Sermon at Winterslow Baptist
Church -
Sunday 28th May 2017
Romans 12:9-21
“Marks of the True Christian"
Let
love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another
with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal,
be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in
suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints;
extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless
those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those
who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another;
do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser
than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what
is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on
you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave
room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will
repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they
are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap
burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome
evil with good.”
Let us begin with a prayer,
Father God, we bless and praise you that we can
meet here this morning without fear of persecution knowing that you are always
present; especially when we are assembled together as your Church. We thank you
that you gave us Your Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us to redeem our sins and
that we are forever forgiven. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit and,
in these current times of political and economic uncertainty and unrest, may
that same Holy Spirit and the example set by Etty Hillesum, the subject of this
morning’s talk, be there with us as an inspiration to us all in making and
keeping the presence of God deep within us even when the going gets tough. Amen
Last month,
Liz and I, together with my two children, Thom and Mary, visited Poland and
during our time there, Liz, Mary and I journeyed the 50 miles west from Krakow
to Oswiecim to visit the former Nazi concentration and extermination camps at
Auschwitz and in particular Auschwitz-Birkenau. For Liz and Mary, it was their
first visit, but for me it was my third.
Thom, having made a previous visit which he had found somewhat
distressing chose to stay behind in Krakow and visit a football stadium
instead.
On the two previous occasions that I had been
there I had been conscious of little or no bird song; Birkenau especially
having an overwhelming atmosphere of great evil and hopelessness as I had gazed
upon the remnants of the destroyed Gas Chamber and Crematorium II where the
“Angel of Death”, Dr Josef Mengele, had carried out his cruel experiments on
twins and where so many Jewish men, women and children had perished within a
matter of a few hours and in some cases minutes of their arrival at the Camp.
However, on this occasion, and perhaps it was because we were visiting in the
Spring, I did, for the first time, hear birds singing amongst the trees where,
seventy-five years ago, the ashes of over 1 million people were scattered. We also observed a skylark flying high over
the ruined prisoners huts and a single “Lady’s Smock” or “Cuckoo Flower”
flourishing only a few yards away from the site of such indescribable and
grisly human misery; fresh symbols of hope and healing after such appalling and
evil acts had taken place there in some people’s living memory.
Whilst on the tour of the two extermination
camps, I also visited, for a second time, the cell used to house Father
Maximilian Kolbe and others who were starved to death as a warning to others
who disobeyed their Nazi captors. Today
it is a shrine to this 20th Century saint, canonised by another
Polish saint, Pope John-Paul II in 1982.
Father Kolbe, a bachelor, took another’s place in the punishment block
so that the other man might live and be re-united with his wife and children
after the war. We were also reminded of
Anne Frank, the teenager from Amsterdam who hid from the German occupiers with
her family in a secret room in that city until one day they were discovered and
sent first to Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen where she died of typhus. Her
diary of those years is now a famous best seller. However, there is third
individual who perished there whose life is little known about outside Dutch
and Christian circles; another woman diarist from Amsterdam named Etty
Hillesum, a Jew who became a Christian and who did so much to record the fear
and treatment of Amsterdam Jews after the Nazi occupation and the
subsequent misery of the transit camp
where hundreds of thousands of Dutch Jews were later held pending their
transport to the East and their ultimate destruction under the Nazi’s “Final
Solution”.
Etty’s story is contained in several volumes of
diaries written between 9th March 1941 and just before her own
deportation on 7th September 1943.
She died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, possibly in that same Gas Chamber we looked
upon on 30th November 1943 – just under 3 months after her arrival
at the death camp. A short biography of
her life containing some of the more poignant extracts from her diaries is
contained in this book “Etty Hillesum - A
Life Transformed” by Patrick Woodhouse which I strongly recommend to any of
you who find this talk helpful and inspiring or just simply interesting..
Etty was born in Middelburg, Holland in 1914, the
eldest child of a Russian Jewish mother who escaped to the Netherlands after a
Russian pogrom and a Dutch Jewish father who was a classics scholar and head
teacher. They lived in the Dutch town of
Deventer and after leaving her father’s school in 1934 she went to Amsterdam to
study law – although she never practised it.
She had two younger brothers but to all intents and purposes, and
without going into great detail, it appears to have been a pretty dysfunctional
and unhappy family. She describes family life as being “degenerate”, “tainted”,
a “madhouse”. A family portrait of this
time shows the family group looking quite detached from one another with little
feeling or warmth or love for each other. During her time in Amsterdam, and
following the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940 she met and sought counselling from a
psychotherapist named Julius Spiers, a much older man with whom she shortly
afterwards had what might be called today an intimate and by today’s standards
an “unprofessional” relationship. However during that time, and under his
influence she was introduced to the Bible and Christian thought and teaching
and learned the art of contemplative prayer. However at no time did she ever
engage with institutionalised religion; never joined or went to a church – her
Christianity was based entirely on what she learned from Spiers, from reading
the bible and other theological and psychological writings and poetry and,
above all, her own feelings within herself through regular habitual
contemplation. Indeed, she had suddenly
felt an unexplained yet compulsive urge to kneel in prayer. In her own words;
“This
afternoon I suddenly found myself kneeling on the brown coconut matting in the
bathroom, my head hidden in my dressing gown, which was slung over the broken
cane chair. Kneeling doesn’t really come
easily to me, I feel a sort of embarrassment. Why? Probably because of the
critical, rational, atheistic bit that is part of me as well. And yet, every so often I have a great urge
to kneel down with my face in my hands and in this way find some peace and to
listen to that hidden source within me”
Having done it once, though, the barrier is
crossed and over the months ahead, from September 1941 onwards, especially as
the conditions for her and her fellow Jews around her got uglier, this
compulsive kneeling became part of the pattern of her days as she continued to
search for her life within her.
At first she doesn’t acknowledge that it is God
to whom she is praying, she is merely seeking for that inner person within
herself, but as time passes this acknowledgement arises and she says something
very profound in one of her early morning prayers at a time when the whole
world around her seemed to be tainted with the evil of the German occupation.
This has struck, for me, an incredible chord and which I feel has great
significance today when, following the horror of Manchester and the political
confusion and hatred all around. I think it can be a prayer which we can all
repeat today-
“Dear
God, these are anxious times. Tonight I lay in the dark with burning eyes as
scene after scene of human suffering passed before me…I shall try to help you,
God, to stop my strength from ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in
advance; but one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me, that You cannot
help us, that we must help You to help ourselves; and that is all we can manage
these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little
piece of you, God, in ourselves … Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You
yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you
responsible. You cannot help us, but we
must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. There are, it is true, some who, even at this
late stage, are putting their vacuum cleaners and silver forks and spoons in
safekeeping instead of guarding You, dear God. And there are those who want to
put their bodies in safekeeping but who are nothing more now than shelter for a
thousand fears and bitter feelings. And
they say ‘I shan’t let them get me in their clutches’. But they forget that no one is in their
clutches who is in Your arms”.
Wow how powerful are those words. Etty’s contemplative prayer, those urges to
pray, to find her innermost-self brought about a realisation that God was to be
found dwelling deep within her person.
As a Jew she would have been brought up with the concept of God having
or needing a dwelling place – it’s a theme throughout the Old Testament – The
Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, The Temple and Psalm 23 ends with:
“Surely
your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life and I
will live in the house of the Lord forever”.
God needs a home on Earth. Etty firmly believed that it was necessary
for each and every one of us to make a place for God within ourselves from
which those self-same values and marks of a true Christian, which we heard read
out in this morning’s reading, can emanate. Etty’s concerns were that the evil
around her and her fellow Jews was making her companions themselves bitter,
fearful, in despair and haters in their own right – so much so that there was
no room for God to help them as they had made no space for him in their
hearts. That space was already full of
fear and hatred.
During the course of many interviews with
survivors of the Holocaust, I have heard them say, time and time again when
describing their internment in Auschwitz or other camps “God was never in that place. He
clearly deserted us”. Of course, this is an echo of how the Jews felt
during the period of the Exile and probably again when Jerusalem was sacked in
70 AD and, dare I say, how many people may feel after some of the terrorist
outrages of today. Where is God in all
this? Hebrews 13 reminds us that God has
already told us “I will never fail you or
forsake you” but at times it is so difficult to believe that God is present.
Etty firmly believed differently from those
survivors I just mentioned. In her view and her theology, we carry God within
us and therefore provided we always make room for him he is always there and
was there too during those darkest moments of the Holocaust. She felt it her duty to make sure that we
gave God the resources to help Him by carrying that spirit within us – to take
care of God.
Roosevelt, in his post-Pearl Harbor speech to
both Houses of Congress in 1941 included the phrase “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and Etty felt precisely
the same – fear bred hatred and led to a vicious circle. She wrote:-
It is the
problem of our age; hatred against the Germans poison’s everyone’s mind. “Let the bastards drown, the lot of them”.
Such sentiments have become part and parcel of our daily speech and sometimes
make one feel that life these days has grown impossible”.
It remains a problem of our age too. Gandhi once said “It is written somewhere that if someone dishonours you then you
should take an eye for an eye – but if we keep doing that the whole world will
soon become blind”.
Etty, in similar vein writes
“To sum
up, this is what I really want to say: Nazi barbarism evokes the same kind of
barbarism in ourselves… we have to reject that barbarism within us, we must not
fan the hatred within us because if we do, the world will not be able to pull
itself one inch further out of the mire”.
And further on, after she had been shouted at by
a young Gestapo officer she records the incident ending with these words:
“Something
else about this morning ... despite all the suffering and injustice I cannot
hate.”
Despite strong urgings from friends around her,
and unlike Anne Frank, Etty refused to go into hiding when the Jewish round-ups
and transportations intensified. Indeed, she became more visible and acquired
herself a place on the Jewish Council in Westerbork, the Final Transportation
Camp for Jews being sent east to Poland for “resettlement”. By this time Etty and many knew what their
likely fate was going to be but Etty, acting as an administrator and
self-appointed chaplain and counsellor tried to relieve the suffering and fears
of those hundred and thousands of families (including her own) who passed
through, well knowing that eventually her name would be on the list to join the
train going east. Some who did survive
recall her kindness and gentleness and uplifting spirit and when she did
finally board the train for Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was remembered as singing
songs as the train pulled away trying to uplift those around her.
During her time in Westerbork her diaries reveal
much about the conditions and sufferings of the Jewish people and are a great
testament to the Holocaust and its history.
She recalls, on one occasion seeing a young German soldier herding
people onto a train yet looking into his eyes she sees him as a creature of God
and not a monster.
I have reflected greatly on Etty’s story over the
past few days in light of the evil which recently has promoted such hatred and
fear and which continues to do so. We
must never be consumed by the evil otherwise the Devil will win. By carrying God in our hearts through the knowledge
that Jesus Christ came down, died for our sins and left us all with the power
of the Holy Spirit, by making room for him within us, just as Etty did and
advocated, we can, in the words of our reading, carry with us the marks of a
good Christian and keep the Devil at bay.
And finally, as a post-script, whilst preparing
this talk during the week, I visited a church in the southern part of the
Salisbury Diocese to see a colleague who is currently struggling with his
ministry. Over a very pleasant outdoor
lunch in brilliant sunshine I explained how I was coming here today to preach
on the ministry and life of Etty Hillesum.
“Wait a minute” he said – “have you heard about the Prayer House being
built outside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau?” I had to confess that despite visiting the
site only six weeks ago I knew nothing about it. He proceeded to find and give me this leaflet
from an organisation called Living Stones who had recently visited his church
to describe their initiative.
In the museum at Auschwitz, is a map showing all
the railway lines which carried the transports of people such as Anne Frank and
Etty Hillesum to the extermination camps.
This map shows arrows pointing into Auschwitz. The two founders of
Living Stones, Mark and Cathy Warwick, each had the same vision at the same
time – they saw those self-same arrows pointing away from Auschwitz - in other
words reversed. They are now
establishing a House of Prayer close by Hells Gate, Birkenau.
Just as Liz and I saw, for the first time signs
of new life on our visit – the Lady’s Smock and the skylark, so too did they
see hope springing from that same place of death and destruction.
In their leaflet, Mark and Cathy Warwick write:
“We
believe it is Father God’s desire to close this portal of death and open a
fountain of life in the Spirit. He wants to redeem Auschwitz-Birkenau and
transform it into a place of blessing, healing and reconciliation both for the
Jewish people and for all nations.
Transformation
is only possible because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is his
sovereign work. He does, however, invite
us to participate with Him through our intercession, praise and worship to
bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.
The fires
of the gas-chamber crematoria burned day and night with a stench of death. Now
70-odd years later Father God desires the fire of His Holy Spirit to burn day
and night in a house of prayer”.
I think those words and sentiments are a fitting
tribute to Etty and her unfailing love for God throughout those terrible
times. The Holy Spirit burned within her
throughout. God was indeed there in Auschwitz and He is with us all now as long
as we continue to make room for Him in our hearts.
Amen
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