The New England Church Pulpit New England Congregational Church UCC Aurora Illinois

On the gate that lead to the compound was an inscription that roughly translated means ‘everyone gets what they deserve.’ ‘It’s your own fault that you are here’ it proclaimed. Buchanwald was originally a work camp for all dissidents of the Third Reich but eventually was to be the prison, and for some their tomb, for Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other so-called misfits.

Inside the former camp was a display of artifacts of those who were imprisoned there, a grueling narrative of hatred leveled by those who believed their religion and race–and only their religion and race–were ordained by God. The cavalier attitude of the Nazi privileged was betrayed by such things as lampshades made of the tattooed skin and shrunken heads of executed prisoners, made for their amusement as trophies of their conquests.

I traveled to Germany last week with some clergy colleagues to follow the footsteps of the reformer Martin Luther, and along the way we encountered the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who fought against the atrocities of the Nazi machine. A prisoner of the Buchanwald camp, Bonhoeffer was murdered just a week before the Allies freed Germany for his participation in a plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer laid his life on the line to right the wrongs that were being perpetrated in the name of a pure race. Though unsuccessful in his own attempts, his voice loomed loud among the throngs to raise the consciousness of a people and a world against the atrocities. Without knowing it, he effected a change in the way things were toward the way they’re supposed to be. Perhaps the birds were singing for him. It was some comfort to think so.

It was just the day before that we visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin, opened within the last year to document the history of Judaism. The museum is shaped like a lightning bolt as a way of expressing the harsh, jagged life of the Jews and the Holocaust storm they endured. In the museum, in what is called ‘The Void,’ a large space looms up as a sculpture in it’s own right, poignantly thrusting the observer into participant in the void that has often been the pathway of the Jews. In this vaulted-ceilinged room, one confronts the sharp edges of the lightning bolt that divides the room in dark and strange ways. And on the floor one is forced to walk upon a sculpture entitled ‘Fallen Leaves,’ a collection of 10,000 faces cut from thick, heavy steel as they clank and echo in the hard-surfaced room like so many voices calling from the dead. There was no sun shining in this room; there were no birds singing either. Just the clinking and clanking of steel face hitting steel face as we walked on these layered, nameless faces.

The museum recounts not only the atrocities of the Holocaust, but the history of discrimination over the millennia of their existence. The foundation for the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany was laid hundreds of years earlier by Christians who wrongly accused the Jews of killing Jesus, formulated on the accusations of the gospels, particularly in John. It points out once again the extreme danger of reading the bible too literally and assigning all of its words to the mouth of God. How often in today’s world have we used the bible to club people rather than encourage them with good news. How often has the church been as guilty as Nazi Germany of effectively killing the spirits of those whom society proclaims as ‘getting what they deserve.’

In the film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it. His route takes him along streets that seem progressively darker and more deserted. The man’s fancy sports car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenaged guardians wear expensive guns and sneakers. He does manage to phone for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five young street toughs surround the attorney’s disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm. Just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver–an earnest, genial man–begins to hook up to the sports car. The toughs protest; the driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the group leader aside and attempts a five-sentence introduction to metaphysics: ‘Man,’ he says to the gang leader, ‘the world ain’t s’pposed to work like this. May you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s s’pposed to be. I’m s’pposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is s’pposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s s’pposed to be different than what it is here.’ (Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. Context, April 15, 2002)

Central to the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be. They ought to be as designed and intended by God, both in creation and in graceful transformation of creation. They are supposed to include peace that adorns and completes justice, mutual respect and goodwill, deliberate and widespread attention to the public good. The systems within a culture–whether political, educational, economic, social–should reflect the equality of all in the system, not just a few privileged individuals. It is systems harsh and subtly calculating that must be resisted in large and small ways.

Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little girl named Ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the camp. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend Guerda on a leaf. ‘Imagine a world,’ writes Guerds, ‘in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend.’ (The Art of Possibility, Benjamin & Rosamund Zander)

We are called to be co-creators with God. Things can be changed, if only in our little corner of the universe. A raspberry shared here, a note written to a discouraged soul there, an hour at a soup kitchen that gives some soul to the soup, a meal taken to a sick friend, a word of encouragement to a child, a letter to politicians asking for policies that do not discriminate. These are more than words and actions; they are re-creations of the way it’s supposed to be.

It seems incongruous that the birds should be singing and the sun shining in the midst of the atrocities of our present world. It seems blasphemous that congregations sing as we gather for worship without some resolve to transform a world gone mad with selfish ambitions toward a world the way it’s supposed to be. And yet the birds do sing, and the sun does shine, and congregations do gather for worship and go out to serve, and perhaps these are the signs, small though they may be at times, that redeem the incongruities of life. May we take our pitch from the birds rather than from the drone of the killing machine, and sing for the world to hear. Amen.

–Gary L. McCann

ECCLESIASTES 1-3

Meaningless! Meaningless! Says the teacher. Everything is utterly meaningless.
What do we gain from all our labor at which we toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.
All streams flow to the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.
Wisdom is meaningless. For with wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
Pleasures are meaningless. Though we deny ourselves nothing that we desire, even so everything is meaningless, like chasing after the wind.
Toil is meaningless. We may work diligently, with knowledge and skill, and then we must leave all we have to someone who comes after us who has not worked for it.

But to everything there is a time and a season for everything under heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die
A time to plant and a time to uproot.
A time for peace and a time for war.
A time to be silent and a time to speak.
God has made everything beautiful in its time.

TAO TE CHING
64
What is rooted is easy to nourish
What is recent is easy to correct.
What is brittle is easy to break.
What is small is easy to scatter.

Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.
The giant pine tree
grows from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the Master takes action
by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm
at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire;
what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people
of who they have always been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao [Way].
Thus he can care for all things.

65
The ancient Masters
didn’t try to educate the people,
but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers
people are difficult to guide.
When they know that they don’t know,
people can find their own way.

If you want to learn how to govern,
avoid being clever or rich.
The simplest pattern is the clearest.
Content with an ordinary life,
you can show all people the way
back to their own true nature.

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Copyright © 2002 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved.

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