Friday, September 1, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Life together
We visited our friends George and Anne, in what George calls the “smallest apartment in Austin.” They were married at the end of April and are very happy. They will be having a baby at the end of March. Their lives, like all our lives, rise and fall. Emotions, events, words said or unsaid, prayers prayed or left unprayed matter to each of them. Over and over, in all of that, they turn back to God.
When you trust God, you will tell Jesus where it hurts.
When you trust God, you will be less afraid and
you will know that when fear returns, it won’t last.
When you trust God, you will feel more connected…
to God, other people, nature and yourself.
When you trust God, you will be free.
When you trust God, the world will reveal its goodness and beauty.
When you trust God, your heart will hear the song Jesus sings to you.
And when you trust God, really trust God, you will trust yourself.
                                     — Clarence Heller
On Good Friday eighteen months or so ago George and I visited a church he’d heard about an hour away from us in a small town called Buda. Kings’s Cross Reformed Church, with robes and liturgy two days before Easter – their service drew us in, and in time George and Anne decided King’s Cross would become their Sunday home. The experience of Communion every Sunday warms their hearts. And they have found satisfying conversation and Bible study with families that are growing just like theirs.
But I’ll miss seeing George more often. So now we face the task of finding ways to get together that do not involve church, but do allow us to continue our theological exploration and our heartfelt prayers. Times that allow us to love each other, skin to skin.
How do you make that happen with your friends? For us, we share meals and drink a little beer. We share ideas and talk about books. George comes over for lunch sometimes when Jasper is here and he has a day off. We laugh a lot. He brings gifts, washes his own dishes and loves to play with Jasper. He has been a good friend to many people for many years, and now he will be a loving husband for his wife. In a few months he’ll be a first-time father. His life fills up.
After 70 plus years wandering around the world, Margaret and I have hundreds of friends and acquaintances, along with our families. We don’t keep up with those folks as we would like. But I think of something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together …
There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no laim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them. It is not the experience of Christian brotherhood, but solid and certain faith in brotherhood that holds us together. That God has acted and wants to act upon us all, this we see in faith as God’s greatest gift, this makes us glad and happy, but it also makes us ready to forego all such experiences when God at times does not grant them. We are bound together by faith, not by experience. (p. 25)
There are any number of paths to the pot of false guilt at the end of what looked at first like a rainbow. What this struggling seminary dean wrote helps me turn my eyes away from the guilt and back toward Jesus. Then I can speak to God on behalf of my old friends, even when I don’t speak to them.
Professor Bonhoeffer wrote this book as he struggled to hold together an underground seminary in Nazi Germany before World War II tore the world apart. No doubt he struggled with false guilt also, as he found himself un-able. Unable to maintain friendships, unable to protect his friends from persecution, arrest and death, unable to stay out of prison himself, unable to do enough to help remove Adolf Hitler from power … unable, unable, unable.
And as he figured out, his ability was never the point. He needed only to keep the night lamps trimmed.
At midnight there was a cry, “Behold the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” You must simply stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
(1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 97, Luke 21, Matthew 25)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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