And so to Bonhoeffer

I’m working my way through Eric Metaxas biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at the moment and what a man he was. I’m not a great one for reading lengthy biographies, but this one gripped my imagination for the way the story of one’s man life is interwoven into the broad sweep of Twentieth Century History that it covered, and the insights of the Christian struggle against Nazism in Germany that it reveals.

Like many of my generation, I’ve had a copy of Bonhoeffer’s “Cost of Discipleship” on my bookshelf for long enough, but I’ve never fully appreciated just how much that cost meant for him personally, when the path of discipleship runs foul of the accepted wisdom of the day. The book traces his path as a student, thinker, Pastor and theologian and then as a pacifist, conscientious objector and finally co-conspirator in the attempt to remove Hitler, and eventually prisoner and martyr.

Makes me wonder how much does my discipleship cost me in personal terms. Am I guilty of being a recipient of what Bonhoeffer likes to call “cheap grace”? Grace, that is happily taken up without thought to what it costs in terms of living for Christ in the real world. How much more costly does that same grace appear for a North Korean believer, or for a follower of Christ in Vietnam, for example, than for me. And, is it likely, that that cost for us in Europe is set to increase with the continued erosion of Biblical values in our society, and as the tide swings further and further away from it’s Christian foundations? Few Christians in pre-WWII Germany fully discerned that welcoming the promised renewal of Germany's greatness that Hitler brought, would mean also adopting a  world view which so totally diminished and devalued the Christianity of the Bible. Tendencies can creep in so subtly, and in today's world no less so.
 
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer "The Cost of Discipleship" (1937)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bonhoeffer-Pastor-Martyr-Prophet-Spy/dp/1595552464/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371723331&sr=8-1&keywords=bonhoeffer

In the End, God's Still Alive

I subscribe to The Courier Internacional, which is an excellent monthly Portuguese monthly news journal. As well, as it’s own analysis, it picks up and translates interesting articles from the world’s press like Le Monde, Die Welt, La Repubblica etc for a local audience. This June edition is running a feature on .... wait for it... God, with the tile “Afinal, Deus não Morreu” (“In the end, God’s still alive”) and comments that, whereas the Twentieth century was an era of post-religious ideologies and nationalisms that declared with various degrees of intensity, the death of God, the Twenty-first could well see a resurgence of spirituality and religious faith.

The article, understandably, talks as much about the rise of Islam, and the growing New Age style spirituality of today’s generation, as it does about any growth in evangelical Christianity worldwide, but that is also part of the conversation. At any rate, it’s interesting to see that particular slogan (that God is dead) blown out of the water.

Even an article by a leading secularist and columnist in the online magazine “The European”, Alexander Gorlach, which sets out to claim that belief in the existence of God or not makes little difference in the development of the European project, acknowledges the importance of religious thought and Christian values, not only in European history, but as recently as the latter post war period of the twentieth Century.

“After the destruction of World War II” he says “ and this is the flipside of the European project – there was the need for reconciliation. In the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, some found the strength to forgive the Germans for what they had done. Forgiveness was fueled by the power and with the support of Christian faith. It is embodied in the common knowledge of the Christian tradition: Christ forgave his persecutors before he died. This ideal of forgiveness has been a role model of the postwar era.”

http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/alexander-goerlach--2/6722-european-secularism

So, we’re moving on into the Twentyfirst knowing that faith is important, that values like forgiveness and compassion are born out of an understanding of the nature of who God is, and that, in the end, God does matter, and that there’s a lot more to life than just that which exists in the physical, the financial and the political realms.

Rain, rain, rain, rain .... Beautiful rain

Sharon rang us on Skype yesterday morning from Mumbai, and I could hear the violent hissing of the first monsoon rains hitting the city in the background. She switched on video and we watched it teeming over her balcony and down into the street below. Took me straight back, in my memory, to those long hot days of late June in Pakistan when you were just gasping for air and longing for the monsoon rains to arrive.. Nothing moves. The sun seems to stand still in the heavens. The earth bakes. Just need some sweet refreshment from the intense heat.

And then came July, and the clouds began to gather (the monsoon arrives later in Pakistan than India) and, then, by about the second week of July, the skies grow heavy and thick, and eventually break, and then --- there was rain. Sweet refreshing rain.  Moistening the parched, hardened ground. Powerful, intense rain. Breaking bridges and causing landslides. The same rain can bring life and vitality, and can cause death and inconvenience. But, in the first instance, when it first arrives, it was always welcome.

Alexander Frater writes about the arrival of the monsoon, in "Chasing the Monsoon", a book I picked up some years ago - can’t remember where - probably in some second hand bookshop in Islamabad or Karachi. In it, he follows the course of the monsoon rains from the southern tip of the subcontinent to the north, and writes vividly about its effect on the land and the people.

Rain figures largely in a few examples of music I am listening to today. First in my list, there’s an electronic dance track by Armin van Burren, which cleverly expresses musically the incessant drumming of a constant downpour. Then, Ladysmith Black Mombasa, from South Africa, singing about the “rain, rain, rain, beautiful rain” falling on the dry African earth. Thirdly, any one of the countless expressions of  the “barsat kaa mausam” (Monsoon season) that appear in the musical genre of the Urdu ghazal (this one by Jaswinder Singh). And finally Misty Edwards, longing for the sweet rain of God’s presence with the track “Waiting for the rain". As the prophet Hosea says

“Let us acknowledge the Lord;
    
........let us press on to acknowledge him
As surely as the sun rises,
  he will appear;

........he will come to us like the winter rains,
    
like the spring rains that water the earth.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug7myED6nOk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pLWunYWWtQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFHn3wmkNAU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXcqPPsz4Q0

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chasing-Monsoon-Alexander-Frater/dp/0140105166

God Has Left the Building

Today Pope Benedict resigns his office as the leader of the Roman Catholic church. And the above title was that given to an opinion column in the weekend Portuguese newspaper. It drew my attention, partly because the title was in English, whereas the rest of the piece, as the rest of the newspaper, was all in Portuguese, and partly, because it seemed mildly shocking for a country that continues to be for the most part fairly traditionally Catholic.

I thought the last paragraph by the writer, Luís Januarío, commenting on the ways in which the news of his resignation was received by the leaders of the Church, was worth recording here.

“It’s a symptom of the times, he writes, that the cardinals of the various factions, seemed to making declarations (about the pope) in the manner of professional politicians of a modern democracy, rather than in the old roman rhetoric. Applauding the decision of the Pope, many of them seem to be ratifying the secularization of the church and admitting that their High priest, is in fact an ordinary human being, albeit a saintly one, with a right to retirement and to resign his post. No longer, does it seem, is he the Holy pope of the Catechism, who was first infallible, then infallible in questions of faith, but finally, now one like the rest of us, capable of good and bad decisions”. God, the article, concludes is no longer in the Vatican.

Uncommon Grace

I listen quite regularly to Desert Island Discs. It’s one of those old radio programmes that has continued to be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 since time immemorial. The formula consists of an interview with a well-known personality linked with their favourite pieces of music and what those pieces have meant to them at certain times in their lives. It’s a simple formula that has stood the test of time, and hardly changed since the fifties. 

I was very impressed with the interview Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, gave on the programme last month. There are certain people in this life, and in history who cut across the neat Christian theological distinctions of common and special grace. (That distinction is, that, whereas all of humanity enjoys a common sense of the grace of God, special grace belongs to those who, through faith and repentance, have trusted in the redeeming  power of the  blood of Christ, and as such, confess Jesus as their Lord and Saviour). 

Aung San Suu Kyi is not a Christian. Her Buddhist faith is very important to her. And yet she displays in her bearing, in her statesmanship, in her conversation, an uncommon grace, and it’s impossible not to be aware of the image of God in her. At the end of the interview, when it is standard for the interviewer to offer any choice of a book, besides the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, to take with them to the desert island, Aung San replied that she would treasure the Bible, seeing that she often used to read it aloud to her maternal grandfather when his eyesight was failing, as he had previously converted to Christianity.

But I was struck by something she said about the nature of sacrifice. She was asked about the price she had paid for her political principles in terms of an almost lifelong separation from her husband and family. 
“When you have chosen a certain path in life” she said,  “you should walk it with satisfaction and with determination and not try to make it appear as a tremendous sacrifice. That can be like looking for something back in return for the sacrifice.Whatever you do out of your own free will that, in itself, should be the gift you give to the cause and to those you love." 

Whether it’s out of political motives, or from a religious or missionary calling, that’s a good principle to reflect on when you’re tempted to think that God, or the world, sort of owes you something for all that you’ve done and given up.

A River Runs Through It

At the weekend, we travelled to Bucharest for the wedding of Sam and Ioana. The Air France flight took us via Paris, and the takeoff from Charles de Gaulle on a crisp winter morning afforded us a magnificent view of the Seine curling through the city, and the famous landmarks of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame. 

I like to get a window seat when flying in Europe. There’s something magical about rising above the streets and buildings, and out into the cloud filled blue. And what stirs the imagination most for me is the sight of these great rivers, whether Tejo or Thames, Seine or Danube, snaking their way through the intricacy of the urban landscape. The river running through it gives the city it’s soul, creates the dividing line between the natural architecture of creation and the concrete and glass. And for getting around, is always there as a snaking landmark, giving you your bearings (which is probably why I never seem to enjoy Madrid that much - it just seems to be one big urban sprawl).

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God”. Psalm 46 makes a clear connection between the River and the City - the river as a source of life and freshness, the river cleansing and gladdening the heart of man.  From my ninth floor window, with the sun shimmering over the surface of the River Tejo as it passes through the city of Lisbon, I can well understand that imagery. This great body of water, passing beneath the bridges on its way to the sea, brings in fresh supplies of water every day, and carries all the waste and dross of the city out to the ocean.

Biggest Wave in the World

Some people come to Portugal with a single purpose in life - to be able to surf on some of the biggest waves in the world. Last week, Garrett Macnamara  flew half way across the world from Hawaii to do this, and broke his own previous world record, entering into the annals of surfing legend by riding what was believed to be a 100 feet monster in the Atlantic off the coast at Nazaré!  He described the experience as  “.. like snowboarding down a giant mountain. You're just chattering, flying down this bumpy, bumpy mountain. Your brain is getting rattled.”

It made me think about what drives a man (or a woman) to travel half way around the world like that to ride a monster wave. Anna also voiced it by asking “Now, how did he happen to know that by coming to Nazaré on the 28th of January he would find his record wave?” Of course that is as much down to a bit of scientific know-how as anything else - ocean topography, currents and weather patterns and all. But the fact is that Garrett, and many others like him, will dedicate their lives, their income and their relationships to following the surf.

Question I am pondering. How much do I dedicate my time and resources, and how much do I research and seek to understand, in order to ride the wave of God’s will in my life? For, if you talk to any surfer, it’s the thrill, the energy and the power that they want to experience, and that makes them follow. Well, what greater power is there in life, than following after the Creator of this world, in His plan of restoring all things to Himself? My, I need to get onto that wave!