“We train you here to be stewards of life’s crises.” Former chaplain and seminary professor Martin Scharlemann preached those words in chapel at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis decades before I was born. Not much has changed in pastoral ministry since he did. Pastors exist, whether I like it or not, to steward the crises of life on both an individual and corporate scale. We care for the one who received the terminal diagnosis and the family that is losing that person. We deal with the broken relationships of the self, the home, and the congregation. We comfort those who have been hurt and those who have done the hurting. I wish the old joke were true, that we only worked one day a week. I wish all I did was study, lead worship, and preach. That’s not, though, all that I was trained for. I am a steward of life’s crises, individually and corporately. 

A friend of mine is a pastor too, another steward who knows what it is to care for the crises in life on an individual and corporate level, another preacher who does more than preach. He reached out to me the other day because the texts for this coming Sunday assigned by the lectionary we both use gave him pause, not because they are particularly difficult texts, but because this moment in the life of the country is. He is rightly concerned about “preaching politics” because texts like Micah 6:1-9 (What does the Lord require of you? Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly) and Matthew 5:1–12 (the Beatitudes) seemed primed for misuse this coming weekend especially. It is easy to see why. Questions of justice, mercy, peacemaking have risen to the brim of conversations concerning not just those whose status in this country should or should not be questioned, because of the tactics used and the split second decisions being made, but because the times right now foment the fear that those things are short supply. This moment, as a preacher, as a pastor, is another moment of crisis to steward. 

“He forgives, this God without compare.” Franzmann coined that phrase in a sermon he preached toward the end of his life on the campus of Concordia Theological Seminary, then in Springfield, IL. It was a sermon about forgiveness, about the God who forgives, and about those who have received what God has done. Here are a few paragraphs:

He forgives, this God without compare. He forgives freely and sovereignly because “He delights in steadfast love.” There is in His forgiving none of that grudging weariness that is the mark, too often, of our forgiving: “Well, maybe the bum does have some redeeming qualities after all; let him go.” Our God does not operate with “redeeming qualities”; He works with redeeming love. His action is not that easy “acceptance” on which we pride ourselves but forgiveness, forgiveness in the face of “anger,” forgiveness in the face of judgment, forgiveness for the “remnant” who have bowed before that judgment. His forgiven people say, “When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light.” They do not reckon with a general benevolence, with a slack and slovenly divine good nature. They look with astonishment to the forgiving love of their Judge, to a forgiveness to which “His sons . . . come trembling” (Hos. 11-10-11).

Our God forgives compassionately and therefore wholly and effectually. He treads our iniquities under foot and casts all our sins into the depths of the sea. Micah’s language recalls the story of Israel’s release from Egypt. God deals with our sins as He deals with the enemies of His people: “You shall never see them again,” He told His people concerning the Egyptians and tells them concerning their sins.—“So wir’s glauben” as Luther says. It is not God but our perversity of little faith that builds dreary museums for the contemplation of drowned Egyptians. 

Our God forgives; and in His forgiving we have to do, not with a principle, an idea, a conception, but with an act. Forgiveness is as actual as the Exodus, as actual as Jacob, as Abraham, as the fathers, as the oath sworn by the living God by His living self—as actual as Jesus of Nazareth, as actual as history under a Roman procurator, sub Pontio Pilato, as actual as crucifixion and resurrection, “publically portrayed,” officially proclaimed by God Himself (Gal 3:1). Forgiveness is an overt, irreversible act. You may refuse it, but you cannot undo it. You cannot fiddle with it, modify, or remake it. It is there, as real as “Rise up and walk”—as real as Jesus’ “I will; be thou clean.” [Some morning when you feel particularly leprous and look upon your face in the mirror and ask, “Can God love that?”—remember that two-word Greek absolution of our Lord: Thelo, katharisthetil] 

Apart from the usual poetic prose, Franzmann’s words strike me as needed for this moment, because the only thing I have to steward is what I have first received, something that I cannot undo but can certainly refuse. I would suggest that, far from making things excusable, forgiveness actually changes the dynamic. I cannot ask those who do not claim to share my faith to forgive as they have been forgiven, but it would seem than any of us who pray the prayer taught by the Lord of forgiveness regularly commits themselves to such a task. That does not mean the task is easy or that we always see such forgiveness at work. A few more paragraphs:

This is old stuff; as old as sin itself, almost as old as the hills and the enduring foundations of the earth which the Lord summoned as witnesses against His people (Micah 6:1-5). And, God forgive us, we tend to grow weary of this manna: “our souls loathe this worthless food.” We have developed a diseased passion for the “new and improved,” for “new and exciting” (Will no one rid us of these pestilent adjectives?) theologies from over the sea. We are told, moreover, that modern man is no longer in search of a gracious God; he is not looking for forgiveness. His disease is not guilt, but a sense of lostness, insignificance, futility. He feels, not unforgiven but unwanted.

Conceding for the moment that there is such a thing as “modern man” (The modern men I meet are all kissing cousins to the men I meet in Genesis or Homer), the question is, obviously, not whether he wants forgiveness but whether he needs it. Does he need it? He seems to have all the symptoms of the unforgiven man. 

The forgiven man, we read in Luke, “justifies God” (Lk 7:29) He accepts God’s verdict on his sin as a true verdict and glorifies God for admitting him into the Kingdom on terms of forgiveness. The unforgiven man must justify himself, ceaselessly. Look at the church, how self-justification has left its slimy mark on our churchmanship, our scholarship, and has become incarnate in our one-upmanship. Look around in the world for the symptoms of the self-justifying man: the rich supply of righteous indignation, rebel against Establishment, Establishment against rebel, etc., etc. our extreme sensitivity to other men’s sins, our acute perceptiveness for other men’s hypocrisy. The barbarous yawp of rebellion, the self-pitying yowl of the desolate, the yammer of the pauperized, the erotic yip of the emancipated—all these are marks of the unforgiven man, who cannot look upon God’s face and call him Father.

The unforgiven man transfers his guilt to the world, thus justifying himself. Because he is, in the desolate grayness of his unforgiven sin, one grown dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable. All the uses of this world are drier, stale, flat, unprofitable too. He is the man of whom Deuteronomy speaks, the man of trembling heart, failing eyes, and languishing soul who says in the morning, “would it were evening!” and at evening, “would it were morning!” 

There is new stuff only for the forgiven, sustained newness and sustained joy and astonishment. I no longer go out and buy a piece of beef and a bottle of wine. I receive the new gift of meat from him who owns all the cattle on a thousand hills and the undeserved favor of Him who gave wine to make glad the heart of man. Every morning is new because the mercies of my Forgiver are new every morning. Every new baby is new, not a mere plus on the series of accumulated vital statistics but the sun of His forgiving favor breaking through the cloud of the deserved curse (surely the most terrible in the whole Old Testament) of the miscarrying womb and the dry breasts. Newness comes into our life with every praying of the Fifth Petition, with every absolution, with every “and give thee peace.” 

What strikes me here is that last paragraph. Sure, Franzmann diagnoses well the unforgiven man, or maybe I should say the person acting as if the forgiveness they have received hasn’t made a bit of difference, hasn’t given them a different kind of life to steward amidst the crises. Newness comes, a new perspective, a new life, a new way to inhabit the world. And yet, we still resist. Still more from Franzmann: 

And “modern man’s” question of identity (Do I count? Do I matter?) gets solved too. To be inscribed in God’s book, to be a citizen in God’s people, a member of God’s household, a living stone in God’s temple, the apple of God’s eye, snug under the shelter of His wing, sustained by the everlasting arms—what identity-seeker could ask for more than that? 

So, what else is new? Without forgiveness, nothing. “Nothing is strong, nothing is holy.” And nothing we can do will make it strong and holy and new. No burnt offerings, no calves a year old, no rivers of oil—no committees, commissions, task forces, cadres, structures, statistics, computers, or all the dreary etcetera of our business. Shall we give our firstborn for our transgressions and the fruit of our body for the sin of our soul? Millions of young men dead in thousands of wars cry out: No! No newness there: and in our day God’s trumpets blast that No into every ear. Whatever we do, we remain crooked men walking crooked miles and end up being hell to one another in a crooked house. But with forgiveness, then we begin to walk humbly with our God and learn to walk a straight mile, doing justice and loving mercy. Then we can cast our anxieties (which twist us crooked) on Him, the Forgiver, who cares about us, who has given His Son for us. Our crooked, constricted hearts are enlarged, and the joy in heaven over one sinner who repents calls forth a new song on earth. 

Our crooked little house will become liveable under the sky of forgiveness: there will be freedom there, and humor, a capacity for self-criticism and growth, wise charity, and wisdom that roots in the fear of Him with whom there is forgiveness.—Joy of men begotten to a living hope. 

It seems to me that in this moment, indivually and corporately, we who have been forgiven, whether we are called to be the public stewards of life’s crises or not, can walk the crooked way where we are hell to one another or we can receive from the God who is unlike any other, who gave of himself for those who are hell to one another, the God who forgives. It does not mean that life will be nothing but joy, but it does mean that stewarding the crises of life means making the house liveable when it seems to be anything but. It means we aren’t afraid to see ourselves for who we are, to see ourselves in light of what God has done, and to be good stewards of the forgiveness, the joy, and the love that has been lavished upon us. 

Martin Franzmann, “Who Is a God Like Thee,” The Springfielder 37, no. 2 (September 1973) 81–83.