Nielsen’s Nook

Mark 5:24-34 (ESV)

²⁴ … And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. ²⁵ And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, ²⁶ and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. ²⁷ She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. ²⁸ For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” ²⁹ And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰ And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” ³¹ And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” ³² And he looked around to see who had done it. ³³ But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. ³⁴ And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Meditation

Jesus is on his way to heal the daughter of Jarius, a ruler of the synagogue. Embeded in the account of the healing of Jarius’ daughter is this account of the woman with the discharge of blood.

What struck me this morning was the question Jesus asked, “Who touched my garments?” The apostles give the obvious answer reflecting that all sorts of people would have been touching him given that a great crowd thronged about him as they walked.

The difference between the great thronging crowd and the woman with the discharge revolves around faith, hope and love. She had touched Jesus with purpose that is only spawned out of hope and that hope had produced faith and had come to find the healing powers of love. For Jesus does not turn as one perturbed by the power that had gone out from him; rather, he approaches our hope and faith in him as our Good Shepherd, the Caretaker of our Souls. He wants to personally know and comfort those whose hope and faith drives them to him. He heals not from a distance but as a Physician who deeply loves the infirmed. The woman was already healed, but Jesus wanted to stop and bless her face to face.

O Lord, our God, would you so stir us to hope that our faith would be expanded, our hearts dilated, that we might have greater capacity to receive and relish your love for us in Christ Jesus our Lord, who loves together with you and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. [1]

These lines of Eliot give me pause to ponder. Many changes have come in life and many that I have longed for have eluded me. A hardened unbelieving retirement age man told me one time that he did not have any regrets towards the end of his life. What sort of devil can so numb our souls that we become indifferent to the sense of loss and regret that grows up around us, great weeds in our aging garden?

I watch my little girl play in the sprinklers, make mud volcanoes, and sprinkle music power on me. Flashes of the once-before short like a fused bulb across my weathered memory. Ah, when time was free and naivety had thrown its blissful cloak across the mud puddle.

There was something tranquil about the moment. It wasn’t important that we were in our back yard. It wasn’t important that we were together on a Saturday or otherwise. The warming peace that comes, even now while writing, is that of simple communion, just being together. Contentment, I think, is the obscene key to unlocking love.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. [2]

I’m 34 and I’ve got regrets. Places I should have gone. Things I should have studied. Holes that I can’t seem to circumscribe. And yet, if I understand Eliot here, the exploration is not sailing away from our regrets, but moving through them.

For me, I am sure that I will never mature past the Cross, where in Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, God passes over and forgives all for which I have regret. The Eucharist is a cross-shaped celebration of life in Jesus, where all the holes are circumscribed. It is a time when I confess my sins, taste the goodness of God, and hear the Gospel of grace proclaimed over me in thought, word, and deed. In the stillness there is a reposed reminder that I am aboard a Great Ship that continues moving Christward as it has for millennia. In dying I am raised, indeed my end is my beginning.

[1] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.190-201.

[2] Eliot, T.S. East Coker, V.202-209.

Thirsty ones come to the waters! The Lord sees our want; he knows our deepest needs. With this intimate knowledge of us he does not exploit us; but, he seeks to fulfill us. The human situation is not simply that we “still haven’t found what we’re looking for;” but, that we are looking for all the wrong things. Why do you spend money, the prophet asks, on what you do not need? Why do you work so hard for that which does not satisfy? Before and after these questions, the Lord has wrapped us up in his mercy: you who are poor, come and eat what is good, delight yourselves in rich food, so that you may live.

This passage in Isaiah seems to be at least one of Jesus’ sermon texts in his Sermon on the Mount, namely in his introduction we commonly call the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied (Matthew 5:6, author’s translation).

If the questions posed by Isaiah 55 affect you; if they thud off the emptiness that I believe we all have when we consider the lusts of our own flesh; then, I believe Jesus’ words have a most merciful weight for us.

Most of us don’t strive after the unsatisfying because we really enjoy being unsatisfied. Sometimes we do not realize just how unsatisfied we really are. Other times we know that we’re unsatisfied, but don’t feel we have any better options. In even other situations, we cannot imagine how any of this matters because we’re operating in an economy of the world that uses completely different currency than the economy of life. It is as if we have fistfuls of cash we just printed out on our home computer, funny-money, and we cannot imagine why it buys us nothing.

It is not the rich that buy what Jesus offers. In fact what Jesus offers cannot be bought at all; it is received as a gift. We see that in Isaiah 55: Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. In the language of the Beatitudes, it is the poor who paradoxically trade in Christ’s economy, for theirs and theirs only is the kingdom of heaven. These are not the blissful poor, the ignorant poor. No, they are painfully aware of their poverty, such that they mourn it.

My wife and I have a really nice set of living room furniture that we could never have afforded to buy.  If you knew my wage, you would wonder how this furniture happens to be in my home at all. It is furniture that was given to us by a most gracious friend when we bought our home. So when people pay compliment to it when they visit our home, I am quick to mention that it was a fantastic gift. I cannot boast in myself or my provision, but in what the Lord has given us benevolently.

Ultimately the couch is going to disintegrate; but it is a figure of the way God’s gifts work in the divine economy. He gives us the greatest riches in such away that we may not point to it as a result of our own labor or merit or wealth; however, what God gives us is really ours to care for and walk in.  This gives the Christian the impetus for meekness.

Isaiah has asked us why we hunger and thirst for that which does not satisfy. Jesus proclaims that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied. We of ourselves will chase after all sorts of things, all the wrong things. Christ comes to us that our affections may be recalibrated and our appetites whet for what is glorious and truly wealthy.

Righteousness is a character trait of the Lord. God is not righteous because he does certain things. Rather he is simply righteous, in and of himself. We are created as the image of this righteous God and yet we have chosen a path that is most unlike him. We live in a way that is disharmonious with our status as image and this disjunction is the root of our dissatisfaction.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:10-11 that we are blessed when we are persecuted for righteousness sake, when we suffer on his account. In these two verses the grammatical parallelism identifies righteousness as Jesus himself.

And so we come full circle. God sees us buying everything but what will truly satisfy and grow us. He is not content to placate our “bentness,” to multiply our fists full of funny-money or nice furniture. Rather, he enters our economy with his own currency, himself. It is an infinite currency that has only one bill. In God’s economy there is Christ: Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen and exalted, Christ the Lord. He alone is the righteousness of God. He alone is the one human being who has lived as the image of God also in his likeness. As such, fellowship with God has been restored for humanity (Colossians 1:15-20).

When we see what God offers all humanity in Jesus, how foolish are we to not seek the Lord while he may be found. He calls us to lay down the fistfuls of funny-money that we have printed off for ourselves and lay hold of Christ. Why, scripture asks, do you spend your money for that which is not bread.  Jesus will later ask why do you labor for bread that perishes, “for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:33)

Every Sunday this truth is proclaimed, reenacted, and received by faith. The Word of God is spoken, inviting all who thirst to the living waters. Every Sunday we celebrate the Word of God broken in which the bread of life is given to the eater that in mind and body, the whole person may be gratified with Christ, who alone satisfies. For it is Jesus who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor 4:6).

Every now and then things just come together in such a way that one has the sense that God is writing his poetry across one’s life. Today has been a moment like that for me.

My daughter, Ashley, has been patiently waiting for admission to the Lord’s Table for months now. Recently she would address the priests directly while Cynthia and I were receiving the elements, saying (sometimes a bit loudly), “I want the Body of Christ too!”

We went to a class on the Eucharist yesterday where a pair of very gifted people taught her a bit about the Good Shepherd and the Table. Today when we went forward for Communion, Ashley was in my arms. We knelt down as a family at the sanctuary rail and I helped her put her hands together extending towards our dear Father Houk. I watched him put the wafer in her hand and the tears just flooded me as they do now while I write this.

There is something most moving about a God who would commune with us, not by merit in ourselves, not on the basis of our performance, not by our ability to articulate fine points of theology, but on the basis of His love to us. It is Christ who chided and perhaps continues to chide his disciples for impeding children from coming to him. He is a God who wants us to grow up into him and that is precisely what happens in the Eucharist as we receive Christ in worship throughout our lives. Indeed, the mystery of the Eucharist is that all of scholarship and all the mysticism from all the ages cannot circumscribe the mystery of God communing with his people through mere bread and wine.

It seemed then, so perfect, that after Ashley’s first Eucharist, we went to the Dallas Arboretum and celebrated the beauty of these botanical gardens, which embody the participation of humanity with God. For nature is gorgeous and yet the Lord has created such that humans can order nature into gardens. The beauty of a garden is that it is an organic sermon that proclaims God’s participation with humanity even now. To watch Ashley run through the grass, wanting to smell every flower along every path, lifted the wonder of the Arboretum to the level of the magical.

Thank you Lord, for the most wonder-filled Father’s Day ever.

²⁸After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” ²⁹A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. ³⁰When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (Jn 19:28-30 ESV)

I must first acknowledge that this is a meditation upon our Fr. David Houk’s homily last night at St. John’s (so perhaps this is a re-meditation on John 19:28-30). I woke up thinking about one central moment in the crucifixion of Jesus that has gripped me this Holy Triduum.

The God who made the world hung upon a Cross, the wood of which he brought into being and sustained in its existence. He hung there in the merciless Jerusalem heat having his torn and lacerated flesh sun-burned by the very sun that he had made and sustained.

I have access to this account through Scripture interpreted through the tradition handed down through the apostles and prophets. Even that scripture itself is a deep form of divine condescension:

For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height. ¹

John Calvin is speaking against those who had over-emphasized the references referring to God anthropomorphically (e.g., God’s right hand) and made the point that such language about God has nothing to do with body parts but is telling us much about the immeasurable degree of the divine condescension that began in the Garden, continued in revelation, and reached its apex in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, Jesus the Christ.

If we back out of Calvin’s polemic, I believe the point can be made that divine condescension does, as a matter of fact, express quite precisely what kind of being God is.

He is a being that when reviled by those to whom he gave and sustained life, he did not revile in return but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant. And being led to the slaughter by those same revilers, by me and by you, he opened not his mouth, but said, “I thirst.” And when the soldiers gave him this last bitter drink, the last chalice of his Passover meal, he declared “It is finished,” and died, bearing the death of death upon his life that in him, and him only, we might have life that never ends.

Yes, indeed, God has stooped beyond what words are able to convey. He has humbled himself beyond what we can know in the person of Jesus. And in showing us these things, he has in fact expressed quite boldly what kind of being he is. God is mercy. Amen.

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¹ Jean Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Translation of: Institutio Christianae religionis.; Reprint, with new introd. Originally published: Edinburgh : Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846.;Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), I, xiii, 1.

³ Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, ⁴ rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. ⁵ Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. ⁶ He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” ⁷ Jesus answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” (Jn 13:3-7 ESV)

Last night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, a remembrance of the Last Supper, when Christ instituted the New Covenant. I could not help but weep as I watched the celebrant priest divest himself of his magnificient chasuble (Eucharistic outer-garment) and take up a basin and wash the feet of three representative laity.

There is a God. I struggle to know what it means to be godlike, but what is even more overwhelming is that God proclaims himself to be Jesus-like. Jesus of course had already divested himself in taking on humanity (Philippians 2:6-7). He left the splendor of heavenly glory to become one of us.

However, the Incarnation itself could have taken countless variations. The one we have is not that God became a king, like the ancient Egyptians taught in Ra, but that He became the son of a carpenter. He did not surround himself with twelve princes, but with fishermen, a tax collector and a traitor. The Incarnate God did not promote himself but demonstrated always love and mercy and humility. God washed Peter’s feet.

It is quite amazing to me that as the Church of the Risen and Exalted Lord continues on for some 20 centuries, the way he has chosen to visibly communicate himself to his people is in something as common as bread, the most common food on earth. It is one of the least expensive foods to buy no matter where you live. It is common, yet sustaining and nourishing.

Of all the other visible means he could have used to communicate himself (if any) to his Church throughout the centuries he chose wine. Wine is not so common. The poor do not have fine wine at their meals. It is not something you necessarily drink at every meal. Wine underscores the celebration, the banquet to which Christ has invited his Church to participate with him, His banquet. Humble bread and exalted wine circumscribes the wonder of Jesus. The exalted God became a humble man that humble we might participate in the very life of Jesus now exalted at the right hand of the Father Almighty.

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

“That is,” writes Farley, “they are to manifest the Lord’s life on earth, as His Body.” ¹ I remember one of the extremely helpful and paradigmatic books I read in seminary by Benjamin B. Warfield. In this little booklet that he wrote to incoming students to Princeton Seminary, he encouraged us that there is never a time that we would turn from worshiping the Lord to our books or from the study of our books to the worship of the Lord (to paraphrase). ²

Warfield, Farley and St. Paul all resonate symphonically together here. The strange thing about truth is that it transcends all kinds of boundaries, traditions, cultures, and time. Colossians 3:17 underscores union with Christ the paradigmatic element of Christian theology and life. This union is in fact a participation in the divine energies (workings, ενεργη) and is most profoundly proclaimed at the Lord’s Table, where Christians by faith receive the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus—where God gives us himself and we give Him ourselves. And so we say during the consecration of the Bread and Wine:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. ³

This is of course a continuation of the theme we find in John 15, where Christ makes plain his desire that we abide in Him and He in us, as He—the Second Person of the Trinity—abides in His Father. In this way Christians graciously participate in the divine life given to us in Christ Jesus. “[Our] life is His life. [Our] existence is to be one continuous outpouring of thanksgiving to God in His Name. The Christian calling is to be a eucharistic man.” ⁴

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 186.

² Warfield, Benjamin B. The Religious Life of Theological Students.

³ Book of Common Prayer, 336.

⁴ Farley, 187.

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (ESV)

It’s amazing how sometimes just a turn of a phrase will strike you in a way that makes an amalgamation of the familiar burgeon into something fresh and stirring. Writing about Colossians 3:9-11, Farley writes:

The only abiding reality is Christ—He is all and everything and the only thing that matters. And He is in all. He is in everyone in the Church, without regard for their former race, religion, culture, or social position….¹

There is a boldness here that, to some, might verge upon audacity. Farley’s point is that the Apostle Paul seems to intimate that if Christ is the Incarnate Deity, the Savior of the World, the Perfect Imprint of the Father; then, indeed there is a cosmic reordering that is at hand. You see this echoed in Farley’s idea of former. In a very real and transcendent sense there is no longer race (and gender, c.f., Gal 3:28-29). There is no longer religion. There is no longer culture. There is no longer society. There is Christ—all in all.

Have we contemplated what it would be to allow Christ to more fully transform and renew the way I think about race, for example? In Christ, I am formerly a Caucasian. What does that mean? It seems to mean, at least on the surface, that Salvation circumscribes every aspect of the world in which we live, every facet of who I am as an individual and member of humanity. It does not obliterate our distinctions but puts restores them to their purposed places in the mosaic of Creation.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Help us to think cosmically about your work in our lives and in this world. Amen.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 182-3.

Commenting on Colossians 3:1-4, Farley writes of the parallels between the Gnosticism of the Lycus Valley during the time of the Apostle Paul and the theological novelties of today:

The many forms of theosophy, anthroposophy, and other variations of the New Age spirituality still offer a potent and heady mix to those seeking a spiritually more exotic than what they think they know as the traditional Christian Faith. … The Church will always have to contend with those who falsely claim to offer a more “spiritual” approach. And its answer will always be the same — to reveal the ultimately earthbound nature of such “spiritualities” and our transcendence of them through our union with Christ. ¹

There is not an expression of Christ’s Church on earth that finds itself exempt from this statement. What has struck me about Farley’s comment is the way it speaks to the individuals and the corporate body in one stroke. One the one hand, it asks the individual to consider the desire to make the Church and worship of God after her own image. In chasing after the so-called spiritually more exotic experience, in making what religion does for us the measure, do we not remove ourselves from the self-evident course of Christ’s Church through the experiences of history? In other words, it is not novelty that has endured over millennia in the context of Christ’s Church, but the tradition (i.e., the deposit of faith) that has been faithfully handed down from the Apostles and Prophets. Paul’s words then, when applied to us post-modern persons is as a two sided coin. On the one side is the face of encouragement, pierced hands extended, bidding us to progress patiently and faithfully in the faith to which the Scriptures bear witness. However, upon turning the coin over our eyes would fall upon a great and vicious beast that warns us of the fate of all who would presume to worship God after their own image.

Corporately, this passage gives warning to the Church on how to persevere through the ages. During the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that plagued Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century (and perhaps the controversy that plagues the Episcopal Church USA today), the Church was faced with modernists, on the one hand, who sought creative, rationalistic, and sophisticated ways to throw-off the deposit of faith handed down to them in their age, namely to divorce themselves from the yoke of scriptural-authority that this deposit necessitated. Fundamentalists responded ultimately by remotion. That is, when the Fundamentalist saw the spiritual rebellion happening in modernist circles, they became anti-modernists, which also misses the deposit of faith that the Apostle Paul has handed down to us in Colossians 3:1-4. It is not in being an anti-modernist that demonstrates the Church’s essential mystical union (hidden with Christ in God), but in being unswervingly focused upon the Christ, beholding His glory, exalting His Name, and being faithful to pass on the tradition and scriptural-authority that has and will continue to be the way that Christ sustains His Church hidden with Him in God.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 179.

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.