Sermon for Churches Together Pentecost Service on the Evening of Pentecost 2010
On the 8th November 1938 Heinrich Himmler assembled the top leaders of the SS and told them the following: “We must be clear that in the next ten years we will certainly encounter unheard of critical conflicts. It is not only the struggle of the nations, which in this case are put forward by the opposing side merely as a front, but it is the ideological struggle of the entire Jewry, freemasonry, Marxism, and the Churches of the world. These forces – of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit the origin of all the negatives – are clear that if Germany and Italy are not annihilated, they will be annihilated.” The very next evening an orgy of elemental violence erupted against the Jewish minority in Germany which has been recorded in the pages of infamy as “Reichskristallnacht” due to the millions of fragments of broken glass which littered the pavements outside numerous wrecked Jewish shop fronts. During that night anti-Semitic mobs speeded Germany’s retreat from modern democracy and led this civilised nation into a savagery which would have been more at home in the Middle-ages. In 1933 Himmler had become president of the police in Munich and head of the political police in Bavaria. From this power base he was able to build a state within a state expanding the SS and establishing its autonomy. The same year he set up the first Concentration Camp just outside Munich at a village called Dachau. The scene was thus set for the realisation of his vision of racial purity for the German people which meant among other things the eradication of the enemies he named in his speech of the 8th November and principally the Jews. We know only too well the outcome of this perverted and psychotic vision for we have seen the newsreel footage from 1945 when the death camps were liberated; we have seen images of the scattered bones of the sons and daughters of Abraham.
The story of “Crystal Night” is of course a relatively modern manifestation of the hatred and persecution suffered by the Jewish people down through history, a story in which the Church has played a part to its shame. Ezekiel had a vision which was connected with an earlier attempt to annihilate God’s chosen people. During his life time the city of Jerusalem and its Temple were raised to the ground and the mass of the intelligentsia and the wealthy of Israel had been taken into captivity in Babylonia. In his vision he sees the nation as it were a lifeless mass of scattered bones. God asks the prophet a challenging question, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
Last Sunday evening I returned from the City of Munich, the scene of Himmler’s infamous speech, where I had been a participant in the Second Ecumenical Kirchentag. I first began to take an interest in the church in Germany back in the 1980s and have attended a good many Kirchentags. The “church day”, more accurately three days, originated in the aftermath of the Second World War as a result of the German Churches realising that they had, with a few notable exceptions, got it very wrong during the rise of the Nazis in the pre war years. Determined that this should not happen again they meet on a regular basis to discuss ethical and political issues of concern to Christians. This event happens year on year with the Lutheran Church organising an event one year and the Roman Catholic Church organising an event the next year, and so on. The first united Kirchentag happened in Berlin 2003 and was attended by a small group from the Good Shepherd. The event has grown into a huge religious, political and cultural affair involving in Munich last week an estimated 450,000 participants who profoundly affected the city for the three days of its duration.
I vividly remember my first visit to a Kirchentag; this particular one was held in Hanover in the mid 1980’s: two memories in particular remain with me. The first was that my host on that occasion, an elderly German gentleman, took me for a trip around the city in his car. Hanover is a very modern city due to the fact that it was virtually flattened in the Second World War by the RAF. The one building which survived was the Rathaus or Town Hall. Inside the town hall, standing in front of a series of models of the city showing its development, he pointed to one of the models which depicted Hanover just prior to the war and extending his arms in imitation of an aeroplane said, “Englander kommen sie mit Flugzeug Hanover kaput!” I got the message: his beloved city had been smashed and there were as a result many scattered bones. Later that evening we sat together in his apartment, he spoke very little English and I even less German, but over a couple of beers and with the help of a dictionary, which we shoved to and fro across his kitchen table, he told me about his war time experiences and how he and a colleague had swam across a river to avoid being captured by the feared Russians. There was through that beer fuelled conversation a coming together of broken bones in the sense that we were able to connect meaningfully with one another. I could listen empathetically to his story and he could extend the hand of friendship to the son of an ex enemy.
The second incident was on a somewhat large scale a day or so later; this too has stayed with me ever since. I was wandering through a vast series of exhibition halls where many of the events of the Hanover Kirchentag were taking place. In the distance I could hear the unmistakeable lilt of Jewish music. I followed the sound until I entered the hall from which it was coming. A sight met my eyes which, as I watched, caused tears to trickle down my cheeks, for there in the Hall a large number of German young people were joyously engaged in a Jewish circle dance. In that moment it came home to me forcibly that the Spirit of God of which Ezekiel speaks so eloquently in his vision had swept across a broken and divided country and, in the subsequent generations since the war, the dry bones were coming together bone on bone and the breath of new life had been breathed into them. They had risen up, a great army, an army not of death and destruction as previously, but an army of life and hope for the future. A Jewish dance no less – God obviously has a strong sense of irony!
Human beings are by nature strangely divided creatures. At their worst, when ruled by fear and paranoia, when crushed or cornered, they can produce such a plethora of destructiveness which is almost beyond belief. When this happens then, in the vivid language of Ezekiel, a valley of dry and fractured bones is the result. However human beings seem to also have a capacity for not being able to tolerate this state for long; in their heart of hearts they cannot live with division and they long for unity. They become weary of endless suffering and destruction and start to ask themselves, “Can these bones live?” Perhaps it seems impossible or at best highly improbable, and the natural initial response is the same as was Ezekiel’s reply to God, “O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” In the Bible God does not then enter into a discourse with Ezekiel about the difficulty of the task rather he instructs him, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones hear the word of the Lord’.” As he obeys he starts to both hear and see the bones coming together until they are once again a recognisable people full of breath and vitality. They come to life and are a vast pulsating army.
A few weeks ago, during Holy Week, we remembered how the first Disciples of Christ were crushed and broken by the death of the one on whom they had placed all their expectations. “We hoped he was the one to redeem Israel!” exclaims the disciple on the road to Emmaus when talking to the stranger who had joined him and his companion. Meanwhile the other disciples had withdrawn from life and hidden themselves in the upper room consumed with fear. The risen Christ appeared to these fractured individuals and bound them together to be the beginnings of his body on earth of which we are a part today. He breathed on them and said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Forgiveness is the first step in the process of coming together. It involves the willingness to let go of fear, hate, prejudice, etc. It is summed up in Christ’s words as he was nailed to the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. It is enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. It was demonstrated by that elderly German who opened his home and offered hospitality to a young Englishman and who was willing to talk about how he felt despite the language barrier. It was shown last Sunday when 450,000 people from 81 countries, Roman Catholics, Protestants of various shades and Orthodox believers joined together in a cold windswept and wet field in Munich and raised their united voices in praise to God. It is manifest here tonight as we come together to worship God in unity at this Pentecost Festival.
So very often we tie ourselves up in knots and allow theological niceties to divide us when actually what God is calling us to do is to be prophetic and proclaim by word and deed the Good news of the Gospel. That is our common task whatever our denomination. Karl Barth was a very famous Swiss Theologian who wrote tome after tome of the densest theology – I know I had to read him at college. His works were so technical that it was very difficult to translate them from German into English. Towards the end of his life someone pointed to the shelf load of books he had written and asked, “But what does it all mean?” Barth answered, “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so!” Often our theological differences get in the way of the simple truth of God’s love manifest in His Son Jesus Christ. When we allow that to happen we become dry and dusty, divided bones and we are of no use to God or man. But when the Divine life-giving Spirit breaths over us we can come together and rise up as a mighty army. It might be very easy to feel disillusioned and dispirited when we think about the church today, a church divided by disputes about sexuality and discredited by sexual abuse scandals. A church which is treated with derision by much of the populous who just don’t want to know. It would be all too easy to feel that these dry bones could never live again. But be encouraged, for God looks upon us with love and gently breathes the breath of forgiveness and life over us. These bones can and will live and will be the means of speaking his word to the world.
I began by quoting the words of Heinrich Himmler who was himself sadly a personification of a message of hate and destruction a message which consumed him and led to his suicide in 1945. He was however right when he listed the Church among the enemies of the Third Reich, for the Church, when enlivened by the Spirit of God, is diametrically opposed to everything Himmler and his type stood for. Human beings can be vile and destructive but a deeper truth lies at the heart of not only humanity but the universe itself. Our Creator God is a God who brings things together bone on bone, flesh on flesh. Our Redeemer God is a God who breathes life into situations where there seemed only to be death and division. May he breathe upon us tonight as we worship Him together in our common faith and may He fit us for the task of bringing His forgiveness to those we will meet this coming week in our broken world and divided world.
