The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.
The above comes from the book, Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the sermon Sunday, I quoted Bonhoeffer from one of his other books: The Cost of Discipleship. The quote I used was his differentiation between Cheap Grace and Costly Grace. What he is attempting to do in this is untangle the church’s concept of grace. In an attempt to make grace more ‘gracious,’ people have detached it from the source. Grace has become this ubiquitous concept that means lots of good things, but has forgotten where it came from and what it cost. Bonhoeffer sets out to root grace in Christ so that we don’t allow the sinful flesh to take God’s gift to us and apply it on our own terms.
Life Together is Bonhoeffer’s attempt to do the same thing with the concept of Christian community. At the point in his life that he wrote this (late 1930s), he had already spent time studying abroad (New York), had led a church in Germany, had left his homeland in anger at the church’s willingness to cooperate with Hitler, and had then returned home to lead an underground seminary. It was at this time, leading a clandestine seminary, that he wrote about the richness of the physical presence of other Christians. It was a persecuted church where Bonhoeffer found incomparable joy and strength. He recognized that the ability to gather was a grace of God. He says as much:
So between the death of Christ and the Last Day it is only by a gracious anticipation of the last things that Christians are privileged to live in visible fellowship with other Christians. 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 the visible fellowship is a blessing.
He needed to know this, because it was less than 5 years later that he was arrested and imprisoned: first at a military prison and then at the Gestapo prisons where he eventually lost his life by hanging at 1945. While he always found Christians with which to share this life, from this point on it was as a scattered lonely rather than as a member of a thriving Christian community. Even with so much taken away, Bonhoeffer seemed to be able to find JOY. This was how one of his fellow prisoners described him at the end of his life:
Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive…He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near.
What is it that would cause someone to act this way while imprisoned and awaiting an almost certain death? How could someone who had such a high view of Christian community be joyful when it was taken away from him? He understood grace. The bar of what human beings are owed had been lowered to a proper place, and so everything, including life, was viewed as a gift from God. Christian joy is not dependent on situation or circumstance, because the Christian life is about having our eyes opened to how little we deserve and yet how much God has given.
I write this at the end of 2020, a year that has been difficult for individuals, communities, and for the church. Many of the things that we are accustomed to being easy have gotten very hard; those things that were already hard seem unbearable. It is right to struggle and mourn, but it is not right to do so at the expense of JOY. As I preached about Sunday, joy is not a feeling of light-heartedness or an emotion of glee; it is an assurance that God is good and present in His creation. We can suffer through loss and discomfort because we know that a God of grace is over all. The more we focus on what we have received, the more we will learn to be okay with what we lose. Early in the pandemic, we preached through the book of Job, which states the heart of joy, saying:
And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” | Job 1:21
May we stand with Job and Bonhoeffer before us, finding joy in the grace upon grace that we have been given.