Choose your foolishness

This sermon was sent in by Bill Lewellis, Bethlehem,PA and written by The Rev. Andrew T.Gerns, who gave us permission to post it here.

Many thanks to both of you!

Martyred April 9, 1945

Choose Your Foolishness

The Rev. Andrew T. Gerns
Rector, Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a foolish man. He was a brilliant theologian, a gifted pastor, and very foolish. He lived in Germany when the National Socialists rose to power in 1933. Early on he worked in opposition to the Nazis, eventually going to serve two Lutheran congregations in London where he preached and worked against the Nazi. He came to the United States where he lectured at Union Theological Seminary in New York City when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939.

But Bonhoeffer was a foolish man. Instead, he returned to Germany and worked with the resistance in Germany. In the 1930’s he was a founder, along with others, of the Confessing Church movement—raising up a church that was opposed to the unchecked nationalism and super-patriotism that has swept through the German Churches as the Nazis rose to power.

Bonhoeffer was foolish because he advocated a non-violent approach to opposing Hitler. To stand against the military might and the police state power of Nazism with nothing more than ideas seems foolish indeed. And yet it must have been a threat to the regime because in early April, 1943 he was arrested and thrown into a Berlin jail. A year later, after one of the many failed attempts on Adolph Hitler’s life took place in April, 1944, he was sent to Buchenwald and later to the SS Prison Schoenberg. A year after that, he was taken out of a church service at the prison and hanged. As he was escorted away, he said to another prisoner “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.” Bonhoeffer was hanged the next day, April 9, 1945—sixty years ago--at Flossenburg Prison.

Bonhoeffer was foolish also because he gave up the relative safety of going along with the prevailing direction of his church in supporting, or at least tolerating, what Nazism was doing to German culture. He was foolish because came to understand that the strict pacifism of his early opposition was outweighed by the harm of not eliminating Hitler. He accepted responsibility for his actions, and went to his death filled with faith. That seems foolish, too.

The lessons for the lesser feast of Dietrich Bonhoeffer teach us that what we consider wise in our daily transactions are pretty foolish in God’s eyes. What God considers wise is really foolish in the world! Proverbs 3:1-7 teaches us to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight” and “Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.” In a culture where we taught to be self-reliant, to always be a leader, and to always stand on one’s own, this advice seems strange. This scripture teaches us to rest in God’s wisdom, even when we think we might know better.

The Gospel is even more foolish. In Matthew 13:47-52, Jesus teaches us that God’s kingdom is like a fisherman who draws a net full of fish and who sorts out the good from the bad; or a household who inventories his goods and sorts out the useful from the useless. We often leave that sorting to God, and we certainly are to be wary when we start sorting other people out on God’s behalf. But there is a kind of sorting that must happen within us. We have to choose what kind of foolishness we want to live: do we want to chase after the foolishness of the world, with an endless chasing after wealth, or power, or acceptance, or material things. Or would we chase after God’s foolishness that is grounded in faith, that seeks justice, and stands up for the poor, the outcast or the weak?

Today, if you read or listen to the popular media, much of what has become the New Religious Establishment (aka The New Right) would tell us two contradictory propositions at once: that (their brand of) Christianity is oppressed by the culture at large; and, second, that the way to solve this is to legislate narrow religious values and run the courts according to narrow religious percepts. It is the world’s foolishness to believe that political power is the way to righteousness with God.

We must beware of strident religion. We are seeing today a potent mixture of Christian symbol and patriotic fervor at work. Left unchecked, it creates the false notion that to be a Good Christian equates with being a Good American—of a certain political party. This is the kind of foolishness that got the German Church into trouble in the Nazi era. They lost their ability to moderate, let alone critique, the Nazis because they either feared reprisal or bought into their ideology. The Confessing Church movement worked to free the Gospel from the constraints of culture and that meant standing mostly against the Nazis but also made the communists unhappy, too.

God’s foolishness is a hard road. God’s foolishness is costly. God’s foolishness is also redemptive. Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid for his foolishness with his life. He understood something that we often miss in the midst of our own anxieties: God foolishness is our power to keep the world demands at bay. In God’s foolishness the poor and the weak find a voice. In god’s foolishness justice rings. In God’s foolishness we discover the Risen Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a fool alright; God’s kind of fool.