SERMON 12 - St. Mary's Hall, Whaddon - Sunday 9 September 2012
Psalm 119:41-56; Exodus 14:5-31; Matthew 6:1-18
May the words of my
mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable to you oh Lord. Amen
[Psalm 19:14]
As some of you may know, I have recently returned from a few
days break in Poland – in Krakow to be precise - and during my stay I had the
opportunity to visit the sites of some of the worst atrocities ever committed
by Humankind against itself. Whilst
there I visited the former Jewish Ghetto and Gestapo Headquarters and cells in
Krakow, the factory of Oskar Schindler and the nightmarish and desolate locations
of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. As I reflected upon the massive human tragedy,
standing by the remains of one of the crematoria at Birkenau, the words of a
Jewish survivor of the Holocaust came to me ...
“God was never in this place, or if he was, he was certainly on holiday during
1939-1945 for he never heard any of our prayers”.
I have been struck and haunted by those words ever since I
heard them.
Yet, as we heard in our Old Testament reading from Exodus,
they are an echo of the thoughts of those earlier Jews who were led out of Egypt
by Moses and Aaron when their cry then was “Did
you lead us out to die in the wilderness because there were no graves in
Egypt?” It was a cry of despair and
disbelief that anything good could arise from the apparent suffering which was
all around them. There are countless
parallels between the suffering of the Israelites in the Old Testament and the
suffering of the Jewish people in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. As I looked around Birkenau,
it did indeed seem incomprehensible that the omnipotent, omnipresent God could
let such a thing happen; but I think that when we read the Old Testament again
in the context of these more recent events, we can make some sense of it all.
It is interesting to reflect upon the passage in Exodus which
tells us that God “will harden the heart
of Pharaoh”. Having gone through much to persuade Pharaoh to let the Jewish
people leave Egypt - ten awful plagues for a start – God now tells Moses that
he will set Pharaoh against them, to follow them and to try and stop them. But a greater demonstration of God’s power
lies ahead – as we know, the parting of the Red Sea which is one of those
illustrations of God’s power in the bible which is so well known by everyone –
indeed, sitting next to a fellow football fan at St. Mary’s only last Sunday –
he described an attack by Manchester United against Southampton’s defence as a
“parting of the Red Sea”. I promised him
that I would use that in a sermon sometime!
God explains his reasoning – that by doing this, God can
demonstrate his glory over Pharaoh and his army. The apparent pursuit will turn
to tragedy for the Egyptian monarch and his army when Moses, once the
Israelites have safely passed through the Red Sea, is instructed to stretch out
his hand for the waters to return and destroy the pursuers. The passage ends with the words “So the people feared the LORD and believed
in the LORD and in his servant Moses”.
On my visit to Auschwitz I visited the cell of Saint
Maximilian Kolbe whose feast day we recently celebrated on 14 August. Inside the cell there is an everlasting
candle flame which was lit by the late Pope John Paul II on a visit to the
notorious Nazi camp on 7th June 1979. Maximilian Kolbe’s story is one which does
indeed show that God’s presence existed in this part of Poland during the war
years.
Father Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar who, like many
other priests, was arrested and interned by the German occupying forces in
February 1941. His crime was printing and publishing material which recorded
the truth, as he saw it, of the effects of the German occupation upon the
Polish population. Priests came second,
only to Jews, on Hitler’s hate list and one SS officer is recorded as having
said – “if there are Jews in a transport
then they cannot expect to live more than two weeks on their arrival here – if
priests, maybe three weeks”.
Maximilian arrived in Auschwitz in May 1941 and survived
until 14th August 1941. It is the manner of his last few days on
earth and his death which show that his love of God and teachings of Jesus never
left him.
Whenever there was any escape attempt at the camp, ten
prisoners from the same barracks would be selected to die for each
escapee. On the last day of July 1941
ten such prisoners were selected to be taken to the notorious Block 11 where
they would be placed in solitary cells and starved to death. One of those selected, a Polish Army prisoner
of war, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was heard by Kolbe and others to cry out “My poor wife and children”. Kolbe
stepped forward and in an act of unselfish love offered to take the man’s
place.
Of the ten men who went into Block 11 that day, all but Kolbe
died of starvation but during their time they were heard singing hymns and
praying together albeit through the walls of their own individual cells. Kolbe,
having survived all his colleagues, eventually was killed in his cell by lethal
injection. One writer has described this
act as one “which brought new life by
death and was not, what the Nazis had intended, death of “undesirables”, death
to people who had ceased to be human beings. Their long period of suffering and
resilience led to reverence and respect. The world of violence was lost by this
one act”.
As I stood gazing into Kolbe’s cell, I recalled this heroism,
this monumental act of a simple kind loving priest and felt a warmth of hope
and of God’s love in that awful place.
Psalm 119 talks about the need to trust in God’s word and
commandments. Kolbe must have thought about some of those words during his time
in solitude and suffering “Hot
indignation seizes me because of the wicked, those who forsake your law. Your
statutes have been my songs, I remember your name in the night O LORD”. His prayers, his conversations with Christ,
meant that he was never ever really alone.
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus implores us to pray quietly
and humbly. After all, prayer is a
conversation with God through Jesus.
Back in the first century, the giving of alms was a means of
demonstrating righteousness in the eyes of God (“Those who perform deeds of charity and righteousness will have fullness
of life – Tobit 12:9) Yet many saw it as a means of demonstrating their
piety to others around them. For this
reason Jesus uses the giving of alms as his first example of humility in piety.
How good are you at prayer?
I often think that I am not very good at it. How should we pray? I am often left quite unmoved by some of the
long winded prayers I hear in public worship – prayers which tend to end up as
a personal shopping list by the intercessor or use words which are unfamiliar
to us today. Of course, there is no
wrong or right way to pray. Jesus
already knows what is in our hearts he simply wants us to acknowledge his
presence and talk to him as we would talk to a friend.
I am struck in this passage from Matthew by how simple and
normal Jesus makes prayer seem. Though he yearns to hear us he knows what we
need before we ask. He appreciates, like
any lover, our giving with no ulterior motive. However, bitterness will always
poison a relationship. We therefore need
to find God’s grace to forgive before we can engage in any meaningful
conversation with him.
Jesus has given us, in this passage, a basic pattern for
prayer. The Lord’s Prayer should be a
template for all our intercessions and conversations with Him. We need to keep asking for forgiveness for
our sins and those of others and his help to overcome times of temptation,
trouble and even, as Kolbe found, evil.
I often hear that people give the excuse that in their busy
life there is little time for prayer.
Let me let you into a secret, my best prayer time is when I am mowing
the lawn! I can have a conversation with
God with the mower whirring away below me. All my thoughts, frustrations,
dreams and confessions seem to bubble up and I can discuss them with Him.
Answers to prayer may not always be those you are
seeking. God’s idea of time and place is
often very different from our own. You
may not hear his word immediately, or even this side of the grave. I am sure that Moses prayed many times to God
to reach the Promised Land much earlier than his people eventually did; but
God’s plan did come to fruition but on a different time scale. You may pray for somebody yet never know when
or how that prayer was answered. Our
Faith is based on believing the power of God through prayer and the power of
the Holy Spirit.
Maximilian Kolbe never knew the power which his sacrifice and
prayers unleashed. The Polish sergeant
he saved lived to a ripe old age, although, ironically, he survived both his
wife and children: the spirit and memory of Kolbe’s sacrifice shines as a
beacon today amongst the dark satanic blocks of Auschwitz Main Camp and adds to
the shame of his Nazi persecutors. His
one act of selfless sacrifice and suffering to save one man because of his
belief in His Saviour, Jesus Christ, is an example to us all and a sign that
God was not, nor ever is, absent or “on holiday”.
Father, We ask that your
will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”.
Amen
-------------------------------
Before we finally affirm our faith
and say the Creed, I would like you to listen to about three minutes or so from
the 2nd movement of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony – entitled the “The
Symphony of Sorrows” which was the very first piece of music played at
Auschwitz after it’s liberation – on the occasion of the 50th
anniversary of the liberation in 1995. The words sung are those written on the
walls of a Gestapo cell in Zakopane in southern Poland by an eighteen year old
girl imploring her mother not to despair over her incarceration and certain
death:
No, Mother, do not weep,
Most chaste Queen of Heaven
Help me always.
Hail Mary.
Most chaste Queen of Heaven
Help me always.
Hail Mary.
Let us
reflect and pray on the life and sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe as we listen to
these few notes:
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