Eyes for Injustice

Author: Pastor Heidi Eickstadt (from Sermon on 4/3/22)

When I was in seminary, I discovered many figures who turned my world upside down: people that challenged my understandings of faith, of who Jesus is and how I am called to serve Him.

One in particular has held my attention for the past eight years, one whose story and theology continues to inspire and challenge me. I’m speaking of the Lutheran theologian and Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Many of you are familiar with him, I’m sure, the German pastor who spoke out against the Nazi regime and who eventually became part of an attempted coup and assassination plot against Adolf Hitler. He was eventually discovered and killed shortly before the end of the war in a concentration camp.

You may know Bonhoeffer as the author of books like “The Cost of Discipleship,” or “Life Together,” books that have become classics in church book clubs and adult ed groups over the years. He was a brilliant theologian who was committed to living out his faith concretely, taking seriously the call to love thy neighbor, taking seriously the Sermon the Mount, taking seriously the passage from Matthew 25 that is our Gospel today: to see Christ in the face of our fellow human beings, especially those who are suffering and oppressed.

He took seriously the call to see the face of Christ in even those his country and indeed, most of his church, deemed subhuman and contaminated: Jewish men, women and children. But how did he recognize that was the call of Christ, when everyone else didn’t? How did he see the dangers of Nazi Germany all the way back in 1933, giving a radio address challenging Hitler’s ideas two days before Hitler even became chancellor of Germany, let alone before he took complete control of the state?

He was a smart guy but there many other brilliant theologians in Germany, older and, one would think wiser, than the young 27 year old assistant professor…what did he see that they didn’t?

Well, unlike those other German theologians and church leaders, Bonhoeffer had spent a year in the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, from 1930-1931. Here he heard the sermons of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., who preached that faith couldn’t be compartmentalized into only your private life but that following Christ encompasses your WHOLE life.

Here he heard sermons titled, “The Naked Christ,” and “The Hungry Christ,” about our gospel reading for today from Matthew, sermons that revealed the mission of the church to serve and to see injustice against others as injustice against Christ.

It was here in this black church that Bonhoeffer met the black Jesus, the Jesus Luther taught us about, the Jesus who’s not found in a theology of glory and power but standing in solidarity with the oppressed, the God who enters into the suffering of the cross on behalf of others.

Bonhoeffer attended this black church, taught Sunday School there, even later preached there, even though the people in this community were so different from him. Bonhoeffer was from an upper-middle class family in Germany, well-respected and part of the academic elite. Although foreign, he was a white man in America and as such, well-treated and given deference, not subject to discrimination or segregation.

Ironically, he was from a country that had recently fought against the US in World War I but as a white man, he had more privilege here than black citizens, even those who were World War I veterans.

But even though he came from such a different place, he had empathy with those who were suffering, and allowed himself to see the world through their eyes and to see Christ in those who were treated as less than human.

Dr. Reggie Williams outlines how Bonhoeffer was changed by this experience of Harlem and the black church in his book, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. Williams says, “In Jim Crow America, the narrative of race depicted black people as subhuman, which served to legitimate brutality against them.”

Bonhoeffer saw this narrative at work against his community at Abyssinian, in the lynchings and injustice he saw happening in America, and when he returned to Germany, he recognized it in the Nazi propaganda against the Jewish people.

He saw those same dynamics at work that he saw in America, caricatures and scapegoating that depicted black people and later Jews as less than human, as inferior and even a threat to white or “Aryan” people. He recognized the white supremacy of America in the “Aryan” superior race ideology that the Nazis proclaimed and many churches adopted.

The black church’s teachings and actions gave Bonhoeffer new eyes to see what he hadn’t before; he came back from New York a different man. He said when he got back he was now a Christian; following Christ had a different meaning for him than before. Bonhoeffer was now able to see how the superiority of one race or people over another got in the way of following Christ.

I offer Bonhoeffer’s story as it has been a story to which I, and maybe you too, can relate. This Lent we have been hearing a different story than the one we have known, a lot of hard truth about the White-centered narrative that we don’t even realized shapes our views and our actions. In our Lent of Liberation devotional, conversations and sermons, we’ve wrestled with the past and present injustices perpetrated against black Americans.

So where do we go from here?

It’s a question we’ll be considering in the weeks ahead, for ourselves and as a congregation, but in the meantime, I find this excerpt of an article by Leonard Pitts Jr. to be helpful and hopeful as we look to the future. It’s called “Black History is Everyone’s History.”

He says:

This is a column about hating black history. It's occasioned by a question I've heard more often than I'd like: What do you want from me?

Happens every time I write about the harsh days of slavery or Jim Crow. Some white reader will pick up the phone or dash off an e-mail asking the same thing: Why are you telling me this? What do you want from me?

Each response (no matter the person’s race) seems to spring from the same gaping irresolution, the same untreated wound. Trouble is, as a nation, we've never even acknowledged that wound exists. Black people have spent generations trying to come to grips with their passages and have done, at best, an imperfect job. Yet that process has scarcely even been contemplated for whites who, after all, went through the same passage, albeit from the other side.

We have yet to grapple, or even truly pose, the questions arising from that fact. What do you do, if you're a person of conscience, faced with a history that damns much of what your forebears did, believed and were? How do you find a comfort place with that, a space to simply be?

I spent some time pondering…what do you want from me? Here's my answer:

Don't hate black history, if only because it's your history, too. It exists not to accuse you or to shame you. It simply exists. And you, every bit as much as I, have to make peace with it.

Understand that this is sacred ground and it hurts to walk here. But at the same time, I need to walk here, need the strength, the sense of purpose, the knowledge of self, that walking here imparts. And I'm obliged to witness here on behalf of those who can no longer witness for themselves, no longer say the things they saw and felt.

So please, don't tell me how to walk this ground. Don't tell me when you think I've walked it long enough. And don't think every silence needs a voice to fill it. Sometimes, silence is an opportune place to ponder and to pray.

What do I want from you?

I want you to be my sister, my brother, my sibling and to walk here with me. I know it's a hard walk. I know it causes you pain.

But this much I also know: If ever we learn to tread this ground together, there's no place we can't go.

May we like Bonhoeffer, walk with those who are suffering, walk the painful road of the cross, trusting in the new life God promises will grow out of the dust, the new creation God is planting in and through us. God let our hearts be good soil. Thanks be to God. Amen.