Sometimes, historical rifts play out in hilarious ways.
Mar Awa III is the "patriarch of Babylon," the leader of Assyrian churches in the Middle East that became a distinct denomination after schisms in the 5th and 6th centuries. He is also from Chicago and knew exactly what he was doing.
Settle in for story time, because this is where I explain just how amazing it is to witness this epic troll, which involves 1600 years of history.
When Emperor Constantine I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and moved the capital to Constantinople (now, sadly, Istanbul), he convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD with Christian leaders across the empire.
Up until that point, Christianity had been considered a cult and a threat to the Greco-Roman gods and was loosely scattered due to persecution. The council at Nicaea was the first state-sponsored attempt to make sure churches were united in how they approached Scripture and theology.
But a century later, the new and growing Sassanid Empire in modern-day Iraq and Iran was putting pressure on the Romans; that cultural rift exacerbated theological divisions that came to a head with the teachings of Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople. For the first few centuries after Christ's death and resurrection, people argued a lot about how God could physically exist in a human body. A lot of this debate came out of pagan perceptions about how "gods" like Zeus could take human form.
Nestorius said Jesus had two different persons existing in one body - one that was God, and one that was human. Nestorius was fired and exiled for his teaching, but the churches of the East stuck with him.
A thousand years later in 1552, however, a bunch of these eastern churches - now living under Islamic rule - sought to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church after the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim hordes in 1453.
Those churches became the Chaldean Catholic Church.
Trump recently selected a member of that church (who sells pot in Michigan) to be a cultural ambassador to Iraq!
Many churches, however, decided not to reunite with Rome, which was in the middle of a little thing known as the Protestant Reformation at the time, and became known as the Assyrian Churches of the East.
And that, my friends, is what brings us full circle to two men from Chicago with a prank involving the rivalry between the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox.
God has a sense of humor! ⚾️ ✝️
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