There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God's reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world ... It is a denial of God's revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be 'Christian' without being 'worldly', or [to] wish to be worldly without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 58
This quote raises for me, as so often in my reading of Bonhoeffer, troubling questions about approaches to mission that tend to see Christ as present in the church, absent from the world, and therefore the Church's mission to take Christ to a needy world. Actually, Christ is already there and the Church needs to catch up with him, and discover ways of incarnating, embodying and offering the love of the living God in Christ through practices that are themselves Christlike -- such as peacemaking, brokering reconciliations, expressing imaginative gestures of redemptive love, acts of mercy and compassion as contradictions of other ways of doing business. Bonhoeffer is not only right, he is so right -- God so loved the world, and the Cross was plunged into the same earth out of which humanity is made. And the Church is never more faithful to Christ, than when it finds those places in our world, and in its local communities, where in the name of the crucified Lord, it too is lifted up in loving surrender, arms outstretched to embrace the world and announce God's love -- and on a cross plunged into the earth of a God-loved world.