A Glorious Covering - Nick Napier
I grew up working farms. I worked several commercial chicken farms, turkey farms, some hog farms, and baled more hay than I care to think about. I have helped deliver breech calves—those who know, know the nature of such. I have dug innumerable post holes and stretched enough fence to wrap around earth at least once. I have pranked and been pranked enough with electric fencing to wonder why my heart is still in rhythm. In school, I was tops in academics in the FFA, gladly learning about soil and fertilizer and what slope of field was conducive to crops and at what slope it was best to give over to cattle. I raised show steer and went to FFA camp. I had every desire to be a farmer, and still have coursing through my veins a strong desire to a more agrarian and less suburbanite life.
On the home front, my grandfather had a small farmstead that all my mother’s 9 other siblings pitched in with. There was a large garden there—enough that my grandparents and their ten children and their families could help with and eat from. He raised a few chickens, some beef cattle, some milk cows, and some hogs. There were two barns, a pond (where I fished weekly), and lots of pasture land. I set all of this before you in order to say that I know farms and farming. I know the beauty of life and the joy of harvest and the honor in a day’s work done well.
Now, I come to this blog post, I ask you to envision, if you will, a beautiful scene. Envision a stately old farmhouse with a serpentine trail of smoke coming from the chimney. Envision it set neatly on a ridge, and out before it is the pristine beauty of a snow covered pasture. You even get the quaint dollop of snow on the tops of the posts and snow mounded to the lowest wire of the barbed wire. Envision it with all the picturesque beauty and quiet and calm you can muster.
Now, if you didn’t grow up working on farms, you might think that THAT is farm life. Let me disturb your picturesque scene and remind you—that for all it’s purity and beauty and quiet, it’s still a farm underneath. There’s mud and muck and grime and mire, and since I had you envision a pasture: poo. Lots of it. Enter Martin Luther—or at least a paraphrase of him— with a statement about the nature of Christianity: “Christians are like snow covered dung; it is the purity of the covering which the Father sees!” Though, this exact phrase isn’t in his corpus that I’ve ever been able to find, it stands out as something he likely would have said.
The Christian is who he is as he is covered by Jesus. Here is an actual Luther statement from a sermon on Psalm 51:7:
[T]he Christian is rightly said to be purer than snow . . . even though the defilements of spirit and flesh cling to him. These are concealed and covered by the cleanness and purity of Christ . . . . if you look at a Christian without the righteousness and purity of Christ, as he is in himself, even though he be most holy, you will find not only no cleanness, but what I might call diabolical blackness. . . . Therefore if they ask: “Sin always clings to man; how, then, can he be washed so as to make him whiter than snow?” you reply: “We should look at a man, not as he is in himself, but as he is in Christ.1
Back to our scene, it’s glorious to see how snow can “erase” the muck and the mire and the mess. Any hope of serene beauty to be had is in that covering. So it is with us. Any hope we have of ever having the muck and mess of our sin covered is not through our exceeding effort, but by being covered with the righteousness of Christ Jesus.
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. -Isaiah 1:18-
1 Luther’s Works, vol. 12, 366-367