September 25, 2011: Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
or
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25: 1-8
To follow God, to be faithful to God, means to be grasped by God, to have given one’s whole person over to God. This requires a certain softness of heart, a malleability of spirit, that Jesus implied the tax collectors and prostitutes had but the chief priests and elders did not. This is because the chief priests and elders were set in their ways – they didn’t believe John the Baptist’s message because they had their own agenda of not rocking the boat with Rome. For the chief priests and elders to listen to John “in [his] way of righteousness”, they would have had to give up their smug, self-protective self-righteousness.
Have any of us been so grasped by God that we were willing to change our minds/change our ways, like the first son in Matthew’s parable? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who spoke out against Hitler in WWII, was a person who changed in his mind in his efforts to follow God. In 1939, Bonhoeffer initially sought refuge from war-torn Germany by coming to the U.S. to teach, but ended up returning to his homeland to show solidarity with his suffering kinsmen and the persecuted Jews. For Bonhoeffer, being a Christian meant to speak out against evil, even if it meant leaving the safe haven of the U.S. to go back to the perilous Nazi-run Germany.
Bonhoeffer’s desire to follow God by resisting Hitler is eloquently described in his famous quote, “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.” Bonhoeffer ended up giving his life to stand up for his beliefs as a Christian who opposed Hitler, and he was executed at Flossenburg Concentration Camp in April, 1945.
Most of us are not called to pay the supreme price of martyrdom as Bonhoeffer did, but we are all called to follow God, to listen to God’s invitation to us, even if it means changing our minds to a course of action that might be difficult. Are we willing to leave behind the safety of our preconceived yet misguided notions to walk in the ways of the Lord, or do we insist to stick to a belief system whose primary tenet is not love?