student refectory, where the teaching monks ate too, as distinct from the monking refectory of the monkatorium itself, there ain't no lectio divina, and ain't much of anything done in silence either.

So it don't get no more Benedictine than to have the refectory and Mary Caf, the official restoring room and the other one on the side. Hey, don't laugh, the Eastern Orthodox, as usual, amp it up even more. In their monkeries the refectory is called the Trapeza, always with at least one icon and sometimes a ruddy church unto itself, altar, iconostasis and all.

And they got this Lifting of the Panagia to end the meal too. What in all monking monkery is a Panagia? It's the prosphoron from which you take a chunk in honour of the Theotokos. What the hell izzat? The former is the loaf used in the Eucharist, the latter is Mary. After the service, the refectorian (don't freak, it's the monk who runs the refectory) cuts a triangle out of it, cuts the rest in half, puts it on a tray, the boys go over to the refectory with the tray in the lead.  Then after the meal there is a ceremony in which the refectorian says "Bless me, holy fathers, and pardon me a sinner" and the assembled holy fathers say "May God pardon and have mercy on you" (as if he had not already done so at Calvary, but I digress).  Then he says echoing the liturgy "Great is the name" and the boys chime in with "of the Holy Trinity", then comes "O all-holy Mother of God help us" and the reply "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us" (as if he had not already ... oh well).  Then accompanied by a dude with censer he offers it, then each, uh, holy father takes a piece between thumb and forefinger, runs it through the incense, and eats it.

Now that's some serious monking. Judas H Priest OSB, we're a bunch of Bavarians, or at least the joint was founded by them.  Hell, the closest we came to anything like that was to make sure you went back before they ran out for more of the good dark bread they bake. Closest I'm gonna come to any Lifting of the Panagia now is the lifting of the Panera. Besides, Panera's got wi-fi too I think -- for some digital lectio divina of course. I still don't like white bread, though, and will take a wheat or dark bread every time. Every time. And still call a dining room a refectory once in a while too. It's a spiritual thing of course.

So we had our refectory and our "cafeteria" named for Mary. Later, the food service would open a more night oriented spot, Der Keller, which means the cellar or basement in German, in the cellar of the old main building, though it took a new food service director who was a Baptist from Alabama to come up with the idea. Now that's my kind of Baptist! Also my kind of refectorian. Hell, with the secular and ecclesiastical sides of the 1960s both raging, he was more German and Benedictine at heart than the German Benedictines.

And Mary? Just as Gabriel said, full of grace, the Lord was with her; blessed is she among women and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And if you're looking for an example, if your cost of discipleship is seeming a little high, there is no better example than her submission in faith to God, which she for all she knew at the time ran her the risk of execution as an adulteress, only to survive that only to see her son executed as a criminal. And if you're looking for direction, there is no better direction, rather than quasi-pious speculation about dormitions and assumptions, than she herself gave to those wanting her to sort things out one time at the wedding in Cana -- "Do whatever he tells you".

Robert Barnes, DD, Martyr. 30 July 2022.

I like this guy. There aren't a whole lot of English Lutherans. I'm not one either. Huh?  Well, my ancestors are from Suffolk, and I professed the Lutheran faith, taught in Scripture and correctly stated in the Book of Concord, when I was 46. Close enough. At least to really admire Robert Barnes.  Not just for what he did but moreso for what we can learn from it now for us.  To see what that is, let's get into what he did and his times.  It's quite a story!  The current controversies surrounding some of the present members of the English royal family are quite tame by comparison.

I. Who Is Robert Barnes And Who Are The English?

Robert Barnes was born about 1495 in Lynn, formally Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England. Norfolk, Suffolk -- that's the North folk and the South folk of East Anglia, once its own kingdom, named after ourselves, the Angles, who are named in turn from where we came, Angeln, or Anglia in the international language of the day, Latin, in the modern state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, way up North damn near, er, just South of, Denmark.

Before us, a Brythonic tribe called the Iceni lived in the area. Who are the Brythons? A Celtic tribe whose land it was before we, the Saxons, the Danes, the Vikings and yet more starting piling in. It's from the Brythons that we get the words Britain, British, etc. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 BC, called the place Brittania after the Brythons, and as they did in many places, left the local stuff pretty much alone so long as they obeyed the Roman governors. Despite revolts here and there, including the great one by the Iceni queen Boudica, they held out until about 400 AD. That's when the Saxons from Germany moved in, uninvited, the bleeders.

We were invited. The Iceni ended up pretty much wiped out, but in 433 the Brythons asked us if we'd like to come over and settle since things were getting a bit sparse, and help against the Picts too. How  about that -- in a world history of pretty much conquer and re-conquer everywhere, we were invited to come! We Angles are all like that -- just look at the irenic tone, the stepping back from controversy, the staid measured writing style, for which I am known throughout the Lutheran blogosphere. Anyway, about 520, the North folk and the South folk united to form the Kingdom of East Anglia, one of seven kingdoms that emerged in what would become the United Kingdom, literally.

East Anglia is called such to this day as a region of England, generally also including Cambridgeshire to the West and often Essex to the South too. Anglia is the root of the words England and English for the whole thing and its language, East Anglian or not.

Lynn, in Norfolk, shows its Celtic origins in that the name simply means "lake" in Celtic. Robert Barnes was born there, and went to Cambridge for the university there, where he was associated with the Augustinian friars, same as Luther. Ah Cambridge. Seems that in 1209, some Oxford scholars got upset at the hanging of two Oxford scholars by the town for murder and rape of locals, so they went to the school at Cambridge and turned it into a university, the second oldest in the English speaking world. Ah, the pure pursuit of learning, when academic freedom also included no prosecution for murdering and raping locals. Call it academic immunity. Talk about town and gown!  Well, at least there actually is a bridge over a river Cam.

II. So How Does An English Guy End Up Reading A German Reformer?

Anyway, Barnes also hung out at the White Horse Tavern, aka White Horse Inn, in Cambridge where starting about 1521 groups met to discuss Luther and his thought, including Thomas Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, William Tyndale, and others. Because of their interest in the ideas coming from Germany, the group got the nickname "the Germans". Damn, wish I was there.

In 1523 he graduated Doctor of Divinity, or Divinitatis doctor, from Cambridge. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1525, Barnes preached an openly Lutheran sermon, at St Edward's church in Cambridge. He was brought up on charges, examined by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey -- a Suffolk boy, from Ipswich -- Lord Chancellor to the King, Henry VIII, and ended up being sent to jail in 1526.

He escaped two years later, made his way to Antwerp and then Wittenberg, where he met Luther and was his house guest. I'm guessing they spoke Latin to each other. Maybe he learned German, like me, hanging around with the fellas. Damn, wish I was there too. While there, as Luther noted in his work to be mentioned below, he used neither his title nor his name, enrolling simply as Antonius Anglus (there's the Angle thing again).

In 1536 he was able to return to England, working as a liaison between the English government and Lutheran rulers and churchmen in Germany. In 1535 they sent him back to Germany, to get Lutheran support for Henry's efforts to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and Henry's vision of reformation in England. He didn't get it, and Henry never forgot it. Catherine of Aragon was really Catalina de Aragon. What does this mean? (If you're Lutheran and ain't laughing, oh well.)

III. So Why Was An English Guy Reading A German Reformer A Big Deal?

Oh boy here we go. Now Catalina was married to Henry's older brother Arthur, who was supposed to become king, being the first son of Henry VII, but he died before his dad (predeceased him, if you like it put that way) so Henry became the heir. This was a big deal. Henry VII claimed descent from the legendary King Arthur and said his son would restore the glory days of the equally legendary Camelot, and thus named him Arthur. And to bolster his kingdom against the French by an alliance with Spain, just recently united under Isabela I de Castilla and Fernando II de Aragon, a marriage was arranged when Arthur was 2 between him and their daughter Catalina.

Henry VII had another problem too. None of the other European monarchs recognised him as a real king -- you know, by birth. He became king by his victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Hill in the "War of the Roses", between the House of Lancaster, which he as Henry Tudor led, and the House of York, of which Richard III was the last English king, since he not only lost the battle but was killed in it. Well hell, Richard had become king by taking power from his nephew King Edward V, who was just twelve and, um, disappeared after Richard took power, but they were born to this stuff so it's OK. Henry Tudor wasn't.

Not only that, his great grandfather on his mother's side, guy named John Beaufort, was a bastard. No, not that kind, born out of wedlock. Now John's dad, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was indeed the third son of Edward III, but he did not lock in wed with John's mother, Katherine Swinford, his mistress of some 25 years, until after John and three other kids were born, and even at that she was his third wife. Which made the kids legitimate, but not eligible for the throne because they were not legitimate by birth.

So here's Henry Tudor with his claim to the throne, all other claimants from the House of Lancaster dead in battle, murdered, or executed, so his claim rests on military victory, with an illegitimate ancestor by birth, and not on the male side of his ancestry. All the wrong stuff.  That's why all the stuff about jumping over all that to the legendary King Arthur. And also why Catalina as queen would make the House of Tudor accepted as for real by all the other kings and queens. Catalina was actually of descent from the House of Lancaster, and was named after Catherine of Lancaster, her great grandmother and a legitimate daughter of John of Gaunt and his wife Constance of Castile, who was his second wife but that's OK as his first, Blanche, died of the Bubonic Plague two years before they were married, so there's a wrap on that.

Catalina had all the cards to make everything OK. Not only that, she was enormously well thought of in all respects: highly educated, devoutly Catholic, privately critical of many of the moral abuses and superstitions the Lutherans condemned but nonetheless had no time for Luther or the Lutherans, and was a lay member of the Franciscan Order.  That's what's called a secular tertiary, meaning a lay member of the third order, the first order being friars (OFM, Order of Friars Minor, there ain't no friars major, the phrase is from "little brothers" or fraticelli translated into Latin) and the second nuns (OSC, Ordo Sanctae Clarae or Poor Clares, from St Clare, a female follower of St Francis).  She was praised by such notables as Erasmus, who called her a defender of the faith, and Thomas More, who said she was also a complete and total babe, or words to that effect.

After a long-distance relationship by mail, Arthur and Catalina finally met on 4 November 1501 and were married 14 November 1501 at St Paul's Cathedral in London. He didn't know Spanish and she didn't know English, and even when they tried the international language of the day, Latin, that didn't work due to differences in pronunciation! Then they both get sicker than hell, most likely from the deadly "sweating sickness" that swept England from 1485 to 1551 and hasn't come back since. She recovers, but he dies on 2 April 1502 and that blows the whole thing all to hell.

IV. I'm Henery The Eighth I Am.

It gets worse. Now Henry VII has two more problems! One is, with Arthur dead after not even five months of marriage, he would have to pay back Catalina's dowry, but he needed the cash! What's a dowry? Serious stuff in those days. No it was not part of a woman being bought and sold like a commodity as the "woke" might have you believe. Quite the opposite, a dowry was meant to insure her well being and provide an incentive against mistreatment of her. It provided money toward the establishment and maintenance of the new household, and, there being no "life insurance" at the time, provided for their support should he die, since the dowry remained hers, not his. A woman without a dowry might have a problem getting a husband, and you know what, that is what the original Santa Claus, St Nicholas, was all about -- tossing money into stockings to provide poor girls a dowry that their fathers could not, so they would find husbands and not end up prostitutes or in the slave trade; it wasn't just for something fun to open on 25 December!

Plus there's the legitimacy that Catalina's descent brought, but, when her mother died, Castilla (Castile) passed to her older sister, Juana la Loca (Johanna the Mad) so that diminished somewhat Catalina's desired cred since she was now just a king's daughter. Nonetheless it was decided that she would marry the new heir, Arthur's younger brother Henry, five years younger than she, though Henry VII had second thoughts. The marriage was put off, officially to allow young Henry to grow up a bit, hell he was only 10 at the time, but really because it solved the giving back the dowry problem. Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and Henry VIII and Catalina were married 11 June 1509.

But more problems. In Roman Catholic canon law (church law) a man cannot marry his brother's widow. For you canon law freaks, and others uncomfortable with my sometimes offhand style of discourse, this is called the impediment of affinity. But given sufficient power and money, and church laws being church laws but not divine laws, one can get what one wants; like Sister Sarah said in Two  Mules For Sister Sarah, by Clint Eastwood, the pre-eminent theologian of our time, "The church has dispensations". The Pope at the time was Julius II, who gave himself some unofficial dispensations, shall we say, having illegitimate children, one who survived being Felice, after whose birth he married her mother (Lucrezia) off to the majordomo of his cousin's (a Cardinal) household. All quite openly, hell, she's in a painting by Raphael. Well, like Sister Sarah said...

Henry VII got the dispensation from Julius II, mostly because Catalina's mom La Reina Isabela was also leaning on Pope Julius to give it.  In support of the case for it, Catalina said she and Arthur never bopped (oh sorry, said that the marriage was never consummated). Actually Henry, being at this point  a widower, could have married her himself, and did give some thought to marrying somebody and having more male heirs.

Now whyzat, what's wrong with the younger Henry? The thing is, Henry-soon-to-be-VIII was not brought up to be king, Arthur was, and Henry was educated for a church career, to probably end up Archbishop of Canterbury -- you didn't think being a bishop in state churches from the old Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox in the East, had a damn thing to do with being an overseer (translated bishop) in the Christian church, or was anything more than a state office, I hope.

So Catalina and Henry, now 17 and she 23, were married 11 June 1509, and on 24 June 1509 (Midsummer's Day, btw) were crowned king and queen (queen consort actually, meaning a queen who is queen by being married to the king but the king is the ruler) of England in Westminster Abbey.  King Henry VIII.

V. How the Catalina Thing Played Out.

Catalina proved an exceptional queen. Even before her marriage, she had been the Spanish ambassador to England, the first woman in Europe ever to hold an ambassadorship. In 1513 Henry made her regent (ruling in his absence) when he went to France on a military campaign, and Catalina went downrange herself, leading the army though pregnant against the invading Scots (holy crap, over a millennium before, the Brythons asked us to move in and help them with the Picts, and they're still invading, persistent bleeders!) and won. She also commissioned a book, The Education of Christian Women, it being a novel idea at the time that women, Christian or otherwise, be educated. And she was conversant with the great scholars Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Even Cromwell, who hated her, said if she weren't a woman she could have gone up against any of the great heroes of history.

But that wasn't good enough. Catalina was pregnant six times: a stillborn daughter in 1510; a son, even named Henry, who died in 1511 after 52 days; another son who died at birth in 1513; yet another stillborn son in 1514; then in 1516 a healthy baby but who was a girl (this would be Queen Mary, oh hell ya); and in 1518 another girl who died though. Looked like she couldn't even give birth to the wrong sex right.

Henry began to think his marriage was cursed because it had been wrong in the first place. Leaning on Leviticus 20:21 he began to think the prohibition in the Law against a man marrying his brother's wife, with the consequence that they be childless, was the basis of what was happening, and therefore old Julius II even though pope could not legitimately grant a dispensation. So he took the case to the then current pope, Clement VII.

Well, there's some problems with that. For one thing, Catalina always maintained her marriage to Arthur was not consummated. She rejected appeals to quietly become a nun. To top it all off, the pope, Clement VII, following the Sack of Rome, the one in 1527, was the prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, yes, the same one to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, but who also doubled, as Carlos I, as king of Spain, and was Catalina's nephew. So there was some doubt he would side with Henry against Aunt Cathy, shall we say, or allow the pope to do so.

Not to mention, though I am about to, that about 1521 Henry started bopping Mary Boleyn, one of Catalina's maids of honour and otherwise Mrs William Carey. No, not Anne, Mary. Right along with all the Biblical high principles and stuff. Hey, used to be only kings and royalty and bishops got to do this kind of stuff and get away with it, now we all do, so no finger-pointing!

In 1535 Barnes (remember him, this post is actually about him!) was sent back to Germany in hopes he could get his Lutheran friends to side with Henry about the annulment. Didn't work. Emperor Charles sided with Aunt Cathy, and so for that matter did Luther himself. So did such otherwise different men as More and Tyndale. Hell, even Henry's sister Mary Tudor sided with the queen! So Henry turned to him whom he had earlier avoided, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, for the appeal.

Old Tom, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor to the king and created cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515, worked like hell to get the annulment. He argued that the pope could not overrule the Bible, assuming of course Henry's case fit the Bible's scenario, back to the whole consummated thing. He argued the wording of the dispensation was faulty, but, guess what, a properly worded version turned up in, guess where, Spain! Finally he argued that the decision, he being papal legate in England and all, should be made in England, and of course he knew which side he would take. The pope took that one, in 1528, but said he would send a second legate too from Rome, who took his sweet time getting there and getting things going.

Wait, there's more! Remember Mary Boleyn? She was at the royal court and began an affair with Henry about 1521 and it lasted about 5 years. She was already good at affairs, having had several in France including one with the King of France, Francis. Somewhere along the line her sister, less attractive but more ambitious and intelligent, Anne, caught the king's eye, but Anne was not about to be any old mistress like her sister had been, she held out for the whole pie, queen. Which made getting the annulment all the more imperative. Man, would to-day's diocesan RC marriage tribunals been handy then!

Well after all the delays the pope decides Henry may not marry until the Great Matter, as it was called, was settled in Rome, not England. Wolsey took the fall for that decision, Anne getting him ousted from government office in 1529. But old Tom fought back, and tried secret arrangements with Catalina and the pope to have Anne forced into exile from England. But he was found out and, though he remained Archbishop of York, was arrested for treason and would have been executed except he got sick and died in 1530 on his way to London to face trial.

Wolsey was replaced as Lord Chancellor by Sir Thomas More, Catalina gets banned from the court and her rooms given to Anne, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, William Warham, died, in the finest tradition of apostolic succession, Anne had the Boleyn family priest Thomas Cranmer, made the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The pope wasn't too keen on this, but after the King of France leaned on him a bit -- more "apostolic succession" -- he relented and gave the pallium, a  sign of a bishop's special affinity with the pope, to Cranmer.

VI. Next?

It all went downhill pretty fast after that. Cromwell gets the Law of Supremacy, which recognised the final authority of the king over the church in England, passed in Parliament, More resigns over it, Henry and Anne wed secretly, Henry meets with the King of France to get his support for the marriage, Anne gets pregnant, the couple is publicly married 25 January 1533, then on 23 May 1533 Cranmer in church court rules the marriage between Henry and Catalina was no marriage at all because it was invalid (that's what annulment is, not divorce, a recognition that no marriage in the sacramental sense ever took place because the marriage rite was done under invalid conditions, hence  null, hence the term annulment) and on 28 May rules Henry and Anne are validly therefore truly married, on 1 June Anne is crowned Queen of England and on 7 September Queen Anne gives birth! To a daughter, oh MAJOR oops!

Nonetheless Parliament enacts the Act of Succession of 1533 (hell of a year, that) recognising Anne's, not Catalina's, children as legitimate and heirs, and in a sign of things to come, repudiates any appeal to any foreign authority of any kind (guess who that means) and high treason punishable by death to publish any such things. Yeah, my kingdom is not of this world indeed!

Judas, Parliament even made it a matter of praemunire facias -- holy crap what's that?  Well, it's bogus mediaeval Latin for a bogus mediaeval English idea that it is treason to appeal to any authority beyond the king re the church in England, from which acts the sheriff does (that's facias) a warning (that's praemunire). Praemunire actually means to fortify, but the word was mistaken for the correct Latin for warning which is praemonere, the ancestor of the word premonition. Bad Latin for a bad idea.

Henry warn't no Lutheran. In 1521 Henry VIII published Assertio septem sacramentorum, A Defence  of the Seven Sacraments, which he had shown to Wolsey and then expanded as an attack on Luther's De captivitate babylonica of 1520, a key influence on me, and dedicated it to Pope Leo X, who in turn named Henry Fidei defensor, Defender of the Faith, on 17 October 1521. But after Henry decided he was head of the church in England in 1530, Pope Paul III revoked the title and Henry was excommunicated, but the English Parliament restored it, and the English monarch to this day remains Supreme Governor of the Church of England, formally above the "Archbishop" of Canterbury.

Prince Charles said in 1994 he wants the title changed to Defender of Faith, not the Faith. Well, rock on Church of England/Anglican Communion.

Anyway, Pope Clement blew a gasket at that, excommunicated Henry and Cranmer, said Cranmer's annulment decision was itself null and broke off relations with England. Anne miscarries in 1534 and by year's end Henry is trying with Cranmer and Cromwell to figure a way to dump Anne without having to go back to Catalina. Then what the hell but Catalina dies, Henry and Anne rejoice, since death breaks the bond of marriage, Anne's pregnant, and -- MAJOR MAJOR oops, miscarries with a baby boy on, guess what, 29 January 1536 the very day of Catalina's funeral. I ain't making this up and didn't read it in a Dan Brown novel either. Who needs that when the truth is way weirder!

VII. And Next?

Well hell Henry is bopping a lady in waiting at court named Jane Seymour (no, not the actress) anyway, and hell yes, death ends any claim of marriage, so whadya know but charges of infidelity and treason are brought against Anne, she's arrested along with five guys, including her brother, accused of schtupping her, they are executed and five days later, 19 May 1536, so is Queen Anne. The next day, Henry and Jane are engaged, and ten days after that, are married. Wow. Another Act of Succession says now Jane's kids are first in line for the throne. Jane gets pregnant and gives birth to, guess what, a baby boy (who will be Edward VI)!  Problem solved!

Well no.  She also gets an infection in childbirth and dies on 24 October 1537. Henry gets his long desired son but loses his queen, whom he always afterward thought of as his true wife and next to whom he is now buried in Windsor Castle.

Now it would be easy to put this all down to attitudes towards women, but that would be to read it as if it were happening now. Yes, that was part of it, but only part. We saw above, at least I hope we did, I went on about it enough, that civil war and legitimate occupancy of the throne had kept England in a state of civil war at home and in problems abroad for years and years, and we saw that Henry had that situation much on his mind, and also that he not leave such a situation behind when he died. Having an unquestioned heir and ruler, at home and abroad, was a really big deal. Henry had exactly the same problems his dad did, just with different details.

Of course they were centuries from knowing it is the father who determines the sex of the child!

VIII. Number Four and The End For Barnes.

Well a guy's gotta move on, right? So Cromwell starts thinking this Anne of Cleves would be a hell of a good idea as his next wife, even gets a guy to go paint a portrait of her to convince Henry. Why her? Well, Anne of Cleves is really Anna von Juelich-Kleve-Berg. That's near Düsseldorf.  Wherezat?  It's the dorf -- village -- near the delta of the river Düssel for crying out loud, a tributary of the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine. Anna was the daughter of the Duke there, John II, and was promised at age 12 to be the wife of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, but Cromwell thought she'd make this hell of a wife for Henry since Protestant German allies would help if the Catholics invaded England, so Barnes, with his German connexion, was involved in helping with that, and it happened.

Henry was not all that into the idea, hoped Cromwell could find a way out, but there was too much at stake in alliances with the Germans for that, so they were married 6 January 1540 by bleeding Cranmer himself, but there was no consummation of the marriage and by Summer Henry wanted out.  The Duke had ticked off the Holy Roman Emperor and Henry did not want to get into that either. So Barnes was asked to help in the annulment of Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, and an annulment was granted on the basis of the contract with Francis and there having been no consummation, which, in more contemporary language, means no sex. Anna went along with it all and fared pretty well in contrast to Henry's other wives, and for going along with annulment she lived out her life relatively well, not to mention in the former home of the Boleyns, Hever Castle, which was given to her.

But those involved with setting the marriage up didn't fare so well. Henry already had refused to accept Lutheran theology, the Six Articles of 1539 effectively renounced Lutheranism and affirmed Roman practices considered abuses by Lutherans. The Six Articles affirmed 1) transubstantiation, 2) communion in host only, 3) clerical celibacy, 4) vows of chastity, 5) private masses, 6) auricular confession, private confession of sins to a priest.

Then the annulment in 1540 also worked against Barnes. He preached against Bishop Stephen Gardiner (another Suffolk boy), active in the enforcement of Catholic doctrine, in the Spring, was forced to recant, then recanted his recant and professed the Lutheran faith, for which he and two others were burnt alive for heresy under the Six Articles, along with three others for treason for denying royal supremacy over the church, on 30 July, 1540.

In Germany, Lutherans and Catholics alike were shocked and outraged. Luther took Barnes' final confession of faith, translated or had it translated into German, wrote a preface to it himself, and published it later that year (1540) as Bekenntnis des Glaubens.

IX. What Happened To The Other Guys and Everyone Else.

Cromwell was executed 28 July 1540, two days before Barnes, by beheading in the Tower of London. Thomas Cranmer, who would become the first non-Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who believed in the right of the king to determine the faith of the nation and all its people, which makes it hard when you go back and forth between Catholic and "Anglican" monarchs, recanted his recantation of his recantation, whatever, and was burnt at the stake 21 March 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary.

Remember Mary, that's Catalina's daughter! Wanna know the kicker? After all this long story coming from an enormously complicated matter of the legitimacy of and succession to the Tudor line of kings of England, Henry ruled for just short of 38 years and left only three heirs of either sex, and within about ten years of his death on 28 January 1547 all three of them came to the throne -- Anne Boleyn's daughter becoming Elizabeth I and as we saw Jane Seymour's son becoming Edward VI -- and not a one of them left an heir! Not a one! Elizabeth I was the last Tudor on the throne. And she never even married! All that for nothing.

Through secret negotiations Elizabeth arranged for the House of Stuart (or Stewart) to take over a combined England and their original Scotland. Man, the Scots again. And we (Angles) were asked to come there and keep them out way back when. Now they're gonna be the royal line of the whole damn place! Well, not really, the Stuarts aren't real Scots, they're Normans from Brittany in France who arrived in Scotland after the Norman Conquest of England. The last Stuart was Queen Anne, who died 1 May 1707, and the English again turned to the Germans to solve things, with the House of  Hanover taking over and lasting until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

Victoria's son, by patrilineal (from the father) descent, which rules in such things, Edward VII, is of the house of his father, Prince Albert, the house of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, Englished to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but which adopted the much more English sounding name Windsor during World War I, German descended monarchs on a throne in a war against Germany being too weird. His cousin, who was on the German throne, Kaiser Wilhelm II, thought that was a riot and said he looked forward to seeing Shakespeare's new play The Merry Wives of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

The current English royal family is the House of Windsor. There's still Hanovers though, the current head of that bunch being Ernst August V Prinz von Hannover (I ain't translating, it's not hard to work out) who is also the current, that being the third, husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco, so maybe he'll end up with a throne or something. I mean, his titles are not recognised in modern England or Germany, but they are in Monaco! Caroline got an annulment (yeah annulment again, it's a Catholic line) of her first marriage, and her second husband died in an accident, but the Prince on marrying her married a Catholic and so, under the Act of Settlement of 1701 which allows neither Catholics nor spouses of Catholics on the throne, boofed himself out of the line of succession for the British throne, which at 385th in line at the time was a bit of a long shot anyway.

The heir to the English throne, Charles, is through his father of the House of Gluecksburg, short for the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg (Schleswig-Holstein, current name of where we Angles came from!) in turn a branch of the biggest baddest ones of the all the House of Oldenburg, who have been or are on the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia (yeah the Romanovs), Greece and looks like the British Commonwealth one of these days.

After Charles will come the absolutely delightful William and Catherine, currently the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, dear old Cambridge.  Their first child, Prince George, is now third in line.

X. What We Can Learn From This Now.

Notice something? Ain't no reformation going on here, just getting the church to baptise, as it were, matters of state, the church and the state being all part of one thing. From the Assertio of 1521 to the Six Articles of 1539, it's Catholic as all hell, just with a little jurisdictional modification so the king can get an annulment when he needs one.

One of the most enduring enticements of the descendants from the state church of the Roman Empire   --  in the West, the RCC and those non-Catholic national churches, generally Anglican or Lutheran, which consider themselves to have taken over Rome's function within their jurisdictions, and in the East the Orthodox churches  --  is the apparent solidity of their continuous existence, presumably then with a connexion to the catholic church of the creeds, the Apostles, and Christ himself.

For a person of a faith not solidly grounded in Christ and the Gospel, and often troubled by tumult in their churches, this enticement is so strong as to solve or resolve all doubt. It produces many converts for this reason.  For a famous example, the ridiculous John Henry Newman, to the point that his deus-ex-ecclesia, shall we say, solution to his indecision led him to declare that really there are only two real possibilities, atheism or Catholicism, and that those not in either camp are either on their way "home to Rome" or have not thought through the implications of not going to Rome.

While faith in Christ can exist in such an environment, what an unnecessary, distracting and complicating encumbrance to it.

Our foray about into the situation in which Robert Barnes lived and by which was ultimately killed is but one of any number of such situations which show this apparent solidity and continuity is but the most appalling and grotesque of shams, rooted in NOTHING WHATEVER of Christ, his Word or his Sacrament, all of that being a self-justifying veneer over which affairs of state played out. Miserable blasphemous parodies of the catholic church which have survived the passing of the states as then constituted which created them.

We needed Barnes then, and we need him now. Happily we no longer live under the idea that rulers are agents of God with the right to choose the religion of their people. Barnes himself struggled to find his way between the political reality of this idea in his time and spreading the Gospel in reforming Christ's church. In England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, with which the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod is in fellowship in the International Lutheran Council, is the heir of Barnes' work in England.

Yet, in this freedom now, Christianity, the church in general, and our beloved synod in particular veer between the same two poles of those times.  On the one hand is the attractive exterior in which the errors of Rome and the Orthodox are couched, particularly the Newmanesque reinvention of the RCC at Vatican II that inspires so much wannabeism.  On the other is the different but no less attractive exterior in which the errors of Calvinism and the Reformed are couched, most recently in American "evangelicalism" that too inspires so much wannabeism.

Our beloved synod is greatly beset by this. May the works and example of Robert Barnes help and strengthen us as they did Luther in our Bekenntnis des Glaubens, our confession of faith, holding to the Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, and steering our course so as not to crash on the rocks under the influence of either of these siren songs, which unlike those of Greek mythology, are quite real.

From the last words of Robert Barnes, DD, martyr, on 30 July 1540:

Lord if Thou straightly mark our iniquity, who is able to abide Thy judgement? Wherefore I trust in no work that I ever did, but only in the death of Jesus Christ. I do not doubt, but through Him to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

(Quoted from "The Reformation Essays of Dr Robert Barnes", Neelak S Tjernagel editor. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1963. Republished 19 October 2007.)

A Visit From a Different St Nicholas - and Alexandra. 17 July 2022.

17 July 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, with his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and their children in 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.  Alexandra began life as Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a Lutheran.   She's actually the second German Lutheran princess to become Empress of all the Russias.  The first was Catherine the Great, no less.  The aftermath of both of them shapes events to this day that are much in the news.  Here's the story, both of them.

The Chilling Legacy of These Murders.

The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. We hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, yet that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of Nazi Germany. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the total number of Nazi victims, and even less yet about the even greater number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.

By the most conservative estimates, that number would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10  million. That is roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims, and nearly twice the number of their specifically targeted group. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what Nazi Germany managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.

The Soviet Union itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and the three of their children then found were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. Why there?  The city was founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint, St Peter. It was the capital of Russia until the Communist revolution, then it was known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, and its name was restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.

At the burial, the then-president of post-Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981. On 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints, of a type called Passion Bearers. These are people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and the manner of his death.

On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood" in Yekaterinburg, the city in which the Tsar and family were murdered in the Ipatiev House, on whose site the "Church on the Blood", whose full name is Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, now stands.  Seeing "Catherine" in the city's name? It's there, named at its founding 18 November 1723 after St Catherine, name saint of Catherine I (Yekaterina), Tsarina and wife of then ruling Tsar Peter I the Great, who died 8 February 1725, after which she became ruler like the next Peter and Catherine duo (III and II/the Great).  That's right, Catherine the Great, who also began life as a German Lutheran princess. Lots of stuff comes full circle in the cycle that includes Nicholas and Alexandra.

The regime which killed them has passed into history, but, there is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.

About 70% of Russians count themselves Orthodox Christians, though few regularly participate in church. Of Orthodox churches, 95% are Russian Orthodox, the traditional Russian religion overall. There are Lutherans in Russia, in large part due to the open immigration policies of Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran princess to end up Empress of Russia.

So yeah, an Empress of Russia is actually a German Lutheran princess in origin.  Happened twice actually, both times pretty big deals with effects that endure now.  Here's the story.

How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia.  The Second Time.

Alexandra was born 6 June 1872 in Darmstadt in Das Großherzogtum Hessen und bei Rhein.  Don't freak, I'll translate, it's The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine.  OK but where izzat?  In west central modern Germany, that's where.  Its biggest and probably best known city is Frankfurt, on more correctly Frankfurt am Main (that's pronounced like "mine" in English) which means Frankfurt on the Main.  OK but what is the Main?  It's a river, a major tributary of the Rhine (Rhein).  Darmstadt was the seat of the grand dukes of the Grand Duchy, which is why Alexandra, as the daughter of the then-current ruling one, was born there. The current capital of the current German state of Hesse is Wiesbaden.

Anyway, the baby girl was given her mother's name.  So her mom's name was Alix? Well actually it was Alice, as in Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, a daughter of Queen Victoria.  That's right, Queen Victoria was Alix' grandma.  This we'll shortly see influenced both the beginning of her life and the end of it.  Her childhood nickname was Alicky, which would become a favourite term of endearment with her husband Nicholas too.  Alice was a remarkable woman, a huge fan of Florence Nightingale and worked to involve women in health care.  Ironically she died pretty young, at age 35 in 1878 in Darmstadt, of diphtheria which was overtaking the whole ducal house.

Alix died relatively young too, at 46, but her career as a noblewoman was not to be like her mother's.  Alice was much loved in both her native and her married lands -- they lovingly put a Union Jack over her coffin at her funeral in Darmstadt -- but Alix was never accepted as really Russian by nearly everyone from peasants to royalty alike.  The whole Russian thing with this German Lutheran princess, which would alter all subsequent history, started with her attraction to the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas, and his to her.

So how would they even meet, you know, German, Russian?  You gotta understand that European nobility and royalty are mishpocha (don't freak, that's Yiddish for "extended family").  Nicholas and Alexandra are second cousins, and also third cousins, depending on which ancestral line you go through.  They met in 1884 and it was mutual from the start, and when they met again in 1889 there was no denying it.  Neither family wanted the match.  Grandma (Queen Vic) wanted someone else for Alix, and Nicholas' dad Tsar Alexander III, was dead set against any German or Lutheran marrying into the royal family.  But Alix stood up to Grandma, who actually kind of liked it that she did, and as Alexander's health declined he eventually gave in.

They got engaged in Germany (Coburg, to be exact) in April 1894 and Alexander died on 1 November 1894.  The Russians first saw their new empress-to-be (he became emperor on his father's death, she would become empress consort on marriage to him) as she came to St Petersburg with the family for the funeral.  "She comes behind a coffin" was heard everywhere.  Things were off to a bad start.  She and Nicholas were married right after, on 26 November 1894.  Alix at first was not too sure about having to become Russian Orthodox, but she eventually became an enthusiastic convert, and got a new name in the process, Alexandra Feodorovna.  Then things went right straight to hell.

During the coronation ceremonies a riot broke out when it seemed there wouldn't be enough to go around of the food provided for the public, and several thousand were killed in the stampede.  The French had a gala ball scheduled in honour of the coronation.  Nicholas and Alexandra were reluctant to attend given what had happened, but they were persuaded by court advisers to go through with it so as not to offend the French.  Which ended up offending their own people, who took it as a sign that their royalty cared nothing about what happened to them.  Then there's the matter of producing an heir.  Alexandra was having daughters, and under court protocol of the time the heir must be male.  Then when she finally had a son, he was born with haemophilia, a deadly disease for which there was no treatment at the time.

And, haemophilia was known to be passed on in, guess what, Grandma's (that's Queen Vic) line, so she was further thought a disaster for having brought the "English disease" as some called it to the Russian line.  Neither all her works of prayer and devotion, nor any available medical treatment, helped, and Alexandra became pretty much a recluse making sure her son had no injury.  In time she turned to this itinerant Russian Orthodox "holy man" and healer, Rasputin, and guess what, her son got better, and Rasputin gained influence at the court.

Rasputin was a supposed mystic, a type of religious lunacy.  Yes, her son got better, but as usual a little science clears up all the "mystical" bullroar.  The doctors attending her son were using a new drug widely thought at the time to be a new wonder drug.  Aspirin.  Yeah, aspirin.  It actually is a pretty good mild analgesic (pain reliever) but it also, and this was not known at the time, is an anti-coagulant.  Now, retarding the coagulation of the blood is exactly what you don't want to do in treating a haemophiliac!  So of course when she turned away from medical treatment and followed Rasputin's advice her son got better -- she quit giving him an anti-coagulant, nothing mystical or spiritual about it.

Rasputin's advice unfortunately began to extend to other matters too, and he supposedly had a revelation that Nicholas should go to the front -- the Great War, the War To End All Wars, which it didn't and is now just the first of "world wars" -- and personally take command of the military.  This left Alexandra to run the internal affairs of state, for which she was completely unsuited by both training and temperament.  So, all sorts of incompetent officials further made a mess of things.  Between the shortages due to the war effort and the Russian Winter everyone was miserable and many thought Alexandra was actually sabotaging things, being German and all.

Riots ensued, and the soldiers who were supposed to put down the rebellion joined it, and the next day, 13 March 1917, they established a provisional government called the Petrograd Soviet.  No, not communists or the Soviet Union.  Petrograd because this happened in St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and soviet because that's the word for council in Russian.  This is known as the February Revolution.  Huh, you just said it was in March!  Yeah, in our calendar now but in what is now called the Old Style calendar used there and then, it was February.  The Tsar was told he must abdicate, and he did, first being kept with his family in the palace, then, for their safety the provisional government sent them to Siberia.

Things changed.  The provisional government was itself overthrown by the communists called Bolshevik (the word means "majority") under Vladimir Lenin on 7 November 1917 in the October Revolution (same deal about the calendars, it was 26 October in the Old Style calendar).  Their promises of "peace, land and bread" attracted many.  Alexander Kerensky, the major figure in the provisional government, was exiled and ended up living out his life in New York City.  The royal family did not fare so well, and at 0215 on 17 July, Bolsheviks, having disarmed their guard, shot the entire royal family to death, then smashed the rib cages of the tsar and tsarina with bayonets, stripped the bodies, burned the clothes, and threw the bodies in a mine shaft 12 miles away, then the bodies were pulled out, their faces smashed, dismembered, burned with sulphuric acid, and reburied.  There they remained until after the fall of the Soviet Union decades later.

(A personal aside -- my French teacher as a kid in the 1950s was an old Russian woman who was a young woman in a family at court through all of this.  They were among the exiles, and French being the language of the court, she earned a living as a translator in embassies and ended up in an apartment in her daughter's home.  French lessons came with tea and all the decorum of her youth.)

How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia.  The First Time.

Now there's a story too. Tsarina Alexandra wasn't the first German Lutheran noblewoman to end up Tsarina. Catherine the Great was originally the noble-born raised-Lutheran Sophie Friederike Auguste, nicknamed Figchen, or Little Frederica. Her father was the devout Lutheran Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who as a Prussian general was governor of Stettin, Pomerania, then part of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire.  Her birth city (Stettin) is in a part of Pomerania that is now part of Poland and called Szczecin.

Huh? How does Figchen end up Empress of Russia? Because her mother, Johanna, loved court intrigue and wanted it for her daughter, but she really ticked off Tsarina Elisabeth who threw her out of the country for spying for Prussia. The Big E liked Figchen though, and apparently liked the family, hell, she was going to marry Johanna's brother Karl but he died from smallpox before it could happen. Figchen ended up married to E's nephew and heir, Peter III, who was also Figchen's second cousin. But first she learned Russian, and on 28 June 1744 she converted to the Russian Orthodox Church -- against her father's orders, who went ballistic over it -- and was given the name Catherine. Then she marries Peter on 21 August 1745, and after Elisabeth died on 5 January 1762, Peter takes the throne.

He didn't last long. He pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War -- remember that, left Mother England in huge debt, to pay for which they taxed the hell out of the American colonies who ended up revolting and becoming the United States -- got friendly with Prussia, admired the Western Europeans, tried to make the Russian Orthodox Church more Lutheran, and had a mistress for whom Catherine was afraid he would divorce her. So he pissed off everybody, and when he went to his paternal ancestral Schleswig-Holstein (the area from which my ancestors the Angles left for Mother England, but hey), Catherine with her lover (fair is fair I guess) staged a military coup and Peter was arrested 14 July 1762. He wasn't too upset really, he just asked for an estate and his mistress, also named Elisabeth.

But three days later he was killed by one of the conspirators while in custody, though Figchen/Catherine does not seem to have been behind that part of things. So after Peter being Tsar for six months, his wife succeeds him. Some say she should have been Regent until her son, Paul, was old enough to become Tsar, but what the hell, the first Tsarina Catherine (Catherine the Great is technically Catherine II) succeeded her husband Peter I (aka the Great) in 1725, and anyway Catherine no longer Figchen ruled until she died, which was 17 November 1796, at which time George Washington was in his second term as President of the United States. Got all that? No wonder George didn't want anything resembling royalty here.  (We got 'em now anyway, political dynasties, sports and entertainment celebrities and all.)

Why Eating Runzas Is a Spiritual and World-Historical Experience.

And a damn good eating experience too.

In 1762, the year she came to power, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting non-Jewish Europeans to settle in Russia and farm using more modern European methods. It got few results, French and English preferred to emigrate to America, and another manifesto with more benefits was issued in 1763, attracting Germans since they were allowed to maintain their language, religions and culture, and were exempt from military service. This last was particularly attractive to Mennonites, but many German Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed also came, settling along the Volga River, hence the name Volga Germans, or Wolgadeutsche.

However these benefits, particularly the exemption from military service, were eroded and many Wolgadeutsche, especially the pacifist Mennonites, left for the midwestern United States, Canada, and South American places of German emigration. The midwestern US immigrants have given us people as different as US Senator Tom Daschle and and big-band leader Lawrence Welk. But most importantly, it has given us the Runza, a magnificent pocket sandwich of beef, onion and cabbage -- thank you Catherine!!

In 1949 Alex Brening and his sister Sally Everett opened a drive-in in Lincoln NE offering food of Wolgadeutsche derivation, which has since expanded to a regional chain, including one close to Concordia-Seward (NE) as every grad of there knows.  Besides the fantastic runza (get the cheese runza, Combo #2) they have one of the best burgers, fries and OR (get the half and half "frings") in the whole "fast food" industry, right up there with Five Guys. You can have a great meal, be a part of history back to Catherine the Great, proclaim your solidarity with ethnic self-determination and praise God for religious freedom as a Lutheran (or anything else) all at the same time! Makes me wanna go to the one a few blocks from me right now!

Lutherans In Russia Now.

Anyway, in this heavily Russian Orthodox land with notable German-born raised-Lutheran Tsarinas, there are Lutherans. Not a lot, but even so, not all in the same group (just like here). There is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia, which is a member of the International Lutheran Council (founded 1993), as are we ("we" being LCMS).  There's the Evangelical Lutheran Church - "Concord", a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (founded 1996), whose American members are WELS and ELS.  And there's the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and Other States, a member of the thoroughly heterodox Lutheran-in-name-only Lutheran World Federation (founded 1947),whose American member is the similarly characterised ELCA, and to which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia also belongs.

Also there's the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church.  It began with a Siberian named Vsevolod Lytkin, who converted from Soviet era atheism to Lutheranism in Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union, at age 20 in 1987.  In 1991 as the Soviet Union was passing into history Estonia became independent and Lytkin began missionary work back in Siberian, with support from our beloved synod (that's LCMS).  In 2003 the result of his efforts, the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church, became independent of the more liberal WLF-affiliated Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church.  Pastor Lytkin now serves as the bishop of the SELC.  While it is not affiliated with larger Lutheran bodies, in 2010 full recognition and fellowship was established between the SELC and LCMS.

Kind of all comes full circle, huh? That's what's cool about history.  It makes the circle clearer, sometimes even gives one a clue there is a circle, an interrelation, at all, amid all this stuff of life that otherwise seems like so much dust from the past.  And it makes where we are now clearer, which is why I get into all this stuff.

Crimea.

2014 was the 100th year since the start of the world war whose aftermath saw the end of the Russian Empire and rise of the Soviet Union (not to mention the end of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and pretty much the world as it had been known).

2014 was also the 60th since year the Soviet Union under Khrushchev made Crimea part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.  Huh?  Isn't it just part of Ukraine, annexed by those bad Russians?  No, it isn't.  Crimea is a recent name for what for most of its history has been known as Tauris or Taurica.

Its recorded history begins in the 5th Century BC, as a Greek colony named after the native Tauri.  It came under Roman control from 47 BC to 340 AD.  After that it passed among the Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars and the Eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantium).  In 968 Vladimir the Great of Kiev brought most of it under his control.  Well there you go, Kiev, in Ukraine, right?  Wrong.  In the Kievan Rus'; "Ukraine" means borderland or homeland.  Borderland or homeland of what?  The land of the Rus', that's what.  There's been a Russian identity here for over a millennium; nothing started with Putin.  It was here that Vladimir, after checking out Islam, Judaism and Roman Christianity, converted to Christianity in its Eastern Orthodox form from Byzantium, from which it passed to all of what is now Eastern Europe and Russia.

Then in 1223 the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, the "Golden Horde", as they swept through all of Asia and eastern Europe, changed everything everywhere, including here.  Settled descendants formed what is called the Crimean Khanate, which lasted from 1449 to 1783 and was a vassal state to the Islamic Ottoman Empire based in what is now "Turkey".  Then Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran born Empress of all the Russias, won the Crimea back from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, and there is stayed until 1917, when the last Tsar was overthrown, with his wife the second German Lutheran born Empress of all the Russias.

During the Russian civil war from 1917 - 1921 it was the scene of murderously bloody conflict as the Red Army (Bolshevik) and the White Army (anti-Bolshevik) slugged it out.  The Reds won and in 1921 it became part of the Soviet Union and stayed that way until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Huh?  Didn't you say it was transferred in 1954?  Yeah, and this is key -- the transfer was within the Soviet Union, from one of its 16 members (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) to another (the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic).  The action was taken 19 February 1954 unilaterally by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (council, remember) of the Soviet Union following its passage 25 January 1954 by the Communist Party.

This action violated Soviet law, specifically article 18 of its constitution which states any border change must have the approval of the member republic involved and no referendum was ever held, and article 33, which does not give the Presidium such power.  So they changed the constitution after-the-fact a few days later.  Yeah, illegal as hell under even Soviet law.  So much for "territorial integrity".  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 its former component became an independent nation and just a year later the Crimean legislature voted for independence but Ukraine stopped any referendum from being held.  When the armed regime change in Ukraine favoured by the EU to bring it under its orbit happened in 2014, a referendum was finally held and Crimea was restored to Russia itself 60 years after it had been illegally transferred by and within the Soviet Union.

That's the stuff the "media" doesn't tell you.

You wonder what a different world would be now had Alicky listened to Grandma or Nicholas listened to dad.  Or, if Alicky had decided confessing Lutheran faith was more important than literally anything else.

Nicholas and Alexandra's feast day follows the longstanding custom of using the date of earthly death, which is regarded as the day of birth into eternity, as the person's feast day, so it's 17 July.