Yesterday I had the joy of speaking to about 300 church workers, most of them teachers in Lutheran schools. I closed by quoting Dr. Martin Koehneke’s address to the 1955 graduates of Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Illinois. I hope all of us, lay as well as church workers, see in his words the uniqueness of our discipleship.
“You join the ranks of thousands of men and women who for the most part have said with St. Paul: ‘I thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, Who hath enabled me, for that He counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry.’ (1 Timothy 1:12) In the discharge of their debt of love to God and man, a host of them have already gone down into the grave, by men unpraised, by the world unknown. While others filled the world with the breath of their name, they counted it their honor to fill thrones in heaven. They thought it far better to part with gold than with God, to bear the heaviest cross than miss a heavenly crown.
“You link yourselves with men and women who look to Jesus Christ and say: ‘Thy love to me is wonderful,’ with Christian teachers whose holy calling requires the long and penetrating look of faith. To be a teacher worthy of the name given to Him, Who was called ‘A Teacher sent from God,’ you must understand by faith that not until you yourself have passed in at heaven’s gate, not until the palm of victory is in your own hands and a blood-bought crown is on your own head, not until you walk the streets that are paved with gold and join the songs of the heavenly choir, not until then will you fully understand what you owe to the love of Christ, and why you may justly say: ‘Thy love to me was wonderful!’ And on that day, when souls redeemed claim you as the friend who put their hands into the clasp of the Friend of sinners, then shall you better understand why I say that you are about to find yourself in a great tradition and a great ministry….
“Go, then, to work for the God Who loves you; work for the Savior Who bled for you; work for the world that, sinking into its doom, needs men and women who have tasted of the Lord’s mercies and found that they are good.” (“For All the Saints,” IV, 73)