Co-missioners,
A colleague was poking around in old publications recently and unearthed the item we’re sharing today. It’s an essay by the Rev. Stephen Krueger that appeared in a Crossings newsletter in late 2009. The opening paragraphs will tell you everything you need to know about the author except that he died three months after this was published. In the week following his death, his teacher and mentor Ed Schroeder remembered him warmly in a Thursday Theology post which I hope you’ll look at. It will reward the time you spend with it. Make a point of not missing Ed’s last two paragraphs.
These days we try with Thursday Theology to pay some attention to the rhythms of the church year. This being so, you might wonder why we’re resurfacing Pr. Krueger’s reflection in this first week of Advent. It will seem like a poor fit. The season of hope launched by a rumination on death? Really?
Well, yes, really. After all, what you’re about to encounter is a joyful refusal to be cowed by the death that each of us and all of us are obliged to tumble into at some point along the way—this very year, for all we know. You’ll catch Pr. Krueger—Steve, as we’ll call him from here on in—exuding hope even as he stares death in the eye. He’ll invite you to do the same. He’ll do it with his finger pointed as John the Baptist’s once was to the Christ who authorizes the outrageous confidence that drives his joy.
This, of course, is the Christ at the heart of Scripture and of every church year, to say nothing of every honest Christian proclamation. Here he is for us, the flesh-and-blood embodiment of God’s determination to make right what sin has ruined. This year’s third Sunday of Advent will feature a jailed John the Baptist wondering whether Jesus is the real deal or not. Steve will gush below with the answer we can only hope John glimpsed again before the headsman came for him.
“Even as we live each day / Death our life embraces.” So begins the briefest and least sung of Luther’s hymns in Lutheran Book of Worship (#350). It was so unused—so unpopular, one guesses—that both LCMS and ELCA dropped it from their subsequent hymnbooks. That’s too bad. The blunt truth that Luther spits out overshadows every year and is quite properly faced at the start of every year, or so it seems to me. So much the more when one confronts it as Steve does below, by following Luther’s lead and pointing where Luther points, to Christ and the baptism that envelops us in Christ. Come to think of it, Steve’s essay could be read as an extended riff on that little Luther-hymn that no one wants to sing. As for you, we at Crossings hope and pray that you’ll enjoy the song and thank God that you get to sing it as Luther, Steve, and countless others already have. With gusto, that is. With joy.
One other note about Steve Krueger: though a Seminex graduate, he began his ministry serving LCMS congregations. In the late ‘90s he became involved in Daystar, a community of LCMS dissidents which overlapped a little with Crossings. Steve was soon the first editor of Daystar’s online journal. His introduction to the journal is well worth a glance. So is one of his posts entitled “The Promising Tradition,” a useful adjunct to the superb overview of Law/Gospel communities that we got last week from Robin Lütjohann. (If you haven’t read that one yet, do so now!)
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Christ, the Death of Death our Foe
by Stephen Krueger
[Introduction)
[Editor] Mike Hoy’s kind invitation to contribute to the Fall/Michaelmas Crossings newsletter intersects at a time of life where crossings of many kinds seem to be in order. For me, while writing during a hot Florida July, it feels like a brittle, wintry theme I’m taking up instead: the theme of death and dying.
Just to help the reader, a quick biographical sketch of me. Trained in the old LCMS system, which included prep school, a senior college, and then a route to ministry that was to have been highly scripted through Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, I am among those blessed hundreds to have had that interrupted cross-wise, by exile (1973-74 was my internship/vicarage year.) Book of Concord theology suddenly took on new life as Promising Tradition theology was learned now with the exciting cadences of “the Augsburg Aha!” A hermeneutical approach to doing theology, a dialectic between God’s two words of law and promise, made my LCMS world of upper Midwestern-styled brand of Orthodoxy come together in a whole new, living way and I was forever hooked on Crossings. Suddenly Christ no longer lay buried in the tomb!
Thus, without belaboring, my own vocational tasks included 30 years of parish pastoring, mostly in the North American urban setting, which evolved into hospice chaplaincy in Florida ad enabled spouse and me to care for an Alzheimer’s father-in-law, while also juggling the wonderful role of doting grandparents three times over.
Yet, comes now that one more thing for me: a three-year-old battle with cancer, that sneaky disease that strikes and costs dearly. For me, it has meant the removal of my larynx and a large part of my trachea and the now-daily trips to the oncologist for radiation and chemotherapy in a current last-ditch effort to stave off the malignancy’s stage-four invasion.
The hospice chaplain is being taken to school all over again and it’s good to notice how people quietly watch how you take your own theological medicine. People are forever interested in how good our gospel really is when it’s put to the test of applying to ourselves.
This newsletter piece is intended to be a brief reflection about what happens in that quiet, private place you go for thinking, meditating and prayer to make sense out of living and dying. I hope you don’t mind. Fr. Henri Nouwen used to say that those things which are the most personal are usually those things that are the most universal. I think he is right about that.
Baptism = Living and Dying and Rising with Christ, Our Life, Death’s Death
From Canva
The place I keep learning to go ought to be no surprise even though it surprises daily anyway. For confessors whose lives were first led by water and God’s Holying Spirit, baptism is that place’s name. Among the dozens of things you can say about the pristine promise of the sacrament, the Apostle Paul lists death (of all things!) among the top reasons why baptism is that hallowed space to go for the twin joys of hopeful comfort and for all the benefits Christ has come to bring. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3).
How strange that claim once seemed. Baptisms are for beginning lives, not ending them. That is, of course, until death begins to make its way into your own growing consciousness and claims you to make sense of it.
The young Martin Luther made sense of his very real consciousness of death by reading Paul’s words from Romans 6 and concluding the Apostle here was talking about two kinds of deaths: the “temporal” (or we might say, “little”) one and the “eternal” (or we might say, “big”) one we already get in on through our baptism into Christ (LW25, 310).
In his Romans commentary (the young Reformer’s lectures on Romans 3:5-8:39 appear to come from winter 1515-1516). Luther explicates how our baptismal death with Christ is the mortal, huge death we face because in it “death perishes totally into eternal nothingness, and nothing will ever return from this death…” (p. 310). God, having drowned us in the blessed water bath with Christ, then pulls us out of that blessed water for our brand new life with the risen Christ, ready to face now the littler, temporal death with death’s defeat secured through the promise of the resurrection. Baptismally dealing with the big death gets the sting of the littler one out of the way.
Luther later refines the idea further in his familiar drowned Old Adam/Risen-with-Christ New Person baptismal image found in his Small and Large Catechisms, but the mighty big death baptism has come to me now to mean everything (would that I might have been more attentive all along!) Elsewhere, Luther notices how baptism’s promise daily includes putting our sins to death through Christ’s cruciformed pardoning (The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism of 1519) and how the promise of baptism is good enough to stand up even to God’s own wrath which my sin incurs (by Godself becoming me the sinner under wrath, see Luther’s Commentary on Psalm 90, LW 13, 75-141 for starters). Good thing that baptism involves no less than a death the mega-christology surrounding that death!
Baptism: A Water Bath That Awakens from Deadly Slumber
To lay hold of Baptism’s claims and promises as a way to deal with your dying is to entrust yourself to a bold, feisty faith which has to be believed against a host of counter-claims, counter-gospels and counter-promises which surround us daily. As I go about my daily routine as a cancer patient, the little death has become the preoccupying feature and really big death is too easily, quickly and readily set aside by a world which echoes that ancient lie: “God knows you will not die” (Genesis 3:4). The Deceiver beguiles once again about how your eyes will be opened and you will be “like God…”
When I was a hospice chaplain, I noticed even hospice workers would most often not be able to admit the “d”-word. People would want to talk about the “final transition” with me when one “passes” or “passes away” or “is now sustaining a life-limiting illness” (a hospice favorite) but nobody is permitted to die.
Some years back Ernest Becker wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (1974) to describe the hidden power that has ensnared our western culture. That the study was Becker’s challenge to the power of repressed sexuality described by Freud, something most still believe, meant that Becker’s magnum opus remained largely an unopened book for many who might have been wondering about death. Yet, while fully from the secular side, the volume says much the same thing as Ed Schroeder did in his 1972 Encountering the Last Enemy. Ed’s essay noted Helmut Thielicke picking up on how original sinners try to dodge responsibility for their dying by affixing their meaning or justification on noble projects or ideas beyond themselves which outlive them (which is what Becker also says). That way they don’t really die. But the problem is we do. “You are Adam, man from the dust, it’s back to the dust you must go.” That haunting sentence does not get wished away.
In my baptism I am reminded that it does get defeated.
My youngest granddaughter is an Orthodox Christian where the tactile sensations of the water bath at baptism really comes into play. That baby really gets wet, as if, there’ll be no slumbering through this grand celebration and the Name of this child’s God is put on her so grandly: the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit! In the sacrament the community is really reminded about drowns and risings, about deaths and resurrections.
Baptism= Pulling Off Easter Along the Lenten Way
From Canva
One of the treats I remember from my seminary days was Ed and Marie Schroeder’s gift for pulling out a carefully crafted hymn, fit for the right occasion. It is a trick that I’ll bet they learned from Luther. Nonetheless, from them I learned it’s okay to reassign great songs of faith from one purpose to another. In my case, the Lenten cycle hymn, Christ the Life of All the Living (LBW 97) has become my favorite baptismal hymn. The next line tells why: Christ, the death of death, our foe. I, too, now have come to need one of those, the very thing I have proclaimed for everyone else: a Lord of the living and of the dead (Romans 14:7-8) in whom death’s forever defeated.
It is my faith I use now to reassure those around me that it’s okay to die if that is what God has planned for me right now, reassurance that my own still-living parents need and want to hear about (the hardest thing, I know, is the death of your child…just ask another Heavenly Father!). When mother and father say to me, “I wish it could be we, instead, for you” (as loving parents would), I get to say to them: “You feel so powerless, do you? Well, you did everything a Christian parent could do for me when you brought me to the baptismal font of Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest, Illinois in 1949 and death’s defeat was sacramentally proclaimed to me as Another’s death became mine, and mine, his. When you, mother and father, brought me to God’s baptismal washing, you did everything.”
No wonder Luther was so struck by his own baptism that he knew where to go when his own fears and doubts assailed him. Baptizatus sum, he would say (But still in it all…… “I am baptized”). Baptism is for knowing whose you are because you have shared a death, and thus, a resurrection. To Martin Luther, baptism is for putting daily to use what we confess as God’s pulling off Easter while we walk life’s Lenten time still. Or, as St Paul would have it:
So, we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot…. (2 Cor. 3:16-18).
God grant each of you a baptismal place [in 2025] for all your crossings between faith and life.
Steve Krueger
Fall, 2004
________
P.S. My thanks to Cathy Lessmann for her help in preparing this re-publication. –JB
Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community
