I remember it was a bitter, cold day standing amongst the
ruins of the Dachau Concentration Camp, the first of many such camps
established by the German Nazi regime in 1933 to house political prisoners and
those believed to be unfit for life in the glorious White Aryan Third Reich
some twenty or so miles outside of Munich. Munichen means “by the
monks,” recalling the Benedictine monastery that once stood on the site of this
now bustling modern city of innovation, culture and commerce. I was standing
outside of a modern Carmelite monastery attached to the outer wall of the Camp,
and built under the direction of a survivor of the camp, Dr. Johannes
Neuhäusler, one of thousands of clergymen who were sent to Dachau as “enemies
of the state” for preaching against the regime – all culture including religion
was required to conform to Nazi White
Supremacy ideology.
As I wandered alone from our group which had come from
America as a protest to visit the Perlacher Forst in Munich while our
President, Ronald Reagan was in Bitburg honoring dead SS Troops buried there.
Perlacher is where Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and other young people who
were part of The White Rose, a resistance movement to the Nazi regime, are
buried having been executed for their efforts to warn German citizens what was
happening. We had met with some White Rose survivors the night before taking
the train to Dachau. It was a sobering privilege to be amongst them as we were
enacting our feeble little protest of the Bitburg visit by our President. What
did they think of a U.S President honoring the very troops who had executed
their comrades? As we waited for the train to Dachau I was talking with Ernie
Michel, himself a survivor of Auschwitz where he had been interned at age 16.
Growing up in Mannheim, his family would visit Munich and he said he could
still recall the sickly-sweet stench of burning flesh in the Munich air all the
way from Dachau some twenty miles away. Ironically, Munich which had once been
the home to Benedictine monks had been declared “The Capital of the Movement.”
As I walked across the vast expanse of now empty space, snow
flurries floating in the air, I see a man in a beret on a bicycle making his
way toward me over the gravel that now covers much of Dachau. He hails me,
stops and begins talking in mixed German and English with wild gesticulations.
He had been interned in Dachau as a young man for leading a youth group in his
church. Thousands of clergy and church lay people had been held in Dachau,
worked to the bone, and many thousands were gassed or shot in groups. He
presses a small pamphlet into my hand and rides off into the snow. I imagine he
comes here every day to remember. Though liberated in 1945, he still cannot
leave. Elie Wiesel, a mentor of mine, writes about our need to pay attention to
the mad men and women who really are prophets trying to gain our attention to
what is really happening in this world of ours. The Madman of Dachau is one of
these.
As I read Luke 14:25-33 over and over this week in which
Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my
disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down
and estimate the cost…”, all I can think of is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The
Cost of Discipleship. Written in 1937, four years after Dachau was established, the book was a warning
against “cheap grace,” a phrase he had learned while attending church at Adam
Clayton Powell Sr’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem while at Union Seminary:
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance,
baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is
grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
He goes on to write about “costly grace”: “Costly grace confronts us as a
gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken
spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit
to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke
is easy and my burden is light.’" The Cost of Discipleship also includes
Bonhoeffer’s critique of the Imperial or Triumphant Church’s use of the cross
once the Emperor Constantine declared, “In hoc signo vinces” – In This Sign
Conquer. Crusaders had the cross emblazoned on their shields as they
slaughtered not only Muslims and Jews, but Christians of whom they did not
approve across Europe, Jerusalem and the Middle East, making it no longer a
sign of sacrifice, service and redemption for the whole world.
Bonhoeffer,
a Lutheran Pastor and Theologian, and others in his family, was an outspoken
critic of the Nazi regime and its ideology and actions against Jews, invalids,
homosexuals, gypsies, immigrants and anyone who dared to challenge White-Aryan
Supremacy. While on his second visit to the U.S. he was encouraged by many at
the seminary to remain here until things resolved, but he was compelled by his
own theology to return to carry the cross and follow Jesus. Like Jesus in Luke
whose face was “set toward Jerusalem” to confront the powers of religion and
the Roman Empire, Bonhoeffer returned and continued to work in the resistance
like the members of the White Rose I had met in Munich. He was eventually
arrested, and was executed April 9, 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp
just days before the camp’s liberation, having paid the cost of discipleship.
As the new year began in 1945, Bonhoeffer sent a letter home
to his mother. In it was a poem. The poem speaks directly to the circumstances
of both his incarceration and the madness of evil that had taken over what was
once perhaps the most cultured and Christian of European nations that had given
the world Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, Martin Luther and so many others. His words,
like those of Jesus in Luke chapter 14, are both hard in their unflinching
realism, and yet at the same time powerfully inspiring for many who have faced
tragic circumstances in their own lives and treacherous times in their own
countries. Translated by the British Methodist minister and hymnodist F. Pratt
Green, and put to music by many, Bonhoeffer’s words of strength and hope in the
midst of crisis remain amongst the most powerful words and hymns of the
Twentieth Century. Whenever I read or sing them, I recall that day at Dachau,
the Madman of Dachau, and the thousands of fellow priests and clergy and church
lay leaders whose lives were ended in that place for having carried the cross
and followed Jesus.
By gracious powers so wonderfully
sheltered,
And confidently waiting come what
may,
we know that God is with us night
and morning,
and never fails to greet us each
new day.
Yet is this heart by its old foe
tormented,
Still evil days bring burdens hard
to bear;
Oh, give our frightened souls the
sure salvation
for which, O Lord, You taught us to
prepare.
And when this cup You give is
filled to brimming
With bitter suffering, hard to
understand,
we take it thankfully and without
trembling,
out of so good and so beloved a
hand.
Yet when again in this same world
You give us
The joy we had, the brightness of
Your Sun,
we shall remember all the days we
lived through,
and our whole life shall then be
Yours alone.
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