Maggie's Farm

Dear RWF,
Why not? Say more, please. Not that I want to turn you into a Protestant. But that one does not have to be Protestant to benefit from Bonhoeffer. I go to a church so loving and nurturing that cynical agnostic friends who visit sneer at its happy-clappy style. The God we worship and kind fellow worshippers keeps me going thru dark days, but I know I need Bonhoeffer's reminders that tho Jesus came to bring us abundant life, it will always be a life of sacrifice and struggle, not blessed relief (people take drugs off label for the latter....) Jesus himself called us but told us to count the cost first ,not be all loosey goosey about faith, as if it were a picnic on a sunny day. The pearl of great price costs us dearly.

The Catholic missionaries I worked with in my youth have lived this more directly actually than many of my present Protestant fellow workshippers, especially the Jesuits and others I worked with in child welfare for a Catholic agency.

Here's a nice short sermon I found random googling, trying to find something else today, that could have been titled, the limits of cheap grace or lovey dovey faith: http://www.godweb.org/limitsoflove.htm

Do not mean to sound hectoring, tho, so pls. forgive me for verbal clumsiness (home w mild flu, have to drag kid out to doctor unrelated, and wish I could have a nice angel zap me with some feel good energies to sally forth less like a drowned rat...)

And, yes, Fra Angelico is awesome...

Thanks, Rick, for your helpful comments. Am retreating to the sofa with some books and the laptop to read more about it all...

Then, again, may just watch "The Mission" for the tenth time...Robert De Niro is my idea of a justified sinner in it...love him dragging that armor around, and what the Jesuit missionary tells him to do with it...

When I was in grad school, the theological snobs used to sneer that Bonhoeffer was no more and no less than a popular Lenten author for congregations, that his theology was flawed, that he preaches only a crucified Lord, and not much about Resurrection. Easy for them to say...He died young. Thinking about Tertullian (?) saying the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, re: Bonhoeffer. Would his book, and his inspiring tho imperfect theology have hit home so hard if he had not been killed by the Nazis? Read a decent post on this from a Reformed perspective here http://www.reformationtheology.com/2006/05/the_blood_of_the_martyrs.php

Perhaps it hit home because our church was just visited by a missionary speaking graphically about the persecutions he and his fellow misionaries were enduring. My offspring were scathing about the foolishness of said missionaries, I snarled that they were native inhabitants of the country in question, and could not therefore be sneered at as Ugly Americans imposing Cultural Imperialism on an indigenous culture (the stock PC view on missionaries espoused by kids in their public school), but rather brave converts to Christianity who were living in abject poverty, yet reaching out in love to others and looking after abused kids and orphans, etc. And who are being beaten and killed by their neighbors in return.

But I am very ignorant about Roman canon law. In my youthful ministry, the Catholic hierarchy were positively vile to the priests, brothers, nuns and lay ministers I worked with serving the poor. Our local cardinal was an SOB, and it seemed that whenever any priest reached out to the poor they would run afoul of him. I was the token Protestant in my agency (our constituency were mostly Protestant or unchurched) and I still remember being warned not to take communion when said cardinal came to preen at a service at our chapel. Because, of course, tho I worked for a church agency, "extra ecclesia....etc." I was diplomatic and refrained from taking part in the Mass when he was there. But he preached abominably, and was about as spiritual as a beefsteak. No compassion for the people we served, just cliches in a bored tone of voice....

I wish there had never been a Reformation. So much blood, so much division in Christ's body. Weakened the church. Imagine what this country would have been like divided, had we not kept the Union together....But years of working with people in the RC church convinced me that I would have bolted too...The Church and its leaders are fallible humans, IMHO, and that is why I lean towards the congregation rather than Mother Church. And if I toast in hell for it, so be it. I wouldn't promise to obey in my marriage vows, either...just an uppity New England woman, seldom wrong and never in doubt...actually, these days, often wrong and my most cherished beliefs regularly shredded by my fierce adolescents' claws and teeth delighting in proving me wrong!

God in man made manifest.