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Earlier this year, I went to St. Louis University to hear a lecture given by one of my colleagues, Pastor Tina Reyes. She was speaking to some student groups who wanted to understand better the conflicts in the Holy Land between the nation of Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. I was interested to hear how she would present hundreds of years of history in the space of an hour.
It’s not that simple to determine levels of injustice, compounded by time, complicated further by international relations and weapons and economies, not to mention different world religions. And a brief lecture is only a starting place, but it is a start.
Since I arrived early with Pastor Tina, I explored the meeting space, which was a huge hall filled with books. I was told this was a library of books no longer in circulation, so I guess the books were ornamental, but they were real. And accessible. It’s dangerous to let a Lutheran pastor roam in a room full of books.
The book that caught my eye that day had a red spine and large block letters: “God Is My Fuehrer.” Well, that sounds specific. I took a closer look and discovered the author’s name: Martin Niemoller. I remembered his name from a well-known poem of his:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me[1]
Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. That book I had spotted in the library, “God Is My Fuehrer,” is the American edition of the last 28 sermons he preached in his congregation in the fall of 1936 through the early summer of 1937, when he was arrested.
The preface of that book reads:
“To grasp the significance of the Hitler-inspired People’s Tribunal’s decision to release Pastor Martin Niemoller, charged with abuse of the pulpit for political agitation and treason against both the state and the people, you must know something about its role in Nazi Germany. Fundamentally, he was guilty, guilty in the Nazi view; hence this was an amazing triumph for the man’s personality. ‘The nation,’ he had said ‘has no eternal being though its everlastingness be repeated a thousand times.’
“Professing himself an evangelical Christian, he had openly rejected ‘German Christianity.’ Against the deification of the State—this State above all!—he had lodged his spiritual protest; he had declared: ‘We are ready to give unto the World, without [complaint], the things of the World. But if the World asks for the things that are God’s, then we must [courageously] resist, lest we give the World the things that are God’s; and for the sake of a comfortable life in a strange land lose our home.”[2]
I learned this book of sermons was published in England with the title “The Gestapo Defied.” In the first edition of this book, published in 1941, the preface, which doesn’t name an author, reads:
“There are few men whose name is as well-known throughout the world as that of Martin Niemoller. Probably no man has ever had so many prayers said for him as he has had. Even in the circles in the German nation in which people do not pray more questions are asked about him than about anyone else.”
So I could tell his political imprisonment was a big deal. That edition’s preface closes with these words:
“…the sermons will give every one an opportunity of forming [their] own judgment as to whether the statement put forth in the newspapers…that Niemoller is a pulpit agitator and has misused the pulpit for political purposes…is justified, or whether Niemoller has merely done what is his duty as a preacher of the Gospel.”[3]
Now why should Martin Niemoller, or his sermons or his life, matter in these days, some 80 years later? Because I’m interested in how faithful Lutherans, and particularly pastors and theologians among Lutheran leaders, saw the world through the lens of their faith. It’s easy for us now to look back at history and say that Adolf Hitler was a villain, but that wasn’t always obvious.
Evil doesn’t often announce itself in an obvious way; evil starts out looking reasonable. How can one tell when evil has gone too far? How can a faithful Christian respond? How can a faithful preacher speak of hope in God and also speak truth to power?
I confess that I’m self-interested because I care about preaching faithfully, and Lutherans are big into preaching contextually. Preaching contextually means that Lutheran preaching is based on God’s Word, which is ancient and timeless and eternal, but we’re not just leaving God’s Word in the past: we believe God’s Word is still speaking to us today because God is living and active and the Holy Spirit is always making things new.
God’s Word doesn’t change, but the world does. In times of big change, people of faith cling to the un-changing God: God who still cannot be manipulated, God who still prioritizes people who are vulnerable by investing directly in people, God who alone is eternal unlike any human institution.
Taking a moment to consider how we put God first is how this Reign of Christ Sunday came about in the first place. It was created by Pope Pius XI (the eleventh) in 1925—just short of one hundred years ago—after the first World War, during the rise of secularism and nationalism.[4] Now imagine, the pope is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, with a responsibility to lead faithful people in nations all over the world, with some of those nations at war with one another. Where’s a sign of unity among all these national and political differences?
That unity is Jesus Christ, the nonviolent human executed as a political prisoner, and also the crucified God. Jesus didn’t die so that we could feel righteous in taking up weapons against one another. Jesus didn’t die to make some of us right and others of us wrong. We will all answer to this Jesus on the day of judgment, and we long for that day of judgment because injustice has to end somewhere so that love can flourish, so that God’s will can be done and God’s dream for creation can come true.
In Sweden, this Sunday is called Judgment Sunday.[5] It used to be called Sunday of Doom.[6] And I don’t think this is about terrifying people into behaving better; I believe this our moment to meditate on how we take God seriously. Are we really so lacking in our humility that we would presume to tell God what to do? Are we so lacking in our humanity that we would write off those people with whom we disagree, show them no love, and instead choose to focus our energy on keeping our own selves righteous?
There is always the possibility we’re getting things wrong. Repentance exists for all of us, and repentance and forgiveness are only possible for us because of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
And this isn’t just a nice, comforting word to make you feel better: it’s a discipleship challenge. You’re not just done when your soul is at peace. You’re still alive in this world, a baptized agent of God’s mercy, and God desires the healing of all creation, and guess how God is gonna work? By investing in you. Your hands gathering food for people who are hungry, your ears listening in compassion to those who are grieving, your voice speaking on behalf of the voiceless and speaking against emboldened evils like white supremacy and telling the stories of the saints who invested their lives to glorify God.
God didn’t give up on Martin Niemoller, who as a young, patriotic man served his country in the German Navy, on U-boats during the first world war; then as a national conservative, he supported Adolf Hitler, who he believed would unite the country, and he even endorsed anti-semitic views. Niemoller also went to seminary to become a Lutheran pastor, like his father.
It was over time—and I would imagine many many conversations—that his views shifted, and he took the risk to preach against the Nazi government claiming power that belongs to God. He became a founder in the Confessing Church, which rejected the Christian nationalism that was taking over Protestant churches in Germany.
He did end up imprisoned for years, some of that time in Dachau, a concentration camp where many people were killed during World War II. Martin Niemoller survived. I suppose he could have stopped there, perhaps chastened by the whole experience. But he spent the rest of his life committed to nonviolence as a pacifist, using his voice as an anti-war activist and particularly campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He died in 1984 at age 92.[7]
It's not easy, in this complicated world, to follow a leader—a king, Jesus—whose realm is not from this world. But only this king can transform our sinfulness, can redeem our mis-steps, can hone our listening ears for the voice of truth.
O God, lead us in faith through this strange land where we now live, and bring us—through your mercy—to our true home in you.
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
[1] https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/ accessed on November 22, 2024.
[2] Martin Niemoller, God Is My Fuehrer, Preface.
[3] Martin Niemoller, The Gestapo Defied, London: William Hodge and Company, Limited, 1941, Preface.
[5] Ibid.
[6] One of my colleagues told me this during our text study.
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