Life Together: In Christ

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 15).

Sometimes its easier to love the idea of community more that the actual people around us.

We can imagine about what the community of believers should be like, could be like, would be like, and this isn’t necessarily wrong. We are always looking for deeper, more authentic ways to express who we are as the body of Christ, and how we outwork His kingdom.

However, Bonhoeffer reminds us that

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize, it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate (Life Together, p. 18).

We don’t wait to participate in community until the conditions are just right, or that irritating person has changed or moved away. We don’t wait to give until we are full ourselves. We don’t wait to love our brothers and sisters until it’s convenient, or we have the time.

It is so helpful to remember that

our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us… I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ (Life Together, p. 14).

The only thing necessary for unity and community is relationship with Jesus. We don’t need common interests, ages, agendas, life situation, or anything else. We are called to love each other because Christ loved us first. So no one is excluded and there is no one who doesn’t count. And we find that

the exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ… we must, therefore, be very careful at this point (Life Together, p. 24).

It starts with loving, appreciating and serving the people who are right in front of us today.

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Life Together

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945 for his role in the resistance. He was a man who lived and died by what he believed. The historical context he found himself in required that ideas be matched by actions. You can’t keep your Christianity theoretical in the midst of Nazi Germany.

Words carry weight when their author has been willing to die for the ideas they convey. Written during the prelude to the Second World War, Life Together is Bonhoeffer’s account of what a communal Christian life looks like when the call of Jesus Christ to discipleship is taken seriously. Its theology stands in sharp contrast to that of the state controlled church of Germany during the 1930s.

Gifts of Grace

The first thing Bonhoeffer points out is that

It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s Word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the Gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing (1954:8).

Some days it is so easy for me to remember this. Life is exciting, the world is full of beautiful people and I am full of love and appreciation and grace for every last one of them.

Other days, it is so easy for me to forget this.  I’m impatient and selfish and exhausted. I don’t want to entertain the least of these, I just want to hang out with my friends.

Stanley Hauerwas has this to say on the subject

I take the body image in Corinthians to be extremely important. We are interconnected in a way that some of us have gifts that others do not. And the gifts that the others have that we do not, we need. One of the problems that the so-called ‘weakest’ present is that many of us think that is an invitation for us to be very strong, where we can take care of the weak, rather than to see how the weak offer us gifts, that doesn’t make it imperative for us to always be strong. That’s part of what it means to learn to live as a body.

The Politics of Gentleness: Vanier and Hauerwas

Maybe exhaustion is the point I have to reach before I can discover what gifts lie inside those I perceive as weak. Maybe then I can exchange griping for gratitude and truly appreciate the gifts of others that make up for my lack.

In The Politics of Gentleness, Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, communities for disabled adults,  comments that these are places

where we learn to appreciate people different, to love that and then to grow together and to become a sign that our world is not just a world where we have to live in rivalry, competition, in a sort of tyranny of normality, but it is possible to create places where we can learn to celebrate our differences.

I love the idea of living as a community who is a sign of peace, a sign that we don’t have to live in competition with each other, a sign that we can enjoy, rather than get bitter over our differences. I think this is the kind of grace we can receive as God’s family and the kind of grace Bonhoeffer envisions as being part of our life together.