Christ Reshapes the Past – Dr. James Nestingen

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, thanks very much for the welcome. I left St. Paul yesterday at 11:30 in the morning, thinking that I would give myself some extra time, and I used all of it up. So, south of Minneapolis, going toward Northfield, there was one spinoff after another, and then things improved until I got down north of Des Moines, and then it was like driving through an auto graveyard—overturned cars and spun-off vehicles. And then this morning, you know, I took off and thought I had an easy morning of it, and pulled in at one o'clock. So it is absolutely delightful to work with you.

Some of you know, I suppose, that my family comes from a group that was known years ago as the Norwegian Missouri, because we sent up all of our pastors to St. Louis to be trained before we built a seminary of our own. And so there's been a long and close friendship in my family. I remember the first time that I got invited home to lecture at St. Louis. I went and told my dad, and they wept for joy. He was really thrilled about that. And, thrilling to all, I've got to know several of you from different connections, and especially love to see Ron, who's a dear friend, and others of you as well. And I look forward to—I can brag of this—that, having bridged the gap between the ELCA and Missouri, the now growing gap, I also have one or two people whose lecture would vote for women in orders, or I recommend medical credentials.

So, you have my outlines. I'm a little hesitant about handing out an outline, because it's a little bit like appearing in your underwear. Lecturing, I will say, is a little bit like jazz. You have a riff, and you play on it, and so when all the riff is on paper, you can see how I'm messing with it. And I'm going to fill in the blanks and move along. Since this is a retreat, we're not going to be excessively formal, I hope. I'm real eager for your questions. I'll go 45 or 50 minutes, and we'll stand up and shake, and then we'll take some time for questions. I really look forward to that, because that's a time when we can dimension things together and go into the specifics, and your questions tell me what you're thinking about, and what I need to think about, and I regard your questions as a good work of which I'm the beneficiary. And if you don't help me, I may employ a little of the second use of the law. You know, greater words, right? It'll go from there.

Some years ago, the New York Times, in its list of the ten great books of the year, listed Norman Maclean's book, Young Men and Fire, as one of the best books ever written in the U.S. That's high praise. The editor, in writing up the evaluation, said there were some sentences in this book as perfect as any in the English language. He was a masterful writer, and he grew up in Missoula, Montana. His father was a Presbyterian pastor. You may know him, most of all, for A River Runs Through It, his slightly rippled and a lot of fun book about trout fishing in Western Montana. Maclean, as a young man, did what lots of young men in Montana do. He went to work for the forest service as a firefighter. And so he spent his summers fighting fires.

There was a big blow-up in Hell's Gate, north of Helena. A huge fire that literally crowned, blew up, and just sucked all the oxygen out. And that fire killed thirteen out of fifteen in a fire crew. That was 1948. One of my friends served one of the survivors of this fire in Western Montana, where it is extremely well remembered. For Maclean, this event was an overpowering question. He grew up in a tightly disciplined Calvinist home, under the conviction that everything works together for good, that God has arranged all things and keeps all things in order. And now, right across the ridge from where he was working, fighting another fire, there was this spontaneous eruption of chaos. The fire blew up and consumed the lives of thirteen men. He spent the rest of his life thinking through what had happened there.

I have several friends in the West who are firefighters. His book is required reading for the fire crews, because it is such a meticulous account of how fire works on this larger scale. But I used it as a theological textbook for the last several years that I taught up at the seminary. Because this is about as fine and careful and disciplined an approach to the question of evil as I've ever read. He had a hard time with the faith, like many preachers' kids. He couldn't come quite to a confession, but there are passages that are just practically pure, about as fine a theology, as straight a theology of the cross, just straight out—done by a person with no theological training. He was a literary critic at the University of Chicago who, pushing, pushing, pushing, in the course of writing this book, losing his wife and realizing the first evidence of dementia in himself, marshalling all this considerable intellectual power, came face to face with these defining questions. It's just magnificent.

Maclean assumes what is commonly assumed, that our life is carried in our narratives. So when we meet one another, we say automatically, where are you from? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Where do you live? We start poking, and the narrative starts to unfold. Sometimes the narrative unfolds in stories of triumph, sometimes in stories of joy, sometimes in brief bits of narrative—sports stories, jokes, foolishness. But we start right away exchanging narratives. We start right away telling of ourselves, and we organize our stories in such a way that we go beginning to end, or beginning, middle, end. And when someone's gone, someone dies, we say born and died. In the old Norwegian cemeteries of the churches where I grew up, they had two words on the tombstone: born, died. There's the beginning, the end, and encompassed between, stories. Stories of life, stories of law.

I had an unusual privilege as the oldest son of the second son and the oldest daughter. I knew four of my great-grandparents and all four of my grandparents. Norwegian Americans are famously reserved about public expressions of affection, but the large families indicate they're not emotionally stunted. I have some twenty-seven uncles or aunts. All of us storytellers. And so last night, when I stopped in Dubuque, I was with one of my younger cousins, and he was pressing me because I know lots of stories that he doesn't—about our grandparents and about our great-grandparents. I suppose I told you a few of those. They were particularly colorful, and a lot of fun. But you know how that works. You start talking about yourself, and you tell where you came from and about significant relationships along the way, and you intuitively know there are different types of narratives.

For this purpose, Maclean distinguishes three. The first is a disaster—an eruption of chaos, a breach, in which everything that we've taken for granted, for the time being, is brought into question, and all there is, is the raw event. Clearly, for Maclean himself, the Hell's Gate fire was such a disaster—that is, it's the raw event. Still, we hear stories of 9/11, and we can tell about where we were and what was happening, and we say right away about things like this, "I can't believe it." People have been dying for as long as there have been human beings around, since the garden was emptied, and when death comes, you say, "I can't believe it happened here." As if here should be immune, as if there's never been death here. That's part of the routine—the disaster breaks in, and when it breaks in, it disrupts.

When I was a kid going to country school, I was walking home, and there was a car accident. And there were three people sitting upright in the back of the car, all of them dead, sitting side by side in a row, in the back seat of a 1938 Chevy. I was in grade two, probably. I couldn't figure out what that car was doing there, and couldn't figure out why those people were sitting there. When I was driving down and saw cars rolled over and lying on their backs, and semis, that back seat of that car popped up. It's part of us. We carry these stories in ourselves, and they provide some kind of reference. A disaster breaks the continuity. It's just there. So there's a death in the congregation, or there's a death in the family, a sudden death. And that disaster just sticks, and it sticks in such a way that we go back, and we go back, and we go back, and we say, it won't move. It's just there. We wake in the morning and think to ourselves, "Oh no." Maybe I was—maybe I just—no, no, no. It's a clear, glaring, hostile, unresolvable breach.

The first bad death that I had to deal with as a pastor was in my parish in the southern part of Oregon. I had a thirty-nine-year-old man, my closest friend in the congregation, drop dead outside my office door just after the wedding of his nineteen-year-old daughter. The family was celebrating in the reception room, and I was doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for fifty minutes. When I came home after informing that nineteen-year-old of her father's death, I finally got back to the house late in the evening, and I reached into my pocket, and I found his teeth. And I started screaming, and just stood there in raw terror. Disaster does that. No preparation, all surprise, and then we start trying to figure out what in the world was going on. The native human intuition is to try to put it in a frame of reference, to say, here's how it began, and here's how it ended, and here's what was happening.

My mother died at the age of fifty-six of breast cancer. My father remarried precipitously, in a red-hot haste, to avoid being alone. It was terrifying. And this marriage crossed him, it plagued him the rest of his life. He was an ELC believer who had drifted. And I remember going to him before the marriage and saying, "You know, have you thought about what Jesus says concerning divorce?" She had been a divorced woman twenty years before, and he had just about died over the first divorce in his generation. But no, he was ready to go with us. "We've thought about this," he says. "It has nothing to do with this. Nothing." It was so difficult. I would go and get him and take him with me when I had to go out and speak and stuff. So I picked him up. We were driving out to Wilbur, Minnesota. I still remember that point on the highway where this happened. He said, "You know, Jim, I finally figured out why God took your mother." I mean, I nearly went in the ditch. You don't want to figure that out, and if you've got it figured out, just forget it. He wanted to tell me. He told me that God had taken my mother to protect my mother from my little sister's sins. Now that does not make any sense whatsoever, theologically. That's just plumb nuts. We don't look over God's shoulder and read God's mind. God, get a life! For Pete's sake. But it was very important to my dad. And you know why? Because that disaster had hung in him unresolved. And finally, he was finding a place for it. Finally, he had a way of dealing with what he could. He was moving toward resolution.

So the first inclination with the disaster is to give it a beginning, a middle, and an end—that is, to make it into a story. And once we've made it into a story, the disaster has progressed from mere disaster into something that we can understand, that we can find a place in. We've got books on it now. The word "understand" is a very interesting word. It's a power word, of course. When you understand something, you stand in the controlling position. And so the inclination with the disaster is to try to understand it, to get into a position where we can spread it out, deal with it, and then it becomes a story, and we've got it. But first of all it becomes a tragedy, and finally a story. A tragedy, in the sense that we see the forces that are deployed in this. We can analyze what forces have been involved, and we can now put those forces together in the story, and it is digested. It's one story among many that I tell. When I think about myself, when I talk about this, that story becomes part of the whole thing.

Now, in the midst of this, we have to say there are some narratives that we can't face, some narratives that get stuck. Sometimes the disaster is so overpowering that it won't move. My mother was a Canadian, and so half my family is in Canada, and we would go back and forth across the border all my life. I was working up in the northern part of Alberta in June. You should think of Alberta at this time of year, because it's absolutely gorgeous. The light does not leave till about eleven o'clock, and you have these long, lovely twilights. We had a good friend who was a professor at Camrose Lutheran College, Walt Miller—some of you might know him. He did some work in Korea. He's a wonderful confessions scholar, really sharp. He lost a daughter at the age of twenty-five. She was a nurse, a very good one. Smart as Walt, capable, disciplined, organized, an overachiever. Went through nursing school like a hot knife through butter, and then became head nurse. She died that fast of cancer, just like that, just bang.

So I would teach my classes, and then I would walk over to the Miller house. When we'd get to about eight, something like that, we'd sit down on the front step, in the Alberta twilight, and drink rhubarb wine. Now, if you know country life, rhubarb wine is not generally to be recommended, because it's just too blame sweet. It'll give you a toothache, it's like Kool-Aid times two. But Walt, of course, good German folk, they knew how to make good wine, and he made rhubarb wine, with just a wisp of rum. It was just perfect. And we'd sit out and drink that rhubarb wine on the step. And Walt would grieve for his daughter. Oftentimes we wouldn't leave, and Walt would put his head on my shoulder. It was just incredible. The narrative would not yield. That disaster would not yield. It just stood there. And it just raised its middle finger to both of us in the night and said no. There was simply no way to understand or explain, justify or defend, to resolve. That woman was gifted. He had his whole life invested in her. She died in the most miserably outlandish way, just like that.

Well, they say that the deepest grief in the human community is that of a parent for an adult child who has become a friend. When you've gone through all the stuff of child-raising, and that kid who was such a jerk and so full of promise all of a sudden matures, and is right there in front of you, and you can actually enjoy being together—that's as good as it gets. And when you lose somebody like that, the whole thing just stands there. There are things like that, stories like that, disasters like that, that just stick. And you keep going back to them.

Ten years after that friend of mine died at his daughter's wedding, I got a chance to go back to Coquille, my first parish, a little town a hundred miles north of the California border, just off the coast. I'm going to be shooting ducks there next week. I got a chance to go back, and I drove right through town. She had invited me. I drove right through town, right past the church. I went straight to the cemetery. I was standing by his grave. That disaster had not even a single resolution. It was just hanging in my head. I was standing at the grave by myself, weeping. And I heard a voice say, "Hi, Jim." And it was his widow. I said, "Oh, did you know I'd be here?" She said, "I knew you wouldn't go anyplace else. I knew you'd be here." And the two of us stood together, just in the silence of death.

There are disasters like that that don't deal. Sometimes they are just these raw, emotional events that hang out there in the past. But oftentimes they are narratives in which we are implicated, in which we have a sense of participation, of benefit, of contribution, of cause, in which we are just stuck. These are the limping narratives, the broken narratives, narratives that you speak, and that I speak, and that we hear, as confessors, over and over and over again.

The narrative of a divorce, for example. There is a beginning: we were so in love, we were so happy together, everything was just great, it couldn't have been better. There's the middle: I should have known better, but I saw some things, and I didn't realize, and I thought—There's no end. The marriage broke, and the narrative just recycles. And the person goes around again and tells it. You've heard these stories. That's our job. We sit and listen to these sorts of things. If you don't get enough of them, you can go and sit with a bartender or a cab driver, or go to the beauty shop and just sit and listen. These narratives are the partial of broken narratives, country-western narratives. My students would come peddling that crap book about how people don't feel guilty anymore. I'd recommend that they be tied to a stool in a country-western tavern for an afternoon. That's how they make their living, that's what they sell—an ear for those narratives. You know what they say: play a country-western song backwards, and you get your dog back and your wife comes home. That's funny. These narratives, if they are narratives, break. They just break. They can't resolve, we can't bring them to a story, but they just stick.

Or the narratives of guilt. There are the narratives in which I am not only a participant, but one of the causes. And I keep going back to it over and over and over and over again, rehearsing remembrances, rehearsing visions of retribution and reimbursement. In the AA prayer book—the little one, the little brown one—the prayers deal with those recycled words, where we remember, and we rehearse, and we keep going. And this is the bondage of the will. We get stuck going back, going back. "I remember when that so-and-so did that, and I'm going to finally get them. But finally, I know that I shouldn't be thinking like this, and I'm not going to do it again, and I make a resolution." Luther said we should never make resolutions. We just make liars of ourselves, right off the bat. So there you go. These are narratives that are stuck. You've heard them, and you've told them, and you hear them again and again.

In the forgiveness of sin, Christ Jesus' narrative overlaps the personal narrative to bring it to resolution.

In 1925, there was an old Norwegian pastor who was serving in Eau Claire. His name was Osgaard—A-S-G-A-A-R-D. Because, as Jim Scully would say, there age were wild—too many A's, huh? There are lots of Norwegian names like that, where he'll wind up with a set of A's, just for the sake of order. So Osgaard was a big, bald-headed, old Norwegian, strict, damn stern. There was a bust of him in the entrance to Gullixson Hall at the seminary, and when we walked by it on the way to our exams, we always rubbed Osgaard's nose, and they finally had to move it up to the library, because his nose was worn down.

Dr. Osgaard performed a wedding. And three weeks after the wedding, the bride came to his office and asked if she could speak to him. He saw right away what was coming. He said there's a service in the hymnal for someone like her—the service of confession and absolution. So they used that service, and this was her narrative. She had had an affair with a doctor in Eau Claire, and become pregnant by the doctor. And so she had gone to the doctor with this information, and he found a colleague who was willing to perform an abortion for her. The fetus was aborted. The pregnancy ended. And the affair ended. And that was it. Now, you've heard narratives like this, right? Of course. You know how those narratives will hang in a person's consciousness. It is unresolvable stuff.

So then another man came courting this young, attractive woman. He came courting, and she thought, when he first took her out, that she'd better tell him the story. But she couldn't. Of course not. I never recommend that people in courtship use one another for a confession—it'll kill it pretty fast. And I don't like people in courtship confiding their sexual disease to one another, either. I've put out enough of those fires. But those things burn deep. So she couldn't tell. They kept going together, and she wanted to tell him, and she couldn't. And when he proposed to her, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn't. And when they married, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn't. And when he touched her, her flesh burned. She couldn't stand herself. And she couldn't stand his touch either. And so she was withdrawing and withdrawing, and unable.

Dr. Osgaard stood up and put his hand on her head, and he said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sin." The woman stood up and said, "Well, now, I suppose I can finally go home and tell my husband this story." And Osgaard said, "What story? What story?"

You see, here's one of the most important things that happens. In the forgiveness of sin, Christ Jesus' narrative overlaps our narrative. And it overlaps at a point of self-loss. It overlaps it as a going to death. For a young woman, golden, ready for childbearing, eager to enter into a traditional vocation, wife and mother—to have to disclose this to another person is death. It's death. Luther distinguished between the big death and the little one. The little one happens when we run out of air, when we can't breathe anymore. The big one is this one. See, here she is, lovely, and having confided—you just can hardly bear it. And of course we can't, because finally, it has to get out. And the getting out is a dying.

Christ's death overlaps our death at this point. He joins that point of self-loss. He died. He didn't just appear to die. He cried out, in words that are preserved in the Aramaic, "Eloi, Eloi." The early Christian community preserved those words because they're absolutely sacred. This is the expiring cry, a cry of faith and unbelief, back to back, distinguishable, never separable. "My God, my God—so why hast thou forsaken me?" They come right together. And so, when Dr. Osgaard said to this young woman, "What story?" he indicated what had happened. Christ died for her. His death became her death, and her death became his. The joyful exchange—the two narratives come right together, and they wound her into the dance. And the end of her story is the end of Christ's story, which is, of course, Easter. She has been joined with him in a death like his, that she might share in a resurrection like his. And so the story has ended in Christ Jesus, and she walks away.

So what is happening in substitutionary atonement happens not behind the scenes in heaven itself, but right in front of you. The descent into hell—whereas the new ELC hymnal, because how much it, nicely pasteurized it, even though it objected to and denied it, made it "to the dead"—I hate that. I want him to stand up and say, "The hell you say. I've been there, and if you'd like to hear it, I'll take you at your word."

One of my favorite old parishioners, in Spokane, Washington—a fabulous old German church, one of the old saints—this congregational treasurer was a guy named Henry Beske, who drove a Model A still, in 1968. There's something reassuring about a church treasurer like that. He gave a search for me. The pastor's wife was a lesbian and her lover was the choir there. And they had the pastor between them, and they literally picked the kitty clean. It was just incredible. So I wound up serving a congregation of 650 all by myself. Sink or swim. I came into the office on Monday, and here was Mr. Beske, wearing a suit, his Sunday suit, which is about the same vintage as the Model A—worn only on Sundays, carefully preserved. I was scared to death that I'd forgotten about a funeral. I was just petrified, and I didn't want to come right out and ask. And finally, Mr. Beske said, "I suppose you're wondering why I'm wearing my suit." As a matter of fact, I am. "So, my wife was over at Mr. Wittenbraker's yesterday afternoon, and he confided in her that he didn't believe in hell. So I'm going over there to raise enough hell to convince him."

Well, that's right. Instead of denying the descent, they all ought to be sent to class with Mr. Beske. He and the others of us will teach them what happens, really. When you, the "descended into hell" is exactly that. Some of you have been there yourself. Luther described hell once, in the end of one of his disputations, as the relentless accusation of a troubled conscience—an eternally troubled conscience. If that isn't hell enough for you, I don't know what it would take. It makes flames look easy, actually. Because to review, to return, to rehearse, to remember, to go back—forever. Cold as ice. That is hell. Of course it took place, and of course he descended there. He's gone into your conscience, into your disjointed sense of yourself, into your self-accusation, into your relentless preoccupation with your failures. He's gone into it instead. "I'll take that thing. Give it to me. I died for the sins of the world. I want all of them. Give that to me. You can't have it anymore. That's for me." He's been in hell with you, and it has lost its power over you.

That's what that language describes, that's what it is. That he is doing this on your behalf—not in some heavenly transaction, but right here and right now, in you.

I was telling Ron about my friend—we talked together for twenty-five years. He had a real unusual form of dementia, a Parkinson's-type disease called Lewy body disease, in which the brain literally turns to mush. And so he lost himself. I took him to Europe. He wanted to go. He went over to Denmark. I made a big mistake there. There's a famous Scandinavian drink, schnapps. I love it, and the older I get, the more I enjoy it. I don't want a lot, just maybe one or two before supper. They make good schnapps in Denmark. So we started going through, and I bought some. They had some new stuff, but it had kind of a licorice flavor to it. And I thought that'd be fun to try, a bottle of it, and we went to the hotel, and I gave him a shot of the deal, which was a damn fool thing. That stuff addles the mind of even somebody who's composed, but you put that stuff in someone confused, and he was just lit. Then I really enjoyed it. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how sick he was. We went back to the hotel.

I woke up, and his bed was empty, and my door was open. I went raising home—I was running down the hall. I got him back, and I laid awake all night, and I was up all day the next day. The second night, I didn't know what I was going to do. We'd been up all night on the plane, and we were up all night the first night, up all night the second night, and I finally drifted off, and he grabbed me. And I said, "What's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong?" He said, "There are demons in here." Demons? "Yes," he said, "they're demons." I thought it was dementia. So I said, "You know, Christ Jesus has power over the demons, and it's promised that he will use that power for you. So I think we'll just trust the demons to Christ Jesus and go to sleep." And we lay down. And then I heard what it was. It was a person moaning in their sleep, in the next room. Good hearer.

Well, I had made a classic preacher's mistake. I proposed the conceptual cure to a doubting man for a real difficulty. I knew who the fool was. So I stood up. I put my hand on his head. I said, "The Lord bless you, and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace." And as I said those words, his shoulders sank, and by the end of the benediction he was at peace. For me, it was just fabulous. His heart was loose, running, unresolved. He was losing himself, and was aware. There's no conceptual deliverance in that situation. You're not going to solve that problem by explaining the substitutionary atonement. It's got to happen right there. Which is exactly what the absolution does. It links our narrative with Christ's narrative at the point where our self was, and so we're saved.

"One story?" "What story?" The story is in Christ. It's his story. He has and holds all my sins. They are a part of his biography. When he tells the narrative, it goes like this: "I died for the sins of the world, but I never imagined this. You see what I got for him? Come on, give me a break. But even so," he takes it in stride, and then says, "There's no reason to worry. And you have my righteousness." What story? Your story is now his story.

Thus, the broken narrative indicates that the sinner is in bondage. The sinner keeps coming back to that breach, unable to resolve it. Luther's telling description of this: always doing penance without ever coming to repentance. Always returning to the narrative, always digging it up, always re-examining it, always looking it over. "I didn't mean it that way. It couldn't have meant—did I really do—?" Always trying to unearth it. And finally, there is no repentance, no resolution. Thus, we are caught in confusion, self-rejection, self-hatred, self-loathing, regrets, resolutions, more regrets, more resolutions. "I'm never going to do that again," until I get another chance. That's how it goes.

The cause is sometimes moral. This is a tricky part. Sometimes our narratives are of moral sins. In the old days in the ALC, some of us were appointed by the bishops to go in and help pastors who were committing adultery—weekend entertainment. As a church, we get these tickets. It was frightening at first. But often enough, we'd come in, and the pastor would say, "Thank goodness you've come. I've been waiting. I can't stand it. I just can't live with this any longer." And the narrative would go something like this: "One thing just led to another. I didn't want this. I can't imagine that this happened to me. It's the last thing. One thing just led to another and led to another." And as it led to another, the self-loathing and the self-hatred, and the inability to stay away—"she's so wonderful," or "he's so great, and I just kept going one more time"—that old dreadful cycle. And finally, when that breaks, it heads toward the resolution, even when the resolution is unacceptable, or frankly deadly.

Thus, Christ becomes our death. The narrative is taken up into him.

Now, there are a couple of things to note in particular about the absolution, because we tend to overlook them. First of all, the absolution is an indictment. Your sin is forgiven. Your sin. At this point, the gospel confirms the law, the law's announcement: your sin. The law comes and accuses us and says, "You've done this. You did that." It might be moral, might be relational, might be something just out of the act. The law comes and says, "That's wrong." The gospel does not say "Forget it." Neither does it say "You couldn't help it." Neither does it say "This sin was predestined." Neither does it say, "You know, if you try hard, we could forget this." The gospel enters the world of our narratives at this point: your sin. And because it enters at this point, it has a bite. The gospel has teeth. The gospel confirms the law's analysis, confirms what the law says. And so this is the difference between the gospel and all the placebos. Christ justifies the sinner, not the sin. The placebos try to make the sin go away, and leave the sinner holding the bag.

I have some wonderful stories about this. My experience with my Norwegian students, and with my friends from here in North Dakota that I grew up with—remember my father's parish? He had a stroke in Minneapolis. He was up in the hospital, laid there for several days without any of us knowing where he was. Finally, somebody from Bemidji called and said he was in the hospital, and I should get my tail up there, so I went up to see him. And I said, "How are you doing?" "Fine," he says. "But I think you're a particularly lousy teacher." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" He says, "Well, I met some of your students dropping by here to call. I've been waiting for them to preach to me. None of them do. I've been waiting for that, and none of them preach." "What do they do?" I said. "Well," he said, "the student comes in and says, 'How are you feeling?' I said, 'Lousy.' They said, 'What then?' Then the student said, 'I hear you're saying that you're frustrated.' 'Oh, okay, just frustrated. You don't know that I'm laid here in this hellhole, and you come in here and ask me how I feel? How do you think I feel?' Or, 'You seem to be kind of pent up.'" He just blew up and said, "Where did you get that? You're a parrot, not a pastor!"

Finally, what the placebos do is just hand us back to ourselves, and say, "You see to it yourself. It must be in there someplace. Get with it. Come on, come on, come on." But Christ Jesus comes into your hell for you. The bad physician, you remember this, comes to the bed, says, "You'll feel better soon," takes his leave, and goes home. The good physician comes to the bed, says, "This is difficult," and stays, and stays, and stays. That's it. Christ, the good physician, comes into your hell for you, and when he comes into your hell for you, he doesn't say, "You couldn't help it," or "You'll get over it," or "Take two of these." He says, "What you need is an ample bosom to lay your head on. What you need is a muscular shoulder. Cast your burden on me. I care for you." That is the difference between life and death.

So that when the absolution comes, it doesn't say, "Take two of these." It confirms the law's analysis. It says, this is for sins. You can't be forgiven unless you're a sinner. You have to be a sinner in order to get this. If you're not a sinner, you're not welcome. Christ Jesus doesn't have any time for you. He's got plenty of work to do, there are enough sinners around. He doesn't need some do-gooder standing in there reading love stories, narratives of sanctification, self-recovery. When judgment breaks out, the Lord suffers, and gives the blessing to those who are convinced that they really do deserve to be there, and that others don't. Here's the promise for you.

Secondly, the gospel announces a new future. Your sin, which is forgiven for Christ's sake, is forgiven—that is, it loses its standing in the relationship. To be sure, there are consequences. We live in a roughly equal causal nexus, one where one thing usually indicates another. When I was living in Toronto, there was an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, my favorite newspaper, about the new chastity—in Toronto, of all places. It turned out that the new chastity was fatigue. People had done everything, tried everything, and sexual relations had lost their fascination, and they were boring, and so there was no difference between the new chastity and being satiated. The mystery was gone. One thing generally leads to another. Indulgence generally leads to contempt. Not in every single instance, not automatically, but generally speaking. So there are consequences. They are out there.

When Dr. Osgaard said to that young woman, "What story?" he knew full well that she was living in a context where that story was shaping her. It was shaping her future. It was shaping her present. When he said "What story?" he removed the story from the controlling position. He relativized it. He undermined its ultimate claim. He put it into Christ Jesus' area. The story lost its threat, its control. The story still lingers. It's not being told every moment now. It's quiet. So Luther uses this—this is good Luther—he speaks of this beautifully. He says the law is quiet, its mouth is silenced. It still remembers, unfortunately. But now it's not standing there, pointing its finger, saying, "You dirty bird." That's lost its power. A law that no longer accuses is dead. It has lost its identifying function.

You can see from this why forgiveness is so desperately important in the family. Marriage and the family bring together adversarial relationships that are inherently antagonistic. My wife and I have been married for forty-two years. My mother-in-law loves all three of our children and our grandchildren desperately. She refers to herself always as Gigi, great-grandma, and she indulges her great-grandchildren. She has recently forgiven me for having carnal knowledge of her daughter. She never said that, but I know it's true now. Because for the first forty-one years and eleven months, there was just a little edge. I'm the one that took her oldest daughter away from her. And not only that, but I took her to my bed. And not only that, but her pregnancies confirmed that we weren't simply lying there holding hands. My mother-in-law's love for her daughter is one of the miracles of life. Just raw, surging power, just tender enclosure. Gorgeous stuff. And when the man comes and breaks it, he gets what he deserves. Which is why men tell jokes about their mothers-in-law.

It's a contest. Mothers and sons. Just when mommy is turning down every thermostat in the house, the kid is breaking out the door. Just when a woman is beginning to experience the change of life in her early years, the kid is surging with adrenaline and powering his way out. That is a conflict made for trouble. A mother's love can't let go, and the kid can't stand to be contained, and they meet like two locomotives right in the kitchen, and the whole thing blows up. We're having Cain and Abel in our house, Jacob and Esau. My wife and her sister inherited the lake cabin in Minnesota. The murder has not yet happened. But it has been contemplated and planned, and carried out in the mind.

I had a bunch of students over at my house before I retired, and my sister was there. And I came in from—I was getting everything ready, I was in the kitchen, and I wasn't paying attention, I was running late and trying to get everything done, and I came in, and here's my sister sitting and telling my students stories of my sins. With relish. These relationships are inherently tense. You put sinners belly to belly for a lifetime—they took their in-laws and put them together in a family—what do you expect? Most murders happen in families, for obvious reasons. These relationships are typically hostile. If you start saving up your sins and investing them at compound interest, to be realized whenever you have the advantage—"I remember when," and then, "double, double toil and trouble," with this golden boil in the whole—all I have to say is, "You're just like your mother," and you can see the mushroom cloud in the kitchen.

This is how it works. We have sinners, held together by promise. Sinners who share a common narrative that is contested. She's heard my story so many times that she knows where I'm going to take a breath in the story, and she's sick of it. So there's nothing she enjoys more than just a little twitch at the bottom of that that throws the whole story off. And she likes to do that in front of company. So that in mid-flight, just ready to pirouette, maliciously, as though murder is going to erupt on my eyeballs, she leans over and says, "Did they get a good night's sleep?" Absolutely impenitent. For which I quickly tell her, I love her, and I'm going to get even just as quickly.

You see how this works. The forgiveness of sins becomes the impetus to the family and to family love. Thus, absolution becomes as simple as breathing. I spent a lot of my life with Finlanders, the old-time Laestadians, for whom absolution is part of the reservoir every day. They taught me to say what I say to my wife first thing: "God's peace." They taught me to say what I say before we go to sleep: "God's peace." That's the absolution. And so we begin each day, not compounding memories, investing and reinvesting, waiting for the opportunity to finally score, but rather we begin in Christ Jesus. To awaken to the day, to hear the one whom I adore and whom I contest, to hear her say, "God's peace," and enter the day in that. And to come to the end of the day, to lie down together, not to lie with the teeth remembering, "she got me, I'd better even the score just so she knows I'm not going soft—I am getting older, but I can remember"—but to go to sleep. In other words, God's peace is to enter the night in the absolution.

These simple rituals of the day—I never forget when I was serving the sacrament in a little town in Minnesota. They all looked like they were Norwegian, that white-blond hair, the whole church. I was the only black cat in the whole place—I wasn't white then. So they came up before they received the sacrament, and the pastor pronounced the absolution. So they'd come past, with his hand on their head, and he absolved them, and then he went to the next person, and then to the next person. And then there was a whole family, nine kids. The Laestadians can do this—they breed. The pastor and his wife had twenty-seven kids. Twenty-seven kids, and he was forty-eight. Three sets of twins. She'd been pregnant all her life, poor thing. I asked her about the last pregnancies, and she said she had to watch her real closely; she said the kid was going to drop right through her skirt. Just incredible. So here comes this pastor, and he lays his hand on the husband's head, and then on the mother's head, and then each one of them turns to those nine kids. "God's peace. God's peace. God's peace." See, Christ Jesus' story becomes our story in the actual declaration.

I hope you don't send me home reporting that you're weak on the relevance of sanctification. The third group of uses—so, if the law doesn't produce any questions, I'm going to go to the second one.

QUESTION: As a pastor, just like the rest of these guys, I have trouble sometimes finding the right words to share, and a lot of times, whenever I share, I find myself sharing more of a theology of glory than a theology of the cross. And whenever you are talking about rationalizing a disaster, that's our first major reaction, really, to make sense of it all. That's exactly where each parishioner wants to go, every time something happens. And I struggle with—well, I understand, I think I do, conceptually, in my mind, the theology of the cross, but to communicate that in a way that is pastoral oftentimes brings me a little bit of trouble. This particular conference that we go to here, with Doxology and Dr. Senkbeil, Bob, and the others we've heard, has helped me out a lot, to try to understand how to even communicate the theology of the cross. So I don't really have a question, other than, could you—?

NESTINGEN: Yeah. This is the frustration of the pastor, of course. Going in with people who have just been through something life-shaping. The disaster has erupted. And as you say, the first thing that the human heart attacks—it wants to fit it in, right, it wants to bring a resolution. Those resolutions are oftentimes very inhuman. One of my great teachers, with whom it was a privilege of a lifetime to study, was a Jewish rabbi, Emil Fackenheim, who taught at the University of Toronto. I loved it. He escaped from Germany on Kristallnacht. He just got out at the end, and he came to Canada. And Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, two of the great scholars in Canada, got him, even though he was a Jew, a scholarship at St. Michael's College, where I studied. He is just brilliant. He always used to explain the theodicies of the Holocaust—"I can tell you why it had to happen," that favorite way of explaining. He always used to call it "giving costumes to God." "I can explain why Hitler had to do this." You wind up justifying him. And oftentimes, what these explanations do is they wind up justifying death. Just like my father: "I can tell you why God did that to your mother." There are so many theological problems with that one statement, you can't find the end of them. But it makes sense to a lonely heart.

And I think, myself, that the important thing is to let—those statements are flailing at the air. A person is throwing everything they've got, and they're trying to hold on to something, and they can't find anything to hold on to. If you start arguing with the flailing, you're going to get in trouble. You'll just get flailed. But on the other hand, if you don't let the flailing happen, you're not doing the person any favor either. All the time you start to be handing over the goods. "Christ Jesus is the resurrection and the life." These phrases, in which we tend to lose confidence—they're liturgical, and we call them merely liturgical, but they're liturgical in the deepest sense: they're repeated, and they're powerful, and when a person is in that place—

I always remember my dear father-in-law. He was a professor of New Testament. And when he retired, he was convinced that the church had given up the message of the resurrection. He kept saying that. So we were driving down to the funeral of his brother, through weather like this, roads like this, 200 miles in six hours. People from fifteen miles away didn't get there, but we did. And we came driving up to this little white frame church sitting on a hill. And there was the casket—you could see it in the snow, the blowing snow. It opened, the hearse, and they carried the casket in, and they set it up, and the church was warm, and it was all Douglas fir plywood, the pews, the walls, everything orangey, warm. Grandpa had said to me, "I hope we hear the promise of the resurrection. If we don't hear the promise of the resurrection, I think I'm going to stand up myself and just shout it." And the pastor came out and stood by the casket, placed a hand on it, and said, "Now that Sandy was baptized into Christ Jesus, we are here in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection." Grandpa grabbed my leg and he said, "There! There it is."

You see, those things that pastors tend to distrust as canned, standard recipes, artificial liturgical phrases, are full of power. And far better than explanations. Explanations, theodicies, are occasions—you know what you're doing then is moving the art from the Word to words about the Word. That's right. You're leading to unbelief. I'm never happy until the bereaved say, "I can't forgive God for this," and in the next sentence say, "God could never have anything to do with this." Mutually exclusive, completely contradictory, but entirely appropriate.

QUESTION: Maybe this isn't something that's part of the conversation, but it certainly needs to be understood to some degree—"Why did God do this?" Well, he didn't. Satan hates you, wants to kill you.

NESTINGEN: That's exactly it. That's got to be part of this conversation. That's great. Satan is the lord of the flies, the lord of death. Wherever death is, he's been there, just as surely as the law has been there—this evil triumvirate. And to say to somebody, crying out like that, "The devil is getting his due. He did this. He's responsible." That's just great. But then you can't stop there.

QUESTION: In terms of pastoral situations like the one I was talking about here, we tend to try to explain things, and it ends up being a theology of glory. Is it too simple, when you're trying to acknowledge for your parishioners the theology of the cross, simply—is it too simple just to say, just tell the truth about the situation, that it is chaotic, and that's what sin and death are?

NESTINGEN: Right, exactly. That's exactly it. I remember one time we were in class together, and Gerhard Forde had given a wonderful exposition of the theology of the cross. There was a Baptist in the class, and he looked at Gerhard like he'd just fainted. He didn't have a clue. And so this Baptist said to Gerhard, "Well, what happens if you don't feel any pain?" And Gerhard looked at him and said, "Take your pulse." When people cry out against the chaos, the chaos is real. It's the power of the evil one, that chaos, and it's just flying loose. And the temptation is always false theories and false explanations, somebody complaining about the ambiguity of the Word coming to offer something that's ephemeral and stupid. Can you imagine? That's literally ministry with snake oil. But the real stuff says, "This hurts. Christ is greater than your—" It doesn't tonight.

QUESTION: As I was hearing you talk about the woman who confessed her adultery and abortion, and you describe her confessing—I kind of envisioned that person as a few in our congregation, and I just wonder, do you have a suggestion how we get more of our parishioners to commit suicide, in the sense you mean—to die that death?

NESTINGEN: Sure. Good. Do you want me to repeat that question? Since I described the death of the young woman who came under confession, the question is, how can we have more people in our congregations "commit suicide" in this appropriate way? First of all, the idea that there's no appetite for the absolution is just false, right? It's just complete garbage. And it's peddled by theologians who have never been in a country-western tavern, for example. But take a plunge. Ask your barber. Talk to the beauty operator. Ask a cab driver if he ever hears people's stories. Or here's a place—watch your fellow passengers on an airplane at the first turbulence.

For years and years, I traveled in church work. Every weekend, I'd preach everywhere. Corner to corner. And so I'd teach all week and then preach all weekend, and sometimes I'd go five or six weeks in a row without a day off. And finally, I realized that part of the problem was I was wearing my collar on the plane. Because I'd get on the plane and sit down and start off to sleep, and then the guy next to me would start. So I stopped wearing my collar on airplanes.

I was preaching in Savannah, Georgia. Great, great, Ascension Lutheran Church—just a fabulous church, I love that place. They'd had a pastor in 1869 who committed adultery with a parishioner, and they tied them to the door of the church and horse-whipped them. Simple people. Their previous claim to fame was that John Wesley had paid a particular visit to a widow in Savannah, and so I thought the Lutherans would wink at that stage. Anyway, my wife was with me. We'd gotten tickets late, so we had flown to Charlotte, and then we went back, and we got there late, and I couldn't change my shirt, and we got to Charlotte, and I went hustling into the men's room and put on a fresh shirt. And then we got to the gate, and we couldn't sit together, so—there's a rule that the person who comes and sits in the middle is going to be bigger. So we were sitting in the seat like heads on a pimple, just squeezed. Terrible. And we took off.

The guy next to me says, "You're a pastor." Then he starts in, and he starts confessing. He was a Vietnam vet. And he'd never—it was like—one thing led to another, and pretty soon it was just pouring out of him, like a poor man, in an airplane, of all places. And he's down way deep in that confession. He got done. I said, "Have you confessed the sins that are most troublesome to you?" He said, "I didn't know I was confessing." Which is most of the time true. And I said, "You have made a confession. And I am under obligation to the Lord Jesus, when I hear a confession, to say the following." And I stood up. The plane was in a landing pattern. I put my hand on his head, and I said, "In the name of Jesus Christ, I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sins." He split like a melon. Just wept and wept. I sat holding him as he went. He said, "That's the best thing I ever heard in my life. That's the best thing I ever heard." I said, "Tell you what, I've been entrusted with this Word. I'll speak it to anyone. Here's my card." But I said, "I have two questions." He was a—so I said, "I saw you changing shirts." He said, "Yeah, I was a lawyer." And, "I saw you with that book, and I knew you were an old priest." Well, once people know, there's nothing they won't trust you with. They start to come.

And we'll talk—I want to talk specifically to the pastors about this issue, because it's very important.