‘Jesus is there only for others.’…‘The church is church only when it is there for others.’
Dietrech Bonhoeffer. On a rainy grey early June morning, the thought of a God who grieves was not exactly primary. The cool damp air had already penetrated our light jackets as we boarded the train at the ‘Zoo’ station in West Berlin. Our hope was to find, Marienburger Allee 43, the Bonhoeffer Haus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings and life had become one of the focal points of my sabbatical. His short 39 years of life had formed my faith and practice just as another 39 year old martyr, Martin Luther King, Jr’s life had done. While most know of King, Bonhoeffer’s legacy as a German Lutheran pastor attempting to bring an early end to Hitler’s life and consequently to the Nazis, is far less known. Even though the assassination plot failed and cost him his life, Bonhoeffer’s writings and thinking have not. His life continues to speak with amazing congruence to contemporary socio-political Christian conundrums. At the door of the three-story light brown stucco house, we were asked to remove our wet attire. Quietly we were led into a warm spacious and brightly lit conference room lined with photos of significant points in Dietrich’s life. Kathie and I found two separated seats around a large wooden table where a resident pastor was engaging a group of Protestant seminarians and professors from Paris. Our speaker stressed that Bonhoeffer’s thinking in later years was very different from his earlier. The ‘later’ (ie. prisoner) Bonhoeffer’s overriding issue, was not to be found in the ‘Cost of Discipleship’ (which he later saw as his attempt ‘to acquire faith by trying to live a holy life’), rather it was the desire to participate in faith by being where and who Jesus Christ was. His remaining quest was: ‘Who is Jesus Christ actually for us today?’ This is not an abstract question regarding God’s attributes, but rather a quest as to who Jesus is and what he is doing in the present. For Bonhoeffer, God is found in Christ- the man for others. God so loved the world that He ‘consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross.’ Precisely at this place of suffering and abandonment God permanently establishes an unshakeable relationship with the world. Bonhoeffer’s search for Christ today is clear: ‘Jesus is there only for others.’ Bonhoeffer believed that the God of the Bible was a very different God than the ‘god of religion’. The God of the Bible is the ‘suffering God.’ Jesus, ‘the man for others’, continues to suffer at the hands of a godless world- and we ‘are summoned to share in God’s sufferings.’ Real repentance (metanoia) must move beyond a personal pietism where a person only obsesses on ‘ones own needs problems, sins, and fears’. Repentance is the decision to return to the God who ‘is there only for others’-the SUFFERING GOD. The critique of his contemporary church (even his own Confessing Church) was clear. He writes, ‘our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. Just as Jesus was the man for others, ‘the church is only the church when it is there for others.’ What would the church look like if it only existed ‘for others?’ This is ‘upside down’ thinking where church communities are commonly suffering adverse and shopping around for the best religious rhyming rap. And who are ‘the others’ that God is grieving for? I guess I need to write a another entry!
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‘Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.’- Christians and Pagans- a poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
‘We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short from the perspective of those who suffer.” When one wanted to loose oneself from the ongoing mantra of Nazi war sites in Berlin, there was always the Tiergarten. ‘Thank God for the Tiergarten!’ A green space of nearly two square miles, sprawling with plains (trees) and waterways, providing a much desired respite for Berliners weary of the German grind. One sunny Sunday afternoon this June, Kathie and I, found and shared a shaded bench with two young ladies conversing in French. As we enjoyed this sensual sanctuary on our sabbatical, the sufferings of seventy years ago seemed as far away as the Berlin wall does to contemporary Berliners. But the space between succor and suffering is as small as crossing the street. Directly across from the Tiergarten stands the Berliner Philharmonic, an architectural acoustical masterpiece, where one of the greatest orchestras performs. Adjacent lies a vacant lot, with a plaque embedded into the pavement reading: ‘Tiergartenstrase No. 4- Action T4.’ ‘Action T4’ was the code name given in the late 1930’s to the racial cleansing that Hitler began on his own people. By the beauty of the Tiergarten, the first acts of compulsory sterilizations and euthanasia were incubated, marking the beginning of what would become the foundation for the ‘Final Solution.’ The Berliner Philharmonic side by side with ‘Action T4’ represent two tales, two views, one ‘from above’; the other ‘from below’. Kathie and I saw high ‘from above’, perched in our ‘seventh heaven sixty, Euro seats’, listening to a seventy-piece orchestra play the celestial sounds of Strauss. This was ‘sabbatical on steroids.’ Neither the view nor the electric energy between orchestra and audience could be sustained. The scene ‘from below’- ‘Action T4’ remained as we exited the Philharmonic to our train. This tale of horror was juxtaposed to a tale of heaven by only a few meters. The diced difference between tears of joy and tears of suffering, were sharpened in the Tiergarten. A conundrum contained deep within the German soul. And also ours! Bonhoeffer writes, ‘We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.’ Bonhoeffer is pushing the envelope here- he is claiming that ‘the act of Christian faith’ is to stand with God in HIS SUFFERING. ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’ This is the question of a grieving God in Gethsemane. Why? What good could his ‘friends’ have been? God grieves and He does not desire to grieve alone! Where are we, when GOD GRIEVES, in His Tiergarten? “Everyone wants a happy ending to a story-but some stories have no ending at all.”- Eldad Beck, (3rd generation Holocaust Survivor, in Hitler’s Children) “What happened to Christ has happened for all, for he was the human being.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer- Ethics “The German people are dealing with their past shame. In fact the way that they are coping with it may very well be an excellent model for other nations who are still unwilling to honestly look at their past.” REALLY? I thought to myself as Kathie and I listened to our German tour guide while on a walking tour of today’s Berlin. Is it really possible to find closure for the travesties of the Nazis? Is there possibly a ‘take away?’ It was true. Kathie and I saw the sculpture of a grieving mother holding her dead son at the ‘Memorial to Victims of War & Tyranny.’ The ‘Holocaust Memorial & Museum’ found us loosing ourselves among the 2100 dark granite ‘coffins’ towering higher and higher as each year during the war the efficiency of the German killing machine improved. We noted the bullet marks still remaining scared into the stone facade of Berlin buildings. When we walked into the German Reichstag, we were reminded that not everyone was ‘in step’ with Hitler. There, 96 names of assassinated elected representatives are memorialized because of their political opposition to the Third Reich. (We pay ‘silver- tongue radio DJ’s’ to do our ‘character’ assassinations!) We stood inside the court-way building where General Stauffenberg (one of the people who led the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life- and whose story is seen in the movie ‘VALKIRIE’) and others were shot by a firing squad. The Germans were not hiding what had happened 70 years previous. The German people with courageous honesty were unpacking their shame. And, yes, our German guide was right when he pointed to this ‘unpacking’ as a necessary exercise for other nations as well. I wondered to myself if our country has been as courageous in unpacking our unwanted cargo: Slavery, Jim Crow, and costly & unnecessary Wars- to name a few. Unpacking shame, whether personal or corporate, necessitates a courageous honesty. Give credit to the German people for making a start. A start for sure, but it is only a tiny drop in a sea of mammoth misery. Eldad Beck (a 3rd generation Holocaust survivor), after an Auschwitz visit, accurately assesses: ‘Everyone wants a happy ending to a story- but some stories have no ending at all.’ Point well taken, yet the story continues- and so does the unpacking. As a pastor of the ‘other race’- every act or word that encourages and strengthens my African-American brother or sister breaks open this suitcase of shame a little further. And each time I or my family pays a personal price (make no mistake, the cross does carry ragged edges) for engaging in this activity- it gives my African-American friends an opportunity to unpack our shame. This is an ongoing task. Like the Dutch who continue to live by holding back the never-ending threat of flooding with their dykes, ditches, and dunes. So this mission of setting one another free from the ever-constricting chains of shame is what enables us to become human. How? As Bonhoeffer tells it, ‘God became human so that human beings could become human.’ Every piece of shame we courageously and honestly unpack moves us closer to authentic humanity- that is Jesus. Unpacking shame ain’t just for Germans! 'Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One can protest against evil; it can be exposed…against stupidity we are defenseless.'- Dietrich Bonhoeffer- “After 10 Years- 1943.” Is ‘stupidity’ a German gene? If Auschwitz further radicalized my reckless belief, leaving it gave opportunity to behave playfully. As our luggage was being swept off the Prague platform by a Czech trying to earn a tip, we found ourselves relaxing in a first class suite sipping coffee. The German ICE train whisked us at 130 mph out of the old and into the new. We were leaving the former Soviet satellites and entering what was being named the ‘new Germany.’ But ‘Berlin’ by now represents far more than schnitzel, sausages, and sauerkraut. Auschwitz wasn’t the only dark place I had paid a visit. I also lost myself during the visit to Oskar Schindler's museum in Krakow. I stood beside the Danube in Budapest and saw the bronze shoes set on its edge representing the nameless Jews who were tied together 2 by 2 so the Nazi's could ‘kill 2 for 1 bullet.’ I had listened to the stories of how the Germans starved entire towns on their march eastward toward the Soviet Union. And now we were headed to Berlin, the place where the ‘master race master-minded’ it all, at a price of 50 million lives. How could the ethnicity of the Enlightenment evolve into an absence of light? How does one give an account for what happened in Germany and Europe from March 1933 to May 1945? How could centuries of rich German culture and thought be permanently scared in 12 sudden years? How could Berlin give birth to both a Bonhoeffer and a Hitler bunker? In short, how could this happen? Berlin quickly became personal as I heard my German name called. 'Herr Wolff' the security guard shot back as he checked my American passport at the entrance to the German Reichstag (the German ‘House of Representatives.’) 'We must be related!' With a smile he directed me to his nametag: 'Klaus Dieter Wolff'. Yes, ‘Wolff’ was and is German and very possibly Jewish. (In Anne Frank's house, a place where Jews were hid in Holland, a 'Wolff' family was entered into the guest ledger.) It is easy to demonize the Nazi's (we have everything from ‘calorie counter’ to ‘church heresy hunter’ Nazi’s) and to thereby keep their degenerate gene in a ‘never-never land’. But Klaus Dieter Wolff made my resemblance personal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘stupid’ statement also spoke to my heart. 'Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One can protest against evil; it can be exposed...against stupidity we are defenseless.' Yet stupidity is not a dull intellect; on the contrary many stupid people have a 'remarkably agile intellect.' What marks a 'stupid person' is their refusal to challenge their own prejudgments or worldview. Even irrefutable facts are pushed aside as 'inconsequential or incidental.' Making matters worse the 'stupid person' is 'easily irritated, and becomes dangerous by going on the attack.' Stupidity! Could that explain what has happened and continues to happen? Or is it only the Germans who get ‘stuck on stupid?’ This gene of stupidity is not generic to Germans, it is germane to humankind. And it is particularly acute in our religious and political landscapes. Could this ‘stupidity gene’ be what is infecting our polarized partisan politics today? Why do we talk past each other on common ground topics like health care, immigration, climate change, illegal & legal abortion, and the proliferation of violence & killing of ourselves by our own weapons of mass destruction? The church unfortunately is not immune to this 'stupidity sickness.’ Sadly when it comes to discussions around poverty and race, clergy sex abuse, women in leadership, and (our most current lethal ‘stupidity’) same sex unions and marriages, the ‘stuck on stupid gene’ is activated. And the church is viewed like some old Nazi movie. Only when we willingly crucify our ‘cocksure contagion’ (Eg.“This is what I think and I’m sticking to it!”) will we begin to move off ‘stuck on stupid.’ We can’t be cocksure of anything- not my line but Eugene Peterson’s. Today Bonhoeffer’s ‘Cost of Discipleship’ may be the suffering that comes from being personally vulnerable and having a willingness to take a good look at oneself and be okay with doubt and uncertainty. And Bonhoeffer’s ‘Cheap Grace’- that may be the cozy spot of ‘stuck on stupid.’ |