Elie Wiesel, who as a teenage prisoner in two Nazi concentration camps watched his family taken away to be killed, wrote out of that experience one of the most important books of the last century, Night. How he began has haunted me ever since I first read it, and even more so today.
Stephen Shoemaker
He tells of a poor member of his town, Moishe the Beadle, almost clown-like in his awkwardness and beloved in the community, a master of the Talmud and the mystical form of Judaism, the Kabbalah. One day he was arrested by German troops and carried away on a train with other Jews. They were transported to a forest where they were told to dig a long trench which would be their grave. Then they were executed. To Moishe’s horror, children were tossed into the air for target practice. He escaped, shot in the leg and taken for dead.
When he returned to his town, he went through the streets and knocked on doors to tell people what he witnessed. No one believed him. It was too terrible to imagine.
Few of us could have imagined the time we now are in. The present regime is using the most vulnerable among us for target practice. How are we then as ministers and members of Christ’s church to live? We scramble to answer.
“No one believed him. It was too terrible to imagine.”
Thomas Merton once wrote that in bad times an ethic of love turns into an ethic of resistance. What might resistance look like for followers of Jesus today? We cannot focus on Donald Trump long without our hearts turning to stone. So he cannot be our preoccupation.
Our first call is to be the church.
The Reformation definition of the church began “where the word is rightly preached.” So we seek to be faithful to the whole counsel of God and preach mercy and justice and comfort, reconciliation and (sometimes costly) love.
When Bonhoeffer and friends created the seminary for the Confessing Church, their daily worship focused on the Psalms. Making the Psalms our daily prayer book would not be a bad place to start. In the late second century document by Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition, we see Christians being taught to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, following the Jewish tradition of prayer three times a day. That would shape our souls and our resolve.
The second part of the definition of the church in the Reformation was “where the sacraments are rightly administered.” We cannot neglect the pool and the table. And we should care for all the ways and means of grace, not just in the sacraments of the church, but also in the ways we take care of one another in our communities, our love a means of grace.
And, as part of who the church always has been, we must not neglect the care of the poor, the stranger, the different from us, the victims and targets of state action and those who care for them and teach them, now losing their funding and jobs.
I was ordained almost 52 years ago at Emerywood Baptist Church in High Point, N.C. They gave me a Bible I have used almost every day since, a bit tattered, not worse for wear but bettered for wear. Inscribed on the first pages of the Bible are these words from 2 Timothy 4:1-5 — “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus …: Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching … .always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”
Could there be a better charge for the people of God in our nation today? For us?
Stephen Shoemaker serves as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He served previously as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.
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