Bonhoeffer Is Everywhere

Remembering Lyle

On Sunday evening, February 27, 2005, at 7:30 p.m., my late friend Lyle posted the following on his blog.

Everything I read has a Bonhoeffer quote. He really nails it here:

We have listened to the Sermon on the Mount and perhaps have understood it. But who has heard it aright? Jesus gives the answer at the end (Matt. 7:24-29). He does not allow his hearers to go away and make of his sayings what they will, picking and choosing from them whatever they find helpful and testing them to see if they work. He does not give them free rein to misuse his word with their mercenary hands, but gives it to them on condition that it retains exclusive power over them. Humanly speaking, we could understand and interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his word. He does not mean that it is to be discussed as an ideal; he really means ut to get on with it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

One year and two weeks later, my friend suffered a death dealing heart attack. Twenty years ago.

If Lyle were with us today in the flesh, for he is very much alive among the Great Cloud of Witnesses, he would find quite a few additions to his observation, “Bonhoeffer is Everywhere,” the title of his blog post quoted from above.

Lyle would have met my friend Tripp on one of the occasions Tripp preached at Snow Hill. From there, he would have followed Tripp and likely taken his online course, a docuseries, The Rise of Bonhoeffer. Over the past several weeks, Tripp has been hitting it out of the park with essays that included more reflections, such as Bonhoeffer, like this one. The Person, Not the Principle.

Not long after that, he would have met my friend Jason on one of his visits to flyover country, where he preached at Snow Hill. Lyle would have begun to read Jason’s writing, as many of us would. Recently, like me, he would listen to the Live conversations on Bonhoeffer’s lectures on homiletics. Even more, he would have listened to sermons and posts by Jason that included numerous references to Bonhoeffer, such as this one: Expansion on the Lectures on Homiletics.

And after all of that, he would likely have taken up to read some of Bonhoeffer’s works, such as Life Together. Lyle would then have discovered that, in the same way people use Jesus as their mascot for whatever ideas or ideologies they proffer, so many have done to Bonhoeffer what Dietrich noted Jesus disallowed at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. They make of Bonhoeffer what they will to suit their means, a move that is absent from pointing to Jesus, which is what Bonhoeffer did and does.

Evette caught me off guard last week when she posted that it had been twenty years since Lyle died. I did not do much the rest of the day. I read about half of the posts on Lyle’s old blog. After reading his post about U2, I put on several of their albums. I reminisced.

Lyle named his blog Divine Conspirator. He had taken quite a liking to the late Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. I found the sermon I offered at his funeral twenty years ago yesterday. The last line is still true.

Today Lyle finds his life hidden with Christ in God in ways he had hoped and longed. This is our hope today.

I miss my friend.

Still.

After a tear or two, I stilled myself with Jesus’s words,

I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.