Dietrich Bonhoeff er was a Lutheran pastor and theologian who helped found the Confessing Church movement in 1930s Germany to resist Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Forgoing an invitation to teach safely in the U.S., Bonhoeffer worked in the German underground during the war, was arrested, imprisoned and eventually executed in a concentration camp two weeks before its liberation.
My parishioner Eleanor Neel is a Bonhoeff er scholar and former member of the board of the International Bonhoeffer Society. Eleanor recently passed me an article titled “The Witness of Sinners,” an interview with Jennifer McBride, also of the Bonhoeff er Society. McBride contends Jesus’ identification with sinners was central to his being.
When we see Jesus, we do not see a triumphal presence speaking from a morally pure distance, she says. “Jesus was in solidarity with sinners in at least three main ways that defi ne his person and work.”
“First, as God incarnate, Jesus assumed sinful fl esh” (Romans 8:3), and in his own body became “intimately acquainted with the complexity and messiness of fallen existence.”
Second, Jesus accepted John the Baptist’s sinner’s baptism, and “in this way ‘numbers himself with the transgressors’ (to use Isaiah’s language about the suff ering servant).”
“Third, and fi nally, refusing to be called good (Mark 10:18), he instead accepts responsibility for sin as a convicted criminal on the cross. Throughout his ministry, Jesus denies any claim about his own moral righteousness and instead actively accepts responsibility for the world’s sin and suffering on the cross out of love for fellow human beings.”
In the tradition of Bonhoeff er, McBride calls on the church to be “conformed to Christ” by “taking the shape of Jesus in public life.” She says the church must be “present in public life not as standard-bearers of morality but as repenting sinners seeking to accept responsibility for social sin and injustice … out of the same divine love for human beings.”
Christians are inherently entangled in society’s structural sin. We are complicit with injustice. The church needs to repent. McBride says repentance is “concrete social and political activity that arises from the church community taking responsibility for that sin.”
I know how that looks in my own congregation.
Every human being does not have access to health care. That is a structural sin. In 1994 our church took some responsibility for that sin, and we helped create a clinic that has now grown to serve more than 30,000 low-income and uninsured patients. We have been advocates for universal health care access. We’re encouraged by the gains made through the Aff ordable Care Act and hope one day every person will be able to access health care.
Homelessness is a structural social sin. Every person should have shelter and security. In 1999 one of my parishioners brought a plan for responding to some unmet needs of our homeless neighbors, and the next year, our church took some responsibility for that sin by starting the 7hills Homeless Center, now a community nonprofi t organization making a profound difference among our most vulnerable neighbors.
Through various other congregational ministries, we’ve taken some responsibility for several of our corporate sins of hunger, poverty and imprisonment.
Yet, if every person were housed, fed and healed in Fayetteville, we would still bear the sin of human suffering in our region, nation and world. Confession and repentance also has to be embodied in our entire national and international context.
In the spirit of Bonhoeff er and Jesus, McBride says, “Christian faith is inherently public or political because it concerns how we order our lives in relation to the good of others — in relation to neighbors, stranger and enemies. Discipleship is about following Jesus, who embodies the reign of God; it is about living into God’s social order ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’”
Christians are to be Jesus’ presence in the world. We are called to identify with the same people and problems Jesus identified with — the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the sinner, the ill, the imprisoned, the widow and orphan. We are to order our lives in relation to the good of others. We are called to bring about God’s social order on earth as it is in heaven.
That’s why Christian politics and economics are always focused on what we can do to take responsibility for the vulnerable, broken and outcast. It even goes so far as to obey Jesus’ command to love our enemies. Repentance is to acknowledge complicity in structural sin and act to redeem it out of love for fellow human beings.
LOWELL GRISHAM IS AN
EPISCOPAL PRIEST WHO LIVES IN
FAYETTEVILLE.