The Pursuit of Happiness

I can barely bring myself to read or watch the news these days. When I do, I’m either embarrassed by our moral obscurity or lapse into a state of disbelief at what I see and hear. It makes me think that the old Johnny Cash saying, “Trust gets you killed, love gets you hurt, and being real gets you hated” might hold some advice worth following.

The urge to withdraw is irresistible and I want to find my old boat, a Peterson 34, and sail away, sail away, into… a world without trust or love or reality? Instead, I take down my copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and am reminded again that people of faith believe that love, trust, and being real are worth getting killed for, hurt, and hated.

Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, was arrested in 1943 for condemning the German government – and the complicity of its Christian churches – in the imprisonment and execution of the Jews. He was hanged in 1945, one month before Germany’s capitulation to the Allies.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote, “Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others, we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” He also wrote, “A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”

Bonhoeffer also coined the phrase “Cheap Grace” by which he meant holier than thou people who hire brass bands and printing presses to proclaim their love for Jesus while judging and condemning anyone and everyone who is even slightly different than they are. These are the people – often politicians – who will hurt you for loving who you love, hate you for being who you really are, and who may, as in the case of refugees and immigrants, stand by while you get you killed.

God does not need politicians or Ten Commandment Monuments to prove His existence. He does expect us to know “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of the victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”