Sermon Text:

Discipleship

Where do we go from here?

St. Paul tells us “So you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus…”

Christ, in Matthew’s Gospel speaks in dire terms:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…”

Pope Lero XIV takes a different route:

“Even when the church finds herself in a minority, she is called to live with confident courage, as a small flock, bringing hope to all, mindful that the aim of mission is not its own survival, but the communication of the love with which God loves the world.”

Surrounded as we are by ample evidence that our world continues to exhibit all manner of sins, the small daily lapses and the large and terrifying challenges of war and pestilence on a global scale, we might be forgiven for a measured degree of pessimism and a modified portion of hope over our future.

Back to St. Paul:

“As Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

I dug back into my own spiritual journey to identify some additional sources of encouragement. Thinking about Christians who have confronted evil times in the past, I was reminded of the remarkable witness of Dietrich Bonhoffer, who, faced with the utter evil of the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, gave his life as a result of his public opposition.  Bonhoffer first denounced Hitler in a public broadcast as early as 1933 when he was 27 years old.  Among his best-known books, The Cost of Discipleship, of 1937, and Letters and Papers from Prison, of 1945, first published in English in 1953, were part of my reading for Divinity Class in 1957.

Bonhoffer offered me powerful advice as I began to examine the influence of my nascent faith on reaching early adulthood.  I was already in the habit of underlining quotes that resonated for me. Here are my “Top Five” from Dietrich Bonhoffer:

1. ‘The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.’
2. ‘There is no way to peace along the way to safety – for peace must be dared.’
3. ‘Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.’
4. ‘Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating.’
5. (Perhaps my favorite.) ‘We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.’

Discipleship, for Bonhoffer, can thus be seen as a journey in which we must run the risk of making mistakes. We are not perfect and need to remember that we have God’s promise that we are forgiven and that, through the gift of Christ’s life and sacrifice, we are offered God’s unquenchable love, that perfect love that casts out fear and allows us to make unlimited fresh starts, the ‘newness of life’ that St. Paul announces.

The peace we seek will best be achieved if we have the courage to act as peacemakers in all that we undertake.  In our secular, competitive and politicized world, it takes that courage to proclaim the superiority of peace as a principal plan of action, in opposition to all actions of hatred and failure to respect the dignity of every human being, a promise that we undertake through our baptismal vows.

And we are called to speak out in the face of evil.  The easy dismissal of unpleasant realities – “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” or “It’s none of my business” leave us condoning actions and attitudes that we know to be in total opposition to God’s plan for us.

We must distinguish between acting judgmentally and pursuing justice in an environment that too often criticizes without empathy and ignores the unjust treatment of the oppressed. Taking on our Christian mandate to love our neighbors, we can gain clarity of purpose by asking ourselves two relatively simple questions:

“What would it be like to be walking in a particular neighbor’s shoes?’ And:

“What would Christ have said or done in a given situation?”

Christ’s answer to the first question would be that we are called to show compassion, a word derived from the Latin for ‘to suffer with,’ a reflection of Our Lord’s adoption of the role of the ‘Suffering Servant’ described in Isaiah, Chapter 53.

As to the second question, we are called to be imitators of Christ in our words and deeds, so that we are mentored by our attention and adherence to the Gospel accounts of Christ’s life and ministry.  Our challenge is that we become adept at not asking the two questions.

Back to Dietrich Bonhoffer.

In 1935, he was banned from teaching at the University of Berlin and prohibited from living in Berlin.  He moved to England and ministered to the community of exiled Germans at St. Paul’s Church in Sydenham, a suburb of London.

In 1939, he embarked on an extensive lecture tour of the United States, with a temporary base at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  At the Declaration of the Second World War, and against the advice of his friends and colleagues, Bonhoffer returned to the Confessing Church in Germany and joined the group that planned to assassinate Hitler.  This action led to his arrest and imprisonment, including two years at Buchenwald, after which he was taken to Flossenburg Concentration Camp and, on April 9th, at the age of thirty-nine, hanged, a mere month before the war in Europe ended on May 8,1945.  As he was praying before being led to the scaffold, Bonhoffer’s last words to his companions were, “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.”

As I was talking to my daughter, Laura Bartsch, about the challenges we currently face, she reminded me of a prayer I have always admired and, along with many, believed to have been written by Sir Francis Drake, Queen Elizabeth I’s heroic naval commander.  While he would have enjoyed its maritime symbolism, I was interested to learn that it was in fact written in 1945 by an American Episcopal priest, Addison H. Groff, a Doctor of Divinity, who, like Bonhoffer, believed that we need to be interrupted or, as he put it disturbed by God.

Let me end by reading you his prayer, copies of which I will place at the back of the Church for you to take home and share.    

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Disturb Us, Oh Lord

(More information on the prayer HERE)                       

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

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Prayers of the People, 4 Pentecost, 21 June 2026

The response to the bidding, “Lord, in your mercy,” is “hear our prayer.”

Loving God, guide your Church: Open our eyes to see your justice unfolding in our midst; grant us wisdom and courage to be agents of your love and compassion. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We pray for the world in its brokenness, remembering those places where war, violence, injustice and disease are causing great suffering, especially in those places we name [pause]. We pray for the wisdom and will to bring peace, healing, and reconciliation to our broken world. 

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of Mercy, grant wisdom to our leaders and open their hearts, that they will respect the dignity of every human being and make decisions that lead to justice and mutual flourishing for all. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of abundance, we pray for your Creation, that we might be good stewards of your bounty, living in harmony with Mother Earth and reciprocating her generosity by protecting and preserving what She freely gives us.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We pray for our parish family: Be present Holy One, and bring your healing power to all who suffer in body, mind, or spirit, remembering especially, Sam, David, Kathy, Richie, Linda, Mike, Doug, and those we name. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Let your wisdom and grace rest upon those who celebrate birthdays this week, especially Linda Brookhart, Michael Kosterlitz, Katherine Cottone, and Jill Scott.  

We celebrate with Scott Pontes, who was received into the Episcopal Church last Sunday at St. Peter and St. Andrew’s Church in Providence.

We pray for those we love but see no longer, especially those we name [pause]. And we pray for all who grieve. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Celebrant adds a concluding prayer.