Saturday Advent 2 - Mark 4:30-41

After several parables about how the Kingdom of God grows, Jesus returns to doing miracles. This time He demonstrates that He is God by rebuking the wind and commanding the sea to be still.

And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!”

The only possible answer is God Almighty. While there have been known cases of false healers throughout history (perhaps with the aid of demons), only God is known to be able to cause the wind and the sea to obey Him.

And Jesus, causing the wind and sea to obey Him, is God Almighty.

Faithful Christians have no problem accepting that once upon a time Jesus Christ really did perform the miracle of calming the wind and waves. But, as I’m sure we all understand, God is not ever required to do miracles. Just because He is capable of them and performed many as recorded in the Gospels doesn’t mean He is required to routinely perform them in our lives. Acknowledging this much also doesn’t mean that somehow we lack faith by not believing in miracles enough.

But our problem is with the smaller and less life-threatening storms we all experience, for which no miracle is forthcoming. How do we respond to these?

The same way the disciples responded to a much graver danger. We might forget that the storms that arose, for example, on the Sea of Galilee could arise suddenly and were capable of capsizing a boat the size the disciples were in. These were no mere landlubbers but included several lifelong fisherman. And they were afraid. The boat was already being swamped with water, and there was real danger and threat to life.

But Jesus seemed to be asleep at the wheel, so to speak. The disciples woke Jesus questioned whether or not He really cared for them. And He responded by rebuking the winds and the sea.

But immediately after He had rebuked the wind and waves, He rebukes the disciples. “Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?” Their response is an interesting one. If I were one of them, I’d probably have felt tremendously sheepish about my lack of faith. Except that I’d be too afraid of the man who was God and could calm the wind and waves.

Though our emergencies and crises are rarely as serious as what the disciples felt, we often respond in the same way. We temporarily doubt that God will come to our aid. When He does not fully rescue us from our difficulties the way He did the disciples in Mark 4, then we wonder if He really cares as much as we thought He did. We throw little temper tantrums because we did not get our way and because life’s difficulties have not been completely removed. Or we become discouraged and less motivated to turn towards God.

I am tremendously sheepish about own lack of faith sometimes. In the Greek in Matthew’s version, it’s possible to think of Jesus as calling the disciples “little-faiths.” Not just that they have little faith but that they are Little Faiths. I know I am sometimes. A few years ago, as I was racing to try and put up my church's long overdue website, I began testing what I had worked on for two months, learning how to do it all from scratch. The time came for me to test the site I had put together and which looked fine on my own computer. But when I tested it on my wife’s older computer, my little-faith world crumbled for the rest of the evening. I couldn’t understand how something I had worked so hard and long on, for a good cause, could be taken away from me.

What a pitiful thing to lose heart over, compared to what the disciples faced. I find many such times when my faith falters. Some are larger, and some are smaller, but there are storms just about every day of our lives.
How do you respond to them? Do you become discouraged? Do you wonder where God is, even when you haven’t bothered to ask Him for help? Do you cry out to Him and because He doesn’t appear to be answering you lose your patience with Him? We have almost as many ways of being faithless as there are human personalities.

But remember, in all of the storms that arise in life that the same Lord who calmed the wind and waves is capable of calming yours. He may not choose to do so immediately, and He may not even choose to take the difficulty away. But He has promised to draw near to you if you draw near to Him. Whether your storm is related to a job, finances, children, relationships, loved ones who are self-destructing, physical pain or sickness, heartbreak, loss, disappointments, broken dreams, apparently wasted labor, lack of progress, or any other source, remember: the Lord of the wind and the waves is your Lord.

He hasn’t promised you a miracle today, and He hasn’t even promised to take away every source of pain (even He didn’t receive that promise from the Father, did He?) But He has promised to be with His people whenever they cry out to Him with faith.

And that’s enough for me. Having that promise, I’ll trust in the One who not only has the power to command the wind and waves but also the knowledge and love to have created them and me in the first place.

Prayer: Lord, I cry out to You in faith because I feel as if I am perishing today. You know the difficulties I have in my life and how they threaten to make me sink. I cry out to You this moment in faith, trusting that You will be with me today in all Your love and providence. O, Lord, I want to believe and have faith: help me in my unbelief. Amen.

Point for Meditation:
1. What storms have you been experiencing lately? Meditate on some of these, making sure not to leave the presence of the Lord until you have entrusted these storms to His loving care.
2. Practice remembering times in the past when the Lord delivered you out of difficulty when you cried out to Him. It would be useful to write these down and maybe even begin to keep a list of such deliverances.

Resolution: I resolve to turn to God in faith today in the middle of whatever storms I am facing today.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Friday Advent 2 - Mark 4:21-29

Today, Jesus continues His teaching on how the Kingdom grows, which is to say the process of discipleship. The secret to the Kingdom of God and its mysterious and wonderful growth is the growth of the Church, which is to say the growth of Christians, which is to say discipleship:

“The Kingdom of Heaven = the Church = the people of God = disciples of Jesus Christ”

I think that sometimes we misunderstand Jesus’ words: “With the same measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Often we take this to mean that if you judge other people, you will be judged by God. But in this passage the meaning is related to the parable of the sower and the seed and Jesus’ teaching on our response to God’s Word and the fruits of how well we do this. He prefaces this teaching with “Take heed what you hear.”

Spiritually speaking, in the Kingdom of Heaven, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is why Jesus says, “For whoever has, to him more will be given; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.” Jesus is teaching us a spiritual truth about how well we receive Him and His Word. Those who respond in faith when they hear the Word of God – those who believe and obey – will be rewarded with greater grace and faith in their lives. Those who have heard the Word of God and either do not believe or do not obey will begin to grow farther away from God.

Jesus teaches this in many different forms. “Draw near to me, and I will draw near to me.” The corollary, of course, is “Run far away from me, and I will be far away from you.” If you have proven faithful with a few small things you will be entrusted with more (this is also the meaning of the parable of the talents.

As a preacher, I have seen this spiritual truth in action many times. After I have preached a strong sermon on the cost of discipleship and what God is really calling us to, the responses of people afterwards are very revealing. Many times, those who I know have already put the words I preached into effect and are truly saints before God and men come up to me after the service. They come with a look of great intensity, as if they have just met with God and are trembling before His holy presence. And they tell me, “That sermon really convicted me. God really spoke to my heart. It’s just what I needed to hear.” After the same sermon, as some pass by who I know really needed to hear the sermon, they pass by with a casual greeting or perhaps exit the other way. There is no recognition that God has just spoken to them.

It was the same sermon, the same Word of God, and yet people responded very differently.

What if this same pattern were repeated Sunday after Sunday, day after day, and year after year? You would find that at the end of life those who were rich in faith became fabulously rich by the end of their lives. But those who were poor in faith died paupers in the faith.

“If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Jesus repeats this again from verse 9 because the Word of God is worth listening to – because God is worth listening to.

Remember: how you treat the Word of God is how you are treating God Himself.
For this reason, those who worship God in Spirit and in Truth by hearing and obeying His Word will be blessed by Him. In other words, those who seek God Himself will be blessed by receiving more of God.

But those who do not hear and do not obey God will not receive the blessing of God. That is, those who do not seek God will not find Him and will not receive more of Him.

“Take heed what you hear.” When the Word of God comes to you, do you hear it as the Word of God, or do you hear “Blah, blah, blah . . .”? “For whoever has, to him more will be given, but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.”

I am always amazed at what young people are capable of doing when they pursue one thing for many years with great passion and perseverance. It is embarrassing to try to sit down and play computer games with most young people. Through hours and hours of practice, and year after year of pursuing the goal of excellence at playing computer games, some young people are so adept that they seem like wizards. They are so fast and intuitive that they seem like a stealth fighter in combat with a Sopwith Camel.

When the same young people pursue knowledge, the results are even more spectacular. My son Calvin’s fascination at age 2 with tying together anything within reach with strings or laces or rubber bands became in time a curiosity about cause and effect and tying together the most unusual things in this universe. Given time, such a mind may grow and be transformed into a love of science that results in an advanced degree and discoveries that astound us all and make the world a more glorious place. In others, such a passionate and persistent curiosity has led to Ph.Ds and Nobel Prizes and cures for diseases and technologies that turn Star Trek into reality.

But what if a man, woman, or child pursued God relentlessly? What if every day of his life, Calvin learned to love God and His Word and devoted Himself to following God, forsaking everything else, and obeying all that the Lord commanded? I can’t predict the exact outcome, but I do know that in God’s Kingdom, he would be incredibly rich because God’s blessing would rest upon him.

Einstein reputedly said that the most powerful force in the universe was compound interest. This is especially true in the Kingdom of God, which is like a seed that the sower planted and grows and grows until it produces 100-fold, if the soil is good.

Take heed what you hear: for how well you hear is a measure of how faithful you are and how much God will bless you and the people around you.

Prayer: Father, I ask that today You would give me the grace to seek after You with all my heart. Help me to take heed to what I hear, and bless me with Your presence. Give me such a hunger for You that, being filled by You, I would desire You more each day. Amen.

Points for Meditation:
1. Compared to other pursuits in your life, how passionately and persistently have you pursued God?
2. Meditate on the growth of God’s grace in the life of someone you know, who through passion and persistence pursued God all the days of his or her life.

Resolution: I resolve today to more passionately and persistently devote myself to hearing and obeying the Lord.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Thursday Advent 2 - Mark 4:1-20

How appropriate that the parable of the sower and the seed occurs in the week of the Second Sunday of Advent. The Book of Common Prayer collect (prayer for the week) is: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”

This is a parable about the Word of God in our lives, and the Second Sunday in Advent is a week in which we prepare for the coming of the Lord in Christmas by opening our ears to His Word again. It is plain enough in the parable (especially because Jesus gives us a cheat sheet!) that the seed is the Word of God and that we are the soil. The focus of the parable, then, is on our reception of the Word of God.

This is a parable that has a general meaning for humans, both those who ultimately accept the Word in some manner and those who do not. But it also has a more specific meaning for those of us who already claim to be Christians. The point is still the same: how have you been treating the Word of God?

Let’s get one thing straight: how you treat the Bible is how you are treating God. The Bible is not just any book that is made of paper and ink: it is the Word of God, a living and active thing in which the ink is its blood and the paper its flesh. It is animated by the new wine of the Holy Spirit being poured into the new wineskin of God’s people. If you sever the Word of God from God and from His people, then you really are left with just another book, and one of which there are plenty.

Do you believe that the Bible is the Word of God? Do I really believe that? If I do, then it will have radical implications for how I treat it. If I believe that God has chosen to speak to me through this book called The Book and which is found in every nook and cranny of my house, then I should treat it as such.

If God were to make it clear to me (perhaps through the voice of Charlton Heston or something like that) that I was supposed to show up at a particular time and place where He would speak to me, you can bet I’d be sure to be there. I’d come with my laptop to write it all down (actually, I’d have to go out and buy one – but I’d do it); I’d bring a tape recorder – no, actually I’d bring several of them, taking no chances. I would get plenty of sleep the day before, have a double dose of coffee (grandes), and get there an hour early just in case He was on daylight savings time.

Yet God’s Word pervades the universe so that it is always present. By coming to me in His Word (as in prayer), God is always accessible to me. I think God’s Word is part of a spiritual electromagnetic spectrum that composes the spiritual cosmos. Do you know that there are TV and radio waves bouncing around your walls and beaming into your car or office all the time? Duck - here comes one now! Though it’s possible to be out of range sometimes, in most places you can turn on the radio or TV and receive these waves any time you want. In fact, we choose to access these waves all the time.

But what of God’s spiritual electromagnetic waves? He calls to you throughout the day, only we don’t have our spiritual radio on – or it’s tuned to another station. It electrifies me to think that I could open any portion of the Word of God, and the voice of God comes streaming out of this book I hold in my hands. This morning I turned to Mark 4, but what if I turned to Genesis 1 and heard God tell me about Himself as creator, or to any other passage of the Scriptures?

So God is always speaking to us, and the Word of God is how He does it. Therefore, I say that how we are treating the Word of God is how we are treating Him.

What kind of soil are you? How well have you been hearing and listening, which I believe are like faith in that they require obeying?

This is football season. Have you ever had the experience, when talking to someone watching football, in which you were saying something important but the other person only pretended to hear? This is how we listen to God. It’s not just about football but also about any TV show or movie or any thing of this world that so enraptures us that we can’t hear God and His Word in our lives.

It reminds me of two Far Side comic strips. One is titled “What Dogs Hear.” The owner is speaking earnestly to the dog, and all the dog hears is “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, Ginger. . . .” It could be worse: you could be a cat. What cats hear: “Blah, blah, blah, blah; blah, blah, blah, blah . . . .”

Are you a dog, a cat, or a man or woman of God?

You have many opportunities every day and week to hear the Word of God and to respond with faith. How many of these are you accessing? You should be reading the Word of God daily, meditating over it, and praying over it. You should at times study it and learn it. Your church probably has an adult Sunday school class, and you should probably go. Where did we ever get the idea that Sunday school and the Bible was good for children on Sunday mornings, but not for adults?

How well do you listen to your pastor’s preaching? Assuming He is a godly man who loves and preaches the Word of God, his words are as the Word of God to you. This being Thursday, do you even remember what God said to you last Sunday? If not, then you may need to examine what kind of soil you are. It amazes me how much time and effort pastors put into sermons that are treated as completely disposable. I think the average half-life of a sermon is the time from which the sermon ends to the time the service ends.

Instead, we should be discussing the sermon at the fellowship hour, if you have one. We should be trading insights and the convictions of the Holy Spirit on our way home from church. We should be seeking to apply what we have heard for the next 7 days.

The fact is that the Church of God is built on the Word of God. A man, a family, and a church are only as strong spiritually as is the relationship they have to God through His Word. We are supposed to be so fed by the daily bread of God’s Word that in time we produce fruit 30, 60, or 100 times as great as ourselves. This is another way of saying that disciples are to make disciples. It is by the faithful hearing and doing of God’s Word that God’s Kingdom grows and spreads.

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Prayer: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Resolution and Point for Meditation:
I resolve to find one practical way in which I can be better soil for the Word of God. It may be in my daily Bible meditations, in the way I hear the sermon, in the way I teach my children, or any means by which I can hear and obey God’s Word more faithfully.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Wednesday Advent 2 - Mark 3:20-34

Today’s lesson is a lesson about family.

What is a family? We all know the answer to this question, but at its heart a family is a group of people who are related to one another. The most immediate kind of family is, of course, the biological families we live in. But the notion of family is larger than what we often think it is. For example, my brother and his wife have adopted two bi-racial children. Are these precious children part of their family – and mine? Of course! In ancient times, family was more than just the nuclear family but included a complex extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, servants, and others.

Since the idea of family is all about people who are related, we should all be keenly interested in learning about the family of Jesus. We learn a few things about Joseph, Mary, and Jesus’ brothers throughout the Gospels (and some things about James in Acts and James), and each fact we have about them is to be treasured.

But as important as Joseph and Mary are in the Nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t tell us about this. The first thing we hear about Jesus’ family in Mark’s Gospel is that “His own people” (verse 21) think He’s out of His mind. We’re not sure exactly who “His own people” were, but it’s likely to have included his unbelieving brothers (at that time) and possibly people from the region around Nazareth. We know from verse 31 that his mother and brothers came and sent to Jesus, calling for Him.

And then something surprising happens. When Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are waiting outside for Him, He doesn’t run to greet them or immediately and enthusiastically send for them, and He doesn’t say, “Behold the Queen of Heaven!” Instead, He amazes us (as He always does) by asking, “Who is My mother, or My brother?” Looking around in a circle at those who sat about Him, He said, “Here are My mother and My brother! For whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.”

This is the meaning of family, in the divine sense. Regardless of how many human families, clans, tribes, or nations we may count, there are really only two human families. There are only two basic relationships to God: disciples who believe and obey, and those who reject God and disobey.

Jesus’ teaching about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit makes more sense when placed next to His teaching about His family. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the one unforgivable sin because it is a willful rejection of the ministry of the Holy Spirit who testifies about the Son and the Father.

While Satan’s kingdom may indeed be divided, the Kingdom of Heaven, the family of God which is the Church, is united. In spite of our family differences and separations, we are one, holy family, united in Jesus Christ. The reason Jesus can look around at His disciples and say that they are His brothers and sisters and mother is because He is saying that they are now His family. At this point, Jesus had more in common with some of these anonymous disciples than He did with James, Joses, Simon, and Judas (see Matthew 13:55), who apparently did not yet believe (John 7:5.)

Just as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit leaves one outside of God’s family, a faithful response to the Holy Spirit makes one a member of God’s family. Through the Holy Spirit, all who are true disciples are of the Body and Blood of Christ. Genetically, my flesh and blood is related to Jesus only in that we both proceeded from Noah. But spiritually, I am His kinsman, and I partake of His Body and Blood. He dwells in me, and I in Him (there’s that perichoresis again!)

How blessed to be put in the same category as Mary herself, who first received Jesus into her heart and then was made a member of His family. She was called “highly favored one” and “blessed,” and now so are all who have faith in Him, for we are part of His family, partakers of His Body and Blood.

I am thrice blessed: my family growing up was a loving one and one who were disciples of Jesus Christ; my own family now are disciples of Jesus Christ and are learning to live in love; and I am also part of God’s own family. How blessed someone like me is when my biological family is also my theological family – to have parents, siblings, a spouse, and children who all share the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ!

How blessed as well to think that all of you who are reading this are my brothers and sisters because through Jesus Christ God is the Father of us all and we have been adopted into His heavenly family!

Christ in us, the fact that we are the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, is an inexhaustible mystery. As His disciples, keep gathering around in a circle around Him to listen as He speaks. Like Mary, treasure these things up in your heart and receive them with wonder, awe, and everlasting thanksgiving.

Prayer: My soul magnifies You, Lord, and my spirit rejoices in You as my Savior. For you have regarded my low estate and have called me blessed through my relationship with Your Son. Holy is Your name. Praise be to You forever and ever. Amen.

Resolution and Point for Meditation:
I resolve to take some time today to ponder the mystery of Christ in me and of my being a member of the family of God through Christ.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Tuesday Advent 2 - Mark 3:7-19

“And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him. Then He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons.”

In verses 14-16 of Mark 3, we have a picture of God’s work in our lives. Never forget that it is the work of the Lord. It begins with Him; it ends with Him; and is by and for Him. In the beginning, the Kingdom was limited to the person of Jesus Himself. This means that the manifestation of the Kingdom was also limited, since Jesus, in His divine humanity, could only be in one place at a time, dealing with a limited number of people.

But now God’s firstborn produces fruit that produces seeds that are scattered and propagate the Kingdom. Here (and in 1:16-20 and 2:13-17), Jesus miraculously multiplies the heavenly bread with which He has come to feed the world by raising up disciples who will, as in the feeding of the 5000, feed the world with the Bread of Heaven.

We find Jesus calling “to Him those He Himself wanted.” The call of God is at His pleasure, and it is His holy will that initiates the work in His Kingdom. He calls whom He will, for that is the divine prerogative. But we know that the call of God is mysterious – not only that it comes to us in a variety of ways and at times when we least expect it – but also because the whole means by which we hear it and receive it is beyond the reach of telescope or microscope.

In this case, Jesus calls, and they came to Him. Mark doesn’t specify how many come and how many didn’t. But the essential truth of God’s work in the world is this: God calls, and man responds. This is the divine antiphony, the true celestial music of the spheres, and it is proclaimed throughout all of God’s creation.

The sun calls with his glorious, life-giving rays, and the moon responds by mirroring that glory, and the earth responds by joyfully receiving that energy and transforming it into life. One bird sings, and another one answers. Day turns into night, and night returns the favor by turning into day. A lover looks at the beloved, and the beloved looks back. We inhale the grace of God, and we are to breathe it back out again into the world as a blessing. We eat the kindly fruits of the earth, transforming the earth into our bodies, and are to return that life and energy back into the care of the earth and its inhabitants.

Jesus calls to Him those He Himself wants, and some of us come to Him in response.

Jesus calls many, and some come. Out of those who come, He appoints 12 in particular to be with Him day by day and to receive special authority to do the things He began to do: to teach, preach, heal sicknesses, and cast out demons. This, too, is part of the pattern of the ministry of the Lord: that according to His pleasure He appoints some to special offices and special ministries.

This is entirely by the grace and will of God Himself. But the twelve likely became The Twelve because of how they responded to God’s call in their lives. In Mark 1:18, Simon and Andrew immediately left their fishing nets and followed Jesus. In 1:20, James and John left their father and their nets and followed Jesus. In 2:14, Jesus said simply to Matthew, “Follow me,” and Matthew arose, left his lucrative tax booth, and followed Jesus. Does anybody else notice a pattern here?

Those who respond to God’s call will hear a further call, and those who have proven faithful with small things will be entrusted with more. It never ceases to amaze me how in God’s Kingdom the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The way we approach God in His Word is a perfect example. Those who crave God’s Word will get more of it, and those who ignore God’s Word will get less of it. I have seen so many times that those who have faithfully sought God in His Word, day by day, year by year, continue to grow in grace and wisdom. But some who have equal access to the Word of God and the grace of God ignore or spurn it, and they yield little if any fruit.

There are their Bibles sitting on their shelves, unread. Meanwhile, the most
meaningless e-mail forwards get devoured religiously, almost as if they were the Word of God. No e-mail goes unread, for fear that something wonderful will be missed. Yet there lie the Old and New Testament lessons for the day, with untold treasures and infallible nutrition, unread and unconsumed. In the Kingdom of Heaven, the hungry are fed and satisfied, but the sated slowly starve to death.

The difference between those who are blessed by God and those who are not is in their response, for these are the terms of His holy covenant. When God calls, some respond, and some don’t. Some hear His call from the mountain of God and come closer, some are so faithful that they are raised up as mighty leaders, and some walk away, thinking to themselves, like some spiritual traffic cop, “Move along, now, there’s nothing here to see.”

Every day, all throughout the day, God stands on His holy mountain, calling men to Himself, calling you.

Today, you are Philip and Andrew with their nets and Matthew at his tax booth. Today, God is calling you.

How will you respond?

Prayer: Almighty God, whose heavens declare Your glory and whose firmament shows Your handiwork, and whose voice has gone out through all the heavens and earth, open my ears today that I might hear Your voice again. Open my heart that I may receive You again. Give strength to my body and mind that I might respond with joyful immediacy to Your call on my life, and give me a voracious appetite for Your presence in my life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Points for Meditation:
1. Imagine yourself in the situation of the disciples Jesus called: one of the fishermen or Matthew. Imagine the call of Jesus on your life and how you responded, including what you gave up to follow the Lord.
2. Find a quiet place and time, and listen to what the Lord has been telling you. To what has He been calling you? How well have you been listening and obeying?
3. Spend some extra time asking God to fill you with a hunger for Him.
4. Consider the ways in which you experience call and response in nature. Imagine that each of these is a picture of God calling to you and waiting for you to respond.



Resolution: I resolve today to listen for, hear, and respond to the call of God in my life. I further resolve to respond in one practical way today.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Monday of Advent 2 - Mark 2:23-3:6

Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of God incarnated. Though we already know this, it’s good to have an illustration of it from the life and words of Jesus Himself. And that is exactly what Jesus gives us today – a teaching on the meaning of wisdom.

Biblically speaking, wisdom is knowing God and doing His will. But there is a secondary kind of wisdom that Jesus deals with here (the two are related) – the human wisdom (though made possible by the grace of God) that knows how to apply God’s Word in a given situation.

What should we do when it appears that two of God’s commandments are in conflict and we can’t obey them both? We could try to reconcile them, and sometimes this is possible. We could try to compromise, but then we might not be faithful to either. We could choose one over the other and feel guilty about not obeying the other one.

I believe that God never puts us in a situation where it becomes necessary to sin. If the reality is that we truly can’t obey two conflicting commandments, then I think one of them is becomes subordinated to the other. In choosing the greater and subordinating the lesser, there can be no sin.

The famous example of this is the importance of Christians speaking the truth and the commandment to protect life. What if Pharaoh tyrannically commands you to kill the Israelite boys? What if the Canaanites ask you if you’ve seen two Israelite spies and you know that if you tell them the Israelites will be killed? And what if the Nazis come to your door and ask if you’re hiding any Jews? In all of these cases, godly women lied and did not tell the truth. But they did so to protect the image of God in man. We have no obligation to tell the truth to those who seek to murder God’s children, at the time they seek to murder.

This requires a kind of wisdom, the kind of wisdom that Jesus always manifested.

God clearly said that in the Sabbath God’s people were not to work. But He also said that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. What if these two commandments are in conflict? Jesus’ answer is that it is always lawful to do good. (Of course, healing on the Sabbath had never been formally defined as work and it’s likely that the Pharisees were upholding only their own law and not God’s – but the point still stands.)

At stake is not only the wisdom we are required to have but also our view of God and His commandments. Sometimes we fall into the trap of believing that God’s commandments are arbitrary, that is, that they are right simply because God has declared them to be so, regardless of any intrinsic goodness to them. But God’s goodness and His power are more holistically related than this. God’s commandments are right, good, and good for us. How can they be anything else, since they are reflections of His loving, good, and holy character?

The point is that the Sabbath principle was not commanded by God just to create one more hurdle for His children to jump over but because it is a reflection of God and His goodness. The Sabbath is good for us, and even God took a Sabbath rest. The point of the Sabbath is to trust in God. For this reason, no manna fell on the Sabbath, and the people were required to trust in God without the manna and by preparing the previous day, remembering both His commandment to not gather on the Sabbath and His promise to give His daily bread to His people.

The point of the Sabbath is to trust in God and to learn to do His will and not ours. The Sabbath was made for man, that He might learn to trust in God, worship Him, and find his rest in Him. Man was not made for the Sabbath. It’s not as if there is a missing verse from Genesis 1 (it’s Genesis 1:23 ½ , if you want to look it up) which reads, “And on the fifth and a half day, God created a set of abstract principles by which He would make man live. And He established a logical system of commandments so that man might unthinkingly follow them. And He saw that they were good, though inscrutable.”

God made man in His image, not His commandments. It’s for us, and not for abstract principles, that He sent His only Son to die for the sins of the world. For this reason, we are to obey God’s commandments, not with a slavish unthinking attitude but with a heart of love. Every single commandment has love as its purpose and fulfillment. When we consider God’s commandments, always think of them in terms of how they help you love God and neighbor.

It is a living, loving God that you serve by obeying His commandments, and it is those made in the image of God that you also serve by keeping His commandments.

Obeying God, then, is a very personal decision for each of us, and we must engage God’s commandments with our whole being, including our minds. And this requires wisdom, for which we must always remember to ask God.

Prayer: Father, thank You for sending Your Wisdom down from heaven in the person of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Enlighten my heart and mind today that I may know Your good and loving will and have Your grace to obey. Amen.



Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve to consider my attitude towards God’s commandments. Have I been trying to obey them out of mere duty, or have I been seeking God and His love through them?

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Saturday of 1st Sunday in Advent - Mark 2:13-22

Saturday of First Sunday in Advent
Mark 2:13-22

Most who have read and studied the Bible at all know that the parable of the new wine into old wineskins is Jesus’ teaching on the coming of the New Covenant and the necessity of the Old Covenant being abolished. Because of the radically new nature of the New Covenant (even though there is remarkable continuity as well), the New Covenant manifests itself in new ways that the Old Covenant was not capable of containing. Most importantly, the coming of God in the flesh and all of the cosmic implications of the ministry of Christ meant that the fulfillment of the Old Covenant had come.

This much we know. But if you’re like me, sometimes when reading a portion of the Scripture that has a particular historical fulfillment, I feel as if the passage seems somewhat remote from me. It would be possible and appropriate to meditate on this passage in light of the surpassing excellence of the New Covenant. We could, for example, go down a list of reasons to rejoice because the true High Priest, Temple, Sacrifice, etc. are here. And such a meditation would be fruitful for the soul.

But I want to meditate today on the new wine in the old wineskins in my life and yours. Of course such an application would not be possible without first understanding the coming of the New Covenant, but often I find that I need a more immediate application of God’s grace. After all, the Kingdom of God is at hand in my life, as I sit here writing this in December of 2006.

The sad fact is that I often feel like (and actually am) an old wineskin. I don’t just mean that the body is losing its war of attrition against time: I mean that many days I wake up and I am the same old person. With the new day I seem to clothe myself in heaviness and to pick up the heavy load I left by the side of my bed the night before. I dutifully saddle my back with it and go out into the world, and another day passes much as the days before.

It’s a comfortable arrangement, this old wine in old wineskins. I’ve hardly even noticed that the wine is kind of sour and gritty. I drink it to drink it, because it’s there, and because I’m supposed to. It’s really become a part of me, and at least with the old wine in old wineskins I know what I’m getting today.

But praise God that He offers me a source of new wine! I do get tired of the old wine, now that I think about it and see an alternative. By comparison with this explosive new wine, the old is flat and vinegary and dirty. When I seek God again, He pours for me His new wine. Maybe it’s that I’m stirred by reading His Word or hearing it in a sermon. Maybe it’s the wise counsel of a brother or sister in Christ, or the brightness of the sun on a winter day, or the child resting in my arms, or the whispering of the Holy Spirit through my conscience. There are many ways God offers His new wine, though all come through Christ.

We’ve all experienced the bite of the first taste of the new wine coming. But too often, we are in a hurry to get on with our “lives,” and all we do is sip the new wine. We leave, satisfied for an exciting new experience that cheers up our day temporarily and adjusts our attitude so we can continue in our old ways again for the rest of the day.

But what God really wants and what we really need is not to sip and run but to sit down and eat and drink with the Lord. We need to relish His good gifts to us and savor them and to linger in His company, intoxicated again with His glory and power and love.

What I want is for the new wine to flow freely and not to have a sip once a month or so. Therefore, what I need to do is to sit down and spend some time with God, finishing the first cup He gives me and asking for more, if He so pleases.

But I do not desire this new wine the way I should. Somehow I’m “too busy” or have “more important” things to do. And I wonder why my old life is still full of vinegar and sets my teeth on edge! The problem is that I am trying to put God’s new wine into my old wineskin. I’m trying, in the flesh, to continue in the flesh while enacting a “drive-by-sipping” of God’s new wine.

What I need is for God to make a new skin for me, as He did with Adam and Eve in the Garden. I need Him to cover me with the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ that the new wine of the Holy Spirit may fill me again. To do this, I must be willing to trade in my old wineskin, that is, the flesh and its ways. To put on the new wineskin that is Jesus Christ and sanctification, I must also take off the old man through the process of mortification.

I need to fervently ask Him to give me this new wine and to make me willing to get rid of my old wineskins. I’d better be ready, because for God to transform me and clothe me with the new wineskin of His Son means that I will have to change. I will have to give up my old ways, my old skin that cannot contain the Holy Spirit. I will need to ask God to make me a fit vessel for His grace and then to freely partake of this grace when it’s offered to me.

If I attempt to accept God’s new wine of the Holy Spirit in me, I’d better accept the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ first. Otherwise, what will happen is that the grace that God so freely pours into my life will expand and split my old wineskin, and the new wine will be wasted.

The new wine of the Holy Spirit has come to fill the new wineskin of the Body of Christ, the Church. And we are called to be made new.

Now that I think about it, I am kind of tired of this old wineskin, and the wine has been upsetting my stomach and making me pout a lot. I think I’ll go immediately and seek the new wine and the new wineskin.

Resolution: I resolve today to set aside some time to seek God with a renewed spirit.

Prayer: Father, thank You for sending us the new wine of Your Holy Spirit and for making us Your new wineskin through our Lord Jesus Christ. Fill me with Your Spirit today, and help me to take off the Old Man that the New Man Jesus Christ may live in me. I know that You have been offering Your grace to me many times each day and I have ignored or refused it. Please help me to see You and accept You however You choose to come to me today. Amen.



Points for Resolution:
1. Meditate on a time in your life when God’s new wine in your life was sweet – and give thanks.
2. If you are still storing old wine in old wineskins, consider one way in which God has brought You His new wine in the past. Then seek Him in that way today.
3. Make a petition for God’s new wine in your life part of your daily prayer life.


© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Friday of First Sunday in Advent - Mark 2:1-12

It’s easy to think of the miracles of Jesus as being ordinary occurrences. After all, we’re only halfway through Mark 2, and already we’ve heard about 4 specific miracles, as well as references to multiple miracles. The New Testament is so saturated with miracles, especially the Gospels where Jesus lives, that at times I wonder if I live in the same world where Jesus lived.

I wonder, “Where are all the miracles in my life?” But such an attitude produces a kind of envy in me, and envy drives out contentment and thanksgiving. What I forget is that most people in Jesus’ day, even with Him seemingly performing miracles in every nook and cranny of Israel, never saw one of his miracles and if they did, they probably only saw one.

What I also conveniently forget is the quiet miracle of Christ in me that I wake to every morning. Jesus doesn’t need to perform an additional miracle for me because He’s already doing one, by the mere fact of His presence in me through the gift of His Holy Spirit.

The truth is that when I gaze more intently at this miracle of Jesus healing the paralytic, I am right there, smack dab in the middle of God’s wondrous work. I like to think of myself as one of the guys who carried the paralytic to Jesus. As a father and pastor, this is in fact exactly what I do. But it is also true for me simply as a Christian.

Maybe it’s less that I see myself in this miracle than that I see this miracle in me, for like the miracle of the leper, this is the story of my life and the story of your life. As in verse two, Jesus preaches the Word to us, and, as in this miracle, there is often an obstruction to my hearing His Word the way I should. In this case, there were so many people around Jesus that the friends of the paralytic couldn’t bring him close enough to Jesus to be healed.

In our cases, our chief obstacles are the busy-ness of our schedules and the demands we place on our lives that crowd out Jesus and His miracle in our lives. We populate our lives with a day crowded by Things I Must Do Today. The funny thing is that “Going to Experience the Miracle of God’s Presence” doesn’t ever seem to get scheduled in.

Jesus is present in the lives of the paralytic and his friends, as He is in ours, but there is an obstacle. He is ready to breathe out on us His life-giving Word and to touch us with His grace. But something or some things are in our way. What are we to do?

We’re supposed to do what the friends of the paralytic did, and that is to determine what the obstacle is and find a way around it. The grace of Jesus is near us, through His Word and His presence, but often we are supposed to go and find Jesus and to so order our lives that we overcome whatever it is that is in our way.

In this case, the friends of the paralytic uncovered the roof so that the paralytic could go through it. I think of this as like prayer. Sometimes the heavens seem shut up before us so that God is hidden and we can’t seem to get any closer. But in prayer, we uncover the wall of partition that separates us from God, and once again we are able to see God. Like the friends of the paralytic, when we pray, we often “break through” and find God on the other side. The good news is that even a paralytic like me is able to pray.

At what point in the story of the paralytic and his friends does Jesus heal the paralytic? It’s after they had acted to remove the obstacle that stood in the way of their coming to Jesus. At this point, Jesus says to them, when He saw their faith, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.”

Jesus could obviously see the need of the paralytic, but what He waited for was to see the faith of those who brought him to Jesus. Notice how Jesus saw their faith. Their faith was not some invisible force that only the X-ray vision of Jesus could see. Instead, their faith was their faithfulness in taking the necessary action to place themselves before Jesus and His power and grace.

How often do we lament the lack of miracles in our lives and the seeming remoteness of Jesus? As often as we refuse to pray and act faithfully to draw near to Him. By the grace of God, sometimes He mercifully descends to us, even when we are not trying very hard to see Him.

But I find that more often He waits to see the faith of His children, a faith that His grace has already made possible but that we often refuse to put to use. Instead of lamenting the absence of God and His miracles in your life, why not seek Him today? Why not investigate the obstacles in your life that keep you from Him and determine to remove them? Uncover the roofs in your life that put a limit on the grace of God, and break through to the presence of God that is the daily miracle in your life.

Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve today to investigate the obstacles in my life that keep me from seeing Jesus. Some possibilities are: an attachment to the things of this world; poor choices in my use of time; valuing leisure time pursuits over time with God; discouragement from the apparent remoteness of God; a feeling of weakness or lack of faith; an unwillingness to come before God because He will probably convict you of your sins; and many others.
Whatever the obstacle, prayerfully consider what action you are supposed to take so that seeing Jesus becomes a daily pursuit of yours.

Prayer: Praise be to You, Father, that You have uncovered the roof that separated the earth from Your heaven and that You have torn down the dividing wall between God and man. Praise be to You, Jesus, because You stand ready to forgive those who come to you freely confessing their sins and seeking forgiveness. Praise be to You, Holy Spirit, for the continuing miracle of Pentecost in our lives. Amen.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Thursday of First Sunday in Advent - Mark 1:40-45

Imagine that you are a leper. Imagine that you have a disease which began several years ago with a chronic fatigue and pains in the joints. This part of the disease was something like fibromyalgia - but it gets worse. Parts of your skin become discolored, and little nodules form on this discolored skin. First they are pink and then brown, and they begin to populate especially your cheeks, your nose, your lips, and your forehead – essentially your face. These nodules grow larger over time, and they develop into sores from which comes a stinking discharge. Others tell you that your eyebrows have begun to fall out, and your face takes on the look of a lion or satyr. The sores begin to spread, your breath begins to wheeze, and your mind begins to decay. You may have been lucky enough to escape some of these symptoms but only at the expense of gradually losing sensation in the nerves of your limbs and having your hands and feet covered with sores and lose all feeling. In this case you survive 20-30 years instead of only 9.

Along with your biological suffering comes your social suffering. You have become an outcast, an untouchable, and live in a segregated world in which there are separate facilities. You live outside the city, and your only peers are others as sick or sicker than you are. People look at you as if you are demon-possessed, and you are required to cry out, not for mercy, but that you are “Unclean! Unclean!”

But one day you hear that a man named Jesus is coming near. You’ve heard that he has healed many others – even those worse off than you and who are possessed by a demon. At this point, you have nothing to lose. It seems so unlikely. It’s not supposed to be done.

But you approach this Jesus, wondering if He, like so many others, will simply redirect his steps and eyes to avoid you. You are not sure of yourself, you have some doubts, and yet you really believe this man may be more than a man.

You approach him and cry out, with a voice you had intended to be heroic and yet pitiful, but it comes out something more like laryngitis. He may not have heard you, and so you come closer to kneel and repeat: “If you are willing – you can make me clean.”

Jesus stops. This is a good sign, and yet you wonder why. His face changes. It is a face you have not seen in a long time – a face of compassion, of one whose body has been moved by your condition.

And then he does the unthinkable, even to you: he reaches out to touch your hand, knowing that he will now become like you, unclean. This great man, who a small crowd has been following, actually touches you. It feels like the hand of God, for only God or a madman would dare to touch someone like you.

For the first time in so long you can’t remember someone who is not a leper speaks kindly to you. But it’s not the pitying kind of kindness – it’s a powerful kindness that is both love and authority.

He says, simply, “I am willing. Be cleansed!”

You have the strangest feeling of synesthesia: you experience so many things simultaneously that you think you must have died and gone to heaven. At the same time that you hear the voice, the fog is lifted from your mind and your eyes become clear again. Colors and shapes suddenly have a new meaning. Your body has stopped aching, and you stand up straight. And most of all, you rediscover your soul.

“Clean! I’m clean!” you say.

Jesus strictly warns you not to tell anyone but to go immediately to see the priest and offer the sacrifice for being cleansed.

You obey immediately, whispering with a newfound strength, “Clean! I’m clean!”

Though there’s some debate about which disease this is in the New Testament, it may well have been Hanson’s disease, which we usually associate with leprosy. Regardless, the drama of this terrible disease is the drama of your life, and what Jesus did for this leper in Mark 1 He has also done for you.

It intrigues me that the same Greek word means both to save and to heal, and the miraculous healings in the Bible are actually the miraculous salvation of God in our lives.

You are that leper. You are the one who is afflicted with a terrible and progressive disease. You are the one who will one day die and who, because of your sin, will be progressively separated not only from human contact but also from the grace of God. Lepers were commonly known as “the living dead,” and that is what we all once were. We walk around with the sentence of death upon us, awaiting an even worse fate.

And then one day, we fall on our knees before Him, saying, “If You are willing, You can make me clean.” And Jesus, moved with compassion, stretches out His hand to you, touches you, and says, “I AM willing. Be clean!”

And you are made clean.

You were made clean because the King of kings whose kingdom is now here because He chose to become a leper like you. He risked touching you and took upon Himself your disease of sin and death.

The story of this leper is your story. We can all imagine with what joy, praise, and thanksgiving this leper went to make his sacrifice. But I’m amazed at how many Christians walk through life as if they are still the living dead – spiritual zombies. If only we knew, if only we remembered what Jesus, out of compassion, has done for us, we would remember the uncleanness of sin that was once ours. We would remember the complete separation from the society of God that was our birthright.

And we would remember to make our lives a joyful whole burnt offering of praise and thanksgiving.

Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, thank You for coming to me, a leper, in Your compassion. Thank You for touching one so unclean and for making me clean through Your blood which washes away my sins. All praise be to You Father, through Your Son who has come once again to save His people. Amen.


Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve today to meditate on how Jesus has healed me from my sins and made me clean and fit to live in His presence again. I resolve today to remember this throughout the day and to offer up the appropriate sacrifice of a life of praise and thanksgiving.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Wednesday of Advent 1 - Mark 1:29-39

Why did Jesus Christ come into the world? Sometimes we think it was only to die on the Cross, and of course the Crucifixion and Resurrection are central to understanding the ministry of our Lord.

But if all He did was come to die on the Cross, then why did He spend three years ministering publicly before then? It’s important in the work of Jesus our Lord that we don’t separate one part of His ministry from the others. Jesus came to die on the Cross to save sinners, but how could He die on the Cross unless He were first born and took on human nature to redeem it? And it’s not as if He only took on human nature only so He could die – He came to redeem our fallen nature, and this relates to His whole ministry.

The birth of Jesus, His public ministry, His death, His Resurrection, His Ascension, His sending of the Holy Spirit, and His session and ruling at the right hand of the Father are all part of the same ministry of reconciliation and redemption. Returning to our idea of perichoresis, we might see all of the parts of the ministry of Jesus Christ as interpenetrating all of the others.

Therefore, what Jesus did for three years, even before His path to the Cross is important for us and instructs us. And what do we find Him doing? He is baptized, or anointed as God’s Messiah. He is tempted and defeats the Devil. But especially He comes to teach about Himself. This teaching takes two forms that also must never be separated: His words and His deeds.

Verse 28 of Mark 1 is a fascinating verse. After Jesus has just cast out a demon, the people don’t just say, “Wow! What is this new power you have?” Instead, they say, “What new doctrine is this?” In their minds the miracles Jesus performed were clearly related to what He taught regarding Himself and His Kingdom. When Jesus taught in verse 21 in Capernaum in the synagogue, the people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught as one having authority. This authority and teaching was then confirmed by the miracles of Jesus, especially in casting out demons (Jesus has authority over Satan and His forces) and in healing (Jesus has authority over creation and human bodies.)

Therefore, in today’s lesson, we find Jesus healing again and teaching.

When Jesus healed, therefore, He healed because He came to redeem the world, including our sick bodies. But He didn’t heal everyone. In fact, He couldn’t have healed everyone even if He had wanted to because He was limited to being in one place at a time.

In our lives, Jesus is not obligated to heal our bodies, even though we know that ultimately because of His life on our behalf we shall all be completely healed in heaven. But He heals us sometimes that our faith might be increased. His work in our lives is primarily to proclaim Himself to us. As in His day, this comes through the words and deeds He performs in our midst.

In fact, if we look for it, we will see that Jesus is constantly at work in our lives. Sometimes, when we have had minor illnesses (even as I write this, St. Chrys is being wiped out by a stomach virus), Jesus heals us, and we don’t even notice because it naturally would have gone away. But isn’t it His grace the same?

Often, when we withdraw to a solitary place to pray and offer up our problems to Him, He heals us. And often we don’t return thanks because we haven’t seen it as His work.

How many times does His Word come to you each day? If you are reading your Bible every day, He comes at least once every day. But doesn’t He also come to be with you and redeem you throughout the day, as the Scripture you have ingested and digested becomes a part of you and feeds you throughout the day?

I’m convinced that for those who have been faithful Christians for a long time and have faithfully maintained the godly habits of Bible reading and prayer, that Jesus proclaims Himself to you in silent ways that are subconscious because He has become so much of a part of your life. Through the testimony of the Holy Spirit, as He permeates your being, your natural habits are trained to become godly habits. Each of these is, in reality, Jesus speaking and ministering to you through His Spirit.

Sometimes I lament the lack of miracles in my own life (the advent of Jacqueline, my wife, is the one exception). But then I remember that Jesus is with me through His Spirit in a more powerful way. Instead of having one dramatic moment with Jesus, He offers me a continual feast with Him. When I accept the invitation, we eat together throughout the day in a quiet way with very little drama but a high degree of satiety.

What’s even more amazing is that because He has sent His Holy Spirit to us, He can work in all of our lives at once and is no longer limited to just Capernaum or Jerusalem at a given moment.
The same Jesus who came with such authority to Capernaum and Peter’s mother-in-law and the synagogues of Galilee is here with us today. Let’s respond with amazement, praise, and obedience.

Prayer: Praise be to You, Lord Jesus Christ, because You have come with authority into my life. Thank You for ministering to me every day, through Your Word and through Your actions on my behalf. Give me eyes to see You again, and heal me, that I may arise and serve others in Your name. Amen.



Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve to meditate today on the ways Jesus Christ reveals Himself to me each day. I further resolve to seek His presence each day and to acknowledge the ways He has come to me. If possible, I will re-discover one way He has been coming to me that I have been ignoring.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Tuesday of 1st Sunday in Advent - Mark 1:14-28

It’s here! The time is fulfilled! The Kingdom of God is at hand!

He’s here! The Messiah has come! The King of kings is at hand!

This is the message of Advent and Christmas, the message of the New Covenant, and the message of our lives.

Sometimes we seem to believe only in the eschatological coming of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom. We know that Jesus will come again, and we know that He came and lived on earth for about 33 years. But then we seem to think that He isn’t around anymore. While it’s true that He sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, He sent His Holy Spirit to be His presence among and in us. Oh, and by the way, what is He doing at the Right Hand? Ruling over His kingdom!

Jesus Christ came as a man that He may dwell among men – and not just for 3 short years, never to be among us again. Immanuel: God is with us. This is not only an Old Testament prophecy that was fulfilled but a present reality for every true Christian.

Dallas Willard, in his Divine Conspiracy, sees the Kingdom of God as meaning essentially the rule of God in our lives. God’s ruling power is now available to mankind, through Jesus Christ who became man. Our kingdom, Willard says, is the range of our effective will. It is the realm of choice that we have and is related to our being made in the likeness of God. It is our ability to go and take dominion over the earth.

But this Kingdom of God was invisible for so long and burst forth only at key moments, it seemed, in the Old Covenant. The rule we were supposed to have in union with God was taken from us so that we became ungovernable and used our God-given powers for our own selfish purposes.

But when Jesus Christ became man, was baptized, and began His public ministry, all this changed. The King of kings descended and become man, and now man was able, through Jesus, to once again rule over creation with God.

That the Kingdom of God had come because the King had come is clear from Mark 1, for what do we find there? We find that Satan is defeated in the first fight between Jesus and Satan (he also loses the rematch at Calvary), that Jesus gathers disciples who will follow Him, that these disciples will make other disciples, that demons are cast out, people healed, and the Kingdom of God preached. All in Chapter 1. I told you Mark was like a literary John the Baptist!

The Kingdom of God is here!

But if the King is here and God now dwells with man, then we should find man ruling with God again. And we do. We find it in Jesus’ calling of His disciples. Now that the King has come and has brought His Kingdom with Him, the first thing He does is share it with man. So he chooses four fishermen to be His disciples. Those who used to feed off earthly food now seek the heavenly food which is Jesus Himself. Because they have accepted the rule of Jesus in their lives, they immediately leave their fishing nets and fathers, follow Jesus and begin the life of a disciple.

More than this, they are elected to spread the Kingdom of God by making disciples themselves. Those who before only caught fish were now commissioned to catch men, to bring them under the rule of the King of kings.

The Kingdom of God was therefore manifested especially in the lives of people who submitted to the rule of the King and to those who have given up their own petty and selfish kingdom and have bowed the knee to the King of kings. When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” we are praying that God’s kingdom will come because His will is being done. That is the measure of where God’s kingdom is at: it’s wherever His rule is accepted.

The spread of the Kingdom begins with us, but we must all be faithful disciples who then spread His Kingdom by making disciples of others, that is, by bringing their lives progressively under His rule. We are all called to be fishers of men.

You have heard the call of John the Baptist: now hear the call of Jesus Christ. The kingdom of God is at hand! It is here, among you, within you, by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, live as if you are in the Kingdom of Heaven – because you are! Repent from your sins, that God alone may rule in your heart again. Believe in the gospel, a belief you will demonstrate to the world both by what you say and by what you do.

Be a disciple! But being a true disciple requires that at some point you will also be manifesting God’s kingdom by making more disciples.

The Kingdom of God is at hand! God has come to rule among His people again. This Advent, make it your goal to accept the rule of the King of kings by being His faithful disciple. Since He lives in you, go out and make other disciples.

But don’t worry, the One who is asking you to be a faithful disciple is also the One who reigns in you and will shower you with every gift necessary to do His loving will.

Prayer: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us or trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Points for Meditation:
1. Do you believe that the Kingdom of God is here? Spend some time today cultivating an awareness that the Kingdom of God is within you and around you because the King is here.
2. As you prepare for the day, remind yourself that you are living in the Kingdom of God. Imagine the decisions and actions you will take today and how they can be brought under the rule of God.
3. Meditate on how much of your life has been brought under God’s rule. Examine one area which you have not surrendered to God, and carefully consider what steps you might take to surrender it to Him.

Resolution: I resolve today to meditate on the meaning of the Kingdom of God already being here because the King is here.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Monday of First Sunday in Advent - Mark 1:1-13

Monday of First Sunday in Advent
Mark 1:1-13

Happy New Year!

No, it’s not January 1, the civil calendar’s New Year’s Day. It’s not the middle of August and the New Year’s Day of the school calendar, and it’s not October 1, the New Year’s Day of the U.S. government fiscal calendar.

Yesterday was the First Sunday in Advent and marked the beginning of the Christian calendar or year.

So Happy New Year!

In Advent, we prepare for the Advent or Coming of Jesus Christ in Christmas.

Advent is your own personal John the Baptist, for with John it proclaims “Prepare the way of the Lord! Jesus Christ is coming soon (at Christmas), and so you’d better be ready!”

Like John the Baptist, Advent catches us sleeping and shouts to us “Sleeper Awake!” Before the days of John, it had been 400 years since a prophet had been in the land. Dreams of the Messiah and deliverance had grown dim, and life seemed to go on pretty much as normal. And then John burst onto the scene, clothed in camel’s hair, wearing a leather belt (the clothes Elijah wore, by the way), and eating locusts and wild honey. Out of the blue, he reminded Israel of what they were to hope for and remember all along: that Jesus Christ was coming.

Like John’s day, we have experienced the long season of Trinity, in which one week seems like the next. We get comfortable and complacent, and then Advent comes, and everything changes as we are called to attention again.

Advent is therefore a liturgical alarm clock that goes off in our lives, saying, “Wake up, stupid! Jesus Christ is coming!” John himself was a walking, talking alarm clock. The way he ate, the way he dressed, and the way he spoke certainly were designed to awaken people again to the Advent of Jesus Christ in people’s lives.

Mark’s Gospel, like Advent and John the Baptist, is also a very loud and clanging alarm clock. In the first 13 verses of his Gospel, we hear prophecy from the Old Testament, meet John the Baptist, see the people coming confessing and being baptized, hear John’s pointer to Jesus Christ, witness Jesus get baptized, and experience Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Whew! What a way to start the Church year!!

The church year, which begins with Advent, is one of God’s ways of sanctifying out time. We humans are creatures bound by time, and we will have calendars, we will observe hours and days and times and seasons. We will set alarm clocks and timers so that we don’t miss something important. Many of us will even observe the holy time that is set aside for our favorite TV show or sporting event and even perform the supererogatory work of learning how to program our VCR or Tivo.

But the fact is that we often don’t sanctify the time that is one of God’s choicest gifts. Like the characters in Kerouac’s On the Road, we claim to know time, when in reality we are more likely to waste time or kill time than we are to redeem time or know time.

Once we’ve been awoken again, how shall we use the time of Advent that God has given us? The answer is that Advent is a season of preparation. We’ve all heard the saying, “Prepare to meet your maker!” It’s usually heard in the context of someone about to be killed, but it has a special meaning with regard to Advent, because preparing to meet our Maker and Savior is the whole point of Advent and why we must be awoken. We prepare to meet our God, our Maker, because He has come to meet us in His first Advent or Coming. “Immanuel,” “God with us,” is the reason we celebrate Christmas. God has broken into the time and history of our lives and become one of us. Because of the love and glory and cosmic implications of God’s dramatic action, we’d better prepare our hearts to receive Him once again.

But Advent also celebrates the Second Advent or Second Coming of Jesus Christ. While Christmas is historically past (though in reality it persists every day of our lives), the Second Coming, at which Jesus Christ will judge both the quick and the dead, is yet to come. One day, at the Second Coming, we will meet our Maker with finality and be summoned to give an account of our lives. At that time, or at the time we die, whichever comes first, our time will have run out. So we’d better have woken up and prepared beforehand.

It always amazes me how much time, money, and effort even Christians in America spend preparing for the Advent of Christmas – not for the Advent of Christ that’s celebrated at Christmas – but for the Advent of Christmas as a holiday (and not necessarily a holy day.) We carefully save our money and budget it so that we can give each other gifts. We prepare months or even a year in advance to make sure we will be able to go where we want to go to celebrate Christmas the next year. We make a big deal about it with our children and know how to fill their little lives with joyful anticipation.

But do we spend as much time and energy preparing for the coming, not of Santa Claus, but of the Lord Jesus Christ? In Advent, we are given four entire weeks to prepare. This year, why not use Advent as a time of holy preparation?

Advent is here, which means the King is coming.

Are you ready?

Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve to find one practical way today to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ during the season of Advent. I probably already have some good ideas for what might please my Lord, and so I will use one of these. The One Who Has Come and Has Come and Is Coming will come to me through His Word, through prayer, through the spiritual disciplines, and through the act of serving and discipling others. I resolve to prepare for the coming of the Lord this Christmas, so that the secular meaning of Christmas does not distract me from Christ Himself.

Prayer: Heavenly Father, who 2000 years ago sent John the Baptist to stir up the hearts of your people and to point to Your Holy Son, Jesus Christ, I ask that You would stir up the hearts of Your people again this Advent season. Wake me up especially from my spiritual slumber. Baptize me again with the presence of Your Holy Spirit that I might prepare to meet You once again. Assist me in any vows I have taken that I may love you better. May I, through Your grace, be a prophetic herald to others of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson

Introduction to Daily Bread

Introduction to Daily Bread

“Give us this day our daily bread” is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.

As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The words and images of the feedings of the 4000 and 5000 (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.

But He feeds us in other ways. In his Sermons on New Testament Lesson, St. Augustine expresses his belief that the feeding of the 4000 isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”

However, Christians in the twenty-first century (and probably all others) often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your “real life.” “I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today,” you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.

Scripture must therefore be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?

The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not primarily to feed the mind: it is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:

1. lectio – reading/ listening
      a. cultivate the ability to listen deeply
      b. slow, formative reading
      c. based on previous reading and study
2. meditatio – meditation
      a. gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally
      b. ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud
      c. say it over and over, noticing different aspects – “tasting” it
      d. allow God’s word to become His word for you at every level of your being, ton interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas
3. oratio – prayer
      a. pray – dialogue with God – over the passage
      b. interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you
      c allow God to transform you thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, habits
      e. Re-affirm, repeat what God has just told you
4. contemplatio – contemplation
      a. rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you
      b. rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God
      c. leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you

Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food to nourish our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect since time of Enlightenment, and our random foragings into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.

At the end of each of my devotions I will offer a suggested Resolution for you to more profitably use your mediation on the Scriptures and put into effect what God has just been telling you. Use this suggested Resolution and the meditation itself in a way that is most beneficial to you.

Because I am offering these meditations and ruminations on the daily lessons out of my own experience with the lectio divina, they are not intended to comprise a systematic teaching on Scripture. Each meditation will not attempt to reproduce my actual time of devotion but only some of the fruit the Lord has given me for the day to live on. I have re-written these meditations in a way that is more general and applicable to everyone, and not just myself.

I have chosen to follow the lessons from the Daily Office from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for a number of reasons. First, as a Reformed Episcopalian and Anglican, it is my spiritual tradition. More importantly, it is a system of reading that allows the entire Bible to be read in a systematic way so that our diet of spiritual food is a complete one. It is, as well, a program for eating the Scriptures that is descended from those spiritual gourmands of the early Church out of which and into which the Holy Scriptures were written and received.

My intention is to begin with the Morning Prayer lessons for each day of the week, excluding Sundays, and to begin with the Second Lesson in each Morning Prayer service, which is usually a New Testament lesson. When I have gone through all of these, I will go back and go through the Second Lesson for Evening Prayer, and then hope to have a complete set of devotions on the entire New Testament.

Eventually, I’d like to publish these as a book that could be used along with any lectionary or system for reading the Bible.

A few words of advice:
1. Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.
2. Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Daily Bread. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary keep up with a different Resolution every day – you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure. Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Daily Breads as they are most profitable for you.
3. If God stops you and tells you to do something different – for example to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today – drop everything else and listen to Him!
4. Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day – don’t ever let go of it!