Sermon on Bonhoeffer and Matthew 25

I had the good fortune to join the congregation at Saint Michael's Lutheran Church for Holden Evening Prayer and a reflection on Bonhoeffer and the parable of the sheep and goats. Here's what I said

READING from “After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943,” included in Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from the perspective of the outcasts, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”

SCRIPTURE Matthew 25:31-46

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?’

Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’

And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

SERMON

Today our two readings take us to a single place. Both Jesus of Nazareth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are speaking from a location few of us expect to find ourselves in: with our toes on the edge of destruction. They are looking out over the precipice of the end. The wheels of fate have begun to turn for both men: for Jesus, it is only a few short days to his judgment and death; for Dietrich, only three years to his martyrdom, on April 9, 1945, exactly eighty years ago today.

In Matthew’s gospel, in the very next verse, Jesus says to his disciples, “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.”

In Dietrich’s writings, we find ourselves in the collection titled Letters and Papers from Prison. But this letter we read from today is actually from the year just before he was arrested, from 1942. In that year, Bonhoeffer assembled a series of short essays and paragraphs, with titles like “On Success” and “Trust” and “On Stupidity,” [wait for possible laughter] in which he wrote, “Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental… The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.” [meaningful pause]

And finally, at the end of this collection, Dietrich wrote: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”

Bonhoeffer would name the collection “After Ten Years.”

Ten years.

In July 1932, German democratic elections resulted in a deadlocked parliament with an inability to reach consensus, with none of the parties reaching a controlling majority, including the Nazi Party which -- though it had significantly gained elected seats -- represented only thirty-seven percent of the parliament. The incumbent president Paul von Hindenburg, who had defeated Hitler in the elections by a narrow majority, was forced to call for a new election in November 1932 with the hope of resolving the deadlocked parliament.

The Nazi Party actually lost seats in this election, but no matter; President Hindenburg, under pressure from conservative elites and industrialists, ultimately appointed Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933. After only two months in office, which included the burning of the Reichstag which was blamed on the Communist Party, the German parliament passed the Enabling Act, giving Chancellor Hitler full legislative powers and allowing him to introduce any law without parliamentary vote. When President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler used the Enabling Act to merge the office of chancellor with that of the president to create a new office, "the leader" -- in German, Führer.

1935 would see the passage of the The Nuremberg Race Laws, including the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, removing citizenship rights from Jews and other ethnic minorities. 1936 brought a rigged parliamentary election with a single party list for the Reichstag composed exclusively of Nazis and nominally independent “guests”.

Then 1937: the opening of the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Then 1938, when Austria was annexed and forced into compliance with another rigged parliamentary election, and Jewish passports declared invalid, and Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes and stores were systematically set on fire and destroyed.

Then 1939: the invasion of Poland, and the second world war began.

Ten years. 1942, on the cusp of 1943. America had finally entered the war, dragged in by the attacks on Pearl Harbor after years of refusing to join the struggle against the spreading Axis powers. But Britain and America and the other Allies were not winning, not yet.

Bonhoeffer was an avowed pacifist who had been coordinating nonviolent resistance within Germany’s borders. He was a key organizer of the Confessing Church, a collective of churches and seminary students who rejected the German church’s collusion with the Nazi regime. His publication of The Cost of Discipleship in 1937 detailed a Christian’s call to “costly grace,” in which faith in Jesus demanded a changed life and a willingness to give up comforts and self-protection for the betterment of the neighbor.

In 1938, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans brought him into the German military intelligence service, supposedly as a pastor who could use his church contacts to further the Nazi regime, but actually as a spy who could pass messages to resistance efforts and attempt to spread information to Western allies about Nazi atrocities. It was in the German intelligence service that Bonhoeffer came to know a fuller scale of the ongoing genocide of the Jewish people.

Bonhoeffer’s pacifism and nonviolence were under theological, philosophical, and personal siege.

How long do you work within the system?

How long do you hope good preaching and orthodox theology will turn the tide?

How long do you trust in time, or democracy, or external global powers, or basic human decency to swoop in and save the day?

How long do you wait for God to show up?

In 1942, after ten years under Hitler’s rise to power, Bonhoeffer was standing on the precipice of transformation. He was beginning to answer the question. Bonhoeffer was beginning to realize that God had already shown up: in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the stranger, in the naked, in the sick, in the imprisoned, in the outcasts, in the maltreated, in the powerless, in the oppressed and reviled, in the suffering.

Bonhoeffer was beginning to realize that God had already shown up -- in the millions of political prisoners and supposed racial “inferiors” interred and murdered in German concentration camps.

A year after writing of the “perspective of the suffering,” eleven years after Hitler’s rise to power, Bonhoeffer would be accused in an assassination plot. He would be imprisoned for a year and a half, smuggling out letters to his friends and final essays on faith and the church, until his martyrdom on this day in 1945.

What is it like to stand with our toes on the edge of destruction?

How do you choose to step forward?

Bonhoeffer called it “an experience of incomparable value” to see from the perspective of the suffering. But much like discipleship, much like grace, this incomparable value has a cost. To stand with our toes on the edge of destruction, to look out over the precipice of just how dark humanity can become, demands a response.

We cannot only stand and look. The human heart and true Christian faith will never be satisfied to only see from the perspective of the suffering. The human heart and true Christian faith will compel us to act. We cannot dismiss suffering with vacant calls for thoughts and prayers, with a casual flip of our hands heavenward to appeal to the divine to deliver humanity out of its brutality to itself. We cannot turn our eyes to Jesus and refuse to see the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned in need of compassion and protection.

We must act, not to earn our salvation but out of the liberated conviction that it is God who is the one suffering, it is God who is turning needy eyes to us, it is God at the street corner and in the soup kitchen and the over 200 Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across our country.

If that is God, how do we not act?