Urgent Care, Autopsy, and A Resurrection | Lessons from the Last 15
Six months into my seminary internship year, if you could’ve seen my thought bubble it would read, “I think I’ve said everything that I can think of saying.” I started to worry about where I would find material for decades of preaching. I’m not worried anymore. If I was called to share anecdotes or antics, principles, or proofs, I’d have run out years ago. No, we don’t have a little reservoir with a finite resource. We have a refreshing spring, an eternal cleansing tide, a fountain that forever quenches our deepest thirst. The Bible gets more exciting and the gospel more amazing—not less.
Formed primarily by more conservative communities, my more liberal seminary experience often surprised me—actually alarmed me by the way they treated the Scriptures. Looking back, the conservatives and liberals shared more in common with each other than I realized. Both stood over the Bible.
Generalizations will have to do, but often conservative movements with their cyclical battles for the Bible are in the position of defending the Bible, helping it by explaining alleged discrepancies in genealogies or the scientific record or perceived differences between gospel writers. It's as if the Bible comes walking into urgent care, sits on the exam table, and says to the Doc, “You know, I could use a little help. Sometimes I feel like I can’t communicate clearly. I’d like to be able to speak to this generation, but I keep getting my lines crossed. I don’t think the culture really trusts what I am trying to say. Can you help me?”
“Looking back, the conservatives and liberals shared more in common with each other than I realized. Both stood over the Bible. ”
My more liberal experience at Seminary only changed the severity of the Bible’s need. It wasn’t in urgent care, but at the morgue. Now, we weren’t physicians trying to help, we were doing an autopsy. Using textual, form, source, and literary criticisms, we pulled apart the sinews and found where the tendons and muscles and the bones interacted, or used to interact. Standing over the corpse, other newer forms of criticism, more connected to identity, made some wonder if there was something wrong with the old story. Tumors were diagnosed in those old documents that made it inconsistent with modern culture.
It was toward the beginning of my time at Trinity, that a gracious repositioning of the Bible happened in my life. We traded places. It would be the surgeon, and I, the desperate and even dead patient. Trinity wouldn’t be my patient, but God’s. Anything I had to say about the Bible, took a lower place to what it had to say to us! The Bible didn’t need my help. I needed help, and so did the rest of the church. The Bible wasn’t laying on the autopsy table, I was, we were. The Bible doesn’t need resuscitation or resurrection, we do.
Now, it is my conviction that the living God has something to say. The Bible as a surgeon might give other information, but is always moving towards a spoken diagnosis (law) and a spoken solution (gospel). This word exposes and heals. It kills and raises. Steven Paulson says, “Mere words about God will be of a quite different sort and function than words from God” (The Captivation of the Will, 26). So, what it says is more important than what I say about it.
“The Bible as a surgeon might give other information, but is always moving towards a spoken diagnosis (law) and a spoken solution (gospel). ”
What does the Bible say? From nearly the beginning to nearly the ending, the Bible correctly interprets me as a profound idolater. I am prone to hear the serpent’s whisper and believe his lies, trusting myself more than God, like Eve and Adam. I am prone to care more about myself than my brother like Cain. I am prone to assimilate to my host culture like the churches in Ephesus, Pergamum, and Thyatira (Revelation 2). I am prone to complacency like the churches in Sardis and Laodicea (Revelation 3). God’s word correctly points out my (and the church’s) profound brokenness. This is God’s word of law that always says “do” and is never done, revealing clearly my longing and neediness for a finished work.
Here it comes! Because right in the middle of the darkest night, into our deepest shame and despair, while we were yet sinners, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4.4-5). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1.5). It is clear that the Word comes to us! Jesus comes, Word incarnate. Interpret this! “For you, for the forgiveness of sins.” “For you, not against you.” “Nothing can separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus.” The Gospel is, then, not something to pick at or pick apart, but something that speaks clearly to you, beloved son, beloved daughter: “though deeply broken, I love you even more deeply.”
*Portions of this article are reprinted from an article previously published by Lutheran Connections, Sept/Oct 2013.
Lessons from the Last 15 is a series of articles from Pastor Nathan Hoff on the occasion of his 15th year in ministry at Trinity San Pedro.
“It seems like they need me,” I said pretentiously to a dear family I was visiting in the first congregation I served. Just shy of three years at that Call, I broke the news about our upcoming relocation to Southern California. It was the Fall of 2005, and I had recently received and accepted a new Call to Trinity Lutheran in San Pedro, California. How that family managed not to roll their eyes is more impressive as the years go by. I had a lot to learn.
October 31st marked the 15th anniversary of my installation as pastor at Trinity San Pedro. They didn’t “need” me in the way I thought they might need me. They did need the Gospel, and I needed it too—as desperately as anyone else. I still do and they still do. We are a good match.