Introduction and “Christological” Heresies

So, Michael and I,
we were talking,
it was a while back,
and this idea had come up, I had,
at some point in the last year,
I had read a book that I’ll talk about in a little bit,
and remember making a note to myself that I thought heresy might be interesting,
which doesn’t seem interesting.
And so I hope that maybe there’ll be something in this that will spur some conversation or some discussion.
I do think,
and I have a particular interest in kind of the history of the church
and theology and that stuff,
so I’ll try to make it interesting,
but I do think there’s some stuff to learn
from that history.
So, the word “heresy”
in Greek means “choosing for oneself.”
It means a choice,
and it came to represent a position that was in opposition to an established idea,
or in other words,
a departure from truth.
So when the early Christians argued about ideas
and what was true,
when there were ideas they considered dangerously untrue,
they used this word,
they called them heresy.
It was a label that was given to an idea that was not just wrong, but deceitful,
or misguided,
or dangerous.
And it’s in opposition to what they began to call “Orthodoxy.”
And the word “Orthodoxy” means a right belief or a right opinion.
And in practice, this is a Christian word.
We talk about Orthodox Jews or Orthodox things,
but this word really grew up in the Christian church.
In the first century,
when they came to find a word that meant the right way to think about the faith,
this was the word that they used,
that they put together.
Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on Orthodoxy has an asterisk at the top of it that says,
“This article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.”
So Wikipedia in describing Orthodoxy is a little bit skeptical of the idea of Orthodoxy,
an established truth, a universal truth even.
In our day of individualism,
and the celebration of free thinking,
and the idea that we are suspicious of the big picture,
conspiracy thinking, and all of that stuff,
Orthodoxy is not a very popular idea.
The idea of a party line that you have to subscribe to is difficult for us.
It is hard to imagine that in the history of the church,
there were trials over ideas.
People were called to account and demanded to defend themselves for their thinking,
for their ideas,
their teachings,
complete with punishment,
and in the darker periods of our history,
even executions.
People were put to death because they had an idea that diverted from the main,
that was considered dangerous.
And Christians have been on both sides of that.
We’ve been the ones burning,
we’ve been the ones holding the torches.
It is interesting, though, that these people,
our ancestors in the faith,
believed that the battle over truth had to be fought,
that it wasn’t okay for everybody to just think whatever they wanted about the faith,
that there had to be established guidelines and a safe middle that was true,
and that untrue,
a lack of truth, was dangerous,
and that people who taught and spread wrong ideas were a threat to the faith.
So those people were called heretics.
For instance,
in the last couple of years,
I don’t know if anybody paid attention to this,
about five years ago,
it was released that the Gospel of Judas had been found and translated.
The Gospel of Judas has existed in piecemeal form,
but someone had found the manuscript,
and the Gospel of Judas is interesting in the sense that it tells a completely different story,
as you might imagine,
than the other Gospels.
In the Gospel of Judas,
Judas is the hero.
Jesus talks to Judas and tells him,
“Look, Judas, you’re the only one who understands.
All the rest of them don’t.
In fact, when they die, they’re going to be dead,
but you, Judas, are going to live eternally because you get it.
Now I need a favor.
I need you to turn me in.”
And this got a lot of attention.
A lot of people,
if you can look this afternoon or this evening,
you can get on Amazon,
search the Gospel of Judas,
and read the reviews.
I’m not suggesting you buy the book.
That’s up to you.
But read the reviews.
I never knew this stuff.
Changed my whole life.
Can’t believe the Church has done this.
Well,
the problem with that is we already knew all of that stuff.
There’s no new ideas in the Gospel of Judas.
There have been people saying things like that the whole history of the Church,
and we call it heresy.
But now it gets put out there as conspiracy.
This is another thing that makes me smile whenever someone comes and wants to argue with me about the Bible,
and points out that there’s contradictions in it.
And I say,
“Yeah, I’ve read it.
I know.”
And they say, “But this says this,
and this says this.” I said,
“I promise you, you are not going to tell the Church anything about the Bible.
We don’t know.” People have devoted their lives for centuries studying the book.
We translated it.
We copied it.
It’s our book.
We know what’s in it.
And yet people think that we’re surprised or threatened by the gaps in it,
with no idea that there’s rarely something that wasn’t a part of the struggle of the early Church.
In the first window of the early Church,
the thing we’ll talk about tonight,
because Christ was the new idea,
because the concept of Christ,
the person of Christ,
is the new idea introduced to faith,
most of the early good heresies involve Jesus.
Most of the knockdown dragouts of the first couple centuries are Jesus’ arguments.
There are battles over who Jesus was,
who Jesus wasn’t,
and what Jesus did.
And the book of one of the Bible that got me thinking about this,
this is a very intriguing title.
It’s called Bad Religions,
How We Became a Nation of Heresies.
And this columnist,
who is also a man of faith,
makes a pretty good case that heresy has not only been accepted in the American Church,
but encouraged and tolerated.
You can make your own decision on that.
But I do want to read you something,
because I think this is very helpful.
It’s a little long.
I’ll try to be quick with it.
Christianity is a paradoxical religion because the Jew of Nazareth is a paradoxical character.
No figure in history or fiction contains as many multitudes as the New Testament Jesus.
He’s a celibate ascetic who enjoys dining with tax collectors and changing water into wine.
He’s an apocalyptic prophet at one moment,
a wise ethicist to next.
He’s a fierce critic of Jewish religion who insists he’s actually fulfilling the law rather than subverting it.
He preaches a reversal of every social hierarchy while deliberately avoiding explicitly political claims.
He promises to set parents against children and then disallows divorce.
He consorts with prostitutes while denouncing even lustful thoughts.
He makes wild claims about his own relationship to God and perhaps his own divinity without displaying any of the usual signs of megalomania or madness.
He can be egalitarian,
hierarchical,
gentle,
and impatient,
extraordinary charitable,
and extraordinary judgmental.
He sets impossible standards and then forgives the worst sinners.
He blesses the peacemakers and then promises that he doesn’t bring peace but a sword.
He’s superhuman one moment,
the next he’s weeping.
And of course the accounts of his resurrection only heightened these paradoxes introducing the post-crucifixion Jesus who is somehow neither a recitated body or a flitting ghost but something even stranger.
A being at once fleshly and supernatural,
recognizable,
and transfigured,
bearing the wounds of the crucifixion even as he passes through walls and doors.
The boast of Christian Orthodoxy as codified by the councils of the early church are expounding the creeds and have always been in fidelity to the whole of Jesus.
Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradiction in the gospel narrative rather than evade them.
Was he God or was he man?
Both,
says Orthodoxy.
Is the kingdom he preached something to be lived in this world or something to be expected in the next?
Both.
Did he offer a blueprint for moral conduct or a call to spiritual enlightenment?
Both.
Did he fulfill Judaism among the Jews or to convert Gentiles to the world?
Both.
Was he the bloody man of sorrows?
The stuff of Mel Gibson movies?
Was he the hippie,
the lilies of the field Jesus of God spell?
Or was he the wise,
moralist, beloved by the Victorian liberals?
He was all of them and more.
On the other hand,
the goal of the great heresies has often been to extract from attention of the gospel one narrative in a more consistent, streamlined,
non-contradictory Jesus.
In other words, and I’m sorry about the length of that quote,
where heresy has often went wrong is to take the complicated and try to simplify it.
To take something that is held in tension and remove the tension from it.
And this is where we believe we have gotten ourselves in trouble many, many times.
And there are several ideas about Jesus that we’ll talk about tonight and many of them are exactly that.
They are flattened complexity.
They are in the midst of a church saying multiple things about Jesus and attempt to simplify and unify one thing about Jesus at the expense of the other.
Typically, not always,
but typically heresies are named for whoever championed them or advocated the ideas and the heresies we will talk about tonight are called crystallological heresies.
And that’s just the word that means they have to do with Christ.
Crystallological, the study of Christ and it simply means that these are bad ideas about Jesus.
So let me stop there and ask if there are just any general questions,
comments or thoughts before we get into particulars.
OK,
these are crystallological heresies.
These are ideas within the church.
So they’re not from critics.
They’re from people of faith,
though we would later say misguided faith.
The first one is called adoptionism.
Take a guess.
Anybody got a best guess on what this one teaches or taught?
Some of these don’t really exist anymore.
OK,
so there’s a man named Theodotus about 150 or so.
And the idea was that Jesus was a very virtuous person,
but only a person,
born, parents,
man,
flesh,
body, blood,
human,
who gets a lot of things right,
who lives out a high degree of righteousness.
In fact,
he does so well that God adopts him.
And his baptism adopting him by the presence of the Spirit and making him divine,
conferring divinity on him,
not as something he has intrinsically,
not as something he’s born with or a part of who he is,
but something he’s given.
Now,
this obviously ran into the church’s idea that Jesus had a human nature and a divine nature,
that he was sinless.
This lent itself to works righteousness and completely denies that theological tenet we call incarnation,
to be made flesh,
the Spirit made flesh.
So this one is rejected by church councils.
It’s rejected by Nicaea.
There’s two councils of Nicaea.
It’s rejected by the first one and met in 325.
And they come down on this pretty mark,
two natures of Jesus,
that he’s human and that he’s divine,
that he was with God in the beginning.
If you read through the creeds,
you can often, by the creeds, tell what they were arguing against by what they put the most effort in.
So this one is rejected and pretty much lost to history.
After the early church,
there’s not much of a resurgence of this one.
I’m not aware of any modern evolution or even somewhat historic evolution of the idea of adoptionism.
If it’s out there,
I don’t know it.
Any thoughts on this?
Comments,
questions on adoptionism?
Now we meet a man named Martian,
M-A-R-C-I-O-N,
not as in from Mars.
But Martian of Sinope,
this is the one-forties,
and Martian teaches that Jesus is in fact the Savior described by Paul.
He did die for our sins.
He did do what he said he did.
He did miracles.
He walked on water.
He’s human.
He’s divine.
He was crucified, dead and resurrected.
But Martian,
as Christians have occasionally wondered,
struggled to reconcile the Old Testament and what he read and the New Testament and what he read.
So Martian concludes that those are simply not the same God.
He throws out the Old Testament and he attributes the God of the Old Testament as a lesser being and not the Father of Jesus Christ.
That he prays to in the New Testament.
When it comes to the New Testament,
he selected parts of the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters and he threw out the rest of the New Testament saying it’s too Jewish.
It’s too Old Testament-ish.
All those feasts,
all the tabernacle stuff,
the sacrifice stuff, all that’s gone.
He got a little bit of Luke and he liked Paul a lot,
but he taught that Jesus was who Paul said he was,
but that the Old Testament and the New Testament gods are incompatible.
Now, here’s a good example.
If you’ve done any serious reading in the Old Testament and New Testament,
you’ve wondered this.
You’ve said how is it that the same God that destroys people by the thousands in service to Israel feeds people and heals people and forgives people a thousand pages later.
That’s the tension.
And Martian decided I’ll get rid of the tension because that God doesn’t fit this God.
I like this one better.
We’re going with this one, which is,
you know, if you get to do that, it’s good.
He didn’t get to do that.
The church fought back pretty hard.
The church denies him as a heretic.
Although it takes several centuries for the idea of this one being some pretty good traction.
Adoptionism didn’t have a lot of traction.
Martianism gets a fair hearing and it takes about six centuries for it to die out in the West.
It takes closer to a thousand years for it to die out in the East.
People resonated with some of his concerns.
They made sense to them.
Also, it coincides with some antisemitism,
which helps his cause,
strangely enough, as he’s trying to flush out the Jewish elements of the faith.
So that’s Martian.
Comments or questions?
How do they rationalize?
Yeah, that’s a good question.
I don’t think he I don’t think he worried about that at all.
I well, because he he essentially isn’t looking at the Old Testament as a source to validate Jesus.
Jesus is validated on his own.
And so he doesn’t need it doesn’t matter what the Old Testament says,
though, I’m sure he may have said that it points to a truth beyond itself or something like that.
But I don’t think that would have been particularly important to him.
Were believers in either of these persecuted territories?
The Marcy Knights a little bit later on,
they run afoul of the church significantly.
Again,
there’s a second Council of Constantinople.
I’m sorry, there’s a Council of Constantinople.
There’s a second Council of Nicaea.
That’s in about 380.
And again,
they affirm they affirm that they stand against Martin.
He himself, to my knowledge, has never punished or anything.
But yeah, he had some followers that got crossways with the church.
It’s probably it’s probably hard for us to put ourselves in that situation.
But we do have to try and remember the days that these battles are being fought,
this is new territory.
They’re they’re all going to the scripture and they’re all arguing on the merits of their ideas,
but they don’t have it.
We’re in the first few generations of Christianity,
and there’s not a lot to take an appeal to as historic teaching.
And so one had to sort of hold sway on the power of their argument,
their logic, their rhetoric, their biblical work.
If the one they were arguing with acknowledged that as a source of authority.
Again,
I don’t know.
I know that there are people who would be OK with Marcion in this day and age.
I know Christians even who lean Marcion.
I have had conversations with Christians who say,
I have no time for the Old Testament.
I don’t we don’t need it.
We could do without it.
I don’t know of a movement that calls itself Marcionite.
I’m not aware of any organized arm of the church that lives under this label.
But I know people who would at least say he could be on to something.
Yeah, well, I think I think there have always been people that have held that there are more than one God.
But even within the monotheistic camp,
the one God camp,
there are people, for instance, who are comfortable talking about
angels and spiritual beings and lesser beings.
And so that language isn’t unknown to us.
He does something uncomfortable with it for us.
But we have that kind of.
OK,
now we get to a guy who did stir up some pretty good trouble.
His name is Arius.
And in the late two hundreds and early three hundreds,
he’s hanging around Egypt.
And he comes up with an idea that we now call Arianism.
And Arianism sounds a little bit like adoptionism.
The summary is that Christ is the Son of God.
And God is God.
But the Son of God is not co-eternal.
In other words,
he’s not always been.
The Son,
Jesus, is created.
At some point, God makes him, creates Jesus as the Son,
as the Savior, as the Messiah,
sends him to earth where he lives out that mission perfectly.
And Arius would be on board with all the things about Christ, except his argument,
Jan, was exactly that there’s one God.
And if there’s one God,
then Jesus must be something else.
And if he’s something else,
God had to make him because God made everything that is in himself.
And so he argues that because there’s one God,
that Jesus is subordinate to the Father and not equal.
Now,
Arius got a lot of followers.
And if you kind of do the logic,
you can see where they came from.
Jewish Christians who are uncomfortable with the Trinity language and were steeped in the idea of the one God, hero Israel,
the Lord your God is one,
right?
The Shema.
Those early Jewish Christians,
they thought this made some sense.
And it seemed for them a way to honor Christ and maintain this idea that there’s not three that are somehow one,
but also three not different and saying that there’s just one.
And then there’s Jesus under that created by the Father.
Well, if you read our creeds,
you know that they hammered this one pretty hard.
You read the Apostles Creed even or the Nicene Creed,
particularly begotten of the Father not made.
We have a lot of that language in our history.
And it’s because we were fighting a pretty significant battle with Arius.
Arianism got very popular in Egypt.
He had a large following and there was significant battles theologically.
He is in large measure the reason not I shouldn’t say he’s the reason.
He’s one of the reasons that the Council of Nicaea in 325 is called by Constantinople and Arius and his followers are exiled after.
They won’t give up their argument during the conference at Nicaea.
They’re riding in Nicene Creed.
Arius says, no, I won’t say that.
We won’t sign off for that.
The Egyptian Christians are backing him and Constantine says,
okay, then you can just go away.
You can be exiled.
And so Arius and others are exiled by the Second Council of Nicaea in the late 300s,
381.
This matter is pretty much settled theologically.
There are still Arians,
but in the stream of the church,
they now exist outside of the church.
They’re not really in the family anymore.
They’ve been moved out.
They go away.
Again, I’m not aware of a modern movement that would hold this as a theological tenet that Christ is created.
Our faith journey has sold completely and decided this so early that those folks have all fallen out somewhere else.
And to my knowledge,
there is not a tradition that considers themselves Arians in that regard.
There may be, and I don’t know about it.
It’s certainly possible, but I’m not aware of it if it exists.
Questions, thoughts on that one?
What do you think of the Holy Spirit?
Same thing.
Well, in fact,
if I remember correctly,
and help me if I’m wrong,
if I remember correctly,
he even put the Holy Spirit under Jesus because Jesus said I’ll send him to you.
In other words, Jesus has authority over the Holy Spirit.
It’s kind of a hierarchy.
God, Jesus,
Spirit.
And again,
there are even some modern Christians probably not uncomfortable with that language,
but theologically, it’s not where we’ve come out.
What’s their connection between a Dr.
Christian and somebody who’s in a location?
Now, to my knowledge,
what are the questions?
The question was,
there’s a group of Christians in Egypt called the Coptic Christians,
whether they were Arian,
and while his ideas were prevalent there,
I’m not aware that they dominated that strain of the faith.
I don’t think they did,
as a matter of fact.
I’d even say I’m pretty sure they didn’t,
which means they probably did.
Well, it’s worth pointing out that St.
Augustine was Bishop of Egypt,
what,
600?
So, by then, it was a bastion of Orthodox theology, so.
If they were around,
they were going by shortly after that because he had no time for that.
In fact,
Augustine is still,
Arianism is fresh enough in the memory that Augustine will still write about him as an enemy,
as will Calvin and Luther to some extent.
They’ll still point that out as a dangerous idea.
Isn’t this closer to the day that I’m more going to believe that…
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think there are some similarities,
Anthony.
I don’t think it’s,
I don’t think it traces,
I don’t think the idea traces to Marcin,
but I do think they’re some of the same kind of language.
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.
I don’t think they’re related,
but they,
you know, I should say I don’t think they’re connected,
but they are, I think they might be related.
They’re similar.
Moving on, we get to another heresy called Docetism.
Docetism was the belief that Jesus’
physical body was an illusion.
In other words, you have human and divine,
we erred on the side of human,
now we er on the side of divine.
Jesus is a spiritual being who just looks like he has a body.
He doesn’t really have a body.
The word Docetes is the Greek word for phantom,
so he appears real.
Spiritual being, pure spirit.
They denied,
the Docetes denied the death of Jesus,
said that it appeared as a death,
looked like a death,
but it wasn’t, because of course he couldn’t be dead.
This idea is first identified by the late 100s,
but it really never gained a serious following outside of a very few pockets.
Obviously,
in a religion that’s central pennant is death and resurrection,
the idea that there wasn’t a real death was a tough sell.
They couldn’t really get that going very well,
but it was out there and it popped up in a couple of places.
There’s another heresy that follows briefly, called Utikianism.
This is the modified position,
this said that Jesus has two natures,
human and divine,
but they’re not equal.
The divine nature supersedes the human,
even absorbs it in some versions of this idea.
So this is the idea that Christ had two natures,
but he only had one will.
He wasn’t really,
he was human, but he was mostly God,
and so he didn’t have struggles.
He didn’t have real temptations.
He didn’t have doubts.
He didn’t have pain.
He didn’t have those things that it means to be truly human.
And again,
this one I think pastorally didn’t meet the eye cast.
It didn’t pass mustard,
because we resonate with this reality that Jesus understands what it is to be human.
The great message of Christ is that he lived with skin on,
that he knew struggles,
that he had pain,
that he bled, that he cried,
that he did all the things we do,
but did them in perfect obedience to God.
So this one shows up late.
It’s mid 600s, and really by the end of the 600s,
it has fairly well faded out.
But again, the idea that we’re taking a complex idea and trying to flatten it,
and that we wanted to deny something of Jesus.
So I think if we think back to the quote,
we see the truth of it here.
Most of these early heresies are failures to integrate Jesus,
failure to integrate the divine and the human.
And I’d be curious as to your opinions,
why it is that we have felt the need historically to pit one against the other or to choose one over the other.
Why do you think we have found it troubling to consider that Jesus is the union of both human and divine?
Why do you think we struggled with that idea so much?
Okay, it’s unprecedented,
it’s unique,
certainly.
I’m struggling with a related concept,
and I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Careful, we’ll have a new,
we’ll call it Rogerism.
There are two of them.
The first one is,
would Jesus really go to hell as he says in the
following is even more difficult.
We are well above my pay grade.
This is exactly the question.
Yeah,
no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael and I have this conversation once in a while.
He helped me tremendously
recently understand about myself that I like complexity.
And so my struggles are with people who oversimplify things.
I find myself extremely frustrated when someone flattens an idea because I like the gaps in it.
I like the tension in an idea.
And so from
my perspective with that admission,
one of the things I love about exploring Jesus is that inevitably we find ourselves at a point where the next step is mystery.
We can’t know what Jesus DNA looks like,
whether that’s fully human DNA or whether the very imprint of God is upon his cells.
I think we can take our best guess and live with our theory,
but we can’t know.
And I find that I don’t find that problematic.
I find that inspirational.
We hold those things in tension, those two beliefs.
Jesus was one hundred percent human and all what that means and Jesus was one hundred percent God and all of what that means.
And we,
if we’re honest,
don’t have any idea how that works.
And that’s OK.
Because we affirm that not as scientific knowledge,
but as spiritual reality,
as belief.
And I was fascinating to put that DNA under a microscope.
I don’t know what we would see.
Do angels dance on the heads of penins?
I don’t know.
I see.
C.S.
Lewis,
in the journal that he wrote after his wife died,
has a beautiful section,
one of my very favorites,
where he says,
“Can mortals ask questions that God can’t answer?” And he says,
“Yes, I think we do it all the time.”
They are our nonsense
questions.
What color is loud?
What does yellow smell like?
And then he says,
“I think most of our great philosophical theological questions must sound like that to God.”
I think,
you know, it’s when we study God,
which is what the word theology means,
we are inevitably going to come to the question mark at every road we take.
Which I would suggest if I design,
but again, I’m prone to like that, so.
In fact,
I would caution you to be a little wary of religious people who want to flatten complicated ideas.
Because rarely has that been good for us in the history of the church.
Sometimes, but not often.
Most often we find ourselves trying to integrate the human and the divine in difficult ways.
But,
yeah,
back to your question.
Right away,
I think it puts the bonus on a piece of truth.
So, it would be better if he was part of God than him,
because it would be easier for him to be here.
Yeah.
Maybe so.
Well, we’re off the hook because we’re not Jesus.
Is that the…
Yeah, right.
I mean, if he was more God than human,
you know.
Yeah. He had to do that,
but if he was human,
then we have to look at ourselves and say, “Well,
we have to be more Christ-like.”
We do.
Which, we certainly want to point out,
Jesus has access to resources.
We don’t.
But on this side of the resurrection,
Jesus promises to be a resource.
And that’s good news.
The fact that we struggle is also good news.
So, let me close with a couple of thoughts.
Why does any of this matter?
And, you know, I’m not sure that this does.
I don’t know that
in your day-to-day life,
in your faith journey,
that knowing about Marxism and Arianism,
I don’t know if that means anything to you.
But the idea that we claim some things as true about Jesus are,
I would argue, monumentally important.
Because if there is truth,
then there is untrue.
And what we believe is not simply of a faith table that we get to pick and choose.
We inherit, through God’s guidance and the hard work of our mothers and fathers in the faith,
a set of doctrines.
And while we need to be compassionate and humble,
it matters
to us that God has, we believe,
revealed truth to us.
And as I’ve been reading this and as I’ve been working with the Martin Luther stuff,
I’ve been struck by the idea that Christians
before us fought over what was true.
And they believed it desperately mattered.
They believed it mattered to the extent that people who taught something untrue were dangerous and in many cases had to be pushed outside of the community,
lest they pollute it and corrupt it.
It matters what we hold as true about Jesus.
It’s not simply our version of an opinion.
There’s something at stake in it because it governs how we live,
what we believe, how we act, how we speak, how we treat others.
And that’s vitally important.
And heresy, though it’s not a word we would use often in this day and age,
remains dangerous because when we believe the wrong things about God or Christ,
we inevitably go the wrong direction as well.
And so I think there will be opportunities to think that through as we continue.
Next week we’ll get back into some of this stuff.
We’ll get a little bit of the two nature stuff.
Jesus will get some Trinity stuff.
Trinity, that’s spawned lots of heresies, too, the ideas,
three and one, we’ve talked about some of that,
and we’ll go from there.
Any comments or questions?
Thanks again to the folks who brought food,
and thank you all for your time,
and by the way, closing prayer.
Gracious God,
thank you for the promise that you are a God of truth,
and that you,
through sign and wonder and inspiration and prayer and scripture and church and guidance,
have shared truth with your people.
Help us to know it when we see it,
help us to embrace it when we hear it,
help us to live it as we know it,
and share it as we are able.
In the gracious and wonderful name of Christ we pray.
Amen.
Thank you all.