Every week, I have two sacred tasks: preaching a sermon and writing this column. The world moves quickly, and sometimes what feels relevant and compelling on Wednesday does not resonate with the human heart by Friday or Sunday. Still, I keep asking, “Where is God calling us to speak the truth of the timeless message of our living Christ?”

This morning, as I write, I realize that so much is unfolding in our nation. Many people – old and young, left and right – are feeling anxious. In these moments, I often turn back to my own spiritual mentors, those men and women whose Christian witness bravely stretches across history. One of those is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Reading about Bonhoeffer, I stumbled across a book by Alison Owings, who wrote Frauen. During the 1980s, Owings conducted interviews of ordinary German women who lived through WWII. The women were from a variety of ideological perspectives. Although she mostly lets the interviews speak for themselves without much commentary, at the end of the book, Owings offers a warning:

“It may be simplistic, but [it] is a warning nonetheless. It is that we are all well advised to take seriously and keep honed and in good repair our peace-minded instructive freedoms—especially public education and a free press. It is that anyone of goodwill cannot happily go about a private life, but must be alert enough and brave enough to butt in and be assertive the minute that injustice or intolerance, not to mention despotism, is spotted. It is that ignorance, avoidance, and stereotypes of any kind certainly are time-savers, but in the long run break, and reveal plain old human beings, who have a lot more in common as human beings—such as not having chosen where, when, or to whom we were born—than as members of any group. It is that we must cross superficial boundaries and get to know each other as individual human beings. It is to remember that as individual human beings, we are all connected.” *

Something similar is said in the Bible: ‘Christ is our peace . . . Has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us’ (Ephesians 2:14).

Grace and Peace,

Carla

* Quoted in Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus by Laura Fabrycky