Exodus 3:1-6

All of us wish life were easier. Troubles afflict us at every turn. They are as abrasive as sandpaper and as relentless as a dripping tap. One day someone dear to us dies, and we are bereaved. Another day disappointment steamrollers us, and we are crushed. Another day the person we always trusted betrays us, and we are flattened. Another day the political climber decides to climb above us by climbing on us, and we feel we’ve been buried.

In addition to what befalls us from one day to another there is the chronic affliction whose pain is relentless every day. One of my friends has a son with cerebral palsy. The son is markedly affected and has never been able to join in children’s games and adolescents’ cavorting. One arm is of little use and one leg drags awkwardly. Recently my friend was waiting for his son, waiting and waiting until his patience curdled into annoyance. “Hurry up!”, he shouted in exasperation, not thinking that his son couldn’t hurry up, simply not thinking at all. To his surprise his son unravelled. “Dad, I am twenty years old; all my I life I have been slow; all my life I have been last; all my life other people have told me I keep them waiting; all my life I have felt I am an impediment, a nuisance, something others endure out of social politeness even as they secretly wish they didn’t have to.” My friend was crushed at what his impatience had unleashed in his son. The son’s affliction is his physical disability; the father’s affliction is his guilt over his thoughtless reaction to his son’s helplessness.

How much easier it would be to “believe in God”; how much easier it would be to “take time to be holy” or “sense God’s presence” if only we weren’t ceaselessly distracted by our troubles!

All of us are stressed in some measure, afflicted, set upon. And all of us tend to think we are more stressed, more afflicted, more set upon than most. Yes, we admit that the human condition extends over humankind. At the same time nobody quite “knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

All of us assume that our foreparents in faith had an easier time than we are having. Surely faith came more readily for our ancestors; surely they didn’t have to struggle for faith the way we seem to have to struggle. Just imagine how much less harried they were than we! They may have suffered more physically (painkillers being unknown), but their mental anguish could never have compared to the emotional torment we are stuck with today.

All of us assume one thing more (at least assume it for a while). We think that in the midst of our intensified suffering we do have one enormous advantage over our foreparents: we can leave the bleakness of our inner or outer wilderness. Or if not leave it, at least we can find relief from it in ways they could not. We have TA,TM, TV (transactional analysis, transcendental meditation, television). In addition we can “live better chemically”, thanks to pharmaceutical companies and their helpful researchers. Whether because of prescription drugs, self-help, psychotherapy or the latest in technological sophistication, we feel that a new era, with new human potential, is just around the corner. One quick turn and the wilderness (inner or outer) will be behind us for ever!

And then the truth dawns on us, as discernment is granted to us. The wilderness belongs to the human condition! The wilderness is inescapable! To attempt to flee it is to flee life. To try to escape it — and everything about it that chafes us — is to pursue unreality. Pursuing unreality leaves us falsifying our humanity, as we magically think we can transcend the human condition. To succeed in pursuing unreality tragically lands us in the world of unreality: mental illness, derangement, psychosis.

As if whatever wilderness we live in, cannot avoid living in, were not enough, the bleakness of the wilderness is intensified whenever we suspect, with chilled heart, that God has withdrawn himself from us, turned his back on us, rendered himself inaccessible to us. God, we feel, has become deaf or indifferent. At this point our isolation (part of what it means to live in the wilderness) has worsened into desolation.

The psalmist feels that this is what has happened to him. “I commune with my heart in the night”, he tells us in Psalm 77. (Everything seems worse at night!) “I meditate and search my spirit. Will the Lord spurn for ever, and never again be favourable? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? ” Here the psalmist is pouring out his doubts about God. Perhaps God’s heart has mysteriously calcified. Perhaps God is no longer favourably disposed toward us. Perhaps God’s steadfast love has ceased, God’s faithfulness to his people somehow having evaporated. Perhaps God’s promise — “I will never fail you or forsake you” — is never going to be fulfilled.

Yet there is something more. In addition to his doubts about God the psalmist is stricken by his doubts about himself. “Has God in his anger shut up his compassion?” Everywhere in scripture there is one thing, and one thing only, that arouses God’s anger: sin. There is one thing only that perpetuates God’s anger: impenitence in the face of sin. No wonder the psalmist moans, “I commune with my heart in the night;…I search my spirit.” Plainly he would repent instantly if he knew what he had to repent of. Just as plainly he doesn’t know. He can only speculate, in his wretchedness, whether, or where, or how, or how often he has sinned so grievously as to anger God and for how long he has unwittingly remained unrepentant so as to perpetuate God’s anger. So confused is he that he isn’t even sure if he has sinned at all. Hence the question, “Has God in anger shut up his compassion?” How can the psalmist be expected to defuse God’s anger when he doesn’t even know whether sin-awakened anger is behind God’s apparent disappearance?

The wilderness intensifies, doesn’t it. First there is the human condition which can be described accurately as a wilderness. Then there is the chilling feeling that God has fallen silent, disappeared on us. Finally there is the erosion of self-confidence. As the psalmist’s self-confidence erodes (“Is God inaccessible because he has failed me or because I have failed him? How am I ever going to find out?”) he begins to spiral down; down into that mess of doubt, self-accusation, depression, short-lived protestation of innocence, longer-lived suspicion of guilt. Left alone he is going to go all the way down to despair.

Just before the psalmist crashes in despair a surge of faith short-circuits his doubt. He cries out, calling up God’s deeds of old. “I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; yea, I will remember thy deeds of old….Thou art the God who workest wonders.” His simple recollection of God’s deeds of old halts the spiral as he particularly recalls the foundational item in his people’s consciousness: deliverance through the Red Sea. The Israelite people had always believed that they had been released from slavery in Egypt only because God had taken note of their suffering, their helplessness, their isolation, their desolation; in a word, God had taken note of their horrible wilderness in the midst of Egypt’s luxuriance. The angel of death had passed over them, sparing them annihilation on their way out of Egypt. Spared annihilation then, were they going to be slaughtered when they arrived at the seaside with no way through? But a way they could never have imagined opened before them. “Thy way was holy”, the psalmist exclaims with gratitude and wonder as he recalls the last-minute deliverance, “Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters.”

“Great waters”, “seas”, “floods” — all these terms in Hebrew symbolize one thing: chaos. Chaos is impenetrable confusion; confusion which is formless, fathomless, exitless. While there was no way out, and no way around, under God there was a way through. “Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters.” From that moment Israel exulted ceaselessly in its deliverance.

Then the psalmist adds a line that all we wilderness-wanderers must hang on to: “Yet God’s footprints were unseen.” Israel always knew its deliverance to be real, even though God’s hand in it remained invisible to others. There was nothing about Israel’s deliverance that would dispel unbelievers’ unbelief and impel them to cry out, “Truly God is!” The literature of the nations that surrounded Israel at this point in history (particularly the literature of Egypt) contains no reference to the Red Sea event. A rag-tag bunch of social misfits managed somehow to avoid slavery in Egypt? So what! This was nothing to the nations; but to Israel, everything. As far as the nations were concerned God’s footprints were invisible (which is to say, God himself is unreal). But as far as Israel was concerned, “Thou art the God who workest wonders.”

God’s footsteps have always been unseen to all except the Spirit-attuned. When the baby was born in the cowshed, who bothered to note one more baby, born out of wedlock, whose arrival could only worsen the poverty of parents who were already poor enough? A few shepherds (and fewer wisemen), however, were overtaken by the wonder of the Incarnate Son who had been appointed Sovereign and Judge of the entire cosmos.

Years later passers-by in Jerusalem saw three crosses on a road leading out of the city. There was nothing noteworthy about the crosses, since Rome had never boasted of either patience or clemency, always preferring to crucify first and ask questions later. Nevertheless, on one cross there hung a young man whose death has ever since found the Spirit-attuned startled at the wonder of their own forgiveness.

City-life continued without interruption in the days after the unexceptional execution. To be sure, members of a small, Jewish messianic sect behaved as if something momentous had occurred. But Palestine was riddled with small, messianic sects that behaved oddly; all one had to do was wait for the sect to sputter out. The story was that some women had taken perfume to the cemetery in order to deodorize a corpse. They were met by him who was the same one they had known for months even as he was now indescribably different.

God’s footprints are unseen. Yet those in whom the Spirit has surged know that the God “who workest wonders” has come upon them.

Wonder is not a sigh of relief as the wilderness is finally left behind. Wonder is our gasp of amazement at God’s drawing near to us in the midst of that wilderness that cannot be left behind. While it is true that God’s footprints are not visible to anyone at all, it is also true that those who do not harden their heart against God come to know that the wilderness is the venue of God’s visitation. In this wilderness we are surprised and startled, made to understand and moved to give thanks. Wonder seizes us in the midst of a wilderness we had thought to be as bitter as it is barren. Now we are found exclaiming with the psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel who alone does wondrous things.” (Psalm 72:18)

It is plain that as the psalmist reflected on the wondrous deliverance at the Red Sea he knew he could not merely survive in the wilderness, but even thrive in it. We shall be persuaded that we too can thrive in it as we look to the psalmist and other foreparents in faith. After all, the varied wildernesses which overtook our foreparents were no less bleak or unpromising than ours.

Think of the prophet Hosea. His wife became a prostitute and bore three children whose father could have been anyone except her husband. When she was thoroughly used up, as discardable now as she had long been degraded, she was deemed to have a market value of fifteen shekels: half the price of a slave! Absorbing blotter-like the obscene jokes which downtown loungers had long snickered over but which Hosea was only now hearing, he made his way to the marketplace and brought his wife home. Why? Just because his love for her was greater than his outrage, sorrow and agony on account of her. Thereafter Hosea spoke the warmest word of any Hebrew prophet, steeping his people in God’s tenderest love for them. It’s not that Hosea’s life-story had a Cinderella-ending: his threw herself remorsefully at her husband’s feet and lived ever after as his dutiful, affectionate and faithful wife. There is no evidence that anything like this happened. In other words, the wilderness was not escaped. Nevertheless, through his wilderness-experience, and only through this experience, Hosea was granted the profoundest insight into the wounded heart of God. More than granted an insight into the wounded heart of God, Hosea was entrusted with the tenderest word of God. Through this one man God was able to say to all the people of Israel, “It was I who knew you in the wilderness…”. (Hosea 13:5) Hosea speaks to all who cringe self-consciously in that wilderness of public humiliation and private shame. They must know that they are uniquely qualified to speak gently of a tender love ceaselessly issuing from the God whose people embarrass him but never deflect him.

Elijah spoke God’s truth to political power; spoke God’s truth to the evil tyranny of King Ahab and his cruel wife, Jezebel. Jezebel swore she would kill Elijah. Feeling that faithfulness to God was tantamount to suicide; feeling that his life had boiled dry and might just as well blow away in the desert aridity of it all, Elijah “went a day’s journey into the wilderness…and asked that he might die.” (I Kings 19:4) To his surprise he was fed by a messenger of God. Strengthened now, he made his way to a cave where neither the earthquake nor the fire nor the hurricane (all of which were publicly verifiable) bespoke God. On the other hand, the “still, small voice” (undoubtedly heard by Elijah alone) most certainly did. Told to return home by another wilderness (the wilderness of Damascus: there really is no escape!) Elijah anoints the kings of Syria and Israel, as well as the prophet Elisha, his successor. The wilderness of fear and self-pity is yet the place where we shall know ourselves met, cherished, moved beyond our complaining self-indulgence, and reclaimed for a glad obedience which furthers God’s work in the world.

Moses knew his vocation to be that of leader. He knew too that hardship in the wilderness was vastly preferable to the security of slavery in Egypt. Through this leader God thundered to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Eventually Pharaoh did just that. Pharaoh would have laughed, however, if he could have overheard the people railing against Moses for forty years. Life in the wilderness was certainly hard; so hard, in fact, that they clamoured for the “meat, fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic” they had had in Egypt (forgetting, of course, the wretchedness of the captivity that had reduced them to well-fed domestic animals.) Now they were left with nothing better than — nothing better than manna! Manna? The Hebrew word means “What is it?” It’s undefinable! The resources of God are unique! They do not fit any of our ready-to-hand categories. “What is it?” “It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.” (Exodus 16:15)

Leadership anywhere in life entails loneliness. To be summoned to lead in business, industry, government, church, university, hospital, community organization; to be summoned to lead is to be thrust into a wilderness of loneliness where few others (if any) understand or care.

Yet while Moses alone of all the people of Israel knows the loneliness of leadership, it is to Moses alone that God speaks as God’s fiery presence sets the bush aflame and God’s scorching truth brands itself upon him indelibly: “Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you stand is holy!” Moses speaks to all who are called to lead, and who know the loneliness that leadership entails. Moses also tells them that faithfulness to their vocation will render their wilderness holy ground. As often as their spirits sag God’s fiery presence and word will remind them.

Whenever a leader appears courage appears as well. John the Baptist exemplified courage. His clothing of animal skins gave him an earthy appearance, reflecting the untameability of the wilderness and his aversion to soft compromises. His diet was as stark as his speech: grasshoppers (noted for their protein) and wild honey. (How many bee stings had he incurred in gathering the honey?) John’s courage could come only from someone who was unimpressed by the cute games and politically correct conventions of those who had long since jettisoned transparency. John’s fearless truthfulness had found him telling Herod, the puppet-ruler of Judaea, that not even the king had a right to his brother’s wife; kingly philandering, after all, was still low-life adultery. Herod’s sister-in-law (mistress too) seethed. Luke tells us that John was in the wilderness until his public ministry began. Where was John, then, after his public ministry began? Merely in a wilderness of a different sort. Thirty years (more or less) in the wilderness for a ministry of only a few months? But what a ministry! The world will never forget the man whom Jesus pointed to as the greatest prophet to arise in Israel. John speaks to courageous people, all of whom discover, sooner or later, that courage brings on isolation and as surely as courage calls forth hostility. Just because John didn’t flee the wilderness by surrendering courage he continues to embolden all who, like him, will not compromise.

We must not forget John’s namesake, the seer of the book of Revelation. This man had been sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in exile on the island of Patmos. His faithfulness to his Lord in the face of political pressure had landed him on a wind-swept rock-pile as desolate without as John himself was within. Except that he wasn’t desolate within! Just because John was stuck on Patmos “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” the Spirit surged over him, leaving him exclaiming, “I was on the island called Patmos, and I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” So far from excluding the Spirit, the wilderness is the condition of the Spirit’s visitation. Faithfulness to Jesus Christ in the face of persecution is wilderness to be sure, but also a wilderness where the Spirit unfailing finds us.

The wilderness surrounds us. The wilderness of shameful humiliation, the wilderness of long-term hardship, the wilderness of isolation enforced because of one’s courage, the wilderness of punishment handed out by the politically powerful; it’s all wilderness. What are we to do when we realize that this is where we live and there is no escape? We must look to our foreparents in faith, and especially to him who was most at home in the wilderness, Jesus himself.

Never attempting to flee the wilderness, our Lord deliberately sought the wilderness time and again as a place of spiritual refreshment. On the one hand he knew that life there was lean, spare, hard, even harsh. On the other hand he knew that there there were fewer distractions, fewer illusions, less likelihood of that spiritual folly which always attends affluence and its life of ease. Never naive, Jesus knew the wilderness to be the place of temptation and trial and testing. (The Greek word, PEIRASMOS, has all three English meanings.) At the inception of his public ministry Jesus was even driven into the wilderness, say the gospel-writers in deploying the word which they also use of the violent driving out of demons. (Who says that God is always and everywhere gentle?) Yet it was in the wilderness, the gospel-writers tell us, that Jesus was refreshed. Paradoxically, the place of spiritual assault is also the place of spiritual invigoration. We are sustained most profoundly precisely where we are most threatened! The resources of God abound precisely where we assume they are wanting!

So unusual is this truth that even the most intimate followers of Jesus are slow to grasp it. Jesus draws a huge crowd around himself as he teaches for days on end. Matter-of-factly he tells the disciples that the crowds, on whom he has stomach-wrenching compassion, need to be fed. “How can we feed these people in the desert?”, the disciples ask, perplexed. They will see shortly that wherever Jesus Christ is present, anything that is offered to him, however slight, is multiplied so as to provide enough for everyone.

We fear the desert or wilderness largely because we assume that whatever we desert we are in, for whatever reason, will only become even more arid and barren as there is added to it the spectre of spiritual annihilation. In fact the opposite is the case. Because Jesus Christ is present the desert becomes the reservoir of riches as indescribable as they are inexhaustible. The prophet Isaiah knew whereof he spoke when he wrote, “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” (Isaiah 36:6)

                                                                                                    Victor A. Shepherd
April 1994

Exodus 24:3-8

 

I: — What did people do before the invention of dry-cleaning? How did they ever remove stains? They didn’t. Stains worthy of the word “stain” were simply indelible.

Blood stains. Bloodstains are fixed fast in clothing. When Moses assembled the people before him, gathered blood in a basin and flung the blood out over the people, he knew what he was doing. He knew that every morning when the people put on their clothing the bloodstains would remind them.

Remind them of what? Of the promise they had made to God with their neighbours as witnesses. They had already received the Ten Commandments, the ten “words” that had forged their identity and would form their obedience ever after. On the day they received the ten “words” they had pledged themselves in gratitude to God for releasing them from slavery in Egypt, for rescuing them when they were on the point of annihilation at the Red Sea, and even for the freedom that the Commandments themselves provided them. On this occasion they had pledged their heartfelt, grateful service to God. But pledges and promises are easy to forget. Zeal evaporates. Commitment wanes. Dedication dribbles away. For this reason Moses assembled the people before him for a service of rededication, reconsecration.

The service was graphic. Since sin isn’t a trifle and can’t be pardoned cheaply; since God isn’t naïve and can’t be approached presumptuously; since the Holy One is just that – holy – and his creatures are defiled; since…; all of these considerations were gathered up in a sacrifice of oxen whose blood was reserved. Half of the blood was thrown against the altar, the altar being the symbol of God’s presence among his people. The other half of the blood was thrown over the people, the sign that they owned the sacrifice that admitted them to God’s presence and allowed them to survive in God’s presence. As the blood seeped into their clothing they renewed their pledge and promise to God, crying out together, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”(Exod. 24:7)

Those people never got the bloodstains out of their clothing. Every morning they clothed themselves with the sign and seal of their reconsecration to the Lord.

 

II: — Actually the sacrifice that Moses had offered was an anticipation, a foreshadowing, of that one, effectual sacrifice that the Son of God himself would make, a sacrifice of such a nature as never to have to be repeated. On the eve of this sacrifice Jesus called out, “Father, the hour has come.” It was that “hour” of which he had spoken again and again throughout his earthly ministry. Now he was consecrating himself to the Father with utmost intensity. “For their sake (i.e., for the disciples’ sake) I consecrate myself”, he cried, “that they also may be consecrated in truth.” (John 17:19) Jesus consecrates himself to the Father in order that his disciples may consecrate themselves too.

To consecrate, in scripture, is to dedicate or set apart a person to a sacred purpose related to the service of God. Jesus dedicates himself to the service of his Father so that his disciples will do the same as they discern the particular service to which God has appointed them. You and I are disciples too. Then our Lord has done as much for us in order that we might consecrate ourselves to God as well.

Today, in our annual service of Sunday School Teacher Dedication, we are recalling our Lord’s consecration to the Father’s appointment in expectation that these teachers will consecrate themselves (or reconsecrate themselves) to the service to which God has called them. And yet this service is more than a service of reconsecration for Sunday School Teachers, with the rest of the congregation looking on as spectators. Today’s service is a service of reconsecration for everyone of every age and every situation. To be sure, what the eighty year-old brings to the service is different from what the eight year-old brings. The eighty year-old brings her mature experience of the God who has confirmed himself in her life time without number. The eight year-old brings the curiosity and the mental pictures that flood her whenever she hears the word “God.” But under no circumstances must we ever say, “Eight? Only Eight?”

 

III: — To say “only” would be to sneer at the One whose hand has been on these children in Streetsville since they were born, even before they were born. It was as a mature man, gripped by a vocation he could neither doubt nor deny nor escape, that Jeremiah heard God say, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jer. 1:5) Let’s be sure we note the precise details here: before Jeremiah was born God knew him, God formed him, God consecrated him, God appointed him. To be known by God is to be given an identity before God, an identity that no occurrence in life, good or bad, can alter or affect, never mind destroy. To be formed by God is to be given that bodily existence that is crowned with the ineradicable image of God himself. To be consecrated by God is to be set apart for a specific purpose. To be appointed by God is to have that specific purpose named. All of this transpired before Jeremiah was born.

Before Jeremiah alone was born? Of course not. Scripture says as much about Samuel, about Paul, about John the Baptist. In other words, this is the truth for every human being. I was fourteen years old when I became aware of my vocation to the ministry. But I have never assumed that the day I became aware of my vocation is the day God thought it up. The children whom our Sunday School teachers are to teach in the coming church-year: before these children were born God knew them, formed them, consecrated them and appointed them. The fact that these children aren’t yet aware of their vocation doesn’t mean that God hasn’t yet appointed them to it. He has.

Needless to say, one person’s vocation isn’t a carbon copy of another’s. Needful to say, any person’s vocation can assume different expressions in the course of life as God directs us here or there, uses us in this manner or that, summons us to attend to developments that no one could foresee. Plainly, then, what matters above all else is that we never trifle with or disregard that Spirit-sensitivity wherein we daily discern the tasks to which God summons us. Since it matters above all else that we never trifle with or disregard such Spirit-sensitivity ourselves, it matters above all else that we foster the environment, the atmosphere in which others will abhor trifling with or disregarding the selfsame Spirit-sensitivity needed for their obedience to God.

 

III: — In other words, we must always endeavour to provide the environment in which our Sunday School children come, little by little, to discern and own all that God fashioned for them before they were born. We adult believers are to provide such an environment. Our faith, our manifest possession at the hands of the gospel, our prioritizing of public worship and private prayer, our unselfconscious dinner-table conversations where as much is caught as taught; above all, our glorying in our own vocation – it’s all to provide the atmosphere in which a child’s faith may germinate and thrive.

Whenever I think of such an atmosphere I think of the development in Corinth which Paul addressed forthrightly. Different individuals had come to faith in Jesus Christ after they were married. They were now believers but their spouse was not. What were they to do? There were some “hardliners” in the congregation there who said, “Since light has nothing to do with darkness, and since those who lie down with dogs get up with fleas, the believing person should leave the unbelieving spouse.” Paul disagreed most emphatically. He maintained that the believing partner should continue to live with the unbelieving spouse, for in doing so the believing partner would provide the atmosphere, the environment, in which the unbelieving spouse might come to faith. Listen to the apostle’s exact wording: “For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband.” (1 Cor. 7:14) The apostle isn’t pretending that the faith of one spouse can be transferred to the other or credited to the other. At the same time, if the unbelieving partner is ever to be “infected” with faith, there has to be contact with someone who is currently contagious. Therefore the believing partner shouldn’t abandon the spouse who hasn’t been faith-infected – yet. It’s the same with our Sunday School children. The teachers who have consecrated themselves to the service of the Sunday School children are doing so for the sake of those children in order that the children eventually consecrate themselves to the service of God. To this end teachers provide the atmosphere wherein faith can be quickened in children, vocation discerned, God’s appointment owned – and all of this not once but many times over in the course of the child’s development. That to which God consecrated and appointed children before they were born they can come to know and own only after they’ve been born. And they will come to know it only as they are consecrated by that environment in which faith and discernment and obedience are the atmosphere inhaled and exhaled week after week.

Several years ago on Teacher Dedication Sunday I preached a sermon, Where Are They Now?, in which I spoke of the Sunday School teachers I had had as a youth. I can still recall every one. I can still recall the idiosyncrasies of each; I can still recall what I gained from each. How is it I can recall all of this? How is it I can do so with merriment and gratitude? It’s because they shaped me profoundly, and shaped me profoundly, I am sure, even when they were scratching their head and wondering if anything was “getting through.” We must never underestimate our influence with young people.

In 1931 Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught a confirmation class of rowdy boys in Wedding, a working-class district of Berlin. Bonhoeffer himself belonged to the old German aristocracy. One of his grandparents had been a piano-pupil of Franz Liszt, the piano virtuoso of his era. Bonhoeffer’s father was a neurologist, professor at Berlin University’s Faculty of Medicine and director of the Berlin Neurological Hospital. His older brother was chief lawyer for Lufthansa airlines. The pastor in Wedding had died unexpectedly. The confirmation class was without a teacher. Bonhoeffer was asked to fill in. In 1931 Germany was economically destitute. These boys came from families who had nothing. The first time Bonhoeffer walked up the stairs to the second-floor room where the class was to be held the boys threw lunch-box remains down the stairwell at him. At the end of each class-period the boys went home to an urban squalour that only inner-city slums of the depression era could produce. In order to be closer to the boys Bonhoeffer moved out of his own home and rented a room where the boys lived. When he saw the deprivation the boys lived with daily, Bonhoeffer put aside his holiday plans (overseas travel) and instead took the class on a two-week holiday to the Harz Mountains. It was the first time that most of the boys had seen anything but asphalt and grime. Listen to what Richard Rother, a member of that class, had to say about their teacher:

In the course of time we…confirmands from the slums of Berlin were scattered to the four winds. We were shocked and deeply moved to hear that our pastor had to die a cruel death as a martyr in the discipleship of Jesus Christ in April 1945. [Bonhoeffer was hanged three weeks before the Americans liberated his part of Germany.] The gratitude which I feel for having had such a pastor in our confirmation class makes me write down these recollections.

Richard Rother, conscripted in 1943 (twelve years after the class), survived the war. He wrote this tribute to his teacher 33 years after his exposure to Bonhoeffer.

 

V: — There is one more matter to be discussed this morning. What is the qualification for consecrating ourselves to the service of God? In his second letter to Timothy the older man, Paul, writes, “If anyone purifies himself from what is ignoble, then he will be a vessel for noble use, consecrated and useful to the master of the house, ready for any good work. So shun youthful passions and aim at righteousness, faith, love and peace along with those who call upon the Lord from a pure heart.” (2 Tim. 2:21-22) The key to consecration is shunning youthful passions.

 

We must be sure to understand what the apostle means by “youthful passions” and why they are to be shunned if we are serious about consecrating ourselves to God’s service. “Youthful passions” are the vehement, intense preoccupations of young people. A facial pimple is sufficient ground for suicide. A phone call from the class beau brummel precipitates mania. Not being asked to the highschool prom is the end of the world. “Youthful passions” are the passionate, exaggerated, horizon-filling, life-consuming preoccupations of younger people who attach utmost passion to what is decidedly less than utmost important.

Young people do this? Adults do it too! Middle-aged people do it; elderly people do it. All of us tend to attach utmost passion to what is far from utmost important. All of us attach utmost passion to what is frivolous, froth, fleeting, shallow, unsubstantial, inconsequential. Our new car has a disc-player that can find musical tunes by key signature. Wow! The Dow-Jones average shifted a smidgen and the value of our RRST went up $9.43. Awesome! The apostle insists that the key to consecrating ourselves to the service of God is the shunning of “youthful passions” regardless of our age. Since nature abhors a vacuum, even as we shun youthful passions we are to aim at righteousness, faith, love and peace.

Then with single-minded heart we (not just Sunday School Teachers but all of us) are going to preoccupy ourselves with our Lord Jesus Christ, his consecration of himself for our sake, our consecration of ourselves for our children’s sake, and all of this in order that together we shall renew our promise to God; we shall resolve to discern afresh our vocation, knowing that God has appointed each of us to a particular service; we shall endeavour to provide that environment wherein the children entrusted to us are “infected” with that Spirit which brings them to recognize their Lord, love him, and obey him in that service to which they were appointed before they were born.

The moment of reconsecration is upon us. I don’t have basin of blood that I can fling over you. I do have a basin of water. But to fling it over you would be politically incorrect in a world whose deity is politically correctness. Therefore I shouldn’t fling it – should I.

“All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” “For their sake”, says Jesus of his people, “I consecrate myself.” For the sake of our children we are going to consecrate ourselves, afresh, right now.

 

                                                                        Victor Shepherd
September, 1998