Seventy Images of Grace in the Epistles . . .: That Make All the Difference in Daily Life

Foreword

To Iowa

Two words, those two words, appear in isolation on the first page, the dedication page, of the memorable novel Lila by the celebrated author Marilynne Robinson. Most authors use their dedication pages to thank or give credit to family members, teachers, or other inspiring people. Thanking or giving credit to a thing is a different matter. Why does a state deserve Dedication Page privileges? And, of all states, why Iowa?

Those who know the work of Robinson and the fact that she teaches at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop well recognize that Iowa helps shape the outlook and work of this novelist. To many Americans from the coasts, Iowa is flyover country. To some traveled sophisticates it seems boring. Why not dedicate writings to Rhode Island or Hawaii? Doesn’t New York generate more sparks for the imagination than Iowa? (I am not prejudiced against Iowa: as a son of the Plains, I spent five of my best youthful years in that state and still savor memories of people who live there.)

I have gone on a bit about this because I want to foreword this book with a takeoff on Robinson and make the claim that the book you are about to read could well have been prefaced with these two words:

From Iowa

Professor Everist was born and grew up in Iowa. Her value as an author will soon win your attention and favor. I am moved by a word of José Ortega y Gasset: Tell me your landscape, and I will tell you who you are. But who we are is by no means exhausted by one geographical reference. Professor Everist and her husband and children spent two decades in the metropolitan areas of St. Louis, Detroit, and New Haven, Connecticut, most of that time ministering in the inner city, walking the neighborhood, which shaped both her life and her theology. They returned to Iowa, where she has taught many years at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, a learning community where students are encouraged to listen deeply not only to Scripture but also to one another.

Professor Everist, a very observant person, gathers into her vision and soul the landscapes in which she has lived. The key to her discernment is a love of and care for people and their stories. She teaches her pastoral and diaconal ministry students to do the same, how to walk with people in their diverse neighborhoods and to listen to their stories in the languages of their daily lives. Their stories and hers, reaching from Iowa across the United States and beyond, become the grist for Everist’s narrative art, and she translates that love to people from anywhere. People from anywhere make their appearances on many pages; Everist hones her talents, sharpens her vision, and focuses the stories on people especially in various kinds of need. In these accounts we meet passersby whom she—and her students—never pass by. As I read the stories, I kept feeling that I would know on a first-name basis the people who appear here with only a first name after a first-page of readerly acquaintance.

Persons who are graced or are vividly in need of grace—you are one of them—under God, are the real focus or subjects of this book, but they are special people who experience the grace about which Everist writes so well. They may not always be highly aware of the grace-full existence available to them, or with the promise and potential realization of grace with which she endows them—just as the reader may not have experienced yet what the reader will experience upon meeting each in print.

That’s how God works, in the Everist vision. I was struck from the first pages and then, through them all, with the I-Thou perspective, the personal angle, in a world so often reduced to the I-It of mere objects. Just for fun, with the help of the computer’s search device, I started counting all the times we or us showed up, but soon gave up, once the usage of the plural personal pronoun had worked its effect. Again, it’s all personal; that’s how grace works, whether from God or among the people who respond.

Two more things. First, this is a book of stories. I know, I know: grace is a concept, in its own way also a thing, to be treated in various ways, including by diverse servants of the word. Professor Everist is a teaching theologian who begins not with Christian dogmatics or religious philosophy but in the world God created and in which ordinary people live. She may be able to impress with abstractions but she finds the challenge in helping people think theologically by beginning with the complexities of daily life and by doing theology together inductively and constructively. She could use words that end with -ation, as in justification, sanctification, or propitiation, but she would not work her effects with them nearly as well as she does through her stories. (Do we properly recognize the influence of biblical parables on this superbly informed student of the Bible?)

That leaves the other key to this book: it is full of stories. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes that humans are storytelling animals. And somewhere Martin Buber proposed that God created the world because he loved stories and needs a world of people to be part of stories. As tellers of their stories, people conversed and converse with God. Experts on philosophy and grammar often note that argument has its purpose in life, but conversation more often opens participants to change. This is clearly a book that bids for conversation, a fact signaled by the many, many questions within the plot and at the end of the chapters. They are invitations to conversations on the life-changing, life-giving reality of divine grace. Let the conversation begin, following through on an author’s call from Iowa and into all the world.

Martin E. Marty

Lutheran pastor and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago

Preface

How can faith speak directly to people’s real lives? How can conversation around Scripture make all the difference in the arenas of someone’s daily world? People who have heard the Bible many times—or for the first time—want to know in the terms and images of their life situation. When my world seems to be shaking all around me, why doesn’t it help to hear ‘You are forgiven’? And ministerial leaders as well as lay people ask,What can I say to someone who feels totally alienated from God?

Seventy Images of Grace in the Epistles . . . That Make All the Difference in the World is a book for all who are concerned about the gap between what people hear on Sunday morning—even about what they deeply believe—and what they do in daily life all week long. It is intended to help people make connections and to empower them for their ministries in daily life. We will present the interplay of stories of people’s actual lives and Epistle images of grace. This book will neither moralize nor sentimentalize but help people begin to recognize the depth of the human predicament and the power of the gospel, thereby becoming equipped for vocation, not out of guilt, but from freedom.

Why talk about grace in the languages of the arenas of people’s daily lives? Aren’t the words justification by grace through faith Sunday words? Is not faith something I simply apply to my life in the world? Many people think so, leaving theology and deep biblical thought to the clergy. We who are clergy and theologians could be tempted to separate call to faith from call to ministry in daily life. However, we then miss the intricacies of the particular. There are not different kinds of grace, nor different places to live out our faith. God is not detached from the human situations and predicaments in which people are immersed. Jesus Christ’s incarnation means he not only put on flesh but entered, and still enters, the places in which we live and work and relate to each other. It is in those places that the gospel meets the world’s great need.

We need to be able to name the human predicaments in our daily arenas and hear—and speak—grace there. It is not sufficient to merely try to be good people, or to apply what we heard on Sunday, but all of us, young and old, actually can do theology there. We are transformed by grace in that place, in the languages of daily life, the vernacular, as Martin Luther put it. Then, through grace in Jesus Christ, all of the baptized, the laos, are freed and empowered to be the priesthood of all believers, for ministry in daily life. Therefore we need a broad range of images to meet the broad range of human situations crying out for grace. Scripture itself provides them.

The Images

The church through the centuries has often focused on sin and atonement (or the legal image of forensic justification) as the central way to speak of salvation, but in the Epistles that is not a major image at all. Death/Life and Captive/Free are found much more frequently. If the human problem is death, Jesus Christ has brought new life. If the human problem is bondage, the good news is that Jesus brings freedom. Other major images are Darkness/Light and Alienation/Belonging. All of the baptized, members together of the priesthood of all believers, need to hear the gospel of God’s grace in terms of their own specific situations. Theologian Letty Russell wrote that Jesus did not say to the blind person, You can walk, nor to the person who could not walk, You can see.¹ Christ met people on the road and asked, What do you want me to do for you? Jesus cared about people, the societal problems related to human need, and God’s saving justice in the world in which they lived.

There no doubt are more images of grace in the Epistles than I will have enumerated and described here. Likewise, images should not limit. God’s work in Christ is beyond any image or metaphor. Readers of the Epistles will make their own discoveries. Any attempt to put concepts in boxes, or to debate them, misses the purpose. These seventy images are arranged in eight chapters, grouped by themes; those images used most frequently have been placed at the beginning of each chapter. Minor images, such as Broken Off/Grafted On to the Tree, follow. We encounter the images in the texts and they encounter us. An index of texts used is provided at the back of the book.

The Stories

The stories in the book are those of real people. Names and situations have been changed as appropriate. To begin where people are is to engage in a ministry of accompaniment. Such ministry requires walking with and deep listening. Together we discover the human predicament, and, by God’s grace, together we discern God’s good news in Jesus Christ. Sometimes a story introduces an image; sometimes it comes at the end, or at the end of two or three smaller images. Sometimes the story is intertwined with the biblical texts. Often we hear writers, many of whom are former students of Wartburg Theological Seminary, telling in first person the story of the person with whom he or she is walking. The stories presented here are edited excerpts from longer stories written about people living out their vocations in ministry in daily life.

We can start from either direction: the stories of human lives and people hungering for the grace of God, or with a scriptural image. If we begin with the human situation, we cannot simply look for an answer in Scripture, in a proof-texting way. Nor should we take one of the images and project it onto someone as though it were a sort of personality test—for example, Joe is alienation/belonging; Melinda is darkness/light. The goal is to look at and listen to people as we meet them on the road in daily life. Just recently, at a church potluck, a retired professional man said to me, I’m glad spring is coming, so I can be doing yardwork. During this long winter I have felt so useless. The good news for him was not You are forgiven, but that in the human predicament of feeling useless, Christ continues to call him with his gifts. (Uselessness/Gifts, we find, is a major image in the Epistles.) We need to listen carefully to people’s comments and learn their stories, and to convey in words—more so in action—the good news of Jesus Christ in its many and varied expressions. Each person’s story is significant and all of our callings (vocations) are equal in God’s sight. This is countercultural in a society marred by income inequality in which people’s worth is tied to the compensation they receive for their work. Our calling (our vocatio) is rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The stories in this book may or may not relate precisely to yours. There is always room for your own stories or stories of people with whom you walk to become part of your reflection and conversation. Stories beget stories and so the conversation continues. Questions for personal reflection and collegial conversations are provided at the end of each image. They also are embedded throughout the text rhetorically, particularly connecting the image to twenty-first-century reality. These questions are not yes or no, right or wrong, but rather are meant to draw people in more deeply and to challenge us all for ministry in daily life.

The Readers

This book, while based on solid biblical work, is explicitly written in accessible language rather than the language of the academy. It is intended for a broad readership, including ministerial leaders and all people in the Christian faith community. This book can be read alone but would be more productively used in a group setting such as a pastor’s class, an adult study forum, a Bible class, or a peer support group. It could be used as an introduction to Christian faith or as a reintroduction for people considering returning to a faith community after being away for a number of years. A campus ministry setting is another possibility. It could be used in any number of formal educational settings, including seminaries, because students preparing for public ministry often feel intimidated by and not competent to enter into a parishioner’s world.

In addition to teaching ministries, this book provides a broad range of images to use in sermon preparation. It heightens our awareness of images not only in the Epistles but also in the Gospels and provides material for thematic preaching. In liturgical planning, the book heightens our awareness of the many images of grace, not only in Scripture but also in hymns and prayers. In pastoral care ministry, or spiritual direction, this book helps pastors, lay care ministers, and spiritual directors listen in the languages people use to describe their lives, meeting people where they are in times of stress and during opportunities for growth.

Blessings as you enter the Letters and become engaged in the many ways God has reached out and continues to reach out with unconditional love in Jesus Christ.

Norma Cook Everist

Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, 2014

1. Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective: A Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster,

1974

)

53

.

Acknowledgments

Because I have been engaged in this work over the years, I have many people to thank, not all of whom are mentioned here. I particularly thank Joe Daiker, Roberta M. Pierce, and Tami Groth, student assistants during the years I was working on compilation and completion of this book. I add my thanks to former student assistants Chris deForest, Gloria Stubitsch, and Katherine Woolf for their faithful collaborative work, and to Nancy Woodin, administrative assistant to the faculty, for her meticulous proofreading. I give my appreciation to my colleague Craig Nessan, with whom I taught as we invited senior seminary students to walk with lay people. I am so pleased that Martin E. Marty agreed to write the Foreword for this book. I have enjoyed working with my editor at Wipf and Stock, Charlie Collier, whose initial interest and consistent support have made all the difference in the world.

I thank the following people for stories about themselves or, in most cases, about their walking with a person in daily life: Alicia Anderson, Shannon Arnold, Alyssa Augustson, Matthew T. Barnhouse, Hannah Benedict, Jackie Cook, Trisha DeBoer, Allison deForest, Chris deForest, Christopher Deines, Amanda Esping, Mark Everist, Arnold Flater, Lee R. Gable, Robert Garton, Donald W. Glanzer Jr., Jeremy D. Johnson, Kirsten Curtis, Josh Knudsen, Benjamin Splichal Larson, Jonathan Splichal Larson, Renee Splichal Larson, Joseph L. Liles, Rob Martin, Melinda McVey McCluskey, Ray McKechnie, Rich McLear, Chuck Meyer, D. Patti Meyer, Rich Mohr-Kelly, Roberta M. Pierce, Michael J. Rahlf, Scott Ralston, J. Mamy Ranaivoson, Megan Reedstrom, Malcolm P. Ridgeway Sr., William Rosin, Donna Runge, Arlyn Rusche, Arhiana S. Shek, Emily Lynn Shipman, Rhia Strohm, Gloria Stubitsch, Rod Thompson, Amy Deloach Waelchli, and Andy Zoerb. Now engaged in faithful ministries all over the United States, these people, many of them former students, walked alongside others, listened as they told their stories in the languages of their daily lives, and wrote so that their voices would be heard. The stories have been edited, with permission, to fit the pages of this book. The names of the subjects, places, and authors have been changed as appropriate. The stories are real and also, as Martin Marty wrote, become part of the narrative as people from anywhere who are loved by God’s grace.

Introduction

1. Human Predicament/Grace

The members of the laos, the people of God, carry out their ministries faithfully, sometimes in the midst of struggle, but often the full meaning of the gospel in their lives doesn’t seem to fit unless it is in guilt/forgiveness language. What images would relate to the ministries in daily life of people you know? Estranged/Partners? Weakness/Strength? Judgment/Mercy? Futility/Purpose? Death/Life? Division/Unity? Labor/Rest? What are the human problems, challenges, and predicaments they face? What are their working theologies? In what ministries in daily life are they already engaged? Are they able to connect biblical and theological concepts with these ministries? The first of the seventy images of grace in the Epistles is presented here in the Introduction as a basis for all the rest.

Steve the Salesperson

Lee walked with Steve, who works full-time as a salesperson at a big-box store in the windows and doors department. Steve said that the fundamental component of his ministry is integrity and trustworthiness. When asked about the effects of sin and human brokenness, he said, I see it in death and dying. His boss had three significant losses within a few days. I took his hand between mine and assured him God was with us in all our pain. I could tell he appreciated that. Steve ministers to his boss, but for some reason he doesn’t call it ministry. He ministers to customers, too, in certain situations. I also see human need in my customers—especially the elderly ones. One will come into the store and seem bewildered by the size of the place. Even if she isn’t looking for a window or a door, I make sure she finds what she’s looking for.

When asked where he might see God’s grace at his workplace, Steve responded, I haven’t broken the rules at the store and so I haven’t experienced God’s grace there. Even though Steve shows God’s grace and love to broken people, for him grace is synonymous with forgiveness of certain sins, so he doesn’t think he is experiencing it except when he feels condemned for something. Grace is much larger than Steve’s conception of it.

What Is the Human Predicament? What Is Grace?

So what do we call this human situation? The human condition? Human brokenness? People hungering for the grace of God? I refer to this as the human predicament, which relates both to the human relationship with God and people’s relationships with one another. It is sin in the broadest and deepest sense. And this problem is active, not just passive (e.g., "It happened to me"). We need to be surrounded by God’s unconditional love in Jesus Christ through the body of Christ in order to begin to deal with the radical ramifications of the human predicament. Otherwise, we hide and blame. The human predicament is vertical and horizontal, personal and communal, complex and systemic.

The writers of the Epistles do not mince words in naming the particular human predicaments in the young Christian communities. Here are a few samples: It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters (1 Cor 1:11); Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry . . . (Phil 1:15); You who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds . . . (Col 1:21);Recalling your tears, I long to see you . . . (2 Tim 1:4); . . . even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials . . . (1 Pet 1:6).

In exploring images of grace, or, one could say, the theology of salvation (soteriology), I mean God’s agency in the salvation of humanity through the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. As we expand our range of salvation images, we can meet people in the many diverse manifestations of the human predicament. The radical grace of God is always a surprise, and always life-changing. Words of grace, almost without exception, begin each letter to the early Christian communities. Here are the beginnings to the Epistles cited above: To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor 1:2–3); To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishop and deacons, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Phil 1:1–2); Grace to you and peace from God our Father. In our prayers for you we always thank God . . . (Col 1:2–3); To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy and peace . . . (2 Tim 1:2); May grace and peace be yours in abundance (1 Pet 1:2).

The good news is for the community; it is not just about me and Jesus. The Epistle images make it clear that forgiveness, life, reconciliation, and freedom, among other concepts, are plural and so meant for communal life in Christ. This new life together is unachievable and unattainable on our own. The gospel is a gift. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the dangers of being the church in a dangerous world. He also wrote about the great loneliness in community. We make demands on one another. We fail to hear the other’s cries of pain. As the love of God restores communion between God and humans in Christ, so too the human community is transformed into a living reality of love. The Holy Spirit makes us aware of the ways in which we are estranged from one another so that we know we need Christ. The Spirit places us within the divine community so that members of the community no longer see one another as claim (demand) but as gift.²

• How do you see the human predicament in the arenas of your daily life? How