Above: Dirk Willems rescues his pursuer; as a result, rather than escape, he was burned at the stake 16 May 1569. One of the most famous images from the Martyr’s Mirror 1660.

Reading An Introduction to Mennonite History by Cornelius J. Dyck (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1993). 452 pages.

Why?

I’ve been deeply moved, not to say strangely warmed, by the reading I’ve done in Anabaptist history of the 16th century. These people were a class act. Menno Simons (1496-1561) had a vital ministry among them at a time when his leadership was desperately needed for their survival; hence, they took the name Mennonites. But 100 years later thousands had been executed for their faith, and those remaining were changing.

You can read about Menno and read his works here.

What I want to know is what happened to the Anabaptists after the crucible of the first hundred years. Their martyrology called Martyr’s Mirror became a foundational book, and is still a traditional wedding present for Mennonite couples.

Martyr’s Mirror here.

One of the most powerful images in the book depicts Dirk Willems, about to escape, but turning back to rescue his pursuer. He was shortly thereafter burned at the stake. (See above.)

The publication of the New Testament in German in 1522, the Old Testament in 1534, contributed to the birth of vibrant spiritual life among the common people. Anabaptists often met 3-4 times a week to study the scriptures together.

At age 37, he was martyred in 1527 by torture and burning. Two days later his wife Margareta was drowned. Drowning, or ”third baptism,” appealed to many authorities as punishment for Anabaptists or re-baptizers, so nicknamed because they rejected infant, and practiced adult, baptism.

One of the most articulate, pure, and shining representatives of the Radical Reformation—unlike the major Reformers Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, he and many others insisted upon total freedom of the Christian from the power of the state.

Luther argued infant baptism was valid because salvation is pure gift. The Radicals argued that only an adult could choose to follow Christ, and thus began rebaptizing converts. At about age 29 in 1527, Felix Manz, the first adult to be baptized two years before, was drowned by authorities.

Sattler was a former monk, who married Margareta, a woman of the religious order of Beguines. He was well educated. He preached in the forests, and in many clandestine places. Acting for a gathering of like-minded believers, he probably wrote the Schleithem Confession in 1527, titled in German Brüderlich Vereinigung “Brotherly Union.” The first Anabaptist confession of faith, its chief significance may be that it demonstrates that these unruly radicals could come to an agreement.

You can read the Schleithem Confession here.

So what?

The document and the people, based on readong the Bible, stood for:

• absolute freedom in Christ of the believer from the power of the state in matters of faith
• refusal to swear oaths or bear the sword
• enforcement of church order by shunning (the ban) rather than drowning, burning, etc.

As I read Martin Luther, I keep in mind the people he opposed in violent language—the papists, the Jews, the Turks, the sectarians. I pray God to help me stand for righteousness not as Luther, but as Sattler did.

It’s important that you know that before you find out that I was a Southern Baptist pastor, and Southern Baptist most of my life. 

Why assure you I am NO WAY NO HOW manipulative, rigid, self-righteous, hypocritical, power-hungry, Ur-fascist, brain-dead hater of women, gays, and of diversity and otherness?

Because many folks outside the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) think that at least the people today in charge of the SBC are all that stuff.

My sympathies lie with the moderates who lost the SBC Church Struggle of the 1980s.  “Church Struggle” is the term for the Nazi takeover of the German Lutheran Church in the 1930s. I use it intentionally.

Many of those who lost formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Those in the Alliance of Baptists are soon to unite with the United Church of Christ. Others simply followed God’s Spirit into many other denominations. It’s a Baptist diaspora, like the early Christians who scattered at the persecution of Stephen. 

On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. (Acts 8.1)

 When the Judean diaspora began in 586 BC, the Spirit of God, abandoning Jerusalem, went along into foreign territory:

The glory of the LORD went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it. The Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the exiles in Babylonia ^[b] in the vision given by the Spirit of God. (Ezek. 11.23-24)

Southern Baptists in exile have planted their hearts in service for Christ and fellowship with the Beloved Community of the Church wherever they find themselves.

My wife found a haven and home in the United Methodist Church. I attend a local Methodist church with her, and support the ministries there. God is mightily at work in that congregation  Trinity UMC, Richmond. The flame of service burns hot and bright.

But I remain Baptist—not Southern or American or Freewill or General or United or Primitive or Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist. I am close kin to the Anabaptists. Scripture says:

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
       and who seek the LORD:
       Look to the rock from which you were cut
       and to the quarry from which you were hewn;

     look to Abraham, your father,
       and to Sarah, who gave you birth.  (Isa 51.1-2)

Those women and men in the 16th century, martyred in Europe by the tens of thousands to the point of extinction, are my forebears. My Christ-DNA descends from theirs. I am not casting dirt on anyone when I say with the likes of them, 

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. ¹⁷ Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.
(Ruth  1/16-17)

MORE…..

End of a long day, a stream of consciousness reflection.

Day began at 1 a.m. with Sandy unlocking the front door and coming in. She came home from the hospital in a taxi. At these times I wish I could still drive.

We slept, a little later than normal. She had a doctor’s appointment.

Peritonitis had occurred, not that unusual for starting PD.

She’s been on the end stage renal diet (what a bad name) for seven weeks, and is finding the cardboard-styrofoam-library paste menu hard to choke down.

Sandy’s taken in stride so many challenges, it rattles me to watch her struggle.

I concocted a simple sauce made of margarine, sugar free red raspberry jam, sugar free cranberry juice, and water. Reduced that by about half. We poured it over roast pork and barley Mary Fran brought earlier in the week.

A highlight of the day came when Sandy enjoyed the sauce.

Flavor! Flavor! the name of the game.

Some patients actually starve because they just can’t take the  restricted diet.

I’m resolved to find some tasty alternatives on the net and in various cookbooks, as well as trying my hand at some things.

Tonight we had phone calls that assured us that we do not stand alone.

But I admit I feel kind of blue.

Letting go of feelings

This morning I felt high reading Sölle’s book The Silent Cry. She defines mysticism as “direct experience with God,” the chief value of my childhood faith, and looks to some on the left wing of the reformation, the Anabaptists, as models.

Their spiritual writings in the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality (for me, not including Menno Simons) literally light my fire.

Sölle writes:

• “[I]n praising the source of all good, the ego that is possessed by goals and that craves dominance vanishes. It has stepped out of itself. It has scuttled itself.”
• “That we may live without Eigenschaft [what is one's own: characteristic features, idiosyncracies, and singularity, as well as love of self and egoism]…is an expression of the most profound freedom we can attain. We become free when, no longer wed (ledig) to fears and constraints, we are in God’s presence “without a why or a wherefore.”

I re-member (am joined again to) exalted feelings as I think about this.

In Philippians 3, using accountant language of profit and loss, Paul writes about leaving behind all things, bad and good, for the sake of Christ: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8).

He goes on to say that he longs to share in Christ’s sufferings that he may also share in Christ’s resurrection (vv. 10-11).

A year or so ago, I discovered this:

 For [God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.

Phil 1:29 (NRSV)

My gut response was being pissed off. No thanks! I thought.

I read some prayer of someone asking God to make it really hard, agonizing, for them. They could take it!

Not me! I thought. I know suffering from the inside. I’ll use my Get out of jail FREE card any time I can.

What I am learning, I hope, is to become less enslaved to such feelings.

Some days are diamonds,
some days are stone.
Some days the cold wind
won’t leave you alone.

That’s how it is. So what?

In  good times, in bad times, feeling fine, feeling lousy, feeling nuthin’—may I praise thee, God. May I praise thee!

• Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
• The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
• In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
• The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)

Bare Essentials

Kyrios Christos!

If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:

You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.

My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:

• loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
• loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
• a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware

Anabaptists

Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16^th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.

My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17^th century.

But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.

The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.

Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.

How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?

Where does Jesus fit in

No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.

Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.

However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.

That changes everything.