Sermons

Patriotic Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Rod Frohman                            Third Presbyterian Church
July 9, 2006                              Luke 9: 57– 62; Mark 2:13-17

It was the 18th Century English poet Sir Walter Scott who asked, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said. ‘This is my own, my native land.’ Whose heart has ne’er within him burned as home his footsteps he has turned from wandering on a foreign strand?”

In this season of celebration of the 230th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence there are American varieties of public citations of examples of patriotism, which, in their very variety, beg the question, “What is patriotism?” Patriots of various countries who are also Christians, who affirm that “Jesus Christ alone is Lord of the conscience”, are compelled to ask, “Does the practice of our Christian faith ever challenge or contradict the burning heart of patriotism?”

I would like to respond to that question indirectly this morning using biography as theology. When sermon becomes biography the emphasis is on story rather than application.

On April 9, 1945, a Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was executed in the Gestapo concentration camp in Flossenberg, Germany. His life and witness to Jesus Christ is the biography that sharply illuminates the many dilemmas of patriotism in the modern world.

Those of you who were young adults then, or students of W.W.II, know the agony of the timing of Bonhoeffer’s execution. How close can a person possibly get to being rescued, yet so far away? April 9, 1945. In one month the European war would be over. In two days, April 11, the American army reached the Elbe River, 60 miles from Berlin. On April 12 Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide while the Russian army was encircling Berlin. May 8 was V-E Day. April 9 through May 8, so close yet so far away. On such a delicate thread of time Bonhoeffer’s life had hung.

In the months following his death, chaos reigned in Germany. On July 27, 1945 his aged parents tuned their radio to a London radio station to listen to the Sunday service, as was their wartime custom. For seven months they had heard nothing from their son. “A memorial service was in progress [on the BBC]. The triumphant measures of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ hymn, For All The Saints, rolled out long and solemn from the many hundred voices. Then a single German was speaking in English. “We are here in the presence of God,” said the disembodied voice, “to make thankful remembrance for the life and work of God’s servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” So the news came to his aged parents.” (Mary Bosanquet, The Life and Times of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 16.)

To Christians and it seemed like a terrible end. Little did they know of the impact of this intense, enigmatic figure? He was a patriot to some, a renegade and traitor to Hitler. He was actually opposed to violence, yet ready to be involved in it when he believed there was no other alternative. Besides his total opposition to the racism and imperialism of Hitler, Bonhoeffer was specifically executed for his part in the Putsch, the plot to assassinate Hitler, a decision he very painfully made. Bonhoeffer was 39 years old when he died.

Dietrich von Bonhoeffer was born in 1906. So this year is the 100th anniversary of his birth and many quiet celebrations are going on around the world remembering this man, largely organized by the Bonhoeffer Society of which I am a member. Dietrich was born into a doctor’s family, his father being a famous neurosurgeon. “The Bonhoeffers were a large, bourgeois family in what now seems a protected, privileged environment, with all the qualities, prejudices and values such an upbringing bestows.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament, c. 1976 Little Brown & Co. p 184)

At the age of 27, in 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Dietrich was working as a chaplain in a hospital for paraplegics. This hospital was to be phased out and the patients killed under a program invented by Hitler to eliminate all the so-called “useless lives.” There in the hospital, Bonhoeffer began to taste what Nazism really meant. As the Nürnberg rallies began to beat the drums of war, Bonhoeffer began to shape his own pacifist theology, much in the image of Gandhi.

As part of his growing sense of opposition to Hitler, Dietrich took a regular part in the “Confessing Church”; the Christians opposed to Hitler. Christians who supported Hitler, interestingly enough, called themselves, “The Christian Church.” Many of Bonhoeffer’s clergy colleagues supported Hitler.

Already becoming somewhat of a world religious figure, Bonhoeffer accepted the call to be the pastor of a church outside of London, England. But as the Nazi menace grew Dietrich returned to Germany to establish secret seminaries to train pastors who clearly understood that “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” and who could explain the spiritual and moral degradation of the state religion of Nazism.

Once again in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, Bonhoeffer visited the United States and taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was strongly pressed by Reinhold Niebuhr and others to stay and be safe. But his inclinations were otherwise. “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany”, he wrote. “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”

So back to Germany he went, feeling evermore the pressure to take a definite stand against Hitler rather than just curse the dirty work of the generals. He felt personally responsible for the horror of Nazism.

So, at the suggestion of his brother-in-law, Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr, the Nazi Secret Service, and became a double agent moving easily between Germany and England encouraging exiles and resistors and promoting the underground church. Working with his brother-in-law and a sympathetic general, Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators plotted twice unsuccessfully, to assassinate Hitler in March of 1943. One attempt was an attaché case bomb that was not placed close enough to Hitler and the other was a bomb in Hitler’s private airplane in which the timing clock on the bomb had not been properly set. Scarcely 15 days after the attempts, the conspirators were in Gestapo hands. Bonhoeffer spent two years being shunted among concentration camps and Gestapo prisons until he was hung, by direct order of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, on April 9, 1945.

There is a word that is very scarce in Christian circles today, but a word with which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was most familiar. The word is “discipleship,” meaning the condition of being a disciple. We are familiar with showmanship, horsemanship so the word discipleship is understandable as a word which describes the quality by which we are disciples of Jesus Christ. There is a popular notion that there were only 12 disciples and the rest of us are merely Christians. From one of our texts this morning, Luke 9:57 – 62, we see that Jesus offers the call to be a disciple to all people. Therein lies the unique New Testament meaning of disciple—someone who receives a personal calling to follow Jesus.

Notice, if you will, the text of the morning, that in every case the person whom Jesus calls to be a disciple has an excuse.

And they are pretty good excuses don’t you think? Isn’t Jesus being unreasonable here? He demands complete obedience. One poor man can’t even go to bury his father, or another can’t even say goodbye to his wife and kids. The answer is yes! Jesus is being unreasonable! Jesus is asking potential disciples to cut themselves off from their own normal life situation.

When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to establish secret seminaries he wrote a very penetrating book. It is called The Cost of Discipleship. It was first published in 1937. ( I first read it in 1965 when I was 20.) Listen to what Pastor Bonhoeffer has to say on the subject of discipleship.

The disciple who places oneself at the Master’s disposal but at the same time retains the right to dictate his own terms…ceases to want to follow it all. Then Bonhoeffer goes on. The first step that follows the call cuts the disciple off from his previous existence. The first step places the disciple in the situation where faith is possible. Whoever is called must go out of the situation in which he or she cannot believe and into a situation in which first and foremost faith is possible. (Cost p. 68-69) In other words, as long as Levi’ sits at the seat of custom and Peter at his nets, they could both pursue a trade dutifully and honestly. They might enjoy religious experiences old and new. But if they want to believe in God, if they want to have any kind of freedom, the only way is to follow the call of his incarnate son. (Ibid.)

It is precisely at the point of call to Christian discipleship that Bonhoeffer’s most famous and self-fulfilling statement is made, “When Christ calls a person he bids that one to come and die.” (Ibid. p. 90) This is unreasonable and it is extreme, but it is the only way by which we can save our lives. The call of Christ is so clear that the easiest thing to do is to try to escape. Even Bonhoeffer wanted to escape the call to return to Germany.

His best friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, to whom Bonhoeffer wrote many letters which are now published as Letters and Papers from Prison, says that the only way Bonhoeffer kept his freedom, the only way he saved his life, was to stifle the impulse to flee. Bonhoeffer was safe in the United States in 1939, but he decided to follow the call of Christ and return to Germany. Even 1945, late in the war, Bonhoeffer could have escaped from prison with the cooperation of the guards. Had he done so, many people now living would have been executed, including Bethge himself.

So Bonhoeffer was a person like ourselves who had a strong desire to save his own life, to escape, but he chose not to escape in order to keep his own freedom. Even when Bonhoeffer’s conspiracy group decided to assassinate Hitler, Bethge reports, it was not a dramatic decision with long hours of hand wringing full of moralistic discussion. Rather it was a simple understanding that as followers of Jesus Christ they could not allow themselves to become accomplices in the slaughter of Jews and the worship of the state.

What is the call of Christ for each one of us that will put us in a situation where faith is possible? This is the hard question.

As a pastor in pre-World War II Germany, Bonhoeffer found many people who were living listless, meaningless lives. They had the usual amount of personal frustrations, family anxieties, and job problems as well as health problems. Many people talked to him and told him that they found it hard to believe anymore, or they said “I’ve lost the faith I once had.” Pastor Bonhoeffer’s response was tough, maybe even a bit rude, but nevertheless true. “You are trying to keep your life under your own control,” he said. “You cannot hear Christ because you are willfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to Christ’s call. Your difficulty is your sins.”

That’s pretty rough treatment isn’t it? But if we really want to be free, if we really want to have faith then we must wrestle like Bonhoeffer with the great loyalty issues of our time. And we are compelled to wrestle with the paradox of loyalty to Christ as posed by Bonhoeffer. “Only those who obey [Christ] can believe, and only those who believe [Christ] can obey.”