God’s Glory; Neighbor’s Good

by Zenos Hawkinson

Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.
For his steadfast love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,
those He redeemed from trouble
and gathered in from the lands,
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south. — Psalm 107:1-3

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ:

We have it from the Apostle Paul that we are clay pots. But we are clay pots filled with treasure from God. And in the quietness of this hour, I should like you fellow clay pots to reflect with some imagination about the treasure you contain.

First of all, the treasure of Christ — Jesus the Savior and Jesus the Lord; the Grace of God; the treasure of memory; and, for those of you who tonight have eyes to see, that host of white robed witnesses ringing us in this room, asking do we mean to carry on their Covenant work — people from East and West and from North and South, gathered.

Think tonight how strange and mysterious it is that each of us is here. Most of us have come from far places, and our coming here is a series of mysterious incidents none of which were clear when they were occurring. As my colleague and friend, Mel Soneson always loves to say, “God works best in the midst of chaos.” While we much prefer the settled order, God stirs his great finger in history and sends his unwilling servants out — as Pastor Sundholm said in this morning’s sermon, “into the desert where, of all places, they don’t want to go.”

Why would a nice Swedish girl from Småland end up in Minneapolis of all places? Why would a nice Swedish boy from Värmland end up in Chicago of all places? And why would any Swede at all end up in Kansas?

We are here, as a people and as persons, as the consequence of a vast movement in human history — a movement that uprooted millions and millions of European people out of their accustomed native soil and projected them out into a new promised land. It is not a mistake that one of our own metaphors for our institutional experience is the ancient metaphor of Israel leaving Egypt, searching for the promised land.

So, tonight we feel, I hope, our sense of connection with the mystery of those beginnings, which then implies our own sense of connection with the mystery of our continuings. For, as one black preacher asked Milt Engebretsen in a very direct way at an Annual Meeting or a Midwinter Conference some years ago; “Now, Milt, you’ve got all these nice people here in the United States of America. What do you intend to do with them?” I’m not aware that there was an answer that night, but it is our question tonight.

Is there anyone else in this assemblage tonight as astonished as I am that it is already nine years since the centennial celebration, which I think most of you remember — with pleasure. Nine years! Or is it just my advancing age that says the time is telescoping? A hundred and nine years ago on a terribly snowy day in the city of Chicago in the balcony of the old Tabernacle at 30th and LaSalle, about 50 men sat together and concluded that there was a possibility of binding themselves to each other. This came after a long and bitter discussion and troublesome mutual experience. But, it was finally arrived at on the basis of F.M. Johnson’s keynote sermon to the assembled delegates, based on Psalm 119:63: “I am the companion of all that fear thee, that obey thy precepts.” I am the companion of all them that fear thee.

What they were groping for, these green immigrants, was a satisfying and effective relationship that would express authentically their own devotional and theological experience both back home in Sweden and here in this strange new land. They wanted a principle of order that was a guarantee of the freedom, of the joy they already had experienced in the Gospel. They didn’t want to sacrifice either order or freedom, but they were living within sight of the Tower of Babel.

Into late 19th-century Chicago where the prairie met the lake, every day came thousands upon thousands of Amelikites. Amelikites — people of a thousand different tongues and traditions, as threatening to this little group of Swedes as ever were the Amelikites to the children of Moses. What would be their principle of order? What would be their security here in this strange land where everyone called them dumb Swedes? What would be, after all, the possibility of accomplishing a secure sense of identity in a place as confusing as that Chicago was?

Finally, they were driven by their own experience. It was an experience of 40 years of cell-going, conventicle sharing, of devotions, and finally at the rock, the experience of God’s Grace — his own ineffable Grace in their lives. That primal experience, however it is received, in whatever style and in whatever time span, bound these people together with a network of meaning. The primal experience, the experience of Grace.

On a Sunday evening in 1687, a young German theological student named August Hermann Francke found himself in profound spiritual anguish. His account, later written:

I decided that if I experienced no change, I would again refuse to preach for I could not preach in unbelief and against my own heart and thus deceive the people. I also did not know whether it would be possible for me because I felt much too deeply what it was to have no God on whom one’s heart can rest.

Bemoaning one’s sins and not knowing why or who he is who presses out such tears or whether there is truly a God who is angered thereby to one’s sorrow and great distress daily and yet know no savior nor refuge, in such great anxiety I fell once again to my knees on that Sunday Eve and cried to God, who I neither knew nor believed, for salvation from such a sorrowful condition, if there was truly a God.

Then the Lord heard me, the living God, from His holy throne as I was still on my knees. So great was His fatherly love that He would not take away such doubt and restlessness of heart little by little with which I would have been quite content. But rather, He suddenly heard me so that I would be all the more convinced and would bridle my strayed reason to use nothing against His power and faithfulness.

Then, as one turns his hand in a twinkling, so all my doubts were gone. I was sure in my heart of the Grace of God in Christ Jesus. I knew God not only as God but rather as one called my Father. All sadness and unrest in my heart was taken away in a moment. On the contrary, I was suddenly so overwhelmed with such a stream of joy that I praised out of high spirits the God who had shown me such great Grace. I rose again of a completely different mind then when I had knelt down. I bent down with great sorrow but arose again with inexpressible joy and great assurance. As I knelt, I did not believe there was a God. As I arose, I would have confirmed it without fear or doubt even with the shedding of my blood.¹

Those things happen. Sometimes silently, sometimes with little more than a sigh. Sometimes with the shaking as of volcanoes, but those things happen. That mysterious grace occurs. And the memory of it transforms life. That’s what it is to be gathered in. To be gathered in, and then, to be sent out.

This same young August Hermann Francke spent six months with the founder of German Pietism, Philip Jakob Spener. Spener became his mentor and he sent Franke first up to Hamburg, Germany to work. To work with whom? To work in the peculiar way that pietists always seem to have worked — with children. He found the lost deserted kids in the teeming city of Hamburg and learned how to teach them.

And then, on Spener’s recommendation, Francke was sent to the new University at Halle, where he was given the chair in Greek and Hebrew and, to eke out his income, the pastorship of a noxious suburb of Halle, the little burg of Glauca.

Very quickly he began to work with the children of Glauca. First, finding in the almsbox of his church a sum the equivalent of 70 of our dollars, he resolved, on that basis, to take it as a signal from God to establish a school in his home. And he began. And very soon, the reputation of the school spread until there were middle class and nobles trying to get their kids into his school because he was running the best school in the district.

That being not enough, he established a free lunch for penniless students at the University of Halle, so at least they got one square meal a day. From the school, he established orphanages, several of them. And then a home for widows. And, finally, in cooperation with Baron von Canstein of Berlin, the Canstein Press, which took it as its charter to print inexpensive Bibles for distribution all over Germany. Within a 100 years, Canstein Press had printed 1,200,000 Bibles in a country which, ravaged by post-reformation religious warfare, had many parishes that hadn’t seen a Bible for a generation.

These were the famous Halle Foundations. And they illustrate the double-sided proposition that pietism brought into the modern world. First, God’s glory. This inexpressible sense of the glory, the majesty, and the grace of God, without which the soul simply cannot live. This sense, sometimes acute in us, sometimes moribund in us, but, somewhere once in, always there. God’s glory. And, because of God’s glory and as a conclusion from it, neighbor’s good. Not as a separate matter, but as integral with the glory of God. Because of this, I am mobilized and active according to my neighbor’s need. In accord with Jesus’ own commandment, you will recall in Matthew 22:37-40, the first and greatest commandment and the second commandment. On these two commandments, says Jesus himself, hang all the law and the prophets.

The Foundations at Halle achieved a world-wide reputation. And it was in that same spirit that John Wesley of the Church of England, having been influenced by German Moravian missionaries to Georgia, found his heart strangely warmed at Aldersgate 11 years after the death of Francke. As someone said; leaving as his legacy not much — a set of spoons and the Methodist Church. And also in his legacy, a young Wesleyan pastor named George Scott, who came to Sweden at the invitation of an industrialist, who established the first machine tool factory in Sweden, to preach to his English workmen. Scott soon learned to speak Swedish and enrolled a young Swedish Lutheran named Carl Olaf Rosenius. When Scott had to leave the country, for reasons of Swedish hostility, Rosenius remained behind to edit the newspaper that Scott began — called Pietisten.

[Do I have to tell anyone in this room that Pietisten is available in Minneapolis at $10 a year and if you haven’t subscribed, do it tonight? Another of those mysteries that come out of the chaos of our American experience.]

And so it was with Maria Nilsdotter, a widow living in Värmland outside Karlskoga, bitter, hopeless, discontent, with six children and no future. She had attended her parish church in Karlskoga and from the pastor of that parish church she heard orthodoxy, that is, a demand for unreasoning obedience and, above all, a demand of a young peasant widow that she make no waves and ask no questions. Life out there in the woods was dark. She was, as Francke had said two hundred years earlier, without the hope of a savior, full of sorrow, until a young assistant pastor in that parish put her in touch with another woman of the same mind, Britta Jonsdotter. He suggested that the two sit down to begin to read Luther’s Postila and Bible together.

They read for several years and gradually accumulated along with them, in that same parish, other women. Until, little by little, (as my old colleague Bill Fredrickson used to say, “You can’t read Bible very long without running into Jesus”) Maria came to the conclusion that God’s grace was real and that it was for her — in her own way — this primal experience.

And suddenly she began making a pest of herself all over the parish — delivering seditious (meaning mission-minded) newspapers, in general upsetting people’s applecarts by insisting on enlarging the local conventicle, and, finally, just as Francke did, coming from God’s glory to neighbor’s good. How? She went and found kids who were lost. Brought them to her farm — this is a widow with six kids, now — brought them to her farm with no visible means of support and began to teach them Sunday-School style, which meant not only religious instruction but also reading, writing, ciphering, and the other things a kid needs as a foundation for education.

She discovered that having had them only on Sunday, they were soon uproarious the rest of the week. And, let me tell you, people in those neighborhoods lived a raw life. So she thought, “I’ve got to have these kids with me all week if they’re to have any chance.” She went to the county Poor Relief Board and asked that the kids be placed on her farm as at an orphanage. They refused. She was a troublemaker, she was a pietist, she was a member of the conventicle, she was an unreliable female, and she didn’t know her place. So, she talked with the other women in the conventicle and then went where they auctioned these children off and bought them, brought them back to the orphanage, clothed and fed, dressed and taught them, though she had no educational degree or certification, and gave them a chance at a full life. God’s glory; neighbor’s good.

This woman then pressed her son, Carl Johan, into the service of the Gospel when his primal experience came. And in due time, he became something like the Free Church Bishop of all of Värmland and was an essential architect of the Covenant in Sweden. He was in that balcony on February 20th, 1885 with his Swedish-American brethren when the American Covenant was formed. And his son, Maria’s grandson, was David Nyvall, the founding President of North Park. Britta’s son was Olaf Olson, the founding Augustana pastor of the settlement in Lindsborg, Kansas. Two women around Gospel. God’s glory; neighbor’s good.

This is what makes Maria’s grandson David write:

With us as with the Apostolic Church, strength lies not in number and accomplishments nor in order and discipline nor even in health and wealth, our outlook is certainly not in any telescopic vision of the immensity of nature nor in any microscopic vision of its depth, but in the constitutional sufficiency of faith.² The constitutional sufficiency of faith.

Are you troubled tonight, my friends, that we aren’t bigger? Do you long to be a member of a church of 32,000,000? Would it make you happy to have everybody quite clear that we are not the Convent Church, but the Covenant Church? You see, the genius of the discovery of the grace of God is that it is entirely suited to the person to whom it is given — and to that person alone. That is how we have our names with each other. And out of the work we do with each other, we have the habits of the heart by which we become truly, to use the Swedish, förbundet, meaning bound together. Or to take that secular word and give it its permanent Judeo-Christian weight, this is how we have become covenanted together in mission and, to use the language of my boyhood, became Mission Friends.

Do you remember when we were Mission Friends? Not just friends in mission, but members of the mission who were, as members of the mission, friends. And friends because we were of the mission. And the mission — not simply separated congregations — but the mission wherever there were mission friends who had God’s glory and neighbor’s good to see to. No barriers between the congregations, no artificial sense that I belong to this and I belong to that. Mission friends. So that, whether I visit here with you in Salem or am in my church at North Park, I can, as a mission friend, help to plant trees with the Carlson Foundation in Zaire. I can help with MacGregor. I can help at Unalakleet. I can help at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

In fact, one year after they founded the Covenant, Henry Palmblad, The City Mission Society director in Chicago, went around and put the finger on all the mission friends he could locate on the street and said, “You know what we need? We need, here, a home of mercy.” Why? Because people were being lost and hurt and damaged in the violence of the migration. There had to be a place where people could be cared for. So Palmblad mustered the first Covenant president, Carl Bjork — a great big ex-cobbler of a man whom nobody turned down if they wanted to remain spiritually healthy — who kept a little notebook in his pocket in which he wrote down what he expected of each person and what he got. And they bought the farm at Bowmanville and established the Home of Mercy. Neighbor’s good. These Mission Friends who understood the primal glory of God.

Their next mission was to take over Covenant Mission in Alaska, at a place called Unalakleet. We’re still there. No distinction between local and foreign. Mission wherever there is neighbor’s good.

Well, I have no more time. That’s been my history as a history teacher, by the way. In fact, I said in later years that history was accumulating faster than I could teach it. I want to say, however, here, one more word. It would be a mistake tonight to imagine that these people, upon whom God’s benediction rests, were better people than we — were more pious, had fewer struggles, or felt less despair.

And with that in mind, I want to read to you from L.J. Peterson of Princeton, Illinois, 1871, a letter that turned up in the early Covenant publication, The Mission Friend.

Finally, brothers and sisters, only a short time and then an eternal rest, an eternal year of peace which will never be interrupted by outward crosses or by inward vexation. Instead, we will always be together with our Jesus and undisturbed, and enjoy his holy fellowship. May God from whom all grace comes fill our dead, cold, lukewarm, empty, narrow, sluggish, careless, false, hypocritical, unfaithful, doubting, frivolous, erring, Godless, dispirited, depressed, sorrowful, glad hearts — often without peace — with the comfort of peace in faith and keep us through evil or good reputation, through darkness and light, to happily come home to our dear Lord. That we see him eternally as he is. Face to face.³

Brothers, sisters, an eternally blessed meeting. Called out of darkness, gathered into förbundet, into covenant by God for mission, for God’s glory, and for neighbor’s good. May God, richly bless the Covenant, not because it is big, not because it is important in the eyes of the world, but because it is the authentic home of fully grown Christian men and women, and a nourishing place for our children. So be it. Amen.