In Not Of
May 16, 2021
for Prospect United Church of Christ
The Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson
The Scripture quotations
contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©
1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture:
John 17:13-19
Let
us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be
acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.
In
the early 1930s the Christian pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and
other Germans both Christian and non-Christian faced a number of daunting
crises—the economic collapse of the Great Depression; the rise of virulent
German nationalism; the worst form of that nationalism, Nazism; and a profound
feeling of shame and betrayal over the country’s loss in World War I and the
gross unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles. Bonhoeffer and other German
Christians struggled to understand just how the Christian church was called to
be and to act in that world of so many overlapping crises. Most German
Christians bought into German nationalism and even Nazism. They saw no conflict
between Christianity in its German Protestant form and German nationalism.
Bonhoeffer and several other prominent German Christians responded by issuing
the Barmen Declaration. That declaration was not as radical in its opposition
to Hitler as it should have been. It was concerned primarily with resisting
efforts by the Nazi regime to control the churches. It did not address the
greatest atrocities of Hitler’s regime like its rabid anti-Semitism.
Nonetheless it at least marked the beginning of Christian opposition to
Hitler’s political madness.
Some
of the people associated with the Barmen Declaration later formed something
they called the Confessing Church as a counter to the German churches that had
capitulated to and been taken over by the Nazis. Some individual Christians
went farther. The best known of them is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both he and his
brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi participated in groups working to assassinate
Hitler as the only way to stop World War II and the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer at
least considered what he was doing a sin, but he thought it a necessary sin for
which he would beg God’s forgiveness. The Nazis executed both Bonhoeffer and
Dohnanyi just before the end of the war. No German Christian organization was
particularly successful in its opposition to Hitler, but at least some German
Christians resisted, sometimes at the
cost of their lives. In retrospect it seems obvious that the call of the German
church under Hitler was to oppose and resist Nazism in very way possible. Some
Christians did. Most didn’t.
We
do not live in Nazi Germany or anywhere too much like Nazi Germany, and I do
not mean to suggest otherwise. No one is going to throw me into a concentration
camp for what I say here this morning. No one is building gas chambers
disguised as showers in which to commit genocide. Yet we do live in troubled
times, and I don’t even mean by that the pandemic, though it has laid bare many
of the contradictions in America’s social, political, and economic structures.
I mean mostly other huge issues before us—racism, the climate crisis, sexism, a
woefully inadequate and unjust health insurance system, college costs that
leave many students with debt that still burdens them decades after they finish
school, the immigration crisis and the gross mistreatment of immigrant families
at our southern border (mistreatment that sometimes amounts to a crime against
humanity), and the gross income disparity between a small number of
unbelievably wealthy people and the rest of us. One of our major political
parties has become a cult of personality that will not tolerate anyone who will
not genuflect before the Dear Leader. Tens of millions of American Christians
belong to that cult, hard as that is for most us to understand. No, we don’t
live in Nazi Germany. We do however live in a complex time, and we face a
number of daunting challenges.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and other German Christians of the 1930s asked what the role of the
church was in the disordered and dangerous world in which they lived. Today we
must ask the same question. What is the role of the Christian church in our
disordered and dangerous world? Though it may not have sounded much like it
when you heard our passage from John this morning, I think we can tease out of
those complicated verses an answer to our question. Let me explain.
In
these verses in which Jesus is praying to God he says two seemingly
contradictory things. He says first of all that “they,” meaning his disciples,
“do not belong to the world.” He actually says that twice in these few verses,
I suppose to emphasize its importance. Christ’s disciples do not “belong” to
the world. Yet Jesus also says here that he is not asking God “to take them out
of the world.” He says that he has “sent them into the world.” So what precisely
is going on here? Jesus sends his disciples to a place, the world, to which
they do not belong. What does that mean? Why would Jesus do that?
We
start with that it means that Christ’s disciples do not belong to the world.
Jesus means, I think, that they are somehow detached from the world. In fact
the early Christians always thought of themselves as apart from the world. They
called the church the “ecclesia.” While that Greek word was originally
secular, it became the Greek word for church. It means “called out of.” The
earliest Christians understood themselves precisely as a group of people called
out of the world, called to be separate from the world. They considered
themselves as apart from the world because they had committed themselves to
something far greater than the world. They called Jesus Christ “Lord.” They
mean by that term that Christ was the one they had obligated themselves to
obey, the one they were to follow. To them Christ their Lord represented a
radical new way of being, God’s way of being not a worldly way of being. At
John 18:36 Jesus says to Pilate “my kingdom is not from this world.” He meant
that the kingdom of God is located on earth but arises and has its authority
not from the world but from God. When the earliest Christians called themselves
ecclesia they meant essentially the same thing. They, the church, were
located in the world, but they were called by God, got their authority from
God, and were committed to follow God’s ways not the ways of the world.
Ok,
but if Jesus’ earliest followers weren’t of the world in that way, if they
didn’t belong to the world in that sense, why didn’t Jesus ask God to take them
out of the world? Why did he specifically send them into the world?
Certainly a lot of Christians have so emphasized being apart from the world
that they have withdrawn from the world and wanted to have as little to do with
it as possible. Monasticism in some of its forms is one example. Making the
faith be only about an entirely inner pietism is another way that a great many
Christians have understood and do understand the faith. That way of thinking
effectively takes them out of the world.
Yet
true Christianity does not call us and never has called us to that kind of
withdrawal from the world. Bonhoeffer wrote at the height of World War II, and
please excuse his male exclusive language, that a great many German Christians
“fled from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness....”
He considered doing so entirely unacceptable. He wrote, “Anyone who does this
must shut his eyes to the injustice around him.” That’s something Bonhoeffer
could not and would not do. He thought no true Christian could or should do it
either. Rather, true Christian faith calls people into the world and into
action in the world, and let me add that it doesn’t have to and shouldn’t be
action to try to assassinate someone. Bonhoeffer wrote that “only at the cost
of self-deception can [a Christian] keep himself pure from the contamination
arising from responsible action.”[1]
Though we may not belong to the world, our faith calls us into the world not
out of it. That’s why Jesus sent his friends who did not belong to the world
into the world, not out of the world.
He
does the same with us. Of course, we’re all at different stages of life, and
we’re all our own people. So just what it means for Christ to send us into the
world is different for each of us. Jesus understands if we are unable actually
to go act in the wider world because of physical or mental disability. Still,
out in the world is where the church belongs. It’s where at least most of us
belong. The church is of little or no use to the world or to God if all it does
is call people inward to concern for their own virtue and their own souls as so
much of the church does. Yes, Jesus sought sabbath time for himself as a
spiritual virtue and necessity, and we should too. But Jesus never withdrew from
the world. His ministry had him constantly out in the world healing the sick,
comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and condemning all
structures of injustice and oppression of all people but especially of the
poor. He calls us to do the same. Maybe we like to think of our country as the
land of the free and the home of the brave, and compared to much of the rest of
the world it is. Yet our land is far from perfect. I named some of the crises
we face at the beginning of this sermon. They aren’t going to be resolved on
their own. God and Jesus Christ call us to tackle every one of them, though
some of us are called to work on a particular crisis the way Meighan is called
to work on the climate crisis and others are called to work on other crises. It
is easy and largely just to condemn most Germans of Hitler’s time for going
along with the Nazi madness, but some Germans resisted. Our call is to be not
of the world but in the world resisting all of the forces that denigrate,
oppress, or destroy God’s earth or any of God’s people. It’s not easy. It cost
Dietrich Bonhoeffer his life. Still, it is our call. May it be so. Amen.
[1]
All Bonhoeffer quotes are from Elizabeth Seton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary
Men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in
Church and State (New York, New York Review Books, 2013), p. 101. The male
exclusive language in the quotes is Bonhoeffer’s, not mine.
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