Remembering a modern Saint and Martyr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945

Luke 9:57-62; Mark 14:32-42

Saint and martyr

A saint and a martyr have this in common. They are exceptional in their commitment to God, and for that commitment they are prepared to suffer disadvantage, torture and even death.

The English word "saint" invites the notion of holiness, and the word "martyr" comes from the Greek word ma/rtuj, which means "witness".

Both words are often used in the New Testament, and they are used to describe ordinary Christians. People like you and me who believe in Christ and haven been baptised into his reality.

All Christians are called "saints" because through faith and baptism they are sanctified, declared holy through the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

Christians who have die for their faith were called "witnesses/martyrs", with Jesus being confessed as the "true and faithful witness" (Rev 3:14).

A "saint" and a "witness" is a person who accepts responsibility for what they know and believe. They are people who stake their life on what concerns them ultimately, what is most dear to them in their conscience.

The Christian church has a tradition of saints and martyrs who chose death rather than denounce Christ or cease doing what they considered to be God's will.

This was prefigured in the Jewish Bible. We think of the suffering prophet Jeremiah or of the Maccabean martyrs who accepted death by crucifixion, rather than denouncing God's law.

In the Christian Bible we know the story of Stephen who was stoned for his faith in Jesus; and probably Peter and Paul also died a martyr's death. We read the moving stories of Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna and Bishop Ignatius of Antioch who were willing to die rather than renounce their saviour and Lord. In our own tradition in the 16^th century there were 5000 Anabaptists who were banned, tortured, drowned and burned because of their faith in Christ. In recent times Baptists in Russia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia were imprisoned and tortured by militant atheist; and regrettably in Spain and Brazil by the Roman Catholic Church.

A church that forgets its martyrs is in danger of forgetting that it was the crucified Christ who is the basis of our faith.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Today we want to remember a modern saint and martyr: Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

60 years ago, on April 9, 1945, the German Lutheran Pastor, ecumenical worker and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, went calmly to his death. As he was led out of his cell in the Concentration camp Flossenbürg (in Bavaria near Bayreuth) in the early hours of the morning, the prison doctor through a crack in the door observed him, without knowing then who he was. Later he recalled:

Through the half-open door ...¦ I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer.

The prisoner was ordered to strip. Naked under the scaffold, Bonhoeffer knelt for one last time to pray. Five minutes later, he was dead.

The immediate legal charge was that Bonhoeffer was part of an organisation ...“ Operation 7 ...“ that helped a small group of Jews to escape to Switzerland.

But, as is well known, the 39 year old theologian, who had written a book on the "Sermon on the Mount" and was a confessed pacifist, was also part of a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. His participation in the plot to remove Hitler obviously conflicted with Bonhoeffer's pacifism. His sister-in-law, Emmi Bonhoeffer, cited his reasoning. He told her: "If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver."

Three weeks after his execution, on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. A week after that, Germany surrendered, and World War II came to its end. The Flossenbürg Camp was liberated on April 23, two weeks after Bonhoeffer's execution.

The day before his execution Bonhoeffer had drawn the British Payne Best aside and given him a message for George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester. The message contained his last recorded words: "This is the end ...“ for me the beginning of life."

Allow me to pick out a couple of emphases from that short but rich life. Emphases that may help us in our feeble attempts to take our faith in Christ seriously.

Faith and politics

On the basis of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ, Bonhoeffer affirmed that reality is one. The world should not be divided into different spheres, into holy and profane. Christians should not flee into the safe harbour of the church, nor should they simply identify with the world.

While "religion" tends to separate reality into holy and profane, sacred and secular, Bonhoeffer affirms that reality cannot be divided into two spheres, into "the one divine, holy, supernatural and Christian, and the other worldly, profane, natural and un-Christian." In Jesus Christ these two spheres have become fused to constitute one reality. "In Jesus Christ the reality of God entered into the reality of the world."

Consequently, Bonhoeffer rejects two alternatives.

There is the sectarian alternative that Christians tend to withdraw from the world. Let the world be the world. The church which is often portrayed as a ship would then stay in the safe harbour and never brave the storms of life.

And then there is the liberal alternative where Christians and the church so identify with the ways of the world that the impression is given that the world does not need the Gospel and that people must not be challenges with the option of faith in Christ.

Bonhoeffer comes out of a tradition where faith and politics were clearly separated.

But then in 1930/31 when he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York he became good friends with the French pastor Jean Lasserre and he attended the African American Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. In this new context with these new associations he began to understand that faith and life, faith and existence, faith and obedience cannot be separated. They cannot even be seen as a sequence. They must be seen as a dialectic unity. A unity of life. Life and faith is a whole. It should not be divided into different spheres.

Faith therefore does not withdraw from life. Indeed, since faith is faith "in Jesus Christ", therefore faith cannot withdraw from life. In Jesus Christ, his humanity, God has taken the world on board.

When Bonhoeffer was therefore confronted with the persecution of Jews and with the evil of Hitler's ideology, the situation took on the dimension of "call". Will you engage or will you withdraw (as the church then and, indeed, too often has done!). Bonhoeffer engaged!

In 1939 Bonhoeffer went a second time to America and entertained the possibility of staying there. But he stayed only a month and then decided to return to Germany. He expressed his thoughts to Reinhold Niebuhr:

...¦ I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will 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 ...¦ Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security ...¦.

For Bonhoeffer there was no way to avoid political action if one wanted to be a relevant and credible Christian.

The call to radical discipleship

Yet in whatever Bonhoeffer did came out of his allegiance to Jesus Christ.

He became disillusioned with the established, the official churches (and regrettably it must be said that the German Baptists were no exception!). They had failed their members by conveniently overlooking that Jesus Christ is the one and only word that the church must hear, trust and obey in life and in death. They chose the option of compromise with what was popular and convenient ("liberal" option) or they simply withdrew from political responsibility ("sectarian" option). For Bonhoeffer the church was so pre-occupied with its self survival that it had lost the credibility of being bearer of the gospel.

But where to look for renewal? Where to look if one wanted to reform the church? Where to look if preaching is to gain its credibility again?

Bonhoeffer turned his attention to the "Sermon on the Mount". That is quite interesting. Because in Lutheran teaching the Sermon on the Mount was considered "law" from which Christ needs to liberate us. But for Bonhoeffer it contained the promise to reclaim the name of Jesus Christ in a new way.

Two things are worth mentioning.

1. Faith as discipleship.

When Jesus calls, he calls people to follow him. "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head," he said. Into that strange and adventurous existence he calls people. All else in life becomes secondary: "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Not faith as doctrine, not faith as a liturgy, not faith as a comfortable feeling, but faith in Christ as an invitation to engage with life and its challenges.

2. Bonhoeffer made the interesting distinction between "cheap" and "costly" grace. We should not forget that grace is tied to Jesus Christ who lived in obedience to God's will and who was killed on a cross. Therefore we need to be careful of not cheapening the grace of God.

Our own spiritual forebears, the Anabaptists of the 16th century, marked the difference between the formal faith of many Christians and their more serious attempt to follow Jesus by distinguishing between a "sweet" and "bitter" Jesus. Conrad Grebel from Zurich wrote to Thomas Muntzer in Germany in the beginning of the 16^th century: "... today ... every man wants to be saved by superficial faith, without fruits of faith, without baptism of trial and probation, without love and hope, without right Christian practices, and wants to persist in all the old manner of personal vices ...." And Hans (John) Denck summarizes the Anabaptist ethos of Christian discipleship: "... none may truly know (Christ) unless he follow after him with his life. And no one can follow after him except in so far as one previously knows him."

The same emphasis we find in Bonhoeffer. We know Jesus Christ by hearing and obeying his call wherever it may lead. We know where this celebration of life led Bonhoeffer.

The compassionate God

I finally want to mention an emphasis that has exercised the Christian church from its beginnings. It is the question how we can bring "Jesus" and "God" together. How can we think "Jesus", the real Jesus, the Jesus who was opposed, betrayed, sentenced, tortured and executed, and "God" together?

We confess that in Jesus, God has made God's nature known. We read in the Gospel of John: "No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known."

But then Jesus did not just live a comfortable life, walking with some friends through the green meadows of Gallilee. He was opposed, betrayed, forsaken, tortured, executed.

So obviously the question arose: how does God feature in all that? Was God opposed, betrayed, forsaken, tortured, executed? Can God be weak? Can God suffer?

Here is a brief quotation from a letter that Bonhoeffer wrote from prison:

The God who is with us, is the God who forsakes us [Mark 15:34]. ... In the presence of God we live without God. God allows himself to be pushed out of the world on to the cross. God is powerless and weak in the world and only as such and in such a way is he with us and helps us. According to Matthew 8:17 it is clear that Christ does not help us because of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness, his suffering! Here is the decisive difference to other religions.... only the suffering God can help us. ...¦ (16.7.1944).

The reference to Matthew 8:16f.: reads "That evening they brought to Jesus many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases."

The point that Bonhoeffer wants to make is also addressed by the hymn that we sang earlier ...“ based on the poem Christians and pagans (1944) .

He distinguishes between the way of religion, where God is functionalized to meet our own needs and interests, and the Christian understanding of God where God shares in our struggles and we share in God's suffering:

In the first stanza he describes the way of religion in general:

People go to God in their time of need,

pray for help, ask for fortune and bread,

for being delivered from sickness, guilt and death.

All of them do so, Christians and pagans.

This stanza speaks of the religious aspiration of all people (including Bonhoeffer, including us, of course!). People want God to supply their needs. We have needs and desires and problems ... God is there to meet them. God is there to make up for our inadequacies. God fills the gaps. And if God does not deliver, then we blame God, or we turn away from God. That is the way of religion. This way Bonhoeffer began to question in prison. He says in the famous letter of July 16, 1944:

God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!).

The second stanza seeks to capture the Christian understanding of God:

People go to God in God's time of need,

they find him poor, scorned, without shelter and bread,

they see him involved with sin, weakness and death,

Christians stand with their God in God's suffering.

Here he brings out what he sees as "the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions." He says in one of his letters:

Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machine (the one to deliver the goods that we need and can't deliver ourselves). The Bible directs people to God's powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.

What he learned from the Sermon on the Mount, what he practised in his commitment to non-violence, what he experienced in prison begins to open the curtain to what it means to think, to live "God" in terms of the "crucified Christ".

Can you not stay awake with me and for me for one hour, Jesus asked his disciples in Gethsemane. Christians stay with God in God's time of need.

Yet all this presupposes what is said in the third stanza:

God goes to all people in their time of need,

satisfies body and soul with his bread,

God dies for Christians and pagans alike on the cross,

and forgives them both.

We can only go to God and stay with God, because on the cross, God has come to us, to all people and forgiven them.

Conclusion

Today, my friends, we remember a modern saint and martyr. He cannot create faith in us. Only God through God's Spirit can do that. But a person like Dietrich Bonhoeffer can help us to shape our faith in Jesus Christ. He can become an example of the grace of God as it touches the nitty gritty of life..

We have seen that faith in Christ must be lived in the market places of life. Therefore faith and politics cannot be torn apart. We accept responsibility for our faith in the arena of life.

We have seen that faith in Christ calls us to follow Jesus in radical discipleship. That is not morality. It is the journey of life, what Jesus himself called the abundant life.

And we saw finally that God is not removed, not separated from us in splendid isolation, but that God's power is his love in which he freely shares his being with us. God's holiness is his willingness to bear our burdens and share our sufferings.