Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast,
our third session on this book,
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as we look at the second chapter today.
If you’ve not had a chance,
you want to go back and see those other episodes first.
But if you’ve been through those,
welcome.
We’re glad that you found this one as well
as we make our way through this just incredible book,
this classic of Christian literature.
And today’s chapter, I would say, Michael, is a little different than last week’s in that it’s
a little more topical.
There’s a variety of things that Bonhoeffer walks us through as we consider, in his words,
the day with others,
which really seems to me an expression of what it means
to connect not just with congregation,
though that’s certainly part of it,
but with Christian community,
including family.
Right.
Yeah.
And definitely want to make that mental note.
If you haven’t already,
you want to pick up the book of the link for that is in the description of the video,
the podcast, all that jazz.
You’re, you’re exactly right, Clint.
I think what is really interesting about this is if you’re casually reading,
it may seem actually
like a huge turn.
Like this is something completely different than what we were doing.
So if you listen to last podcast and thought,
wow, that’s kind of deep, that’s theologically rich,
there’s a lot there,
you know,
this chapter includes the same kind of depth,
but it does it in a very,
very accessible way.
So instead of framing it from the lens of what is
Christian community and then exploring that both theologically and scripturally,
Bonhoeffer shifts to look at a day and he looks at that day as an image of what it means to be people of God.
And this is, I think, a classic example of where modernity and I’ll define that what I mean by
that in just a second here,
where advancements in technology and some of our Western ways of
thinking have really create a blinder for us that we can’t see some of the deeper things of the
gospel.
And Bonhoeffer actually points it out.
The idea of the light bulb,
that there is no time or
place for humanity now in a Western industrialized society.
At night you flip on the lights,
right?
And so some of that rich scriptural imagery that we have,
some of the even theological
things written from the reformers from Luther and certainly even the ancient Christians,
this idea of framing the day from sunrise through the midday,
sun, bright, hot,
all the way through
the end of the day and the coming of darkness and the kind of exposure that that brings.
The fact that while you’re sleeping in that moment,
you’re vulnerable.
The Christian tradition has a rich
tradition of looking to scripture and seeing this imagery of this entire day cycle as being an
image of God’s faithfulness to us.
And he really works that out in detail.
And we’ll talk more
about that.
My point now, suffice it to say,
is essentially that we may miss some of this for
some of the things that we now take for granted because we don’t often think of this cycle in the
way that Bonhoeffer presents it.
And as he presents it,
he has a compelling theological vision for how
it should shape our Christian imagination.
So in some ways,
we have to unlearn some of the things
that we assume now so we can draw from the richness of things that Bonhoeffer is talking about.
Yeah, in my mind, this second chapter is connected to the first but also significantly different from it.
Last week,
we saw this expression of what it means to be community.
What do we mean when we
talk about connecting with Christians in unity, in fellowship?
And having sort of painted a picture
of that or challenged us to endeavor to do that,
here we kind of get from Bonhoeffer a toolbox.
What are the things that we can do?
What are the practices that add richness to that experience
and genuine experience of Christian community?
And within each of those veins,
what are the struggles?
What are the challenges?
And we might go some places that surprise you.
One of the
interesting dichotomies I see in Bonhoeffer is that he’s going to talk about fairly simple things,
but he’s going to talk about them incredibly deeply.
And so when he says something about prayer or about singing,
your temptation is to kind of think,
“Well, sure.” But as he
digs into that, I think you’re going to be challenged.
I think we all have those moments
when we read our way through this book and particularly this chapter that are going to be a little compelling,
but also maybe a little conflicting.
They’re going to challenge us.
Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying my experience reading this chapter was being hit over the head
with a theological board.
This is for me,
I think, a particular place of growth for me in my own
faith.
So I think there’s a lot of personal learning to be done here.
I think for any one
of us who have conceived of spiritual disciplines as something that are mostly confined to our
individual responsibility and our individual practice,
this entire chapter is going to be a
challenge because while he talks about the things that we do individually,
Bonhoeffer takes
deadly seriously with the kind of seriousness of a scientist and not a historian or a philosopher.
When he talks about us praying,
say, for instance, one of the first sections here is
praying through the Psalms.
He’s not talking about just a feel good thing that we should do
because it would be nice.
He is making the theological case that when we pray the Psalms,
we are going to, by definition,
run into things that don’t speak with our voice.
If you’ve ever read through the Psalms,
you know that there are a lot of Psalms of grief.
There are some Psalms
where it’s calling out vengeance upon others,
asking God to rain down judgment upon other people,
other Psalms that are just cries of innocence,
“Lord, forgive me,” or “I’m innocent
and protect me.” There are times if you just opened up to the Psalms and picked any chapter,
you’re going to read that Psalm and think,
“My goodness, that is not my prayer for the day.
That’s not my experience right now.” Bonhoeffer makes this beautiful theological case to say,
“Yes, and that’s the point because the Psalms aren’t there to be your individual prayer,
though it’s good when we feel a connection with them,
that chiefly he wants to make the case the
Psalms operate as a tool to teach us that this is Jesus’s prayer,
that ultimately we see Jesus
praying these Psalms and we get to participate in those Psalms because we’re in Christ.” For him,
that theological presupposition, that his starting place,
is that we by grace are in Jesus.
So that transforms everything.
And when it comes to praying,
particularly praying the Psalms in
the beginning of the day,
we should understand that as our voice speaking the words of Christ
because we’re in him and he’s in us and there’s no other way to understand that experience,
that the Psalms aren’t chiefly for our devotional benefit, though they are,
but they are for us to be
reminded of the one who speaks in and through us.
And I mean, that kind of transformation is taking
an unbelievably simple thing,
reading the Psalms, praying the Psalms.
This is a long-standing
tradition in Christianity and it is showing us how deep it goes.
And for me, something like that was both compelling but also convicting because I found the Psalms difficult to pray through for that very reason.
Man, sometimes I thought this sounds a little whiny and his point is,
“Well, it’s not about you and you need to learn from the Psalms that it’s not.”
Yeah, there are Bonhoeffer scholars,
people who devote their whole life to studying Bonhoeffer,
Bonhoeffer,
and Michael and I are not among them.
But one of the things I very much hear in this
chapter that I really appreciate is it would be a temptation for a pastor to write about the tools
of devotional life in community and make it a how-to manual.
And Bonhoeffer, if anything, makes it a how-not-to manual.
And I think being confronted with the ways you can get it wrong,
particularly if you’ve ever given serious effort to doing it and you’ve committed most of the
mistakes that he outlines,
I think is really helpful guidance in its own way.
And without being judgmental,
Bonhoeffer is able to set out this struggle of being really,
truly with other people and the places it’s most likely in each of these areas to go off the rails.
And I found that fascinating,
I found it very real,
and I find it very helpful.
You know that something
as simple as when people are asked to pray out loud and they say,
“Well,
I’m uncomfortable doing that.” And he says,
“Good,
be uncomfortable.” But your community,
rather than being just
uncomfortable with you, should be holding you up in prayer because your discomfort is an opportunity
for them to invest in you by praying.
And those kind of insights are incredible,
and I think they’re very helpful.
And I think if you read this book,
it is very difficult to find theological
material that is not hard to read but beautifully and simply laid out for all its difficulty.
And I think Bonhoeffer has a unique gift for that.
At least I saw that in my experience with this chapter.
I’ve encountered that a dozen times.
You know, one of my big takeaways from especially the
early parts of the chapter,
though it goes throughout,
and this never comes explicitly
because he’s not talking about the contradictions of different culture,
but a thing that really
struck me was how much of an impact our individualistic culture makes in our understanding
of the world and our practicing of the faith.
We did an entire series on practices of the faith,
and you know, you can find that in the archive on our website.
But what is really striking about
Bonhoeffer’s laying out of these things that you might rightly call individual practices.
He does talk about prayers with your family.
He does talk about even prayers in the congregation,
like you just mentioned.
But what’s striking is when he talks about reading scripture and when he talks
about doing the work of praying,
and then he even later goes in to talk about the work of work,
like you going to work and how that plays into the day and the devotional life of the Christian,
you know,
he conceives of all of that as being knit together in Christian community.
And we so often think of it as an individual job.
It’s our individual relationship.
And we miss the next step,
that is, if we’re doing this with Christ,
then because our brothers and sisters are also doing it in Christ,
we’re doing it together.
And so for him,
things like common prayers,
like reading the Psalms because other Christians are reading the Psalms,
or reading other Christian devotional
books that other Christians are reading for Bonhoeffer,
that is not merely a nice tool.
That’s not a nice thing to do.
It’s not a how to.
It’s actually deeply theologically significant,
because when you say a prayer that other people are praying,
your voices together are making harmony.
And in fact, we’ll talk about music here in a little bit where he makes the same argument
directly directed to songs that the reason we do these things is because they knit us together,
remind us of who we are,
not just as individuals,
but as a community in Christ.
What is really interesting about this,
I think, is that from the pastoral lens,
you just see Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
He is a theologian.
He is a scholar.
But at heart, he writes as a pastor.
And so he frames this for real people with real struggles and real questions.
And so the idea that he would in a book about Christian community that becomes a theological
cornerstone of the faith,
write about people who don’t sing well,
or people who sing too well,
or people who don’t like to read,
or people who don’t know their Bible as well as they should,
and say, “Well, it’s hard to read the Old Testament,” that he has a word for each of our
excuses, for each of our temptations,
for each of our barriers to really enter into and maintain
community.
And I think it’s helpful that he frames this in the idea of a day,
that you begin the day
not with thoughts of work,
but with thoughts of the one who has given you the day, with gratitude,
with prayer, by turning to the Psalter which connects you with the historic story of faith,
and with the Christ who prays through the Psalms with you,
and then moves throughout the day as
a reminder without ever saying it,
that the only day we can live faithfully is the day that we’re currently on.
The struggles of yesterday,
the mystery of tomorrow,
are always sandwiched and
give us this moment we’re in.
And I think Bonhoeffer,
with a real expertise,
with a real depth and richness,
without ever having to say that,
in walking us through the practices of a single day
with the community of faith,
whether that be family or church,
gives us this beautiful
encouragement to dig in where we are,
and to bloom where we’re currently planted.
And I think
it’s remarkably helpful and profound in its simplicity, really.
I don’t know how else to say it.
We are going to be tempted,
and I just want to caution all of us as we encounter these ideas,
to not take them too loosely,
to take Bonhoeffer seriously.
Bonhoeffer really means what he’s
saying.
This isn’t metaphor, and this really isn’t idea.
When he talks about engaging in Scripture,
when he talks about praying through the day,
when he talks about the idea of a day being a form and
way of living out the faith, that’s not metaphor.
He considers that the way that it is,
that this is a reality that we’re describing,
that the Christian is called to live in it.
And if you really take that seriously for a moment,
how many of us conceive of our days as to-do lists,
as opportunities to get things done,
to be effective or to reach the end of the day and
feel guilty that we weren’t effective enough.
We think maybe of some of our days as opportunities
for relaxation or enjoyment or pleasure,
but we so often conceive of our days as the value of what
we get out of them.
We have an intention,
we live our day,
and then we measure that day by how
closely we met our value.
Bonhoeffer,
that’s not even in the conversation.
The value of what you
intend makes no difference unless your day is firmly rooted in the worship and awareness of
the divine creator, redeemer, sustainer throughout your day.
So conceiving of everything from waking up,
to praying,
to eating breakfast, to then going to work and doing work.
And we’ll talk a little bit
about what he does with work,
which I think is spectacular,
to eating the noon meal,
to then finishing your work, to finishing your day,
to how this entire arc is a part of Christian worship.
And this is, if we’re going to be honest,
an extreme critique of Christianity that conceives
itself as being a once a week endeavor.
When we think of Sunday worship as our communal practice, that is worship,
we are completely underestimating what Bonhoeffer means by a day together.
Because if we live in Christ all the time,
there’s no other way to be Christian but to be in Christ,
then it follows that our every day is a participation in this radical new reality,
what he calls the Christian community.
And because of that,
every day Monday through Friday,
Saturday, and of course then Sunday,
these are all practices,
liturgies of living out our faith,
that everything that we might consider common is at some deep level sacred because of the one in whom we live.
And this has,
if we really get it,
we’re willing to listen.
Man, this has a powerful
ability to transform our imagination of what the day exists for.
Is it to do things?
Is it to reach
the end that we intended?
Or is it to worship God?
Is it to give God glory and praise?
That’s a radically different foundational starting point,
and it has implications for everything that we do.
In fact, Michael, I think if you look at this chapter as a whole,
you could say that Bonhoeffer would go so far as to suggest that even the things you accomplish in a day,
even the religious things you might accomplish in a day,
religion or prayer or Bible study or whatever,
if not done from the right place in the right spirit,
are in fact barriers to Christian
community and to Christian growth.
Not helpful.
There’s no sense of a kind of ritualistic, dry,
you know, just go along.
And that, I do think you’re right,
that stands as an indictment,
not only to the modern church,
but to the church of his day.
Remember that Bonhoeffer is living
in a moment where many of the churches in his culture are turning at best a blind eye
toward fascism and toward a practice of what Bonhoeffer sees as deeply out of step with Christian character,
dangerously so,
even demonically so to use extreme language.
And so without really ringing that bell,
without pointing toward anyone else,
Bonhoeffer asks each of us to focus on the day we’ve been given and what are we doing,
not just in it,
but what are we doing with it and why are we doing that and to what end is it being used to glorify God?
Again,
extremely challenging.
If you can get through this chapter without feeling
significant awareness of where you might lack,
I think I’d suggest,
read it again,
slow down and be careful when you read it because I can’t imagine that anybody can exit this chapter unscathed
from feeling some being under the microscope a little bit.
You’re exactly right and that’s part
of what makes Bonhoeffer,
I think, so powerful is that is the impression you have while reading it,
but simultaneously you can’t help but be inspired by his authentic faith.
It is convicting to
recognize how easy it is to miss God’s working in our everyday and yet there’s something inspiring
and being reminded that he is,
that God is there.
There’s no place that God’s not alive and active.
My takeaway was,
ouch, that hurts and wow, that’s amazing.
And so if you haven’t picked up the book
yet and you’re still on the fence thinking about buying it,
don’t think that this is an incredibly
critical book.
It’s not.
That’s what makes it so– It is convicting though.
Right, yeah, exactly.
That’s this beautiful narrative.
It’s a beautiful theological vision that Bonhoeffer has.
It’s inviting and make a point there.
He’s talking about reading God’s Word
and I think many people come to the reading of scripture with a great sense of inability.
You know, we don’t feel like biblical scholars.
Even we go to worship on Sunday and the preacher
preaches and sometimes there’s a gap there because they talk about a language thing or they
talk about a thing in a commentary and we can sometimes feel like there’s different abilities to read scripture.
And Bonhoeffer says, I think it’s incredibly helpful,
he says God’s Word
is to be heard by everyone in his own way.
He goes on to talk about the difference between a child
hearing God’s Word and an adult.
And I think that both he intended age,
but I think that also
includes spiritual maturity, right?
Those who are just beginning their Christian devotional life,
who are growing in the faith,
and those who are long,
long far down that road.
When we come to the scriptures,
God speaks to us through those scriptures at exactly the level where we are.
That’s the amazing gift that we have in the spirit of God working within us.
So if you have that anxiety about,
well, if I turn to the Bible,
will I understand it?
You will understand exactly
what you need to understand,
not because of your ability or because of your research method,
but because God will show up and be faithful.
And you know, I think that’s a good reminder.
It’s once again, convicting and inspiring.
It’s convicting because I think we can all confess
we would do well to read our Bibles more.
It’s inspiring because it’s a reminder when
you turn to them,
God will be faithful to teach us wherever we’re at from them.
Yeah.
In regard to that scriptural part of the chapter,
you know, it’s amazing the journey that
he takes from saying,
yeah, there are people who like short Bible readings,
but those can be
dangerous because they keep you away from the longer,
the more difficult, the readings that demand more discipline and more attention.
And then in the context of that,
he says, but it’s not about how much you read because once you begin reading,
it will be said for the mature Christian,
every scripture reading is too long,
even the shortest one.
And what he means by that is
you will find so much in it that you can’t deal with it.
There will be more there than you can
possibly mind, that you can possibly uncover.
And it’s an incredible journey to start with.
Well, don’t be satisfied with short readings.
Everyone should read at least a chapter.
And as you do that,
you will find that even a short reading is beyond what you can comprehend.
And Bonhoeffer takes us on a really interesting journey there as he explains how to interact with scripture,
or less maybe if how to and more as he explains what happens
as we interact with scripture.
Really, really good stuff.
Yeah.
And within that section where he’s talking about scripture,
I think another insight that is
unbelievably helpful is he reminds us that the source of our salvation,
and so therefore the
source of our life,
everything past salvation is a gift given to us in Jesus Christ is the full sum
of who we are and the promise of who we will be.
And, and because of that,
because Bonhoeffer takes salvation so seriously,
that being in Christ is the fulfillment of what it means to be human,
that Jesus takes on flesh.
And so therefore being in Christ is the fulfillment of being flesh.
This is this theological,
rich ground that he starts from that he says,
and that’s what makes
the scriptures your story,
that if you’re in Christ,
then when you read the scriptures,
they are now your history.
These are your people.
These words point you to the reality that you
participated, not because of you,
you’re earning it or because of your status,
but because of grace and Jesus Christ.
So much so that he says that your story,
your individual story, the who, what, why, where of your life,
this recedes into the past.
It really doesn’t matter anymore,
because you’ve been adopted your new creation is a new life that,
that the words of the text have
now become your story by way of adoption in a way that we so often don’t conceive of them.
We think of the scriptures as a thing that we should read and should learn more about,
but that’s not helpful.
He uses this image of it’s like a friend of yours wrote a letter to someone else.
When you read that letter,
you don’t think it’s about you,
but you care about it because your friend wrote it and it
teaches you something about who they are.
And it says something about your relationship with them
in the same way.
When we read scripture,
we discover who God is.
And that has a way of
transforming who we are because we’re in God.
Such a simple, yet deep theological insight and the
implications of it could change our entire way of understanding of what we do when we read the Bible.
And a difficult thing for us to hear in a moment of culture and history where we hear a great deal
about our story, our narrative, our truth.
And Bonhoeffer suggests we cannot even know what that
means apart from scripture.
For the Christian,
I have no story outside of the grace of Christ.
And so for me to understand my own history,
my own life can only be done in consultation and in
connection with the living Word of God that I encounter in the daily and regular practice of reading scripture.
Otherwise, I can only know the shadow of myself apart from God’s grace,
which is to say that I don’t know myself at all.
And I think there’s so much more here.
I don’t know about you,
Clint.
I was struck by some of
the sections on singing,
talking about how the singing in,
of course, corporate worship, but also in devotional life,
which is not a thing I’ve traditionally thought of or really,
to be honest, practiced myself,
is it’s deep and meaningful,
not because of the music,
but but he lays out this is both practical and it’s unbelievably deep.
How the reason why we sing
is because it joins people’s voices together.
The reason why there’s melody instead of just
a reciting of words is because it points us to that there’s meaning here beyond what can be
carried by the words themselves,
that it should move our entire being,
not just our mind.
And he goes on to say,
so there’s really no excuse if you can’t sing.
Well,
you’re still you should
participate because that’s part of what it means.
Or he says, you know, if you are a great singer
and you belt out and you do harmonies that are distracting,
if your voice carries over other voices,
then you’re distracting from the whole point,
which is to be unified.
And there’s something incredibly practical in that insight,
but yet unbelievably theologically deep,
you see how he
gets there and you say,
oh, my goodness, next time we’re in worship and we’re singing,
or next time that I think of song,
I need to think of that as an opportunity to be united with others,
instead of that very natural thing that we all do.
Well, I really enjoyed that song or that that music spoke
to me, we can see that turned on its head and see how it connects us with others.
And that that’s the major thrust and point of the part of music.
I don’t know if this is intentional on his part or
not.
But if there is a part of this chapter that serves as an illustration of Christian community,
it might be this section on singing as as he envisions that everyone adds their part to it
without calling attention to themselves in it.
And it seems to me not only is there a wisdom there for singing,
but that is ultimately the goal he’s trying to portray for congregation,
for family, for Christian community,
that each of us bring our level of giftedness,
bring our, if we say rudimentary prayers, then pray them while other people pray for us.
If we can’t sing,
join your voice with those who can,
and yet do so in a way that doesn’t make it self-referential.
Do it in a
way that doesn’t call attention to yourself.
I thought it was very interesting.
Again, I think only a pastor could say this,
there is no place in the service of worship where vanity and bad taste
intrude as often as singing.
And that seems to me to be very subtle,
an expression of what he’s
trying to say in the entire chapter and really the entire book about community and the difficulty
and dangers of it.
Yeah, and it is such a helpful reminder,
especially if you’ve given any thought
to singing in church,
the choir, the praise team, or you’ve led church and the organization of worship,
you know how much thought and time you put into trying to knit these things together for
them to be audibly pleasing,
for them to be engaging for people who are there.
You want people to be moved.
The temptation of that is that we make it about us,
that we forget the reality that
ultimately not only is worship to be lifted to God,
it rises and falls on the participation of those gathered.
It is about the heart and intent as much as it is about the thing that’s done itself.
You can have the most beautiful voice and it can be used wrongly in worship.
If it points others to you instead of to the one who you have found grace and salvation by grace,
we are in Christ and anything that pulls us away from that reality,
Bonhoeffer is going to point
it out.
And he does so masterfully in all of these areas,
but I think music,
he does it with
a great amount of clarity.
You and I both share to some extent that I think neither of us would
call ourselves musical by nature or certainly by training.
And so I hear Bonhoeffer as a
non-musician hearing him and I’m very interested in this line.
He says, “It is not you that sings,
it is the church that is singing,
and you as a member of the church may share in the song.”
You know, in the same way that we might sing with our children when they’re young.
And we care not about are they in tune.
We sing for enjoyment.
We sing for fun.
We sing to express something and have moments together.
You know, I can remember when the girls were small
and we’d be in the car and a song that we all knew we would sing.
Now, trust me, that’s winning no awards and I’m glad there’s not record of it video or anything.
But those were beautiful moments
because they’re not really about the song,
they’re about the relationships.
And in church, they’re about the one to whom we are singing.
And that Bonhoeffer can take something as simple
and as common and ordinary as singing a hymn and give it about four pages that make you think new
thoughts about it, I think is a wonderful tribute to him.
Yeah, and I want to be clear here because
this is not what he intends.
So it’s an implication that it spurred thought for me is,
you know,
in what has been called contemporary Christian music,
certainly that style of more of a band and then
then you have people leading the congregation and worship,
you know,
a whole sort of genre within
that are songs that are very individualized.
So that a lot of I,
me kind of language often directed
to God, sort of calling us to this idea of individual relationship.
What strikes me about
Bonhoeffer’s theological vision is that in one sense,
he would not argue,
I don’t think that I
can put words in his mouth,
I don’t think he’d argue that that is completely wrong.
I think what he’d argue is, it’s incredibly short sighted,
because we do have an individual relationship
with God.
In fact, that’s the only relationship that we have.
That’s the only situatedness that
matters in our life is that we are in Jesus Christ.
So that music that is very I,
me,
we with Jesus kind of music is in some ways very true.
But I think Bonhoeffer would critique
that it does not go far enough to point out that it’s we,
that we are all connected in Christ,
that we cannot possibly sing that song,
we cannot possibly worship together,
whether it’s on Sunday
or through our week,
our sort of our common days,
we cannot worship if we are not aware
that that worship binds us together.
So we do show up as a body,
even though that connection
that we share is in Christ.
I think it has implications for the songs that we sing,
it has implications for why we sing them.
It is,
once again, it’s so deep, yet so practical.
And that’s what I think makes these words stay in the test of time.
Yeah, and those themes just are so woven through this chapter,
you know, as we think about the section on prayer.
And there is in it,
I think, guidance that goes beyond prayer,
maybe even harkens back to this passage on singing.
But he says if someone is struggling in prayer,
and likely we’ve all been in a church service or a devotional setting where someone was tripping
over words, and it was clear,
they didn’t know what to say,
you know, having been a, having been veteran of many youth group trips,
both of us have had experiences where some,
some young person will offer to pray or maybe be volunteered to pray,
and you don’t know what’s
coming next.
And they just, they don’t want to do it,
they just want to be over with,
or they mean well.
And that that can be a moment of separation,
where those of us that are hearing
it are hearing the problems with it.
And Bonhoeffer says no,
instead turn that into an opportunity
to pray for them,
to, to focus your prayer on them as a brother or sister.
And again, he just has this wonderful way of bringing our focus back to the center.
And he also acknowledges
how easily and how often we let it drift.
And I think, you know, that’s a great word.
Remember, he says that you are a brother or sister praying among brothers and sisters.
In other words, you’re not being judged,
you’re being upheld by them.
And, and that is a,
that’s a wonderful goal.
That’s a wonderful expression of community as well.
So I just hear that kind of stuff
in every part of this chapter.
Yeah.
And I think that that spurs for me,
one of my greatest
takeaways from the chapter,
this, this I’m going to be chewing on for quite a while,
because some of this, in fact, I would say maybe all of this that we’ve discussed this fault thus far,
we would think of as sacred faith based things.
These are spiritual practices that make sense to us.
We read the scripture, we pray,
we sing Christian songs,
hymns that join us together,
right?
All of these are things that we attribute to worship in some way or another.
But remember,
this chapter isn’t about worship per se.
And what we think of as a one day a week endeavor.
This is about worship
as an everyday practice from morning to dusk over and over and over the liturgy of life.
And so one of these sections he talks about is work,
which we tend to not think about as a part of a worshipful experience.
But Bonhoeffer does something with work that that blew my mind and like I said,
will require a great amount of thought from me.
He talks about as work is an opportunity for us
to reframe our lives from ourselves to things outside of ourselves.
This is a quote, he says,
it being work would be an instrument for purification of self centeredness and self seeking.
Now, when’s the last time you got in your car on a Monday morning,
going to do whatever task
lie ahead for you that day,
and thought to yourself,
this is going to be a spiritual opportunity
for me to be less selfish and less self seeking.
I bet it hasn’t happened for me.
And you know, I think there’s this beautiful opportunity that he says that we can go do a thing that needs done,
you know, whatever vocation you have, whether it’s mechanical,
to informational,
but you have to go do a thing that is your job.
And when you do it,
that it that you’re doing enables you to live through it to the service of he says,
thou to God to Christ,
that we can move through the everyday humdrum.
And we can see in that calling out of ourselves,
the offering what we have for the sake of others using our skills to accomplish a task,
things that need done are unto themselves an invitation to see the one who stands behind them
and made them the idea that everyone from the street sweeper to the sanitation worker to the
doctor to the lawyer that every vocation and every area,
regardless of whether you are cleaning
snotty kids noses to working for the UN to solve a hostile situation between nations,
whatever your vocation is an invitation for you to see through the task that needs done to the one
who’s given you the task.
That insight is unbelievable.
And it shows us how deep this
connectedness to both worship community,
but also this devotional practice of living life can be
to those of us that are maybe tempted to segment our life into our work life,
our faith life, our family life, our educational life.
I think Bonhoeffer is a wonderful remedy here.
You know,
without the burden and labor of the day,
prayer is not prayer.
And without prayer,
work is not work.
So this vision of bringing faith and practice together seamlessly.
And he continues later on.
He says, thus every word,
every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer.
And then there’s this beautiful piece,
just a page later,
we cannot take for granted that our work provides us with bread.
This is rather God’s order of grace.
And so our work is not tied to the outcome of our work.
It’s not tied to what work gains for us materially.
It is the internal that we are allowed to express by doing the task.
If that makes sense, if not,
I would suggest you go back and read this chapter.
But every work becomes a prayer because
the work is not about what we get at the end of it,
but what we give to the doing of it and who
we do it for,
not the world of things that he says,
but instead because in it we encounter again
the living Christ by the opportunity to devote it to him in service.
And, you know,
that is,
nobody thinks of work that way.
Nobody thinks of their vocation.
We are pastors and I suspect
we don’t think of our vocation with that kind of depth and insight.
And that is a game changer
when you consider needing to go spend a day at the office that even that act is an act of worship,
is an act of faith,
is an act that connects you to others in and through Jesus Christ.
And
that is very compelling,
very insightful,
and of course very challenging.
Reading Bonhoeffer in this chapter as he looks at a thing that is so common as is our every day,
and he sees in it layer upon layer of depth and spiritual truth is unbelievable.
The transformation is like going from a black and white TV to a full color HD TV where you just see
all of this nuance and detail and texture and it’s moving.
It’s not just better.
It moves you forward.
It inspires you to see that there’s even more than what you see in front of you.
And I give you a practical example of this.
This one hit me between the eyes.
He talks about eating lunch,
how that idea that our work earns us food,
right?
This idea that we connect what we do with the
benefit of it.
He says, listen, everything you have is a gift from God.
So when you sit down
at a meal, it should remind you that you have a Christian conviction to give food to others,
that that should be a sacrificial reminder of the gift that’s been given to you.
And then take it
another step further that we as Christians should partake of that meal with gratitude.
A lot of people have a practice where they’ll pray for their food before they eat it.
That’s a prayer of gratitude.
Thanksgiving to God for that food.
What we fail to think of,
this one hit me,
is he said,
if you’re eating your food carelessly or wantonly or just fast,
you’re just blowing through it.
You are not practicing a grateful spirit for the gift that’s been provided for you at that table.
Friends, how many times do I go home and snarf a sandwich while watching a thing
on my phone and not once think of the gift present to me on the table?
It’s a small thing, admittedly,
but that’s in all of Bonhoeffer’s day is framed as those small things with deep theological
meaning.
And if we could get a tenth of it,
it would revolutionize our understanding of what
means to be Christians living in the world.
Yeah, I think that’s what I had in mind early in this
podcast session where I said that Bonhoeffer,
it seems to me,
is just incredible at showing us
where we can go wrong.
And in seeing where we miss it,
he simultaneously provides this goal
for us to take a step in the right direction.
You know, there were some lines I passed
about prayer.
He said, “A ritual becomes an evasion of real prayer.” If we do ritual prayers,
if we come to church and we know the prayers…
And he said, “The prayers become beautiful and profound,
but not genuine.” That it’s not the beauty of the words,
it’s not the formula.
The…
And he just…
He gives us that kind of insight in all of these various…
You know, this is the kind of chapter that I think a person could go back to repeatedly,
and you are going to
be very likely to find something in it continually.
And as we move toward the end of this session,
of this episode,
I thought it was very interesting.
He ends, or very close to the end,
he says, “It is perilous for the Christian to lie down to sleep with an unreconciled heart.”
Something as simple as considering in my day,
at the end of my day,
is there someone I need to forgive?
Is there some part of my day in a negative sense that is still with me that I need to let go of?
Did I find a way to offend someone?
Did I do something today that I am not proud of, or guilty of?
And to let those things go before sleep.
And he makes this very insightful thing
that in ancient times,
there was a lot of,
in his words, “prayer for preservation during the night,” that historically,
people considered the night a dangerous time.
I think it’s still the case
that most deaths happen in the evening.
And we probably, we may say evening prayers,
we may do an evening devotional,
but the wonderful insight that before one’s head hits the pillow,
it is a moment to consider,
“Do I need to ask forgiveness or extend forgiveness to anyone
based on the way that I lived my life today,
so that tomorrow I can get up free from that
to pursue it all over again?” It’s very humbling.
It’s very inspiring.
It’s just great stuff.
I hope that you found in this chapter many things that speak to you like that,
because, again, I just about wore out a highlighter making my way through a book that I’ve already read.
And, you know, that doesn’t happen very often.
I think you started us this way,
Clint.
I think it’s a great place to end is,
this is not a how-to book.
This is not a book that is about telling you the right practices
to do in the right order.
This is a book that is exceptional in its ability to
force us to ask the question,
“Why?” over and over and over again.
Why at every stage of your day?
Why are you doing that?
Why are you doing that?
Why are you doing that?
And the fruit of that
is taking the deep wisdom,
the ancient wisdom of the Christian faith and the practices of faith,
and then seeing them as opportunities and invitations to build every link in the chain
of our day, from the first moment through the work that we do,
through the meals that we eat,
through the prayers that we pray,
to literally the last moments of our conscious time.
And to conceive of all of that as part of a divine spiritual drama that we have been invited into
as an act of grace by Jesus Christ,
that this way of conceiving is surely going to transform
how we do things.
But it’s not a how-to manual.
It’s a call to the deeper and greater things
of faith, to see beyond the outer practice,
to see the real heartbeat of why it exists.
And I think for that reason,
if you read through this chapter with a highlighter,
you’re going to see one thing in every section that speaks to you today.
And next month,
when you read again,
you’re going to see new things that speak to you in every section and
part of your day.
And that’s sort of the spiritual checklist that I think we could all
do well to return to,
because there’s so much wisdom here.
There’s no chance that we sum it up,
certainly in one reading,
and definitely not in one podcast episode.
Yeah. If you’ve ever had the experience to be able to shadow or apprentice or observe someone
who is a master of something, maybe a musician,
maybe a chef,
maybe a carpenter,
but someone who has come very close to truly mastering a craft,
you’re tempted on the front end of that to think
that you’re learning what they do,
that you’re going to watch what they do and copy it,
and nothing could be further than the truth.
You learn later, reflecting on those experiences,
that what they provided you was an opportunity to see how they do things.
How do they prepare?
How do they make decisions?
How do they practice?
How do they bring the task to completion?
It’s what they do that is impressive,
but it’s how they do that is the process you have to learn
if you ever want to have some degree of expertise or mastery in that field.
And that’s what we get
when we look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
We see a man who practices this beautiful spirituality,
and who shares with us some of how he does it.
So rather than simply copy it,
yes,
you can read a chapter of Scripture a day,
and you can say a prayer that you’ve said a million times,
and you will never take a step toward the wisdom and depth that we find in this chapter.
But instead, if we humbly look at what Bonhoeffer offers us,
then each of us find a step for our own lives,
our own spiritual quest,
and we get an opportunity to move forward.
And I think that’s a real gift.
Hope that you will be able to be with us next week.
Next week is a fascinating look at another
aspect of this book.
I think in some ways,
for some of us,
I think perhaps as challenging as this chapter is,
I think there are some of us who will find next week even more challenging.
We’re grateful that you’ve been with us this far.
We hope that you hang in there with us.
We hope that you’re enjoying this book,
and thank you for being a part of this.
Very much.
Two quick things for you.
Number one,
if you have not picked up this book yet,
and you’re even remotely a reader,
this chapter alone is worth the price of admission.
So definitely consider picking this up.
You’re going to get it really cheap from a used dealer if that’s the route you want to take.
Second thing is, I’m excited to let you know that we have set up a Pastor Talk podcast response
form that’s linked in the description of this video and the podcast.
And the purpose of that
is really to just make it simple for you to engage with us.
So if you have questions,
if you have thoughts,
if you have anything that you would maybe like to hear more of about either
this book or other topics,
you know, we’re always sort of thinking ahead and wondering what would
be helpful.
And, you know, we’d love to have your feedback on that.
So you’ll find that link right
here, and we’d love to hear from you.
That said,
we look forward to join with you again next week
as we continue on in this book and hope you’re blessed until then.
Thanks, everybody.