American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, France
Remembrance Sunday, November 10, 2019
Proper 27, Year C + Job 19:23-27a + Psalm 17:1-9 + Luke 20:27-38
"A Community of Memory"
Thirty years ago, last night, I was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, and along with countless other people throughout the world, I was glued to my television as I watched an event that most people, myself included, thought would never take place in our lifetimes. An impermeable barrier, which for three decades enforced a border that was created by World War Two, was suddenly breached. It had been a “fact of the physical geography of the world,” as Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford University historian called it, and suddenly it went away. No one had foreseen this event. This breaching of the Berlin Wall, and the events that followed, were not planned, nor was the opening of the wall on the night of November 9, 1989 intentional. It was casually announced by a midlevel East German bureaucrat that travel restrictions, between East and West Berlin, would no longer be enforced. (Thank God for incompetent mid-level bureaucrats) By 7 p.m., some brave souls began to test whether this was in fact true. By 8:00 p.m. news of the reality of the opening of the wall had reached many, and by 10 p.m. many thousands of East Berliners and West Berliners had gathered at the wall and the level of euphoria at this sudden and totally unexpected event was immense. The media became aware of this and soon people all over the world, including me, in Shreveport, Louisiana, watched this with rapped attention, and rejoiced with the Berliners and others. One woman remarked, “World War II has finally come to an end.”
A thirty-five-year-old physicist and academic in East Berlin, who had grown up as a Lutheran pastor’s daughter and had suffer the discrimination that countless churchgoers had suffered in East Germany and elsewhere in the Communist bloc, watched this event. Within a year, she saw her country disappear from the map, as the two Germanys united. She soon entered politics and continues to represent her home jurisdiction in the former East Germany in the German Bundestag. She has now also been the chancellor of Germany for 14 years, the first woman to serve in that position. Thirty years and two days ago, this would have been unimaginable, especially to Angela Merkel.
Christianity is a religion of history. Together with Judaism, we claim as sacred scripture a collection of books which span and record over 1000 years of ancient history and claims to speak about many more. It is also believed that the God to whom these scriptures testify, is intimately involved in that history. In fact, this God is claims to be the Lord of history. The world, all creation, all life, each individual who ever lived, even each blade of grass, is said to have its origin and its fulfillment in this God.
In this sense, many people gave thanks for the unexpected and inexplicable fall of the Iron Curtain on a random Thursday night, thirty years ago. For months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, people had gathered each Monday night for candlelight services in churches throughout East Germany, especially in Leipzig in the churches of Johann Sebastian Bach, praying for a peaceful transition to a democratic and free society. Was this opening of the wall an answer to these prayers? Yes and no. Did the God of the Bible finally rouse him/herself to answer people who had no doubt prayed for this kind of event for decades? Yes and no. Yet, this is too simplistic. Certainly, one can and ought to thank God for such events. But did God directly do that?
In this context, it is sobering to remember that the 9th of November has not only this very happy association that we saw in 1989. But exactly fifty-one years earlier to the day, also on November 9th, also in Germany, was Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom against the Jews of Germany, which moved the inflammatory rhetoric of racism, antisemitism, discrimination, expropriations, and pressure to emigrate, to a new level of violence. Countless Jewish businesses, institutions, and scores of beautiful synagogues were destroyed by well-orchestrated mobs incited by years of anti-Jewish propaganda on the night of November 9, 1938 and the days that followed. This was the beginning of what would become the Holocaust, the intentional destruction of over six million Jews by the Nazi regime. This too is history. But where was God in this?
There are some so-called Christians who claim to see this as part of God’s direct action in everyday life. The San Antonio megachurch preacher, John Hagee, sees the Holocaust as God’s action to bring about the end times, and the founding of the modern State of Israel, which for him is but a pawn in a game plan in his version of an end-time scenario. This scenario involves another upcoming destruction of Israel, while Christians, of his ilk, are plucked out of the world through something called “the rapture” a word and concept that does not exist in Scripture. A significant swath of Christianity has this view, although the relationship to the Holocaust is not stated so explicitly. To most other Christians, such as myself, this view is abominable and utterly unchristian. The God of love, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, does not bring about this evil, people do. Yet the scale and depth of this evil is not fully explained by the collective evil or bad choices of individual people.
Last week I was in Vienna, and we were invited to the honoring of a friend of ours by the Vienna Jewish community for her tireless work, over more than a decade, uncovering a Nazi genocide site in Belarus called Maly Trostinec. Thousands of Viennese Jews were transported there and murdered by the Nazis, between 1942 and 1944. This site had fallen out the collective memory, which focusses on more well-known sites. This last year a large memorial was built at Maly Trostinec, near Minsk in Belarus. Our friend is a Lutheran, but she had a Jewish step-grandmother who perished there, and other Jewish relatives who perished in the Holocaust. Memory is vitally important. These victims had no memorial, now they do. It is our duty to remember. This is what people of faith do in places of great evil, and places of mourning.
A few meters from this pulpit, is our cathedral memorial cloister. It is a memorial that is not new, it was created in the early 1920s. It remembers the sacrifice of US-American soldiers who died in World War I. Today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow is the 101st anniversary of the Armistice that ended hostilities in World War I on November 11, 1918. That war cost an estimated 8-9 million military deaths on the various sides. The United States entered the war in its third year, and in the 19 months remaining in the war, the US incurred about 120,000 military deaths, and over 200,000 wounded. These military deaths are memorialized here in our cathedral, not as a glorification of war, but as an honoring of those who died for their country. Memory is very important – may we never forget, especially the cost of war.
During these events, events of horror, events of destruction, also in events of heroism, events of euphoria, we turn to mark these: in connection with the Eternal. We turn to God to mourn, to cry out as Job did in our first lessen, or as the Psalmist did in the Psalm. The answers to all our questions regarding this evil are never fully answered in this life, but calling on God, orients us. It places such events in the context of the eternal.
During all of the events that I have recounted, this cathedral has stood here, in this very place, as a witness. It has stood here as a witness that there is something greater than the worst evil that humans can inflict on one another. It has stood as a witness, that ultimately the God of Love is triumphant over the forces of evil. It stands as a witness that people of faith can work to prepare the way for the breaking in of the good, the breaking in of the Kingdom of God. The people of this cathedral worked tirelessly during the First World War, long before the US entry, aiding the Paris population and ministering to wounded French soldiers. This was a witness.
Long before the US entry into the Second World War, the Dean of this cathedral was preaching throughout the United States, speaking about the evils of the Nazi regime, when some in the US admired it. He was called the “Crusading Dean.” That also became the title of a book about him. Preachers from this pulpit have spoken to the issues of the time, and brought the higher message of God’s love to people in distress. The people of this cathedral have responded with courage and strength, even in the darkest of times.
We are in that time in the church year when we encounter scripture texts to do with the end times. These complicated texts confront us with a cornerstone of our Christian belief, that both individuals, and the world as a whole, have an eternal destiny. And, as our collect for today reminds us, this eternal destiny involves an ongoing conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. In this opening prayer, we prayed,
“O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom”
In our first reading, Job exclaims,
“For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another."
Jesus when confronting the Sadducees, who do not believe in the concept of resurrection or of eternal life, says:
“And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
The Christian hope gives us a comfort of eternal life with those we love, it speaks of the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Occasionally we receive a foretaste of this triumph of good over evil. The Christian hope also tells us that we remember, we remember that which has gone before us. The church, and this cathedral in particular, are places of memory, a place where we learn about the God of love. It is a place of collective memory, which informs our lives into the future. It is a place where we have the space to integrate our lives into the loving purposes of God. It is the place where the transforming power of the Gospel is hear and proclaimed.
These stones speak of tradition, but it is not a dead tradition, it is a live tradition that speaks hope and truth into a world that can slip very easily again into chaos and destruction. The church proclaims the message: that God’s power of love is ultimately stronger than anything that evil can throw before us.
In our time, may we be blessed with more events of rejoicing than mourning, more events of thanksgiving than of sadness. And may we respond to God in thankfulness.
Later in this service we will hear about opportunities to help this cathedral to continue to be a witness to God’s love and God’s loving purposes for us. Please prayerfully consider your response. It is important. The fine work of this cathedral can only go forward with our active participation. Our participation in gifts of time, talent, and treasure – enable us to be a beacon of hope and love in this place.
I close with the sentence of scripture that is read at the end of Morning and Evening Prayer:
“Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
