Boxing Day Miscellany

Due to my 17-year sojourn in The Great (formerly) White North, today is not only the feast of St Stephen the First Martyr, on whose feast Good King Wenceslaus Looked Down, but also Boxing Day, a kind of Brit extension of the holiday, for reasons no one really understands. But it's a nice idea.

Giotto's version, I believe

St Stephen was one of the first seven deacons, an order of the priesthood created by the Apostles in response to the failure of multiculturalism in the early Church. Think I'm kidding? Read for yourself in the Acts of the Apostles, 6:1, and following.

6 But with the believers multiplying rapidly, there were rumblings of discontent. Those who spoke only Greek complained that their widows were being discriminated against, that they were not being given as much food in the daily distribution as the widows who spoke Hebrew. 2 So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers.“We should spend our time preaching, not administering a feeding program,” they said. 3 “Now look around among yourselves, dear brothers, and select seven men, wise and full of the Holy Spirit, who are well thought of by everyone; and we will put them in charge of this business. 4 Then we can spend our time in prayer, preaching, and teaching.”5 This sounded reasonable to the whole assembly, and they elected the following: Stephen (a man unusually full of faith and the Holy Spirit), Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus of Antioch (a Gentile convert to the Jewish faith, who had become a Christian).6 These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them and laid their hands on them in blessing.

Ah, the origins of the bureaucratic race-based welfare state and the Christian diaconate! Of course, the absolutely crucial difference is that this is not a state-run distribution, as it was in the Rome of panem et circenses. Or now with us.

Stephen's energetic preachig enraged his fellow Jews so much that he was condemned to death by stoning (Sharia did not come from nowhere!) and one Saul, who acted as coat-check boy for the men who did the deed, later became the famous 13th Apostle Paul. (On the far left in the pic above)  Acts 7: 54-60, if you're interested.  The Wikipedia article on him, no surprise, mentions that some find his attitude, gasp, "anti-Jewish." Sigh. Christianity, as the neo-heathens never cease to remind us, arose within the not entirely uniform Judaism of the Second Temple as a fight among Jews.

And for your Schadenfreudenal enjoyment, speaking of martyrs, a White liberal in South Africa who decided to open his farm for Black refugees fleeing "xenophobia"  is now, the wake of the Africans' split into two hostile groups, in fear of his life and that of his wife and ten children. A prisoner of the savage people he wanted to help. Well deserved, I say, and a perfect example of The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c). 

Happy St. Stephen Boxing Day!

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