We are right in the middle of a blizzard here in Omaha, Nebraska. Have a Christ-Centered Christmas!
| Waiting for Rescue | Wednesday, December 23, 2009 |
| Jill Carattini |
An Australian mining town will always remember the year of the dramatic rescue. News of the mining tragedy shook the small town after an earthquake killed one miner and trapped two others 3000 feet under the ground. For days that would turn into weeks, teams of miners bore through tons of rock; rescuers could only work one at a time on their backs in a cramped rescue tunnel, using hand-held tools to avoid caving. Meanwhile, the two trapped miners huddled into a four foot-tall cage and could only wait for rescuers to break through rock they knew was five times harder than concrete. Five days after the accident, the trapped miners began to hear the sounds of their rescuers. Six days later, the miners were located, contact was made, and hands passed food and hope through a crack in the walls that held them. Fourteen days after the accident, over 300 hours of waiting for rescue, the two miners were freed. “This is the great escape,” said Bill Shorten, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union. ”This is the biggest escape from the biggest prison.”(1)
The story is one that fills hearers with anxiety even as we imagine it (its dramatic ending is all the more vivid with mining stories in mind that did not end the same). I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to be freed after such an ordeal.
Over seventy years ago from a pulpit in London, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the image of a man trapped after a mining disaster: Deep in the earth, dark as night, the man is cut off and alone. The supply of oxygen is limited. Food, water, and options are scarce; silence and fear are not. He knows his situation, and he can do nothing but wait. “He knows that up there, the people are moving about, the women and children are crying—but the way to them is blocked. There is no hope.”(2) But what if just then, in the distance, the sounds of tapping are heard—the sound of knocking, the sound of friends, the sound of deliverance?
This, said Bonhoeffer in December of 1933, is the hope of Advent: the coming of a deliverer, the drawing near of God to humankind, the arrival of Christ our rescuer. Those who are caught in darkness will see a great light. Those struggling in silence will stand up and hear the knocking. A voice is crying out of the wilderness: Who will have ears to hear it?
Advent teaches us how to wait. “Can and should there be anything else more important for us than the hammers and blows of Jesus Christ coming into our lives?”(3) In our waiting, should we not cry out as the first believers did, Come, Lord Jesus! This is the ancient cry of palpable hope—Maranatha!—Lord, come quickly! Advent teaches us to wait and to watch, and to live expectantly, though we sit in the dark, though we find ourselves impatient. “When these things begin to take place,” instructs Christ, “stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).
In the days of Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the people of Israel were living in a period of silence. It had been over 400 years since God had spoken of a coming Redeemer and his forerunner through the prophet Malachi. Malachi called the people again to anticipate and to be prepared for the day that was coming. Of course, in the quiet nights of 400 years, in the difficult silence of disease or war or sorrow, even the most faithful stumble and doubt.
But listen. In the distance there is knocking. There is the sound of hope drawing near, the sounds of God’s reign in unexpected places. There are the sounds of saints who have gone before us and who proclaim their rescuer even in death. There is the sound of a promise: “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:19).
The world is still dark and lonely. But in it every day a quiet voice calls out, “I stand at the door and knock.” Christ has come. Christ is here. Christ will come again. Our moment of rescue draws near.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
© 2008 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
At the outset of (The Cost of) Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer declares that he wants to get behind the battle cries and catch words of the church struggle and to turn to the one person who ought to be the center of their concerns, Jesus Christ.
(Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 129).
THE EXECUTION of DIETRICH BONHOEFFER (By Alfred the Great Academy)
Eventually, Bonhoeffer’s complicity in the plot was discovered. From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler personally ordered Bonhoeffer’s execution. Thus it was that at dawn on the morning of April 8, 1945, Bonhoeffer was led naked into the execution yard while prison guards jeered and ridiculed him. At the foot of the scaffold Bonhoeffer paused to kneel and pray. He then got up and climbed the steps to the gallows. Using a meat hook from a slaughterhouse, Bonhoeffer was then slowly hoisted by a noose formed of piano wire. Asphyxiation is thought to have taken half an hour.
Just 11 days later, the Americans liberated the prison where Bonhoeffer had been kept.
For many years, the Lord had been preparing Bonhoeffer for the hour of his death. In The Cost of Discipleship, he had written about the necessity for Christians to embrace death. “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out in to the world. But it is the same death every time – death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”
The following poem was written by Bonhoeffer in the concentration camp shortly before his death:
By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered,
And confidently waiting come what may,
we know that God is with us night and morning,
and never fails to greet us each new day.Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented,
Still evil days bring burdens hard to bear;
Oh, give our frightened souls the sure salvation
for which, O Lord, You taught us to prepare.And when this cup You give is filled to brimming
With bitter suffering, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling,
out of so good and so beloved a hand.Yet when again in this same world You give us
The joy we had, the brightness of Your Sun,
we shall remember all the days we lived through,
and our whole life shall then be Yours alone.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer actually had some of the details for his escape worked out…
With Knobloch, a friendly guard, Dietrich planned to escape. For the escape, the Schleicher family provided a pair of coveralls, in which Knobloch wanted to smuggle him out of prison.
But it never happened because Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rudiger Schleicher were arrested, shortly before Dietrich was transferred to the terrible main Gestapo prison in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. This is where Hans von Dohnanyi had also been held for a while, before he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Finally, Bethge was also arrested six months before the end of the war in Italy and was brought to prison at Lehrterstrasse 3, where Rudiger and Klaus Bonhoeffer were also held.
(Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, 79).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s hope that Hitler would be assassinated ended on July 20, 1944…
It was all the worse for him then when he received the news on July 20, 1944, that the coup went awry. Bonhoeffer certainly knew then that his chances of survival were diminishing.
Nevertheless, he wrote to Bethge on July 21 that he would think “gratefully and contentedly about the past and the future.”
But the disaster continued to unfold. In the resistance, people close to him were executed, including his uncle, Paul von Hase, a lieutenant general and the city commander of Berlin, whose visits to Dietrich in prison had been a great relief for him (Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, 77).
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