Beeson podcast, Episode 465 Dr. Robert Smith Jr. Oct. 8, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now, your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson podcast. I'm Doug Sweeney, the dean of Beeson Divinity School, and I am here with my cohost Kristen Padilla. Today, we're beginning a new series, which will include three parts on the topic of grief and ministering in the midst of grief. I'll let Kristen introduce our guest, but first, let me remind you, if you heard last week's podcast that this week, starting today, is Beeson's annual Go Global Missions Emphasis Week. We are honored to have Dr. Miriam Adeney with us as our special guest, preaching today in chapel and lecturing tomorrow, October 9th. You can find more information on our website, beesondivinity.com/events. Also, don't forget that our last preview day of the fall semester is October 22nd. Prospective students will have the opportunity to hear today's podcast guest, Dr. Smith, preach in chapel. They'll have the opportunity to meet students and faculty, visit classes, and more. We would love to have you or your friends with us on Tuesday, October 22nd. Register at beesondivinity.com/previewday. Now, Kristen, would you please introduce today's guest? Kristen Padilla: Yes, and welcome everyone to the Beeson podcast. Our guest today almost needs no introduction. Dr. Robert Smith Jr has been a regular guest on the podcast in the past, introducing sermons with Dr. Timothy George. However, if this is your first time listening to the Beeson podcast, and you've never heard of Dr. Smith, you're one of the few. Allow me to say a few words about him. Dr. Smith is an esteemed faculty member at Beeson. He holds the Charles T. Carter Baptist Chair of Divinity and teaches courses on Christian preaching. Dr. Smith travels the world, preaching and lecturing and has won numerous awards. He's also the author of Doctrine That Dances: Bringing Doctrinal Preaching and Teaching to Life, and the book we will discuss today, The Oasis of God: From Mourning to Morning. So, we're going to let Dr. Smith tell us more about himself, but I'll end with this personal note. I will always be grateful to Dr. Smith for teaching me and forming my preaching, and I know I'm not unique when I say this, but he never forgets the sermons that his students preach. Even more than 10 years later, he can still recite lines from my sermon, not because it was anything special, and I can tell you that it wasn't, but because he is someone who truly cares about his students. So, Dr. Smith, welcome to the Beeson podcast. Robert Smith Jr: Thank you, Sister Christian, and thank you, Dean Sweeney, for this privilege. Kristen Padilla: Let's begin today's podcast, as I said, with you introducing yourself in a more personal way, where you're from, how you came to faith in Jesus Christ, your call to ministry, anything that you want to say that would help us get to know you better. Robert Smith Jr: I am, as Paul would put it, by the grace of God, I am that I am. That's true. And I am that I am because of the One who says "I AM THAT I AM." So, because of God being who he is, he's called me to be who I am, and that is a recipient of his grace. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Christian and Dean Sweeney. I was born there on May the 26th, 1949, so I am presently 70 years of age, and I'm grateful for that. My parents moved us from Knoxville, that is, moved me, my older sister, my younger sister, and my brother from Knoxville. So, I've been in Cincinnati for 66 years. God saved me when I was seven years of age. I believed in the gospel. I believe, at seven, that the gospel could save me. And now, for 63 years, I am understanding more and more of what justification and sanctification and glorification are. I took and experienced them, but now I'm beginning to learn to express them and articulate them. I was called to preach the gospel, accepted that call at 8:17, so I've been trying to preach for 53 years and have had the privilege of pastoring my home church, the New Mission Missionary Baptist Church, for 20 years from out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Smith, we want to get to a conversation about your book though, Oasis of God. Robert Smith Jr: Yes, sir. Doug Sweeney: But I don't think many of our listeners will be able to appreciate that book unless they know a little something about your son, Tony. In the book itself, you say, "It is very difficult to bury a parent. I experienced this in the death of my father, Robert Smith, Sr., who passed away on February 26, 1996. Our parents are claimed by our past, but our children, who are nurtured for our future are expected to bury their parents." How are we to respond to life when the tomorrow of our children is canceled? Would you please tell our listeners about your child, Tony? Robert Smith Jr: Tony was our youngest, youngest son. He was 34 years of age, heart that was as big as the world, if you'll let me put it that in hyperbolic way, was working at the restaurant that employed him on the 30th of October, 2010. And that night, there was a robbery that took place. He was in the back of the restaurant, frying chicken and onion rings and French fries, et cetera. The other clerks ran out of the store when they saw that the young men came in to rob the store. He had the earphones in his ears, listening to music. They came to get him and tried to get him to open up the safe and the cash register, which they had jammed. When they could see that he couldn't open either of the two, three of them left, and the other one's still on the counter and shot him in the heart. And Tony was absent from the body and present with the Lord. And so, that was a shocking event because I was preaching the gospel in red stick, Louisiana, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when we got the call that, well, that morning, that he had exited life through a murder. Of course, I had buried my father on February the 26th, 1996. That was expected, but I didn't expect to have to bury our baby son, which was something that was not only unexpected, but something that God continues to nurse me through and to massage the heart of my heart and my wife's heart and the whole family about. Kristen Padilla: what were those first couple of years after Tony's death like for you, and what did it mean for you to grieve? Robert Smith Jr: Well, I had good grief. I mean good grief in the sense that it was normal. I knew that it was all right to cry. That's why God gave me tear ducts, and I would have those moments when I would look up in the air and at night, particularly in the stars. And I would say, "I miss you, Baby," which I really, really do. People ask me sometimes, "Have you come to closure since it's been now nearly nine years?" And I reply, "Closure is for bank accounts. It's not for love accounts. The more you love, the more you go through trying to close something that can never be closed and will never be closed fully until the transition is made from Earth sorrows to Heaven joy. So, when we meet each other again in heaven, then, old things will have passed away, and God will have made all things new. And that's when I'll reach closure. But until that time, I'll weep some more until I go to the land of no more, when God shall wipe away all tears from the eyes." I'm very real about that, that it's, I expect to keep coming closer to something where I'll never arrive and that I will need God's grace to help me through. Doug Sweeney: About four years after Tony passed, you wrote the book we're talking about today, the Oasis of God: From Mourning, spelled with a U, to Morning, the morning of a new day. Could you tell our listeners just a little bit about the book and, especially, what were you trying to do for people with the book? Robert Smith Jr: It's a book I never wanted to write, obviously, and I was in Nairobi, Kenya, and my wife and I were over there. She was teaching, I was teaching and preaching, and this was about nine months after Tony's death. And the Lord asked me, "Do you believe in what you preach?" I didn't hear an audible voice, but I heard him, and I said, "Yes, Lord." "Can you accept deep forgiveness?" "Yes." "Have you preached and taught on forgiveness?" "Yes." "I want you to forgive the one who took your son's life." Now, that was different. And it took me literally a month or so before I began to seriously think about this, and then eventually, months later, I wrote him, and it took him about a year to write me back. This was about my turning ink, what I wrote in terms of sermons and lessons, into blood, so much so that I became an incarnational presence, and it was also a challenge when it came to my preaching. If you don't believe in what you're preaching, so that you are not actively living it out, then why are you preaching? And the Lord challenged me for that. So I ... God wrote the book. And it has become a bridge all over the world for me to speak to individuals who've had similar pain, experienced similar things, from a young man at age 15 years of age at a church a couple years ago, right in the [inaudible 00:11:17] in the area ... it's no secret, it's public, who, when the parents came home, he's hanging from the ceiling. He's hung himself, to be able to give the book to the brother, to talk to the brother, and to establish a relationship with him and to tell him that God is able to bring him through. Though he didn't understand, God had not forsaken him because God's Son also was hung on a cross, and because of his death and his resurrection, he offers us a life, even beyond tragedy. So, it's been an opportunity for me to witness about the glory of a God who understands us because he has become one of us. Kristen Padilla: In your first chapter, you talk about living in the in-betweenness of tragedy and loss. The human tendency is either to stay forever in tragedy and loss, the mourning with a U, or to move too quickly away from tragedy and loss to morning without the U. The in-betweenness of the two, often, is too much to bear. So, what does it mean? What did you have in mind and you try to do in that chapter to explain what it's like to live as a Christian in that in-betweenness of tragedy and loss? And how can a believer avoid, perhaps, either extreme? Robert Smith Jr: Dr. Gardner Calvin Taylor spoke of this in Ezekiel 37, where God asked Ezekiel, "Son of man, can these bones live?" And had Ezekiel said no, then he would have, in essence, denied the power of God. No, they can't live. Had he said that yes in a frivolous, unthought out way, it would have meant that he did not take the tragedy of a valley that has become a graveyard seriously enough. But when he said, "Lord God, You know," then it opens space for God to do what he could not do, even with Ezekiel's own words, and that was the sin, the ruach, that is the wind, that is the spirit into the nostrils of these corpses, and they stood up as a mighty army of the Lord, of course, representing not only the resurrection of Israel, the nation, but also the resurrection of God's people. I think it's a tragedy when you make a permanent residence in the past, and at the same time, I think it is a joke when you deny the reality of what has happened, as you view the future as if you are not taking seriously the pain. I was at 16th Street Baptist Church, where the four little girls were bombed, or killed, rather, when the church was bombed on September the 15th, 1963, and in the basement, there's a clock. The clock says 10:22. That's when the bomb went off, and that clock has never, ever been restarted since then. And I think, metaphorically, that's where people can end up, where the clock of their lives stop because their hope, and I'm not taking this lightly ... I know what is like. Their hope was in their loved one, their husband, their wife, their children, whatever it may be. And it's easy to get stuck in that place, so that you stop living from that point. And so, God has helped me to look beyond Tony. The book is not about Tony. It really isn't. The book is about the glory of God, that God can lift us out of the deepest pit, and God can take us through the darkest places, so that we can say, "We may not know about tomorrow, but we know who holds tomorrow, and we know He holds our hand." So, that's what this book is about, from mourning, if God can work on the U, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, then he moves us from mourning, by taking out the U, so that the U is not the central place, and turns it into morning. We may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. And I want to point people to the One who is the bright and morning star, regardless of what happens in their life. That's what the book ultimately is about. Doug Sweeney: There's some profound engagement in this book with Psalms 42 and 43. Why did you pick those two Psalms in particular, and what do they have to offer people who are going through suffering and grief? Robert Smith Jr: Dean Sweeney, I was scheduled to preach at Beeson Divinity School that upcoming Tuesday in chapel on Psalm 42, 43. Doug Sweeney: My goodness. Robert Smith Jr: But that became the text for Tony's eulogy. It really did because God was showing me, and I see it more and more, that life has its place of vacillation and shifting and changing of rhythm. Why you cast down all my ... so, it's my soliloquy. It's my self-conversation. I'm talking to him. I said, "Why are you cast down on my soul? Why are you disquieted within me? Oh, hold on God, for I shall again praise thee, my Savior, my God. Down, my soul is cast down, as I remember you in the land of Jordan on Mount Hermon and the hill Mizar." Now, he called it the deep of the sound of your waterfalls. You're building your ways that will float me up again. The Lord commands his steadfast love by day, and at night, his song is with me. I mean up and down and up and down and up and down, until the very end. You've gone from panting as the deer pants after the water brooks, Psalm 43, verse 5, to praising. I shall yet praise him, my Savior, my God. I find that's rhythmic. I think that's true to life. It's lamentation and laughter, sighing and singing, it's feasting and fasting. It's not this false stuff that we hear from so many, that once you trust Jesus, your trouble is over. No, no. He is the bright and morning star, but he's the Lily of the Valley. He's with you in your valley. He doesn't take you around it. He takes you through the valley of the shadow. That's it. Kristen Padilla: So, it sounds like you're saying that sorrow and joy can coexist? Robert Smith Jr: No, they can't coexist. They will coexist. In this world, Jesus says in Matthew 16:33, you will have tribulation; semi-colon, not period, not the terminal, not the end, but the continuation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. Yes. Kristen Padilla: How does the Inter-Trinitarian life speak to a person stricken by the tragedy and loss of a loved one? Or, asked another way, what does tragedy and loss mean when we understand God as Trinity? Robert Smith Jr: Jonathan Edwards, the crystallization of his theology, at least embraces this. God has forever known himself in a sweet and holy society. That's Father, Son and Holy spirit. So, there's the social Trinity. Yes, the interpenetration, the cooperation of one God in three persons, which is, of course, is mysterious. We can't understand that. We worship. But the fact that the Father says to me, "Son, I understand how you feel because I also lost a Son, but I didn't lose Him. I preordained that He would die for you in order that you might live, that you might have salvation." So, God understands our loss. We don't know. We don't hear anything from the Biblical account about what God said when His Son said to Him, and it's really God saying to God, God said to God, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken God?" And that's Friday, and the Father didn't say anything, but because we know He loved His Son, and we know the angels in heaven must've wept at that, that God feels with us. Wait, wait, wait, we're not those who adopt an open theism or a process theological understanding of a God who does not know the future because the future is not yet, that God gropes along with us in order to experience. Yes, he does experience, but God knows before there's anything to know, and God pre-acts before there's anything to act upon, and therefore, God, I believe, wept, not just at [inaudible 00:20:35] grave, His Son, but He wept when His Son was dying on the cross. So, I serve a God who feels with me and hurts with me and weeps with me, and we have a Son who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities. Yeah. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Smith, we all know and love you as a preacher, if I may say so as your friend and the new dean of Beeson. Robert Smith Jr: Hallelujah. Doug Sweeney: You are one of the most beloved preachers in all the world today, but, probably, a lot of those of us who love your preaching wonder, did the death of your son affect your preaching in any ways? Robert Smith Jr: Yes, sir, Dean Sweeney. It did affect my preaching a whole lot. Again, that question, the Lord asked me, "Do you really believe what you preach?" And I had to answer that with a resounding yes. Not in what I said to Him, but what I said for Him. One year, literally one year after the death of our son, I was back at that same venue of preaching in red stick, Louisiana. It was the Bible conference on the bayou, preaching there, and God gave me ... I can't even describe it. Such, such anointing. That's the word you used in your prayer. That's what it was. It wasn't our own to say to me, "You are not alone. The gospel has not changed. I will use you by my grace. So, weep while you preach." And I am 10 year ... it's been now almost nine years now, and it has given me an opportunity to just represent my Lord and to know that my son is waiting on me and that there will be reunion, where we will gather around the throne and worship our great King who loves us enough to die for us. So yeah, it has. Kristen Padilla: At the end of your book, you talk about a special meaning in the incorrect date on your son's grave marker. And then, there's also a quote on the grave marker. Could you tell our listeners both about the date and the quote? Robert Smith Jr: The headstone was placed on Tony's grave at the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, with their own death date on it. His birthday was correct, but his death date was incorrect. He was born September the 29th, 1976. He died October the 30th, 2010. They have it October the 31st. I had a chance to have it totally replaced, and put the right death date down, but I didn't want to because I thought that, eschatologically speaking, that providence of God had overruled what was, for them, the wrong date and had them put down what was anticipatorily the correct date in terms of resurrection. So, it moves beyond October the 30th, the day he died, to October the 31st, which suggested to me it's a new day, beyond death to life. And so, I had on his headstone the last section of Psalm 42, verse 5; 42, verse 11; 43, verse 5, which says the same thing. "I will yet praise him, my Savior, My God." That's what's on his headstone because October the 31st represented the yet. And so it, it points to the resurrection for me. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Smith, how about one final question? For listeners of this podcast who are suffering right now, going through grief, maybe even trying to minister the gospel faithfully, when it feels like the tank is empty, and they really would just rather rest or cry or something else, do you have any words for them, based on the experience you've had coming to terms with Tony's death? Robert Smith Jr: Appreciate the privilege, and I mean this, the privilege of living in weakness. It's a paradox, and Paul says in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 10, "I glory in my weaknesses, in my hindrances, in my difficulties, in my persecutions, in my troubles: for when I am weak, that's when I'm strong." The reverse of that is when I'm strong, I'm weak, because when I'm weak, it causes me to pull closer to Him, to draw strength from Him. I don't know that anyone could more lyrically express it as well as Isaac Watts. "Oh, God. I help in ages past, our hope for years to come. I shelter from the stormy blast, and I returned home." He is our help, and He is our hope, and whatever we have to experience, that God will use that as a launching pad for us to glorify Him, not just in our strength, but mostly in our weakness, that people might be able to look at us and say, "Wow, he has or she has a power that is not his or her own." And we will then, by the way we deal with our difficulties, point people to Christ. We become a precursor. We become a forerunner. We become a moon that reflects the light of the S-O-N to people on Earth who are looking for help and looking for hope. Doug Sweeney: Amen. Praise the Lord. You have been listening to the Beeson podcast. We've been talking with Dr. Robert Smith of Beeson Divinity School about the passing of his son Tony and what he's learned about grief and ministry in the midst of grief, especially as he's laid it out in a wonderful book, The Oasis of God: From Mourning to Morning. Thank you very much for joining us. Goodbye for now. Kristen Padilla: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pascarello. Our cohosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.