A number of disjointed things have been flying around in my mind over the last week or two – which is not unusual. What is unusual is that I’ve found myself drawing them together in preparing this talk – which is a bit of luck as I was supposed to be preaching last week until Simon asked me to swap with him.
The 3 disjointed items that have been cluttering up my brain are as follows. Firstly, having returned from a wonderful skiing holiday 2 weeks ago, I have found it tough to get my mind off the slopes and back to the desk. I’ve been having wonderful thoughts about how my skiing next year is going to get better and better so that I can tackle increasingly challenging runs and keep up with my kids!
Secondly, I’ve been thinking about OFSTED – little surprise there, in that it has been virtually the sole topic of conversation in our house over the past 2 weeks and finally I’ve been thinking about the Pope. That one you might find a bit more surprising but specifically, I have been thinking about the apologies the pope made this week for the wrongdoings of the church over many centuries. Then I read the two readings for today and all these disjointed bits started to come together around the subject of tests.
I probably need to explain this a bit more. Let’s start with OFSTED because that’s the easy bit as OFSTED is very much a test. It’s a test of a school’s ability to educate children and to develop them into well-rounded individuals and a test of an individual teachers skills in their chosen profession. It is also a test of the marital strength of those teachers whose spouses not only end up cutting out cardboard shapes and sticking work into books but also need to lend a sympathetic ear to the stresses of the day as recounted each evening.
OFSTED is a good old-fashioned test, like an exam. You know it’s coming, you revise for it and you want to do well. No one wants to fail a public test firstly, because it is public and, secondly, because you want to give it your best shot. So that was OFSTED.
Then there was the skiing. My thoughts here were slightly different. No public exams or tests to pass on this one. The test here is intimate and personal and is a test of nerve and courage. Are you willing to throw yourself off the side of a mountain with 2 thin planks strapped to your feet? Are you willing to allow your speed to build up to a level where you are convinced that if you wobble and fall you will condemn yourself to an alpine hospital for the week? Are you really going to allow your 9 year old son to get that far ahead of you and not try to catch up with him? These are very different tests. Personal tests of confidence.
One problem we now experience with skiing as a family is keeping our boys on their skis – and I don’t mean that they keep falling off, I mean that they have a desperate desire to get onto a snowboard. Now I don’t know if any of you have ever tried snowboarding but it strikes me as about as much fun as dunking your head in a tub of cold lard. The first problem with snowboarding is that learning is an incredibly bruising experience. You fall over all of the time – in fact you spend more of the time falling than you do sliding precariously down the slope.
As if the learning process was not bad enough to dissuade you, even when you’ve cracked it, you still have a major problem and that is that when you stop, you have to sit down – whereas on skis you merely stop. Now sitting on cold snow isn’t my idea of fun but the biggest problem is that you’ve got to get up again. This process of sitting down and getting up again is repeated every couple of minutes which, for me, categorises snowboarding as a pastime for the young or terminally fit.
So if snowboarding is such a painful pastime, particularly for the nether regions, why are my boys, and most other youngsters so keen to do it? The answer is of course because “it’s well cool” Snowboarding is seen as an extreme sport. It has it’s own fashions and it’s experts seem to take unbelievable risks in the pursuit of more and more extreme thrills. Their tests are on a different planet to the tests that I put myself to on skis.
So, we’ve got the public exam style OFSTED test, the internal test of courage and skill represented by skiing or snowboarding so where does the pope and his apologies fit in?
Well, one of the things that the pope apologised for was the church’s lack of moral courage in Central and Eastern Europe during the rise of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews. This was by no means unique to the Catholic Church, indeed the Protestant church in Germany formally succumbed to the pressure of National Socialism in conveniently adapting its doctrines to fit with the State view.
And that led me to think about the third subject which was the huge courage needed at that time in Germany to speak out as Christians against these outrages. This was a different kind of test again, a test of morale courage in the face of overwhelming odds and one very few people faced up to. I want to come back to this issue a little later but first lets go on to our readings for today and their tests.
The Old Testament reading is really the apocryphal story of a test of faith and obedience; namely Abraham’s willingness to obey God’s command by preparing to sacrifice his only and much loved son Isaac. God of course stops him doing this saying “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me”
The New Testament reading is different but no less challenging and tests the disciples (and indeed our) willingness to recognise Jesus as Lord and Saviour. As usual, the lectionary is frustratingly brief and enters this story at a particularly inconvenient time in terms of the context. Just preceding the passage you heard was a key point in the gospel where Peter, exhibiting the discipleship skills of the extreme snowboarder, goes out on a limb in responding to Jesus’ questioning about who the disciples say he is. Peter gathers his courage in his hands and responds to Jesus “You are the Messiah”. I’m sure there were gasps from the other disciples who were still metaphorically on the nursery slopes but Jesus rewards Peter’s courage in passing this key test with the famous statement “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church”.
In our passage today, Jesus continues this conversation by telling the disciples about the suffering that is to come and now Peter makes his big mistake and fails the next test. Clearly emboldened by his recent success, Peter goes for the double half pipe with triple salco (or whatever the snowboarding term is) and falls flat on his face. He berates Jesus about these statements on suffering and Jesus lays into him in return saying “Get behind me Satan, you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things”
Ouch – that’s a bit tough – so what’s going on here? Well to understand it, you need to understand what the traditional Jewish view of the Messiah actually was. The expectation was that the Messiah would come in kingly majesty with mighty power over everything. The Messiah would make Israel great again, would kick out the Romans and raise up the nation.
There is nothing to suggest that Jesus’ disciples had any other view than this. So poor old Peter, having stepped out on a limb to declare his belief in Jesus as Messiah was understandably confused when Jesus started talking about the suffering he was to endure. That can’t be right – the Messiah is all powerful. If there’s suffering around then surely he’ll be inflicting it not bearing it?
But of course it was right and Jesus came down hard on Peter to underline just how critical it was to change this mindset of what the Messiah actually was. Having done that, Jesus then turns to the assembled crowd and starts to teach them about discipleship in this new environment and the need to learn to leave self behind and to take up their cross and follow him. Jesus is giving a straight and honest account of discipleship as a tough road.
Peter in his response to Jesus’ predictions of suffering is protective as well as confused. It’s almost as if Peter doesn’t feel that God can handle all that suffering, that somehow it’s all going to go wrong and that Jesus needs a few strong words. It’s almost as if God isn’t big enough to handle all the hassle. And it is in this lack of understanding of the nature of God that Peter fails this test.
It’s a test that we probably all fail regularly. When our trust in God wavers and falters. When we think we know better than God. I want to come back to this theme in a moment but want to break to sing. Before I do, this issue of our misunderstanding of the nature of God brings to mind an amusing story that I found in an essay by Sarah Maitland the theologian and rector’s wife on the subject of A Big Enough God.
The story she relates occurred at the time that York Minster was struck by lightening and you may recall a lot of debate in the newspapers about whether this was an act of God visited upon a failing church etc. Let me read Sarah Maitland’s anecdote.
A few years ago, just a day or so after York Minster was struck by lightening, I was on my way to the local post office near my home, which is in a wretchedly poor part of Hackney, when I met an elderly woman. She was most distressed by this bolt from the heavens, this “Act of God” as the insurance people call it (which alone gives you pause for thought). She was very upset. Did I think, she asked, that God had done it on purpose as some newspapers were speculating? The post was about to leave and I was in a hurry, but how can anyone resist such a subject? “No” I said “I didn’t really think so” Did she? No, she said, she didn’t really think that God was like that. There was a pause, and I was poised to escape. Then she added, in what I can only describe as a tone of affectionate criticism, “But he should have been more careful; he should have known there’d be talk”
We talked earlier about tests. The exam type test of an OFSTED inspection, the personal test of courage of extreme skiing or snowboarding, the test of obedience of Abraham and the test of faith of Peter and the disciples in declaring Jesus as Messiah and in coming to terms with what that meant. I also talked about the test of moral courage that Christians faced in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s and I want to return to that and specifically to one man’s story to see what we can learn from that as our faith is tested in this new millennium.
The man is Dietrich Bonhoeffer and I want to spend a few minutes on his story. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau. His father was a prominent professor of psychology and his mother was one of the few women of her generation to obtain a university degree. The young Bonhoeffer became a renowned theological scholar and as part of the established protestant church in Germany, the German Evangelical church, became a vicar in 1928 serving in Germany, Spain and studying for a time in the US and later in the UK.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the German Evangelical church became embroiled in crisis. The church was always staunchly nationalistic and a lot of church members welcomed the strong leadership that Hitler brought after the chaos of the 1920’s and the Weimar Republic. One particular group, called the Deutsche Christians became the vocal supporters of National Socialism within the church and through that became increasingly influential.
The Jewish issue threatened to split the church with the Deutsche Christians arguing that Jews, as a separate race could not become members of an Aryan church even if they submitted to Christ and were baptised. They put forward an amendment to church doctrine known as the Aryan Paragraph to bring this into law.
Those church leaders who publicly opposed the Aryan paragraph actually did so, not on the grounds of the basic civil rights of the Jews and their right to be treated as equals but on the more esoteric theological argument that it was the church’s duty to convert and baptise Jews.
Bonhoeffer was passionately opposed to the Aryan paragraph and argued that if non Aryans were banned from baptism and then the ministry, then in Christian conscious ordained ministers should resign from the church and set up their own true church. This wasn’t a popular view with the church authorities who were more concerned with keeping in with the state.
Bonhoeffer became more outspoken and later in 1933 turned down an important parish post in Berlin in protest moving to a German speaking parish in London to continue his ministry and to allow him to tell the international Christian community what was going on in Germany. By the end of 1933, Deutsche Christian had effectively gained control of the Evangelical church and the Aryan paragraph became law. Bonhoeffer’s London parish, along with several others around Europe withdrew from the Evangelical church to set up the Confessing Church.
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1935 to help the growth of the Confessing church, teaching and preaching. In August 1937, Himmler issued a decree declaring the training of confessing church ministers illegal. Bonhoeffer spent the next two years continuing his work underground to avoid the attentions of the Gestapo who banned him from Berlin in 1938 and issued an order forbidding him to speak in public in September 1940.
In October 1940, Bonhoeffer took the greatest gamble of all. He offered himself with his international contacts as an agent for German Military Intelligence. This gave him the freedom to travel and he used trips to Italy, Spain and Scandinavia in 1941 & 1942 to gain foreign support for the German resistance movement and to spread knowledge of the Jewish deportations.
On a more active basis Bonhoeffer and other German resistance leaders actively spirited Jewish people out of Germany and siphoned state funds out of the country to support them. It was this last act that led to their detection and arrest by the Gestapo in April 1943.
Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in the Gestapo prison in Berlin, was moved to Buchenwald in February 1945 and to the Flossenburg concentration camp where on April 9th he was hanged. The SS doctor who witnessed his death later recalled a man who was devout, brave and composed. “His death ensued after a few seconds, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God”
His final message was to his good friend George Bell, Bishop of Chichester where he said “This is the end but for me the beginning of life”. Now how does that make you feel? Angry? Humble? Inadequate? All of those things? If ever a man responded to Jesus instruction to his disciples to take up their cross and follow him then surely Dietrich Bonhoeffer was such a man. How many of us would have had his courage to stand up and fight for Christian principle? How many of us would have passed that test?
Fortunately for us, we live in a time when a test of such magnitude is unlikely to face us, a life or death test of our faith – which is probably just as well – certainly for me. I fail a lot simpler tests than that on a daily basis. The challenges to my faith that I fail to pick up. The failure to declare my faith when I should. The failure to defend my faith when it is challenged by others. The preference to find the line of least resistance rather than rock the boat by proselytising too loudly or too forcefully – to go with the flow rather than challenge people.
Are we as disciples of Christ’s ministry on earth and promise in heaven willing to rock the boat? We may not have to challenge authority as blatantly as Bonhoeffer but challenging authority where it goes against the will of God is still needed. Can we pass that test?