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On April 9, 1945, forty years ago last month, Dietrich

Bonhoeffer was executed by his SS | guards at Flossenburg prison as

bias iG peepee: we mo dear CES STES
“traitor to’ the Thira Reich. Bonhoeffer was a young German pastor
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and a theclogian with, international following. When the Nazis

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came to power in 1933 he was a een ool In time, however, his
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mind changed and he joined the conspiracy to assassinate Adolph
Hitler. The plan failed. Bonhoeffer and others were arrested

and several days before the end of the war he was hanged. On the

fortieth anniversary of his death the Christian Century editori-

alizea. "As perilous as the issues of our time may seem
Bonhoeffer’s legacy reminds us that we must take sides. That
indifference is the worsé form of immorality. I eonhoeffer isa
reminder that to love God intentionally, to choose to be a
Christian in this world is a very serious commitment. It can be
a at Worst
an adventure at best, very costly perilous business and—worth.

Bonhoeffer’s experience is a reminded to those of us not forced

by circumstances to make a decision that will determine whether

or not we will live g,-fhat Coden there is more to life in

Christian terms than simply putting in tine, “fhat brief but

publicly faithful life of his is a reminder that by Christi ?
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criteria the meaning of a life has more to do with the(tracgs and

commitments which are made in love than the number of years that \-tc.
happens to endure. From his prison cell in 1944 he wrote "a

person must plunge into life. To be a Christian does not mean to

be religious in a particular way to cultivate some sort of a
sectarianism or pioneer but to be a man." That is the problem.
To be a whole human being. How to live life fully, how to enjoy
it, how to get as much out of it as we possibly can. How to go
to sleep peacefully at night with some sense that this day and
the accumulation of the days I am living are adding up to some-
thing. Knowledge of our mortality is a mixed blessing. Without
it we probably wouldn’t create anything. Herbert Masslow recu-
perating from a heart attack wrote to a friend that if you knew
you were not going to die you probably would never experience
love or ecstacy or beauty. And yet the morbid but accurate
observation that life is at least the process of dying does have
a sobering effect when one stumbles upon it in the wee hours of
some sleepless night. Macbeth’s lament is universal - tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty face from day to
day to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays
have lighted fools the way to dusty death about brief
candle. How to live, how to live with enough intentionality and
commitments so that our lives transcend the power and captivity
of death. That is the human question. The answer I submit is
the truth the saints and martyrs have seen __ brief. A truth ~“
lived by Jesus Christ. A truth to which the church has born
witness in its better moments. It is contained in a deceptively
simple little sentence in the First Epistle of John "for we know
that we have passed from death into life because we have loved a

brother. That is an astounding ascertain. You move from the

morbid captivity of death into the bright fullness of life by
loving your brothers and sisters. Church tradition has always
linked those three brief Episties which bear the name John to the
beloved disciple. Scholarship has determined that they were
written quite late, however, perhaps seventy years after the
fact. If that is the case, the major agenda for the author is to
get the essence of it written down before it disappears, before
it gets lost. And as he thought about it, as he put his mind to
work on the project of refining seventy or so years of Christian
experience into words and ideas that would help others to under-
stand. He kept returning to the idea of love. See what love the
Father has given us that we should be called children of God, he
wrote. There is no fear in love but perfect love passes out
fear, he wrote. God is love he proposed. And the person who
abides in love abides in God and God abides in that person.
Students have always known that the author of these letters is
really a very gifted thinker who is introducing a whole new
category of religious thought. Most religions, certainly the
rich Hebrew religion of Jesus relies on the idea of sin and
righteousness to talk about the human condition. This author is
proposing several interesting alternatives. Instead of sin and
righteousness he is using darkness and light and hatred and love.
He writes "God is life and in God there is no darkness at all.
The one who loves his brothers and sisters abides in the light.
The one who hates walks in the darkness." Now there is a very

important Christian point here. It is one you and I are inclined

to forget. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a new set of ideas
about God. It is about an incarnate love that gets itself lived
in the Christian community. The Gospel is not a new philosophic
system but an invitation to live a new style of life. We move
from darkness to light, from dusk to Light. This author proposes
not by adopting more orthodox doctrines or by growing in our
understanding in the mysteries of God as much as we Presbyterians
like that activity, but by loving the brothers and the sisters.
Ours is not a receptive climate for that basic Christian under-
standing, I fear. Each age has its particular challenges for the
Church, some of them have been in the form of outright hostility
and persecution. In other ages the challenge has come in a
seductive sympathy for religion in general. Which either does
not understand or does not like the essence of this Gospel. That
is our situation. Our culture asks the meaning of life and the
human prospect and then holds up these solitary human self as the
answer and says "this is it, discover it, get into yourself,
actualize it, realize it, celebrate it, indulge yourself, you
deserve a break today, you are worth it, look out for number one,

be your own best friend." The New York Times two weeks ago

reviewed an important new book HABITS OF THE HEART. Based on

four major research projects and edited by Robert Bellah, Univer-

sity of California, Sociologist. The book is a study of individ-
ualism in America and it concludes that individualism which when
balanced with a commitment to equality is a dynamic idea. Is

today tipping the scale? We are concerned the authors write that

this individualism has grown cancerous, that it may be destroying
us. The Times review included the most thoughtful paragraph:

"We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest
assumptions so radically into question." Our problems today are
not just political, they are moral and have to do with the
meaning of life. We are beginning to understand that our common
life requires more than an exclusive concern for material accumu-
lation. Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being
foremost. It would seem at first that if the goal is to get as
much out of life as possible we ought to do as much for ourselves
as possible. We ought to be focusing our energies, our creativi-
ty, our time and certainly our resources on this project. The
only trouble is that it does not work. It ought to but it
doesn’t. Our best humanity is not affirmed by egotism, the best
in us is not celebrated by self-indulgence. In fact, there is a
sense in which the more we live for ourselves the less we are
alive. Theologian Dorothy Leigh-Sayers-has written a provocative

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little book under the title Death by Bread Alone in which she

describes the behavioral terms of how deadly self-centeredness
can be. And I quote "being alone and then wanting to be alone.
Being friendless and then distrusting and despising others,
forgetting and then being forgotten. Living only for ourselves
and then feeling unneeded. Being unconcerned about others and
wanting no one to be concerned about us. Neither laughing or
being laughed at. Neither crying for another nor being cried for

by another." The poets have understood it clearly as life style

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self-indulgence ends ups denying not enhancing life. T. S. Eliot

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once wrote that an apt description of this civilization might be
there were decent Godless people, their only monument the asphalt
road and a thousand lost golf balls. Even B. A. Torrence, not
an artist one would normally characterize as self-denying, once
confessed "I was weary of the world, I was so sick of it, every-
thing was tainted with myself." Well, the Gospel of Jesus Christ
suggest that human life becomes good and extraordinary and
exciting and interesting when we get out of ourselves. Life is
an adventure in love. That is the Christian secret. In Jesus
Christ, God our creator, summons us to realize the fullness of
our humanity and to discover the meaning of life by shifting the
focus away from the question and in the direction of others. To
redirect the energy from introspection to the world outside
ourselves. Its not a philosophic, by the way, the author of the
Epistle moved from soaring abstraction to concrete reality, we
move from death to life when we love he said and then several
sentences later if anyone has the world’s goods and sees someone
in need, yet closes his heart, how does God love that person?
Martin Marty cited a prayer recently which if we haven’t prayed
we certainly understand. "Use me Lord, use even me, preferably
in an advisory capacity." The love that is an adventure, that is
to say Christian love is tangible and practical and it has to do
with flesh and blood, people who need us and flesh and blood
institutions which need us. So today, in the life of this Church

the rhythm is from theology to the Board of Trustees, from

thoughtful reflections on the human prospect to lengthy meetings
of the education commitment. From sermons on love trying to soar
the Church budget. The people who are today ordained and in-
stalled and all those who serve this or any church in pragmatic
everyday ways are eloquently expressing the truth of the Gospel.
Love is practical, love reaches out and makes life better and
happier and safer and healthier for others. Love discovers that
the happiest thing in the worid is some other person’s happiness.
How to live - A noble example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer sug-
gests that there is more to the answer to that question than
managing to stay a live for seventy or eighty or ninety years.
It is a matter of loving and loving deeply. It is a matter of
taking sides, of caring deeply about the world and all its
agonizing complexities. The Christian prescription is to care
deeply about life everywhere, to make choices, to learn and to
develop and form opinions about some of the thorniest most
controversial problems confronting the human community. To take
a stand for human life in those arenas where it is not always
popular nor socially acceptable to do so. The Christian pre-
scription is to love life everywhere, to become vulnerable, to
risk a broken heart everyday of our lives for the sake of love -
to love so much you actually experience the hurt personally
whenever and wherever human life is denied or diminished or
oppressed. And to love so much that you experience the ecstacy
whenever human life is affirmed or enhanced or celebrated in

great part in music and a walk by the lake on a Sunday afternoon

when justice is done, or in the miracle of another person’s love
for you. To the ancient question how shall we live fully - the
faith answers love. Love the people God gives you to love. Love
them with strength and kindness and ultimate loyalty. Love them
by listening to them, by taking in to your own heart their joys
and hopes and aspirations and disappointments and fears. Love
school and church and community, love your nation enough to
expect it to be as noble as its nobelist ideals. Love it enough
to weep when it is less than that. Love the whole wide wonderful
world God has given and love the God who made it to give. The
meaning of our humanity is established when we love enough to
make choices and commitments. And when in love we put our lives
in service to some great cause. Each of us decides, therefore,
to live fully or not to live fully. What makes those proposi-
tions a proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus and not just sound
psychological advice, is that their truth has been demonstrated?
God has put life on the line. God has allowed himself to be
defined as love. Love fully lived out in Jesus. Love lived in
serving and teaching and healing and ultimately dying. The truth
is, you and I have been loved, are loved by God. And in Jesus
Christ summoned to all the glorious fullness of life as God
conceived and created it. We are invited to love’s adventure for
life and forever in our praise in glory and wisdom in thanks-
giving and honor and power and strength be to our God, forever
and ever.

Amen