Open Range

OPEN RANGE

The Europeans immigrants who first introduced cattle to the Western plains of America only built hewn wood fence to keep cattle out of the yard or for a corral.  Barbed wire was not used to fence off large tracts of privately owned land until about 1880.  Grass and water were warily viewed as free to all, and they relied upon brands to keep track of who owned individual livestock.  This economy was called “open range”.  Among the 32 avocations I have had (most “one horse” preachers need to moonlight) I worked with a “brands inspector” in Campbell, Crook, and Weston counties in Wyoming.  The churches I preached at encouraged me because they saw my outside work as good “PR” for the church, and it was.  Brands are still used on range cattle west of the 100th meridian.  We inspected brands when cattle were sold or moved into or out of state and shot predators (from our pickup window!  That’s illegal for regular folks.  Ain’t I special!)  The West is not as “wild” as Chicago or Detroit;  perhaps never was.  We didn’t encounter a single violation.  Mostly we just visited with the ranchers, and made a little extra money shoeing their horses.

  Christians graze under the “HS” brand (Holy Spirit); but they graze among those of another’s brand.  There are no fences.  “Open range” with respect to the church among humanity was the burning emphasis in the life, teaching and writing of a man named Dietrich.

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran preacher/teacher/philosopher/theologian, taught at clergy training schools (primarily Finkenwalde) in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.  His ideas were distilled from an eclectic exposure to philosophy and theology as he traveled extensively, teaching, preaching, writing, and learning.   He has, for me, been a fascination.  I first heard about him in Bible College.  We were studying theologians and philosophers,  but only “thumbnail” sketches;  our main purpose was to get a bird’s eye view of how theology and philosophy had evolved through the centuries and the contributions each major figure had made.  I became intrigued by Bonhoeffer because he is woven into the fabric of WWII.  WWII was actually WWI, part 2.  It has held tantalizing curiosities for me;  especially how Hitler could experience such a rapid ascendency in an otherwise sane and civilized nation.  I have always wondered if the same scenario could be repeated in America.  When the Weimar republic supplanted German imperialism, hyper-inflation ensued.  It seems the best of societies become bizarre when they must haul their money to the store in wheelbarrows.  They will reach for anyone who can convince them that he is their savior, and Hitler filled that role.  He was the consummate master of crowd manipulating rhetoric.  I have watched his speeches, his gestures, his timing, his tonal variations.  Amazing!   Not since Demosthenes has there been such a spell binder.  I remember listening to a tape of one of his speeches in our homiletics class.  Even though I don’t speak German, he communicated clearly to me.   I was also stunned by the way that he could justify his ethnic cleansing to the “fatherland”…...  but not everyone jumped on the bandwagon.

  Bonhoeffer witnessed the systematic extermination of the Jews and other non Aryans, while the Teutonic  Christians stood idly by, isolating themselves with a mindset similar to our current misguided interpretation of “separation of church and state”.  They held a “dichotomist” view of themselves.  Man is supposedly a creature with split personalities divided  by a “fence” of sorts, over which he jumps back and forth, hiding or revealing his brand depending upon which pasture he is in.  One pasture is the spiritual, one the secular.  Bonhoeffer hated this view of man, and insisted that the Christian is but one man who does not have two separate personae.  The natural man is crucified with Christ and all that is left is a spiritual man, for all venues.  God is sovereign over all creation;  both the evil and the good, and is progressively bringing the evil to reconciliation with Himself.   

  Bonhoeffer’s understanding of his role as a spiritual man in the world played out in political activism to the point that he participated in the planning of Hitler’s assassination.  The plan, of course, never came to fruition.  He reasoned that the saving of millions of lives depended upon the death of one man, therefore he defended his actions as “ethical”.  I cannot judge him on this, nor speculate if I would have done the same in his place.  I believe that God uses governments to execute wrath on the wrongdoer, and the Allies certainly did that, but until the Allied armies congealed, Hitler’s army was rolling like a juggernaut, quickly assimilating one nation after another, and Bonhoeffer could not have known that an unlikely alliance of diverse peoples would stop him.  Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in April, 1943 when it was confirmed that he was part of the resistance.  Massive Allied bombing (a staggering 2.7 million tons) had killed 305,000 German civilians (by comparison, 42,000 Brits were killed in the “Blitz”) and irreparably crippled the Nazi war machine;  yet the Fuhrer continued sacrificing his own people in a futile effort.  In a demonic, drug induced rampage of vengeance, He ordered the executions of most of his aristocratic political prisoners who were thought to have worked against him.  One week after Resurrection Sunday, 1945, Bonhoeffer was leading a worship service for his fellow prisoners when the doors burst open and two plainclothes SS officers entered.  “Come with us” he was ordered.  His “congregants” wept openly, for everyone knew that the words “come with us” meant certain death.   At dawn on April 9 at Flossenburg concentration camp, he was stripped naked and hanged.  He was 39.  A week after that, the Russians breached defenses around Berlin.  A week after that, U.S. soldiers liberated Flossenburg.  A week after that, Hitler had an afternoon “tea” in his bunker consisting of a cyanide capsule and a bullet from his own Walther PPK.

  I received Bonhoeffer’s biography as a birthday gift .  It helped me see Bonhoeffer in his historical context, which elucidated many things that otherwise would have escaped me.  Bonhoeffer’s magnum opus is a book entitled “Ethics”.  It seems that his book entitled “The Cost of Discipleship” has captured the popular imagination, but I think he desired “Ethics” to be his signature effort.  It is technical, philosophically;  and would never have been popular to the masses.  He worked on it sporadically throughout his academic career.  After his death, friends gathered up as many of his notes as they could find and compiled them.  Some of the concepts in the book are incomprehensible to me;  but I think if Bonhoeffer himself had redacted, summarized, and concluded, it would have been more fathomable.  Much of it sounds like, and probably was, rough draft.  One must take into account the duress he was under.  He was a “marked” man, imprisoned, and keenly aware that each day could be his last.  Every sound of heavy heeled footfalls coming toward his cell could be that of his executioner.  He speaks of the specter of death repeatedly.  One can tell it weighed heavily on his mind, though he spoke of it as “the beginning of life”.  It seemed to me that some of Bonhoeffer’s thought took on a life of it’s own at times and became an end in itself rather than a means to an end.  No doubt there was an end to which he was working, but some of his extrapolations were cut off before they reached a conclusion. 

  I think “Ethics” was written primarily with his students and other colleagues in mind, who were privy to much of the preliminary philosophy, but what I was able to grasp is good for universal consumption, very good indeed.  If you are not Calvinist, you will have to adjust for some of those presumptions.  If you read it, I encourage you to set aside these bones of contention, for there is some good meat to be savored. 

  Enough of darkness!  Let me insert a little comic relief.

 Since I have retired, it is my habit to eat breakfast at a local café.  It is a gathering of “good ol’ boys” who have graciously accepted me into their midst (Actually I just barged into their midst).  Every candidate for political office should sit with us, for we have all the answers!   It is a mystery why Mr. Obama has not joined us.  I’m sure he knows about us.  His intelligence people could never ignore such a powerful “think tank”.  Not long ago as they were bemoaning our nation’s decadence, one man threw up his hands in exasperation and shocked us all by saying, “I don’t know what the answer is!  I don’t even know if there is an answer!  What do you think, preacher?   I held up my hand and spread my fingers wide.  “Five what?”  said he.  “Five letters.” said I.  “J-E-S-U-S”.  I thought everyone would start looking at their watches and decide that they had to go, but to my surprise, they heard me out.  I went on to say something like this:  “The answer will not come from the top down.  Change comes from a grassroots groundswell and the politicians, who are mainly concerned with keeping their seats, pander to the perceived desires of the majority.  Our system has seemingly come to necessitate that.  The electorate makes this country what it is.”  I was already past the point of extrication, but I was waxing eloquent, overly enrapt by the sounds of my own sagacity;  so I strode, perhaps unadvisedly, forward.  “The obligation falls squarely at the feet of this country’s churches.  They represent the most ready made launching pad for a grassroots movement that I can think of.  Our churches have strayed from emphasis on Biblical teaching.  The tenor of most churches today is similar to the band playing on the Titanic.  ‘All is lost.  The Lord is coming back any day now.  Let’s just concentrate on anesthetizing our faithful to help them make it through to the end.’  We need preaching and teaching that saves the last third of the sermon or lesson for asking ‘Now what are we going to do about this?’  and then formulating and urging some strategies to be implemented within our respective areas of influence;  beginning with ourselves, then our families, then our congregations, then our communities”  ………..It was then that the café emptied.  I could feel the withering glare of the owner/cook;  but  no one challenged what I said.  Now that’s odd because these fellows are not slow to critique a debatable sentiment.  (I was utterly appalled one day when they told one poor fellow “were you ever to have an enema, there would not be enough left of you to fill a shoebox!”  So appalled was I that my mouthful of iced tea was partially expectorated.)   Perhaps they were bored stiff at my diatribe.  Maybe they thought I was going to begin recruiting a militia of crusaders right then and there;  or maybe I had stumbled onto some truth.  If so, perhaps they judged it to be a truth too impracticable.  Too unattainable.  I admit, it does seem overwhelming;  but I have learned never to give up when God is in the mix.  I have seen dark horses come out of nowhere to win the race, walls come down, skyscrapers come down, and sudden, cataclysmic events change the face of entire societies.  Jesus can feed the multitude but it begins with the offering of our meager supplies.  The answer to a change in our nation is a change in the church; but when the church changes, it cannot be corralled within it’s fence.  In fact, there is no fence.  Not until the church is in Heaven will there be gates and a wall to ban all evil.  For now, it’s open range!

  I am not talking about turning the church into a political activist organization.   I don’t think that’s what Bonhoeffer advocated either, though he did not shy from political activism as part of his Christian duty.  Neither do I think Bonhoeffer was advocating a “social gospel”.  The term “social gospel” has come to mean that the church involves itself in all manner of humanitarian efforts, but never gets around to issuing the call to the sinner, or teaching him from the Bible.  Certainly, affecting government has propriety in the church’s “open ranging”, but not priority.  We must never let it overshadow our grand commission.   Let the church roam freely among the other commoners with the message of salvation as job #1;  then let’s tell them what the Bible teaches about current issues and what the various bodies politic stand for.  Christians who are politically gifted should not hesitate to throw their hat into the ring.  Christians with that ability should serve in the vetting process for candidates by being involved with caucuses and not hesitating to be convention delegates, etc..  This is all a part of being on the open range;  but it is subordinate to the propagation of the Gospel.

  The economy, the projection of military strength, unemployment, the redefinition of marriage, abortion, the “God free” environment in our public schools, over regulation, and the handling of immigration policies are all things that we are concerned about;  but these are only the outgrowth of a deeper problem.  They all stem from the endemic weakness of human flesh.   This is not just America’s problem; nor is it a problem unique to this generation.   It is a problem of man being what he is without God;  and it has been that way for millennia.  Every preacher since Noah has told us that we are on the brink of disaster.  I don’t mean to treat the present crises lightly.  I am just asking, “when have we not been at war?”   The conflict of ideologies is our staple fare. 

  I can’t count us out, because the church is indestructible by divine mandate.  She has weathered much more violent storms than this.  The church just needs to clean up it’s act and then get out on the range.  The church has always seemed to go through periods of cloistering until Hell is at the door, then she bursts out of her slumber and the end of civilization is averted.  The enemy has made Christians believe that we should keep our opinions to ourselves, and we’ve bought it.  It’s time to burst out again;  however, let’s keep our priorities straight.

  If we get the cart in front of the horse, we will find that decency, nobility, integrity, fidelity, and moral rectitude do not result from our efforts.  All the government can do is set an example in their legislation,  and I am glad when they do that;  but laws that attack moral rot have little effect because the root cause is  heart disease.  A man will have what his heart desires, whether it is legal or not.  Sin just goes underground when it is illegal.  You must change the desires of the heart, and that only happens when Matthew 28:19,20 is obeyed.  Hereby is the Holy Spirit received, and He, working through believers is the only agent that can affect change.  Conversely, if legislators make my Christian duty illegitimate, do you suppose I will quit it?  Neither would you.  When the Church’s obligations are illegal, they continue to proliferate, sometimes more so, underground. 

         For sure, those who are opposed to morality are vocal and coarse;  but I hear those who are being saved speaking up also.  The church is not going to lay down or go away.  My wife is on “facebook”.  I have seen Christians put up some unpopular “posts” that get viciously slammed by the opposition.  The retorts of the un saved actually encourage me, because when a man has to be vitriolic, vulgar and obscene, it is a pretty good indication that he is desperate to bolster an indefensible point of view.  I have seen quick, firm, intelligent responses to the opposition, frankly, from people I didn’t know had it in them.   It is almost as if I am Elisha’s servant and my eyes are being opened to behold an army of angels in chariots of fire.  God will not quench the smoldering flax.  Perhaps the ember is being fanned even now.  Pray, pray, pray;  and let us walk proud and talk out loud. 

  We must realize that we are not the only ones who see themselves as part of a beleaguered minority on the brink of extinction.  While the Christian says;  “Woe is me!  I alone am left!”,  be assured that the hedonist is cursing the same perceived majority who wants to pour a little rain on his parade.  Fear not, pilgrims.  Fear of anything but the wrath of God is sin.  It is a negative commentary on His  ability.  What good is a bunch of “chicken littles” running around crying “the sky is falling!”  Is that going to help anything?  Actually, it is antithetical to our identity.  Settle down.  Don’t change or hide your brand.  Just keep on ranging, wide and free.  You have as much right to the open range as the Godless.  We must remember that God looked at what He had created and called it “Good.  Very good.”  “Good”, then,  is the native state of all creation.   Sin is the illegal immigrant, the usurper, the interloper;  foreign to the cosmos.  Sin is the abnormal.  Christians are the truly indigenous people of the creation.  The Christian is one man in one domain which encompasses both normal and abnormal, and the normal is to be in process of overcoming the abnormal.   Rom 12:21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

 The word for “church” is “ekklesia” meaning “the called out”.  Called out of what?  1 Peter 2:9  But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light:    We are called out of worldliness but not out of the world.  We are in the world as those who have been called out of darkness into light, and we shine forth as light unto those in darkness.  What purpose has light but to dispel darkness?    It has to be taken into darkness to be relevant.  We are to those in darkness what antibodies are to a virus or bacterium.  We latch onto them and through conversion, their shape is changed;  but we are both swimming in the same system. 

  To summarize "Ethics";  we cannot view ourselves as properly situated behind our own fence, because a fence only exists in our erroneous suppositions.   We stay in the world to heal and preserve it.   Physicists need no longer speculate about the "great attractor".    It is the Christ, Who is before all things and by Whom all things consist.  The Christian is imbedded in the world, and His Spirit has chosen, by moving him, to exert a force of inexorable power upon the whole.