Author Archives: St. John’s Church Office

Posted on by

Sermon preached on October 7th, 2018 by the Rev’d Elizabeth Senft, Lutheran Associate.

Proper 22

Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12

Psalm 26

May the words of my mouth and the mediations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  AMEN.

What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.   

First of all, let’s think in this case of “man” as gender neutral.  Whether you heard these words first from the second act of Hamlet, or from the musical Hair, they resonate because they tell us good things about ourselves.  And we like to hear those good things, even if we aren’t always honest when we apply them.

They echo our lesson from Hebrews, although our lesson from Hebrews adds some responsibility along with these praises.  The author of Hebrews reminds us that God left few things beyond our control and reminds us about death, which is the one thing beyond our control in that we cannot prevent it from coming.

The Psalm spells out these responsibilities in a little more detail, and if we wanted a litany of what is not happening in our public discourse, Psalm 26 would be it.

When looking at horrific events in human history, I am sometimes struck by the note we give the positive stories, the stories of human goodness.  The lives saved may be counted in the tens or the hundreds and when looked at against the millions lost, the numbers of those saved by righteous individuals are minute.  But we insist on telling ourselves and our children these stories.  The Holocaust provides some of the most striking examples.

There is the story of course of Oskar Schindler, a very flawed man, but one who came to use his influence, money, and a certain sense of power to hire Jews to work in his factory, and also to insist that they manufacture unusable arms and bullets.  Recently, Schindler’s list did another run in theatres to remind us of the consequences of letting hatred run amuck in a society. 

There were the people of a small village in France, in the mountains, Le Chanbon sur Lignon, who took in Jewish children.

The recent movie, The Zookeeper’s Wife, tells another tale of a very few people emerging to help their fellow human beings, this time in Warsaw.  These people risked their lives to save others from evil, and we prefer to look at them as fellow human beings than those they fought.  The movie opens with an idyllic morning as a zoo in Warsaw opens, a garden of earthly delights, with happy animals and happy people greeting each other.  Early on, there is a party, during which it becomes clear that an elephant mother needs some help bonding with her new born infant.  The zookeeper’s wife, animal whisperer that she is, is able to make this happen. 

Eventually there is the strafing of Warsaw by Nazi planes and the soldiers move in soon after.  The animals of the zoo begin to suffer the consequences.  The zoo is forced to help with a Nazi animal breeding program, and eventually the officer in charge of that program shoots all of the remaining animals, including the bouncy ostrich that seems to embody the joy of the zoo and the life that is no longer available to the people of Warsaw.  The zookeeper and his wife start a pig farm.  If they can deliver supplies to the soldiers keeping a strong arm lock and key on the Warsaw ghetto they may be able to survive.  While making deliveries, the zookeeper sees what the Jews of the Ghetto are experiencing and begins to secret people out in his delivery truck and hide them in the zoo.

Eventually of course, they are caught.  One young girl, who was raped by soldiers in the ghetto and whom the zookeeper rescued, has kept an artistic record of all of those saved. She has drawn each one with a zoo animal’s face. Her drawings infuriate the Nazi captors, who realize that several hundred people have been spared the fate of those murdered in the Warsaw ghetto.  After the war, the zookeeper and his wife, both of whom have somehow survived with some of their secret guests, rebuild the zoo.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them?  You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet?”

What do we do with that power, the power we have over all things subjected under our feet?  In recent weeks, we may be thinking of the abuse of such power, of the damage that it can cause human beings who get caught up in the drama of those who have no care for them as individual human beings.

Psalm 8, the Psalm from which the poem in the letter from Hebrews is taken, talks about humans being a little lower than the angels and being given responsibility, but it also talks about what those responsibilities are.  And the gospel lesson today ends with Jesus asking his followers not to send the little children away, but to welcome them.  He says how important they are both to Jesus and to the vision of the kingdom that he wishes to share.  The kingdom of God as Jesus describes it, is made for these little children, who in that day, were among the lowest of the low.

In times like ours in which there is so much going on, it is easy to feel like shutting down, to feel completely overwhelmed.  We might start to avoid the news.  Actually, a little avoidance might good, because we do get overwhelmed with the magnitude and the intensity of the constant barrage of scandal, cruelty, injustice and anger that is so much a part of our setting and our daily lives right now. A little avoidance might give us enough distance to keep from becoming enmeshed in one side or the other, so much so that it fractures our families and our relationships to the point where any possible reconciliation is off the table.

Being a little lower than the angels requires that we act like it.  We certainly need to strive to be better humans and in these passages, we are not only crowned with glory, but we see and feel suffering. The intimation is that this is supposed to give us some empathy, some willingness to feel the suffering of others and do something about it.    

We may not all be called to save groups of people from physical annihilation, but we are called to do what we can to make things better.  The Nobel peace prize was announced this week. It was awarded to Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who risks his life working with women who are victims of gang rape as an act of war, and Nadia Murad, a young woman captured by Isis and repeatedly raped, who went on to advocate for those who shared her experience. The prize was given to these two people who did the best they could under dire circumstances. When they were free to do so, they worked to see that those same circumstances don’t happen to other women. Dr. Mukwege, in his address to the Lutheran World Federation, said, “It is up to us, the heirs of Martin Luther, through God’s word, to exorcise the demons possessing the world so that women who are victims of male barbarity can experience the reign of God in their lives.”

Either one of these brave people could have stood back and continued with a quiet life, but neither one of them did that.

Each of us, in large and small ways, has a chance to make life a little brighter for someone else. That is God’s grace. That is what makes us a little lower than the angels.  That is what crowns us with glory and honor.  That is what gives us joy.

AMEN.