A Bonhoeffer moment

 

Psalm 25: 1-10
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 1, 2024

Rectangular granite slab, on it a bronze sculpture in the form of a kneeling male torso in an abstract form, resembling a cross. The inscription DIETRICH BONHOEFFER is on the granite slab in front.

Last weekend a few of us went to go see the new film about German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was arrested and executed by the Nazis in April 1945 for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. I wore my t-shirt from Clackamas UCC that reads “The Gospel is antifascist”. I knew there was controversy surrounding the film and Angel Studios, the media company that distributed it, so I was prepared to view the movie with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. Which is not a bad way to approach many films as they are asking you to suspend your disbelief.



When I posted on social media that I was going to see the movie, a colleague and a few friends from seminary objected to the movie strongly, one saying that they would wait until it would be shown on a streaming service, not wanting to give Angel Studios their money, to another vowing not to see it at all. A review in The Christian Century called the movie “dangerous” because in the film, rather than watch Bonhoeffer’s struggle with using violence against Hitler, we witness Bonhoeffer declare that he has no hands but dirty hands, that in effect he sees this act of violence not only as a necessary evil but morally justified. Will God forgive us if we do this, his friend Eberhard asks. Without batting an eyelash, Hollywood Dietrich replies, “Will God forgive us if we don’t?”



Actors in the film and members of the Bonhoeffer family have written open letters, expressing their fear that this film could be used to support violence and Christian nationalism, the very things that Bonhoeffer resisted and worked against. And with good reason. Tucked away in the foreword to Project 2025 is a reference to Bonhoeffer, calling “open-border activism” an act of cheap grace, revealing that the authors have no concept at all what cheap grace is.



Those who have misappropriated Bonhoeffer and his moral struggle refer to a Bonhoeffer moment—when nonviolence is no longer an option against evil. Instead, a moral clarity of good and evil arises that supports acts that previously would have been rejected outright.



Meanwhile, in Psalm 25, one attributed to David—someone who justified lies and violence for his own benefit—he prays that God would direct his path, teach him and lead him in God’s truth. David knows he is a sinner, someone who turns from God’s ways and seeks only their own way. He also knows that it is the humble who find God, who listen and learn from God’s wisdom. Maybe that’s what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”.



When we seek our own way and think that we can achieve moral clarity on our own, it is then that we become lost. When we surround ourselves only with people who think and sound and look like us, we become like the sycophants we denounce. History shows us it is not religion that gives us the ability to be moral, rather it is empathy that teaches us the difference between right and wrong. And diversity teaches us about empathy, how to have compassion for people who are different from us.



At the end of the Bonhoeffer film, the writer/director Todd Kormanicki indulges in a sentimentalized piece of fiction, having Dietrich pastor to his fellow prisoners by serving them Communion on the eve their execution. Kormanicki has Dietrich include in that circle a Nazi officer who sympathizes with him, creating a false equivalency between the actions of Peter and Judas and an officer of the Third Reich. Jesus doesn’t expect us to tolerate intolerance or sympathize with it. Jesus didn’t invite the Roman centurion to his table but rather his flawed, compromised inner circle of friends, none of whom could be found when Jesus faced his own death.



When we approach this Table, we come not with moral clarity or superiority but with the humble confession that we are all compromised. We live in and benefit from a system that is also killing us. None of us have clean hands but we also do not wish to dirty them any further. And so, we come for the forgiveness that heals us from the shame that keeps us exactly where we are so that we can be free to imagine another way.



Only days before he was murdered, another idealized disciple of Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr. said to his friend Harry Belafonte that he believed that after so long integration would happen, that they would get the civil rights laws but that he was afraid they would be integrating into a burning house. He could see then that America had lost what little moral vision it had and that Black people had struggled to get into a system that was and is morally bankrupt by self-interest, clouded by the need to be the best and the ever-increasing need for more.



Harry then asked him, “Well Martin, what then are we to do?” Dr. King replied, “We must become the fire fighters. Let us not stand by and let the house burn.” Not moral clarity that justifies but moral honesty. That’s the real Bonhoeffer moment, when we struggle with our role, our complicity in the mess, the evil of this world but at the same time, we do not stand by and let the house burn. Instead, we say, “Send me, send us.” The only real moral clarity in the Bible is how we are to treat the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner and how we are to behave with our money and our neighbor. And that is where our hope lies. Amen.

Benediction

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison,
“Blessing means laying one’s hands on something and saying,
‘Despite everything, you belong to God’.
This is what we do with the world 

that inflicts such suffering on us. 

We do not abandon it, repudiate, despise or condemn it. 

Instead, we call it back to God."

May you be blessed and hope-filled
knowing that on your worst day
you belong to all that is
good, holy, and true.
And that you have power
to restore and to call the world back to Love. 

Amen.