If you ever stop by my office, you’ll see a framed document sitting on top of my bookshelf that you’re probably not able to read. If you’re familiar with Arabic writing, it may seem familiar; but it’s not quite the same. It is, in fact, Aramaic, not Arabic; the language of Jesus, not of the Quran. And the text is the text of the Lord’s Prayer in an ancient manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic—the closest thing we have, in a sense, to the original words of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples.

There are no hidden secrets or bombshell revelations in the Aramaic text of the Lord’s Prayer. The text that sometimes circulates online as a translation of the “original Aramaic text” is, unsurprisingly, a very modern creation. But to me, this text is more exciting than any Da Vinci Code invention could be. It’s a tangible connection to an ancient and living tradition, that stretches back through two thousand years, still speaking a dialect of a language quite similar to Jesus’ own.

Our stories about the history of Christianity often focus on its westward spread, from its origins in Jerusalem through Paul’s journeys around the cities of ancient Greece to Peter’s martyrdom in Rome; the Church’s domination of medieval Europe and its early-modern colonization of the world. But at the same time Christianity was spreading west, it was also spreading East. And in fact, by the 600s AD — at the same time many German and Anglo-Saxon tribes were being reluctantly converted to Christianity, well before the conversion of Scandinavians, Russians, or Poles, Christian missionaries had begun spreading the good news as far as China.

These missionaries mainly came from the tradition that’s known as the “Church of the East.” Centered in what are now Syria, Iraq, and Iran, these churches spread east along the Silk Road toward China and south into India, thriving especially among merchant and migrant communities of Persians. By the 8th century Christianity had a long enough history in China that in the year 781, a memorial was created in Xian to celebrate its 150th anniversary in the country, mixing writing in Chinese characters with Syriac text and images of the cross.

If you’ve never heard of this tradition, it’s no surprise. It’s been subject to persecution over and over again for nearly 1500 years. The Church of the East has always lived as a minority, wherever it was: first as Christian refugees fleeing across the border into Persia from Roman oppression, then as a Christian minority within a Zoroastrian and later Muslim society. Christians were expelled from China in the 9th century, never to return; minority Christian communities in central Asia experienced alternating periods of discrimination and outright persecution under different local leaders. The Syriac Christian heartland of northern Iraq has seen recurring periods of violence in the modern era, including the Assyrian Genocide that occurred alongside the Armenian Genocide, and more recent violence by ISIS and other radical forces in the region, such that the predominant centers of the Syriac tradition are now among expatriate and refugee communities of Assyrians in Sweden and the United States, and the Grand Catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Patriarch of the Church of the East has his seat at Mar Gewargis Cathedral in… Chicago.

There is no hidden mystical meaning to the Aramaic words of the Lord’s Prayer. But there is much to be learned from the Assyrian tradition that has carried them on. I wonder in particular about what lessons we can learn, as our church loses the power it once had, about what it means to be a small religious community embedded within a larger society. What does it mean to spread the good news without social and political power? What does it mean to live as faithful Christians, when the society around you doesn’t particularly care? What does it mean to transmit the traditions of your faith, generation after generation, as your numbers slowly dwindle and it seems your church may die?

There are no easy answers, but there is, at least a model—living evidence that Christianity can survive and even thrive outside the structures of Christendom that prop it up.

Last week, we looked at the Christian tradition of Egypt, which stretches from the ancient world to the present day. This week, we’ll head south along the Nile River to Ethiopia, where a vibrant Christian community began long before the spread of Christianity to most of Europe, and where the majority of the population remain part of this ancient tradition to the present day.

Ethiopians trace their relationship to the people of God back three thousand years; the Solomonic dynasty that ruled Ethiopia from 1270 to 1974 claimed direct descendant from Menelik I, whom they traditionally claim to have been the child of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, conceived during a royal visit described in the Bible. (1 Kings 10) Likewise, they link their Christian traditions to the earliest days of the New Testament, which describes the apostle Philip sharing the good news with an Ethiopian court official traveling near Jerusalem in the days soon after Jesus’ death. (Acts 8:26ff.) It’s unclear how successfully Christianity spread in the earliest centuries in Ethiopia. What is clear is that the Ethiopian Kingdom of Aksum officially converted to Christianity in the year 330, just a few years after the Council of Nicea, when Christianity was officially tolerated in the Roman Empire and even endorsed by several emperors, but not yet the state religion.

Ethiopian Christian artists, like European Christian artists, have traditionally depicted Jesus and other figures of the Bible in ways that look quite a bit like them and the people around them, which has made Ethiopian art a rich source of inspiration for anyone looking for depictions other than the “pale, blond Jesus” of much medieval Western art.

The Ethiopian Church’s connections to King Solomon and to Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, as well as several other mentions of Ethiopia in the Bible, have led to a tradition of understanding oneself as part of the Biblical story. Ethiopian Christians maintain several Biblical food practices (avoiding pork, certain practices of religious animal slaughter/meat preparation) shared with Judaism and Islam but not common in other Christian traditions. Their expanded Biblical canon includes several later books not typically included in Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or various Protestant traditions, suggesting an openness to continuing to extend Biblical traditions to later periods. There’s even a church in the countryside purported to hold the lost Ark of the Covenant, brought by Solomon’s son Menelik to Ethiopia and kept safe all these years.

Perhaps the most interesting example is the holy city of Lalibela. In the 12th century, King Lalibela ordered the building of a second Jerusalem when the original was (re)captured by Muslim forces in 1187, enabling Christians who would have gone on pilgrimages to Jerusalem to go to Lalibela instead. The result was 11 interconnected stone churches, carved into the mountain by hand and emulating the layout of the city of Jerusalem.

Today, about 45 million Christians live in Ethiopia, primarily members of the traditional Orthodox Church — double the size of the Church of England, and nearly forty times the size of the Episcopal Church. Over the last century, African Christians have represented a larger and larger fraction of the Church around the world; while only 1.4% of Christians worldwide lived in sub-Saharan African in 1910 (with 66% in Europe), by 2010 that number had grown to 24% (with only 26% in Europe), and the trends have only continued. As African Christian traditions have grown and as Western Christians have sought to break the historic links between Christian traditions, Christian art, and white supremacy, the Ethiopian Christian tradition has been a source of inspiration for many, and a fascinating study in the global, multiracial nature of the Christian faith.

The feast of the Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, the moment in which the God of the Jewish people was revealed to all the peoples of the world. Many of us are accustomed to thinking of Christianity as a primarily European religion—a faith concentrated in Europe and spread around the world by European colonization and imperialism. But in reality, some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are found in parts of Africa and Asia, and their living traditions can provide us with an interesting perspective on our own.

Our Thursday discussion series this winter will take up this theme, learning about and from ancient and modern Christian traditions from around the world. But I know that many of you can’t be there, so I thought I’d offer short versions of some of those presentations on Christian traditions from around the world in textual form, instead!

This week, I’ll say a few words about the Coptic Christian tradition of Egypt.

Egypt was one of the centers of the ancient Jewish community, and of early Christianity. The great city of Alexandria lay just a week’s journey by donkey and boat from Jerusalem, a journey roughly equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington, DC. Alexandria was a major metropolis, a center of learning and Greek culture, and a hub for the Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean during the period of Greek and Roman rule. As Christianity began to spread, Alexandria became one of its major intellectual centers: even before the legalization and then official adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Alexandria was home to prominent Christian theologians like Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215) and Origen (c. 185-253), both affiliated with the Catechetical School of Alexandria, a kind of early Christian proto-university.

Egyptian Christianity developed into a tradition of contrasts. Its intellectual and episcopal leaders in cities like Alexandria were typically native Greek speakers, deeply formed in the Greek intellectual tradition, and learned in the literary analysis of the New Testament (written in Greek) and the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint. But the overwhelming majority of Egyptians continued to speak the Egyptian language, a direction of the language of the hieroglyphs and Pharaohs. As Christianity spread, a distinctive “Coptic” tradition developed, in which Christian scribes wrote the Egyptian language in Greek letters, while borrowing many Greek philosophical and theological terms. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt several centuries later, as Arabic replaced Greek as the language of government and official religion and began to displace the Egyptian language, another bilingual tradition emerged: while even Egyptian Christians spoke Arabic in their daily lives, Coptic remained (and remains) the language of liturgy and prayer.

Egyptian Coptic Christianity is a tradition of contrasts in another way, as well. You can see the contrast in this 19th-century map of Egyptian Christian sites. (The red crosses on the map show parishes and dioceses; the brown buildings show monasteries.) Along the Nile River, in the fertile delta, and on the coasts, local parishes and bishoprics flourished where populations were dense. On the outskirts of Egyptian societies, monasteries grew up around the sites where the early “Desert Fathers and Mothers” had gone.

Egypt was the home of early Christian monasticism, and it’s easy to see why. Early ascetics and spiritual seekers went to the desert in droves—not into the depths of the Libyan Desert, but to the deserted outskirts of society, to the places furthest from the rivers, where it was barely possible to sustain life and few people lived.

The wilderness of the desert provided a refuge from the noise of the city and all its distractions. Just as in our own culture we imagine the wilderness to be a place of pure and simple living—however idealized that vision may be!—so too the ancients who sought wisdom turned to the wilderness to find a place where they could pray and meditate without distraction. At first, the desert fathers and mothers were simply individual “anchorites” turning to the desert to seek God. But soon, communities grew up around these leaders, unified in prayer and seeking to build new communities centered on their shared practices of faith, outside the ordinary boundaries of society. Monastic traditions spread from Egypt throughout the Christian world, and these early ascetics and monastics have provided a wealth of spiritual wisdom from which Christians around the world have continued to benefit.

Coptic Christianity has never had an easy relationship with secular authorities. Christianity in Egypt spent its first three centuries as an illegal religion under Rome, and most of the following three centuries in continual theological conflict with the opinions of the Roman emperors. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, treatment of Egyptian Christians alternated between toleration (with the addition of certain discriminatory taxes and fines) and outright persecution, official and unofficial—including, most recently, particularly violent aggression and church bombings claimed by ISIS. But while the Christian population of Egypt has dwindled over time, Christians still make up some 15-20% of the population of Egypt, 15-20 million people in all. In other words, there are more than ten times as many Coptic Christians in Egypt, a Muslim-majority country, as there are Episcopalians in the United States.

So what do we have to learn from a tradition that has always balanced multiple languages and cultures, that’s sought to maintain the traditions of the past and keep them alive for people who quite literally speak a different language? What do we have to learn from a tradition that lives in bustling cities but craves the wisdom found in the desert? What do we have to learn from a tradition that’s never held political power, that’s never been in charge of its country, but has remained faithful without imposing itself on the culture around it?

I’ll leave that as homework for you, but I suspect the answer is: we have very much to learn, in every imaginable way!

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Philippians 4:4

The third week of Advent marks a period of joy. Many of us light pink candles in our wreaths, reflecting the old tradition of pink vestments and altar hangings on the third Sunday of Advent, a moment of joy in the midst of a “mildly penitential” season. This week comes in the midst of a season of joy, in many ways and for many people. But it is also a time when it can be hard to find joy.

As a priest, I find myself subscribed to a number of different churches’ email newsletters, and this week of joy seems also to be the week of Blue Christmas services, services designed for those who are mourning or in grief, or those for whom the holidays are simply a difficult time, for one reason or another. The Blue Christmas service is an antidote to a world pushing joy and cheer during the holiday season, to a culture that insists that you have happy holidays, when happiness may be the last thing you feel. I imagine that for some of you reading this, mid-December truly is a season of unadulterated joy, in which case I’m delighted for you! But I know that for many of us, there is a note of pain or grief, anxiety or sorrow that is playing in your heart, still audible beneath the eleven-hundredth repetition of the line: “Just hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring ting tingling too!”  

This week’s theme of joy is not an insistence that you feel joy, that you be filled with holiday cheer. It’s an invitation to rejoice. Joy is an emotion, and a fickle one. It’s harder to pin down than contentment or satisfaction, or even peace. Joy comes seemingly out of nowhere, in moments ordinary and extraordinary, and overwhelms us, and then departs.

Rejoicing is something different. Rejoicing is something we can choose to do, however we feel. It is a practice of giving thanks and celebrating. Rejoicing is easy when we’re feeling joyful. It’s harder when we aren’t, and it can feel hypocritical or fake. But rejoicing is not about pretending to be cheerful, or faking forced joy. It’s about recognizing that our lives are always mixed: that even in our moments of greatest joy we carry some sorrow, and even when life is hardest there can be things to celebrate. We rejoice during the darkest days of the year because we know that even in the midst of deep darkness, there is some reason to rejoice.