April 30, 2006 -
Sixty-one years ago yesterday, the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberated the Dachau concentration camp, ten miles outside of Munich, Germany. The Nazis, under the spell of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, began in the early 1930s a systematic campaign to purge the country of all inferior persons who could only deter the glory of the Aryan race and the destiny of the Third Reich. Hitler believed he was bringing in the kingdom of God, so to speak, in a kind of messianic way, mixing religion and politics in a deadly cocktail. He convinced his followers to eliminate anyone and anything that would dilute the strength of the empire. He could envision only those who were closest to perfection as having a place in that kingdom.
And so camps like Dachau were created. First, Hitler sent his political opponents, the communists and Social Democrats, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, disabled persons, homosexuals, and chronic criminals to what was essentially a work camp. They built weapons for the military and provided slave labor to their Nazi masters. By 1938 the camp population was mainly Jews. Dachau’s mad scientists experimented on the prisoners, turning them from human beings into guinea pigs. They subjected them to every kind of indignity, even injecting them with malaria and tuberculosis so that they could try experimental drugs on them. They barely fed them and barely clothed them. And when their bodies became too weak and diseased, they simply exterminated them and put them in mass graves.
My son Rhett and I walked through the Dachau camp last summer. A pall falls over you as you enter the gates that read, Arbeit Macht Frei, a bitter phrase to those within the prison that translates “Work makes you free.” There is nothing of freedom in that place. Work made Dachau prisoners sick or dead, not free.
Dachau was a place that hate built. Hatred led the Nazis to dehumanize those they imprisoned, and once these people were no longer considered to be like themselves, they felt justified to do to them whatever they pleased. You know that one day after another, those prisoners asked themselves what made them deserve to be treated so.
What a contrast to what we see in First John! What love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. If hatred dehumanizes people and makes them wonder about what they are and why they deserve such treatment, love humanizes us and leaves us to wonder what we have done to deserve such love. Children of God, that is what we are, John the Elder says. This is the first part of love’s work, to make us know ourselves as beloved children of God.
If you have ever been in love, you know the astonishment of someone looking upon you with such sweetness. You know the amazement of someone seeing in you what you may not even see in yourself. What love! Why me? How could you love me that way? What have I done to deserve the way you feel about me?
Now take that into your relationship with God. If anyone ought to be able to see the imperfection in you and hate the sin that conceals itself to everyone else, it ought to be God. Yet the one that knows you best loves you most! What love!
This past week, Jana Childers, who preached from our pulpit last Sunday, told a story to our group of pulpiteers about a young girl who knew what it was to be different. She was born into a rural community to a loving family, but she tragically came out of the womb with a cleft palate. There was no money to do anything about it. She was hard to look at and hard to listen to. She bravely made her way through her young life, feeling the sting of comments from other children, knowing they did not want to be her friend, always aware of what it meant not to be included. She played by herself at recess, and she covered her face as much as possible. By the time she was seven, she knew what the world was. She had heard the phrase “only a mother could love that” and she understood it.
One day a special teacher visited the school and put the children through some basic speech tests. When it was her turn, the little girl went into the classroom that had been set aside for the exams. Just stand over there by the door, the teacher said from her desk at the far end of the room. I want to test your hearing first. Turn your back, face the door and tell me what you hear me say.
Apple, the teacher said in a low voice. “Apple,” the little girl repeated.
Man, the teacher said.
“Man,” the little girl echoed.
Banana.
“Banana.”
Okay, the teacher said, Now a sentence. The child knew that the sentences were usually fairly easy—she wasn’t the first child to take the test, after all. She’d heard you could expect something like, The sky is blue or Are your shoes brown? Still, she listened very carefully.
So it was that standing with her face against the door, she heard the teacher’s whisper quite clearly: I wish you were my little girl.
Listen carefully; God is whispering to you in a low and loving voice: You are my child. That’s what you are. Do you really know that? Believe it today.
The next question, then, is what you will be. Both things are important to us. We need to know what we are in the eyes of God, which makes us what we really are, regardless of what we are in the eyes of others. But what is to become of us?
Well, apparently, God is not content for us to remain children forever. The good part about being children is that we are accepted just as we are by our heavenly Father, but we are expected to become something more as we grow in the grace of Christ. And what is that to be?
Part of the answer may be found in the shaping of our souls to be worthy of our status as children of God. Children get a lot of grace to act in ways unbecoming for adults, but that’s because we know they are in the process of becoming adults. My colleague in Asheville, North Carolina, Guy Sayles, puts it nicely: We think of ourselves now as human beings. We really aren’t that—not yet. We are human becomings. The fetus conceived only yesterday is a human becoming. If you are living in Christ, believing in him and trying to follow and obey him as the master of your life, you are, by his grace, becoming ever more and more like him.
Guy cites Gertrude Stein, who in her autobiography described an exchange she had with Pablo Picasso. Even though he had painted a portrait of her, he did not immediately recognize her when they next met. Stein wrote:
I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, somebody said that she does not look like it, but that doesn’t make any difference, she will. You and I are growing into the image of Jesus; and even though there are days when we do not seem to be very much like him, we will be one day. In the end, as Carroll Simcox says it beautifully:
You and I shall be our real, complete selves for the first time ever. [“We Will Be Like Jesus,” on Day 1 radio broadcast (http://www.day1.net/?view=transcripts&tid=547).]But we should be more concrete about it if we can. If we are going to become like Jesus, and in so becoming we will finally be human beings fully alive, how will that be similar to or different from what we are now?
Our text from Luke helps us see something we might have missed. After Jesus is raised from the dead, he appears to his disciples in person, saying to them, as he did in his days before death, Peace be with you. This would have been a preventive word this time as much as a blessing. It didn’t work. Luke says they were startled and terrified, thinking they were seeing a ghost.
And isn’t that what we think about people who have died, that they are ghosts or spirits? That they are these flighty figures without substance that can move about with the greatest of ease because there’s only enough form to them to let you recognize them? And isn’t that kind of what we often think about what will happen to us when we die—that we will shed this ill-fitting uniform of flesh and finally be free?
I have been trying to ramp up my running lately. The big 5-0 is just months away, don’t you know?! I’d like not to be 50 pounds more than my college weight on that birthday. But with every step I take on the road, I am aware of how whatever I am inside does not seem to convince what hangs on it to comply with my instructions. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. So I fantasize about shedding the carcass and running free.
Well, Jesus is the true human being we are going to be like when we get through with this life of becoming and see ourselves in his reflection. And when he appeared to his friends, he held out his hands and feet for them to touch. Luke doesn’t say it was to show his wounds; he says it was to show his flesh and bones. In other words, if we are going to be like Jesus in the next life, we are going to have bodies as well as spirits. And the best news to me is that we are apparently even going to enjoy some good eating! Jesus gobbled down some broiled fish in their presence. I’ll take mine blackened.
Being a human being involves coming together body and soul. A redeemed person is directed from the inside out—but not all the way out as if to escape the body, just in order to make the body whole. Jesus was more concerned about doing the will of God than he was to preserve his own skin. And because of that, God restored his body to its rightful perfection. The way we can prepare for our bodily transformation in heaven, then, is pay closest attention to our spiritual life. By our inner transformation now, we will be further along toward our bodily future.
And isn’t that what love does for all of us? If you pay attention only to the flesh in a relationship, the spirit dies, and the longing for the beloved wanes. But if you give yourself to be soul mates, you find that you are not embarrassed to be yourself physically in the presence of your beloved; you are not ashamed of your nakedness. You are attracted all the more to the flesh and bone of the one you love.
And the way that works is well described by the grammatically quirky poet e. e. cummings: I carry you in my heart/I carry you with me wherever I go/I am never without you./I carry your heart in my heart.
What love that God should not only make us children but also transform us into the likeness of Christ by putting our heart in Christ’s heart and his heart in our heart! This is what you are and what you will be. Now, sisters and brothers, live into this love.
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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