Encountering Bonhoeffer’s passionate preaching on poverty.

Editor’s note — Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings, his courageous stand with the Confessing Church, and his martyrdom for opposing Hitler during World War II all overshadow his earlier writings.  In this excerpt, adapted from The Cost of Moral Leadership, Geffrey Kelly showcases some of Bonhoeffer’s less well-known but powerful pre-war preaching focusing on the poor.   Bonhoeffer’s words are as relevant, challenging, and inspiring today as they were three quarters of a century ago.

Bonhoeffer’s compassion for the poor comes through strongly in several of his sermons. In the ecumenical conference in Gland, Switzerland, for example, he linked the frustration of the poor peoples of the world with the violence that turned national security into an idolatry.  He spoke there of the fallout in nations that neglect their poor; “millions hungry, people with cruelly deferred and unfulfilled wishes, desperate people who have nothing to lose but their lives and will lose nothing in losing them.”

Bonhoeffer’s defense of the poor appears most detailed and energetic in the one sermon that deals directly with their plight, using as its text the Lukan story of Lazarus and the rich man.  The setting was Berlin, on the first Sunday after the feast of the Holy Trinity, May 29, 1932.  Bonhoeffer told them at the outset of this sermon that this Gospel must be understood and preached in such a way that people long for its fulfillment in their lives.  The Lukan story is not intended to lull its listeners into smugness about their own virtue.  Instead, Christians must ask ever anew how the Gospel applies to their everyday living.  All around him, however, he saw not eagerness to live the Gospel, but deliberate attempts to avoid the possibility that Jesus’ words could be insinuated into existence beyond their “feel-good” presence in church.  And so he challenged his congregation to permit themselves to be confronted with the revolutionary words of Jesus in this Gospel.

His congregation was familiar with the story of Lazarus and the rich man.  Bonhoeffer had them imagine Jesus surrounded by the sick, poor, wretched Lazaruses, telling them of that destitute leprous Lazarus lying at the gages of the rich man’s estate.  At their deaths, of course, Jesus’ impoverished listeners rejoice when he tells them of Lazarus being welcomed into heaven and the rich man being condemned to hell.  Justice is finally done!  This story, Bonhoeffer claimed, illustrates picturesquely Luke’s earlier praise of the poor and his prophetic pronouncement of woes on the rich and self-satisfied.

On a more practical level, Bonhoeffer knew that the people to whom he was preaching were the same ones who had been exposed to the drumbeat of Nazi promises of anew millennium, a new world order of prosperity and glory.  Jesus’ message is just the opposite, he reminded the people.  Jeus proclaims not the promises of slick political leaders or the justification of violence done through hatred of the weak, the unproductive handicapped, and those considered of an inferior race, but the compassion that the rich person was unable to show to the leprous Lazarus.  “Blessed are you outcasts and despised,” Bonhoeffer said, “you casualties of society, you men and women without work, you broken and ruined ones, you lonely and forsaken, you who endure violence and unjustly suffer, you who suffer in body and soul.  Blessed are you since God’s joy will come over you and will remain eternally with you.  That is the Gospel of the dawn of the new world, the new order, that is the world of God and the order of God.  The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, and the Gospel is preached to the poor.”  Bonhoeffer’s words are a direct exposé of the seditious tactics of political leaders like Hitler who proclaim their ability to establish a “new world order,” a utopian slogan far removed from Jesus’ idea of how society should order itself.

But Bonhoeffer cautioned his congregation against those who pretend to know the Gospel’s meaning other than what Luke emphasizes.  They spiritualize the stark, uncompromising words of Jesus.  They sublimate, refine, embellish, and moralize the story, arguing that it is not the outwardly poor or rich who are blessed or condemned; it is, rather; how one handles poverty or wealth that is the basis for God’s judgment.  Inner attitude becomes then the sole basis for judging the poor and the rich.  Bonhoeffer pointed out that while there is a half-truth lurking in this interpretation, it is dangerous, because it dismisses Jesus’ emphasis as irrelevant and distorts his meaning.  It is also too easy, giving Christians as it does a pretext to excuse themselves from the demands of Jesus that they show genuine compassion to the real needs of the poor.  It also allows rich people who may have exploited the poor and made their poverty all the more unbearable grounds for boasting that in their hearts they are poor in spirit.

If the message is totally in the realm of the devotional or spiritualized piety, Bonhoeffer asked why Jesus did not speak of Lazarus’s inner attitude.  He must have been desperately poor to have lain at the rich man’s gate unable to move away.  Or, conversely, why doesn’t Jesus speak of the condition of soul of the rich man?  Jesus did not moralize; he simply described their material conditions.  Bonhoeffer asked further why Jesus healed the sick and those in misery if he were not touched by their physical distress.  Why then do we have the arrogance to spiritualize what moved Jesus so deeply?  “We must put an end to this insolent and hypocritical spiritualizing of the Gospel.  Either take it for what it really is or hate it, but be honest about it.”
At this point in his sermon Bonhoeffer spoke frankly to the congregation, asking them truthfully to reflect on their attitudes toward the Lazaruses of German society in 1932.  It would be honest to admit “we really despise the multitude of Lazaruses among us and the Gospel of the poor [because that Gospel[ stings our pride, pollutes our race, and weakens our power.  We are rich but proud of it.”  He went on to declare that it is too easy to scorn the multitudes of Lazaruses because they have no name.  But can one really ignore the Lazarus who encounters us face to face in the many forms Jesus assumes and say that we deride this Jesus and his proclamation that the poor are indeed blessed and loved by God?

{quotes align=right}Bonhoeffer then told the congregation that he considered it a mockery to speak to the poor of heavenly comfort while denying them the earthly comfort they seek.{/quotes}  His words here return in another form in his Ethics, where in even stronger language he declares that refusing food to the hungry is to blaspheme against God and one’s neighbor.  Attending to the actual physical needs of people, not offering them political bromides, is dearest to the heart of God, who cares for the needy through the compassionate outreach of people of faith. The poor have little need for the cynicism behind the pious phrases they are dealt or the lies beyond the miserly handouts of politicians who are supposed to attend to their needs.  Bonhoeffer then related care given to the poor, the paralyzed, the blind, the deaf, and the homeless to the part Christians contribute to the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.

Who really is Lazarus?  Bonhoeffer asked.  He believed that deep down they knew the answer to tha6t question.  Lazaruses are those “who cannot” cope with life, who are often foolish, impertinent, obtrusive, godless, but endlessly in need and, whether they know it or not, our brothers and sisters who suffer and who long for the crumbs that fall from the tables.  If they feel sorry for themselves and see themselves as Lazarus, they may also ask if they are the rich man.  Finally, he told them that Lazarus is “always the other person who encounters you in a thousand despised forms, the crucified Christ himself.”  We are all Lazaruses, he concluded, and there is even salvation for the rich man, whose story of hope is that of the Good Samaritan.  But the task of Christians is to see beyond Lazarus none other than God in Jesus Christ.  If we are to see the poor Lazarus in all his frightful misery and wretchedness, Bonhoeffer said, we are also to see Christ, who invited this Lazarus to feast wih him and proclaimed this Lazarus to be blessed.

Few sermons centered around the care of a nation’s poor can match the passion with which Bonhoeffer so often called his congregation’s attention to the plight of Germany’s outcasts and destitute at a time when the nation had not yet recovered from the great depression and its citizens were being torn between conflicting ideologies preaching their own brand of envy, vindictiveness, and hatred of peoples.  Bonhoeffer refused to be drawn into interpretations that tended to spiritualize and moralize the condition of the poor.  Theirs was the immediate need for compassion and help.  Just a month before his ordination, on the occasion of the Harvest Festival in 1931, he preached a sermon based on Psalm 63:3 (“your steadfast goodness is better than life”).  His theme was the Christian responsibility to extend the material blessings of God to those needy people whose sustenance depends on the compassion that God inspires in true followers of Jesus Christ.  Bonhoeffer very quickly drew a contrast between the words of the biblical world and the words of Bonhoeffer’s own generation.  The cry of Psalm 63 “is the exultant cry of the wretched and abandoned, of the weary and the overburdened; the cry of longing uttered by the sick and the oppressed; the song of praise among the unemployed and the hungry in the great cities; the prayer of thanksgiving prayed by tax collectors and prostitutes, by sinners known and unknown.”  Their prayers have been answered.  But, he added, it was not the shout of joy in his Germany.  It was a joyful acclamation only for the unreal world of the Bible.

Bonhoeffer took his congregation to the world of the psalmist to discover what he was really thinking.  God had come into the psalmist’s life.  He could no longer escape the presence and demands of God.  His life had become split.  He was torn away from everything he had held onto; God was destroying every vestige of evil in him.  There remained only his life; and God would take that too.  The psalmist, like all creation, belonged to God.  The Harvest Festival, Bonhoeffer said, was a good time to reflect seriously on what God’s gracious generosity to human beings means.  Nature produces food, indeed, but that year’s harvest did not yield enough for the people’s needs.  The situation was bleak: “We must be prepared for the fact that this winter seven million people in Germany will find no work, which means hunger for fifteen to twenty million people next winter….  These are the cold statistics behind which stands a terrible reality.  Should we overlook these millions of people when we celebrate our harvest festival in church?  We dare not.”

But when he asked his people to imagine that, as they were sitting down to a full meal and thanking God for God’s goodness, they could not avoid a certain uneasiness.  Why should they be the ones who benefit from God’s largesse and not their hungry brothers and sisters in town?  At that moment comes a ring at the door; there is someone standing there who would also like to thank God for the gift of food and prosperity but has been denied. And that person is “starving with starving children and who will go to bed in bitterness.”  What can one conclude?  That God blesses us and curses the other?  Such thinking that God rewards us in this way for our virtue would be a curse.  No, the point of the good food and prosperity we may enjoy is that this is the sign of an enormous responsibility that God lays on us.  It is God’s way of telling us to provide for our needy brothers and sisters.  In Bonhoeffer’s words: “{quotes}If we want to understand God’s goodness in God’s gifts, then we must think of them as a responsibility we bear for our brothers and sisters.{/quotes}  Let none say: God has blessed us with money and possessions, and then live as if they and their God were alone in the world.  For the time will come when they realize that they have been worshipping the idols of their good fortune and selfishness.  Possessions are not God’s blessing and goodness, but the opportunities of service which God entrusts to us.”  Few sermons, either in Bonhoeffer’s preaching days or in the present time, rise to the practical level of addressing rich Christians directly in the contest of the biblical question: what can the rich do to be saved?  Here Bonhoeffer threw the question onto the level of one’s personal responsibility to use the prosperity that one enjoys for the benefits of the have-nots of today’s world.  Luke’s curse on the rich is very well related to the example Bonhoeffer used, that of the unconcerned wealthy people who believe in their hearts that they have been rewarded for their virtue and in the conceit proceed to be indifferent to needy people, especially the weak and vulnerable around them.  The task of moral leaders, if one can extrapolate from these sermons, is to pressure the strong to take care of their hurting brothers and sisters.

Social justice for the poor has everything to do with the protection believing Christians can offer to weak brothers and sisters in nearly every society on earth.  That Christian duty became the point of Bonhoeffer’s London sermon of 1934, based on Paul’s exclamation in 2 Cor 12:9, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.”  He began by stating that every philosophy has attempted to answer the question of what meaning weakness could have in this world.  He admitted that everyone seems to have attitudes toward physical and emotional weakness, though people would rather ignore the problem of dealing with the presence of the weak among them lest it make them uncomfortable.  But Paul’s declaration opened the way for Bonhoeffer and his people to explore what Paul could have meant and, more important, what meaning dealing with human weakness could have for Christians in the 1930s.

Why does the existence of weak, handicapped, destitute people seem so important?  Bolnhoeffer’s answer was a series of rhetorical questions: “Have you seen a greater mystery in this world than poor people, old people, insane people — people who cannot help themselves but who have just to rely on other people for help, for love, for care?  Have you ever thought what outlook on life a cripple, a hopelessly sick man, a man exploited by society, a colored man in a white country, an untouchable [in India] may have?”  If they had ever thought of these very concrete examples of just what forms weakness might assume, he told them that, first of all, their own life was qualitatively different; and secondly, they were all inseparably bound to the weak.

Bonhoeffer insisted that Christianity was in its own origin a religion of and for the weak.  Its identification with the miserable masses, the weak of this world, became at once its great attract for Jesus’ followers and a source of indignation and enmity for many others, including those who espoused a domineering philosophy of life in which strength, power, and violence were glorified.  Bonhoeffer’s comment on this was emphatic: “{quotes}Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its plea for the weak.{/quotes}”  But Christendom had too easily slipped into the worship of power, and Christians had failed to take the initiative in doing what was necessary to help the weak of this world.  He called for bold initiatives from Christians courageous enough to follow the lead of Jesus Christ, saying, “Christians should give much more offense, shock the world far more, than they are now doing.  Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than consider the possible moral right of the strong.”  Christians and their moral leaders are, in other words, called to be countercultural, becoming persistent advocates on behalf of those who are powerless to escape their destitution.

Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to protest against those who minimize the crushing weight set by society upon the weaker citizens by exalting strength and heaping honors on the mighty of this world.  Christians need to reverse their attitudes.  There must be, he said, an overt preference given to those who are suffering and exploited; the strong should always look up to the weak.  “Weakness is holy, therefore we devote ourselves to the weak…. The weak need not serve the strong, but the strong must serve the weak, and not with any feeling of benevolence but with reverence and love.”  He concluded that ultimately “Christianity turns our human scale of values upside down, and establishes a new order of values in the sight of Christ.”  His words her are very close to the convictions he shared with his congregation in Barcelona, that “Christianity preaches the unending worth of the apparently worthless and the unending worthlessness of what is apparently so valuable.”  They are reminiscent, too, of one of his earliest sermons, given during his internship in Barcelona.  The theme was Advent.  The message was that every day in their lives was an Advent of the Lord in which Christ stood at the door and knocked, asking “for help in the form of a beggar, in the form of a ruined human being in torn clothing.”  In his sermons Bonhoeffer was unwavering in his insistence that Jesus comes to Christians in the form of those who, by reason of their poverty and weakness, have been given us by God to draw on our faith and energies by our concern for them and the care we give them.

Reprinted with permission from The Cost of Moral Leadership by Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson. Copyright 2002 by Eerdmans.