Sermons

November 14/04

The Christian Nazis?

Rev.Dr.Cheri DiNovo
Luke 21:5-19

It seems to me that most of the problems of Christendom could be solved by a couple of simple affirmations. One of them is that it is indeed God who is in charge here and God is a God of grace and a God of love and everything will be all right. And the other affirmation is about the life of Jesus, exactly who he was and what he did and how he did it. Those two things will keep us safe. Those two affirmations will save us, each and every one.

I was thinking after the events of November 2nd about history. You know there was a Christian Church in Nazi Germany, in fact, all the Nazis considered themselves Christian. They went to Church on Sundays. They prayed on Sunday. They heard scripture on Sunday. They heard preaching every Sunday. And it’s really interesting to look back on what those sermons were about during the Third Reich.

The sermons inevitable during the third Reich focused on personal morality. They focused for example, on the demons of homosexuality, on the demons of women’s rights, on the demons of women’s control over their own bodies. They focused on piety and coming to Church. They focused on faithfulness in marriage and faithfulness to the empire. They focused on how to make oneself a better person. Imagine that, that’s what they focused on.

I was thinking, ‘How strange is that?’, to be a guard during the week at Auschwitz and on Sunday go to Church. That your prayer and meditation life you could keep separate from what you did all week. That it helped you to do what you did all week because it gave you some strength and some solace, some quiet ‘down’ time and allowed you to, they would say, connect with your God.

Of course it wasn’t only Christians, the New Age ( we call it the New Age but it wasn’t so new) was very active in Germany during the Third Reich. Third Reich people were into séances, they were into the Runes and crystals. They were into all sorts of pagan expressions of spirituality. They were into, even, yoga. Isn’t that wild? Think of Himmler doing a salute to the sun? There’s an image. And if you go on the net you can find clergy of all denominations, people in Bishop’s robes, standing there in Zieg Heil position Just look, there are photographs of such things.

A very, very small percentage of the Church, a tiny percentage of the Church didn’t go that route. A very, very small percentage of the Church, a handful of clergy really, became part of what was called, ‘The Confessing Church’. Every single one of them paid for their stance with their lives, except those who were lucky enough to get out of the country in time. Very few of them took that route.

And it’s interesting to ask that as they heard these scripture passages on a Sunday, what did they hear? What allowed them to do what they did with the same scriptures that we hear? And then I discovered that they didn’t read the same scriptures that we read. They changed the scriptural passages. They left some significant pieces out of the Sermon on the Mount when they read it in the Nazi Church. Guess what the pieces were that they left out? All about the poor, and all about the marginalized and all the references to poor widows and all the things that might just make someone in the pews think. They left out for example, the entire Hebrew Scripture, the entire Old Testament was left out. Why was that? Of course, it was Jewish. That was the history of God’s saving grace. God’s saving of God’s people from oppression. That part was immediately scratched.

They left the stories about Jesus out where it was implied or stated that the fate of a Christian was to follow Jesus Christ, yeah, even to the cross. They left that part out. They focused on the glib, good news. You know, we’re all saved, it’s all fine, don’t worry about a thing, be happy!
It makes one think about what people hear in Churches these days. How can most of the Christian Church vote against civil rights. They did after all in the November 2nd election. What scripture passages were they hearing? What were they listening to? What message were they receiving from the pulpit? What were their preachers saying to them?
It certainly wasn’t about the Jesus Christ that we hear about in this Church. It certainly wasn’t about the Jesus Christ that you hear about in scripture.

It’s interesting, I responded to an article in Now written from the Left ( I don’t know whether they’ll print it or not) about an analysis of the election and Wayne Robert’s wrote, ‘…the problem is the God we worship here. The problem is the patriarchal, angry, dessert God. That’s the problem’ And I wrote and said, ‘You know the problem is not faithfulness. The problem for the mainline denominations and for all the religions of the Book is not faithfulness, it’s faithlessness! The fact is we don’t read our scripture and we don’t hear a message based on that scripture otherwise there would be no 911’s. There would be no invasions of Iraq. How could we do these things if we read the stories about Jesus the way we have them written?

Who was Jesus anyway? I’ll tell ya! Without a doubt he was a pacifist. Without a shadow of a doubt he was a pacifist. Gandhi once said, ‘The only people in the world who don’t know that Jesus was a pacifist are Christians. Without a doubt Jesus was a pacifist.

Without a doubt Jesus stood on the side of the marginalized which in his day were women, were the disenfranchised, were the ones kept out of empire, notably absent from Christ’s table were clergy people. Notable absent from Christ’s table were any politicians or members of empire. There were no leaders at Christ’s table. There was only the poor, the criminal, again the marginalized, the disenfranchised and a lot of them were women. That’s who sat down with Christ. Now how can you use this Prince of Peace who would rather see himself killed than raise a hand against another, how could you use him in any way as a justification for any war ever?

Not to play the saint, another bit of news that came out last week was the tale that you probably all read about in the newspapers about the unionization of clergy. Heh, brothers and sisters, you know I’m going to say something about this! Ah yes, if we were so concerned about folk that need unionization then where were the clergy for those that work at McDonald’s and Wal Mart? Where are the clergy in terms of unionizing those that are really oppressed? Question number one. Question number two: The polity of the United Church gives an incredible say to clergy. After all, clergy vote and clergy make decisions at Presbytery which is our governance. This is very, very different for example than the polity of the CAW.

But most importantly, two things, most importantly is where in seminary is the message not been given out that what we are called to do as clergy is to follow that (points to cross).Guess what, what is guaranteed to every clergy person? You will be hated. You will be derided. You will get a phone call at least once a day from someone who knows how to do your job better than you do and they tell you so. Yes, you will be stopped on the street and if you are actually doing something and active around social justice issues, you’ll get hate mail galore! I use the number of hate mails I get as a kind of barometer of how well I’m doing. That’s what’s going to happen to you. That’s guaranteed. This is not a profession. This is a sacred and holy calling and guess how it ends, with death. No other way. We don’t get out of this one alive. That’s the clergy path. All of our paths by the way. You heard Jesus talking about it.

Before I get to Jesus though, one last thing. The most discomfiting thing that has been said in regards to unionization is the litany of abuse suffered by clergy at the hands of congregations. Well let me tell you, I understood ordination to be one thing and one thing only, and that is to learn to love you all. That is what every clergy person is called to do, to love every single person in their congregation and to serve them. The congregation can never ever be the problem I such a model. The congregation can never be the problem no matter how weird and wacky and crazy they are because we are called to love them. That is what we are called to do and to serve them. One thing to rail against ‘head office’, it’s another thing to rail against our brothers and sisters in Christ. Enough about unionization, back to Jesus.

So Jesus give you a litany of what is going to happen and boy, he didn’t predict the half of it did he? Isn’t it amazing, what an understatement. Look at the years that have transpired between those words and our reality and think of the holocausts, think of the terror, think of the wars, think of the starvation, think of the pestilence that has happened. It makes his words sound like a Hallmark card really! And look what’s also happened, remember the two affirmations? How the God who has promised to walk with us always, the God who has promised through these words not to touch a hair on our heads even if we are to be murdered.

Look how that God has walked with us, has saved God’s people time and time again, from oppression, has made all things right. Just think about it! And remember what it means to be Church. Just a little stroll through history here .What was the early Church like, not the Church of Christ’s day but the post-Christ Church, just before empire took over the Church, just before Constantine in 314-317 AD This was the Church that just had the memory of Jesus, just had the stories of Jesus. The Church that in many ways was very much like this Church. This is what that Church looked like. I’m quoting all these passages from a book called ‘Evangelism Outside/In’ and it’s written by this no name writer called Cheri DiNovo and it will be published in September but if you wait until December of next year you could probably get it on the remainder shelves for 1.99 so be patient.

This is Luke’s Church, "The poor and the marginalized of Luke’s Church were not the objects of justice or a necessary component of the Church but were in fact the honoured of the Church. The first witnesses of the resurrection were women arguably the most oppressed of the era. The Church was profoundly counter cultural. The roles in it were a reversal of those found under Roman Empire. The Church modeled itself after what Heaven might look like. As signs of things promised, Luke’s Church was to be as if it were the Kingdom, perhaps always failing but always attempting none the less. Luke’s Church did not point to ‘pie in the sky when you die’ but tried to live ‘pie now’. Keith Russell states, "…in truth many Christians today are tithing but it is to Visa or Mastercard." Luke was attentive to the issues of stewardship. It was important to reverse the cultural imperatives, to be able to create a community that would not only sustain life for some but nurture it enough to resist whatever persecution threatened. Faith could then be founded on the experience as well as the stories of Christ’s passion.

Paul’s Church: The struggle and challenge invoked by the very need for the epistles was the Christian journey. Outreach focused on enacting Church. We did not go out to ‘do’ to ‘them’ but invited them in to ‘do’ with us, inward looking meant looking at all the problems that plagued the marginalized because ‘we’ were the marginalized. Even if these communities had wealthy members, they were sharing the wealth to such a degree that distinctions of class became blurred. Persecution also made social division less important.

Peter’s Church: The displaced were the new priesthood. It was critical to make sense of the suffering of those who have forsaken their old lives and households and chosen this new household of God. First Peter reminds believers that it is in their suffering that they are most like Christ. The already suffering, the already marginalized were already living the Christian life. Now they were given hope and they were given status. Church was a home for the homeless. Churches in the twenty first century are used to doing mission ‘to’ the homeless. That is they run programs that allow the homeless to eat in Churches, sleep in Churches and get money from Churches for a variety of programs and direct needs. Many Churches see the marginalized as their reason for existence. Anyone they say is allowed to come to service. But how many Churches in the first world consist of the homeless, of the dispossessed, of the queerest of the queer. How many Churches see it as their reason for existence to become a Church consisting of the dispossessed.

Today we live in an era when Christians are still seen as representing and being represented by the power elites in North America rather than a Church over and against power in all its secular manifestations. The Church is often seen as just another face of that self same power. Much talk is given to the poor but it is often preached to congregations that are demographically anything but.

So the mighty acts of God, the history of the mighty acts of God are the history of God’s saving grace, God’s freedom from oppression for all the dispossessed, marginalized, all the hated and all the feared. And the story of Jesus is the model for how we go about doing just that. Imagine for a moment and you are trying to scale the Berlin Wall. What would the Christian message be to you? Let me hazard a guess. The Christian message would be that although you might die getting over this wall, did you know that the wall is going to come tumbling down just like that? And that freedom will reign for your children and your children’s children.

Imagine if you will that you were a denizen of the Gulag, you were destined to die in the fifties with no name and no marker on your grave building some great highway for the Soviet Union. What would the message of hope be from a God of grace and a God of might and a God who delivers God’s people out of oppression. That message would be this one. It would be ‘Did you know that with all its might the Soviet Union would be gone in a twinkling of an eye. Even there there would be elections, there would be freedom to come and go across its borders, even there the Gulag would be dismantled!’

Imagine if you would that you were a gay or lesbian and just had your marriage annulled by the powers that be in the United States. What would the message of hope be, what would the Christian message to you be? The Christian message of God’s freedom of oppression would be this one, just north of the border the law changed, just like that! It’s just a matter of time before it changes down there too. It’s just a matter of time. You know that despite the fact that 51% voted for Bush 49% voted against. That even the fact that same sex marriage is on the agenda is a miracle. That after all George Bush in comparison to Genghis Khan, to Hitler…nothing, he’s a walk in the park.

Imagine what the message of Christian hope would be if you’re just trying to get through another half an hour without a drink. The message of Christian hope would be that you might be powerless over the alcohol, the drugs, that have you now so addicted but you know that there is a power far greater than yours, a power of love and saving grace and that power will get you through this half hour, this hour, this day, this year. That this power will save you.

Imagine if you came into a Church looking to create Heaven now and you look around that Church and you see incredible difference, you see people from every walk of life, people who disagree on just about everything but this thing, that it’s important and necessary to build a community of grace, a community of acceptance, that this is the critical task at hand, that we need a safe place for people who are not safe out there. This would be the message of hope, that we have built such a place, even if it means for those who come, another committee meeting, another round of politics, another round of dealing with someone crazy on the phone, even if it means that. This is the Christian message of hope, this message of hope is a saving grace.

Brothers and sisters, we sit in the presence of a miracle unfolding. You are the miracle unfolding. There are only few of us. There were only very few of them. You know when Jesus died there were only a handful of people, a handful of people left. Look at what has happened. Those handful have changed the very face of heaven and earth.