The Luthers at Home – Dr. James Nestigen

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be back with you, folks, and to meet some other of you folks. To tell you the truth, I don't like the lecture at four o'clock in the afternoon. I always remember, I had a friend who was president of the University of Oslo. He said he had a recurrent nightmare. He dreamed he was giving a lecture, and he woke up and he was. If it ever happens to me, it'll be at four o'clock in the afternoon. So I'm going to ask you to work with me. You've got an outline. Lecturing from an outline in the possession of your hearers is a little bit like appearing in your underwear — you know what I'm going to do before I do it. So we're going to play with this outline, that is. An outline is like music to a musician: you play it, and you play with it, and the more you play with it, the more fun it becomes. So I'm hoping that we don't get lost in the notes, but that we can have some fun with this.

I grew up in a parsonage, and you'll understand that's why I have a lifelong love affair with jazz. There's something about growing up in a parsonage that makes you appreciative of jazz — probably the fact that it's forbidden fruit. But coming to Kansas City, flying down here, I was thinking of Count Basie and all sorts of other great players, Jay McShann, and above all, Charlie Parker. You put a sheet of notes in front of those guys and you just never knew what was going to come, but you knew it'd be a lot of fun. So we're going to go after this outline that way, and we're going to see if we can't play a little bit. Goodness only knows we've got a topic that's made for it with Luther and Katie. I mean, there are some people who think Luther never had a thought that was not written down. He had a printing press in the basement, and probably that was too much temptation. You can just imagine what would have happened if he had a Xerox machine, or the internet. At one point, three-quarters of all the books in print in German were written by Martin Luther. Three-quarters of all of them. So you get an idea. And of course, Catherine von Bora was a character in her own right — an absolutely splendid woman, whom we remember not as Mrs. Martin Luther, but as Catherine von Bora, and that for a reason. So we've got some fun people to get acquainted with.

You know some of the stories I'm going to tell, but that's not going to stop me, and never has. I discovered that my wife keeps a chart of how many times I tell stories, and I resent it like mad. "Same joke," she said one day. So that's a little hard, you know. So you know some of these stories — but I bet you I know some that you don't, though, and we'll play with that first of all. And then, before you doze off, or start thinking about a pre-supper appetizer, we will talk a little bit about repentance and faith, and the way Luther has relocated repentance and faith in the life of the believer. That is critically important. We understand repentance in a very different way than it's currently portrayed in American public life. Repentance is not something you do, but something that happens to you. You, above all, don't do it by going away someplace else. It happens in your home, with your kids, with your wife, your husband. It happens in your congregation, on your job. It happens in the course of everyday life. So we're going to pay attention to that a little bit too.

Luther was forty or forty-one, something like that, early forties, when he and Catherine von Bora got married. It wasn't his idea, it was hers. He thought a little bit about it. His father and his mother had put a lot of pressure on him about it. His father was profoundly disappointed in his decision to go to the monastery and reminded him of the Fourth Commandment repeatedly. That undoubtedly was on Luther's mind when the possibility presented itself, but he couldn't have imagined how the possibility was presented. Catherine von Bora came to him wearing a perfume called eau de herring. Luther had written on vocation and challenged the basic assumptions of monastic life. Catherine von Bora was living in a nunnery at Nimbschen, not so far from Wittenberg. She was one of fourteen who wrote to Luther and asked for help escaping. There was no other way to get out. So Luther made arrangements with the man who delivered pickled herring to the convent — he took in fourteen barrels of pickled herring and brought out fourteen nuns. How would you like to go to your debutante party wearing herring? When I was working in Ethiopia a couple years ago, they taught me to roast coffee. They said one of the big advantages of roasting your own coffee is that you get to drink it and you get to wear it all day. Herring would probably have the same effect, I think.

At any rate, Catherine was one of the fourteen, and she was the last. Luther announced that these women had arrived, and he prayed that they would be able to find husbands, lest worse befall — there were worse possibilities. So he married them all off. He had an arrangement for Catherine to marry, and she rejected the man because he was too old. Luther was a little exasperated by this and said to her, "Then who'll you have?" She said, "You, or Amsdorf." Luther had never dreamed of that possibility for quite some time. So he said, "All right, you're on." This is not an American description of how people fall in love, right? They married the way two-thirds of people all over the world marry — they married and learned to love one another afterwards. It was a contractual arrangement, hardly anything romantic about it, until afterwards. Afterwards they learned to love one another profoundly. So it was negotiated, and they shared a wonderful life together.

Neither one of them was easy. Luther was accustomed, as he said poetically, to working seventy-two hours at a crack and falling into bed in his monastic habit, which he still wore, befouled with sweat. He stunk. And Catherine was strong enough to have her own mind and to deliver her own mind. My favorite story about her is that in the early 1530s, Luther fell into a deep depression. He disappeared into a study and didn't come out for several days. When he came out, Catherine and all the children were wearing black. Luther said, "Who died?" Catherine said, "God died." Luther exploded in German: "This is impossible! God cannot die! This doesn't happen!" She said, "Then why are you behaving yourself so faithlessly?" She hit him, and he realized it — she was a strong woman who could hold her own ground.

So we'll look first at the adventures of the Luther household, as we've already started to do, and then we'll go into the marriage a little bit. Catherine von Bora was sent to the monastery by her father. Blended families are a historical problem — this is nothing new in the twentieth century. They say blended families take two, three years to settle down to just the normal level of conflict. And the way this was handled in the Middle Ages was to get rid of the surplus. So when Catherine's father lost his wife, he gave Catherine to the nuns at Nimbschen. She was fourteen. She had no choice about it — she was parked there. She adapted quickly.

If you've read the Brother Cadfael mysteries, I hope some of you have — you know about the role of the monasteries and convents in maintaining medicine. Brother Cadfael was the pharmacist or doctor in his monastery, and Catherine von Bora had the same position in the nunnery. She knew the medical lore that was preserved by her group of nuns, and so she became, in effect, the doctor in the area. It wasn't sophisticated. George Ferrell used to say, "I don't know what the doctors brag about — they lose all their patients in the end anyway." I mean, they died a little faster, that's all, I suppose. But they did have medication that could relieve common ailments, and Catherine had that function in her nunnery, and she moved up in the community. She was well respected as a nun.

Luther himself, as you know, came from an upwardly mobile family. The Luthers, or the Luders, as they were called — L-U-D-E-R — were not particularly well known, but they were ambitious. Old Hans Luther was an independent miner, and he pretty soon was able to buy a blast furnace, and he was starting to move up. He thought it would be nice to have a lawyer in the family. He went looking and found another surplus daughter — the daughter of an outstanding academic family who had not done well in courtship. For some reason, the more gifted the woman, the more difficult courtship becomes. There are a lot of very gifted women who never find husbands. There may be a reason for that — I'm not sure. My wife likes to speculate, and I'm afraid I'm not always the beneficiary of her speculations either. But you see the picture: this was a very intelligent woman, unmarried, and old Hans Luther, founder thinking of promoting his business — they became the parents of Martin. So we have two extraordinarily gifted people: Catherine von Bora, the daughter of a nobleman, and Hans Luther, the son of an upwardly mobile family, famous for a number of academics and mayors. These two happened to find one another beside the pickle barrel, and finding one another there, they married.

Now, you know how voluble Luther was — his mouth never stopped, his pen was always working. So we know lots more about the early days of their marriage than we really should. My kids say TMI — too much information. We have letters from Luther to a friend speaking of his penetration of Katie. We don't have similar letters from Katie, probably because she knew enough to keep her mouth shut. But Luther rejoiced following this event to find pigtails on his pillow, and rejoiced too in having made the angels laugh and the devils weep. This is one of the differences between our time and medieval times — marriages are consummated in private, generally. I did conduct one wedding in which I received a call later in the evening from the wedding bed. That was TMI. I hope I never get another call like that. They told me that they were joined when they called. I would have preferred to have had that left in my imagination, actually — and not even there, right? But you know that when a psalm speaks of the sun coming like a bridegroom out of the tent in the morning, strutting, proud of himself, radiant with joy — here is the sun — you know that everybody knows what's going on in that tent, right? And you know too, when you hear a song, that the songs report the bridegroom's shout, that they've been listening. And if you don't know, I will tell you, though you might regret it, that the sheets were generally held out for public examination. So this was much more a public event then than it is now as a private event.

My father remarried. My mother died when she was fifty-six, and my father, who had enjoyed her best friend previously, married her. And his mother-in-law in the new marriage was an oppression — an extremely pious old Swede, punctual and rigid. And whenever she went anywhere, she always carried her own set of sheets. So when she stayed overnight with someone, she would remake the bed with her own sheets, and in the morning put the original sheets back on the bed again. I don't know that this is recommended by Emily Post or Amy Vanderbilt — it seems to me a little excessive, and to my father too. So they were visiting an old Finlander, a cousin up north of Lake Michigan, and old Edith announced to the hostess that they had brought their own sheets along, and that she shouldn't worry, that Edith would change the sheets. And the old Finn looked at her and said, "What, are you still kids that you mess up the sheets?" — which was enough to blow a pious old woman's mind. Kind of fun, entirely appropriate, you know?

Anyway, you don't need any more of that — you have an idea. It took some adjustment on both of their parts. You'd have to say they were both type-A personalities — strong, self-determined, eager, goal-directed, hard-driving people. And there was a little friction in the house that shows up around the edges — sometimes a lot of friction, but probably fiction too, of course.

So they begin to have children quite rapidly, six of them all together, and the household responsibilities started to multiply. The Elector, Frederick the Wise, gave them the Black Cloister, Luther's monastery, for a wedding present. So if you've ever been to Wittenberg and seen the Black Cloister, you know the size of this building — it was a small dormitory. And so they started to fill it with children, but even that was too much for them, so they invited houseguests. It became a hotel. People came from all over to talk to Luther, and Catherine von Bora hosted them at the house. Six children, plus innumerable guests, plus it was a medical facility — her gifts for medicine were well known in the community, and sick people often came and stayed at the house. Students moved into the home with them, so Luther's lecture hall was right there, and his study was right there, and the bedrooms were right there, and there was also room for students to stay. They lived in the house, they were often at the table. So Catherine had that whole house to look after, plus all of those guests to take care of.

So she started to expand. You know, famously, that Luther bragged about her beer — she was brewmistress of the city. She inherited the brewing license for the town with the Black Cloister, and so Luther was able to convince the city council to prevent people from dumping garbage in the river on Tuesdays, because Tuesdays Catherine drew water to make beer. So she was brewing, and she was a winemaker. And in order to get protein, the Luthers lived routinely on deer — that was one of their standard sources of meat — but they also had fish ponds where Catherine raised carp. And pretty soon she started expanding, and she bought an acreage just outside of Wittenberg. And then that proved inadequate, so she bought a farm in the community of Zulsdorf. And Luther joked endlessly about "Lord Kate of Zulsdorf" — Kate and Kette in German come very close together, and Kette means chains, so he joked about her as his Kette, his Kate. And Catherine was able to build that farm into a going concern, to supply food for the table and to have stuff to sell in town in addition. She's really a powerhouse of a woman.

You get an idea of her effectiveness when you look at the probate when Luther died. Luther was compulsively generous. He himself wrote that anything you have that is not used for the benefit of your neighbor is stolen, and so he would give things away liberally, without consulting Catherine. One of the wonderful letters of Luther is to a friend who's getting married — of course, there are some salacious details there that we needn't go into, I've risked that already, so I'm not going to get burned twice — but at the beginning of the letter he says, "I'm giving you a vase for a wedding present that was given to me by this authority, and I'm sure you and your wife will enjoy it." And at the end of the letter he writes, "I'm sorry, Catherine found this letter, and she's hidden the vase. I'm not able to give it to you." You couldn't guess, huh? Lots of fun.

So you know that their economic well-being was due to Catherine and not Luther. You know that. This is like all of this talk about the husband being the lord of the house and so on — Catherine would let him talk till he was blue in the face about himself being the head of the house, but she ran the finances, and he couldn't do a thing without talking to her. Old Ernest Schwiebert — you remember that great biography of Luther, I love it still. His son became one of the great trout-fishing writers in English, Ernest Schwiebert. And old Ernie Schwiebert counted up Luther's estate — this was in 1950 — when Luther died, his estate was worth $300,000. If you think of the economy, that's at least a million, probably a little bit more, and that's all Catherine. The Black Cloister is a big part of it — they got that for free — but Catherine's property, her farm, Lord Kate's farm, was also a big part of it. They were able, selling wine and beer to thirsty people and running a minor hotel and the medical hospital — they made it, and they did fairly well at it.

Unfortunately, when Charles V's Spanish troops came north into Wittenberg, they came right across the farm at Zulsdorf, and they left it in ruins — they absolutely destroyed it. So Catherine went from financial security to poverty that fast. So the last years of her life were spent in some difficulty. She had nursed Luther through the last years of his life. She was worried sick about him. In one famous letter, Luther describes his arrival in the town of Eisleben, where he'd gone to reconcile two nobles who were feuding. When he arrived, he said a brick fell out of the wall and landed in his wagon, and he says to Catherine, "I'm sure if you would worry a little bit more, next time it will hit me." He died there in Eisleben. His last words were, "Wir sind Bettler, hoc est verum" — "We are beggars, this is the truth." And Catherine von Bora's last words were, "I will stick to Christ like a bird to a twig." I will stick to Christ like a bird to a twig. Two great people, two extraordinarily gifted people.

One of the great sadnesses of their life was the loss of a daughter — their daughter Magdalena died just at the age of eleven, and it just about killed both of them. As you know, the death of a child is one of the deep crucifixions that can happen to a couple — lots of marriages founder on the loss of a child. It's also part of the sadness that none of the children became believers. Here they had Luther for their confirmation teacher, and Catherine von Bora — one of the great women of the faith, both of them full of Christ Jesus — but unbelief stalks the parsonage just as it stalks any home. And so we look at the records of the children, and they just wander off, prodigal, without return.

So you see the great joy, the great achievement, the kind of ribald joyousness of this household. You see the contribution that they made economically, socially, politically, in all kinds of ways, but you see also the crucifixion that happened in this family. And of course, Luther's death, prolonged as it was, particularly through the 1540s, must have been for Catherine a daily torture. He was so sick and so crazy in his illness that she had not only his health to worry about, but his reputation. It really got to be wild. So we remember them with thanks. Thankfully, they were sinners, and they confessed their sins publicly. So we don't speak of them as morally self-transcendent — we speak of them as fit for Christ Jesus, as they describe themselves. That's the truth.

Well, when we look at this rhythm — in the first part, a rhythm of transcendent joy and crucifixion, a rhythm of loss and gain, a rhythm of dying and rising — it helps to interpret Luther's explanation of the fourth question concerning baptism in the Small Catechism. Now, I know that Kolb and Wengert's translation has been criticized by some, but one of the great things about it is that they've translated the German properly. "Was ist das" does not mean "what does this mean" — "Was ist das" means "what is this?" What is this? When you start talking about meaning, all kinds of problems arise, right? Especially when you start talking about the meaning of God's word — then you can get into big trouble. You get John Calvin and Zwingli showing up to tell you what meaning really involves. So you've got to stay home with Luther and listen to him when he says, "Was ist das" — "What is this? What does baptism signify? What does it do? What happens to you when you're baptized? This is what happens to you: the sinful self, with all of its evil deeds and desires, is drowned through daily repentance, that a new self might arise to live with Christ in righteousness and purity forever."

Now I've got to see what time it is — okay. So we get a death. Baptism is a death. You know where this language comes from — it comes from Romans, and it comes from Colossians in particular, where Paul describes a dying in repentance. And the language of resurrection has the same source. Baptism administers a dying that continues lifelong; it administers a resurrection that happens in the course of everyday life. What's happened here? There's been a big switch. If you want to talk about repentance in medieval Catholic terms, you have to talk about penance — the sacrament of penance, the plank after shipwreck. Baptism signifies, in Roman Catholic terms, the beginning of a new life, a moral reordering. When you're properly morally reordered, your baptism is working. But if you slip — if you stop for a glass of wine and it becomes seven, or if you go home to the wrong bed, or if you start having carnal thoughts and desires — then your baptism has slipped away, and something is necessary to restore you. That's penance. You go to confession, you are examined by the priest, and you are instructed what is necessary to restore yourself to proper order.

All of this is based on an old Roman understanding of the distinction of flesh and spirit. The body is the flesh, and so anything that concerns the body is fleshy — whatever stinks, whatever ejects, whatever provides lubrication, whatever signifies the body's connection with earthly functions, that's the flesh. The spirit concerns the life of the mind, the religious life. And so when you look at medieval Catholic language for original sin, it sounds like it was written in a boys' dormitory, or in a monastery. One of my secrets — I didn't tell you my secret, but one of my secrets is that I'm an authority on obscure medieval biblical commentaries. She knows it, and she's forgiven me — no, I nearly drove her crazy with it when I wrote my degree. Anyway, one of the most commentated books in all of Scripture is the Song of Songs — Hebrew soft porn, right? The monks loved it. They could give you a complete allegorical exposition: "This is spiritual." Once, when I was working on my degree, I was having a terrible time with a particular part of my thesis. We were living in Toronto, and I went to one of the great bookstores in all of North America, a block square of publishers' remainders. I found a photographic commentary on the Song of Songs. Use your imagination. I knew that if I picked up that book and looked at it, somebody from my hometown in western North Dakota would just happen to be driving through Toronto and would have stopped, and it would be immediately reported all over western North Dakota. So I didn't touch it. But I looked very carefully to both sides, front and back, and I lifted the cover just a little bit, and it was exactly what you'd imagine — swarthy, buxom people engaged. That's the Song of Songs. Well, the monks loved it — this is spiritual. They spiritualized it by shifting out of the soft porn into the spiritual implications of the Song of Songs. You should try to preach it that way — your confirmands would listen.

Of course, original sin is defined sexually in language that's just dripping — carnal thought and desires, concupiscence, which has to be said like a dirty old man would say it: concupiscence, the endless longing of the heart, the insatiable desire of the heart. It's always: turning toward the flesh is evil, turning away from the flesh is good. Repentance turns you from the evil to the good, and once you've repented, then you can start to aspire spiritually once more. Then you can read the Song of Songs without carnal thoughts and desires — you can read it as though it were Portals of Prayer. You can read it without any problem whatsoever — you're properly penitent, you have been restored, right? Maybe bored silly too, but restored, right?

At any rate, you see what's happening. We have a different understanding of sin, and that, of course, leads to a different understanding of repentance. Repentance happens when you leave earthly life behind — so you leave the fleshly world and move to the spiritual world, you leave behind carnal associations and seek the spiritual. And as you leave this behind and seek the spiritual, you become more and more perfect — the truly perfect, as Luther said, go away to monasteries, where they leave the diapers behind and tell their children to become monks and nuns like them. I mean, they leave — the truly spiritual are the uplifted, who are over and above, and the ordinary are those who are stuck in the everyday world. Both Luther and Catherine von Bora went away — Catherine von Bora was sent away, Luther went voluntarily, but they spent their early lives in this kind of a milieu. When they left the monastery behind, it was with the conviction that repentance happens in the down-to-earth stuff of everyday life. That's the move of the Reformation — from a spiritualism that's uplifted and great to a down-to-earth sense of everyday life.

Repentance happens as your connections — your false connections, that in which you seek yourself — when those connections are broken, repentance begins. This does not happen voluntarily. This is not something that we do or achieve. This is something that is worked in us, but in the course of our daily relationships.

We have three sons — no, they're parents themselves now, which is suitable punishment, I think. I love my grandchildren — once I loved them more than my sons; right now, as a matter of fact, I love them more than my sons. But once, one of our oldest son was between college and his vocation and he lost his way. He did what lots of young people do — he started to drink. We were scared. We knew what was happening, we knew something of the proportion, but not all. But one night the phone call came — the police had picked him up, he was in jail. We were lying in bed side by side, both of us overwhelmed. And I heard my wife's voice say, "It's your seed. Nothing like this has ever happened in my family." And of course it was true — my family, our roustabouts; her family was devout. My family could find trouble without looking; her family, they could stay out of trouble. We were meant for one another — I was the trouble delivered to her door. And now: "It's your seed." Cold as that, and just as true.

I did not choose that. I tried everything in the world to get to that kid before the police did. I talked to him about it, I talked with them about where alcohol ends. But it took a policeman to catch him. And that policeman caught me at the same time. We died that night. We died that night. I know many of you have died in the same way. These are not things that we choose. When we hear our Lord Jesus say "repent," we do not think of a kid lying in jail, covered with his own vomit, unable to get up on his hind legs and walk, or walking out of the jail in the morning. What a mess. This is where repentance happens. It doesn't happen in the monastery alone — it can happen there, but it happens in daily life.

If you don't think this is true, go to an annual meeting, and think about the annual meeting afterwards. And if you can do that without experiencing repentance, I think you better call — because for most of us, the daily death is administered in the context of our work. We go to the work of our congregations, the work of our parishes, full of hope and joy, expectation of good, and we discover at the annual meeting — as one of my friends did this January — that his salary had been lowered, by a man who came out of nowhere convinced that he wasn't doing any work. This is what happens. It's how repentance happens — sitting with the couple who have married and maintained a level of conflict that seems impossible, and who call you regularly to settle it, only to have you arrive realizing that it's far out of hand. I, like you, have gone into situations of domestic abuse only to find myself being abused by both parties. I am the problem, and I'm the penitent. I wish the phone hadn't worked, or that I hadn't answered — because these are the kinds of circumstances that carry us outside of ourselves, where we lose touch with our resources.

When you say to yourself, "I can't take this anymore," it's a pretty good sign that repentance has started. When you say to yourself, "There's no solution to this problem" — as my teacher, Gustav Wingren, used to say, you should always give thanks when you say that, because at least you've understood the problem. This is how daily life works. The solutions don't present themselves ready-made. One solution becomes tomorrow's problem, and tomorrow's problem becomes tomorrow's need for another solution. We get caught, and life carries us — this is where repentance begins. It begins in self-loss. This is the daily grounding. It is a real drowning — this is no metaphor, this is no particularly earthy description. This is what happens. You drown. You drown with your children. You drown with your spouse. You drown with your church council. You drown at the annual meeting. You drown in the life of the church. Because that's simply what happens among sinners — it's not because we've created it this way or we want it this way. This is what happens when sinners get together — there's drownings. There's drownings.

And that drowning, Christ Jesus overlaps. This is wonderful — Luther loved this passage where Joseph says to his brothers… this is one of my favorite stories. Joseph's brothers come to him after the death of Jacob, and they say, "Our father told us to tell you…" Well, Joseph didn't become the head of Pharaoh's bureaucracy by being stupid — he knows "our father told us to tell you" comes from the south end of the bull. That's not anywhere near the front end — that's just foolishness. What does Joseph say? "You meant it for evil; God used it for good." You meant it for evil, God used it for good. This is what God does with his word — he overlaps our drowning, he turns the drowning to its proper purpose. What would kill us, what would destroy us otherwise, God takes hold of and uses it to turn us — from ourselves, to himself. Now repentance is underway. This is the real stuff. This is not the plastic stuff that they sell on television. This is not the garbage — "I was such a sinner, but you should see me now." I've seen a little too much of you already, thanks a lot. I mean, if that was repentance, you wouldn't be the subject of every verb that comes out of your mouth. Now shut up.

My brother and I — I have a brother who's four years younger — we got into way too much mischief when we were younger, and we could do those repentance stories with Norwegian accents thick as this: "Once I was lost, you know," and we could tell the whole story of our lostness, but somehow when we started to talk about being found, it got strangely ambiguous. Just like the TV preachers. That's not repentance — that's crocodile repentance, phony stuff. "The intense emotional experience of ten years ago" — what does that count for? Born again, my foot. So when the old Adam makes something new, it's just the old Adam making it new again. It's phony — it's the old Adam in drag, strutting, pretending. Exactly. Ridiculous.

But when repentance happens — what happens? Then I lose my grip on myself. I lose my grip on myself, and I am taken from myself, delivered from myself, freed from myself. I'm dead. Drowned. Drowned. And Christ Jesus turns that misery into a godly death. This is Luther — he turns that dying into a godly dying, in which we are being freed from ourselves as our own projects, freed from ourselves as our own tyrants, freed from our desperate attempts to become our own creator, freed to enter into life. "This is what makes our theology certain," Luther writes in the Great Galatians Commentary — "Christ Jesus takes us outside of ourselves and brings us to rest in him." What could be better? What could possibly be better than to die with him — to get rid of myself and to be found in him?

Now there's the dying, and there's the rising. There's the rising — that I am no longer my own jailer, no longer the tyrant enclosing myself ever more tightly, presenting that as repentance. No, no, no, no — repentance brings a resurrection. I've got to get my water — oh, thanks. Repentance brings a real resurrection. Faith — where I can say, "I can do all things through him who strengthens me." Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much. Yeah, thanks. Then I'm not the subject of my own verbs anymore.

You listen to a lover — a lover does not say things like this: "Well, I took a course in falling in love, and I learned management by objective. I decided that by the first date we should achieve the second stage of intimacy, and here, by luck, we got to the third. And now I know what love is." Lovers don't talk like that. When you talk to a lover, who's the subject of the verb? The beloved — always the beloved. So you talk to somebody who's in love, and you say, "How in the world did it happen?" "Oh, you should meet her — she's the greatest thing since sliced bread, I never knew a woman like her." Who is she describing? Well, not herself — the one she loves. And so with faith.

When I was teaching at Luther Seminary, I used to make my students read through the Gospel of Mark, underlining subject, verb, and direct object. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is the subject of virtually every verb — he's always working. This is lovers' talk. This is faith. Faith says Christ, and Christ alone. Or in that beautiful passage from the Transfiguration: "They saw Jesus and Jesus only." They didn't see themselves anymore — they saw him. And what did he do?

This is why we get all of these great stories in the Gospels in which the disciples appear to be utter fools. It's so much fun. Here's Peter, by all odds the first bishop of the church — he sees Jesus walking on water and he thinks he should too. Is that dumb or what? Here's a guy whose name is Rock, who wants to walk on water — it's so perfect, you just can't imagine anything better. And of course, for those of us who are now refugees from the ELCA, he thinks — because he's a bishop named Rock, he should really be able to walk on the water. And of course what happens? Well, Jesus has got his tongue in his cheek — it's so fabulous. "Come on, Peter." So he gets out, and he takes a few steps, and he says, "Hey, look at me, I'm a Rock and I'm walking on water now." It's like the cosmic toilet flushed, and there goes… there goes Peter, right down the tube. "Lord, help me! Lord, help me!" And of course, now he's got his eyes where they belong — his eyes are no longer on Peter. "Lord, help me." And I'm sure Jesus was grinning ear to ear — I bet he was chuckling. He grabs him and pulls him. That's Christ Jesus. Once I was lost, then — no — I was lost, and if you just let me go, I'll be lost even further. But when Christ Jesus finds, it's a different story. Then the story has a different ending. Then it's not me, and all my self-transcendence, and all my glorious achievement — it's him, who died for you, who took your eagerness for self-transcendence upon himself and went to his death on your behalf. And going to his death on your behalf, he was raised. What's better than that? That's the subject of the story. It's not me.

And what are the disciples doing? Hiding for fear of the Jews, in an upper room that they've rented, which they think is a good place to hide. They're not afraid of the Jews — they're afraid of Jesus. They're worried sick that he might be raised from the dead, and they don't want him to find them, as though they can hide any place that he won't find. So what does he do? You know, there are New Testament exegetes who have made a living studying how Jesus got into the room. It's very simple — he knows what would have happened if he knocked. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock" — all right, just stand there then, please. So great. He goes right through the door. I'll tell you what happened — there was a laundry bill. They were scared to death; if he had knocked, they would have been piled up ten deep, waiting for Thomas to make eleven. No, he walked — he went right through the door, and what did he say? "Peace be with you." Who's that? Who's better than that? You know what I would have said? "You jerks — we're going to have to improve our discipleship selection program. You are inadequate candidates, you have proven it beyond the shadow of a doubt." Right? He goes right through the wall and he says what? "Peace be with you." And it's not enough that he says it once — "Peace be with you," and he breathed on them. No, there's only one Lord like this. He doesn't belong to a political party, he's not a philosopher — he's your Savior. And when he comes to your door, he doesn't just stand there waiting for you to open it — he goes right through. And he takes you, and he makes you his own, tearing you away from the false attachments that would destroy you, and attaching you to his life-giving word, so that you can live as Adam and Eve were meant to be — breathing the freedom, breathing the air of his word, breathing freely, open. I mean, there you go.

Now repentance tears us away — as we get torn away, in everyday life — and repentance ends in faith. This is how it happens. We are drowned, not because we have made ourselves candidates for drowning, but because the stuff of everyday life grounds us. And in the midst of our drowning, Christ Jesus sees us like he saw Simon — going down, just a little head above water, some hair floating — and he grabs us, takes us, and makes us his own, so that we can live by faith in him. This is the transition that happens with Luther and Catherine von Bora. They learned the hard way. You don't go away to a convent or a monastery to study repentance. You live. You live. You live with parents who are dying. One of the leading sources of domestic abuse in the U.S. is not husbands abusing their wives, though that happens far too much — it's the abuse of aging parents by adult children. If you want to drown, be somebody's son or daughter. If you want to drown, it doesn't matter if you want to or not — you're going to drown. You will drown marrying. You'll drown being a parent. You'll drown being pastors, pastors' wives. You are drowning in the life of the church. You are drowning. But that's not the end of the story. The end of the story is that Christ Jesus himself, by his word, has got you under the arms and is raising you to newness of life. That's where we live.

Okay, well, what time is it? Five o'clock. So we've got some time for questions, right? Will you ask? I think we suggested that you go to the microphone — is that what you're getting? Yep. If you've got a question — we'll fool around, or a comment — we'll play. I'm not going to make you sit on your stuff and suffer for another half hour if you don't have questions, we'll quit, but if you've got questions, we'll take them. Is this the microphone up here? Yep, that's the mic.

Hello, Pastor Chris Bramick from Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church in Hazlet. You had talked a little bit before about the Catholic understanding of sin and repentance, and since we've been going through the lectionary recently in Galatians and then Colossians, it reminds me of some Gnostic or pre-Gnostic things that Paul was dealing with, and how they were viewing the body — they saw the body as being wicked, and the soul was imprisoned in the body, and the soul was the good part. It kind of sounds like some of that had left some residue behind in the Catholic Church that lasted to the Middle Ages — is that…

That's exactly it — Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the extreme edge of Roman culture. So what you see in Gnosticism in vivid display is present in Roman culture generally. And the best way to see this is — there's a fabulous book by Peter Brown called The Body. He's, I think, an Episcopalian, he teaches at Princeton, and he's probably the best living Augustine scholar right now — he's just fabulous. He wrote a new book called Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth in the Early Church — one of the great books I've ever read. There is a strange kind of piety in Roman culture that rejects the body, and it goes hand in hand with the indulgence of the body. So the contempt for the body and the indulgence of the body are side by side. And what the Gnostics did was to extend that tendency and dramatize it with myths of the spark that falls into the flesh and gets caught by it, and so on. But it's the same stuff.

So is repentance in Catholic circles more under what we would define as sanctification, or along those lines?

Well, the difference — we'll start with it now, and we'll keep working on this question throughout — the difference is that Roman Catholicism is premised on an assumption of moral law, and so sin is always in some sense a moral infraction. Lutheranism begins with a different base. When Luther says — here's a good example — when Luther says that Christ redeems us, he restores us to the point from which Adam fell, he's not describing a moral transformation, but he's describing a relationship. You see, Luther's premise is faith. Faith is a relationship in which we turn to the other. And Catholicism begins with an intense moral system. So when you go to penance — if you read Luther on confession, he'll say you should confess the sins that are troublesome to you, because penance, in his understanding — repentance is for faith. But if you go to Roman Catholic forms of penance, you get a very close moral examination, in which the priests — I've studied confession and absolution for years and years and years, and I've sat with some great priests and learned a lot from them, the old pre-Vatican II priests, the Baltimore Catechism priests — for them, confession was a rigorous moral examination, and they wanted you to confess all your moral infractions. They were experts — they'd been doing this for years, and they could flush out everything that you were hiding. And they particularly liked to get young women in the confessional. This is why people were willing to buy indulgences — they weren't fools. You bought an indulgence, you didn't have to deal with a priest, especially as a woman. You get a relatively chaste priesthood, with women locked in a closet for a close examination, and there were all kinds of things happening in there. So women would buy an indulgence just to avoid it — but it was the moral rigor.

For us, for Luther, we start with Paul: "Anything that does not proceed from faith is sin," in Romans. And so when we hear confession, what concerns us is the life of faith and where it's being hindered — what sins are most troublesome. You see, it's a very different assumption, and that makes a tremendous difference. The best place to read this too is in the Smalcald Articles concerning the false repentance of the papists, and there Luther has got that argument distilled about as cleanly as you can find it.

Yeah, yeah, great — that's a wonderful question. We're going to have to keep after that question for a long time, because you've spotted what's really a seismic shift.

Hi, I'm Jane Sangbil — what is his name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have a question, I just had a quick comment. A lot of you have probably been to the Black Cloister, and I wondered if you noticed that the statue of Katie there is not like Luther's — where Luther is standing still with a Bible in his hand — but she is walking, and very seriously moving, and that's very typical of Katie in her life.

Yeah, she's not going to sit still or sit down or stand still — it's just a beehive. Notice the difference in the statues. I said it were fun — that's great, it's accurate.

Oh, I'm Fritz Radicki, St. Louis. One of the things I couldn't help but keep rolling over in my mind as I was listening to you is that one of the great sins that I don't think people are aware of — one that's so contrary to repentance — is this sense of being in control of their lives and what they think they can do. If you could flesh that out maybe a little bit more, I'd appreciate it.

In my pastoral experience, most of the people that I've dealt with in deep repentance have not known it — they have not been aware of it. And when I've said, "You're repenting," they've been very surprised, because they've wanted to control their repentance with everything else they've ever done — like the rich young ruler, they've got a shelf full of achievements, and the repentance is going to be added to the list. Repentance involves self-loss. That's why Jesus says, "Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it; whoever loses his life for my sake" — see, that's repentance. And that self-loss is not something we can control, by the very definition — we lose our control. And those moments in life where control has been lost, where we've literally been thrown, where we've been caught and stuck and unable to get ourselves loose — it's those moments that are redemptive. That's Christ Jesus overlapping, as I said, what's a real death with a real resurrection. So making it a project, making it — the myth, the fall, is this: that I will have control. That's what the snake said to Eve: "If you do this, you'll get control of it." And of course we men have nothing to brag about on that count, because the snake knew better than to talk to Adam — at least Eve was a challenge. I mean, Adam saw that apple and said, "Apple pie," he was done for it. This doesn't matter the sex here — this control game is the native human impulse, in sin. "I want to be wise, I want to know good from evil, I want to get it out, get a handle on it." And of course, the tighter I squeeze, the more death-dealing I become.

I just love that. You can imagine what it was like for me to have been a conservative in the American Lutheran, in the ELCA — I couldn't find anybody. And I found — I had a few — and I have a pastor now who's one of us, you know, and I just love him, I just adore him. He says, "Well, I think we're going to just sit down together and hand it over to Jesus and ask him to take it, because if you hold on to it any longer, it's going to kill you." You know, that's a real pastor, because he knows who wants control, and he knows who's going to die. And instead of leaving me to die alone, he's sitting beside me. That's just marvelous. So I think that's the fundamental issue, and I think you got it right by the horns, you know?