Into the Lengthening Light
Remembering Ray Lubeck
Yesterday I awoke to the news that Ray Lubeck had gone on to glory. Yesterday was also the shortest day of the year, the day when the dark of night cloaks the most minutes. Grief is a warm blanket against the howling winds of our collective future without him.
You may not have known Ray, but I can virtually guarantee that his life impacted yours, even in a small way. Let me tell you how in a moment, after a word to my fellow alumni who loved and were loved well by Ray.
For my fellow graduates of Multnomah University, this has been a rough year. We lost our alma mater to the ravenous wolf that is devouring Christian schools one by one (whether the wolf’s rightful name is “demographic cliff” or “culture shift” or “inflation” or “leadership failure” or “crippling debt” no one can agree, but the skeletons of his carnage may be found from coast to coast). I wrote about that loss here.
This fall, we also lost Dr. Tim Aldrich, whose “quite frankly, class” I can easily summon, and whose ability to trace a theme through the Bible (with no notes!) astounded me as a Freshman. Earlier this year, we lost Dr. Karl Kutz, who poured more hours into me than I can ever dare to count. He taught me Hebrew and invited us into his home and came to our wedding, cried with me when we lost our first baby to miscarriage and helped me find a Hebrew name for our next. There’s no telling how he shaped me as a professor and grader during the years I spent as his TA. He believed in me and told me so. And cancer took him way too soon. I miss his infectious laugh.
And then there’s Ray. Where can I even begin? Those who knew him understand why it’s difficult to quantify his influence. To measure the impact of Ray’s life we’d have to trace the tendrils of a tree that unfurls its branches against a darkening sky, scattering light, and we’d have to follow each root into the depths of the soil where it soaks up nourishment.
Remembering Ray
In truth, we’ll never know the impact of Ray Lubeck’s life because we cannot imagine its absence. The only world we have is the one with Ray devoting his life to the study and teaching of God’s Word.
While I was his student, Ray’s Bible started to literally fall apart from years of constant use. He bought a new one, but that created a problem. What about the copious notes and cross references he had etched in its margins? He set about the task of transferring everything to his new Bible. It took months to copy everything over.
My margins are nowhere near as full as his were, but my Bible is falling apart and its font is too tiny for my aging eyes. I think of him as I transfer, page by page, the record of years of teaching and learning, years that began under his teaching at Multnomah.
Every class I took with Ray sparkled. Well crafted assignments, effective lectures, a constellation of quotes and examples to drive home what he wanted us to see. Humor and candor, relevance and revelation. With Ray I studied Worldviews, Creative Classroom Communication, Old Testament Biblical Theology, Bible Study Methods, and Advanced Bible Study Methods. Thirty years later, I can still recall specific details from each of these classes. I can tell you what Ray wore, how he gestured, how he gripped our attention. I can tell you about the papers I wrote and what I learned, because that’s the kind of teacher he was.
If Ray had not fueled my hunger to know the Word as he did and to see what he saw . . .
If Ray had not invited my questions and shepherded my quest for understanding . . .
If Ray had not sat with me at the lunch table in the cafeteria and invited me to teach . . .
If Ray had not patiently taken me through the Scriptures to show me how I, as a woman, could teach the Scriptures without violating God’s design . . .
If Ray and Tamara had not invited us into their home to eat and talk and laugh and pray . . .
If Ray had not spent hours listening to me wrestle over who to marry . . .
If Ray had not driven his family over a thousand miles to perform our wedding . . .
If Ray had not written the letter of recommendation that opened the door for me to earn a PhD . .
Where would I be? Who would I be?
I can scarcely picture it because I am who I am because of Ray.
In part we have his wife Tamara to thank. Her fierce determination to understand and her aversion to pat answers and half truths pushed Ray deeper and deeper into the weeds to find answers that would satisfy and illustrations that would better explain. Tamara was Ray’s staunchest critic and most adoring fan. Her curiosity and tenacity freed Ray to carry on his mission because she depended on it every bit as much as anyone else. She was his unflinching partner in everything.
How can we measure a life?
Ray’s life cannot be measured by the number of pages he wrote (though his book is well worth reading!). Ray did most of his writing on the hearts of his students. He read the room and reached us and shaped us in any way he could, sometimes with music, other times with costumes, always with quotes to consider, and usually with Calvin and Hobbes.
Ray taught for some 35 years at Multnomah, as well as regularly at Ecola Bible College and at least once at Capenwray. To search out Ray’s influence, we’d have to follow each of his students from each of these schools into their adult lives where they love and serve and raise children and build a future. We’d have to sit in on ten thousand Sunday School lessons and innumerable sermons. We’d have to fly around the globe to visit churches and schools and ministries started by those he inspired. We’d have to enroll in the classes of the professors he trained who are now teaching at Harvard and Duke, Nashotah House and Western Seminary, Biola University and Gateway Seminary, as well as those who are still writing dissertations to prepare to teach.
To quantify the difference Ray made in the world, we’d have to listen to every episode of the Bible Project podcast, watch every video they’ve produced, and read every article they’ve published. After all, Tim Mackie and Jon Collins and their team are simply carrying on exactly what Ray taught us all to do in his Bible Study Methods class—slow down, observe the text closely, notice literary design patterns, and express the message of a book on a chart that fits on a single page. We’d have to check with every person who has ever accessed their content to see how it has shaped and encouraged them. We’ve have to find every person who has read his book on how to read the Bible and every person who has translated Ray’s teaching into languages all over the world.
To measure Ray’s influence, we’d have to find all the young people who came to his World Seen events and ask all his interns what it meant to them to pour their energy into a world-class program with his mentoring. We’d have to sit around the dinner tables of who-knows-how-many families as they read the Scriptures together. We’d have to listen in on the homeschool lessons his students have given to their children. We’d have to read the books his students wrote or edited.
Most importantly, we’d have to measure the shift in a generation of souls who decided that faithfulness was worth it because they watched his life and knew his family and savored his teaching.
We’ll never know what the world will be like without Ray because that world will never exist. The world we have is the world where the ripple effects of his teaching and mentoring ministry will reverberate as long as the church endures.
We have the world that we have because Ray brought his whole self to it, investing whole-heartedly until his heart had no more to give.
A bout with cancer before I knew him left him with lingering heart issues. Five years ago, we almost lost him. Since then, he’s been sowing as many seeds as possible on borrowed time. This weekend, his heart had enough.
Into the Lengthening Light
Ray is basking in the light of his Savior while the rest of us stare into the darkness. He now knows fully what we only know in part—the weight of God’s perfect love, the complete satisfaction of union with him, the unbounded joy of new creation life. Ray is tasting the meal he promised was coming and dancing on streets of gold in the New Jerusalem. Perhaps he’s already having coffee with Moses or the apostle Peter or his colleague, David Needham or his mentor, John Sailhamer or Multnomah’s founder, John Mitchell. He might be eating cottage cheese with mandarin oranges—the lunch of champions. Either way, they’ll have enough to talk about to keep them busy until the rest of us join in.
From here on out, our nights get shorter and our days stretch incrementally longer until we soak in the fullness of God’s presence alongside Ray and Karl and all who’ve gone before, whole and together again.