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.
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