February 25, 2026 - Truth before God
“Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”
 
Bonhoeffer wrote these words from prison after the collapse of the German church’s public credibility. Stripped of institutional power, he wrestles with a God who does not rescue from suffering but enters it. Lent begins here – not with religious certainty, but with a God who refuses domination and chooses the cross
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March 4, 2026 - Discipleship
“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ.”
 
Written in the 1930s as the German church accommodated itself to nationalism and comfort, this passage insists that following Christ is not an interior attitude but a concrete break. Discipleship, for Bonhoeffer, is not heroic spirituality – it is the slow death of false securities.
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March 11, 2026 - Obedience and Action
“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
 
In Ethics, Bonhoeffer rejects moral systems that protect innocence at the cost of responsibility. Writing as Nazism tightened its grip, he argues that moral life is not grounded in pure intention but in accountable action taken for the sake of others – even when certainty is impossible.
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March 18, 2026 - Suffering and Solidarity
“It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.”
 
From prison letters written under constant threat of execution, Bonhoeffer reframes faith away from religious performance. True Christianity, he insists, is found not in sacred withdrawal but in shared vulnerability – in standing where God stands, among the wounded.
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March 25, 2026 - Freedom from Fear
“Death is not wild and terrible if we have learned to see it as the great invisible friend, or if we have learned to see it as the gateway to freedom.”
 
Facing death, Bonhoeffer refuses both despair and sentimentality. Resurrection hope does not erase fear, but it transforms death from a final enemy into a passage entrusted to God. Lent closes not with resolution, but with courage shaped by trust.