Our Beloved Friend
Outside the Domination System
May your Holy Name be honored
By the way we live our lives.

Your Beloved Community comes.
Guide us to:
Walk your Walk
Talk your Talk
Sit your Silence
Inside the courtroom, on the streets, in the jailhouses
As they are on the margins of resistance.

Give us this day everything we need.
Forgive us our wrongs
As we forgive those who have wronged us.
Do not bring us to hard testing,
But keep us safe from the Evil One.

For thine is:
The Beloved Community,
the power and
the glory
forever and ever. Amen.

- Open Door Community Jesus Prayer

In honor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday, I am cross-posting this from the Living Lutheran blog by one of the greatest historians of American religious history of our time, Martin E. Marty. 

Visitors today can still imagine something of what it must have been like for a captive to squirm or pace in the 10-foot by 7-foot floor space of a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel.

All the senses can come into play during such imagining. For instance, the odor of the whole third floor in which this cell stood, the prisoner’s pen for a year and a half, was barely endurable.

From that cramped space designed to kill creativity and bury hope, however, there issued letters and papers that became the substance of one of the great testimonial books of the 20th century.

Since there is so little to observe in the shadowed picture of this room, we are left other reminders and, later, his words written there, to fill it in with a human portrait, that of the author.

He was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the best-known German Lutheran pastor, who resisted Hitler and paid for his actions and expressions with his life.

He was a man of many paradoxes: a longtime pacifist, something that Lutherans were not supposed to be; an inconsistent pacifist who became a conspirator in an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler; a thinker who took citizenship seriously but technically was guilty of treason; a still young world traveler who did his most memorable work in this cramping cell.

Many who view the photo of this enclosure do so knowing in advance, from his writing and that of his friends, something of what was occurring in his mind and in the cell. His letters tell us, but in any case it is not difficult to conjure up a sense of what his aloneness meant to the confined man, who was a naturally gregarious and friendly sort.

For a time he was unspoken to, even by guards. In his first days in the cell, they tossed in his meager breakfasts. They were forbidden to recognize the humanity of such a locked-in person.

We learn from a letter that succumbing to despair was tempting to the prisoner and that at a low moment suicide was even an option, because he considered himself to be “basically” dead.

We learn that, instead of killing himself, he began to write, especially as his material circumstances eventually, if only slightly, improved. Many of his notes, of course, were personal letters, some passed on through authorities and some smuggled out and then transmitted to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, a pastor who saved them.

No publisher would have seen a potentially attractive book in the letters or his other various jottings, musings and poems written in prison.

Against all odds, a book was being drafted. After World War II, Eberhard — who had hidden the scraps and scribblings in the days of danger — evaluated and organized them.

This meant deciphering scripts and arranging pages to fashion the book that the English-speaking world knows as Letters and Papers from Prison.

Issuing from that 70-square-foot cell, this little work came to be known, read and used around the world well into a new century. While the physical setting of its letters and papers was a place capable of inducing claustrophobia, spiritually these contents served readers everywhere as a testimony to openness, possibility and hope.

The letters and papers from prison reveal much about Bonhoeffer’s spiritual life and vocation, and they served a new generation of collegians and seminarians who were looking for models of witness and courage.

Martin E. Marty is professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago. He is the winner of the National Book Award and the author of more than 50 books. He has recently written the biography: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.

Sabbath-keeping practiced can unhook us from appetite-driven and production-driven machine of our culture. It helps us discover the liberty of saying no in order to say yes. Identification with God’s rest on a weekly basis can foster some of the spiritual and emotional resources we need to see and feel beyond ourselves. What a priority-calibrating gift it is to take a full day every week to rest and realign your life with the passions of God! No to busyness. No to unnecessary consumption. No to 24-7 productivity. No to media. Yes to God. Yes to worship. Yes to community. Yes to justice.

- Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship:
Living God’s Call to Justice, p. 171

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days my life, I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface

‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl

Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

We rode our bikes to the nearest park
Sat under the swings and kissed in the dark
We shield our eyes from the police lights

We run away, but we don’t know why

Black mirror, your city lights shine
They’re screaming at us, “We don’t need your kind”
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl

Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
Can we ever get away from the sprawl?

Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights

- “Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains)” by Arcade Fire

David with his Birthday Cake (Made from scratch by my wife).

I have a friend named David. He lives in an orange grove. He lives in a tent. Most people would say he is homeless. And I would have to agree except David’s real home is 1041 Corporate Drive. That’s the address of the church I pastor.

I have a friend named David. He rarely changes his clothes. His hygiene is almost non-existent . David smells bad too. When I talk to him, I am greeted by the odor of cigarettes and Bud light beer. People don’t like to sit near him in church. I’ve even heard people don’t want to worship God when David is near.

I have a friend named David. He comes to church every week. He comes on Friday night to hear the worship team rehearse for the next day. He comes back again the following day, for both services. He sits through CrossWalk U. where we talk theology and philosophy. David tells us about the night Jesus Christ walked into his tent and talked to him—and he wasn’t even doing drugs. He tells us this story, again, and again, and again. David loves our church. David prays for our church—every night.

I have a friend named David. He’s a former drug addict. He’s an alcoholic. His mind is gone. At times he doesn’t remember my name, my wife’s name, or my kid’s names. What does David remember? He remembers how his mother died when he was young. How his wife left him in Colorado and broke his heart. He remembers that he used to do the “hard stuff, but not anymore”, as he says. He remembers to tell me these stories every time I see him, as if it’s the first time. And David remembers, that every week when he gets to church there’s warm coffee waiting for him, sometimes a bagel and donuts too.

I have a friend named David. I watched him in church today. He was sitting three rows in front of me. He was wearing his new blue coat. A coat from donations I helped him find in storage today.  I watched David listening to the music, trying to sing. I watched him leave three times to have a cigarette. But David always comes back. I watched him sing “It is Well with My Soul” and it is well with my soul, for I belong to a church that has a homeless man who worships God better than I do.

I have a friend named David. I’ve been told I need to talk to him about his drinking and his smoking. I’ve been told I need to talk to him about his hygiene. We are glad he’s here but we want him to change. We want him to be like us. Smell like us. Look like us. Act like us.

I have a friend named David. I wish he would change. I wish there would be a miracle. But I doubt it can happen. I do not even worry if it will happen. I am at peace. God hasn’t given me the power to heal my friend, fix my friend. He’s only given me the power to love my friend.

I have a friend named David. I watched him in church today. I smelled him in church today. I heard him in church today. And I thanked God for my friend today. Jesus was in church today, not in the beautiful people I saw, not in the lovely children that sat near me, not in the songs or the prayers or the sermon today. Jesus was in church today through a homeless man named David.

I have a friend named David. He’s been sent from God. When I see David, when I hear David, when I smell David, I am reminded that church isn’t about me. This worship experience isn’t about me. It’s not about my comfort, it’s not about my happiness, it’s not about my well being. It’s about Jesus, and Jesus is sitting three rows in front of me in a homeless man named David.

I have a friend named David. Do you?

     If we ask what the sabbath is there for, we are asking about two different things. It is one thing to ask about its function, and another to ask what is meant by its ‘blessing’. (It is only in this sense that we can ask about a commandment.) What does it mean for us when God ‘blessed’ the seventh day? In the way the story of creation is told, it may first of all strike us that the human being celebrates the first sabbath before he himself has performed any work. So he shares God’s rest, not like God, by ‘celebrating from his (own human) works’, but by celebrating with God ‘from his (divine) works’. For the human being himself has as yet no works which he could contemplate. This relativity and relatedness remain the secret of the sabbath even after the human being has gone to work himself. The sabbath does not acquire its meaning from the act of working. It does not just belong to the people who have work. It belongs to all human beings. On the sabbath, human beings do not look at their own work, at least not primarily. Every sabbath is supposed to be like the human being’s first sabbath, when he had as yet no work of his own at which he could have looked back. The rest which is meant for human beings is to be found in the contemplation of God’s works, from which they live. If a person looks at these, his gaze becomes free. It is neither drawn downwards, because it is fixed on the part-work of his own hands, nor upwards at the success of his work, which elevates him above other people. It is not the fragments of what he does that he sees, and not the question of how he could perfect them; what he has before him are the perfect works of God.

- Prof. Bernd Wannenwetsch, University of Aberdeen
Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens, p. 347

My workshop’s title is “The Church and the Community”, where I will tackle the challenge of being Jesus Christ’s presence in the world around us. We will explore the church’s activism and ministry in the community through theological reflection and cultural discernment, ending with some concrete and practical ways we can join God in his mission in the world, with special focus on the challenges of doing this in Suburbia.  I’ll repeat the workshop twice on Friday, February 3, at 9:00 AM and 1:30 PM. Hope to see you there if you can make it out.

     And what we are thankful for provides us with a subversive imagination. While the cybernetic revolution will tell us that the world is in the hands of those with the powerful computers and widest Net access, and while the forces of globalization arrogantly proclaim that those who control capital have a proprietary right to the resources of creation, we confess that this world is the inheritance of those who live in the light—not the din light of the Enlightenment, not the glittering lights of computer screens , televisions and gambling terminals, but the light that liberates us from the darkness. You see, friends, because we are not subservient to the empire but subjects of the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, we have the audacity to say to the darkness, “We beg to differ!” We will not be a pawn to the Prince of Darkness any longer, because we owe him no allegiance, and by God’s grace through our redemption and forgiveness, our imaginations have been set free.

- From a targum for Colossians 1:1-14
Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, p. 40-41

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