13 minute read
JIM NESTINGEN AS EXPERIENCED BY STEVE PAULSON
Steven Paulson
Jim Nestingen grew up on the Northern Plains at the border of Canada among pioneer farmers who were called there from the four corners of the world ― especially from the rural poverty of nineteenth-century Norway. Those farmers were often the second or third sons who inherited little from their fathers’ estates and so adventured to America to use the Homestead Act and claim their 160 acres (provided they could last five years). Surviving that long was no mean feat, which you know if you have ever spent a winter near Bowbells or Estevan. The farmers loved their soil, but even more their families, whose men were good looking, whose women were strong and whose children were above average. They had to be rugged individuals in harsh circumstances living lives far away from anyone they knew—consequently they became ardently communal and coordinated work within families and between farms. Most things were shared, and help was given to the weak; in short order they were not only Grange but full-blooded communist planters who recognized the problem of banks, capital and the control of monied land by people other than those who harvested and fed others directly.
Farms were necessarily far apart, and Scandinavian men are short on words in any case, so their main communication was telling tall tales. We tell jokes and teach and express ourselves in stories of the fruitless fight against the weather, wealthy banks, and gloomy depression. Storytelling understands that everything in life transitions from life to death and thus ends tragically. However, the very best stories of such farmers were not tragedies, they told amazing stories of resurrection from the dead that went far beyond the earthly balms of the cycle of seasons or an occasional bumper crop. Jim’s Norwegian farmers learned these not from nature, but from their little Lutheran catechisms. Wherever they could claim land, they not only built sod houses (and then wood), but also built churches as quickly as they could, and from them they learned that Christian stories are comic, not tragic; they end with eternal life rather than cyclical death.
Despite leaving their motherland along with their biological family trees, these pioneer Lutherans could take their entire faith to the new land by making a pulpit, baptismal font, and communion table. All that they had to add was a preacher— sometimes gotten from the homeland, but then increasingly from their new land. Jim’s Dad was one of those preachers, and when he preached to such farmers, they received both words from God of death and life, the law and the gospel. Without further ado, the holy, Christian church was suddenly present in their midst! Thus, not only did they manage to bring this old-world comfort into the harsh plains, they also opened the door to heaven’s eternal life in their new place, just like the one wandering Jacob found by laying his head on the rock. Most importantly, they learned that the one thing more powerful than the wind, fire and freezing cold (and even the greedy bank)—was the simple word of forgiveness proclaimed by their preacher.
So it is that both farmers and preachers told stories that haunted and freed Jim throughout his life. He learned how to tell and re-tell these twisted, surprising and exalted stories in superlative form. The outstanding feature of Jim’s preaching was his gallows humor that ended in resurrection. Everyone who has spoken to him for five minutes remembers his laugh that emerged from the depths of his body and brought both the hangman and Christ. The hangman hovers over the grave as impending disaster, Christ arrives to a fresh grave from the other side in order to pull the dead man out by the hand: “Come out Lazarus!” While the pious always bristled at Jim’s bawdiness, sinners were attracted in droves to that very laugh—they would be caught up in it and start laughing just like Jim even if they had no idea why or what they were laughing at. Of course, Jim was teaching how Christians laugh at death—but this is never easy. It takes a man who has felt death and the ecstasy of rising with death behind him to learn it and even more to preach it. God gives the gospel through people—to people, which also means through a story to a story—and solely by this means reverses comedy (the Christian story) and tragedy (the world’s way of describing life). Tragedy thus always leads, but comedy wins. Jim’s stories were therefore not merely dark, gallows humor but twisted, macabre irony. Irony cannot be taught; it can only be lived. Indeed, Christians are not only comedians in the end, they are full of irony on the way there. This is the reason Christ announced to the Pharisees that he had come for sinners only—not the righteous (Mark 2). Jesus wins a great victory in the end—comedy! Yet, there is great suffering, sin, despair and loss along the way. Christians call this the way of the cross rather than glory.
I can’t tell you how many times I went to speak at high sounding “learned” societies with Jim when the other scholars were first dumbfounded, then flabbergasted, at Jim’s speech. Why does this man speak so? He sounded like a lugubrious, or stupid, Norwegian farmer. But even more, he spoke to the most learned men in the world as if he were reading stories to children. They would deliver their address in the accustomed fashion of the scholar, with a thesis followed by detailed explanation, ending with the repetition of the thesis—proved! But Jim knew that was no way to teach Luther, to say nothing of teaching life and the gospel. Theirs was the scholasticism Luther had freed the world from, and Jim was not about to go back to that. The Gospel, after all, is a story. The story can be told long (like the Gospel of Matthew) or short (like one of Paul’s letters), but it will not have a thesis, it will have a beginning, middle and end as all stories do.
Christ’s story begins at the start of all creation. Jim was especially aware of this part of the tale and especially good at it. We sometimes call this “beginning” the “first article” after the first article of the creed. It begins: “I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Creation is not a foil for salvation like our friendly Barthians teach. You and the world were not made by God through Christ in order to go through the drama of salvation—salvation was made because God already wanted created things from the beginning, before sin, and loved them. He still does. Jim learned some of the technical matters of this theology from one of the greats in Sweden (of all places) named Gustav Wingren. Wingren made a career of freeing 20th century Lutherans from their European hatred of creation received from both Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann—the two “big names” of theology up to then. But Jim recognized that this teaching of the first article of the creed came from his own earthly father who preached it to communist farmers. This made Jim so “down-to-earth” as only a Christian can be. You have to know the end of the law before you can identify its proper location and use: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we establish the law,” says Paul (Romans 3:31). The law ends, and just so has its proper place in the lives of families, farmers and preachers.
God does not want us to aspire for greatness— divinity that supposedly climbs the ladder into his majestic, almighty power. He does not want us to ascend mystically by making God the greatest desire we have ever had. God wants us to be human and that is all. Some say Jim enjoyed being human too much, but how can that be? We are made creatures of God, created in his image as males and as females for being fruitful and multiplying. Children, crops, animals, foods and drinks - and mutual conversation - all of these are life, and it is what God wanted from the beginning, as well as what he resurrects in the end once the death of disbelief has gripped us.
This is why Jim said he learned the Small Catechism on his grandfather’s tractor wheel in the rhythm of its plowing and planting. Even when sin entered (since we did not want to be creatures—but God, not created—but “flesh” that fights against spirit) Jesus Christ came down incarnate—true God and true man born of a woman, born under the law. Jesus Christ came “down-to-earth” so that the one who was above the law stooped beneath the law. Jesus himself suffered the full accusation of the law and thus also death and the power of the lying devil. But the one who knew no sin, and yet became sin (2 Corinthians 5), did this all “so that I may be his own…” (Small Catechism). Jesus came to take my sin and defeat it, so that when he dies, I will also die in a baptism like his, and certainly then rise in a resurrection like his.
And to think this is only the “middle” of the story! Jim often wept when telling this part of the tale. His tears were also as much a part of Jim as his conquering laugh. No one I ever met could go into such great detail concerning what the ten commandments actually demanded. Nor could anyone tell the story of what God means by a real creature in the first place and why God bothered to make us at all. We are to learn to get along with our Creator—not take his name in vain! That means, for example, learning how to curse properly! That is an art, after all. And we are to learn to get along with our neighbors—not killing! Not hating! Not committing adultery as if sex were our own plaything. But how shall any of these things be done? The power is not in me!
In the end, Jim was the most “down-to earth” teacher of the first article of the creed; the most heartfelt conveyer of the second article and Christ’s own suffering, death and resurrection. Still, his story telling is all about the final word— the comedy that overcomes the tragedy of life. Jim was our best bestower of the third article, and the unlikely, boisterous handmaiden of the Holy Spirit. We all know Jim for his laugh and his cry, but especially for how he could “bring the heat,” and “deliver the goods.” The end of Christ’s story intertwined with our own is a punch line. That word is the means the Holy Spirit uses—through men to men; through a sinner to a sinner to call you through the gospel that Jim taught and used. If you are going to truly forgive sins my own and that of all believers then you have to learn how to listen to the sinner: to learn to “hear the creature waiting.” Like most great preachers, Jim was very quiet by nature. He liked solitude, but also was able patiently to listen to the tragic story of each sinner who came to him—one by one. Every such tale is different, of course, with dark, sorrowful details of the struggle of life with sin, death and the power of the devil. Midway into this confession a preacher often wants to blurt out: “you did wha?”
Jim’s own aptitude for humanity let him become a veritable garbage dump of tragedy and is the reason he loved the classic story Young Men and Fire. When the story came to its inevitable ending of death and destruction—he would then have the very short word of the Gospel—as given by the Holy Spirit. That preaching is called the office of the keys, and when it is used at the right moment, with the right person (as God had decided long ago) then you have the greatest ending the true comedy, the sudden unexpected twist and the “last day” on which “Jesus Christ raises me and all the dead and gives me and all believers in Christ eternal life.” So, Jim would say, “as a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ and by his authority I declare to you the full forgiveness of all your sin.”
Then what? Well then, a new story begins that is unlike anything previously told. This story is actually not a story any longer; it ends neither in tragedy or comedy but is pure and total freedom. At this point, Jim liked to take out his pipe and sit for a good smoke, anticipating what this life would look like. Free to be! For others, this freedom presented horrors of endless “what if” scenarios, potential abuses and stumblings. They routinely warned of the dangers of this freedom from law, from sin, and from death as if Christ’s freedom and story could be anything but some version of starting the whole process of life over again this time trying not to make the same mistake of sin again. But Jim knew that though we have the new life only in faith now and not in sight or in feeling—it was not something fearful. The new heavenly life was precisely what worries us most right now. It is a glorious freedom to be God’s creatures—in full use of all that gives us joy and life even now: family, neighbors, food, home, animals, plants, good weather—no government! Fruitfulness beyond measure. Praising—saying Amen! Rehearsing the best of our stories, including the Lord’s Prayer, but now as filled and accomplished—our Father’s kingdom having come! His name hallowed! His will done on earth as in heaven! Getting our daily bread, and freely forgiving as we have been forgiven. Finally, not tempted but delivered from the evil one—his kingdom, power and glory forever and ever. The one true comedy. Amen.
