Co-missioners,
We’re about to jar you with a post that will sound distinctly un-Adventish. Is not this brief and blessed season about beginnings? A new church year? An old promise still lurking just past the horizon, and who can say when we’ll get to see it starting to unfold? How about one of those excitements for which the Church sometimes dares to pray, a “venture of which we cannot see the ending,” to be met “by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown”? Bracing stuff, in other words. Dreams dripping with hope. Isn’t that what Advent is about?
Or, alternatively, might this season also have been designed to prepare us for what comes next when dreams dry up and the paths we’ve been treading run us into a cliff? This was a common experience in 2024, also for baptized people. We sent you a few posts along the way that reminded you of this. Funerals were as featured as ever. Congregations closed as well. So did other Christian organizations. Much more of this is certain to unfold between now and next Advent. Comes the question—an honest and pressing Advent question, as we submit. How shall we respond—or to put that more accurately, to Whom shall we turn—when failure and death overtake us in 2025?
For that we hand you to Fred Niedner who helped a group of people in St. Louis face this very question six weeks ago. They had gathered to shut down a forty-year-old institution that most of us had never heard though it was deeply dear to them. Fred was their chosen speaker for the occasion. We know that what he said to them will resonate with lots of you too. That’s why we share it here. As we’ve often done in recent years, we’ll do this sharing in two digestible parts. We tell you going in that next week’s Part Two is a homiletical tour de force. You won’t want to miss it.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
__________________________________________________________________
Faithful Ending(s)
An Address at the Formal Closing of
the Lutheran School of Theology, St. Louis
November 3, 2024
by Frederick Niedner
+ + +
Part One
I’m so grateful to be here with so many of you I’ve connected with and worked with over the years. I have always admired and been grateful for the work you have done at LST, the courses you have offered, and the community that you created and sustained.
I’ll not rehearse the story of LST’s “life,” but as we all know we’ve come to a moment that calls us to “end faithfully.” By my lights, that makes this something of a funeral, although on a day when many of you have observed All Saints Day in your parishes, there’s a bit of that spirit in this room, too, this evening, as we remember the saints who have gone before us, and taught us, and ponder our own places in the white-robed throng.
But still, it’s a funeral, and I can’t avoid noting I’ve been attending more and more of them lately. It’s that time in my life. My contemporaries are dying, and a week or two without a funeral is rare these days.
There are many kinds of funerals—many kinds of letting go.
One I could tell you about is a kind of cautionary tale, given what we’re up to this evening. I was once on a board that shut down an organization called the Walther League. Some of will have known it. It was for many years the youth organization of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, though technically it was an independent entity, and it lasted almost 100 years. Toward the end, after it ran afoul of the LC-MS in the 1970s, it was no longer a youth organization, but it had a lot of money because it had sold its headquarters building in Chicago and became a “foundation.” I happened to be on the last board of directors. We finally decided it was foolish to keep spending money to find ways to spend money, so we gave away the corpus of funds, some to the Lutheran Volunteer Corps and the rest to Wheat Ridge Ministries, a sister organization to the Walther League. Then we had a funeral.
In 1993, nearly 2,000 people came to a three-day event that combined a 100th anniversary party and funeral for the Walther League at the O’Hare Hilton in Chicago. The opening night began with worship, and a pastor named Gerry Coleman concluded the service with remarks about how we never know when we’ll all be together again, even come the next morning, and with that he offered the traditional commendation prayer used at funeral rites. Then, as he spoke a benediction over us all, the chair of the event’s organizing committee, a former Walther League executive named Ben Eggers who had earlier welcomed the group, dropped dead of a heart attack. So, that can happen at the funeral of an organization. And any one of us might not be here should we ever try to reconvene.
I know of other kinds of funerals. My dad, all by himself, held a brief funeral, complete with homily, as he buried his long-deceased father’s sermons in a farm field in Oregon. Those sermons had done their work and could now be laid to rest. (My dad’s sermons are still in boxes in my garage. I’ve not yet summoned up whatever it will take to conduct that funeral.)
Many years ago, I facilitated the funeral of a Valparaiso congregation’s old red hymnals—The Lutheran Hymnal, it was called, TLH for short—so the old-timers could finally let go of it and cheerfully sing from LBW, the Lutheran Book of Worship. We sang hymn after hymn with great gusto, then symbolically buried a few tattered hymnals, and afterward it was much easier to sing from the LBW. We need funerals. They aid us in many ways.
Sometimes I’m the preacher at funerals, though not as often as before. But that’s my role this evening—contributing something like a homily for the funeral of a dearly beloved institution.
A text for this homily? Ecclesiastes 3 comes to mind—
It’s how things work among us mortals in time and space, there’s a time for everything, a time to live and a time to die, a time to cling and a time to let go. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. EVERYTHING PASSES AWAY. Yes, everything. For much of my life I assumed Lutheranism would last forever. The same for Valparaiso University, and the United States of America. Now everything around me, whether institutions or individual persons, seems quite mortal, one step from hospice care or sudden death. It seems I should have visited the coliseum in Rome more often. We’re much like the crowds who once filled it and thought it would last forever. They should see it now.
What do we say and do in moments such as this?
We gather. We need to be together—to note the gravity of the moment and to ponder its meaning. We grieve best when we’re together.
From Wikimedia Commons
We grieve because we are losing something we cared about deeply. Something with a story we knew and were a part of has come to an end. LST was part of our story, and we gave ourselves to it. Or better perhaps, we gave ourselves to each other through the community that has been LST. So it’s a complicated “life” that’s come to an end among us.
Ultimately, however, as at any funeral, our gratitude for the gift we received and loved in the one who has passed on, in this case LST, outweighs the sadness that this life has ended, and we go on now alone. Grief, we’re told, is the price we pay for having loved. But we don’t only grieve. We give thanks. We throw our hands up in the biblical Hebrew’s gesture of thanksgiving—yada, is the verb. It’s a heave, a tossing back to God what God has given us. And we do the work of thankful heaving heavenward by telling stories so that we can account for what we’re handing back, giving thanks for. That’s how humans make meaning. We don’t just live through random, disconnected events. We tell stories that connect things, connect us, discover the meaning of our days and lives.
In this case, part of thanksgiving is naming all the people, living and deceased, who gave this school life—which is always risky; we might miss important people—but I’ll name some names my sources suggested: Bob Bertram, of course, as much a founder as anyone, no doubt; and Ron Neustadt (and wife Debbie), Bill Yancey, Tom Schoenherr, John Lottes, Marci Childs, Don Tanner, Carolyn Crowe, Harry Thiele, and an Episcopal priest named Warren Crews. And Ed Schroeder, who was pretty much part of everything. And Mike Hoy, who served so capably as dean for a stretch of years, and then Keith and Penny Holste, and Cathy Lessmann who served as administrator, and now Stephanie Doeschot who has led LST so capably in recent years. And nearly 100 teachers over the years (96 to be exact). I’ll not name teachers, except the first one in the alphabetical list—my dear, old friend, classmate, and fellow Alttestamentler, the late Ben Asen, who taught about as many LST courses as anyone over the years.
We give thanks. We tell stories. And then we preach gospel, and the way I do this at funerals is mostly by showing as best I can how the deceased and Jesus shared a common story. Our story is his story, and his story our story. All through our lives, Jesus lived and lives our story. And we get to live his.
+ + +
—to be continued for Thursday Theology readers next week,
as Fred unearths the content of his last two sentences above.
