Today is All Saints’ Sunday, one of the major feast days of the Church, and one of my favorite Sundays of the year. This first Sunday in November is the day we recognize the saints of the Church — all of them, those who are of historical importance and have their own day on the Church calendar, and those who may be remembered only by God.
And it’s the day we remember our own saints, those whom we have loved who are now part of what St. Paul calls “that great cloud of witnesses.”
Usually on this day I like to tell the story of an unheralded saint, someone who has died in the past year, who may not be well known, but has lived a life of goodness and service. Someone who will never appear on a calendar of the saints.
But for the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about a man who is remembered on the Episcopal Church calendar on April 9, the day he was executed in 1945.
I’m talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well-known German theologian who was part of the German resistance during the second world war, and who was hanged for participating in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was born into a fairly prominent, well educated German family. He completed his doctorate in theology by the age of 21, after which he moved to New York to further his studies at Union Theological Seminary.
He writes that he was greatly unimpressed with American theology until a seminarian took him to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he heard the gospel of social justice preached, and became more attuned to society’s injustices.
While there, he also saw the movie about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, which affirmed his inclination to pacifism.
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931 to teach theology at the University of Berlin. He now approached theology not just as an intellectual pursuit, but as a call to action, a call to live out the teachings of Jesus.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer was immediately a vocal critic. During a radio broadcast he warned Germans against slipping into the dangerous cult of Hitler, who he called a seductive liar.
Bonhoeffer was a leader of the Confessing Church movement, a relatively small group of clergy who signed the Barmen Declaration, that insisted that Christ, not the Fuhrer, is the head of the church. He also strongly opposed the growing persecution of Germany’s Jewish population.
He spent two years as the head of an underground seminary, secretly traveling from one village to another, training pastors for the Confessing Church.
By 1938, it was clear that war was imminent. Bonhoeffer knew that as a committed Christian pacifist opposed to the Nazi regime, he could never swear an oath to Hitler, or fight in Hitler’s army.
So in June 1939, when Union Theological Seminary invited him to come teach, he went back to New York.
He immediately regretted that decision and within two weeks he decided to return to Germany, despite the strong protests from friends who feared what would happen to him there.
“I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America at this time,” he wrote. “I must live through this difficult period in our national history along with the people of Germany.
“I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of the time with my people.
“Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that a future Christian civilization may survive, or else willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization and any true Christianity.
“I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice from a place of security.”
Soon after returning to Germany Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speak in public or to print or publish anything. He was required to report all his activities to the police.
Two events had a profound effect on Bonhoeffer during this period. First, on April 20, 1938, all the pastors of the Confessing Church, which had opposed Hitler, gave their full allegiance to him. Bonhoeffer wrote that he was horrified “the cross had been replaced during Holy Week by an immense floodlit swastika.”
The second event was Kristallnacht, the infamous night when many Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were trashed and burned, in November of 1938.
Bonhoeffer’s response to these two events was surprising. He joined the German military intelligence group the Abwehr. In reality, the Abwehr was also the center of German resistance. Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law gave him the job of using his connections all over Europe to gather intelligence to assist Germany in its miliary victory.
But in reality, instead of acquiring intelligence, Bonhoeffer passed it on to his contacts, giving them information about Hitler’s military plans, and of the unimaginable horrors taking place in concentration camps.
During this time Bonhoeffer used his contacts to help Jews escape from Germany. He also became involved in plotting unsuccessful assassination attempts against Hitler.
He was arrested on April 5, 1943, and imprisoned for 1.5 years, then moved to a concentration camp. On April 8, 1945, in a court martial in which no witnesses or evidence was presented, he was sentenced to death.
“This is the end,” Bonhoeffer said, “but for me it is the beginning of life.”
He was hung the next day.
Bonhoeffer lived a life utterly devoted to God. He struggled with the moral implications of being involved in assassination plots, but came to see it as a fulfillment of his calling.
A biographer writes that Bonhoeffer was able to die a death aligned with his entire life: a death in the image of Christ, bearing the sins of those who knew not what they had done.
I’m not sure that Bonhoeffer would describe himself as a saint, but he certainly fits that description as put forth by theologian William Stringfellow.
“Being a saint does not mean being godly, but being truly human,” Stringfellow says. “It does not mean being other worldly, but being deeply implicated in the practical existence of this world without succumbing to this world.
“It is not about being transported out of this world, but about being plunged more fully into it.”
This past week was the sixth anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 Jewish worshipers were killed.
A young Jewish girl wrote a letter to the congregation after the shootings.
“I am Jewish and I am in fourth grade,” she wrote. “I am very mad and very sad. And if anyone is reading this, I just want to say I will honor and pray for those who got injured or died or who helped.
“When something like this happens,” she added, “we need to make the good voices louder than the bad voices.”
This All Saints’ Sunday may we all find our good voices, and raise them loud and strong, standing up for the good and right and true, combatting the sickness and hate which have infected our nation, and moving us closer to God’s dream of a land of liberation, justice, and peace.
Amen.