Don’t Hold the Fort: Do What You’re Called to Do

My grandchildren believe that I sometimes say weird things. I suppose that some who have heard me preach over the years have believed likewise. Try this on for size: don’t hold the fort. That was the main thought in my preceding blog about the life of the Church today. Then consider this conventional-to-the-point-of-weird-sounding thought, in this our secular age: do what you’re called to do.

This recommendation is rooted deeply in the personal experience of countless pastors of my now passing generation, we who undertook our various ministries in the very era when we had been shocked by the enthusiastic responses by many Lutherans in Germany to the rise and the ravages of Adolph Hitler and his fascism. The worst of them were the so-called German Christians, who enthusiastically supported Hitler and his minions; but many millions of down-home Lutherans in Germany in the Nazi era also, thoughtlessly and heartlessly, went along with what they took to be the rebirth of the German nation in the person of Der Fuehrer – “the Leader.”

When I was a teenager, right after World War II, my family attended a church camp on Lake George in New York State. The key speaker at that event was a German-Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoeller, who was then celebrated as a church leader who had stood up against the Nazis. I only later learned that he had been slow to do that.

That was when I was beginning to study German history as an undergraduate and when I was first exposed to the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was then that I learned to appreciate the full scope of the often struggling German resistance to Hitler, which even plotted to assassinate Hitler, among the conspirators Bonhoeffer himself, who never lived to talk about that experience after the war. That is the much-publicized story about Bonhoeffer’s life that many American Christians, especially Lutherans, celebrate today and rightly so.

What is generally less known is Bonhoeffer’s effort to undergird a Church counter-culture during the Nazi era in Germany by eagerly participating in the Confessing Church, along with others like Karl Barth. To support that fateful faith-venture, they established an alternative seminary in Pomerania at Finkenwalde, which Bonhoeffer directed. At that seminary, the life of prayer and worship were of the highest priority.

From the earliest days of my own theological studies, I regarded the Finkenwalde venture with profound respect. And with this learning. Faithful witnesses like Bonhoeffer as a matter of course immersed themselves in the Church’s communal life, particularly its worship. For me, this had an intense personal meaning.

Beginning already as an undergraduate, I was drawn into what was then called the Movement for Liturgical Renewal, which flourished in a number of ecumenical contexts in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in Western Europe. It had much influenced my own Pastor in those days, the Rev. Henry E. Horn, of University Lutheran Church, Cambridge. Discipleship and liturgy – those became the two theological themes that most captivated me as a young theologian. I commend that twofold commitment to anyone of any station who has ears to hear.

So yes indeed: don’t hold the fort; do what you’re called to do. But what we who think of ourselves as Christians are called to do is surely twofold: to serve and to worship, to be martyrs in this – actually historic – sense. Which, as Bonhoeffer’s case showed, can be both a lonely venture that’s fraught with peril and a communal experience that’s deeply driven by the passions of faith.

All this leaves me – this is almost too obvious to ask – with these questions. I have posed them often in recent years, as have many others. Have we American Christians now entered a new era of our own Confessing Church, which must now contend with a new national Leader, who’s about to inaugurate a new era of an American fascism? And, if so, where, when, and how are we to take our stand, to do what we are called to do facing what we are facing?