From the years of our fathers
This address was given at the 75th anniversary of the Covenant Church, 20 February 1960.
I feel very humble before you in this moment of our history and inadequate to the task I have been asked to do. However, in the power of the Holy Ghost and in the memory of the greatness of God’s work among us I want to bring a few words based upon a very familiar passage of Scripture from Hebrews eleventh and twelfth chapters.
“And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
I have been asked to attend for a few moments tonight to the backward look – the look at the years of our fathers. We’ve been talking these days about the outward reach of the church, the enormous task of bringing all people and nations and tribes and kingdoms into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We’ve been asked to have the great universal vision of the church – a unity in the midst of the great diversity of space and culture. Tonight for a few moments we are going to look at the church in another dimension – the church in the dimension of time, looking backward into the past or downward into the abyss of time.
In 1957, just as I was leaving Sweden, I took a trip down to my little native hamlet to say goodbye to my nearest relatives there. I had four aunts in their 70s and 80s who wanted to perform the final Swedish gesture of courtesy, which is to follow you to the station. They were all little ladies in black and I told them we would take a cab and go up to a town just a little bit north of our village in order to catch the express and we would all go together and they fluttered like little blackbirds in anticipation of this great adventure. So we went and the summer was dying, the day was dying. I remember standing on the back platform as the express train which had stopped at this station began pulling north. Looking back at these little ladies who, in some sense, reminded me of those auspicious spirits which used to hover around the cradles of primitive children, that guarded my cradle in a sense, these little ladies in black standing against the fading sky, shrinking and receding and then gone. I went inside overwhelmed by a sense of the symbolism of this, how this is the way we separate ourselves from the past, even the past we love best – the years of our fathers. The persons we knew and loved who were such vibrant spirits when we walked among them. Then they became portraits in the family album. They were men and women and they are remembered by their portraits to our children. They are not portraits any longer but caricatures – funny people in funny clothes. Weird, bustles and top hats, and Smith Brothers cough drops. As Hamlet says “What’s Hecuba to me or I to her that I should mourn for her?”
We look back at this past, 75 years ago tonight these strange people met together to form the Swedish Mission Church of America. Twenty-five years later they met again in Chicago in the presence of the great Waldenström with the beginning and the end still somehow having a relationship. The people who had been along at the beginning were still along 25 years later – Björk was still the president of the Covenant. 25 years later, we met again at North Park and I was there, which dates me, 25 years ago. And there was a little huddled group of people on the platform photographed to death – fumbling, unsure of themselves – the great Skogsbergh was there; John Hagstrom with his rabbinical cap – skull cap – Svante Lundeen, J. A.
Hultman, I don’t remember if Constantine Olson was there. A few people, a handful. Looking back over fifty years and tonight they are all gone. And if we say Waldenström to our children they sometimes think it’s a joke.
In 1935 there were some young men who decided to publish the Covenant Conference Review. It was published at the annual conferences in 1933, 1934, and 1935 and went into a miserable bankruptcy and had to be bailed out by the Covenant. It was referred to in Missionsvännen as “those young men who sit in the front of the tent clicking on their typewriters.” I was one of the clickers. And one of us, the son of a Covenant pastor, who is now a priest in the Episcopal church, wrote an editorial called “The Swedeless Covenant.” The young people of the Covenant, he said, will raise their fists against any attempt to continue Swedish. He was held up as the arch-heretic. His contract which had just been signed with North Park was threatened and he was under a general stigma, having made this terrible statement in the midst of the celebration. Of course, he was right. And this part of the picture, this part of the image, in the last twenty-five years has fallen away completely. We are today, in a real sense, the Swedeless Covenant. A new language, a new culture. We find our way back through the hymns in translation and something beats in us when we hear these wonderful hymns. Will it also beat in the hearts of our children and our grandchildren? We don’t know. The vast irrelevance – what’s Hecuba to me?
But I like to think that there is also a vaster relevance and resemblance. You will pardon another personal reference to a lady in my tribe. This Christmas we got our little nine-year-old girl a trench coat and a little rain hat. It was her first. She’s nine years old and she came to me, she put it on and she walked over to me and she shook my hand (this is a vestige of her Swedish background) very solemnly and I looked into her face. All of a sudden she wasn’t a baby anymore. And of course, sentimental as I am, it engulfed me for a moment and I looked even deeper and a sort of miraculous thing struck me. I saw in her face not only herself but these little fluttering ladies in Sweden. And back of them their mothers who have been retained on daguerreotype and back of them in some instances little hand painted miniatures the face was there, going on and on and on, back and down into the abyss of time. So that even these children who think of their grandparents as caricatures carry within them the imprint of the past. This is a very simple metaphor of what I would like to say about the Covenant tonight.
We are different from our fathers but we are like them, bound together in a great unifying fact – Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And this is the face which shines through all the other faces; the bearded faces, the peculiar faces, the beloved faces, of the past, that speak to us from every old family album and every old woodcut and engraving – the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The face of Jesus Christ and the face of Paul and Augustine, St. Bernard who was a great father of the Covenant faith, and Luther, Zinzendorf and Wesley, Rosenius and Waldenström, Skogsbergh and Frederick Franson, Carl Björk, and David Nyvall. All of them, like the witnesses in the text, with their faces nailed as it were in attentiveness to the face of the crucified Jesus Christ. This is the family resemblance expressed by a theological professor, old Professor Melander, now long since gone, in 1900, in trying to delineate the difference between the Covenant people and the Congregationalists who were his pet peeve. He had nothing good to say about the Congregationalists. But he had an insight – he looked into their face and he said, “this is not our face – the nose is wrong, the mouth is wrong, the eyes are wrong.” “There appear to be some among us,” he wrote, “for whom liberalism is the highest ideal of the church. I do not want to deny that freedom is a great and high ideal. I do not want to deny that there is a legitimate liberalism but there are other ideals equally high or higher.” “To think freely is great, to think right is greater,” says a Swedish poet. There’s a freedom which is the same as indifference. This is the Free Thinker’s conception of tolerance.
There is also a legitimate conservatism, that conservatism of which the Apostle says, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned, knowing from whom you learned it.” Let him who so desires call this narrow-minded and bigoted but if it is narrow-minded to believe in the Bible as the Word of God, if it is bigoted to maintain the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, if it is intolerant to require a living faith in Christ as the condition for spiritual kinship and fellowship, then there are, praise God, thousands of us who are willing to bear these epithets as badges of honor. And we shall sing as of old, “The sign of the cross I triumphantly bear / though none of my kindred that emblem may wear.” This is the Covenant and so is the face of that other professor, David Nyvall, who, if there was one string to his bow, he had the string of the apostle Paul, “that we might know Him, that we might have the mind of Christ who, though made in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be counted equal with God, but took upon himself the form of a servant.” The form of a servant – this, to Nyvall, was the mind of Christ. This he wanted to be the mind of the Covenant and the face of the Covenant. People sharing in the crucifixion of Christ, people endowed with the mind of Christ, people carrying on their meek shoulders the form of a servant and bringing to a world bewildered and disillusioned and lonely and sinful and ashamed, the message of the Crucified, He who had died for us that we might live with Him. We are surrounded with this cloud of witnesses and before us is the Author, Finisher of our faith.