"The Disciplina Arcani"
In the face of tragedy and injustice, prayer and righteous action.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Texts: Psalms 23 & 16, Romans 12:9-13
In what was clearly one of the darkest and most dangerous times in World War II, in May 1944, a young German pastor called Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a prison in Tegel. A year later he was executed by the Nazis.
Throughout his time in prison, Bonhoeffer was able to do only one thing, namely to correspond with his family and his friends. It is precisely that correspondence in dark and dangerous days which from the grave continues to inspire generations that follow. In one of the most moving and most beautiful letters, he wrote in May 1944 to a little baby called Dietrich Wilhelm Rudiger Bethge, his godson. He wrote it on the occasion of his baptism, knowing that he of course could not be present for that great day and knowing that the little baby couldn't read it. Nevertheless, for posterity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to say something to his godson. This is what he wrote, the final words of a long letter, and I believe in many ways they speak to us tonight from the grave:
Today, Dietrich, you will be baptised a Christian. All those great ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be spoken over you and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out on you without your knowing anything about it; but we are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding: reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ, Christian discipleship - all these things are so difficult and so remote. We hardly venture even to speak any more of them. In the traditional words and acts, we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. This is our fault. Our church which has been fighting in these years only for its own self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. Till we can speak again with those new words the Christian cause will be a silent and a hidden affair. But there will be those who pray and do right and wait for God's own time. May you be one of them, dear boy, and may it be said of you one day: 'The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn which shines brighter and brighter till the full day dawns.'
This was the last time that Bonhoeffer wrote to his godson.
There is in this message a profound word for you and me. It is that when we face terror, when we face death and injustice, very often our words fail us and we are left with simply prayer and righteous action. Dietrich Bonhoeffer later on refers to this as the disciplina arcani, the "discipline of the secret."
Very often when you see the tragedies that we saw on September 11th words fail us to describe the enormity of their impact or the severity of what they have done.
I thought back recently to when I was newly ordained and I moved into a pastoral charge. Within a matter of two or three weeks of my arrival as a new minister there was a tragedy.
The tragedy was caused by a police chase at night. The man who was being pursued lost control of his car and hit a house. But he didn't only hit a house, he went through into a bedroom and his car landed on a man and a woman as they were asleep in their beds, and killed them instantly. In the adjacent room was their 11-year-old son, who saw his parents killed. It was my job to give the message and to minister to the young boy.
I look back almost in shame to how inadequate I was for the task, how ill-prepared I was, how my words seemed to have no power and no resonance. I was rendered speechless in the face of such tragedy. The only thing that I felt that I could do with any legitimacy is what Bonhoeffer had suggested to his young godson: Pray, and continue to do the righteous works in the world.
My friends, this night our words once again fail us. We have had the stories of the horrors of that day recounted to us over and over again in the media. Over and over again there have been commentaries on it; but tonight I feel words still fail us to grasp the enormity of what took place. In fact, I still feel in many ways we are in shock, and the shock began when those planes flew into the World Trade Center, when that plane flew into the Pentagon, and when that plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
But the shock waves have continued and continue to ripple in their effect throughout our collective soul. They do so as we remember this night the dead: those who died in New York City, and in Washington, and in Pennsylvania; but also the countless others who have died on battlefields, or those who have died as a result of friendly fire, or whose who have died going in to protect and save those who were in those collapsing buildings - those men and women who in their valour did the righteous action; who did not even get a chance to say a word but, through their actions, spoke volumes. We have felt the shock waves of those deaths. They still haunt us and the memory of them will never go away.
The shock waves have rippled through our economy. They have caused many people to stagger as a result of the power of them and we are only just feeling their effects.
Just recently I had a conversation with a minister in Brooklyn, New York. He's at the Old First Reformed Church and he was telling me that most of the people in his neighbourhood are West Indian. So many of them since September 11th have been unemployed because they were part of the hospitality trade and did menial work. Many of them have not been able to go back to their jobs. We do not understand or appreciate: Those shock waves go very, very deep indeed into the soul and the life of New York City.
Another minister talked about firemen who still come into his church but, whenever certain hymns are played, have to leave because they bring back so many memories that it's too emotional for them. The shock waves continue and they cannot bear it.
We feel the shock waves in so many ways, and when a person or a society or a community is in shock it is not always our words that are going to be able to provide solace. Sometimes it is actually our silence.
But not our silence as if we do not care, God forbid. Our silence in recognition that the only one who can really speak in the midst of that shock and that horror is God and God alone. That is the discipline of the secret. It is recognizing that it is God's word and it will always be God's word alone that truly brings comfort and hope and meaning.
This night, however, I want us to think for a moment about what God's word means for us; for they are not my words, they are God's word.
Psalm 23 says it so much more powerfully than I can ever say it: Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. This is the word of God that arises amid our silence.
From Psalm 16: Preserve me, O God, for I place my trust in you. These are not our words; they are from the secret silence. They are the words of God in whom we trust.
The Apostle Paul, in writing this magnificent, almost epic word to the Romans who are facing tragedy and persecution and death again from the ashes speaks a word of hope and comfort; but they are not our words, they are God's words to us and we are silenced before them. He says four things to the Romans who are facing persecution.
This night, as we prepare to leave this place, I pray that we will do these four things and, even in silence, remember them.
The first of these is that no matter what the world may throw at those Roman Christians, he says, I want you to rejoice in your hope.
You see, it would be the great victory of those who perpetrate terror if we lost our sense of rejoicing and our sense of hope. Then we would have lost our anchor. Then we would have felt that we were going through the valley alone. But Paul knew we do not go through that valley alone and no matter what waits us at either end of that valley, because of the grace of Jesus Christ we have hope and we are always people of hope. We must continue to be people of hope and we must, above all things, rejoice.
That is why gathering in a church this night is a profound statement of that reality: No matter what has happened, we are determined to rejoice in hope for the living and the dead.
Paul also says that you must do something else. You must be patient in your suffering. There is nothing harder than to be patient when you suffer. Looking forward to a good thing at Christmas, looking forward to a lovely gift, it can be a little hard to be patient. That is one level of patience. But when you are in pain, when your soul hurts, when you are in agony, that calls for another kind of patience. It is greater patience.
The problem is, if we are not patient, then we lash out. We take an action which is not based on reason, or on prayer, or on thought. When we do that we often look immediately for scapegoats and we create enemies and we create violence.
In the New York Times that I picked up on September 12th at a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that very next day, there was a very moving passage by Michael Gordon titled: When an Open Society is Wielded as a Weapon against Itself. In it he worried that in our vulnerability the very freedoms that we love, the very way of life that we adhere to, the very virtues that we grasp can be turned on themselves in the way in which the terrorists used the freedom we gave them to turn on us. He warned us to be careful, and we always will have to be careful.
We must be careful to be patient. We must be patient because of the third thing that Paul said. He said: "I want you at all times to be fervent in prayer." He is saying, I want you to seek the guidance and the wisdom of God in all things.
Currently our world hears about wars and rumours of wars. This world has undergone so much violence since September 11th , even in the homeland of God's people of Israel. We have seen inhumanity and we have seen people responding and reacting out of a gut-hatred and out of a passion that is not always based on devotion and on prayer and on the discipline of the secret. When our words fail us and our enemies torture us, Jesus was right, we also need to take time to pray for them and ourselves. This is a time for us to be fervent in prayer.
But lastly, this a time for us to take care of the saints, to take care of one another. You see, it seems to me that the greatest way in which we can oppose terrorists is to show that our way is the better way, that our way is the holier way.
Janice Stein, in writing in the September 7th Toronto Star, had these wonderful words to say: "The capacity to project attractive ideas of a good society is the most important currency we have in the struggle against those who use terror to promote their ideas." The greatest way then to show those who are the enemies of freedom, and the enemies of goodness, and the enemies of openness and of kindness that they are wrong is to practise those things with an even greater fervour, and an even greater desire, and an even greater passion that they may be shamed and that their deeds may be exposed to be darkness by the overwhelming power of light.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"
My friends, I do not believe for one minute this night, although I could be proven wrong by the Almighty, that Osama Bin Laden is going to be our friend. What I do believe is that we destroy any grounds of righteousness on which they claim to stand when our righteousness is greater and purer and follows the example of Jesus Christ.
That is why this night I think the memory of those firefighters and police officers and others who went in to Ground Zero, of those who sacrificed their lives, who let, as I said before, their actions speak, they are the ones we really need to honour this night, they are the ones we really need to remember: not only those who risked their lives and died, but also those who risked their lives and survived; for it seems to me that in the midst of terror and in remembering violence and injustice, we are all, every one of us, as Bonhoeffer was saying to his young godson, called to practice the righteousness of Christ.
In the wake of September 11th Maya Angelou wrote a beautiful poem entitled: Extravagant Spirits. When I first read it, I put it in a jacket pocket and I hoped I would never lose it, and it got caught in a ripped lining and I thought I had lost it. But it fell out this week.
Without their fierce devotion we are fragile and forlorn,
stumbling briefly among the stars.
We and our futures belong to them.
Exquisitely our beliefs and our breaths are made tangible in their love.
By their extravagant spirits they draw us from the safe borders and into the centre of the centre ring.
There they urge dance upon our leaden feet and to our sullen hearts bright laughter.
Not the crowds roar, nor the gasped breath of the timorous can stay their mission.
There is no moderation in their nature.
They spit upon their fingers to test the wind of history.
They slip into our bonds and steal us away from the slavery of cowardice.
They skin back their thin lips over fanged teeth and rocks in hand, in our presence and face down our Goliath.
These mothers, fathers, pastors and priests, these rabbis, imams and gurus teach us by their valour and mould us with their courage.
Without their fierce devotion we are only forlorn and only fragile, stumbling briefly among the stars.
This, my friends, is the power of prayer and righteous action to which we are all called this night. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.