A Total Waste

In May of 1934, a group of pastors from all over Germany gathered in Barmen to protest the actions of the Fuhrer, as his National Socialist movement (Naziism) arrogantly steamrolled over all opposition. The Fuhrer himself had seized control over the Church in Germany, placing his own puppet as head over it. There ensued a movment to eliminate any and all mentions of anything Jewish in the Scriptures. The State was exalted over the Church as being paramount, based upon, among other things, the belief that Creation trumps Redemption - that is, that Creation itself has established the Aryan race as the dominant and best race from the beginning, and that whatever Redemption/salvation is, it is defined and shaped by that Creation reality. Jesus' salvation, thus, was reduced to something little more than the notion that God would give victory into the hands of the Aryans.

This gathering of pastors produced a protest document called the Barmen Declaration. You should read it. It consists of 6 simple assertions of truth, followed by 6 concomitant assertions therefore of what ISN'T true. And in it they lay bear the hideous idolatry of National Socialism, and, in fact, every idolatry known to humankind. For those of you who cannot stand Karl Barth, you may gain a new honoring of him when you read the Barmen; for he was the primary author of it. Those who adopted it prayed, pled with God, worked passionately on this project, and in so doing became known as the Confessing Church. There were several hundred of them. They became a protest movement within the larger German Church, standing on orthodoxy and historical faith.

Four short years later, every single one of these men (except three) had been put to death, thrown into concentration camps, or silenced. The movement, the only public protest anyone mounted against Hitler from within Germany, was completely vanquished. It was a total waste of life and effort.

Where's the significance in that?

St. Paul had a lot to say about not living by what you see but by what God says. And so, in the context of telling the story of how much he and others had suffered, he says, "For this momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen." 2 Corinthians 4:17-18a And his perspective is eschatological (that is, arising out of what is true in the Age to Come). Paul is saying that what really matters in this life is participating in the life that is already true in the Age to Come. Paul believed that there are events, actions, a reality which is true THERE, but which becomes present to us HERE through faith, and begins to break in upon us. This reality is called the Kingdom of God. And when we participate in these actions, in this reality, what we do and say now lasts forever. Is full of significance, regardless of how it looks to the watching world. . . or Church.

T.S. Eliot spoke to this, at least tangentially, some 1900 years later. "I am not myself very much concerned with questions of influence, or with the publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing, but rather that there should always be a few preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue."

As the Confessing Church was destroyed by the rising tide of Naziism, total failure was all that, honestly, anyone could see. Little would anyone have known that the document would be discovered, resurrected as WWII led into the Cold War, and as the U.S.S.R. seized East Germany as its own. And rediscovered the Barmen spoke courage into the hearts of pastors within East Germany who pastored the faithful through the nightmare of Communism. The inspiration they received from the Declaration led them to start what became a 10 year prayer movement that issued forth in 1989 into the non-violent uprising of the Church in East Germany became a central part of the fall of the U.S.S.R. in East Germany. Without so much as a bloody nose, as Dr. Jim Edwards said a few weeks ago.

Who would have known that simple acts of obedience would not only be signficant in and of themselves, expressions of the Kingdom of God breaking in and full of worth in the Age to Come. But also usable in the hands of the living God 30 and 40 years later, after all the signers were dead, to bring justice upon earth.

Makes you think twice about worth and significance in an age which knows nothing but the immediate and that which makes one feel good right now and that which brings the BIG and the measurable. It makes me think that sometimes the visible result right now might actually be the total waste.