Dear members and friends of Redeemer,
These are disorienting times. We feel the weight of division, uncertain how to speak or where to stand. In such moments, we might turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who understood what it meant to seek Christian community under pressure. Writing from Nazi Germany while leading an underground seminary, Bonhoeffer produced Life Together, a meditation on what holds us when everything else seems to be falling apart.
Community as Gift
Bonhoeffer begins with a simple truth: Christian community is not something we create. It is something we receive. We exhaust ourselves trying to make community into what we think it should be. Bonhoeffer calls these our “wish dreams,” idealized visions that can prevent us from receiving the real, flesh-and-blood community God has given us.
The person whose politics baffle you, whose presence sometimes irritates you—this is the community you have been given. Not the one you would have chosen, but the one that is yours. There is freedom in this. We are not responsible for manufacturing unity. We are responsible for receiving what is already here, for recognizing that we have been gathered by Someone beyond ourselves.
The Rhythm of Solitude and Togetherness
Real community requires both togetherness and solitude. We cannot truly be together if we have not learned to be alone. In solitude, we learn to stand before God without others’ voices or expectations. Without this, our togetherness becomes superficial—we show up with masks rather than our actual selves. But without community, our solitude can become self-absorbed, untethered from the demands of love. We need the rhythm. Both withdrawal and constant togetherness can be ways of avoiding real community—one hides in absence, the other in noise.
Confession and Forgiveness
Here Bonhoeffer is more challenging. He insists that real community requires confession—not vague acknowledgment of our general sinfulness, but actual confession of actual sins to one another. This is where wish dreams die completely. We would rather maintain the appearance of having it all together, but Bonhoeffer knows that such pretense is the death of genuine fellowship.
In confession, we break through to the community. We stop performing and start being known. And in being known—truly known, with our failures and our brokenness visible—we discover whether grace is real or just a word we use in worship. Bonhoeffer writes that it is often easier to confess our sins to God than to another Christian, because in the presence of another person our sin can no longer remain abstract. But it is precisely there, in that uncomfortable exposure, that we meet the Christ who forgives.
The Ministry of Listening
Bonhoeffer writes that listening is the first service we owe one another. Not advice, not solutions—listening. We are so eager to speak, to fix, to share our own experience, that we listen only long enough to find our opening. But true listening requires patience, the willingness to sit with someone’s pain or confusion without rushing to resolve it.
Our sequence hymn for this Sunday, the one sung right before the Gospel reading, “Make Me a Blessing” captures this beautifully: “Be to the helpless a helper indeed, unto your mission be true.” Sometimes being a helper means simply being present, offering the gift of our attention rather than the urgency of our solutions. Bonhoeffer suggests that those who can no longer listen to their brothers and sisters will soon no longer be able to listen to God.
In times of division, listening becomes crucial, not as a substitute for moral clarity, but as the means by which we truly understand what we’re facing. Listening is difficult, disciplined work. It doesn’t require us to accept what is harmful, but it does ask us to see clearly what is actually before us, to resist reducing people to caricatures of their worst moments.
We do not get to choose the time we live in or the people we are called to love. But we do get to choose how we receive what we have been given. We can open our hands. We can practice the rhythm of solitude and togetherness. We can risk the honesty of confession and the grace of forgiveness. We can listen. We can pray with the hymn writer, “Out of my life may Jesus shine; Make me a blessing, O Savior, I pray. Make me a blessing to someone today.” This is enough. This is the work.
Grace and peace,
Keith+