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Hey All,
We were at a country cemetery this past weekend where we saw the grave of my 95 year-old mother-in-law's grandfather! He died in 1879. (My mother-in-law, by the way, is hale and hearty)
It got me thinking: Since one way of thinking about Law/Gospel is that the Law always lifts up our vulnerability, and the Gospel always speaks about God's response to our vulnerability, is it possible that death could be (at some point in life) a gospel word? I'm thinking about people who have lived a long, long time and are ready for the Lord to take them. Is death good news for them? Something to ponder...
I've been thinking about how the Law has most often been thought of as what God expects or demands of us, and how we fall short. If that is the way we think of Law then the Gospel correlate to that is God's forgiveness. What happens, however, if we think of the Law more broadly as does Richard Lischer in his Theology of Preaching. He says that other than the Guilt/Justification correlates, we could also think of Law/Gospel as Debt/Forgiveness, or Embattled/Victorious, or Old Creation/New Creation. Herman Stuempfle suggests other pairings: Alienation/Reconciliation, Anxiety/Certitude, Despair/Hope, and Transiency/Homecoming. I think these possibilities give us many imaginative possibilities for preaching.
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