Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 10, 2007

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the 7th Chapter. (Luke 7:11-17)

Soon afterwards Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When Jesus saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The young man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people.” This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Let us pray. Our loving and gracious God, you call us to see where your spirit is at work in the world; help us to be attentive and respond. In your name, we pray. Amen.

Springtime brings new life and, with new life, the opportunity to observe the world of little creatures up against the brutal world of glass and concrete. That is the natural world up against what we have come to think of as industry and civilization. Rabbits darting down the alley to avoid oncoming cars; ducks searching for a path across busy parkways; raccoons meeting their fate along the side of the road.

Such was the case a few weeks ago when our middle-school choir was scheduled to sing at the Lake Harriet band shell in south Minneapolis. Just twenty minutes before they were scheduled to go on stage, my daughter Kate and her friend Zowie discovered a tiny sparrow struggling on its back, unable to flip over and fly as sparrows do. It looked as if it had unwittingly crashed into the human-made large panes of glass around the band shell, and now it lay wounded, still struggling for its life. Even though it was just a few minutes before the choir was to process onto the stage, Miss LeMay, our kind music teacher, let us carry the little bird—whose name had now become Linda—to the car, where we emptied the softballs out of the bucket and carefully situated the little creature upright in the bottom, where it could spend the night, until it could be taken to the wildlife rehabilitation center early the next morning, where one of the veterinary fathers told us we could go.

I don’t know if you have ever been to this lovely little place—it is north of Highway 36 on Dale—but when I arrived with the little bird in the softball bucket, I was impressed with the care given to each little creature that had arrived. There was a little girl and her dad with a baby raccoon that had wandered, lost and orphaned, into their back yard. There was a turtle that had been hit; it was still alive, but its shell was cracked. And when it was my turn, the rehabilitation worker took the little bird Linda in her hands and examined her and, before I left, assured me that the little creature, with some attention, would recover from a head injury in a few days. When she heard the story of the band shell and the concert, she gave me enough wildlife stickers for each student, and she said, “Give that kind teacher a sticker as well.” And then she gave me a card copy of a quotation hanging on the wall of the center. It is from a book entitled “The Outermost House” by Henry Beston, copyright 1928. It reads like this:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of creatures. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, humans in civilization survey the creature through the glass of knowledge and see thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by humans. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

As I drove to Immanuel, I couldn’t help but think of the one who said, “Consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air,” and reminded his hearers time and again that not one sparrow falls to the ground without God knowing and caring about it. The thought of how much closer are our children and youth and often their teachers to the spirit of the ones so moved with empathy and compassion for the smallest of things, and the least of these.

This is surely the case of the Jesus that we meet in Luke, Chapter 7, who, as always, in spite of the push and the shove and the hurry of the crowd, suddenly stopped, for no apparent reason, to attend to a mother whose child is ill; for no apparent reason, other than that she is there along the path to wherever they in their hurry are going. And Jesus stops, turns, touches the child of the destitute widow, and the child is restored to life, guaranteeing security and a future for the mother as well. And all of the people, we are told, glorify God, recognizing that a great prophet has arisen among them. It is a remarkable picture of divine compassion for the most vulnerable ones who happened to be in the path along the road. These are the ones deserving of special attention and care, for no other reason than that they are there.

The Spirit of God at work in this picture is the same one captured by the psalmist in that beautiful psalm, Psalm 146, for today:

Happy is the one whose help is the God of Israel,

whose hope is in the Lord, their God,

who made heaven and earth;

the sea and all that is in them;

who keeps faith forever,

who executes justice for the oppressed,

who gives food to the hungry,

who watches over the sojourners,

and upholds the widow and the orphan.

This past week, I had the wonderful privilege of attending a pastors’ conference at Augsburg College on “The Life and Teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” My dissertation advisor from Union in New York, Larry Rasmussen, was in town; he was the keynote speaker, as one who wrote perhaps the first definitive work on Bonhoeffer, as early as 1972.

Bonhoeffer is best remembered as the young Lutheran pastor and theologian who organized the resistance movements that opposed the national socialism of the Third Reich, and wrote volumes of theology and ethics in response to it. This time around in my study and reflection, I also paid attention to biography, that is, how the phenomenon of a Bonhoeffer could happen under such historical circumstances as the Nazism of the Third Reich.

Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1906, one of eight children of a prominent neuroscientist at the Unviersity of Berlin. His grandfather on his mother’s side had been a chaplain for the emperor and frequently was at odds with the emperor for his political views on behalf of the poor. The Bonhoeffer family, coming out of an aristocratic background, represented a set of sensibilities for all that was good and beautiful in life and believed that the rise of the Third Reich with Hitler was the barbarization of all good things German: Gerchet, Schiller, Bach, and hymns of Paul Gerhardt.

As a child growing up in the Bonhoeffer household, a young Dietrich, as well as his brothers and sisters, had always been encouraged to seek out the views of others different from your own and to try to put yourself in another person’s shoes. And so at the age of 24, in 1931, when Bonhoeffer traveled as a visiting scholar to Union in New York, he regularly attended and taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Black Baptist Church in Harlem. Bonhoeffer was as captivated by the Spirit of Christ at work in the black church in America as he was deeply troubled by the depth of the “race question,” as he called it, in his experience in America.

But it was precisely this sensitivity to the situation of African Americans in New York that enabled him to draw a parallel to the situation of the Jewish people upon his return to his beloved Germany under the Third Reich, and thus begin the active organization of the confessing church and resistance movement opposing Hitler through the 1930s. It was such a sensitivity to the needs of the most vulnerable, simply because they were there, that motivated him to engage the question of the Christians’ responsibility in the world, and later to write, first, The Cost of Discipleship, then his volume on Ethics, and eventually, finally, Letters and Papers from Prison.

On the first page of every one of his books, Bonhoeffer begins with this question: “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” For the call of Jesus, the Christians in each and every age, he said, was not to a new religion but to life and responsible actions in the world. The Jesus that Bonhoeffer met in the Gospels was the Jesus, in Bonhoeffer’s words, who was the man for others, acting on behalf of those who needed assistance for the sake of life.

The God who we see revealed in Jesus then, according to Bonhoeffer, is not only the compassionate God, but the one who engages our strengths for the sake of the world. Jesus then, in his writings, is the man for others, and the church is the church for others. And wherever the church, in whatever age, denies its role on behalf of the vulnerable, it forfeits its right to be the church.”

As a child growing up, I learned Bonhoeffer loved the stories of the Brothers Grimm and other fairy tales. What Bonhoeffer saw in Nazi Germany was a situation that was a perfect reflection of the beloved fairy tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. ”All we are missing,” he said, “is the voice of the child at the end.” “The Christian and the Church then are called to be the voice of that child, in each and every age, for the sake of others and for the sake of the world.”

Bonhoeffer was just 37 years old when he was arrested by the Gestapo on April 7 of 1943, and only 39 when he was executed at Flossenbürg in April of 1945, just days before Germany was liberated by the Allies. But the spirit of his work lives on in the heart of Christians yet today.

My advisor, our resource for this seminar, has spent a lifetime seeking to understand the life and witness of Bonhoeffer, as well as communities throughout Europe at that time who mysteriously harbored Jewish people and helped them to escape. And one of them that he told us about this past week was a little French Huguenot village known as Le Chambon, and over the years it had captured his attention in the course of his study. One day, a number of years into his work, he was at a conference at Vanderbilt University in this country, and he met a professor who had been a teenager at the time in that very same little town of Le Chambon, when the Jewish people were being harbored and helped to flee. And when Larry asked him why that particular little town had become righteous Gentiles, the professor said because it was a town that remembered its own suffering. They thought of the Jewish people as Old Testament people who needed their help; they took them into their homes and called them relatives. Every year, the professor said, the people of this little town made a pilgrimage to the graves of their own Huguenot martyrs. “We could smell evil,” he said, “and we knew what, in the name of Christ, we must do.”

“In Christ, we are invited to participate in the reality of God and in the reality of the world at the same time—the one not without the other,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote. “The reality of God is disclosed only as it places me completely into the reality of the world. But I find the reality of the world always borne, accepted, and reconciled in the reality of God. What matters is participating in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today, and doing so in such a way that I never experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, nor the reality of the world without the reality of God.”

In the push and shove of the crowds along the road, the Jesus we meet in the Gospel never fails to stop and attend to the one for others. And, therefore, this image of the one who became human was crucified and is risen, and whose spirit lives on in this Pentecost seasons, calls us, whether along the parkway, at a band shell, at the office, or reading the paper in the morning, to notice where God might already be at work in the world for others.

God is already at work in the world for others. All we need to do is be there.

Amen.