The Ultimate Price

Dietrich Bonheoffer

Somewhere in time, February, 1906, Dietrich Bonheoffer was born in Germany.  His father was a professor of Neurology and Phycology at the University. He mother was a teacher.   He grew up in a family with strong ties to the German Government.  One relative was the Kaiser’s minister, another served in the German courts.  The family was full of lawyers, professors and ministers.  I’m sure they had no idea what direction their country was headed. 

Dietrich grew up and decided to become a minister in the German Lutheran church. He and his family were always proud Germans. What do you do when the government of your country starts to make bad decision after bad decision?  Do you say nothing and hope it will change, or do you become part of the change?

Bonheoffer became part of the change.

There were a few hints at problems, but the Aryan paragraph was enough to elicit a strong reaction from many members of the German church.  This basically stated that anyone, not of German decent, could hold office in a German church. This caused a split in the church. There were those who didn’t want to lose the connection the church had with the government and thought this compromise was a way to maintain that connection.  Bonheoffer went with the other group.  The other group believed that God should decide how the church was run, not the government. 

Ephesians 6: 10-13 (NIV) “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.  Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

The day of evil had come and standing strong was going to be hard, but that is what Bonheoffer did.

The Confessing Church was born.

For a while just keeping the confessing church on the right track was his focus.  He started seminaries and trained young ministers.  Things seemed to be going well for a few years, but then the increased persecution of Jews really hit home.  Bonheoffer became acquainted with people that were plotting to over through the government.  He used his travels to let others know what was happening.  They had good plans, but nothing was working out.  They had to think of something else.

Bonheoffer was forced to shut down his seminary; he was banned from teaching at the University.  He was scheduled to be drafted.  He could not resist the draft, the other option was death.  He got the chance to leave.  Some of the people in the resistance were high placed in government. They got him a ticket out.  He came to America.  His books were popular and he could have stayed here for years teaching and preaching.  Many people expected him to, but he felt he could not desert his country in its time of need, so he went back to Germany. 

Spy?

When he returned, he was offered a position with the Abwehr which was a branch of military intelligence.  This is different than the Gestapo, but still not a normal position for a minister.  He was able to use this position to help Jews to escape. He helped his sister and her husband, he was a Jewish Christian, escape. He also helped a Jewish Pastor.  Even with the best of efforts, things were getting worse in Germany.

Assassinate Hitler.

One of the plots of the resistance was to assassinate Hitler.  They had tried a coup and that failed. The next step was assassination.  Many people do not understand why a minister would involve himself in a murder plot.  I think in his situation, he knew what was going on.  Do you continue to allow innocent people to die so evil people can prosper?  I don’t think the decision was an easy one, but when the coup failed.  What other options did they have?

Bonheoffer has a quote that goes something like this.  Sometimes you have to do evil to fight evil.  That is a controversial statement, but I understand what he was thinking.  Being part of the resistance caused him to do many things that a Christian shouldn’t normally do.  He had to lie at times and he had to be party to plans that involved the stealing of information and even the murder of a person.  The other option of sitting back and doing nothing seemed more evil in his mind.  I agree.

Martyrdom

Bonheoffer was caught and sent to Prison. He ended up in a concentration camp.  Many of the people in the resistance found the same fate, but luckily much of the information they had gathered remained hidden until after the war.  Many of the horrors of what happened under Nazi rule surfaced because of these documents.

On April 9^th, 1945 Bonheoffer was executed.  Two of his brothers and two brothers’ in law also perished as part of the resistance. 

I had heard of Bonheoffer earlier and my interest in him caused me to buy the book written by Eric Metaxas, called Bonheoffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. I haven’t quite finished it, but if you ever have the time, I would recommend it.  I cannot do justice to the man’s life in a few words, but hopefully I can spark an interest in a person that lived out his faith in boldness and paid the ultimate price.

Rejected

The Russian Judge

Somewhere in time, okay maybe I won’t tell you, but the somewhere in time is my childhood.  Do you remember watching the Olympics and the athlete would give a good performance and we would wait for the judge’s response?  All down the line, the judges would give marks that were similar and then you would get to the judge from Russia and that judge would score sometime three or more points lower than any of the other judges. This was the height of the cold war, so the reason it sticks with me could be that at the time I grew up it made us a little more sensitive.  I’m not sure, but it is a joke of sorts for me and my family.  When only one person judges your work bad, it must be the Russian judge.

Last year I entered my first writing contest.  I got my results back Monday morning. 

I was so excited about the contest that I quickly read through the rules and then I set about making my sixty five thousand word manuscript the best I could make it.  I spent hours tweaking, changing and perfecting.  Right before I was ready to submit, I reread the rules and found they only wanted ten pages.  Now I needed to find the best ten pages.  I could have sent the beginning of the book, but I opted to send what I thought was an exciting part of the story.  In my ten pages, I could have submitted a synopsis of the story, but I opted not to do that, hoping that the story would carry itself.

That was my first mistake.  The first judges’ comments were focused on what they didn't know of the time and setting or why the people were where they were.  If I had given a synopsis, my marks would have been better.  Seeing they were not terrible as is, I thought I might easily improve the next time.

The second judge was similar, the marks were a tiny bit lower, but overall the comments were helpful.

The third judge was my Russian judge.  No comments except for one.  The one comment they gave me was that next time I should proof read it.  They scored me at the very bottom in every category.  I was confused.  The first judge gave me decent marks in all areas and the last one put me in the bottom.  Who do you trust?

I will be honest; it made me a little mad.  How could someone make a comment like that?  That manuscript had been proof read about six times.  If one judge is stating that my grammar and writing was fine, what did this judge find so terrible?

It was early in the morning, so I had to go to work.  I told my husband about it and we laughed how this was like the Russian Judge.  Thus the Russian judge comment was born in retelling my experience.  For some reason, sarcasm is my first defense.  Once I have gotten other people to laugh with me over my perceived misfortune, can God finally begin to talk to me about the problem.

I spent my drive to work asking God why he would give me the desire to write and more stories in my head than I had time to put on paper.  Why would he do that if I was terrible at it?

Have you ever had someone make a comment about something you have done?  Something that you worked hard on and they just trivialize it and explain how your best effort is not good enough.  I think all of us had.  For some reason, twenty people can tell us something is good, but that one person is the person that gets us, gets under our skin and causes our irritation. 

What do we do in that situation? 

If you’re like me, you get angry, then you get discouraged and then you pray.  Why I don’t pray first, I’ll never know.  Also, why do we let the opinion of the one, override the opinions of the others?  I don’t have an answer for that either.

Matthew 23:8-10 (The Message Bible) “…Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do.  Save that authority for God, let him tell you what to do…”

If God wants me to write, I should write regardless of what the expert says. I can use this to spur me on to perfecting my writing even more.  I start shortly some creative writing classes in hopes of improving my craft.  But even if I am told it would be impossible for me to become a published writer, I say this: Luke 18:27 (NIV) “Jesus replied, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.””

So I will keep writing until God removes the desire or I run out of stories to tell.  Maybe we can pray together that God will give me the desire and talent for home improvement instead.

Jeremiah

America needs a Jeremiah

Somewhere in time, between 627 BC and 586 BC, Jeremiah was a Prophet to the country of Judah.  Judah and Israel were sister’s countries, but they had broken apart at one point.  Neither country was following the God that had led them out of Egypt.  They were safe and secure and started to think they were responsible for their own good fortune. The days of being ruled by the prophet’s had long vanished and the Kings ruled.  This worked out well when you had a righteous King, but Judah did not have a righteous King and the people did what was right in their own eyes, they no longer looked to God to help them determine right and wrong.

This always creates a problem.  Jeremiah was called by God as a young man to warn his country.   When he was just a boy, God gave him a vision and said, “I put my words in your mouth”.  So Jeremiah set out to tell the people to turn back to God.  Give up their sinful ways, humble themselves and serve God.  Destruction was coming from another country and unless the people turned to God He could not protect them.

Did they listen – no.  They assumed, they knew more than Jeremiah.  

Jeremiah 6:10 (NIV) “To whom can I speak and give warning? Who will listen to me? Their ears are closed, so they cannot hear. The word of the Lord is offensive to them: they find not pleasure in it.

This sounds like America.  The word of the Lord is offensive to some.  Why is that?  We have been a great and strong country.  We were founded by people that wanted to be free to worship God as they pleased.  They created a country where freedom to worship was a capstone on which we based our society.  It governed our laws and helped establish our government.  Now we think the first amendment gives us the freedom from religion, not the freedom of religion. 

Jeremiah 8:12 (NIV) “Are they ashamed of thier loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.”

They do not even know how to blush.  This was said about Israel and Judah, but it could be just as easily said about America. We went from a country that fifty years ago, that could not use the word pregnant on television. They did not want to be offensive. There were certain things not advertised on television because they wanted to protect young viewers. Have you watched any television lately? I don’t think anything is forbidden now.

America is losing its place.  We used to be a beacon of freedom and prosperity that the other countries envied.    We did not lose it our place, we gave it away.  We started to think that everything good came to us by what we did and not by what God gave and we are dead wrong.  We still are a blessed nation, but we are pulling the fingers of God off our country, one finger at a time and we are wondering why things are getting worse.

Jeremiah 9:22-24 (NIV)

This is what the Lord Says:

Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom

Or the strong man boast of his strength

Or the rich man boast of his riches

But let him who boasts, boast about this

That he understands and knows me

That I am the Lord who exercises kindness,

Justice and righteousness on earth,

For in these I delight.

It is time for America to boast in a loving God that blessed this nation. I am an American and I am proud to be one, but it is time for us to again be one nation under God.  It is time for us to embrace and not reject our heritage.

When my older brother was a teenager he wrote a song, here is what I remember of the chorus. God will bless American abundantly, the day that he sees us getting down on our knees, if we keep him as our ally and keep him as our friend, than God can bless America again.

We are in an election year.  I want to encourage everyone to vote. I also want everyone to really think about the person they are voting for and what they stand for.  Are they wanting to lead our country in a new direction or return us to past glory?  You make your own decisions, but I am looking for someone that knows and embraces our spiritual heritage with honor.

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Hope

In Remembrance

Somewhere in time, January 1, 2012 a young person died, killed in a car accident.  I was at home on January 2^nd and I got a text from a friend asking me if I knew this young man. I did, I responded that he was formally one of my students.  The responding text told me he had been killed in a car accident the day before. 

This is a tragedy no matter how you look at it.  My prayers go out to the family and friends of this young man. 

I remember a young man with an engaging smile and a fun sense of humor.  When I asked my students to take a Bible story and present its lesson in a different way, he gave me a Dr. Seuss type story, complete with Seuss characters and a rhyming story.   What a fun thing to grade. 

I learned that in the years after my class he grew to be a young man that loved his Lord and loved others.  He left a good legacy. 

Why would God allow something so tragic to happen to someone with such a bright future?  I can’t answer that.  I know that God is in control, but I also know we live in a broken world were bad things happen.  There is no getting around that. 

I was thinking there is a unique situation with Christians.  We do feel sorrow and we do feel pain, but in the midst of that, we can still have hope.  The Bible tells us not to grieve as those who have no hope.  We have hope because this earth is not the end.  This life is not all there is.  To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.  That is hope.

Hebrews 11:1 (NIV) “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see”

When I was twelve years old my Grandmother died.  She had heart problems and had a debilitating stroke a few years before.  When I was nine years old, she told me about her close encounter with heaven.  She had been in her twenties and she had her first stroke and it almost took her life.  In fact, it had, they were trying to resuscitate.  She said she felt the lightness as her spirit prepared to leave the earth.  She saw the light and heard the most beautiful music, then the heaviness hit.  She heard my grandfather pleading with God to let her live.  The lightness left and her soul returned to her body.  She lived for another thirty years.

Titus 1:2 (NIV) “a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time,”

Going to a place with light and beautiful music sounded more fun than life here on earth.    I am not sure why some are allowed to survive and others taken, but I know that whatever happens to his Children, God is control and His love is unfathomable.

Philippians 3:20 (NIV) “But our citizenship is in heaven.  And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Life is fragile and no one is guaranteed tomorrow.  What does matter is that while hear on earth you accept Jesus as Christ.  Then someday when you die, you will get to go home. That sounds good.