Thursday Theology: Dust We Are, and Yet…

Co-missioners,

This week’s post is a little late. It’s personal too, as you’ll see. It also touches a little on a topic that’s come up in a number of conversations I’ve had over the past month. More on this next week, I trust.

Peace and Joy,

Jerome (Jerry) Burce, Editor

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Dust We Are, and Yet…

I spent most of last week at my father’s bedside watching him die. That’s a hard way of saying it, of course, but there it is. My sisters watched too. The breathing stopped in the wee hours of Friday morning. Our dad was 100 years and eight months old, minus a few days.

Willard Burce died fearlessly, I think. He wasn’t able to say so in last week’s final days, but a lot of what he did say in our conversation of recent years invites me to assume this. He spent his entire career inviting people in different parts of the world to take the Word of God as a declaration of reality. “God says, and so it is.” That’s how he operated himself.

“Nothing but nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Check. “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Check. “Fear not! I am with you,” as said by Jesus post-Easter. Double check. “I forgive you all your sins,” as said by Christ through faithful servants every Sunday. Huge check on that one too.

Here we’re on turf that gets covered in Step 5 of the Crossings matrix. A person, having heard the gospel of Christ crucified, starts trusting the gospel of Christ crucified, and they do this not “by my own reason or strength” but by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in them. Not that they’re aware that this work is underway, but it is. They certainly take no credit for it. They simply “have faith” because the Spirit creates it in them.

And because of their confidence in the rock-solid reality of what Christ has and is and will be doing on behalf of this world he died for—and also lives for this very day—they start to “bear fruit” (matrix Step 6). What they trust shapes their attitudes, their choices, their behaviors. It can do this in dramatic ways. More often it does so in ways that are rarely acknowledged and often go unnoticed. For example, there is only one person I’ve known over the course of my own years, 71 so far, who complains less than my father did. There is no one at all who grumbled and gossiped less about the people they were given to live and work with. Not that these people picked up on this lack of dark chatter. Even so, they derived benefit from it. Deo gratia. “God’s Work. Our Clamped-Shut Mouths.” Imagine that for once.

The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church teems with baptized saints whose “good works”—as in deeds and attitudes born of their faith in Christ—are of this quiet variety that gets little attention and even less praise. Not that this bugs them. How could it when they’re scarcely aware of the fruit they’re bearing? They love their neighbors not because someone barked at them, but as a matter of course. It’s who they are. It’s what they do. Thanks be to God. Their preachers would do well to recognize and acknowledge this more often than most preachers tend to do. So much the better if their preachers would help them thank God for each other and for the faith the Holy Spirit keeps sparking in them all.

“The Lord is good.” That’s how my father expressed this faith a month ago, the last time we talked face to face. Not “God” is good but “the Lord” is good. I think the phrasing was both deliberate and automatic. Automatic, because that’s how church-folk talked as a matter of course when he was growing up. Deliberate, because he was a Lutheran theologian through and through. He’d have taught his many students along the way that “the Lord” is a specifying designation. In Christian usage it means not simply God, but, more sharply, the God we get to know and have in Christ Jesus. This God has holes in his hands and feet and side. They keep flashing the message that all of us are included in the promises God made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and those who came after.

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine (Is. 43:1b). When this God says such a thing, take it for granted. When the Christ God raised from the dead adds “I am with you always” (Mt. 28:20) that how it is. That’s why “we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea” (Ps. 46:2).

The Lord is good.

God grant us all such faith, such dying.

JEB