Life Together: Ministry

Hi, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Glad that you’re with us as we continue
to make our way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life together.
Today we move into the fourth
chapter,
a really good chapter,
a chapter that he titles ministry.
We’ve looked at the day together
and the day alone,
and now Bonhoeffer begins to unpack what our service to one another,
what our life in the faith looks like,
and some of the barriers to it.
And this, again, is one of those chapters that is incredibly practical.
There’s deep theology here,
but it’s always couched in the reality of trying to live out the faith in real ways.
And I think that
in some ways maybe this is the most accessible.
It’s a broad chapter,
so probably everyone can
find a challenge in it.
And I think in some ways maybe it’s among the more convicting parts,
because it does hold up the mirror of the standard to us and gives us ample opportunities to see
where we might struggle to attain it.
It does seem striking that we’re now four chapters in.
We’re well past the halfway point of the book,
and it’s now that we turn to a chapter that many
of us may have anticipated to be the first chapter,
in the sense that a lot of us do consider
the heart of the Christian gospel to be the thing that Bonhoeffer is describing here,
sort of the responsibility to care for one another in very practical ways,
the idea of church being
committed to both structurally and also relationally finding ways to live life together to take care
of one another in difficult circumstances.
And it’s striking because as Bonhoeffer turns to speak about ministry,
he’s less concerned about the stuff that the church does,
which tends to be
the thing that the modern church is obsessed with.
We tend to be obsessed with what kind of program
is it, what’s your curriculum,
does it look good,
what does your building look like.
We tend to think
very programmatically in the modern church.
Obviously there’s exceptions, but that is a
very cultural thing that exists in the modern 21st century American church.
What Bonhoeffer is speaking to is very,
very different than that.
When he thinks of ministry, he’s thinking of
in what way are we freeing others to be who they are called to be in Jesus Christ,
as opposed to ways that we try to control others through our own expectations or the imagination that we put
on top of them.
And he looks at that from several advantages that we’ll talk about here,
but it’s a very,
very, I think helpful difference as we see it through his eyes in a way that it
pushes back against maybe some of our own assumptions.
I think the other real positive here
is that ministry is oftentimes a term that we reserve for people who work in churches,
and I think it’s very helpful to reframe that word with the idea that each and every Christian
has a ministry, that you have a ministry that each of us are called to in that sense be ministers,
be ambassadors of the gospel,
and that that ministry is not something that one has to
struggle to discern.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes we wrestle with what is it that God might be calling
us to do, but that each of us live on a ministry that is both simple and challenging every single
day of our lives,
and I think that’s where Bonhoeffer begins,
and I think that in some ways
he does us a real favor by pointing us to the idea that each of us do have a calling,
and it is not difficult to find.
Yeah, right.
That’s actually the problem,
is how not difficult it is to find,
because he goes from really just a page and a half in the beginning of this chapter.
He lays out the fundamental problem as he sees it,
and his point is essentially that the temptation
that Christians have is that we will look positively upon our own gifts,
and we will look down upon others,
and we do that in a whole myriad number of ways,
but essentially he says,
you know, the problem is that we need to let others be free to be the people who God called them to be,
and then we need to accept the same for ourselves,
and he’s going to then now tease
that out, and it gets as practical as the first sort of major practical example is this idea of holding your tongue,
and it’s always made me smile,
although the smile is maybe very close to a
grimace.
Those sections in scripture where,
you know, especially Paul will make a list of sins,
you know, he’ll talk about adultery,
murder, and then he’ll throw in gossip,
and you think, oh, hold on now, right?
That doesn’t seem like that’s the same,
but Bonhoeffer turns to the holding of
one’s tongue, what we do and don’t say, and he said,
you know, essentially most of the significant
conflicts within Christian community and relationship with one another would be
solved if we would simply learn to control our tongue,
to not say something about another that’s not charitable,
and, you know, that is on one hand elementary,
that’s what we tell our kids,
if you don’t have anything nice to say,
don’t say anything at all,
and yet when you read Bonhoeffer’s
understanding of that, the theological significance of finding silence in the moment when we would
have something critical to save another,
it is amazing,
it’s beautiful, and it’s transformational.
What’s really interesting is,
again, we get just two pages in, and Bonhoeffer has
centered on the fundamental challenges to community,
ego and pride,
the idea of self-justification,
this is kind of the preface that he gives,
and then this ministry of holding one’s tongue,
and think about how damaging those elements can be in our relationships and certainly in our church community.
Ego,
which makes me want to feel better than others and lift myself above others,
self-justification,
which means I won’t face honestly my own brokenness and my own struggles,
and judgment,
and how does that play itself out?
How do those things most often happen
in the words that we say?
And those words can be poisonous to a community,
and I think it’s no
accident that Bonhoeffer starts here.
As a person who understands and has this amazing vision for Christian community,
he understands how dangerous,
unguarded,
unproductive,
and
un-careful, unconscious words,
the damage they can do,
and the devastation they can
bring upon relationships and upon a fellowship,
and he begins, I think, in the place where
community breaks down the most often.
Yeah, this is actually one of those very practical
lessons that I had to really learn very early out of seminary was how important the
conversation that happens outside the walls of the church.
In fact,
many of the conversations
that have the power to move things in different directions happen far outside our worshiping
space or our coffee fellowship time.
The reality is our words have power,
and it’s sort of like
a virus in that it’s able to be shut down quickly if there’s honesty and transparency
and mutual shared love,
and you can come in and you can sort of stop that before it spreads,
but once it’s spread,
once it’s like a wildfire,
that now it’s a completely different matter to
put it out, because now by that time there’s untruth,
there’s just pure factual error,
there is malintent people have been hurt,
and now there’s reconciliation that needs to happen.
There’s a sense in which the Christian community,
as Bonhoeffer notes,
we are called as people of
Christ to form around the Word of God,
and then when we use our human fallible words against others,
we’re not only not speaking the Word of God,
I think he’s going to talk about later in this chapter,
we’re actually spreading evil,
we’re spreading discord through the words that we share,
which is the exact opposite of what we’re called to do as the people of faith.
So he starts with
the thing that really is a danger of us malforming within the Christian community,
of taking the thing that we should be saying that would bring life,
and instead using those words
that bring death and discord.
Really interesting.
It must be a decisive rule of every Christian
fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him or her.
How rare it is that we think of our responsibility in church as one of not saying
much of what occurs to us.
And Bonhoeffer goes on,
you know, to point out that in maintaining our
silence, in biting our tongue,
we really are finding the antidote for ego.
Instead of being led to the idea that I need to speak everything I think,
that my opinion needs to be out there,
that my judgment needs to be heard,
as I learn to silence those critical voices,
I am at the same
time wrestling with that part of me that wants to push others down and lift myself up,
that pride that drives me toward judging and being self-justified, self-justification.
And as we do that,
we are able then,
not only is it benefit the community,
it’s beneficial for us as well
as we practice that silence and therefore avoid the temptations of where ego and pride can sometimes take us.
So you just led us to one of I thought the most amazing pivots in the entire
book because for so many of us,
going to church and working with the people and living with the
people is the thing that we,
you know, just sort of take for granted.
Like that’s the thing you have
to do.
I go to church because I want to be inspired.
I want to sing the songs.
I want to feel comfortable and be with people I like.
The downside of doing that thing that I like to do
is I have to put up with the people that annoy me or I have to find a way to sort of be fine with
the other people who I’d rather not spend time with.
Bonhoeffer sees that exactly turned on its head.
To his point,
and we find this on my page 93 here,
is this idea that ultimately the church
community is one in which we should see the others in which we have conflict or discord
or people who we might consider weak or that we might consider not as spiritually mature.
However you might classify or judge other people,
we should see people as an opportunity for us to
practice the spiritual gift of what he’s going to later talk about being humility.
But then also
this idea in the idea of not saying anything,
Bonhoeffer makes the case here,
that you need to
practice not saying negative things about people who you’re tempted to think are fill in the blank.
They’re not spiritually mature.
They’re not whatever.
This is for him a spiritual practice
of the Christian that only can happen in the Christian community.
The people who you find
discord with are put there for your sake so you can practice biting your tongue,
so you can practice not judging them,
not for your own benefit and what you enjoy.
It’s there for you to learn and
grow in the faith and that’s what Christian community is.
Yeah, you have to be careful with
this language and work hard to understand it as Bonhoeffer means it,
but he says the elimination
of the week is the death of the fellowship.
In other words,
when we no longer have individuals
in our church community,
our faith community that challenge us,
when we all agree,
when we all are
the same, when there’s uniformity, we lose the ability to work on this silence.
We lose the ability to pursue getting rid of our self-righteousness and our self-justification.
And it’s a really fascinating turn that he takes as we see in our silence,
self-imposed silence,
a road toward humility and a road toward restraint.
And I think,
you know, not only, again, not only is that good for us personally,
it is essential for a community if it is going to
be a place of mutual trust,
of respect, of relationship.
And it is only to Bonhoeffer’s
credit that in his wisdom he starts us there because as you think it through,
it may be the
only place that you could start a chapter like this,
certainly arguably the best place.
So he gives us this framework,
this very practical guidance.
Bite your tongue.
Watch what you say.
That can be your spiritual practice to help you reshape your imagination of your relationship
with other people in the Christian community.
But fundamentally, what he’s striking at there
is the thing that he moves on to and this idea of meekness,
of humility, that one should not
think higher of oneself than necessary.
In fact, he quotes Romans chapter 12,
“Think of himself more
highly than he ought to think,” right?
We should find our place in the grace and love of Jesus
Christ as underneath those who we serve and know Christ with.
And he’ll flush this out in the next
couple pages.
But essentially, you know, it’s fascinating to the furthest extent that Bonhoeffer
wants to push us to practice humility.
Not just a little humility,
not just to think of ourselves a little lower,
but whenever you’re in the room with someone else to be thinking of their spiritual
journey or their spiritual growth to be higher than your own.
And he’s not doing that in a
masochistic kind of self-flagellation sort of way.
He’s doing that from the theological vantage.
He is a sinner because if you don’t see the depth of your own sin,
there’s no way that you could
serve or love your neighbor in the way that you’ve been called to as a Christian.
And so this fundamental starting block that in the first section where we’re talking about biting your tongue,
that really is a practice that gets us to the second thing,
which is practicing true
Christian humility and seeing others as higher than ourselves.
Yeah. And there’s a word of caution that needs to be spoken here.
The idea is not to
belittle yourself.
The idea is not to have low self-esteem.
The idea is not to hate oneself in
any sense of that word.
In fact, that would likely be forbidden if you understand this correctly.
The idea here, as someone has helpfully pointed out,
is not to think less of yourself,
but to think of yourself less.
And in other words,
not to primarily and not to constantly
be thinking of yourself,
not to be self-referential,
but to actually be in relationship with someone
else in a way that places them above you,
that serves them, that lowers oneself in order to lift others.
And the idea isn’t here to have a negative impression of yourself.
It’s to
do the exact opposite.
It’s to know that you are beloved in Christ.
And because you know that,
you don’t have to constantly be trying to put that out there in front of everyone.
You don’t have to be on the top step.
You are free to take a lower position.
You are free to think of yourself
less because of the truth of Christ.
And so this is vitally important,
but it’s often, I think,
very often misunderstood.
Yeah.
Let’s hear in these words of page 96 here.
“If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison
with the sins of others,
I’m still not recognizing my sinfulness at all.
My sin is of necessity the
worst, the most grievous, the most reprehensible.
Brotherly love will find any number of extenuations
for the sins of others.
Only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever.” Okay.
So two quick things
here just in direct connection to this.
First is this idea that if you aren’t aware of your own sin,
if personal confession is not true and genuine,
then there’s no way that you’re understanding
the person’s sin that you’re judging.
If you don’t know the depths of your own engagement with sin,
how deep those roots go in your own soul,
there’s no way you’re properly diagnosing the sin of the
other.
It’s impossible because whatever appears to you to be the sin is really only the symptom.
It’s not the heart of it.
And the only way that you can get close is to know yourself.
So that’s the first point.
The second point is Bonhoeffer is consistently more generous to people than I think
most of us are.
His point in the latter part of that quote was essentially that when you look at
others and you see their sin,
you can offer excuses for them,
right?
You could say,
“Well, yeah, they didn’t mean that,” or “It was an accident,” or “They stumbled their way into it,”
right?
There’s all of these different things.
You don’t know the thoughts and motivations of their
heart.
So therefore you can offer them some grace in that gap.
His point is you know your own
motivation and you know that it was sinful.
You know that it was rooted in a deep and dark place
and therefore you know that you’re in need of grace.
What’s so interesting about that is most
of us assume the exact opposite.
We assume that other people have bad intentions.
We assume that we know the heart by which they do their actions.
And Bonhoeffer, I think, in that very assumption
that he offers is teaching us we need to reframe how we see others.
Instead of them being the
problem that we’re trying to solve,
we have a problem that we are by the grace of Christ
free to live in the world.
And so therefore in that freedom we can see the other as a brother
or sister in Christ who our job is only to love as a brother or sister who also lives in the grace
and love of Jesus Christ,
right?
It transforms our understanding of who we are when we start
with that awareness that we must be humble because of the state of sinfulness that we
have come to experience within ourselves.
Imagine the hypocrisy of condemning and
identifying and complaining about the brokenness of others while simultaneously
ignoring or worse denying the brokenness of your own life and to do one without the other.
And what Bonhoeffer is saying is that if I face my brokenness,
it by definition leads me to be
more gracious to others because anything else is pride.
Anything else is self-righteousness.
If I’m going to confess that I really do struggle with sinful motivations,
that I really do wrestle
with this ego and this pride and with being judgmental,
if I’m going to lay that out there
in my own heart,
the path that that leads me to is to be more gracious and understanding of others
who share in the struggle with brokenness that I do.
If I won’t do that,
it’s only going to
lead me to be more hypocritical,
to be more judgmental,
and to be more prideful because
I’m not truly following Christ at that point.
I’m following myself.
I’m following my version of the
Gospel which elevates me and lowers others,
and that’s not of Jesus Christ.
And Bonhoeffer is pretty clear about that.
But again, I would want to insert that this isn’t to the end of guilt.
The idea here is not to be bogged down,
not to be, in fact, it is just the opposite.
It is in confession that we find freedom.
And until we confess,
we are not free from our sin because
our sin is directing our path instead of Jesus directing our path.
So this is incredible stuff here.
It is unbelievable how much solid Christian advice Bonhoeffer can shove into three pages.
It’s ridiculous,
actually.
The caution that you offer,
Clint, I think is seen so clearly in all
of the times in this book already where we’ve seen Bonhoeffer making the argument that Christians
must be very careful to never try to subjugate others,
to try to put others in a box or try to
give them a category,
and therefore to make them not simply the person who God made them to be.
In their own nature, they were made by God and they are in their own nature,
image bearers of God.
So you can’t put them in whatever category.
And the temptation that the church has had for millennia
has been to talk about humility and then to use that as a weapon against other people.
You need to be more humble.
And we point that as a tool.
We point that as a weapon.
And people do.
They feel locked in.
I think your caution is very helpful.
We need to recognize that what Bonhoeffer
is attempting to do is show us the road to freedom, not to bondage.
And we need to recognize that the
only path forward in that journey is to go into that deeper,
darker place in ourselves,
not for the sake of being guilty or beating ourselves up,
but for the hope that as we go there,
we will have found that Christ is already there waiting to meet us.
Yeah, that’s a really good insight,
Michael.
And what’s especially poignant about that is to remember the state of Bonhoeffer’s world
as he’s writing this with a government that is literally dividing people into acceptable and
non-acceptable, that is literally stamping people,
marking people as inferior,
that is eradicating people because they don’t meet a quote-unquote standard,
that they’re not good enough,
that they’re inherently flawed.
And with that in the backdrop,
I think it’s especially compelling
that Bonhoeffer could write these words and point Christians in a very different direction.
That then leads us to the next section.
And he makes this transition and essentially says that
as Christians, we might be tempted to believe that one of our core responsibilities,
one of our core ministries is to share the world of God with others,
to share the good news.
And he says that
we miss in that the first call that Christians have,
which is to listen to one another.
And he says in the same way that we’re called to listen to the word of God,
this whole idea of both the day
together and the day alone,
when we talked about meditation,
reading of scripture, hearing the word of God,
in that we now move to say that in the same way we are called to engage with God’s
word and to listen to God’s voice,
we are to listen to one another.
And, you know, Clint, I got to say
of all the sections,
at least as I read it this time,
this one hit me over the head a little bit,
we live in a world in which speaking has the highest value,
right?
You have a thousand different
social media services you can go on today and get to say as many words as you possibly want
with the expectation that the world wants to hear them.
But as Christians,
our calling is not first
to go speak every word that we think,
it’s rather to truly listen to one another.
And there is some
deep wisdom here, but I think to the modern human,
also some significant critique.
Yeah, in a world that seems obsessed with getting our opinions out there,
getting our words out in front of others,
this is a tough read.
This is a very challenging mountain to climb, I think.
And the idea that
it is as often our silence that is our ministry as it is our words,
you know, we saw that, bite your tongue.
And here we have the next extension of that.
This isn’t biting your tongue,
biting back criticism and judgment.
This is don’t fill those gaps with your words because you need
to spend that time listening to the words,
listening to the heart of others.
And if you’ve ever done
visits with people who have lost a loved one or who have lived through a tragedy,
you already at some level know the wisdom of these.
You go into those situations knowing,
“I don’t know what to
say.” And if you can confess that on the front end,
you will likely find,
you will inevitably find
actually, that the person you spend the time with will not later remember what you said or didn’t say.
What they will remember is that you were with them,
that you sat with them in their pain,
and that you showed empathy by not trying to give an explanation or a meaning to something that
didn’t have one, or at least that you didn’t know it.
And so I think there is tremendous
wisdom here, and there’s tremendous freedom.
If people feel compelled that they have to enter
a situation as a Christian and have “an answer,” there’s a tremendous freedom here in saying, “No,
we’re not there to bring answers.
We’re there to bring a brother or sister in Christ,
the presence of Jesus between two people.” And it’s not often not what we say.
It is simply by being there with someone.
And again,
Bonhoeffer cuts to the heart of it and I think gives us some very,
very solid advice here.
It’s amazing how quickly he can bring a critique.
I mean, it takes only a couple
sentences.
He makes the case that secular education,
as he calls it,
has discovered the importance of listening.
He’s talking about psychology and counselors and psychotherapy,
all those kinds of things.
And then he says,
“But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of
listening has been committed to them by him who is himself,” that’s a capital H,
we’re talking about God,
“the great listener and whose work they should share.” Now,
that doesn’t hit you.
I don’t know what will.
The idea that God is the great listener.
God is waiting to hear from us in prayer.
God is always anxiously expecting us like that father waiting for the prodigal’s return.
And the idea that Christians have given up our opportunity,
no,
even our ministry that we’ve
been called into to listen to one another so that people have had to go outside the church to find
people who can listen to them.
That’s not a critique of the counselor.
That is a critique
of the church’s sort of becoming slack in the call that we have to listen.
And he does that.
That was two sentences.
It’s amazing what he did pack in a short time.
I think all great spiritualists,
and we mentioned this earlier on in the podcast,
have had this commitment to the idea of silence and the importance of it.
And we’ve seen it
as Bonhoeffer challenged us in our own spiritual life to have moments of silent reflection,
as he challenges us in relationship to bite our words carefully.
And here, as he says, when you’re in the midst of a painful moment with someone,
your words are not needed.
The presence in its own way,
it’s very encouraging.
And I think it is hopefully freedom for those of us
who think, “Well, I don’t know what to say in these moments.” Or when people say,
“Well, I couldn’t preach,” or,
“I couldn’t do a sermon.” Well,
you might be called to just live one instead.
You might be called to be a sermon by your physical presence and by your emotional presence
and not say anything.
And some of the most powerful moments we’ve shared with people didn’t need words.
Right.
And that leads to the next point.
He talks about how Christians are
called to the ministry of helpfulness.
And basically, his point is we sometimes over-spiritualize
what we’re called to do as Christians.
We try to make it big and showy, but instead,
the going out of our way to help people or being interrupted and having time for one another,
the willingness to go over town and help somebody do a thing that they couldn’t do by themselves,
that we might grumble or complain about those inconveniences.
But that ministry of helpfulness,
that daily living kind of stuff that we do in community and fellowship,
that that’s core to the gospel.
Some people have that built into their DNA.
And for them, that they just sort of surf
that water, and that is what they’re naturally good at.
Others truly bristle when they’re
perfectly managed calendar gets interrupted by this thing or that thing.
You know, this can be a real struggle for some.
I probably find myself in that latter camp.
You know, I think that these
words are unbelievably powerful.
Our lives are not ours to plan and to judge.
They’re only ours to
steward.
And whenever we can find ourselves in a circumstance to help another,
even if that’s an hour Christian ministry.
Yeah, these two sentences are not together in the book, but they’re close.
Nobody is too good for the meanest or lowest service.
And we must be ready to allow ourselves
to be interrupted by God who will constantly be crossing our paths and canceling our plans
by sending us people with claims and petitions.
So what is the antidote to pride?
It is service.
It is doing those things in some cases we would rather not do,
either because the task itself
is unpleasant or because we had planned to do something else,
because we had set a different
agenda for our day or our time,
and to act on those needs that we see.
And what does that do?
That counters our ego.
That counters the idea that my time,
my goals, my plans are higher than everyone else’s.
And so it is a path for us toward that humble service.
And he says it here,
that in a church,
that these are almost countless.
There’s numerous opportunities, whether that be seeing something that needs clean,
whether that be volunteering,
that in a fellowship together,
there is this constant opportunity to be on the lookout for these things,
and that they help us
when we see them and take advantage of them.
He moves sort of beyond this practical sort of language of this outward helpfulness to talking
about bearing with one another.
And I thought, Clint, that this was maybe a little bit more
theological in its frame than it was as practical as just biting your tongue.
Though the practical nature of it comes pretty easily if you’ve been in church long enough to have had a situation
where you saw something differently than another person.
A church is a place where there are lots of intersections.
We do lots of things.
We do fellowship together.
We do life together.
We do ministry together.
We do worship together.
We learn and study together.
And all of these busy
intersections, there’s lots of opportunities to consider ourselves weaker than another or more
likely stronger than another.
We consider ourselves to have a better vantage than the other.
Bonhoeffer makes this very strong case that we must preserve the freedom of the other to be who
God created them to be.
You can’t force them into a mold.
You can’t make them into the person you
think they should be.
That’s God’s prerogative and not your own.
All you can do is bear with them,
have patience for them when they think differently,
or to pray for them when they’re in a situation
that you think is not a good one.
It’s one where we can encounter them as equal in Christ and therefore not judgmentally.
And that bearing together is this idea of patiently and persistently
going along together.
Even though we may disagree,
we may struggle together, we may
be tempted to look down on one another,
we’re called to bear with one another in life.
It is relatively easy to love people when they are at their most lovable,
when we agree with them,
when there’s a kind of connection with someone.
When we go to church and things are good and
things are rolling along and there’s really no bumps in the road,
that’s a fairly easy time
to live out the ministry of love towards one another.
Where that gets very challenging is
when we disagree on something,
when we have fundamental differences with someone’s opinion,
when we see things differently,
when we feel offended by them,
or when we got snarky and maybe offended them.
And those are in some ways the more important challenges of what it means
to live in a community that is to be marked by the love of Jesus Christ.
Those are the moments
in which that calling is difficult.
But I think I would argue through Bonhoeffer’s words here,
that that’s also when it’s most important.
Because when it’s easy,
we are not stretched
to grow in love,
we just do it.
And largely in that instance,
it may be that we say we love
somebody, but it’s really because they reinforce our own ideas.
So to truly love someone whom we
struggle to like, or whom we struggle to agree with,
or whom we don’t agree with,
these are the challenging moments of Christian fellowship.
But in some way,
they are the moments most important
to our growth.
And so this idea of bearing one another’s burdens,
of understanding that we do
step on each other’s toes,
that when we are in relationship with somebody,
there will be some
bumps and bruises.
Some of them may be their fault,
some of them may be our fault.
But as we navigate
that in the love of Christ,
we grow and we offer them an opportunity to grow too.
Because again,
we’re placing some of their good above some of ours.
Yeah, but what about Clint,
when that person isn’t just hard to live with,
but they’ve literally missed the mark,
they’ve sinned, they’ve done something wrong,
right?
That’s the natural next step.
Bonhoeffer anticipates it.
And he responds saying,
it is in the opportunity of being in community with someone else who is
obviously and visibly sinned,
that you are called to your persistent Christian responsibility to
pray for them and be reminded of your own sinfulness to see in even someone else’s lowest
part an opportunity to reflect upon the reality that you have for your own salvation,
a visible reminder of a thing that everyone in the community must be,
you know,
find forgiveness for,
to seek reconciliation within.
And this is the strength of Bonhoeffer’s vision,
that he is consistent
in his call to us to not judge one another,
even to the furthest extent of when someone else commits a sin,
even a sin against us.
Right.
We may suffer the sins of our brother or sister,
but we do not need to judge.
There is a mercy for the Christian.
And, you know,
these are very interesting words.
And I think, Michael, there’s a theme here that people may or may not be aware of.
A lot of the great Christian spiritualists historically have paid less attention
to sinning than we might think.
You know, we tend to think if somebody drops the ball,
that’s a big deal.
The Christian spiritualists assume that there will be sin in the community of faith.
And how we react to it both when it’s ours and when it’s others is almost more
important.
Now, I don’t mean that they’re permissive.
And I don’t mean that they don’t
care about that.
But they rarely get hung up on the details of what the person did.
Oh, this was bad, but this is worse.
They are almost to a person uninterested in those kind of conversations.
And it’s fascinating here how Bonhoeffer says,
“You can be a victim of someone else’s sin,
and the burden is still on you to love them as a brother or sister in Christ.”
That is a challenging word.
And probably the reason we don’t start the chapter with this word,
there is a lot of growth that has to be,
there’s a lot of water under that bridge.
Before one could hope to be at that point,
one would need to be working on these other steps,
these other avenues of faith.
This is, I think,
at the very heart of the difficulty of following Jesus Christ,
when someone truly is guilty,
and yet we are still called to love them as a brother or sister in Christ.
Listen, we could have had a single conversation about 50 things in this chapter
already, but he just keeps plowing on here.
And he does summarize as he transitions to
this next section, so I want to make this clear here.
He writes, “Then where the ministry of listening,
active helpfulness, and bearing with others is faithfully performed,” these are the
sections we talked through, right?
“The ultimate and highest service can also be rendered,
namely the ministry of the Word of God.” We’ve now gotten to the part where most of us probably would have started,
and that is getting to tell people what God wants for them to do.
Now, I say that very
critically, but I do think the human temptation is we want to speak.
We think that we have wisdom
or insight or from our vantage we see something clearly.
We want to speak the Word of God.
Bonhoeffer has ordered this very carefully and intentionally.
The only way to get to speaking is silence,
helpfulness,
and bearing with one another.
And once we’ve gone through that,
now there does come the point where Christians are compelled,
convicted, to speak the Word of God
to one another with humility and also with confidence.
And to your point earlier, Clint,
Bonhoeffer is not permissive.
He’s not saying anything goes in Christian community.
He’s going to say there are times we need to speak difficult truth to one another,
but he started with the
reality we need to be willing to hear difficult truth from another.
So it’s from that vantage that
we enter into this next conversation where we seek to speak the Word of God to one another because
it’s in that speaking,
word here is a capital W,
where the presence of Christ is there made real.
And that’s this beautiful gift of Christian ministry.
Yeah, and Bonhoeffer is not minimizing the idea of proclamation.
In fact, he is elevating it because
he is pointing out the reality that the Word of God is not easily found.
The Word of God is a deep dive.
And only when one goes through confession and restraint and loving the neighbor,
even the neighbor that has wronged them,
do they come back up with something worth saying.
The Word of God
is not cheap and easy,
and it’s not something we can manufacture.
So we don’t begin with it.
We live the difficult path of going in search for it.
And then once we have found it, once we have
discovered it, once it has come to us along those difficulties,
we only then have something to offer.
And I think you’re exactly right, Michael.
Our temptation
is to start with words.
And one of the great themes throughout this chapter,
and I would argue
maybe even the whole book,
is the need for silence before the Word is spoken.
The Word is not rash.
The Word is careful and thoughtful and has to be nurtured in seed and grow to fruit.
And proclaiming does matter deeply to Bonhoeffer.
In fact, it matters so deeply that it shouldn’t be rushed into.
Yeah, in fact, I would say that that’s intensified here at the end of this section
on my page 108.
He writes, “If we carry out his word,” that’s God’s word with a capital W,
“God will save our brother through us.” And then he quotes James 5.20,
“He will convert the sinner from the error of his way,
shall save a soul from death,
and shall hide a multitude of
sins.” He is elevated to such a high level,
Clint, that he sees the Christian life as one embodying
the Word of God within our own human communities.
The idea that when we speak to one another with honesty,
with humility,
with a recognition,
that we need to be silent before we speak,
but there are some words that need spoken.
And when we speak them,
we speak them with the Spirit of God.
That that can be effective to use Bonhoeffer’s language,
even the salvation of our
brother.
And I think he doesn’t mean salvation as in the work of salvation,
but in the effect and
so that lifeblood of being wrapped into the work of Christ,
that is what is possible when
the Christian community takes seriously this call to speak the Word of God.
And I think really the difference can be seen in two experiences.
One, when you judge someone or you
convict or rebuke someone that you’re not connected to,
when you see the thing happen out there and you’d say,
“Oh, that person needs to do this,” or,
“That person was wrong,” and if you’ve ever had
the other experience, it is much more gut-wrenching.
The other experience is when you love someone and
you finally feel the need to confront them about a brokenness,
an addiction, a behavior,
something that they’ve done,
and you know how deeply it is going to hurt both of you.
You know that you
run the risk of damaging the relationship,
but you get to a point where because of your love
and commitment for that person,
you cannot be silent.
You have to speak into it,
and that’s what Bonhoeffer envisions here,
that our brother’s or sister’s sin breaks our heart,
and when our heart is broken,
we must then speak God’s Word into their own brokenness,
into the sinfulness of it, but it is not done.
The whole rest of this chapter is ensuring that it’s not done from a place of condemnation.
It’s not done from a place of pride.
It’s not done from a place of judgment.
It is done from a place of love,
which ultimately then leads us to the final word of the chapter,
authority,
because the word that I speak into someone else’s context is not my word,
and if it is, it’s worth nothing.
In fact, it’s broken.
It is self-condemning,
but the Word of God
that is spoken for the right reasons into someone’s context is spoken with an authority
that doesn’t belong to the speaker,
but to the one who is given it.
Yeah, so this needs maybe just a tiny amount of context.
You need to remember that Bonhoeffer is a Lutheran,
so he has an understanding of church administration,
you know, bishops and ordination and all of these sort of formal things that come with an institutional church, and number one,
this section on ministry is a page and a half long.
It is tiny in an entire book on ministry,
and almost throughout the whole thing,
it is very, very dismissive of humans turning to
human authority figures.
In fact, he writes, “The hankering for false authority has at its root
a desire to reestablish some sort of immediacy,
a dependence upon human beings in the church.”
And let’s be clear in what he just said.
He said that the temptation to invest our trust in human
leadership in the church is ultimately an exposure of our lack of trust in Jesus Christ.
We want humans who are talented,
who are charismatic,
who are gifted, we want them to lead the charge
because we trust them more than we trust the invisible power of Christ to be at work in our community.
Bonhoeffer has no time for it.
He advises us that we need to avoid that like the plague.
And to be honest with you,
in the moment in which the church exists today, this is essential
and also hard because there are so many aspects of the church’s life where good leadership does matter.
So finding the way to trust and respect and to follow in our human leadership without
investing our hope in it,
without investing our trust in human leadership,
that’s essential.
And Bonhoeffer makes that very clear at the end of this chapter that the ministry of the church
is not the leadership of the church.
It is ultimately being faithful to Jesus Christ.
Yeah, the last sentence here I think makes that crystal clear.
“Pastoral authority
can be attained only by the servant of Jesus who seeks no power of his or her own,
who is himself or herself a brother or sister among brothers and sisters submitted to the authority of the word.”
So pastoral authority is an authority not of office,
but of relationship,
relationship to Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ relationship with others.
It is not a badge.
It is not a proclamation.
It is one’s role in the community of faith that has to do with being connected to others in Jesus Christ.
And again,
especially poignant, I think, when you consider the context in which Bonhoeffer is living,
the state church,
the authoritative church is following Nazism.
They are being misled by the policies of the state of the nation.
And there is this small group pushing back and
saying, “Look, you may not consider us pastors.
You may have taken that from us.
We’re not doing what you say we should be doing,
but you do not get the authority of Jesus Christ from any other
person or place but Jesus Christ.” And hence Bonhoeffer can say this.
And on one hand,
he doesn’t say much,
but largely because I think for him,
there’s not much to say.
It is that simple.
And that’s all there is to be said about it.
Right.
And I think even one step more than that,
Clint, he’s already said everything he needs to
say about this topic because the rest of this chapter has been demonstrating how every Christian
person is called to ministry.
So when he gets to the authority of ministry,
he has nothing left to
say because he’s laid the job description for everybody.
Everybody has to be called to account to listen,
to bring that ministry of helpfulness,
to bite your tongue.
We’re all called to enter
into Christian life with these convictions for the sake of the community.
It does not matter what
position you hold in the church.
It doesn’t matter what formal training you have.
We are all called
to live in Christ with whatever gifts,
skills, talents, abilities we have.
And so therefore, when we get to the section about human leadership,
he’s already said everything he needs to say about
that human leadership and the fact that he left it out the entire time because the whole point
has been to make the argument that we are together called as the body of Christ to do this work.
Absolutely. And so that’s where we leave this chapter,
a rich chapter.
This is one of those,
I think you could read section by section and then just start over and do it again.
You would probably see something new and something challenging in it each and every time you read it.
We hope you’ve had an opportunity to read along with us.
If not, we’d encourage you pick up the book if you can.
And for this chapter alone,
I think you’d be well worth the price.
This is a beautiful
description,
a beautiful map of what it means to begin to live out our Christian faith and
particularly to do so in connection with others.
Hope there’s been something in it that has spoken
to you.
Hope that it’s resonated in some way.
As always, if you have comments or questions,
let us know.
We’ll do our best to circle back and respond to them.
Yep.
There is a link in the description where you can send us comments or questions.
And of course, we appreciate all of you who make time to join us for these conversations every week.
Be blessed.
We look forward to seeing you next time when we kick off the fifth chapter of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.
Thanks.