Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
James R. Gorman
September 3, 2000
I first met Hans Berthold when he came to Wisconsin in 1998. He was just retiring from his office as head of the pastoral training school at Schwerte in Westphalia at about 65 years of age. Hans was among the first of the Germans we met in Berlin. He was sitting with others eating lunch when we approached. He is a marvelous man with this wonderfully elfish smile that would cause you to swear that he was really Irish. Someone in our group told him that he had a "mischievous" smile, but he didn't know what the word "mischievous" meant. So he went back to his room and looked up the word in his dictionary. He told me later that he thought that the characterization was a compliment.
Hans Berthold is a deeply passionate and self-effacing man with a wonderful sense of humor. Unusual for Germans, I think, though I have to say that all of the Germans we hung around with on this trip did not fit my stereotype of them. They were loose; they were funny and they liked being around Americans who are known to sometimes be too familiar too soon. We Americans use first names too early in our relationships. Miss Manners makes this point. The fact is, I should not have presumed to have called Hans Berthold "Hans" so early in our time together, but I did. His own warm personality seemed to invite it.
On our second day together, our group of 13 Americans and 12 Germans went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche). It is a church in Berlin that was badly bombed in 1943 and has become an odd sort of memorial. First, this church is a memorial to the devastation of war. The German phrase, "Nie Wieder" (Never again) was all over Germany: on posters, graffitied on walls, in subways, on simple memorials in parks. Nie Wieder Krieg. Never again war. So, in part this was an anti-war memorial.
But it also was the Kaiser's church and that meant that there were mixed messages about war and empire.
Hans Berthold was standing next to me as I gazed up at one of the bas relief sculptures near the main entrance to the old church. And before I could take in the meaning of the sculpture, Hans said to me, "This is a profound blasphemy!" I looked up and there was Jesus praying in the Garden of Gesthemane with the words "Dein Wille Geschehe" underneath him. Trying to do some quick translation, I remembered the phrase from the Lord's prayer, "Dein Reich komme; dein Wille geschehe, auf Erde wie im Himmel." Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So, under Jesus praying in garden are the words, "Thy will be done."
And I thought, well, what's so blasphemous about that? And then I saw that underneath Jesus in the Garden there was another bas relief sculpture, of Kaiser Wilhelm the First and his generals standing around a table with Chancellor Bismark, pointing to a map draped on the table.
I then got the blasphemy that Hans Berthold was pointing to. Jesus' prayer that God's will be done in Christ's passion, death and resurrection, was somehow associated in the pairing of these sculptures with the Kaiser and his generals planning the invasion of France during the Franco-Prussian war. God's will is somehow to be associated with the will of the emperor. Kaiser Wilhelm firmly believed that he ruled by divine right, announcing at his coronation in 1871that he "rule by favor of God, and of no one else." God and country. Thy will be done.
It is hard for me to express the great shame and sorrow that still exists in Germany to this day. I just had no idea. This horrible confluence of God and Country set up the conflicts that would lead to both World Wars.
We had many conversations with our German friends over our two weeks together. Inevitably the discussion always seemed to return to the shame of the German people about all that had transpired in the two World Wars, but especially during the Nazi years. I said to one 28-year-old pastor that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." And he just said, "Yes, but that's so abstract. I have to wonder what my parents and grandparents--people I grew up with, people I loved very much--I have to wonder what they did during that awful time."
The question for Israel and for all nations who honor God is, where does God's will stop and a nation's will begin? Moses says to Israel, "you must observe [these laws] diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!' "
Following World War II in Germany, we were told, there was a time of forgetfulness. A time in which all the signs of war and shame were erased from the landscape. The Gestapo headquarters building, which had been badly damaged by bombing at the end of the war, was completely leveled so that only a plot of land overgrown by weeds remained. It was in East Berlin, and the East German government especially was interested in erasing the memories of what had happened. The Germans call this the "Zweite Schuld," the "second guilt." The first guilt was the Nazi holocaust and associated events; the second was the attempt on the part of that generation to erase all signs of that time.
Now in this time, and especially since the wall between East and West Germany came tumbling down in 1989, there are attempts to reconstruct and document all that went on during the Nazi period. This process, supported by the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany, is not without controversy. Many call for the Germans to move on and look to the future rather than look to the shame of the past. But the Germans we were with said that both must be done. In fact, one cannot look into the future without an honest facing of the past.
So Moses' advice to the children of Israel: "But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children's children."
What Moses was referring to, of course, was the Law that God had handed to a wandering people. But what Moses also had in mind was the turning from the ways of God that is the inevitable destiny of people who confuse the will of the emperor with the will of God. The Old Testament especially is filled with stories of Israel's faithlessness; Israel's turning away from God's will and heading off into its own direction, always with disastrous results. Modern Germany is living with that horror now.
That is why, finally, we begin our weekly worship here with confessions of our sin. It is always important for us to place some holy distance between what we will and what God wills. And this distance becomes even more important when it comes to national and international politics. For if we combine too much 'God and Country' we are always in danger of becoming a people who honor God with our lips but not our hearts. It is always a grave temptation, as Jesus reminds us, for us to pretend to be worshiping God, while "teaching human precepts as doctrine."
This trip throughout Germany was deeply sobering on so many levels. But most sobering was the notion that God's will cannot so easily be identified with that of any nation. It is for us to always keep before us the laws and commandments of God, and be willing to be judged at every point for our temptations to turn away from what is right and good and true and to worship only what we want, what we think is right and what we are convinced is true. I have no easy answers as to how that process is carried out in practice. I just know that it must.