12 minute read
BY HEART
Julie Smith
On a cool spring morning in 1985 I sat next to my two sisters, one cousin, and two other students on the day of our confirmation at Hemnes Lutheran Church. Our pastor had decided that year to reinstate public questioning as part of the confirmation rite. He started with a softball question. “What is the first commandment and its meaning?” We had been doing rather intensive “memory work” from the Bible and the catechism for two years. We were quizzed every week. Prior to that, we had spent years and years in Sunday school memorizing these same words. This shouldn’t be a problem. It was one of the first things we had learned. What a gift this first question was!
My oldest sister was first in line. She recited the commandment perfectly, “I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” But she stumbled on the meaning and the question then came down the line to me. I had already started thinking about the second commandment, assuming my sister would get this one right and the pastor would just go through them in order. So when I had to come up with the meaning to the first commandment, I froze. “We are to fear and love God so that . . .” but nothing more would come out. ALL the meanings started that way, but I couldn’t come up with where the first one proceeded from there. So, down the line it went to my cousin. “We are to fear, love, and trust God above anything else.” Of course! The first one is different than the rest!
That moment is burned into my memory: the dress I was wearing, the chair I was sitting on, even the tone of my cousin’s voice as she proudly got the right answer. Whether my pastor’s method would meet current “best practices” of pedagogy today, I don’t know. But I can tell you that I have never forgotten that sentence again. Those words are lodged deep within me, and, hopefully, even the ravages of time and age will not be able to remove them. Less than ten years after that torturous confirmation day, I was handed the syllabus for my Lutheran Confessions course at Luther Seminary. It was being team taught by two giants of the faculty, Gerhard Forde and Jim Nestingen. My pastor, whom I trusted despite his terrible idea of questioning us publicly, had told me that I needed to make sure to take as many classes from those two as possible, and this was the first. I glanced at the syllabus, and right there in black and white for God and everyone to see they had written that in order to pass the course we would be expected to recite Luther’s Small Catechism. I was dumbfounded. They could not be serious! How had people gotten through confirmation class, let alone been accepted into seminary, without having already done this?
I had a freshly minted undergraduate degree in Religious Studies. The religion department faculty, in their wisdom, had a bunch of nineteen-year-olds read Tillich, the Niebuhrs, bits and pieces from the Jesus Seminar, and Luther’s three great treatises. I had written a senior thesis on the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I knew it all. Now, here we were in seminary preparing to become pastors, full of ourselves and our newly discovered calls, and we were going backwards. We were reading a children’s book. And not just reading it, memorizing it – just like kids do! It was the most ridiculous thing I could imagine, and all my suspicions that a seminary education was going to be less rigorous, and certainly less pure and objective, than a “real” graduate school education, were confirmed.
Nestingen and Forde were unapologetic about this requirement, and there were no exceptions. No one had the option of suggesting that their preferred learning style did not include memorization and recitation. No matter the age of the student or the educational background, everyone had to memorize the catechism. Somewhere along the way they shared Luther’s instruction about reading the catechism every day and I thought, “That seems unlikely and certainly unnecessary. Once you’ve learned it, why would you keep plowing this same ground when there is so much more to learn?” The idea of reading and re-reading this simple little book sounded like the kind of thing you just tell people in hopes that they will read it at least once.
When it came to the actual assignment, I had a leg up on some of my classmates, having already memorized it once, and taught it to confirmation students during college. I hadn’t realized how old fashioned my pastor and the pastor at my college church were, until I discovered that many of my classmates hadn’t had to memorize it. Their confirmation instruction had been more focused on relationship building, trying to get teenagers to like church and giving them some tools on how to navigate the moral questions they would face out there in the world. But I was able to check that silly children’s assignment off the list quickly and move on to the more serious work of real theological education.
Over the course of the next twenty-five or thirty years I encountered Jim in a variety of settings - lecturing to groups of clergy, leading adult forums in congregations, teaching seminarians, recording lectures, even designing a Doctor of Ministry program. But it seemed that no matter what the assigned topic might be, we could expect to spend our time with Jim in the catechisms. If he was asked to speak on a moral issue facing the church, he would teach the catechism. If he was asked to teach on prayer, he would teach the catechism, with a little help from the Psalms. If he was asked to offer an insight into any one of the endless conflicts facing the church, he would teach the catechism. And in almost every instance, there would be crazy stories woven into the teaching.
It was baffling. He was broadly and deeply read. He was no less nuanced than Forde, who cut with a scalpel, while so many are working with axes. With all the resources of the tradition at his disposal, he kept returning to the catechism. What a strange and “unserious” pursuit. This was not the work of a real scholar! This was taking the easy road. Or so I thought.
For my part as a parish pastor, I had been teaching the Small Catechism to confirmation students all those years, using Nestingen and Forde’s brilliant Free to Be as a textbook. Every few years I might preach a Lenten series on the catechism. Every fall we would hand out the little orange catechisms to the second graders. Indeed, the catechism had a place of some prominence in the educational work of the churches I served, even if I could never be quite as hard-nosed about memorization as I was expected to be.
Given this emphasis on the Small Catechism, I was always surprised by the struggles that arose in churches around issues that were clearly addressed in that little book. Hadn’t these lifelong Lutherans had to memorize it? Didn’t they know about our call to not hurt our neighbor in any way? Did they really think they had free will? Why did they think we used “holy water” for baptism? And why were their kids going off to college and getting re-baptized at the behest of Cru?
Then one day, not so very long ago, in the midst of COVIDstrife in my congregation, a realization struck me. I had spent nine months out of every year for the past thirty years, teaching the Small Catechism. So for thirty years I was immersed in the language and witness of that little book. But that didn’t seem to be the case for anyone else sitting around the table at church council meetings. Nor was it true of anyone else sitting in front of me on Sunday morning. They had, maybe, memorized the catechism at some point in their lives, but it hadn’t struck a deep chord. They didn’t recall the details of that book any more than I recall the details of trigonometry. And its ongoing usefulness in their lives of faith seemed to be about the same as the usefulness for trigonometry in my everyday life. And yet this happened in churches which were adamant about a strict memorization policy for their children ― by members who were obviously deeply influenced (at least at some point in their lives) by this little book! It became apparent to me that one brief sermon series a year was insufficient for assuring that the people retained their mother tongue.
But for me, after thirty years of being immersed in that book― coming up with a way to break it up into six little bites to use for a Lenten series, and in teaching first communion classes and preparing parents for baptism ― somewhere along the way, it stopped being a book I had memorized and started to become something I knew by heart. It became the natural, automatic, deep language of faith. It became not only the faith of the church, but my faith, the language of my deepest hope and most enduring peace.
It was like a lightbulb came on and Jim’s lifelong vocation of teaching and preaching the catechism suddenly made sense to me in a way it never had. Far from taking the easy road, sticking with a children’s book when one was a serious scholar took a kind of courage, a kind of faithfulness that is not easy to sustain in a lifetime of teaching. Jim taught the catechism wherever he went in an ongoing effort to return the Lutheran church to its native language. For it is only when we know this Word by heart that we can truly bear witness to the faith that sustains us.
There was no naivete in this commitment to teaching the catechism. It was not driven by some notion that the catechism was the magic bullet that would solve all the problems the church was encountering. It was the recognition that this little book was an outsized gift to the church. It gave us the language and the paradigm for our faith. As Jim put it, “This much is certain: the catechism cannot become a vehicle for the recovery of a lost golden age of Lutheranism. The past wasn’t so golden; now it’s gone. Neither can the catechism be called back on terms of enforcement. That was a failure. If the catechism is to be for this and future generations of Lutherans what it was for those who went before us, it will only be because, as [Gerhard] Frost put it, it has smiled again.”1
The smile of the catechism, the joy it takes in the gospel, the joy it instills in the one who has been grabbed by this promise, was evident in Jim’s teaching of it. He couldn’t help but smile and laugh as he spoke plainly about how the living God has entered into the fray to address the deep darkness in our lives. Even when speaking to matters of deadly seriousness, the smile, whether Jim’s or the catechism’s, could not remain hidden for long. “As stoically responsible as it is about the demands of creatureliness – one of its focal points – it breaks into a smile when it sets out the other: the even deeper and more abiding reality of God’s grace in Christ.”2
The promise that sings through those simple words was the heart language of Jim’s faith, just as it has become the heart language of so many of his students. This isn’t about memorizing the correct doctrinal formulations. It is about the language of faith, the language of the heart, that sustains our own faith and shapes our witness. “With such use – clarifying and focusing the discussion inside; opening up the Word in terms recognizable to the outside – the catechism may regain something of its hold as a living confession of Lutheranism. But the catechism is more interested in witness than in gaining power, and so it may smile prematurely – just for the sheer joy of being able to say it again, to name the name that is above every other.”3
“We are to fear, love, and trust God above anything else.” On that Sunday morning in 1985 that was just a sentence in a book that I had been forced to memorize. Nearly forty years later those words dwell so deeply within me that I can scarcely distinguish them from my own words. What had once been (poorly) memorized, I have come to know by heart. And I have come to know something else too: that Jim’s greatest gift to me was an appreciation for the way those words tend to and sustain faith for me and countless others.
Endnotes:
1James A. Nestingen, “Preaching the Catechism.” Word & World 10 no. 1 (Fall 1990): 33.
2Ibid., 39.
3Ibid., 42.
