Easter 2002

"What is it good for?" asks Bob Bertram about our Lord's resurrection. This issue of Crossings offers several answers. Steve Kuhl offers Crossings workshops to help people lace together Easter with daily life. Robin Morgan reflects on three people, now with their risen Lord, who did just that. Carey Mackesy does it even now. But begin with Bob's own answer.

Easter has always been Bob's day. For a start, Robert W. Bertram was born on Easter. How good-natured of the Lord to give that omen. For Bob's theology and teaching have been filled with Easter's confident delight all along: the delight he shares with us is the great salvation that took place in Jesus on the cross, and the confidence is as Christ-centered and as fresh as Easter dawn. No wonder Bob often had preaching duties for Easter week at seminary chapel.

So it seemed fitting to raise up a sermon of his from 30 Easters ago, when Bob was a professor of systematic theology at the St. Louis seminary of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. Bob offers an evangelical way, a Gospel-based way, out of a controversy about the Bible, less by adjudicating between claims than by drawing all to the Bible's own priority. That point needs still to be made today, in more than one church body.

While these are reasons enough for this re-run, there is another one. Bob is at home, under hospice care. Easter, which by God's grace really is Bob's day--and ours, too, my Fellow Believer--is approaching for Bob in more ways than one.

tbcm

• C-R-O-S-S is for Christ's Resurrection- Only Secondarily Saving?
  So Jesus rose from the dead and showed Himself to His disciples. So what? What is the use of that?

• I is for Invitation
  While "crossings" (as the spiritual process whereby God recreates life through the way of the cross of Jesus Christ) has been around since the death and resurrection of Christ, Crossings, Inc. (a servant of that process) began in 1984. In those early, pre-internet days, Crossings ministered primarily in two ways: this newsletter and workshops (usually led by Ed Schroeder). When Ed retired and the internet emerged, the means of the ministry became a different pair: this newsletter and the present listserve ministries of Sabbatheology and Thursday Theology.

• N is for Nexus
  The fabric of our lives is woven with many relationships. There are the people we spend our day-to-day moments with - our family, the folks we work

• G-S is for Good Service
  What kind of experience have you had speaking over the phone to a "customer service representative"? You needed help from that unknown person sitting in some cubicle, located in which one of these 50 united states you would not try to guess, whose unseen face is framed by earphones and illumined by the computer monitor. Was it a good experience? If the telephone's computer sent your call into the earphones of Carey Mackesy, it may even have been memorable.