On Relics

I'm not really into relics, at least not in the increasing of my personal holiness, but I have to gush at least a little about the "Lutheran" relic I was working with this week.

Without boring you with too many details, I spent hours looking over and making copies of Dr. Gerhard Forde's original sermons. These sermons nurtured the faith of many saints throughout the years and will hopefully become more accessible to the public in years to come.

A side note: Forde's text Where God Meets Man: Luther's Down to Earth Approach to the Gospel, was my catechism in college when the faith promised to me in my baptism finally came to me.

Back to the sermons: I couldn't get over the palpable grace on each sheet of paper, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed out on a typewriter so that you could feel, like braille, the letter through the page. These sermons spanned a lifetime of proclamation and were written on letterhead from various institutions (Luther, St. Olaf and Oxford) and sometimes even on vellum so thin I thought it was butcher's paper. What a treasure! What a gift!

One of the things that I couldn't help but notice were the constant notes to self, questions to self, afterthoughts and other sentiments that seemed to foster an environment of growth, change and development in Forde the preacher. Even in some of his later sermons, Forde continued to ask the quintessential Lutheran question: "What does this mean?" For Forde, the theologian, pastor, church historian extraordinare, theology was the creature's task for the sake of proclamation.

We must hope never to forget this.