The Daily Mustard

The early medieval Church exerted a profound influence upon the kingdoms it evangelized. One might even say that the Church helped create what “kingdom” came to mean. Missionary work usually began with an appeal to the local ruler for permission to operate in his territory and for protection from hostile elements inside and outside the ruler’s territory. The social power of the ruler and his subordinate leaders was also important: if the king and the nobles became Christian, the common people were assumed would follow.

To take the Anglo-Saxons, the kings between Hengest and Horsa (mid-fifth century) and Æðelbeorht and Eadwine (beginning of seventh century) were not what kings eventually became. To be a cyning in the fifth or sixth century meant to be a drihten, a warlord. Kings ruled as much as their sword arm could cover. Each king had a hall, and within that hall some companions (þegnas). The thegns were not yet nobles, as the king was not yet royal. They were basically the king’s professional warriors. To pay them, the king had to have booty (minting of coined money having lapsed with the fall of Rome), either precious goods or land. A good king was a “ring-giver.” Acquiring booty meant waging war (mostly raiding, rather than conquest). The king’s primary job, then, was war – not governance. And kingdoms could be transitory; dynasties even more so. Who would rule after a king’s death was not a settled affair.

So Britain was divided into several petty kingdoms. Traditionally, there were seven (the Heptarchy), but there had been more than that. Kings fought to gobble up other kingdoms, and “England” considered as a whole was a long time a-borning. The missionaries came to each king in each kingdom one at a time. But to each king (and his nobles), they offered not only eternal life in Christ, but certain secular advantages.

For the Christian missionaries remembered their imperial past. They offered to the petty kings of Britain not only the example of Christ, the heavenly king, but also the example of the emperors of Rome. They brought the idea of purple robes and golden crowns to the kings they bespoke. These were the outward trappings of imperial majesty. They brought literacy and good record-keeping (particularly as regards land and money), but they also taught the kings to issue written law codes after the example of the emperor Justinian. And their view of what it meant to be a king offered the prize of legitimacy. A king had the right to enjoy what he possessed; but if he were a true king (in the Roman model), he had a right to possess it in the first place. The king was a product of law, as well as a guarantor of law. Which meant you could build for more than this generation, and hope to see your son – or at least, a member of your family – peacefully succeed you.

This shift in what it meant to be a king resulted also in a shift in what it meant to be a kingdom. The king’s rule was not only a matter of the king’s personal power, it was carried the responsibility of good governance. The “people” were united with each other because they were united with the king. There was the idea that the two depended on each other, and each owed certain things to the other.

The nobles became enthusiastic Christians. They were especially enthusiastic about founding monasteries. This is because in those days they expected to be able to nominate the abbots and abbesses, which gave them patronage powers for daughters and younger sons. They expected to be buried in the monastery church, too, which gave a powerful sense of dynastic communion to their descendants. By elevating the king and establishing his legitimacy, the Church inadvertently elevated his thegns and made them into aristocrats (rather than just thugs).

The Church was not cynical to do as it did. It was attempting to make disciples, as it always does, and it saw the kings and nobles as key to spreading the faith. The Church was also heir to a tradition, and possessed certain skills, that were of value to the pagan rulers it encountered. It all worked out very well. The English were converted to Christ so securely that we can only reconstruct Old English paganism from linguistic remains. We tend to forget this. For at the beginning of the ninth century, we see a new evangelistic methodology in Charlemagne’s conversion of the Saxons at swordpoint. After 800, pagans were to be conquered and forcibly converted, not wooed and won by the unarmed clerics. But of course, Charlemagne himself is the ultimate example of the apotheosis of early medieval kingship, for in 800 he was crowned Emperor of the Romans by the Pope, completing the process begun three hundred years earlier when his predecessor Clovis, King of the Franks, became a Christian. The coronation service for English (British) monarchs dates from 973, and has changed little. It was designed as a sacred rite by St. Dunstan for the coronation of King Edgar the Peaceable.

What else was gained in those years? Bishops were created and churches built in what had been each king’s royal burh. The country was covered with a network of monasteries, which engaged in further missionary activity and pastoral care. Preaching teams were sent to villages to meet in the marketplaces (the origin of the crosses erected there). People were instructed and baptized. Christian customs and festivals were introduced. As literacy in Roman letters (rather than runes) took hold, poets addressed themselves to the new faith; churchmen published sermons, Bible commentary, treatises on the calculation of Easter, and much else. And not just in Latin: the Anglo-Saxons wanted to pray and hear the word of God in their own language. The laity were not just herded into church and thereafter assumed to be Christian. Mission became ministry. And particularly in the case of Anglo-Saxon England, the now well-established Christians turned their attention to their near kin in Frisia and Saxony and began to send missionaries to begin the process among others who had not yet received the gospel. No doubt the Church often appeared greedy or run by prima donnas (not much has changed in 1400 years), but it was a healthy Church for all that: our spiritual forebears as Methodists.

Christian Nationalism is the great bugaboo on the Left these days. My brother-in-law complains about “Christofascists” from time to time. I get tired of it. I’ve been a minister of the gospel for fifty years, and I don’t hear much of this stuff from anybody I associate with.

Now, there is some of this stuff out there. There’s an older, Catholic version that looks with favor upon an autocratic society that fosters the institutional church. And there’s a Protestant version that wants to enshrine the Ten Commandments in public law. Most of this is very small beer. Many conservative/traditionalist Christians like to talk about America being a “Christian nation,” but what they have in mind is more a “nation of Christians.” They see the Founders as secular saints and Christianity as the foundation of the Republic’s values, but they have no comprehensive political program to push. ( Collapse )

James Talarico, the progressive Christian running for U.S. Senate in Texas, has caught some attention for saying that “God is non-binary.” Well, like a lot of progressive theology, this is almost or partly or kinda true, but doesn’t mean what some would like to make out of it.

The Westminster Confession says that God is spirit, without body, parts, or passions. Which means that he is neither male nor female. HOWEVER, in creating humankind, we are told, he created human beings “in his image . . . male and female created he them.” Which means that God designed the binary nature of humankind, and that this reality reflects something about God.

Furthermore, when God incarnated himself – when God the Son became the Son of God – emptying himself of his glory to become one of his creatures, he could not come as a non-binary being to truly become part of humankind. He either had to come as a man or a woman. That he chose to come as a man should not mean that women are less than men in any fundamental way; certainly, he came as a man by means of a woman, so women are essential to humanity. And the incarnation is not a temporary expedient. In joining himself to his creation, he raises it (us) with him to a level above other spirits, such as the angels.

Now, we are told that in the kingdom of heaven, there will be no marriage. We will not need to reproduce, but we will still be the persons we are, as God has made us, and that means male and female, even if biological sex is no longer important. And even in our present world, some people do not engage in sexual relationships. This may be a lifelong choice (celibacy), but it may simply be the conditions we find ourselves in. There is a time for all of us before we have anything we might consider a sexual relationship; and if we live long enough, there will be a time for each of us after we have ceased to have any sexual relationships. Celibacy is a choice for the in-between time, when sexual relationship is a live possibility. But even if we don’t express ourselves in sexual behavior, we are still sexed persons, and this affects how we perceive ourselves and the world. It also affects our health and physical abilities. It is not, primarily, a matter of dress or culture.

People who call themselves “non-binary” are not merely choosing not to have a sexual relationship, or refusing to be limited to what other people think appropriate in dress or culture (pink is for girls, etc.). Rather, they are creating an identity that does not exist in nature as we know it. They are welcome to do so (it’s a free country). But saying that God is non-binary as a means of saying that this new identity is part of God’s design is getting things backward. It’s creating God in our image, rather than the other way round.

Yesterday being St. David’s Day (March 1), it was a good day to sing “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah.” The Welsh are great singers, and many Welsh hymn tunes are to be found in hymnals of all denominations. A quick look through a Methodist hymnal yields the following Welsh hymn tunes.

Aberystwyth: “Jesus, lover of my soul”
Ar Hyd Y Nos: “God, that madest earth and heaven” (a vesper hymn)
Cwm Rhondda: “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah” and others
Ellacombe: “Hail to the Lord’s anointed” and “Hosanna, loud hosanna”
Hyfrydol: “Come, thou long-expected Jesus” and many others
Llanfair: “Hail the day that sees him rise”
Llangloffan: “O crucified Redeemer” (this one was not familiar to me)
Merionydd: “The voice of God is calling”
Rhosymedre: “Our parent, by whose name” (again, not familiar to me)
The Ash Grove: “Sent forth by God’s blessing” and others
Truro: “Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates”

I suppose if you counted tunes by Welsh composers, you could stretch the number. Ralph Vaughn Williams comes to mind as a composer of hymn tunes (Sine Nomine: “For all the saints”), which would give us an even dozen, mostly recognizable, Welsh tunes.

Racism is an ideology that views race as an immutable human characteristic that is simultaneously an identity and a value. It divides humanity into discrete categories – races – and assigns benefits and penalties to each. This can be done by law or by custom. Science, religion, and history may be used to justify the ideology.

Attempting to gain the benefits due another's race or avoid the penalties due one’s own race is an affront to the system, so the races must be strictly defined and each individual assigned to one or another category. Policing the boundaries between the races can be done by law or custom.( Collapse )

The “War” Department and Scouting America have come to an understanding, and Scouting is reining in its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts a bit in order to mollify the current administration’s war on woke. Making the best of an offer they couldn’t refuse, Scouting America said that even though Citizenship in Society MB is going away, the ideals enshrined in the merit badge continue to exist throughout all that Scouting teaches. Which is true. And some of us said it at the time of the merit badge’s introduction.

Remember the hysteria right after the George Floyd riots in 2020? The palpable anger on the left took America by storm. One giant corporation after another announced new, over-the-top programs in fealty to woke ideology. Moguls and bureaucrats of all sorts scrambled to make sure that the newly-awakened tiger of racial and sexual identity would eat them last. BSA (as it was then) rolled out Citizenship in Society MB in a tearing hurry and made it an Eagle required badge. Why? I asked at the time. We already teach respect for others and including everybody, one way or another, without messing up our biggest and best property (the Eagle rank).

So, the woke monster was appeased, even if at the cost of a little more decay among traditional supporters. BSA’s membership decline accelerated a bit. Even admitting girls to full membership across all programs (which is why the renaming to Scouting America) has barely slowed membership loss. Still, the requirements had been made a little less woke in the final edit, to the anger of progressive activists. Even in its groveling, BSA retained some sense of itself. And the traditionalists who remained adapted.

Then came the Return of Trump. If woke-ism stirs up antipathy among many people, so does anything backed by Donald Trump. But something interesting began to happen, even before Trump’s election. The crisis passed, and corporate America began to disengage from DEI radicalism. Trump’s executive orders provided a welcome excuse for many institutions to drop something they never really believed in, anyway.

I have said many times that mass organizations need mass values. I understand why Scouting opened its membership to gay youth some years ago. America’s values had shifted. What had been a no-brainer standard for decades was now an increasing liability. Scouting paid a high price to free itself from its unsought role as spear-carrier to the Right. I said at the time it would be folly if it now voluntarily ran to take on the role of spear-carrier to the Left. But that was precisely what some people wanted. They didn’t want a movement that belonged to everybody; they wanted to win. When the riots following George Floyd’s death erupted, they refused to let a perfectly good crisis go to waste.

Me, I’m not interested in “winning.” As long as I can be comfortable in Scouting with my values, I’ll accord others with different opinions the same access and comfort. From where I sit, that’s real inclusion. And it’s a path back to sanity and membership growth. A mass organization needs mass values. Only a niche organization has the luxury of niche values. The zealots I know (on both sides) would rather belong to a smaller, purer organization, even if it means the loss of opportunity for most of the families they profess to be advocating for and the living death of the movement they profess to love. “No room for bigots” is their mantra. Which would mean, in the end, no room for them, either; or at least, no Scouting for them to belong to.

The National Park Service and its fellow agencies maintain scads of cool places to visit. Here are some I've been to.

US National Parks I've visited

Badlands
Dry Tortugas
Everglades
Gateway Arch
Grand Canyon
Great Smoky Mountains
Indiana Dunes
Isle Royale
Mammoth Cave
Mesa Verde
Yellowstone

US National Monuments I've visited

Devil's Tower
Little Bighorn Battlefield
Statue of Liberty

US National Historical Sites I've visited

Fort Larned
Herbert Hoover
Jamestown
Lincoln Home

US National Historical Parks I've visited

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace
Cumberland Gap
George Rogers Clark
Morristown
Valley Forge
Women's Rights

US National Military Parks, Sites, Battlefields I've visited

Chickamauga and Chattanooga
Fort Donelson
Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania
Gettysburg
Petersburg
Vicksburg

Sound changes separate English from the other Germanic languages. The most obvious changes result from what we call the Great Vowel Shift. English vowels and diphthongs took an interesting turn in the Middle Ages. This happened as English spelling was approaching a standardized form based upon earlier pronounciation, which explains why English spelling is so weird.

But English wasn’t always the one that changed. Early Germanic languages all used /w/ prominently, but sometime after Old English established itself in Britain, the other Germanic languages shifted /w/ to /v/ in pronunciation. German, which was already bring written in Roman letters, thus pronounces spelled W as /v/. The Norse languages, whose spelling in Roman letters was established later, use V for the /v/ sound. So: English “wagon” (wæg’n), German “Wagen” (vah-g’n), Swedish “Vagn” (vah-k’n OR vah’n).

English silent letters are not just associated with vowels, like the E in “make.” We drop initial K and G from words like “knave” (German “Knabe”) and “gneiss” (from Old High German “gneisto,” spark). Initial KN- and GN- used to be pronounced in English. Even in Shakespeare's day, "Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?" would have had that K sounded. Meanwhile, the English combination -gh- often goes unpronounced, as in “brought” or “right.” But -gh- is a remnant of the Middle English letter yogh (ȝ), itself a descendant of the Old English palatalized G (or sometimes H). In German, the same sound hardened. So, English "Edinborough," but German "Hamburg," English "night" but German "Nacht." And compare the ways English and German pronounce their shared word, "General."

Scots retains many older pronunciations which places it closer to our Germanic sister languages: "kirk" instead of "church," "bricht" instead of "bright," "mair" (compare German "mehr") instead of "more." This is because Scots -- a northern dialect politically separated until the 18th Century from the English as spoken in, say, London -- did not go through all the sound changes that give us the standard English of today.

A Word Study

by the Rev. Arthur W. Collins, Ph.D.
Presiding Elder, Indiana South Central District, Great Lakes Conference, GMC


A question about who can celebrate communion in a local church brought out my standard answer: it takes an “authorized presider” (someone ordained or given temporary sacramental authority as a pastor) to make a valid sacrament in Methodism. I did not refer to Paul’s statement about the clergy being “stewards of the mysteries of God,” though I have often used that reference.

The clergy have certain duties reserved to them, such as baptizing and consecrating communion elements. Some laity resent this. So we have to make clear that there is nothing special about my hands, that they can do or make something someone else cannot. But I’ve been given the job, and the Church has reserved that job to me and my colleagues. Why? To see that they’re done the right way. And since “it is required of a steward that he be faithful,” the clergy are set apart to hold each other accountable for doing things the right way, and teaching things the right way.

The Gospel itself could be considered the prime mystery of God, and the pastor is the primary teacher in the church. Once again, we are set apart to learn the story and pass it on, ungarbled. We are accountable to each other for this duty.

This doesn’t mean that the laity don’t know as much or aren’t as holy as the clergy. Our goal is that all of us should become fully mature disciples. But someone has to be given the authority to lead and not leave it up to any Tom, Dick, or Harry’s self-nomination. The Church recognizes my call to that kind of ministry by means of ordination. That doesn’t mean I’m super special, or above anybody else; rather, it means I have a special servitude attached to my discipleship. In addition to the same expectations given to all disciples, I have the additional burden of the cure of souls, the preservation and passing along of the doctrine, the supervision of the sacraments, and being accountable to the other clergy (and through them, ultimately, to the entire Church).( Collapse )

Wednesday, February 11

Afternoon in the Dry Tortugas

We got to the Key West airport early for our afternoon flight to Dry Tortugas National Park. The seaplane was amphibious. It had wheels to take off and land on land, which retracted into its floats for takeoffs and landing on water. It could take 10 or 11 passengers plus the pilot. Everyone had a window seat and headphones to listen to the pilot's narration. We flew at about 500 feet to the Tortugas, about 70 miles from Key West.

Once there, James wanted to change for the beach right away, so we got into our trunks and sandals and hastened to the water. It was cold. I mean, Lake Michigan cold, even though the air temp was 75 or so. James was supposed to be practicing his swimming, but he wouldn’t let me help him. So after a while, I went back up on the shore and watched him wallow and float. I was worried about having enough time to do the fort, but it was his trip, so I let him call the tune.

Soon enough, he got chilled and decided that was enough. We got changed and headed into Fort Jefferson. This massive brick castle (three full stories of cannon and industry, complete with a moat) was in its prime during the Civil War, when it housed a bunch of POWs. It is the largest brick building in the western hemisphere, and was never completed. You can go through and over all three levels. There are no guardrails (just like mountain hiking).

At the end of our time, the seaplane returned to pick us up, and we buzzed over the Gulf back to Key West. We were worn out. We drove back to the marina, ate at Hurricane Hole, and turned in early.( Collapse )