Barth

"Any alleged humanity that is not, from the beginning, already co-humanity is inhumanity."

A Reminder from Karl Barth

“Nothing has happened to change the fact that Christians- even in the middle of their supposedly and perhaps even very consciously Christian environment- will always be strange and threatened creatures. No matter how much they may know themselves to be in solidarity with the world and behave as such, the way of Christians can never be the way of the world- least of all the way of a presumably Christianized world. From the standpoint of what moves within them, they will have to go their own way in matters both large and small, and therefore in what they think, say, and espouse, they will remain foreigners- who will often give occasion for others to take offence. They will appear to some as all too ascetic and to others as all too unconcerned affirmers of life- here as individualists, there as collectivists; here as believers in authority, there as free spirits; here as bourgeois and there as anarchists. They will seldom be found in the majority prevailing in their surroundings. In any case, they will not be going with the flow.”

Wow! The Oldest Sermon Outside The New Testament. What does it say?

"Therefore, brothers and sisters, let us repent immediately.....For when they hear from us that God says, "It is nor credit to you that you love those who love you, but it is a credit to you if you love your enemies, and those who hate you," when they hear such things, they marvel at such extraordinary goodness. But when they see that we not only do not love those who hate us, but do not even love those who love us, they scornfully laugh at us, and the name (ie. God) is blasphemed."

This fragment from Second Clement doesn't need any commentary. Brother and sisters in Christ, let us love one another. 

Nouwen on Christian Peacemaking

Peacemaking can no longer be regarded as peripheral to being a Christian. It is not something like joining the parish choir....What we are called to is a life of peacemaking in which all that we do, say, think, or dream is part of our concern to bring peace to the world.

-Peacework, Henri Nouwen 

The Violence of Christmas

Christmas is problematic, perhaps more now than ever. Why? Well, what’s Christmas about? For most people it is not about the birth of Jesus. For most of us Christmas is a time where we get together with family and friends and exchange gifts. We enact rituals of togetherness and exchange and hope for connectivity, fun, beauty, safety and even a kind of romance- at least a romantic image of peace and love among those we are closest to.  You see the problem. At Christmas time we are devoted to a vision of a small kingdom where things go as we would like, where our feelings, our sentiments, our longings are king and treated like royalty- worshipped and obeyed. Yet the world is not designed that way. In fact the world seems designed to disrupt our petty kingdoms and point us toward the true King, whose kingdom is peaceable because his riches can be endlessly shared and because He is, as the gospel shows, a servant king.

The world is a veil of soul-making, as Irenaus asserted so long ago, and the soul we are to make is in the image of that servant King. When we swear fealty to that King of Kings, that humble master who gives up His life so others may live, than we enter the Kingdom of the cross. In this Kingdom we die to self so that we may live. The life we live is not the life of the flesh (ie. ego) but eternal life. This life is the life given by God, and is therefore endless. It is not a destruction of our true selves, but a revelation of our true name, written on the white stone given to those who conquer by the enthroned Lamb. Yet we only learn this name by letting go of the names whispered by the flesh, the world and the devil. This is not easy. As joyous and vital as it often is it is also painful and difficult, like a caterpillar’s journey beyond it’s birthing form.

When we try to establish our own Kingdom, even a seemingly innocuous one, we are led into violence. Our Kingdom becomes “of this world”. We may think we are seeking a simple, peaceful holiday: a nice dinner, to be loved, to be understood, to celebrate and be celebrated. Yet we are seeking our own Kingdom, and if we do not get our way we will fight for it. Our vision of “peace on earth and goodwill to all” will then take its nightmare turn, our vision blurring as if we’d taken that one drink too many. We will fight, and we will lose. How many families enter Christmas sidestepping the mines left in their internal theatre by the battles of Christmas past? How ironic that the holiday of peace invites war, spurred on by cranky, overfed digestions and a few too many armed and lethal eggnogs.

The fact is that we will be forever unhappy if insist on making Christmas about us. If we truly make is about others, about giving, not in any way about receiving, than the season will surely bless us. Even better, if we make it about Christ- about service, about God, about love- than we will leave behind the kingdom of the world and its violence and enjoy the peace of the cruciform Kingdom.

From Bonhoeffer

I am not posting these words for any reason other than I read them today and their beauty demanded that I share them:

"Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use us and persecute us. They certainly will. But noteven that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them. For if we pray for them, we are taking their their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition, upon ourselves, and pleading to God for them. We are doing vicarouslyfor them what they cannot do for themselves. Every insult they utter only serves to bind us more closely to God and to them. Their persecution of us only serves to bring them nearer to reconciliation with God and to further the triumphs of love."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship. 

Advent Is Coming

Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as "a kind of vast joke whereby the creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers." He concludes, "Until we too have taken the idea of he God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demans to be taken."

-quoted in God is in the Manger (Bonheoeffer on Advent), p.53, notes.

 

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