Last week one of our students, Kristin, reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m leading a Bible study at my church over the summer and they would like to talk about purgatory, do you have any good resources?” I looked, but I didn’t find anything that I liked at first (of course, after looking later I actually found a seminary classmate of mine who did a great job explaining the Lutheran perspective on purgatory). So I reached back out and asked if I could do a video for her and her group. I figured it was likely a good “foot in the door” for some youth to be thinking about campus ministry.
Learning more about purgatory is a sort of odd request. It’s not something we talk about all of the time, but it’s something that at least a few people were sort of interested in. A couple days before, I was in a conversation with someone who was asking some great questions about the intersection of guilt and shame when it came to the Church. Just today I was having a conversation with someone about how “anonymity” is the new righteousness: the less people know about me, the more perfect I look to the world and myself.
These are all the relay. The relay is a part of what makes theology fun for me. The relay brings the “baton” of an interesting thought (or even better, an interesting question) and then hands it off to the Word of God. It causes me to say, “oh yeah, what DOES God’s Word say about purgatory or guilt vs. shame or even anonymity?” But the best part of the relay is usually tracking the baton backwards.
If you track the relay back far enough, you usually find someone who is trying to find some assurance, some understanding, or some hope. Many times you can track this back to someone who maybe isn’t Baptized yet. They ask questions that get us thinking which gets us running to God to hand off the baton. “Hey God, what do you say about this? My friend wants to know.”
And then, the relay goes around the track again. God’s Word brings us something and then we bring the baton back to our selves or our friend or whomever, “here’s what God’s Word has to say about that thing…” which then usually sends us on another trip back to God saying, “Ok God, now what about THIS?”
The relay is lots of fun. So this week we’re asking you to use the “Question of the Week” below to ask some questions that we can address as a part of the relay. Pass the baton to God’s Word. The relay gives a whole new meaning to when God promises in Isaiah that “My Word will not return void.”