Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Feast of Saint Nicholas! I’m sure you’re all aware of the Saint Nicholas – Santa Claus connection...from the story that a young Nicholas protected three young women from destitution (and likely prostitution) by secretly providing money for their dowries, becoming thereby the patron of anonymous gift-giving. You may have also heard how, as an infant, he showed his commitment to the church’s discipline when he refused his mother’s milk on fast days. You may be familiar with the tale of how he raised three boys from the dead after they’d been butchered and brined by a butcher aiming to keep his costs down by murderously changing up his inventory. There’s a story that Nicholas saved people from execution; that, via bi-location, he calmed storms that threatened the lives of sailors while he was simultaneously present at the Council of Nicaea in 325; that he punched Arius the Heresiarch in the face at the same Council of Nicaea when Arius refused to confess both the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus Christ.

Nicholas is quite the character! And while I’m troubled by his temper leading him to succumb to wrath and engage in violence against another person, I’m heartened that of all the stories of Nicholas’ life and of all the accounts of his wonder-working by the power and grace of the Spirit, it’s that story with Arius that scholars feel (perhaps with tongue in cheek, but who knows) is “almost certainly apocryphal” (at least according to Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018)! Whew!

What’s truly and surpassingly lovely about the pattern of Nicholas’ legendary life, though, is how a larger Pattern is visible within it—a lively concern for folks in danger of being devastated or destroyed by predatory social, cultural, or economic systems. Nicholas shares in the Pattern of his Lord’s life, stepping into the fraying tears and gaps in the relational fabrics of the community as Christ stepped into the gap between our death and God’s life.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus speaks of the dead as being alive in God, as being children of the resurrection, because God “is God not of the dead but of the living.” That doesn’t just mean that the dead will be raised or that those we love but see no longer are alive in and to God, their aliveness more definitively real than our perception of their deadness. It definitely means that. But because it means that, it also means that those who are considered culturally or socially or economically dead are going to turn out to be just the sorts of people with whom God constantly identifies—the underdog, the outcast, the misfit, the scapegoat, the victim. What the world calls dead, God raises up by the power of God’s own intense, gracious and loving identification and regard.

By grace, Nicholas practiced that identification and regard—he became a window onto it, his life a lens by which it could shine more brightly into the world. We can do the same. By God’s grace, we too can step into the gaps of our community’s relational fabric, we can make it a point to see and regard and identify with and respond to those the world thinks of as dead recognizing in them and in everyone God’s own image, God's own life. We can participate in the resurrection power of Jesus Christ through loving engagement with the world as the pattern of our lives is conformed more and more clearly to Our Lord’s own Pattern. Like Nicholas, we can work the wonders of Love by the power of Love’s own Spirit.

Happy Feast of Saint Nicholas!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+