One day near the middle of the last century a minister in a prison camp in Germany conducted a service for the other prisoners. One of those prisoners, an English officer who survived, wrote these words:
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident, and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive”¦ He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near”¦ On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners”“the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me aside: “This is the end; but for me it is the beginning of life.” The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.”
Pastor Bonhoeffer paid the price for being ‘politically incorrect.’
I used this very story in my sermon Tuesday evening at a community ecumenical Thanksgiving Service. What an end, or should I say “a beginning”, for the man who introduced us to the understanding of “cheap grace vs. costly grace.”
Simply put, there is no complacency when thanksgiving springs forth out of personal tribulation and when we are yet confronted by uncertainty in this world.
Hmmm! Do you think that there might be a whole lot of thanksgiving issuing forth this year? Looking at the circumstances of my family and myself, thanksgiving has taken on an intense daily quality, something we haven’t experienced for some time.
This year’s gathering is proving to be a very different, yet more genuine Thanksgiving for all of us. After all, I (we) have so very much to be thankful for.