Bonhoeffer sermon |
Jeremy VIII: 4-7. Romans VIII: 18-25.
Matthew XXV: 31-46
Yea the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their migration but my people know not the requirements of the Lord.
Beloved in Christ.
I rejoice to be in Berlin again and especially at a time of celebration and earnest looking forward.
In London last Monday, to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German Embassy created an ice wall in the street courtesy of a firm called “Eskimo-Ice”. It gently melted as a host of well wishers entered the Embassy to join the celebrations.
Earlier in the day I had unveiled a plaque commemorating the service of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer from 1933-35 at St Paul’s Lutheran and Reformed Church in the heart of London. The church was bombed. It is now the site of the Metropolitan University but there is now recognition, close by the main entrance, that Bonhoeffer served at St Paul’s.
I was very moved to visit the Bonhoeffer house on a previous visit to Berlin and to see in the room in which he wrote the Cost of Discipleship a print on the wall depicting London and recalling his many visits and the years he spent there. I rejoice that it has been possible to forge a link between Bonhoeffer’s School, the Walter Rathenau Gymnazium and St Mary’s Hendon so that a new generation can appreciate the cost and the power of living by principle.
Bonhoeffer’s legacy is still inspiring and troubling. He had a lively sense of the judgement of God and that God requires us not so much to have theories about him or to devote ourselves to pious exercises but to recognise that he requires our active compassion and that judgment follows our failure to feed, clothe and encourage the needy and vulnerable. As Jesus says in our gospel reading –“whatsoever ye do unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Bonhoeffer was acutely conscious of the displacement of God from the culture of Europe and the relegation of God to the suburbs of our interest. He said - “One may ask whether ever before in human history there have been people with so little ground under their feet.”
One response to all this is described by Bonhoeffer as “our clerical tricks”. “The displacement of God from the world and from the public part of human life, led to the attempt to keep his place secure at least in the sphere of the “personal”, the “inner” and the “private”. And as every man still has a private sphere somewhere, that is where he was thought to be most vulnerable. The secrets known to a man’s valet – that is to put it crudely the range of his intimate life from prayer to his sexual life – have become the hunting ground of modern pastoral workers.”
This is part of what Bonhoeffer meant by “religion”, a self contained inwardness which is opposed to the Biblical understanding of the relationship between God and the whole person whose “heart” is formed and expressed by outward actions as well as inner dispositions.
Bonhoeffer protested against any attempt to evade the reality of the state of western culture in his day. He protested against any tendency to treat God as a supplement to reality or an escape from it. “Jesus Christ came to initiate us not into a new religion but into life” – life in all its fullness. In the incarnation, God took upon him our flesh and dwelt among us, he was not a “drop out” God.
But of course he came unto his own and his own received him not. The worldliness of God is to be distinguished from what Bonhoeffer described as “the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy the comfortable or the lascivious”. “Profound this worldliness”, is, he said, “characterised by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.” His last words, after he knew that he had been condemned to death included a message to Bishop Bell of Chichester, “This is the end – for me the beginning of life. [Tell the bishop] that I believe with him in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests and that our victory is certain.”
What of now and our responsibility in our own generation? As St Paul wrote in his letter to the Christians of Rome, “We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”
We have this sober knowledge however with a lively hope in God. Alas there are many people who contemplate the perils of our century with no such hope.
In our own day we have been given a vivid account of the cosmic drama by contemporary science. It seems that we are involved in a five act drama. In a series of irreversible transformations the history of the universe has unfolded from its beginnings about 13.7 billion years ago. Act I is the galactic story. Act II is the formation of planet Earth just far enough away from our sun to avoid frying and not so far as to become a sterile rock. Act III is the story of the birth of life on Earth with Act IV concerned with the story of homo sapiens as we emerged some 160,000 years ago from Africa to colonise the globe.
The evolutionary story has a material and physical aspect but also a psycho-spiritual aspect. We are as the Bible and Darwin agree creatures of the dust – star dust in fact; we are participants in a web of life; humans are the universe reflecting on and celebrating life in conscious self awareness.
The problem is that the knowledge which has delivered such great power over the earth has been generated from an “objective” way of observing the world which has tended to divorce us from a sense of inter connectedness with nature. Dominance has been substituted for interconnectedness and we have come to see the earth in a god-forsaken way as a mere theatre for human willing and exploitation, with a diminished awareness that our well being is involved in the well being of the earth.
Act V of our five act drama is just beginning and it will decide whether humanity is yet another dead end in the unfolding story of life or whether promise will predominate and peril will be surmounted. The President of the Royal Society, our premier scientist recently published a book about the prospects for the human race worryingly entitled “Our Final Century” – without a question mark – although he has ascribed this to a publisher’s error.
Shall we develop the wisdom to channel the power we have acquired from the scientific knowledge and discoveries of the 20th century? Where indeed, to quote the poet and churchman T.S.Eliot, is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and the knowledge we have lost in information.
We live at a time when science and religion are commonly perceived to have declared a truce on the basis of mutual irrelevance. Facts and values are divorced because of the rigid exclusion of any notion of purpose in modern science and this has led to a divorce between the kinds of truth which can be entertained in public and the private spheres of life.
A significant and influential strand of Protestant thinking criticised by Bonhoeffer has abandoned the realm of fact and public truth for a private sphere of subjective values. The claim that Christ is the light who reveals the whole of reality and the life that endures for ever has been silenced and reduced to just one of the possible varieties of religious experience.
As Bonhoeffer demonstrated in his work in Finkenwalde, the Biblical text comes to life as it is studied and expressed as part of the venture of Christian living in the Church, celebrating and substantiating the truths of the Incarnation and the Trinity. As St Paul says in his letter to Timothy, “the church of the living God is the pillar and ground of the truth.”
Too often we have seen salvation exclusively in terms of individuals. That is of course vital but the Bible shows us the individual person realistically as someone always involved in relationships with other human beings and with the world of nature. We can perish in a world and a human community that is atomised but we are saved together. Bonhoeffer believed and acted on this truth. Our relationship in the believing community is not just an agreeable twinning arrangement but crucial as we work together to give substance to the promise of the 21st century and to surmount its perils.
At the end of the Divine Comedy, Dante describes his vision of divine reality – “all the scattered leaves of the universe bound by love in one volume”. Such is the origin and the purpose of the Church and it is the calling of Christians in London and Berlin to explore, celebrate and substantiate this truth.
