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Photo by Mary Fran
From Anabaptist roots to Mennonite heritage
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.
Keeping Christ in Christmas
In Dickens’ beloved A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and his nephew are jockeying back and forth about Christmas.
“Much good it has ever done you!” scoffs the old skinflint. The nephew returns:
“I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round–apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that–as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time….
(Modern Library, 1995, pp. 9-10)
It’s that aside I want to think about:
if anything belonging to it can be apart from that
Can you have Christmas, real Christmas, apart from the veneration of Christ and the Incarnation?
Americans have a genius for recreating old customs for the new world. We are a diverse people; we brought many religions to these shores. Rather than shred our society with religious conflict, we’ve learned how to keep the form of our various faiths, while pretty much emptying them of content.
So, Thanksgiving Day is now Turkey Day, followed by Black Friday, the day when we start Christmas shopping in earnest and en masse. Business people call it “Black Friday” because on that day many businesses begin to turn a profit for the year; they’re in the black.
And Santa Claus arrives in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, now totally converted from a religious or cultural symbol into a marketing tool.
We are a people of business. Though we have the military might to enforce our will in the world, the way we really conquer a people is through business. So, you find Coca Cola everywhere in the world, and KFC franchises across Red China.
I don’t suppose that’s all bad. If I were Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, I wouldn’t mind the muting of Christian themes as the only meaning of the holidays.
For Christians, and especially Christian parents and grandparents, however, the secularization of Christmas—the extraction of the distinctive religious meaning of the holiday from our national celebration—means that family and church have to be diligent in telling the real story.
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Books like Santa, Are You for Real? by Harold Myra teach kids who St. Nicholas actually was.
Observance of Advent, with a colorful Advent calendar and daily activities, interrupt the drumming of advertising.
Year-round giving is an antidote for the materialism of getting that marketing departments thrive on. Participating in missions projects through the church helps kids experience life in the inner city.
The living spirit of Jesus in the hearts and lives of Christ-followers will keep Christmas real.
Dickens’ instinct was right on. Nothing genuine about Christmas can be apart from Jesus and his gospel of God’s life-changing love.
The Silent Cry
I learned something that hit me like a ton of bricks this week. We’ve been praying for a little one who’s had a very tough start in life. I learned last night that, because he has a tracheotomy, you can’t hear him cry.
He cries, you just can’t hear him.
That hit me so hard. He’s got a very tough life, his parents do as well. But his cries are silent.
As I struggle to accept this, I recalled a book I read The Silent Cry by theologian/mystic Dorothee Soelle. Like all her writing it’s not for the faint of heart.
The title is a quote from a medieval mystic writing, a pastor advising a parishioner who is suffering. The pastor calls God—not Father, King, Most High, as we usually do—but Fountain, Treasure, Radiance, and Silent Cry.
The fact is, our world is wrapped up in things and self. We aren’t interested in little ones who are struggling. In the two thirds world such die by the hundreds of thousands. Only in the West is the struggle of a little one for life considered out of the ordinary.
And mostly, as long as we don’t have to see these little ones or think about them, we go merrily along.
When God took human form, it wasn’t as a prince in a palace or a general on a mighty steed or a millionaire in a spa. God came to earth as a poor baby in an animal feed trough. Rather than passively watch people suffer, God shouldered their suffering and died on a cross.
God was on the cross (yes, uniquely in Jesus), but nevertheless God is also the Silent Cry of suffering. Do we have ears to hear?
When Christ was born, hardly anybody noticed. There was no room in the inn for this peasant couple and their newborn.
The question is, is there room in our heart?
Bah! Humbug!
I love Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. My favorite realistic version stars George C. Scott (1984); its production values are outa sight. A close second is The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with a lovely musical score. Hallmark’s musical version (2004) also has great tunes. I don’t know the older film versions.
My friends Glen and Julia taught me the tradition of reading the classic every year during Advent, a practice I’ve come to cherish. The original has some spectacular lines that are always omitted.
For example, Scrooge observes that people in the name of religion seek to impose their legalistic views, to the harm of the poor:
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if we had never lived.” [Modern Library, 1995, p. 59.]
Given that we all love this story about a miser whose heart was touched on Christmas Eve and who instantaneously became a generous, warm-hearted soul, how come so many of us still live by miserly values and the lack of concern for suffering which prompted Dickens’ novel of social protest?
Also, there’s the specter of death. Scrooge’s turning point climaxed as he looked upon his grave. But, even though he lived an exemplary life thereafter, he still would come to die.
Given the hard truth that all of us die, why aren’t those justified who live by the motto, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse”?
The answer lies, I think, in something I hesitate to write because narrow legalistic partisans whom I have great difficulty accepting beat this drum: that the only accepted public religion in America, and much of the West, is secular humanism which though it may nod in God’s direction, guts belief of anything substantial—in particular, guts Christmas of Christ.
Jesus spoke of ghostly visits changing lives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, a destitute man. Both these men died; Lazarus went to Abraham’s bosom, the rich man to hell.
[The rich man in torment] said, “Then, father [Abraham], I beg you to send [the spirit of Lazarus] to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”He said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” ’
Luke 16.27-31.
The gospel says simply that human beings cannot on their own change, even if they want to. It takes the power of God, the power that raised Christ from the dead, to raise mortals from the living death of sin.
He [the Word, the Christ] came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
John 1.11-13
I’ve come more and more to believe that no particular denomination has a monopoly on the Word of which the gospel speaks. The Christ Light shines into the heart; and, people from all faiths, and of no faith, welcome that Light.
I love the atheist doctor Willie Tulloch in Keys of the Kingdom. He thanked Father Chisholm for not bullying him into believing on his deathbed. Father Chisholm said, “God believes in you.” In the honest questions of some atheists there is more commitment to Truth (sometimes another name for God) than in many dogmas.
But humanism makes little of humanity’s potential to do evil. Think of the genocides of the past four hundred years! Think of the millions who perish because the prosperous peoples of the world look away. Think of the damage to the environment done by greed and indifference.
Without God’s grace we all—humanists, Christians, Muslims, Jews—all are doomed. But all who open their hearts to the love of God, all those are saved, Christmas and every other day of the year.
A good pastor
A.J. Cronin’s book Keys of the Kingdom.
Written in 1941, it tells the story of Father Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic who turns poverty and tragedy into a life of beauty in the service of the poor and of the Chinese people.
Jesus promised Peter the keys of the kingdom (Matthew 16.18). Cronin contrasts the worldly Anselm Nealy, who rose to be bishop of Chisholm’s home, with Chisholm, bent and battered by the rough and tumble of life in the interior of China.
It belongs with other books such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest.
What makes a good priest? Denominations and Christ answer differently.
Chisholm utterly fails to meet expectations. His conversion rate is lowest in the Mission Society. By the way he refuses to pay “rice Christians,” starving people who profess faith for a stipend. Yet at the end of his tour, the prominent Mr. Chia becomes a Christian, having watched the priest through long decades.
Some of the novel’s clearest preachments espouse pacifism and tolerance. Yet when a war lord threatens the people seeking refuge in his mission, Chisholm arranges for the destruction of his armament, causing the deaths of dozens of his soldiers.
The book is not the first rank of great literature. Often, Cronin uses characters’ letters or journals to pry open their thoughts, while greater ambiguity and tension might have been created otherwise. His depiction of Chinese characters relies too much on stock images of the simple child-like soul addressing its European Master, or the inscrutable mandarin.
What is first rate, however, is Cronin’s grasp of what makes a great pastor and Christian. Here his instinct is unerring.
If only Keys of the Kingdom were required reading for every member of every pulpit committee!
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Light through the cracks
Stephen Tomkins. John Wesley: A Biography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. 208 pp.
I wanted to read a biography of Wesley in honor of the church I attend, and am growing to love: Trinity United Methodist, Richmond.
Nobody with an ounce of psychological savvy can read Wesley’s life without realizing the man had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. His relations with women were disordered, and the celebrated sibling relationship with Charles doesn’t stand up well under scrutiny.
All that said, you can only praise Almighty God who worked such a mighty miracle through this life, “a brand plucked from the fire.”
A story my wife’s colleagues tell sums it up. “He was cracked!” someone says. “It doesn’t matter if he was cracked,” comes the reply, “just that light shines through the cracks.”
All of us who belong to denominations that trace heritage back to persons like Luther or Wesley, however, would do well to remember Paul’s caution to the church at Corinth:
12What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ 13Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
(1 Corinthians 1 NRSV)
Two peasant women
Luke 1.1-56
To begin with, Luke tells the story of two couples: one elderly, formerly childless priest and his wife; the other, a woman, very young and setting out on a journey no other human being would ever take.
Zechariah (Yah, God, remembers) and Elizabeth (God’s oath) were a devout couple in the line of Aaron, full of goodness, lacking evil; but they had no children. Twice a year Zechariah fulfilled his priestly duty, burning incense in the Temple. On one occasion an angel confronted him, promising him a child. He disbelieved, however; Elizabeth was up in years.
Six months later the angel appeared to a young girl, anywhere from 10 to 13 years old, according to Roman law and Jewish custom. The angel blessed her, and though he did not explain in detail he promised that, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, she would bear a son. Mary is the example of submission and obedience.
Mary set off to see Elizabeth, and stayed for three months. Tenderly God provided for each of these two women a companion in the other. Between them they’d work out what it meant to be the mothers of the forerunner and the Messiah. The Roman Senate had no clue; the leaders in the Jerusalem Temple were in the dark—two women alone knew specifically what God was doing.
Also at the beginning of Jesus’ eternal life thirty three years later, it was the women who witnessed and told the story first.
As Michael pointed out in Bible study this morning, Mary is like the father of the epileptic boy who cried, “I believe! Help my unbelief!” She knew the Jewish expectation for a Messiah military conqueror king. But she didn’t know what Jesus would become.
Sandy noted that her themes in the Magnificat of status reversal show up in Jesus’ inaugural sermon. Where did he learn these values? Not only from God directly, but also from his earthly mother and father.
Simeon, an old visionary in the Temple, would say, “‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’
Since the Reformation, most Protestants have rejected Mary as anything other than a baby-delivery mechanism. However, that’s absolutely wrong. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, she cried, “All generations will call me blessed.”
Not bragging, just recognizing fact. Mary was the birth mother of the Son of God! Whatever else we may say about her, we have to accept, minimally, her exemplary faith, her courage, and her unique position in history.
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Footprints
This Thanksgiving families I greatly admire are facing life at its toughest.
What could help?
For one prominent family, hundreds of people want something to do.
Thanks be to God, at the moment my family has chronic concerns, but nothing acute. But I remember sleepless hours, the clean smell of hospital rooms, bad coffee in styrofoam cups. I remember the squeaky wheels of the gurney taking my whole world down a long corridor to the surgery suite. I remember the still small voice, “Will she ever come back?”
When hard times come, my family found it a heavy burden to answer telephone calls, asked again and again and again to share details of the hospitalized one’s health status.
And families need privacy as well. My guess is, they also want as normal a Thanksgiving as they can manage.
Sometimes, when you want to help, especially in cases like these, less is more: a few heartfelt, carefully chosen words on a card that requires no reply. It says, “We care and we’ll let you be.”
A wise book of faith makes a good gift. Barbara Brown Taylor in her book God in Pain reflects on biblical passages about human suffering and sees God as One who suffers. Christ shares our “sorrows and is acquainted with grief.”
Lots of words, however, at this time won’t help. In fact, they might do damage. Job told his friends:
If you would only keep silent,
that would be your wisdom!
Job 13.5
Nothing smacks you down like disease.
First, it drains you. Each footprint can become a Magnum Opus.
Then, you cling to the little things you took for granted. Maybe you bargain with God, or play a few rounds of “If only….”
You can’t help wondering “Why?”
And you come face to face with the damn truth: nobody knows why.
I’ve begun looking, instead, at practical ways people can respond to suffering:
- Practical kindness
- Generosity
- Long-suffering
- Witness
- No holds barred prayer
I’ve grown to dislike “Let me know if there’s anything I can do…” Sure, people mean well. But it puts the monkey on your back to ask. Sometimes, when you have many needs, you hate having to ask one more time. How welcome is that someone who takes thoughtful initiative to offer this or that specific, and makes it clear that it’s okay to say no.
I believe one day my dear friends will look back on this season with Thanksgiving, and they will be able to say, as have saints through the ages, as Sandy, Jim and I can say: “Jesus led me all the way.”
You know who you are. You’re in my heart today.
Fire light
Pilgrim Aflame, historical novel by Myron Augsburger based on his dissertation on Michael Sattler, the 16th century leader/martyr of Anabaptists. The Radicals, a film/DVD based on the novel.
The writing is good enough; the story, absorbing.
Sattler, a Benedictine prior at St. Peter’s in the Black Forest monastery, apparently opted out of his vows sometime in 1524/25. Arnold Snyder, Mennonite professor, documents that the invasion of the monastery by German peasants in rebellion may have tipped the scales for Sattler. His influence on the Schleitheim Confession here. Though he left the order and married, he carried with him the determination to follow Christ which lies at the heart of the Rule of Benedict.
I found myself weeping through the final chapter, Sattler’s martyrdom. He was tortured and burned alive; his wife, drowned in May, 1527, three years at the outside since their conversion to the Anabaptist way of following Christ.
I’m reading Luther, but I keep getting pulled away to these early Anabaptists. I’m finishing Synder’s dissertation on Sattler, available free online here, which sheds light on Sattler’s intellectual and spiritual roots.
Thousands of Anabaptists died for their beliefs in the 1500s. One account is The Martyr’s Mirror here.
What started my delving into these folks was two things:
- the loss of my own theological home Southern Baptists as they existed before the Church Struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, and the sterile hypocrisy of the Christian Right to which the SBC belonged; and,
- my finding Early Anabaptist Spirituality in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.
These people were on fire with God’s Spirit, and by the thousands from illiterate peasants to learned former priests gave their lives.
What turned them on—that depth, that 110% uncompromising no holds barred take over of being by the Christ, is still available to us.
The doctrinal quibbling of the 16th century is gone for good, I hope. Maybe all who love the Christ will be one family on earth at last.
But the fires that flared up in those hearts still lights the world today.