Called to Take Risks

A letter from Burkhard Paetzold serving in Germany

Christmas 2015

Dear friends near and far, I wish you a Merry Christmas!

And I thank you for your faithfulness over the course of the year and for your prayers, your questions and comments, your calls.  Thank you for good meetings and being good travel companions.  Thank you for your financial support. If I was unable to send you a personal thank-you note, please accept my apologies and take this as a big thank-you.

I don’t know how your church celebrates Christmas, but here, every year, we have a Nativity play performed by children of our congregation. My wife and I are happy to see our grandkids acting or singing as part of the company.  Every year they rehearse and perform a new play. Our music director is involved, a group of women tailor costumes, and the youth paint the scenery.

Nativity play actors in my home church

Every Nativity play I remember includes a scene depicting Mary and Joseph asking for shelter for the night. Our family remembers well when our little granddaughter Cecilia some years ago played a landlady asking her husband with a loud precocious voice to shut the door and stop chatting with these strangers: “We have enough to do with our own matters!”

Every year the congregation thinks of the homeless and the refugees, churches are crowded, donations increase, but we live in a suburb and the homeless and refugees, so far, have been far away.

This year everything is different.

We can see this in our yearly celebration as part of the Ecumenical Peace Decade (ten days of prayer for peace: http://www.friedensdekade.de/). This year the theme was Grenzerfahrung, which in German is a play on words that can mean experiencing your own limits, experiencing national borders, frontier experience, boundary experience, threshold experience…

What are my own limits? Who or what is limiting me? Why do I want to shut my door and just have a cozy Christmas? Why is it that after proclaiming “Welcome refugees!” and “Yes we can!” we become so nervous? Aren’t there too many? Isn’t this coming too fast? Who is going to stop this? Can we save the whole world? Shouldn’t we be more realistic—not just romantic hippies? Shouldn’t we build fences like Hungary? Another wall? Detention camps?…

Poster of this year’s “Friedensdekade” campaign in the German Churches

All these questions roil across German society. People march in Dresden calling themselves “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident” (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Pegida).

There is an interesting satirical video out now that seems to turntheir concerns upside down: While daily news broadcasts show exhausted groups of marching refugees, this satirical video shows them in juxtaposition with angry “concerned citizens” marching on the streets.  We see why the refugees have had to flee, and how negatively some Germans feel about the openness and humanity of their own country.  Many of the refugees are uneducated; the video points out how uneducated the angry marchers are.  We see efforts to integrate refugees who come from a different culture.  The video concludes that it will be far more difficult to “integrate” the German marchers that have abandoned the Christian principle of loving your neighbor.

Curiously, in secular Germany most of the angry marchers don’t know much about the traditions of the Christian faith at all. So we church people must ask ourselves: Where, why, and how did we fail to tell them the Good News, to educate them in the faith, to include them in the ministry of a local parish?

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt comes to my mind: “We accuse ourselves for not standing up for our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.”

Christmas shows us that our lukewarm faith doesn’t work and that, in fact, Christmas has become a lukewarm facet of popular culture.

Christ can say: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And everyone responds: “He’s right, of course, in principle.  But, hey, that’s not realistic. I’ve got to protect myself and my family and of course my car and my home, my way of life…”

Christ can say: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And everyone responds: “He’s right, of course, in principle. But, hey, shouldn’t we all have our little secrets? And nations need even bigger secrets—it’s a matter of security.”

Christ can say: “If you would be perfect, go and sell what you have, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come and follow me.” And everyone responds: “Of course, he’s right, in principle.  But we see that the purpose of our whole life and culture is to gather more and more possessions, to have security.”

These sudden great numbers of refugees show us clearly that we have ignored the signs on the wall. There is no war or injustice or environmental damage that is not interrelated with our way of life. We can’t just say: “Shut the door and stop chatting with these strangers; we have enough to do with our own matters.”

Christ tells us to be unrealistic and to risk the impossible. I see this more than ever in my daily work, but I also see Christ’s command in the life of Presbyterian World Mission.

Please tell me how you and I can better cooperate and communicate. What do I need to do to assure that we can make this joint mission in Europe a common ministry—you and I and our fellow mission co-workers together?

I’ve been recently notified of the funding level for my sending and support for 2015.  Unfortunately, even at this late date my ministry hasn’t been fully funded for this year. Would you please pray about this situation?  If possible, would you be able increase your gift for this year?  Would you consider advocating for this ministry with neighboring congregations to see if they would join us? I would so appreciate your help in these ways.

Blessings to you for a peaceful and joyful Christmas Season.  May your lives be filled with grace and peace in the year to come.

Burkhard

The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 328