Nielsen’s Nook

On the one hand, it is good to see so many people so concerned and thoughtful about the 2008 Election. The desire for strong leadership, for a person and administration that can keep one safe and provide an environment in which a person and their family might indeed thrive is a good and natural desire. But how long will it last? How much can one President in our political expression or a king or Prime Minister in others actually do?

I am reminded of our cosmic need for beneficent rule from Colossians 2:15 this morning. In particular, as our own political process in America continues to be reduced to cesspools of slander. This process serves to tickle our curiosity but not answer the questions, many times, that a citizen needs answered in order to vote well. The political fight employs the weapons that only insure more wounding and political blood-letting continue.

Perhaps, the weapons of warfare, political or otherwise, are all wrong for us, for politicians and for the citizens that elect them. “Having stripped-off the rulers and authorities, He disgraced them openly, having led them as triumphal captives through [the Cross],” Lawrence Farley translates Colossians 2:15.

Most politicians want to sincerely change the world, or at least their world. However, with all the rhetoric about change this term, I wonder about the substantive mechanism to get us there. We elect those who conquer best with the weapons that we think are mighty. The Cross would remind us that might is fleeting and can turn upon its wielder: the sword cuts both ways. The Cross for Christians is in fact the place that we find not only salvation from what would swallow us whole, but the way forward in all spheres of life. Indeed, the Cross is “the invincible trophy, the weapon of peace” as Farley reminds us in the kontakion of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 174-5.

Lawrence Farley writes regarding Colossians 2:8-9:

Christ is not just one link in the Fullness of the Godhead’s series of emanations. All the Divine Fullness dwells in Him. And not only that, but the Divine Fullness dwells in Him bodily. It is not, as the Gnostics asserted, that the true Divine Nature would not deign to soil Itself with contact with the bodily; corruptible world. On the contrary, the Fullness of God has actually assumed a body, sharing our physical nature.

Meditating on this passage from Colossians and from Farley’s reflections, there are two things that confront me. First, is of course the importance of my human body. God himself was pleased to take on a body like ours and in that there is great impetus to care for my own body. This point of impetus is related to the second confrontation I experienced. Elsewhere Paul will write about offering our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1-2) and we find Jesus concerned in the Gospels not only with what our body does but also with what our minds (in connection with our bodies) think.

Insofar as we participate in Christ, we participate in one who has a body that is perfect. That is, he has a body that fulfills the purpose for which human bodies were created and the destination that human bodies in Christ are headed. In other words, Christ’s body then provides for us a cosmic goal and direction. And so when I sin in body or mind, in things done or in things left undone, I do with my body that which is immature, that which is in a direction other than the cosmic final direction that Christ has laid down for us and then raised for us on the other side of death.

Lord, in your mercy, forgive us the use of our bodies for those things that are unlike Jesus, so that we might abide in the fullness of the One person in whom the fullness of the Divine indeed dwells. Amen.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 171-2. Commenting on Colossians 2:8-9.

In commenting on Colossians 2:5, Lawrence Farley writes:

… for in this — in [Paul's] love for [the Colossian Church] and his spiritual agony at the thought of their danger — is his moral authority to exhort them. He has never actually met them. They are Epaphras’ spiritual children. His moral authority to teach them lies in the fact of his suffering for them (see Col 1:24). For it is only insofar as we love and suffer for others that we have the right to teach and direct them. ¹

As I reflected on this verse and commentary, it occurred to me that many of the things that frustrate and even anger me at times are, in fact, opportunities in which God would increase and bless myself and others by teaching us to give and receive a love more authentic. In other words, true rich thick authentic love is most inconvenient - that is, unless you think God had His crucifixion for the life of the world merely scheduled out in His pda. Inconvenience, then, for the Christian, is filled with the immeasurable and redemptive possibilities of divine love.

Lord have mercy that your church, starting with me, would recognize authentic love and would be most industrious in its dispensing in this world.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 2:5.

In Chapters in Church History, discussing the Puritan Revolt in England, Powel Mills Dawley writes:

…Puritan intolerance would have imposed a religious system as unpalatable to the mass of the people as Anglicanism was to the few.¹

This of course made me smile, given my Presbyterian background. It also made me think of my favorite definition of Puritans from H. L. Mencken that a Puritan was someone that feared that someone somewhere might possibly be having fun. Caricatures aside, the impact of the Puritans on the Church of England has been lasting as Dawley continues:

… it called forth the famous defense of the Church of England against Geneva, The Laws of Ecclesiastical polity by Richard Hooker, the most notable Anglican scholar of the sixteenth century. ²

However, the most profound impact might be what Dawley records regarding the placement of the Gospel in the self-consciousness of the Anglican Church as a historical continuation of the apostolic faith and practice:

The evangelical concern [imparted from the Puritans] with “Gospel before Church” would enable Anglicanism to call itself into judgment. The Catholic element, on the other hand, would bind the Church, even while under judgment, to the traditional stream of Christian life and experience in all ages. By means of this creative tension Anglicanism has remained aware that in religion of Incarnation, history is both the means of God’s self-revelation and the scene of God’s redemption. ³

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¹ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

² Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

³ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 187.

This was the mystery long hidden from the world in the secret counsels of God and the wisdom that Israel did not expect. Israel expected the Jewish Messiah to come, to exalt the Jews to a place of prominence in the world (with the Gentiles as their servants) [much like some Christians today], and to reign physically from the city of Jerusalem. the full glory and political prominence would come with the first appearance of the Messiah. (That was what the Jewish crowds were expecting when they welcomed the Lord into Jerusalem on that fateful Palm Sunday; see Mark 11:10.) They did not suspect the riches of the glory of God’s mystery, or the overflowing generosity of His grace. They did not suspect that God would pour out His grace upon all flesh — even the Gentiles, thereby abolishing the distinction between Jew and Gentile.

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Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 1:26-28.

[Christ's] death on the Cross was Bloody, painful, and real. Human physicality was thus not something of which to be ashamed. Rather, it was the instrument of our salvation. The Gnostics retreated in revulsion from the flesh as if it were something unworthy. For them, there was a great dichotomy between flesh and spirit. But this was an error: for the Incarnation of Christ dissolved this dichotomy, making the flesh spiritual and making the physical world a channel of divine grace.

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Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 1:21-23.