No Longer the Chapel Hillbilly

 Fourth Wednesday after Pentecost

St. Basil of Caesarea--Color: White

Lectionary Texts:

Wednesday:

1 Samuel 18:1-5

Mark 4:35-41

Thursday:

1 Samuel 18:6-30

2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1

My apologies if the title of this blog evidences socio-economic discrimination. I think it does. I left it in anyway. I started referring to myself as the Chapel Hillbilly after my upper right front tooth was pulled last November 3. My smile had a Buddy Ebsen/Jed Clampett kind of look to it.  A month later we started the ridiculously long implant process. I was measured for and given (or rather, paid for) a "flipper" for the interim. A "flipper" is something like a partial, I think. It was uncomfortable. I soon quit wearing it. My smile was bad, but Providence smiled well for me. Covid was here. I may have been the only person in America truly happy wearing a mask. Well, all that is over now. I got my new tooth today. It feels great. I may eat corn on the cob every day for the next month. 

Today we commemorate St. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea. You probably know St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, with onion shaped towers and beautiful bright colors. St. Basil himself lived more than a millennium earlier, in the fourth century. He was one of a group of three theologians called the Cappadocian Fathers. The other were his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory Nazianzus. More recently their sister Macrina has been included in the list, now called simply "the Cappadocians." The Cappadocians were brilliant philosopher/theologians. At a time when the Greek Eastern Church was developing more and more separately from the Roman Catholic Western Church (the final split was not until 1054), the Cappadocians became the pioneers of Eastern Orthodox theology. They brilliantly synthesized Greek philosophy with Christian theology. I still marvel when I read them. Basil wrote many liturgical texts, some of which are still echoed in The Daily Office of the present. His treatise On the Holy Spirit helped the Church come to its full understanding of the Holy Spirit at the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D.  Incidentally tomorrow, I'll give a progress report on my Daily Office work on the first 50 Psalms. 

The way our blog is working now, I do travelogue on Monday, Acts Bible Study on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and Daily Office progress report on one of the other three days. We did lengthy series on High Church--Low Church, on the beginnings of Methodism, and on the Apostles' Creed. I would like to start another such series soon. I'm thinking about doing one on the Nicene Creed. It would probably help me in my efforts to memorize the Nicene Creed, just like the teenage Glaze girls, Kristen and Lauren, in N. Wilkesboro and like just about every Episcopalian I know. The Nicene Creed is more complex than the Apostles' Creed, though much of the same information is in both. 

I could also do series on important figures in Church History, on the Apocrypha, or on something like, "Memory and Manuscript: The Making of the New Testament." I'm also open to suggestions from you. Our study on early Methodism came at the suggestion of blog reader, Glenn Pomykal. So let me know what sounds good to you. (And no, dear daughter April, I'm not doing a series on the Susan Howatch Anglican Church novels, wonderful as they are). 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

I pray that you will use our reading, writing, and thinking together in this blog to deepen our faith, to gird it with knowledge, an to guide it with your inspiration. Amen

Faithfully,

Christian