Red apple sermons
In the books discussed in these columns, there is probably no theologian and pastor who has been more often mentioned or quoted than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet, until an ongoing project under the title Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English was launched in 1996, the range of his life and work was relatively unknown.
Now, his writings are available in 16 carefully annotated volumes, along with four others that include The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2012).
This latest publication gathers 31 of Bonhoeffer’s sermons in a new English translation. They were preached at various times of the year and in many different settings, and each is helpfully set in context by Isobel Best (one of the five translators), who also provides a helpful 14-page biographical introduction.
Best points out that this youth leader, university teacher, and director of an “illegal” seminary under the Nazi regime was active in the international ecumenical movement. In 1928–29, he served as a pastoral assistant in a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona, Spain; he studied for a year at Union Theological Seminary, New York; and in 1933 he became joint pastor of two German-speaking congregations in London.
We learn that Bonhoeffer’s experience of other cultures and levels of society helped him to honor human beings as he found them: “He had learned from the Gospels,” says Best, “to see the need for repentance in everyone, perhaps especially the church and its leaders. ... For him, to preach a sermon was to make a way for Christ to enter the world in which his hearers were actually living.”
Among the sermons in this collection are no fewer than five on First Corinthians, chapter 13, delivered in London toward the end of 1934. Fresh insights flow as freely as the River Thames through these homilies despite the advancing shadows of Hitler’s Third Reich and the churches’ struggle against it:
- To hope for all things out of love is the power that a people and a church need in order to stand upright again.
- Only a person whom we love can we fully know. We will know only as much about a person as we love in him or her.
- Love does not bear grudges. It meets the other person each day anew, with new love.
- Love ... blesses every place it enters. Everywhere it goes, it finds imperfection and bears witness to perfection.
Think also of the poignancy and portent in Bonhoeffer’s words spoken in 1939 in a temporary sanctuary in a farmhouse in Sigurdshof where he and his congregants were snowed in, had no electricity, and had to draw water from a pump at the edge of the forest. He preached on First Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 54: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
Less than six years later, and just one month before the German surrender in Europe, those words became a testament to his faith. Shortly before his execution by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer said to a fellow prisoner: “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.”
Translator Best tells us that Bonhoeffer once said “that preaching a sermon was like holding out a juicy red apple to a child and saying, ‘Do you want this?’ ” I’d suggest that this collection of sermons, carefully preserved after Bonhoeffer’s death, mostly as handwritten manuscripts, might be viewed in a similar way. Who could resist!
