I’m reading a small book this month called Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer joined a secret group of high-ranking military officers in the Abwehr (Military intelligence Office), who planned to end the National Socialist regime by killing Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. He was charged with conspiracy and imprisoned in Berlin for a year and a half.
Following the failure of the July 20 Plot on Hitler's life in 1944, Bonhoeffer's connections with the conspirators were discovered. He was again arrested and was imprisoned in a procession of prisons and concentration camps, ending at Flossenbürg.
Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging in Flossenbürg at dawn on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Like other executions associated with the July 20 Plot, the execution was brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing, tortured and ridiculed by the guards, and led naked into the execution yard. A lack of sufficient gallows to hang the plotters caused Hitler and Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels to use meathooks from slaughterhouses to slowly hoist the victim by a noose formed of piano wire. Asphyxiation is thought to have taken half an hour.
In the book “Life Together” Bonhoeffer writes:
It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of His enemies. At the end all His disciples deserted Him. On the cross He was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause He had come to, bring peace to the enemies of God.
So the Christian, too, belongs not in seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of the foes. There is His commission, His work. The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies.
2 Corinthians 5:20
20 Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.
Gather, Grow, & Go
Pastor Tim