Scripture: Luke 5:1-11 and Luke 18:35-43
This is, I suppose, one of those sermons that has earned me the reputation I was talking about last week. That is to say, it’s a sermon that deals with a spiritual situation where I don’t think there are any simple answers and where at the end there may seem to be more questions than answers and where I do believe what we may need to do is learn to live with the questions and in a deeper sense live the questions.
It’s also a kind of sermon that I must say I would have preferred not to give today. I was thinking that it would be nice on this holiday weekend to give a sort of light sermon. That might be something of an oxymoron, since sermons are supposed to be about things that matter and so in a sense by definition they are not light, or at least you don’t aim for that. So I don’t think I was really sure what that meant but maybe something that didn’t require too much effort on my part or on yours and maybe something that didn’t focus too much on the weight of the world. Unfortunately, whatever that sermon might have been, it didn’t happen. I tried, but there was just no light sermon in me, and in fact what is in me feels pretty heavy, but for better or worse it’s what I have this week.
I did promise not to turn my post-sabbatical sermons into reports on what I did during the sabbatical, but I also said that what I had to say in the coming weeks would inevitably be strongly influenced by where I had been and what I had done during sabbatical. What’s on my mind this morning is something that is really an issue all the time but that was brought home to me in a new way during our trip to Germany a few months ago, and it has been on my mind ever since.
As some of you know, my daughter Sarah spent the last twelve months volunteering in Germany for an organization, Action Reconciliation Service for Peace that she found out about through European colleagues at Inisfree. It is an organization that has worked over the years with holocaust survivors, mainly I think to provide ways for their stories to be told, and in general to promote educational work regarding the holocaust and broader issues of racism and anti-Semitism. Sarah worked out of the Protestant Church on the memorial site of the Dachau Concentration Camp, which consists of the original walls and barbed wire, a few of the buildings from 70 years ago, an exhibit area that tells the story of the camp, three places of worship, and several commemorative areas. The camp is located in the quiet little suburban village of Dachau just outside of Munich. We were going to Germany primarily to see Sarah and so we stayed with her in Dachau, enjoying its mostly friendly people and relaxed pace, sidewalk cafes and art galleries, its energy consciousness with many people of all ages riding bicycles and with extremely reliable bus service, all in all what felt to me like a pretty gentle way of life.
One of Sarah’s duties was to give occasional English language tours around the site of the camp. She was giving one the Sunday we were there, so of course we went along. One of the issues that comes up in the tour is the question of whether what was going on in the camps was widely known outside the camps, whether there was any general awareness of what was going on. This is subject matter for exhibits in the museum area of the memorial site. It is on the minds of visitors. It shows up in writings and books. I think it is fair to say it is still on the minds of many German people. Did people in general know what was going on and do nothing, or did they really not know?
There is an exhibit in the museum at Dachau that shows a rather extensive network of camps connected to the major ones such as Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth. There were, in other words, not just the few well-known camps but many smaller ones scattered across a wide area throughout the country. The extent of the network suggests that it would have been hard not to know something was going on. Furthermore, prisoners were marched through the town of Dachau on their way from the train station to the work camp, partly as a means of intimidation, and some prisoners from the camp were sent to work outside the camp in the town providing forced labor, free labor to area businesses. A number of things suggest strongly that the camps would not have been completely unknown to the general population. Sarah reports a survivor saying at a meeting she was attending that she, the survivor, could not believe or accept the idea that people did not know. She could well understand and accept that people were afraid and therefore did nothing, but could not accept the idea that they did not know. For her, and I suspect for many other survivors, fear was a better defense than ignorance, contrary to the way it is often presented where it is assumed that to claim ignorance is to claim innocence.
I say all this not to try to engage in a historical debate or come to some conclusion about what happened and what people knew or were thinking and feeling many years ago in an atmosphere that’s hard to imagine, and still less to make some summary judgment about whether the German people should be considered guilty of Nazi atrocities or to what degree they should be held accountable for Dachau and other places like it. I say it because when I was confronted with this issue again last spring, it raised issues for me about me, not about citizens of Germany. It seems to me one reason the question of how much the German people knew at the time continues to intrigue and trouble many people is because it causes us to wonder about ourselves too. What would we have done in that situation? What would it take to make me afraid enough to keep silent and to do nothing in the face of some horrible evil? If the idea that the German people didn’t really know what was going on implies that we think that surely any decent human being would have done something if they did know, maybe that implies that we think, being the noble creatures we are, that we would have done the right thing, but that is something I am not willing to say about myself. The question of what I would have done is truly one that I do not have a confidant answer to, and it leaves me in no position to make confidant statements about others. We admire a man like Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned at Dachau, we admire him precisely, do we not, because he had the courage to risk himself in a way most Germans did not and most of us probably would not. In any case our visit to Dachau brought those kinds of questions front and center for me. It would be hard to visit Dachau without being confronted by those kinds of questions.
As I was thinking about those kinds of questions, however, I also soon realized that these questions were not purely theoretical. It is not just a question of what hypothetically I might or might not do if I found myself in some extreme situation. I am in fact in such a situation, call it extreme or not it doesn’t matter, but I am in a situation not essentially different from the one German people were in. I don’t want to minimize the extremity of that situation, but I do want to recognize that I can’t avoid confronting those questions myself. The question of how much the German people were aware of what was going on in the camps is a difficult and troubling one because it is not just a question of whether they knew or didn’t know. It is a question of what they allowed themselves to see. It is a question of whether you can be aware of something at one level of your being but on another level not admit that you are aware even to yourself. It is a question of the different ways human beings can be in denial, and denial is not only a powerful impulse for us humans but a subtle and intricate one as well. We have lots of ways of protecting ourselves, of tricking ourselves, of even lying to ourselves quite convincingly, of pretending that we don’t know things, convincing ourselves that we don’t know things, even though at some level we do. We can also not know things because we intentionally avoid knowing or finding out.
I think that is a phenomenon in my everyday life. I am engaged in an ongoing, everyday process of not seeing, intentionally not seeing fully or not paying complete attention to all sorts of realities in my world. And I do that because if I did see them clearly and pay honest to God attention, they would make a claim on me that I am not prepared for. There are all sorts of things that I choose not to find out about, because if I did I might very well have to do something or deal with the guilt of not doing something. The questions Dachau raised for me I say were not theoretical or hypothetical. They are very much live questions. What am I going to allow myself to know or choose to see? And what am I going to choose not to know and not to see because I am not prepared to deal with the claim in might make on me?
I believe we would be dishonest with ourselves if we pretended there were not a great many things that we choose not to see except maybe with peripheral vision, deniable peripheral vision. It made me reflect on the many stories in the gospels, one of which we heard this morning, where Jesus restores someone’s sight. In the straightforward sense of the story of course this is an obvious good that Jesus does for a blind man. Jesus asks the man what he would like him to do for him, and the man says, “Let me see again.” And Jesus makes it happen. An obviously good thing in that context.
In the context I’m talking in today though, maybe not such an obviously good thing. Sometimes I’m thinking for us merely mortal and very human human beings, seeing some things can feel more like a curse than a blessing. And if Jesus were to ask us partially blind people what we would like him to do for us, we might answer in all honesty, “Open my eyes. Let me see, but not everything, because everything is too much.” Sight is not always in every circumstance an unqualified and unmixed blessing. We need to be able to be in denial at least some of the time.
So I hope I am not sounding like I want to lay some kind of a guilt trip on all of us because we sometimes choose not to know things and not to see things, and do so at some level intentionally. To live with integrity is to live in that uncomfortable place in between the extremes of demanding too much of ourselves and demanding nothing much at all, between immersing ourselves in a sea of guilt that does little to help us act more effectively or lovingly and constantly reassuring ourselves of our own goodness by patting ourselves on the back and saying to ourselves that it’s ok to be in denial because after all we can’t do everything and so there’s no real point in feeling guilty at all or even thinking about it. Somewhere in between there I believe is where God would lead us. And we do need to rely on God’s leading, and we do need to come to God is a spirit of confession, not because we are such miserable sinners but because we are part of the world’s brokenness and are complicit in it. In that spirit, let us break bread together today, looking to God for mercy and also for sight and strength, courage and love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 2, 2007