Worshipping with the Assyrian Church of the East, Sabtiyyeh, Mt. Lebanon

Today (Sunday / The Lord's Day, October 17) Dean George Sabra's "Contemporary Eastern Churches" class traveled by bus from Hamra (NEST's neighborhood) through Beirut and up part of Mount Lebanon to Sabtiyyeh, a suburb of the city where we visited with Fr. Akhikar Wardeh's congregation in the tradition of The Assyrian Church of the East. 

The Assyrian Church is one of the oldest expressions of Christianity dating its origins to 431 CE. They worship in both Aramaic (the language spoken by many first century Jews & Gentiles in Palestine & the eastern regions of the Roman empire & it is the language of their Bible & liturgy), & in the modern Syriac language which is related to but also different from Aramaic & Arabic. Their Church faced massive persecution from 1914 - 1933 under the Ottoman empire; 500,000 Assyrian Christians were massacred or died on a 1,000 km trek from southern Russia (where the Orthodox Russian authorities had protected them until Russia withdrew from WWI) to northern Iraq fleeing persecution by the Ottomans. At one time there were 750,000 Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq around Mosul (Nineveh) and in the Kurdish regions. Ongoing conflict between the Kurds and Assyrian Christians has reduced their numbers in recent years from 60 - 70,000 to only 20,000 remaining in Iraq today. Now their patriarch and their Church is based in Chicago where many Assyrian Christians immigrated in the 20th century. 

Fr. Wardeh is a young, relatively new priest from Iraq who received his theological education in Rome since there are no Assyrian monasteries or schools of higher learning remaining in the Middle East. There are 3 Assyrian Church congregations in Lebanon, including the village of Sarah (phonetic spelling) in the Bekah valley south of Beirut established by Assyrian church refugees from S. Russia in 1914. The church we visited was built in 1953 and was well attended. 

The Lord's Day service (that was in progress when we arrived) lasted at least 90 minutes and consisted almost entirely in the chanting of their liturgy in modern Syriac by a choir of young, single women (heads covered by a kind of red beret with red choir robes) and three priests who were joined by the congregation in some of the chants. There was much incense that was used, among other things, to cleanse one's hands before received the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Children were communicated with the bread, and women covered their heads with scarves to receive the elements. The Gospel reading for the day was Matthew 20:1-16 (The Laborers in the Vineyard) with a seven minute sermon on 'So the last will be first, and the first will be last.'

In our NEST group some of the Protestants who were less familiar with E. Orthodox liturgics were quite taken when a red curtain emblazoned with a gold cross was drawn to hide from us the consecration of the elements by Fr. Wardeh. Although our group was made up of Presbyterians (Lebanese & N. American), Lutherans (Europe & N. America), Anglicans (England & Scotland), & Armenian Evangelicals from Syria, we were all welcomed at the Lord's Table. 

The Assyrian Church of the East has a distinctive understanding of the Person of Christ that is  close to the Gospel of Mark, Colossians 1:15-20, early Jewish Christianity (before the 'parting of the ways' between Gentile Christians and rabbinic Judaism), and the school of Antioch's theology where Jesus' humanity becomes the subject of the incarnation of God's divinity from the moment of Jesus' conception. For them, Mary the mother of Jesus is not theotokos ('God-bearer') but christotokos (mother of the Messiah). They confess the faith using the Nicene Creed in its original version of 325 CE (where the Holy Spirit proceeds from God the Father, but not from both the Father and the Son) and they add to the Creed Colossians 1:15b, that Christ is 'the firstborn of all creation.' (This same text was used by Arius, the presbyter of Alexandria, who taught that Jesus is Savior of the world but not divine in the same way as God the Father. The Assyrian Church, however, does not have an Arian christology, as interpreted by Fr. Wardeh.)

In the celebration of the Eucharist, the breaking of the bread symbolizes for Assyrian Christians how Jesus' humanity and divinity was broken in the crucifixion, but then reunited in the resurrection and ascension to eternal glory.

Since Fr. Wardeh did his theological training in Rome, I wanted to ask him if the emphasis on the historical Jesus in Catholic theology since the 1940s and esp. since Vatican Council II in the 1960s has opened doors of dialogue with Assyrian Christians who have never forgotten that Jesus, Mary and the disciples spoke Aramaic. 

Given centuries of protected religious minority status under a series of Muslim empires, Assyrian Christians had a significant impact on Islamic scholarship that brought the philosophy of Aristotle & Greek medicine to western Europe through Arabic translations of the Greek texts. But the massacres and persecutions under the Ottoman empire and contemporary conflicts with the Kurds in N. Iraq marks the Assyrian Christians as a Church of the Cross. It is interesting to note that all the crosses in the congregation we visited were not crucifixes (they did not display the broken body of Jesus on the cross) but empty crosses proclaiming the resurrection from the dead of the crucified messiah.