Reflections from Germany III

On the last night I was in Germany a newly met friend, Michael, one of Rev. Bernt-Ekkart’s closest friends took me out for dinner while Bernt had a church meeting to attend too, amazing how a pastor would have to work on a vacation day. Michael, who was not native to the area but had fallen in love with the city we were in and the surrounding communities decided to take me to a nearby village for dinner. He also wanted to work on his English skills and thought that the best way would be with a dinner conversation.

So we got into his car which had a convertible top, he cranked up his stereo using his iPod which he had filled with classic American rock music so that I would be at home, and we took off through the city to the edge of town where we boarded a car ferry and crossed over the Rhine river into the countryside on the far shore.

We headed through the fields and countryside for about five miles until we entered a small town with a village at the edge. We parked in a gravel lot and stopped by the outdoor beer tent where we each got a 2.0ml glass of the local beer. After quenching our thirst with locals who had recently gotten off work for the day we headed over to the walled village near by.

The village was called Zons, a medieval village built around 1372, think about this, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, over a hundred years after this village was built. You could see the age in stones that someone had carried and stack hundreds of years ago. You could also see that the mortar between the stones had been continually replaced as time wore it away. We walked up to the gatehouse, which still had wooded doors and metal hinges that looked to be original and hand made hundreds of years ago. The streets were cobblestones and looked as old as the walls. We walked into the village and it was immediately apparent that this was not a tourist destination. It was a real village inhabited by real people who had lived there forever. Many of the houses looked still had hand cut wood in their framing with updated brick, work and modern windows. You could tell where a house had been replaced even if it was built to fit in you could see that difference between the really old homes and the newer homes.

We spent about an hour walking the streets touching the outer fortress like walls, putting our hands on the walls of old homes throughout the village. We found the church at the center of the town and were in awe at the ornate metal work on the wooden doors. We wanted to go in but the church was locked. On an outside was we found gravestones displayed with dates going back to the late thirteen hundreds. How do you explain what it is like to touch a stone carved by someone seven hundred years ago? Does anyone know anything about the person the stone was for or who carved it?

After walking around the village we realized that we were tired and hungry so we headed to a restaurant near the village gate. It was a family owned restaurant and the chef was the grandmother. They had been running the place for over a hundred years. The main part of the restaurant was in the village with a patio that sat on and over hung the wall where one could sit in a beer garden.

So there I sat, at a table for two conversing with Michael in an outdoor café erected on the wall of Zons facing the bank of the Rhine River. I was drinking espresso, the real kind that wakes you up instantly, and eating Muscovy duck over lettuce greens while Michael drank beer and ate a flatbread pizza with a local ham and goat cheese. The garden was filled with people conversing in German and occasionally looking at us suspiciously as we spoke in English. My guess is that few of them knew enough English to know what we were talking about. As I watched the sun setting and felt the warm dry breezing all I could think about was that God is good. It was God who brought me here, God who connected me with all the wonderful people I had met, God who had me sitting in a conversation with Michael enjoying the abundance God has placed in my life. And I marveled at how God’s whisper is often the loudest in the simplest of places and during the simplest of times.

Reflections from Germany II

My trip to Germany was fantastic. I even got the opportunity to go canoeing down the Wupper River with a confirmation class and their parents. I even steered the canoe so that my pastor friend, Olaf, whom I was with and who has a history of falling out of canoes into rivers stayed dry the whole trip. I visited a Catholic Cathedral over a thousand years old, two Protestant Cathedrals each over five hundred years old, a church that had just celebrated two hundred and seventy-five years, and a couple of churches that were rebuild using the stones of older church that were destroyed by the bombing of World War II. I even made it to two different castles, one near Rimsheid and one in Wewelsburg. The first was a modern castle built to the blue prints of a medieval castle and the other was a Renaissance castle being converted to a medieval castle by the German SS as their spiritual headquarters and what my colleagues called the, Heart of Darkness.

I even made it to the church where the Barman Declaration was written by one of my favorite theologians, Karl Barth, and signed by a second great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, along with many other pastors in opposition to the Nazi party, Hitler and what they were doing with Germany as a nation. The original church was bombed to the ground and the new one stands on its footprint build from the stones of the bombed church. The Barman Declaration was the Protestant Christian churches loudest cry out in opposition to the evil it saw the Nazis representing and those who signed it were persecuted. During the war the Nazis removed the church council at Barman and the pastors and place a Nazis council and pastors in place. The original council sent letters to every member saying you need to choose God or the Nazis and make a stand to which almost every single church member chose God and backed the original church council and pastors causing the Nazis to leave the church alone for the rest of the war. Today a Jewish synagogue stands ten feet from the church as the missing thesis from the Barman Declaration addressing the Nazis hatred and treatment of the Jews.

But the best part of the trip was not the colloquy, not the beautiful scenery I saw, not the coffee or ice cream, not the wonderful sausages, not the castles or churches or wonderful villages, no, none of these. What made the trip so fantastic were the new friendships I started, in particular friendships with three pastors I got to know along with parts of their families. I spent much of my time with Rev. Olaf Wassmuth and got to spend some time with his wife and children. I also spent much of my time with Rev. Bernd-Ekkehart Scholten and was able to meet his wife and one of his best friends, Michael. And then I got to spend a bit of time with Dr. Susanne Wolf and her family. Their hospitality toward me, their willingness to try and answer all my questions and explain things I didn’t understand was wonderful. They even got my dry sense of humor and liked it, which is not always easy when speaking with people from a different culture.

If I hadn’t gone anywhere or scene any of Germany other than the facility we were at, there friendship would have been enough. They had as many questions for me as I had for them and they wanted to hear my story and share their own just as much as I wanted to theirs and share mine. And they really wanted to learn about my life as a minister just as much as I wanted to learn about their life as a minister. We have been emailing each other ever since I got back. Olaf even posted a bunch of pictures that he took on a website that I can access and enjoy where he and I were exploring a castle with his wife and one of his daughters.

What brought us together and allowed us to communicate even when we didn’t have the words was our faith in God and our sense of God’s grace and love in our lives. We were brothers and sisters in Christ and our friendship was birthed out of God’s love. This is what life is about, finding God’s love in the people around us.

Reflections from Germany I

Today I had a wonderful experience. We left the colloquy and traveled to a distant village where we entered a church called St. Mary’s Cathedral. The building was built of stone over five hundred years ago and it was one of the first churches to join what became the protestant reformation that we at Bethany are a part of still this day. It is a gothic cathedral with stained glass windows over sixty feet high. Each window told a story from the bible to teach people the cure understandings of their faith simply by looking at all the stories. The peak of the arched ceilings was probably about a hundred feet above the floor. The benches for sitting in during worship looked like they were hand made hundreds of years ago. The walls of stone were worn by age and there was a slight damp smell to the room. It felt as if the stones had absorbed too much water over time and could no longer dry out.

All around the sanctuary were carvings that told some aspect of the story of St. Mary, the mother of Jesus. On the chancel was a Fresca with each picture pointing out Mary’s roll in Jesus’ life from birth to death to resurrection. Everywhere I turned there was a famous sculpture or painting that I remembered looking at in art classes years ago. I was standing in history that reflected God’s presence and that was older than our entire nation. There was a sense of God’s saints permeating everyone stone telling the story that God has been hear long before we came and will be here long after us.

We then sat down in the pews as a group and worshiped together culminating in singed. The windows changed color as the sun began to set and gave the impression that everything we were doing in the cathedral was rising up to the heavens to meet God. As we sang our voiced echoed off of the walls and floated heavenward as a gift being carried on doves wings to God above.

After worship we all went to the back to look at a famous stained glass window that you saw when you first entered the holy space. It was a picture of Jesus at the last supper filled with fascinating symbols. Instead of the normal bread and wine they the supper had bear and ham that were a regional specialty five hundred years ago. Also within the picture the images show Jesus offering forgiveness to Judas but leave it unanswered at to whether he will accept the offer. There are other symbols that beg the question was this window created while the church was still Catholic or just after it became a protestant church. In the end we left without our questions answered and headed over to the church rectory where we ate a meal of ham, cheese, and bread, all the specialties of the region and things found in the stained glass window.

I can not even begin to tell you how amazing it was to stand in a place and then worship where God’s people, every Sunday, have been praising and honoring God for over five hundred years. We are approaching fifty years of worship this December at the church I serve which is only one tenth of that history. And the Cathedral in which we worshiping survived world war II, world war I and many other major events to carry God’s saints into Jesus presence as they wait and hope for the day of resurrection when God sets all things right and brings together heaven and earth.

May God bless us all so that we too may be in a line of saints that string for over five hundred years bearing witness to god’s presence in our world changing lives through forgiveness and love found in the blood of Christ shed for us on the cross and the new beings we are being made into through our baptism.