"It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."

Those words of wisdom were written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter to his best friend, who was soon to be married, from the Gestapo prison he was held in during the last years of his life.  The idea that marriage sustains love, and not the other way around is one that our culture today need so desperately to understand.  Far too many marriages end when the two people in it don't feel like they're "in love" anymore; the emotions that brought them together have lapsed or faded (as most honest people who have been married a long time will tell you they at times do), and therefore the rational for the marriage itself is gone.
From God's perspective, the value of the sacrament (to borrow a word from our Catholic friends) of marriage is that it sustains us as a union of two of God's children through good times and bad.  It is not dependent upon what is felt but rather rests upon the promise and commitment that has been made before God and man. 
What is it that brings a marriage through a rough patch or dark days and back again into the light and joy of love?  The very commitment that is needed from both man and woman to stay with this union regardless.  It is when we honor each other by remaining true to our word that we allow God carry us through the circumstances that may destroy a marriage not founded upon trust in God, so that we can rediscover what made love bloom in the first place.
When a marriage breaks up over the ebb and flow of life a profound opportunity for growth and character has been forever lost.  It is for our own benefit that we should remain and strive for our marriages.  Our culture would like people to think that they deserve to find happiness and therefore should leave when a marriage isn't "happy", but that lie is selling something is cannot deliver.  Where is happiness without someone to share it with?  Where is happiness in selfish decision making?
It is when two become one, till death, that love can truly be that which sustains us.

What it takes to defeat evil.

I've been reading in the Bonhoeffer biography about some of the various attempts to kill Hitler throughout the war (there were far more attempts than most people realize beyond the famous Valkyrie plot).  Each attempt ended in failure, for a variety of often mundane reasons.  Bonhoeffer's advice to a Christian German staff lieutenant, Werner Von Haeften, (one of Stauffenberg's aides) who in his duties was close enough at times to Hitler to take out his revolver and shoot him, offers insight.  He cautioned this brave man that to simply kill Hitler was not enough.  Evil could not be so easily defeated; there were many of Hitler's henchmen (Himmler, Goring, Goebbels) who were as vile as he was and who would take up his cause if he were removed.  I think that we've identified Hitler so closely, and for good reason, with the Holocaust, that we've forgotten how very many individuals were a part of the evil he unleashed.  It was not hundreds, or even thousands, but tens of thousands of "ordinary" soldiers, functionaries, and citizens who actions helped the Nazis murder millions.  Beyond them, there were countless others who stood idly by, who failed to act, and whose inaction made them complicit in the crimes against the innocent.
What do we learn from such things?  That evil is not easily defeated.  It can be destroyed, but not in one fell swoop.  We would rather believe that easy solutions exist, that wars can be waged cleanly, that one politician is responsible for our troubles, etc. than come to grips with the reality that evil (on a grand scale) could never exist without many helpers.
We should also remember that the efforts of those who fail to defeat evil, even if they're martyred in the process, are never wasted.  Such honorable sacrifice will always ripple throughout our world and down through time as it inspires others to take action even when the prospects for victory seem slim.
In the end, our responsibility is to God.  We must answer when our time here is over for our efforts and contributions.  Did we stand by and let others suffer?  Did we take action for the sake of Christ?  Among the list of victims of the Nazis are a number of good Christian men and women who were martyred for their faith; they met God with a clean conscience.

"Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church"

Another quote from Bonhoeffer's biography; this one arising from his visit to New York in the summer of 1939 (he returned to Germany a month before WWII started)..."Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity.  Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God.  Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness.."  What caused Dietrich to sour on the freedom he saw in the American church?  It was a complete lack of serious study of God's Word in many of the churches he visited; sermons that focused on Henry James instead of St. James; sermons that didn't even mention Scripture or the Gospel.
For someone raised in a church where I heard sound Biblical preaching each and every week, that's hard to imagine.  The theological liberalism of the early 20th Century aimed to remove the miraculous from the Bible and focus on the ethical (we've heard this lie before, John Shelby Spong may be today's wolf in sheep clothing; denying the resurrection from within the church, but he isn't the first to do so).  That any church would stray so far from the true faith as to neglect the preaching and teaching of the Bible is at the same time sad and infuriating.
As someone who believes firmly in Ecumenism within the Church, I believe that there is strength in our diversity of opinion and practice as long as we are all doing so under the authority and direction of God's Word.  If a church, any type of church, forgets that our freedom exists within the confines of God's Word, it will soon cease to function as a church and become another social gathering place.  That Bonhoeffer witnessed this struggle in America 100 years ago should fill us with both seriousness and hope.  We must be serious, because the struggle to maintain a Church committed to Christ's Gospel is ongoing; our vigilance must be unceasing.  We must have hope because in many churches in America today Jesus Christ is still preached as God's Son, crucified for our sins and raised to new life for our justification.

"Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too."

Another lesson from the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Bonhoeffer: pastor, martyr, prophet, spy"

This one is the translation from the German poet Heinrich Heine, who also happened to be Jewish.  He wrote those chilling words in 1821 and his books were consigned to the flames on May 10th 1933 as the Nazis unleashed a midnight pagan ritual during which Goebbels ranted "You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour- to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past."  And so, Germany was "purged" of its non-Aryan thoughts...This section of the book deals with the step by step destruction of civil society in Germany once Hitler and his party took power, as they used democracy to destroy democracy, and used the law to debase the law.  Sadly, there were many in Germany who went along willingly; some because of their own anti-Semitism, others out of pressure and fear, still others who thought that the Nazi nightmare couldn't last.  Men like Bonhoeffer tried to stem the flood, to organize a resistence before it was too late; to no avail.  When the foundations are being destroyed it is not enough for one man to act, nor even a few.  If they must stand alone, then act they must, but if God's Church is to survive the evil that men would inflict upon it, it must stand together to defend the Gospel.  Let Germany be a lesson to us all, the Church was not united in its defense of the Gospel message, it was divided by factions that sought their own agendas at the expense of the Cross of Jesus Christ; let that never be said of us.  We preach the Gospel, here we stand, we can stand nowhere else.

"Where a people prays, there is the church"

That's part of a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was executed for his part in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler (the same one in Tom Cruise's movie, Valkyrie)  The whole quote is: "Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never lonliness."  Dietrich wrote those words before moving away from his family and friends in Berlin in 1928 to spend a year as the vicar (pastor) of a German church in Barcelona, Spain.  To me, those words ring particularly true in light of the past few months.  Nicole and I moved 450 miles away from home, leaving family and friends behind.  What we have found here in Franklin is a new group of people, not brought together out of common interest, but out of a common bond far more strong; our love of Jesus.  In our prayers for each other, for the work of this church, and for this town, we find a new community.  I won't claim to have not felt any homesickness, nor could Nicole say that, but I understand Dietrich's point.  Here, in this place, is the church.  We left a loving community of believers behind in Palo, as well as our friends at the Cathedral of St. Andrew, and before that Galilee Baptist in Saranac, but we have found another loving family of believers here.  Why do they accept me and follow my leadership?  Because they see the hand of God in it; not that there's all that much special about me in particular, but God prepared this path long in advance.
When you feal disconnected, lonely, or sad, do yourself a favor, pray with God's people.

FYI, the quote is from the book, Bonhoeffer: pastor, martyr, prophet, spy by Eric Metaxas; it has been fascinating thus far to read about Dietrich's childhood and the influences in his life that lead him to stand up against the Nazis when so many other German pastor did not.