Forgiveness and the Unfolding Future – Dr. James Nestingen

Transcript (edited for readability).

I had a chance to see my words of thanks to the pastors. I just want to echo that with all of them. I'm sure you're aware that the ELCA is in the process of committing suicide. It has destroyed itself and left this membership at large, so that it's — I've argued that it's no longer a church, but a social justice club. The result is that those of us who believe ourselves defined by the Scripture and the Confessions are really at sea, and we don't know quite where to turn. The idea that our church would do this would never have occurred to us. And we're disoriented and confused and mad and circling.

So this, for me, has been an unimaginable blessing. I have not heard one reference to homosexuality. And I'm just thrilled with the spirit that I hear. One of my old premises — I used to say you can smell where the gospel has been, and why this place smells like roses. It's just fabulous. Thank you ever so much for your kind hospitality. I have loved running with him for a long time, and I've made new friends among you, and I'm really grateful for that.

So, one of my dear old friends, who's also got Parkinson's disease — we sit together, we go to baseball games together. We were at spring training in Arizona, and we went to nine ballgames in five days. That's amazing. It was paradise. He's in the wheelchair, and it's over — we buy the cheapest tickets possible, and then we go right for the most expensive seats in the place, right behind home plate. So great. And for a long time we've been talking about starting a new congregation together, and we've been picking out names for it. One of the names is "Adversarial Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran." No — I'm founding a synod called "Descendants Evangelical Lutheran Synod."

But unfortunately I have to go there myself — tomorrow I have to preach four times and lecture twice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the midst of this conflict. I was just saying that I think the good Lord gave me this respite to prepare me for what is surely to come. My wife is on the committee for forming a new Lutheran church, and when I talked to her last night, she said she'd been at a meeting in Indianapolis, and she said that the officials of the ELCA are now resorting to force against the minority, against the opposition. There have been all kinds of incidents where coercion has been applied, and now we've learned that officials of the ELCA had gone to the African churches associated with the ELCA and told them that if they didn't cooperate on this issue, they would receive no more money. I could say a lot about that, but it's so transparent, it's unnecessary. Praise be to God — the leadership of the African churches said, "Take your money and go." So what's happened, of course, is that the Africans are leading us. The Ethiopians, the Tanzanians.

And my wife flew home from Indianapolis, and she talked with the pastor of one of the Eritrean congregations in St. Paul, and she said, "He confessed Christ to me." She was just bubbling with joy. It doesn't get better than that.

So, anyway — thanks. Bo Giertz used to say, with Katharina von Bora in mind, that your spouse is God's face for you. His spouse is God's face. What an incredible thing to say. The family, with the parents at the center, is one of the hands or channels that God uses to reach out and shape the unfolding of life in us, so that each moment that comes, comes under His care, comes to us in the context of the family, and coming to us in the context of the family, shapes us, moves us, drives us, makes life.

Now this can be kind of threatening. There's the Charles Dickens character — the woman who practiced telescopic philanthropy. The further away the object of her charity was, the easier it was to be merciful. But when it's close to home — when it's the one in your bed, when it's the kids at the table, or when it's the adult children coming home — being shaped can be terrifying. Very threatening. Because they are so dear, and they've got so much information. They know the illusions, they know the slips, they know way too much, and they have memories to go with them.

So you can think of this as the wrath of God, if you wish. It can also be the rest of God. I mean, dealing with one of your adult kids who is thinking through what you could have done better, and what you didn't do better, and how you failed — that's about as tough a gift as there is. Because in our families we experience just exactly what Luther speaks of in the explanation to the Lord's Prayer: the hindering and defeating of every evil scheme and purpose of the devil, the world, and our sinful self. We memorize those words — there's smoke all over them. That hindering and defeating, it's God's hand at work in us, and it's fiercely faithful. It can kill you, and it does, because your adversary is also your redeemer. The one who's carrying you into new life does so by sharing the death like this, so that He can grant you a resurrection like this. And so we're smack dab up against it in these situations, and, of course, we start thinking about ourselves, and we start seeing ourselves in this life, and it becomes pretty painful.

On the other hand, marriage and the family are the points where we're likely to meet a dimension of the absolution and forgiveness that we commonly overlook — almost always. When we talk about the forgiveness of sins, we talk about the past. We think of forgiveness as therapeutic, as helping us come to terms with our broken narrative, so that the narrative resolves in Christ. The reference is to what has come before.

I haven't told you many stories about the Finns. They've just come in on the side, but I've spent my whole life around Finlanders. Norwegians and Finns get along, of course, because they have a common enemy — the Swedes. They're cute when they're small. I grew up with Finnish kids, and, you know, my son is professor of Finnish at the University of Washington, which is a good joke. We spent a lot of time up there. And I have been associated with several of the Finnish theologians, including Tuomo Mannermaa and the others who have been working on the theosis theme. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but I really like those guys, and we spent a lot of time together.

So one time we were lecturing together — I'd seen him before, and I'd been over in Finland working with his doctoral students. That was a lot of fun. He had a great bunch of doctoral students, he lined them all up, and I spent a couple weeks working with them, and then he sent me up into the Arctic just for fun. So I was up in Rovaniemi, way up north of the Arctic Circle, in the middle of winter — Santa Claus's home airport. That put things in perspective. We landed, and as we circled, I wondered where the airport was, and when the plane came down there was ten feet of snow on either side of the runway. It was just wild. Santa Claus's home airport — you could see all of it.

Anyway, Mannermaa and I were lecturing together, and I made this distinction between therapeutic forgiveness and eschatological forgiveness. Therapeutic forgiveness is forgiveness for some loss of self that took place in the past. Eschatological forgiveness is the forgiveness that opens up the future, shaping it. Mannermaa had one of his great graduate students — I just love him — argue with me. In public, of course. It's a great sport. He argued that there's no therapeutic forgiveness whatsoever — that it's all eschatological. That when Luther is talking about forgiveness, he's not referring at all to the past, but exclusively to the future.

I just love the argument. I mean, I can bet on those ponies, in adverse wind, because it was just great. Mannermaa, you know — have you heard American Finns talk? That slow Finnish accent — he said, "I'm very pleased with Seppälä's argument, but I think he's wrong." He was referring to his graduate student. But you get the idea: the preposition Luther uses is consistently oriented toward the future. You see that best in the language you know by heart, in the Catechism: "where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation." See — where do they come? In the future. So that the future is coming to us in the absolution. The future is being laid open in the absolution. The future is being bestowed on us in the absolution. And that is so much the primary dimension of forgiveness that you could make the argument the other dimension isn't there at all. It's way different from the way we treat it commonly.

So what I want to do is finish up by talking about forgiveness and the future. We'll do two things. First, we'll look at the way this happens in families, because there, in God's face to you, you see the forgiveness of sins opening up, where the future is coming to you out of His hands — in these situations, just because they are inherently conflicted.

Our situations — the old Scandinavian marriage service had this line: "Though by reason of sin many a cross is laid thereon." I used to just love that. "And though by reason of sin many a cross is laid thereon, God does not abandon this estate." Do you remember that language? Was that in the old Missouri Synod hymnal? No — it was in the old Swedish hymnal. That was the old marriage service. So realistic, two feet on the ground. You've got a couple standing there in front of you who think they're in heaven, and they're going to be in hell shortly. So the pastor says: "And though, by reason of sin, many a cross has been laid thereon, God does not abandon this estate." That's a promise.

So we know: skin to skin, there's going to be trouble real fast, and the conflict's going to be rough. And so God works forgiveness into the very conditioning of the relationship. Maybe you've done this — there's an oil we use in the North called Norwegian oil. It used to be whale oil; I don't know where it comes from now, but you condition your boots with it, and you work it into the leather. You put it on with your hand so that it warms, and you work it into the leather, and you can feel the leather loosening up — in an old pair of hunting boots that should have been thrown away years ago, but you can't stand to give up on because you have so many memories in those boots. They stiffen up, and then you get the oil, and you rub it in, and then they loosen up, turn supple, and get you through another season.

So, okay — forgiveness comes to us out of the future to condition the relationship itself. It becomes the oil, the generosity, the kind of mutual commitment that makes it possible to live together.

Secondly, then, we should conclude by looking over the shoulder of our spouse and the family to see what Christ is ultimately up to in this work. The future does happen — think of the hymns we've been singing. I sang those hymns as a child, and, of course, the ELCA has been fond of shopping around for what we call "Jesus schlock." It shouldn't be profane to say it, but it's nonsense set to a melody. I mean, I'm going to wash out my mouth afterward, because it's so sacred, and yet so empty. No blood, nothing particular, no Jesus — just me, looking in the mirror, telling all people how much I love him. The world dies on the voice of man, his proclamations and his wishful thinking. There you go. So we should turn away from that.

The best way to see this future dimension of forgiveness is to remember the people to whom you've turned at times when your marriage has been under the most strain — the people you were able to lean on, and really trust.

I was thinking about several stories. My mother was bipolar. Several of her aunts were bipolar — several of them. My mother, and then my youngest sister, is bipolar as well — a bipolar alcoholic, which is — if you want adventures, there you go. The family immigrated from Norway, came through Sioux Falls, settled in southern North Dakota, and then went up to Saskatchewan on the railroads, when the land opened for homesteading around 1905. My grandfather and my great-grandfather were both — they were church musicians in Norway, and they were great musicians. Still, of course, the organ was a pump organ, and the hymnal was the old Concordia hymnal, often enough — which is barely a hymnal. Somewhere between sweet Jesus schlock and something decent. Once in a while a gem in there, but not often.

So we sang, and we sang. My grandfather married my grandmother — she was a large woman. She told me when she was dying that she was under 180 pounds for the first time since she was 13. So she came in the economy package. Her father had been a drunk, my great-grandfather, and she had lived with that. It was in the conditioning of a marriage, and it was hard — it was really tough. My grandpa was a gentle musician; we would sit and listen to Bach cantatas on the radio together when I was a child — he and my great-grandfather. They would smoke a cigar, and we'd listen to the cantata. I still listen to the cantatas every Sunday because of it. That wasn't our life, that music, but it was hard.

Grandma didn't like to be touched. She suspected my grandpa of infidelity, even though there wasn't a chance. And so it became extraordinarily difficult, and my grandpa was never unfaithful. She was the most wonderful woman I ever met, but she was hard as nails too. She would hire herself out to harvest sections of land — a square mile — by hand. She was just, you know, a powerhouse, a wonderful person, just rock-hard. And so gentle, in a way you couldn't imagine — all of the contradictions gathered together.

But Grandpa had a sister. Because of my mother's ill health, I would oftentimes spend the whole summer up in Saskatchewan with them, and Grandpa would take me with him. I was his oldest grandson, and he was inordinately proud of me, and I loved him dearly. I learned Scripture, I learned hymns — it was fabulous. But we would oftentimes go over to Esther's — that was her name, but we always called her Esther. She was also a large woman. People in my family don't come any other way — short, but voluminous, with breasts like huge, swaying sacks riding in the waves. It was just enormous. And full of love. She had lost her husband and raised two kids alone, and she was there.

So Grandpa and I would go — Grandpa would take me with him, we'd go out to see the crops, and we would stop then at Esther's. And the two of them would sit, by the hour, just in the joy of one another's company. The language was mixed — it was Norwegian, then it was English, then it was the combination of Norwegian and English spoken by immigrants, and all that we know. They didn't know which language they were speaking, and they really didn't much care, but they knew to whom they spoke. And so that was just kind of a well of forgiveness in that room. They both knew the troubles they were carrying, but that was safe. And what was utterly safe was — there was no point at which Esther was going to say, "You're just going to have to get over this," and there was no point at which my grandpa was going to say, "Esther, it's your fault." The relationship was beyond judgment. And because it was beyond judgment, there was a kind of intimacy and safety there. That's the forgiveness of sins, conditioning.

I hope, bless your hearts, that you can see this in an old couple in your care. I've been joking for years — Norwegians breed for life. And so we've got all of these long-term marriages — people have been married 50, 60, 70 years. It's so fun. Carolyn and I have got 42. My great-grandparents had 65. We had a couple in our congregation in Oregon — she just died at the age of 90; they'd been married 47 years. This was her second marriage — her first husband was killed in the Second World War, and she remarried a suitable time after. She died, and I just found out last night that Kevin, her husband — we knew that was coming, of course, because we've seen this so many times. Sometimes the wife dies and the husband isn't far behind; sometimes the husband dies and the wife, who's always, of course, been stronger anyway, lives on for a suitable time. But oftentimes one goes, and the other goes soon after, because they're so woven together.

When you go over to serve these people as their pastor, when you sit with them in their homes, you see just what forgiveness does when it's in the conditioning. Because their whole life has become liturgical in the deep sense — their movements are choreographed, their sense of one another is so profound, and it just opens up in blessing. To sit with them is to taste the future. It's to taste what's coming. Because they're beyond judgment. They're, in Luther's sense of the term, lawless. They're lawless in the sense that their love for one another has so carried them past themselves that all they see is one another anymore. That's God's face. When you see that, you know it.

I had another set of grandparents, in Wisconsin, on my dad's side. They fought all their lives — bitter, wild conflicts, scared me to death. I had never seen anything like it. My dad always complained of it, and I always thought he was exaggerating until one time I was with them, playing Scrabble. Like a storm before it breaks. I knew I was in trouble when Grandpa had 113 points after the third tile. And then he laid a tile worth almost that much — used all seven letters, triple word score, all the rest of it. My grandma's name was Inger, and her name was — well, you can guess which nationality they were. So she says, "Inger, Inger, that's not a word." "It was a word a week ago Tuesday when you played it." "You said we could look it up." "It's not in the dictionary." "It's in the 1913 dictionary." They had two. It was in the 1913 dictionary. So he looked it up, and there it was. And they went to war — well into their 80s, both of them. And I'm standing at the table, holding onto it, and just screaming inside, "My whole life has been like this. Grandpa, when is this ever going to end?"

It won't end. It won't end. My grandma came from a family — Grandpa was the only man who survived marrying one of those women. They were all praying mantises — the other three destroyed their husbands, reduced them to shells. Grandpa alone was able to stand up to her, and she was still working on him, no better. So they fought, screaming, hollering — I got up and left, and they didn't even know I was going. I smoked cigarettes in those days, which they hated, so I went out and stood on the step and smoked a cigarette. They didn't even know. Then I snuck in — they had one of those double back staircases, you know, that goes up in a section — so I went up. I went right past them and went up the stairs to my room. I smoked another cigarette out the window. They hated that even more. Didn't see a thing.

All of a sudden it was quiet downstairs, and I thought, "They've gone — something's happened." So I sneak down the stairs, you know, all those creaky old wooden steps — creak, creak — sneaking, all right. And I got around the corner of the steps, and I leaned down, undid the latch, and pushed the door open ever so slightly. And then I heard bedsprings, creaking rhythmically. It had all been foreplay. They were in their 80s — banging away at one another, filthy dirty, consuming one another with joy. It was just incredible.

So when Grandpa died — they both had cancer. They made a deal that neither one of them would ever go to the hospital. They hated it — the humiliation. Grandpa had Parkinson's, and he was taking the first L-DOPA medication, and so his sexual appetites had been properly stimulated. We went to see him in the hospital once, and he came running down the hallway, and I thought, "Good night, Grandpa's never been this glad to see me — I wonder what's going on," when he went right past me and grabbed Carolyn and gave her a kiss she's never forgotten. My grandpa. So — they were both humiliated by it, and they made a deal that they would never go to the hospital.

Grandpa was lying on the couch, taking a nap after lunch, when he had a heart attack. He rolled off the couch onto the floor. Grandma went to the kitchen table and got her Scripture — she sat down and began to read the Psalms, one after another. And when the grocery man came, he said, "What in the world's going on? Your husband's on the floor!" "Don't call the doctor. Everything's fine." They finally talked her into leaving, and then Grandma called the ambulance. The doctors told my dad and his brothers later that Grandpa had died in the ambulance. When Grandma heard this, she got real upset — she whipped around on each one of the family and said, "You don't suppose Inger knows I called the doctor?" She was scared to death.

There was forgiveness conditioning there, and the condition was rough, was hard. They were both classic Type A's. They were both determined to have their way. They married at 18 in a red-hot heat, and they fought the rest of their lives. It was just clashing. Different form, same thing — a muscular, powerful type of conditioning, where divorce was unacceptable, but murder was always a possibility. They were right there, close enough. But had it not been for the forgiveness of sins, one or the other undoubtedly would have taken place.

Well, you see how this works — that when we see these deep relationships, whether in utter peace or in the midst of awful conflict, when we see this conditioning, we're getting a sight of the resurrection under the sign of the cross. That is, in the midst of the loss of self, in the midst of a conflict, in the midst of the trouble, Christ Jesus is shaping, through the conflict, in the strife, through the peace, in the confidence, shaping the relationship in such a way that even while the trouble is bearing down, hope is arising.

Alvin Rogness, who used to be president of Luther Seminary, wrote a book called Sign of Hope in the Thunder of Spring — Signs of hope in the thunder of spring. That is, there is the thunder, the conflict — Grandma at home worrying whether Grandpa might be sitting without heaven; Grandpa at home wondering, "Am I always going to survive another year without getting eaten alive?" There is the thunder. But amidst the thunder, there's spring — bloom, resurrection under the sign of the cross.

Now, the resurrection does not annul the cross. We have to say this for the sake of our Calvinist neighbors, who always want to turn their problems into possibilities and crow about all they have achieved. We're getting down to the irreducible — we're getting past all this talk like there are easy solutions to problems like this. You don't talk to the daughter of an alcoholic about being soft and receptive to her husband — he is the joy of her life and her crucifixion at the same time, and she's going to handle him the way she has to handle him just to survive. You don't talk to a woman like my grandma about respecting her husband. "Well, I'll beat the crap out of him." Respect? Obedience? Give me a break. "You think I want to obey him? That's all." You're not dealing with stuff here that's going to yield — this is just delusional. You're dealing with the stuff of life.

But what happens in the midst of it, under the sign of — the raging battle, which turns out to be foreplay — did you hear that? There you go: signs of hope in the thunder of spring. The whole thing is breaking open, just here, under the cross. Christ is reaching to us out of the future, and He's reaching in through the Word, of course — where there is forgiveness of sins, there is life and salvation. But with the Word He's shaping and conditioning us. We're rough and tough and dry, and He's softening us, so that we begin to move, and to move freely. It's in these deep and hard relationships of life where He builds a bond that simply will not let us go.

You guys have been there, new pastors — you and your new wives have seen this too. There's no privilege in life greater — I can't imagine a privilege greater than sitting with these long-married couples when the end comes to them, and listening to their litanies of thanksgiving. "He was so good to me." "She has been my life." You hear this stuff just kind of bubbling over. That's just part of the joy of it. And when you actually get to see it, when you catch a glimpse of this, it's as though Christ Jesus is pulling back the clouds and letting you look into heaven. You've got a foretaste of it right there.

Because forgiveness is not only — it's gone way beyond therapy. It's gone way beyond a limping narrative that's broken and needs to be fixed. It's gone way beyond that — it's taken over, it's become the shaping stuff. Your baptism now has been completed, as that beautiful hymn we sang this morning put it. When my mother was dying of cancer, I read Luther's treatise on baptism every single day. It started in her hip, then it started in her breast — this was in 1977, before they had the good treatments. By the time she died, there were cancer cells all over her body — her brain, her hips, everything.

We'd go and — she was convicted of her unbelief, and we'd preach, my brother and I, we'd preach and preach and preach to her, and then I'd go home and read Luther's Treatise on Baptism, and we'd go over and preach again, and I'd go home and read through the pages on baptism again. Death is the completion of our baptism. When we die, Christ is finally done with us — the old self. And the new self arises, in the force of the resurrection, in the joy of the resurrection. You can hear that in the hymns — you can hear that in them, just rising up out of them, picking us up to carry us into the day. That's as good as it gets.

So death cannot finally destroy. I will say — God gave you a middle finger so you could express your opinion of death. It's most appropriately used there. Luther used to say this: "To be sure, death, you will have me. But Christ Jesus will shove His fingers down your throat and force you to vomit me up." I just love it — He will spit me out, and He will take me with Him.

Here, now, forgiveness has expanded. It's multiplied, it's compounded, it's overflowed. The heavenly flood is carrying — it encompasses, it surrounds, it buoys, it carries, it sustains all the way through, so that there's nothing left but the forgiveness of sin. That's as good as it gets. From here, then, we're looking into heaven — we're seeing, now, into eternity. On this side, we're catching a glimpse of the other side.

There's an old Finn, a dear friend, who shows up in my classes — I didn't know him well. His name was Melvin, from Seattle, and he was a school principal. He married a woman who had schizophrenia, really quite severe, and they had three kids who all had PhDs. And in the end, with her insanity, she had to be hospitalized for her whole life, really. And so he was a widower, and he was looking for someone to help him — his pastor — reach him with the gospel.