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Simeon Christopher Castaldo was born on January 30, 2007. Below these photos is a brief reflection of our experience.

Simeon (“one who hears”)
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
5:29 PM
18 inches
7 lbs, 2 oz.

Simeon with Mom and Dad

Luke and Simeon

Philip and Simeon

Daddy and Simeon

Waiting on God can sometimes feel claustrophobic. We try (perhaps subconsciously) to escape the suffocating confines of the divine waiting room, but escape is really unthinkable for the one who belongs to God. The cry of the believer’s heart echoes Peter the Apostle when he said, “To whom shall we go Lord; you alone have the words of eternal life.” Because Jesus alone offers this life, we wait on him. Nevertheless, waiting can sometimes be hard.

As a pastor, my role is to remind people of Peter’s confession—the reality that the Lord is indeed compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness and truth. I believe this (as the Church has for 2000 years) and with a 50% chance of hemophilia for Simeon (genetically at least), the last several months have provided opportunity to demonstrate my belief.

It occurred to me when Simeon was being born that his gestation experience strangely resembled his parents’ nine months of waiting: we both waited in a confined space for God to act. For me there was anxiety in this space. Some men enjoy the enterprise of analyzing odds in gambling. Not me, it makes me too nervous and a 50% probability of hemophilia offers no confidence when our eldest son became one in 16,000 males who has the condition. On the other hand, when our backs are up against the wall, we are perfectly poised to see the hand of the Lord. It probably wasn’t an accident that the Israelites found deep water ahead of them and angry Egyptians behind them before Yahweh’s glory was displayed.

Even though confined spaces may confront us with fear, one finds in them a mysterious sense of joy. The Catholic theologian Peter Kreeft supports this notion in his book Love is Stronger than Death. He writes:

“Children, like adults, hate enclosing walls, for they signify confinement and frustration. Claustrophobia is latent in everyone. But children, unlike many adults, also hate doorless, roomless, open houses where every room is open and flows into every other room and everything lies naked and open to view at once, for such a modern interior design expresses the loss of mystery, like the larger modern world outside. There is efficiency but no surprises. Children love to explore houses with secret panels, hidden staircases, and so on. They love to make hiding places such as tents, forts, or little enclosures; for these promise surprises, secrets, mysteries (p. 60).”

Looking back on the last several months, quite frankly I have experienced some dark valleys of fear. I have lost count of the times of awaking from nightmares concerning the baby’s diagnosis. Even to the present moment, as I now write, Angela and I await the conclusive test results of Simeon’s blood. Nevertheless, in this apprehension there is also a mysterious sense of joy. After much time of reflection I think I know why, and with this I conclude.

There is another analogy between Simeon’s gestation and his parent’s season of waiting. We both have done it in someone. For Simeon, he was quite obviously in his mother. For Angela and me, we too have operated in a person: Jesus Christ. Being in Christ makes all the difference in the world. Because Jesus died as our sacrifice and rose from the grave, we now enjoy the presence of the living God in him. This relationship provides joy even in the midst of pain. It transcends understanding and gives life the meaning it craves. Jesus the Christ, crucified for us, rose from the dead, reigning now with the Father, he is Lord and therefore we can wait upon God until he divides the water, whenever that time may be.

*Almost a day after this post was written, Angela and I received the final test results indicating that Simeon does NOT have hemophilia.

The classical world counted Christianity as upstart foolishness. Now, many call it “outdated.” Robust Christianity could not care less; it is always self-consciously countercultural, ever faithful to the gospel, to the narrow way. The words of English non-conformist preacher John Angell James (1785 – 1859) are meant to embarrass any pastor made craven by the culture. He spoke in a day when modernism was budding; his words hold strong in the postmodern era.

“It should never be forgotten that the time when the apostles discharged their ministry was only just after the Augustan era of the ancient world. Poetry had recently bestowed on the lettered world the works of Virgil and Horace. The light of philosophy, though waning, still shed its luster over Greece. The arts still exhibited their most splendid creations, though they had ceased to advance. It was at such a time, and amidst such scenes, the gospel began its course. The voices of the apostles were listened to by sages who had basked in the sunshine of Athenian wisdom, and were reverberated in startling echo from temples and statues that had been shaken by the thunders of Cicero and Demosthenes; yet they conceded nothing to the demands of philosophy, but held forth the cross as the only object they felt they had a right to exhibit. They never once entertained the degrading notion that they must accommodate themselves to the philosophy or the taste of the age in which they lived, and the places where they ministered . . .

Whether the apostle addressed himself to the philosophers on Mars Hill, or to the barbarians on the island of Melita; whether he reasoned with the Jews in their synagogues, or with the Greeks in the school of Tyrannus, he had but one theme, and that was Christ, and him crucified. And what right, or what reason have we for deviating from this high and imperative example? Be it so, that we live in a literary, philosophic, and scientific age, what then? Is it an age that has outlived the need of the gospel for its salvation; or for the salvation of which any thing else can suffice but the gospel? The supposition that something else than pure Christianity, as the theme of our pulpit ministrations, is requisite for such a period as this, or that it must be presented in philosophic guise, appears to me a most perilous sentiment, as being a disparagement to the gospel itself, a daring assumption of wisdom superior to God’s, and containing the germ of infidelity.”1

Footnotes :

1 John Angell James, An Earnest Ministry: The Want of the Times (1847; reprinted in Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993), 69-73.

A protégé of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 –1992) was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. Earlier in his career, prompted by the outbreak of World War II and his thoughts on the problems (and similarities) of socialism and fascism, he published in 1944 his famous book, The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek argued that private property is the necessary link to all other freedoms. If the state owns all of the property, then it can, by definition, alone decide who does what and where. But if, on the contrary, property is distributed among many owners, then a system of self-determination and free competition ensues. For example, the property owner must offer good terms in order to interest people in developing his land. The benefits of such a system are enormous. As the following extract points out, private property makes possible a host of freedoms, including religious freedom.

“What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but [also] for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of “society” as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.

Who can seriously doubt that a member of a small racial or religious minority will be freer with no property so long as fellow-members of his community have property and are therefore able to employ him, than he would be if private property were abolished and he became owner of a nominal share in the communal property. Or that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire [i.e. bureaucrat] possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work?”1

Footnotes :

1 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 103-104.

Albert M. Wolters is the current professor of religion and theology and classical studies at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario. While teaching philosophy at the Institute of Christian Studies in Toronto in 1985, he compiled a collection of his lectures and published them under the title Creation Regained. In this book, Wolters proclaims that Christians are to understand the world through the lens of Scripture—more specifically through the biblical paradigm of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The following quote not only defines “worldview” but also emphasizes the need for Scripture to inform all areas of life. Wolters asserts that there is no non-religious aspect of human life. Scripture creates a proper worldview.

“There is no passage in Scripture that cannot teach us something about God and his relationship to us. We must approach the Scriptures as students, particularly when we begin to think critically about our own worldview. “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us,” says Paul of the Old Testament Scriptures (Rom. 15:4), and the same applies to the New Testament. That is why the concept of “sound doctrine” is so central to the apostolic witness—not doctrine in the sense of academic theology, but as practical instruction in the life-and-death realities of our walk in the covenant with God. It is by means of that kind of teaching that the steadfastness and encouragement the Scriptures bring will enable us, as Paul goes on to point out in the same passage, not to despair but to hang on to our hope in Christ. That is also involved in what Paul calls the “renewal of our minds” (Rom. 12:2). We need that renewal if we are to discern what God’s will is in the full range of our lives—“his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Testing our worldview against Scripture and revising it accordingly is part of the renewal of the mind. . . .

To be sure, we must be taught by Scripture on such matters as baptism, prayer, election, and the church, but Scripture speaks centrally to everything in our life and world, including technology and economics and science. The scope of biblical teaching includes such ordinary “secular” matters as labor, social groups, and education. Unless such matters are approached in terms of a worldview based squarely on such central scriptural categories as creation, sin, and redemption, our assessment of these supposedly nonreligious dimensions of our lives will likely be dominated instead by one of the competing worldviews of the secularized West. Consequently, it is essential to relate the basic concepts of “biblical theology” to our worldview—or rather to understand these basic concepts as constituting a worldview. In a certain sense the plea . . . for a biblical worldview is simply an appeal to the believer to take the Bible and its teaching seriously for the totality of our civilization right now and not to regulate it to some optional area called “religion.”1

Footnotes :

1 Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 6-8.

Yesterday I attended the wedding of Brian and Jessica Hoch. It was not only beautiful, but also holy. Based on the sixth day of creation, Pastor Kent Hughes (grandfather of Brian) emphasized how our marriages must reflect the gracious, tender, sacrificial character of God himself. It got me thinking about what this kind of relationship looks like in practical terms. Numerous examples spring to mind, some mundane like washing dishes; others are more spiritual like Bible study and prayer. I’d like to highlight one that is occasionally mentioned, but is always crucial. It is the need to look carefully.

John Chrysostom (c. 349 – 407), Archbishop of Constantinople and renowned preacher, counseled those who struggle with the mental sin of lust. In his Homilies on Matthew’s Gospel, he encourages the right use of the eyes and warns the wayward. He writes:

“Rather, if you desire to look and find pleasure, look at your own wife, and love her continually; no law forbids that. But if you are to be curious about the beauties that belong to another, you are injuring both your wife by letting your eyes wander elsewhere, and her on whom you have looked, by touching her unlawfully. Since, although you have not touched her with the hand, yet thou hast caressed her with your eyes; for which cause this also is accounted adultery . . .1”

Isn’t it incredible how some things never change? In a world teaming with erotic images, Chrysostom’s advice is for us today. For we who earnestly desire to glorify God there is good news: we need not necessarily compose great theological tomes, or preach in packed halls, we can simply resolve to serve God with our eyes and in doing so we will not only honor our spouses, we will also bring much glory to our Father in heaven.

Footnotes :

1 John Chrysostom, Chrysostom’s Homilies on St. Matthew Part One (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), 256. In other translations see Homily 17 on Matthew 5:27.