Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Wearying God – Finding Hope
James Sledge August
7, 2016
In
spring of 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, had been
in a Nazi prison for a year because of his ties to the German resistance. Later
that year, things grew more dire as the Nazis discovered his role in a plot to assassinate
Adolf Hitler, and he would be hanged in 1945 at a Nazi concentration camp just
two weeks before US soldiers liberated it.
Previously,
Bonhoeffer had been a prominent leader in the Confessing Church movement,
Christians from both Lutheran and Reformed churches who protested Nazi
intrusion into church affairs, and the church’s willing to cooperation.
Bonhoeffer was appalled by a requirement to expel any church member with Jewish
ancestry.
Bonhoeffer
spoke out against the Nazis from the beginning, arguing publically that
Christians’ ultimate allegiance was to Christ and not to the Fuhrer. Although
he was not involved its actual writing, these ideas became part of the
Theological Declaration of Barmen, approved in May of 1934 by the Confessing
Church. Barmen is in our denomination’s Book
of Confessions, and its banner hangs in the back of our sanctuary, notable
for the crossed out swastika on it.
Bonhoeffer
could have safely ridden out the war as a professor at Union Theological
Seminary in New York City, but in 1939 he returned to Germany, convinced that
he had to be there to have any say in some dimly glimpsed, hoped for future.
Even
in from prison in that spring of 1944, Bonhoeffer was thinking about the future.
From his cell, he penned a letter to a colleague’s infant son who was being
baptized. The many-page letter includes these words near its end.
Today you will
be baptized a Christian. All those great ancient words of the Christian
proclamation will be spoken over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to
baptize will be carried out on you, without your knowing anything about it. But
we are once again driven back to the beginning of our understanding.
Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our
enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship –
all these things are so difficult and remote that we hardly venture any more to
speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be
something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express
it. Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its
self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking
the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier
words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being
Christian will be limited to these two things: prayer and righteous acts among
men. All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of
this prayer and action.[1]
As he wrote his letter, churches all
over Germany were still holding regular worship services, but Bonhoeffer clearly
did not think such actions meant much. They had become too detached from the
gospel, from the words Jesus spoke, and from the hope for that new day Jesus
proclaimed – the kingdom, the reign of
God.