God’s promises mean we do not need simple answers

First Sunday of Advent, Year C
1 December 2024

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

I have had anxiety for most of my life. This was mitigated first by my grandfather whom I loved dearly, and then by the church where I learned that I was loved, loved by God and it was in liturgy and community that this took on form and became real for me.
Many people experience from anxiety. In my case it took a few decades to figure out that what I was experiencing had a name.

Many of us worry about the world we live in. It may be the wars in Ukraine or the Middle East (the ones we are more aware of), climate change, government deficits, housing, inequity, the toxic drug supply, addictions, loss of species, polarization, or you fill in the blank. What these things have in common is that they cause us anxiety. And regardless of the specific issue we are most concerned about, we observe the waning of an old world order without knowing what may take its place. Our anxiety is rooted in loss and uncertainty.

It used to be that readings like today’s seemed strangely removed from our experience, which is likely why people were tempted to see them as prophecy of bad things to come, the kind of things doomsday prophets would be saying, tied to a call to repentance, “Smarten up today. Repent or else!”, Or “God is going to get you!”

But the call to repent is absent from this section of Luke’s Gospel. That makes it clear that this is not a “repent or else” kind of text. Rather, by the time Luke was writing this, what is described in these verses was the experience of Luke’s community. Insurrection, wars, and persecution. The temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD, extinguishing a rebellion.

So if we have anxiety about the world we know as ending, if you find yourself saying regularly, “What is the world coming to?”, then our reading is the perfect match.
The thing is that we neither have experience with the disintegration of the existing order, nor do we have a road map. The same was true for the disciples.
We are inclined to simply want to go back to the world we have known, for it offers stability, or to listen to those who say that they can fix the things that are wrong, without acknowledging the complexity of our situation.

A couple of weeks ago I sent you an e-mail expressing concern about a new film about the Confessing Church pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Having thought about it some more, it seems that the greatest error of the film is to depict Bonhoeffer as someone who always had clarity on what a situation required, a person who lived without doubts about his own moral discernment.

Victoria Barnett, one of the editors of the English edition of Bonhoeffer’s works, writes that when she gives a talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, almost always someone asks whether our current time constitutes “a Bonhoeffer moment.” She explains that the way the questioners perceive this “Bonhoeffer moment” is one of moral clarity as to how to act in a certain situation. This, she says, is “based upon an overly simplistic image of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Christian activist and hero, who – moved by conscience and faithfulness to his Lord, singlehandedly led his church in its fight against Hitler and was ultimately executed for rescuing Jews and trying to overthrow the Nazi regime.”1
Barnett suggests that those who survived WW II had a great need to find heroes that would lift them beyond their own moral failure but that Bonhoeffer never had ‘a Bonhoeffer moment.’

It is important to remember that the Confessing Church (the part of the church that spoke out against the Nazi regime) was small, that most Germans remained bystanders, including my family, and that most Confessing Church pastors were eventually drafted and ended up fighting for the regime they had once spoken against. In other words, the Confessing Church may have spoken the truth but it did not convince many, nor was it effective.

Also important to remember is that Bonhoeffer turned 27 shortly after Hitler came to power. While he had already completed two PhDs, he was a young man. At times he was ashamed of his failures and at other times desperate to retreat from the grim realities of life in Nazi Germany. He vacillated and often described his own life as “fragmentary.”

Barnett writes, “What does it mean to be a good person in such a time as this?” She quotes the American writer Flannery O’Connor who wrote, “The Christian writer does not decide what would be good for the world and proceed to deliver it. Like a very doubtful Jacob, he confronts what stands in the path and wonders if he will come out of the struggle at all.²

Considering Bonhoeffer’s participation in the assassination attempt against Hitler³ we must remember that not only was Bonhoeffer’s role a minor role in the plot, his job was merely to try to establish diplomatic relations with Great Britain, an attempt that failed, but Bonhoeffer remained convinced of the moral wrong of violence even as he participated in the plot.

Bonhoeffer insisted that what he was doing, while necessary, was at the same time a grave moral wrong for which he must repent and beg God’s forgiveness. In the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion. If we trick ourselves into thinking that we have full knowledge of good and evil, that we clearly see right and wrong, then we never have to question the moral purity of our actions. Because we are on the side of good against evil, we think that our actions – and our violence – must therefore be good.⁴

I am not suggesting that our current moment resembles Germany in the 1930s. There are too many of those comparisons already. What I am saying is that while Bonhoeffer was not the hero we want him to be in the way that his heroism makes difficult things look easy, he can still serve us as an example and encouragement in the way he accepted God’s claim on his life, in the way he did not extricate himself from his calling – Bonhoeffer spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and yet chose to return to Germany where in 1945 he would die at age 39, and in the way he struggled to discern a path in this to him unknown territory.

Barnett writes that O’Connor’s description of the Christian writer as a doubtful Jacob who speaks truth and wonders whether he may come out of the struggle at all fits many passages throughout Bonhoeffer’s writings, from 1933 until our final glimpses of him in 1945.

In 1942 Bonhoeffer wrote that the ultimately responsible question, “is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living.”

In the same letter (he is in prison) he asks, “Are we still of any use?” And yet he continues: “we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”

This is consistent with the parable of the Judgment of the Nations in Matthew 25 where the Son of Man judges by what we have done to the least of these. I would think that it, instead of whatever rationalizations we can come up with, is the way for the followers of Jesus to live into their calling. Prayer and alertness will help us in being faithful.

And despite all, and in the midst of the struggle to discern the way forward, we need not be afraid, for when we see these things taking place, we know that the Kingdom of God is near. “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”
Jesus says, “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Amen.