Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dear People of Christ Church,

Today is the feast day for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 and was executed by the Nazis in 1945. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer became a leading spokesman and, for a time, led the underground seminary for the Confessing Church, the center of Protestant resistance to the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together describes the life of the Christian community in that seminary. He is known for the expression “cheap grace,” which he explained in his book The Cost Of Discipleship. Grace is cheap, he writes, when it is used as an excuse for failing to be ethically faithful to the Gospel—forgiveness with no conversion. The “costly grace” of the Gospel requires us to follow Jesus recklessly, wherever our faith takes us: all the way to death if necessary, as Bonhoeffer did. He wrote, “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. . . Costly grace is the Incarnation of God."

Bonhoeffer spent time in the United States in New York at Union Theological Seminary, and was deeply impacted by the African American culture he met in Harlem, near the seminary. He taught Sunday school at Abyssinian Baptist Church and was moved by the “black Christ” he met in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance. His witnesses of racism in America would deeply shape his understanding of anti-Semitism at home. His friends encouraged him to stay in New York, but instead he returned home. In 1939, after the persecution of the Jews became more serious, Bonhoeffer was threatened due to his having spoken out against the regime. He returned to New York that spring, but by July was back in Berlin speaking out again. He wrote to a friend,

There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled -- in short from the perspective of those who suffer. (Letters and Papers from Prison, 17)

Committed to peace, he nevertheless became involved with a group plotting Hitler’s assassination, and was send to the Buchenwald concentration camp when his allegiances were discovered. On SundayApril 8, 1945, he had just finished conducting a service of worship at Schoenberg, when two soldiers came in, saying, "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, make ready and come with us," the standard summons to a condemned prisoner. As he left, he said to another prisoner, "This is the end -- but for me, the beginning -- of life." He was hanged the next day.

We’ll celebrate Bonhoeffer at our regular Tuesday service on April 15. Because I’ll be away at clergy conference, Paula Tatarunis will be leading evening prayer. Martin Niemoller, a colleague of Bonhoeffer’s in the Confessing Church wrote a poem you may be familiar with—this version is inscribed in the Holocaust Memorial in Boston.

They came first for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time no one was left to speak up.

On this grey April morning, I invite you to take a moment to pray for all those, like Bonhoeffer, who speak up. Pray that we all have the grace to do the same.