Dietrich Bonhoeffer | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=611300034

Two vineyards. Two stories about vineyards at the start of Holy Week. You might think that we are being exposed to, talking about, another temptation involving wine, but that’s not it. The two vineyard stories in Isaiah and St Luke’s gospel.

Isaiah the prophet singing for his beloved concerning his vineyard – I’m not quite sure how the genders work – the beloved having done all that is necessary to create a fruitful vineyard on a very fertile hill; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded, according to our translation here, ‘wild grapes’: although apparently, according to one of the commentaries which I read, the word in Hebrew literally means ‘stinkers’. Heaven knows what a grape has to be like to be described as a stinker; anyway it was not a successful planting of a vineyard. Somehow the vineyard didn’t turn out as it was intended to be.

‘What I will do to my vineyard’ – it’s quite difficult to follow who’s who in this story – it’s somebody and his beloved who builds the vineyard and then it’s me, it’s my vineyard. And because the vineyard produces stinkers I’ll dismantle it and make it a wasteland so that it’s overgrown with briars and thorns. There isn’t really some boyfriend’s Château Musar somewhere which has suddenly stopped producing decent grapes.

Similarly Jesus talks about a man turning his vineyard over to tenants – literally, farmers – in the King James Bible, husbandmen. Where have all these good words gone? I like a world with husbandmen in it. And where are the handmaidens? I ask myself. The word here is γεωργος (Georgos, which is Greek for ‘farmer’). Like a lot of names, George is derived from the Greek, so if you are called George, in Greek you are a farmer. In Jesus’ story, they were tenant farmers of some kind. And he sent members of his staff – literally, his slaves – one at a time to try to collect the rent, or a share of the produce instead, which certainly seems still to be the way that it works in the south of France even today. A friend of mine had a house there including a vineyard. He let the local cooperative manage the vineyard, in return for which they harvested the grapes and gave my friend a share in the wine produced. He took his rent in bottles.

Here, however, the parable is about wicked tenants who didn’t pay their rent and instead, eventually, when the owner sent his own son, the tenants, having kicked out his servants one by one when they called on the farmers to hand over the rent, actually killed the son. So what did the owner of the vineyard do? Obviously he evicted the wicked tenants and passed the vineyard over to other managers to manage.

Again, this is not an actual story about something that actually happened. It’s a parable and it’s very relevant to Easter. Jesus is forecasting what is going to happen, and the scribes and the chief priests, hearing him, get angry because they realise that what he is saying is directed against them, Jesus suggests that if they do behave like the wicked tenants then ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and that stone will trip people up fatally, and it may fall on other people, with similar devastating consequences.

If they, the Pharisees and scribes, are builders, and if they reject a stone while they are building something, if they reject Jesus, then He will become a stumbling block for them, or even fall on them and obliterate them.

Ploughing up a vineyard. Fatal trips and falls. Being crushed by a massive boulder. I’m not sure whether, when we read these lessons in the Bible, even in the context of Lent and even as we look forward to the commemoration of the amazing events of the first Easter, even so, I’m not sure that these lessons really grab us in the way that some of the language used indicates that they are meant to.

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. And Isaiah’s friend’s vineyard producing ‘stinkers’ instead of the sweet juicy grapes that he might reasonably have expected and so getting dug up and bulldozed. These are two parables, two stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which colourfully illustrate, dramatise, an idea or principle; and they have been chosen to be readings for Evensong today because they put you in mind of what we are going to commemorate at Easter.

Jesus is the son who is sent to the vineyard, the vineyard being the human race, the only son, who gets rejected and killed by the people who are looking after his father’s property, the vineyard, the world that his father has created. The Israelites, the Jews, were the bad tenants who threw out the only son and killed him; or rather, they would be, because Jesus is telling the story before he gets crucified.

But so what? Look, there are only 43 of us here – although that’s a really good turn-out: there are only a few thousand, perhaps, in Evensong services all over the UK. Most people couldn’t care less. Most people are snoozing after Sunday lunch or maybe having a nice walk in the park.

Even if they are vaguely aware of Easter having more to it than just a lot of Easter eggs, nevertheless there is nothing vital or urgent about it so far as they are concerned. Even if they’re going to turn up on Easter Sunday, if they are in the habit of coming at Christmas and Easter, say, (which, incidentally, if they were in the Roman Catholic Church would count as regular attendance), but even if they are really rather sparing attenders at church, or if they never come, they presumably don’t feel any compulsion, any need or anything really vital for their life today about this teaching of Jesus or this prophecy of Isaiah.

Nobody much today really thinks that because they might be descendants of the people who cast out the son and killed him, (in these terms), they should worry that a stone might be a stumbling block or that it might fall on them and crush them. It’s probably a metaphor too far, even if they do know a bit about Jesus, because the idea that Jesus would take some dreadful vengeance on people, crush them and grind them into dust, is not consistent with our picture of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the suffering servant, who washed the disciples’ feet – as we will wash at least one of your feet, on Thursday at Holy Nativity.

What is our Lent reflection about this? I want to read you something which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War because he was a member of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. The church remembered the 80th anniversary of his death last Wednesday. He wrote, from prison, what he called an ‘outline for a book’, in which he tackled the idea of a world in which people do not feel they need God any more. He speaks of a God in “religion” as a deus ex machina. Literally it means ‘god from the machinery’. That’s defined in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary as a ‘power [or] event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty.’ The ‘machinery’ was what they had in ancient Greek theatres, to make the actors playing the part of gods fly through the air.

Bonhoeffer felt that religious people had been seeing God in a way as a magic fixer, that “[God] must be ‘there’ to provide answers and explanations beyond the point at which our understanding or our capabilities fail.” But as scientific knowledge has increased, so people have needed God less and less. They may well feel they can get along without needing God at all.

Bonhoeffer felt we ought to accept this, that this was a sign of the world ‘coming of age’. He wrote, ‘The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur – even if God is not ‘there’. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him’.

He went on to set out a paradox at the heart of this, which I think leads very well into our reflections for Lent. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘God allows himself to be edged out of the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. … This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all [other] religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a deus ex machina. The Bible however [has] directed him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.’

“[Bonhoeffer wrote that he would explain in his book] the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that Jesus is ‘there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others’, maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.” Those are the essential characteristics of the divine, of God, of what he calls ‘transcendence’. He goes on: “Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).” Those are the key things about Jesus: incarnation becoming human, the cross, and resurrection. According to Bonhoeffer,“Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in existence for others, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation.”

We need to think very carefully about this really big mystery. On the one hand we believe in God as a kind of omnipotent father figure, but on the other we read that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God, Jesus, is in the needy people, the ill people, the homeless people, the naked people who have no clothes.

The sky has turned darker since the joyful procession this morning on a donkey. Donkeys are great, and Jesus was on that donkey. But what else was going on? That’s for us to ponder in this week to come.

Quotations are from ‘Outline for a Book’ in Bonhoeffer, D, (enlarged edition) 1971, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, London, SCM Press p.380f., and from Bonhoeffer as quoted in Robinson, J. A. T., 1963, ‘Honest to God’, p36f, ‘Must Christianity be Religious?’

Sermon for All Saints, Sunday 1st November 2015
Rev. 21:1-6, John 11:32-44

Why do you come to church? I’m sorry; I’ll put it a bit less abruptly. Why does one come? I used to know a lovely old lady, Mrs Ryder, who said, ‘I go to church to think about dead people.’ To some extent, I think that’s how I came in, too. What does happen when we die? What is heaven like? ‘Behold, I make all things new. … A new heaven – and a new earth’. Is that where Mrs Ryder’s people have gone?

And then there’s Lazarus. Too much detail: his corpse was beginning to go off, to get smelly. He hadn’t gone anywhere, apparently. Then out he came, blinking, into the light. Not smelly.

In a way, those two pieces encapsulate where I came in; where I started to think about things outside the realm of what I could see and feel and touch. How I started the the process in which I eventually came into being a Christian.

‘Am I going to die?’ I asked my mother one day when I was a boy. ‘No’, she said. Well, not imminently, anyway, she might have added. But even so, I had started to think about it.

Actually, it’s tomorrow that we really think about dead people – All Souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, will be our service at 10.30 tomorrow morning. Today we are doing what Christians have done at least from the third century, and that is to celebrate the special people who have been, from the earliest time, witnesses to Jesus’ mission, the saints. I Sancti, the holy ones, set apart from ordinary people. St Paul mentions ‘saints’ thirty times in his letters. We may think of them as being somehow almost superhuman, but St Paul simply used that name for the ordinary members of the church.

But clearly in many instances the term ‘saint’ does describe someone very special. In the Roman Catholic Church saints are priests, in the sense that they pray for us, they intercede for us with God. ‘Sancta Maria – ora pro nobis’: holy Mary, saintly Mary – pray for us. So in Catholicism the idea grew up that you pray to God through a saint, you ‘invoked’ that saint.

This was all part of the system of purgatory and indulgences which Martin Luther opposed. Thomas Cranmer, following Luther, wrote in our 39 Articles of Religion, Article XXII, ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is it fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’According to the Reformers, invocation of saints, praying through the saints, has no scriptural basis – you can come to God direct: you don’t need a priest to intercede for you. There is a ‘priesthood of all believers.’

Just like a lot of the controversies from the Reformation, the antithesis between the Catholic idea of the saints as being people whom we can call upon to intercede for us with God, and the Reformation idea of the Priesthood of all Believers, is a question which we don’t now look at in such a black-and-white way. We do say prayers by ourselves; we do dare to speak directly to God, wherever we might be: but we also come to church and have the minister say prayers for us.

In the Apostles’ Creed in the Prayer Book (the one we say at Mattins or Evensong), we say,
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’ The Communion of Saints is right up there with all the other really important parts of our faith.

Today we pray in the Collect, “O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy son Christ our Lord…” Being in ‘Communion with the Saints’ means being in the same body with them, in the church down the ages. There is something very powerful about that. All those wonderful men and women, beginning with the apostles and the earliest Christians – Peter and James and John, the Twelve, then Paul, then Dorcas and Phoebe; then the early martyrs, St Stephen and all those who were eaten by lions in the arena: and then all the great figures in the church down the ages.

Martin Luther, certainly: Thomas Cranmer: but also St Francis Xavier, and Pope John XXIII. John Wesley and John Henry Newman. Dietrich Bonhöffer. This is the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that we read about in the Letter to the Hebrews.

These saints were willing to sacrifice everything for their faith. Read the list of faith heroes in Hebrews 11. It might be rather daunting. How could we match up to some of the things they did? But at least we don’t have to face being thrown to the lions.

Whom would you think of as a saint today? This is where we can recognise the force of St Paul’s idea that everyone in the churches was, is, a saint. I’m sure it’s still true. Just look around you, and think how nice we are – think how we have cared for each other and for those in need. In a real sense everyone in the congregation is a saint.

It doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect in order to qualify to be saints. St Paul, when he wrote to the ‘saints’ at Corinth, or in Ephesus, or in Colossae, or even in Rome, wasn’t writing to eulogise their virtues: instead the purpose of his letters was often to correct their errors and put them back on the track of the true faith. Saints are normal people with normal faults and weaknesses. People like us can be saints.

So what is it that calls us, still calls us, to be people apart, holy people – (because that is what Άγιος , Sanctus, sacred, saintly, means)? This is where poor old Lazarus comes in. We are ‘members of one another in Christ, members of a company of saints, whose mutual belonging transcends death’. Jesus conquered death. He raised Lazarus from the dead, and He himself rose resurrected in glory. This is our faith.

This faith is the mark of a saint. A saint – a saint like us – has the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

‘Behold, I make all things new’. That includes us. Us saints.

The Pleasant Plant, the Stinker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Saints