So there was Bob in mid-life. His life was a wreck. He was a mess physically – out-of-shape, wheezing to climb the stairs. He smoked. He ate poorly. He had an office job where he sat all day. And he was lonely. It all came to a head for him when he asked a co-worker for a date and she practically laughed at him.
So Bob said, “This is it. I’m going to change some things.” He quit smoking. He started exercising. Took Zumba classes. Lost a lot of weight. Got an expensive hair implant. Changed his diet. He was a new man.
After six months he got up his nerve to ask the same woman out and this time she said yes. So Bob showed up on her doorstep, looking sharp in brand new clothes, bounding up the steps, feeling better than he ever had. He was just about the ring the doorbell when a lightning bolt struck him and knocked him off the front steps. He was lying there and he looks up into the heavens and says, “Why, God? Why now? After all I’ve been through to get here, why do this to me?”
A voice came from the sky and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”
Now I don’t believe that God does such things. I don’t believe that God sends lightning bolts for the purpose of zapping us. But I do think God asks some difficult things of us. For instance, as we read in 1Timothy today, we are asked to pray for everybody. In this letter of the early church, the apostle writes, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone.”
Everyone. Not just our friends and our neighbors. Not just our loved ones. Not just our fellow Christians. Not just my cat and my dog. Not just the people I can tolerate. No, the call is to pray for…and even to give thanks for…everyone.
It’s not easy to pray for everyone. We’re not always wishing everyone well. We’re not always feeling like giving thanks for everyone. Some people really get on my nerves from time to time. Some people do some pretty rotten things. Some people make my life difficult. Some people think funny. Some people have some pretty crazy ideas about politics and some of them are in high office. I’ve got pray for them?
Well, according to 1 Timothy, it seems that the answer is yes. And then it goes on to get specific. Pray for kings and all who are in high position so that we may lead a lquiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is the language that has always disturbed me. We don’t have many kings around anymore but we know the history and we know that they were often not noble, upright characters. They were often flawed. Greatly flawed. And our leaders today are no different. They are all too human. All too easy to mock. All too easily corrupted. 1 Timothy and Romans 13, where it tells us to be subject to the governing authorities, seem to be telling us to do something that can be morally dangerous. What if the people in high positions are not worthy of our allegiance? Pray for them. Be subject to them. That’s the response.
In his recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas talks about the struggle of the German church in the early days of the Nazi takeover there in the 1930s. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young professor in Berlin who would go on to become a pastor and then a participant in a plot against Adolf Hitler. He died in a Nazi concentration camp just days before it was liberated in the waning days of World War 2.
It was a crazy time. Germany had been through a long period of instability. Many Germans felt that their country had been bankrupted and crippled by the terms imposed on them following the First World War. Their democratic institutions were weak and there was the constant threat of revolution or governmental overthrow. In a period when there seemed to be no leaders, Hitler put himself up to be that leader and he did it by demonizing Jews and socialists and others that he could point to as destabilizing forces.
It seems hard for us to believe, but that Nazi ideology also infiltrated the German churches. In the spring of 1933, at the instigation of Nazi figures, the German Protestant church considered a proposal to purify the churches of all Jewish influences. Any minister who was of Jewish descent was to be removed from his post and parishioners who were converts from Judaism or racially Jewish were to be asked to form their own congregations in a separate church. The church was now for German Christians.
Bonhoeffer recognized that if the church were to adopt this it would be more than a bad idea, it would be heresy. The church was not formed on the basis of racial identity; it was built on Jesus Christ in whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, man nor woman. He could see that it was wrong. He could see the church capitulating to the Nazis. And yet he was haunted by the command to pray for the ruling authorities and to submit to them. How could Christians put together respect for the state with their Christian identity?
Bonhoeffer wrote about it in a famous essay on the “The Church and the Jewish Question.” In it he said that the church should not interfere in the workings of the state as a matter of course. That it should pray for its welfare and its leaders. But the church could also help the state see and evaluate what it is doing, particularly in providing for an atmosphere of law and order. When the state failed to secure order in the society, then the church should point it out, since it could see the state for what it is. And when the state, through an excess of concern for order, deprived Christians of their rights to live and worship, then it was the duty of the church to reject that government as a grotesque distortion of what a state should be.
Finally, when the state creates victims because of an excess of ordering, the church has “an unconditional obligation to the victims…even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”[i] Bonhoeffer believed that this meant standing with the Jews, with the outcast. Even if they weren’t Christians. It was part of the identity of the Christian to identify with those Christ came to die for. And it was all built on the notion that none of us who are called by Christ’s name are here by our own merit. As it says in the first chapter of 1 Timothy, “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the foremost.” We’re all here by God’s grace and by the fact that Jesus came to identify with us.
Bonhoeffer knew that his stance was only going to get him into trouble. It took him to a Christian home for people with epilepsy and other disabilities – people whom the Nazis grew to call “useless eaters” or “life unworthy of life.” It took him into a movement to protest the bishop of the German Church, Bishop Muller, who started to talk about his opponents such as Bonhoeffer as “Pffafen,” monkey priests. Finally it took him into a new Confessing Church that refused to give allegiance to Hitler’s state above Jesus. Ultimately it took him to a hangman’s noose.
I think about Bonhoeffer’s story and I wonder if I have such a radical notion of the love of God for all people. Or do I pull my punches and not associate with some people for fear that I will be considered tainted? Am I so closed off by preconceptions that I begin to believe that there are some folks who don’t deserve a place at the table…who have set themselves apart by what they have done? Are there some people for whom Jesus didn’t come?
“This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,” Paul says in 1 Timothy. “God, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for just the Christians…no…just the baysiders…no…just the conservatives…no…just the liberals…no…just the Cavaliers…no…Christ Jesus gave himself a ransom for all…For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”
I can’t imagine our bishop, Charlene Kammerer, referring to some of her clergy as Pffafen – monkey priests. But if a bishop were to become so heretical as to believe as the Nazi bishop did, I hope that I would do something to deserve that epithet. I hope I could be Pffafen. I hope that they could say of me what they said of Jesus – that he ate with sinners. That he welcomed foreigners. That he was not afraid to identify himself with those the world had rejected.
Who do we have to pray for? Our nation. Our leaders. Even when we think they’re wrong. For our brothers and sisters who are caught up in debates that dehumanize them. When we talk about immigration…we are talking about real human beings who are our neighbors. They, like us, are caught up in a system that is broken and that needs to be fixed. Can we identify with them? When we talk about the plans for an Islamic center and mosque in lower Manhattan…we are talking about fellow citizens who love and appreciate the same right we have to worship in freedom. We may question what wounds will be opened by having this center on this site, but we cannot allow our fears to trump our freedoms. One day it could be us. Can we identify with these people outside the Christian community?
Who do we have to pray for? Ultimately, we have to pray for ourselves. That we may have the courage to follow where Jesus leads. And the confidence to know that Jesus knows the scandal of an open door and an open table. Jesus knows the cost. Jesus knows where the journey leads. And he knows who we are – unworthy all – yet he invites us to come. Who knows who we’ll meet around that kingdom table? Thanks be to God.
1 Timothy 2:1-7[NRSV]
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all-- this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
[i] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010], ebook location 2923.
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