Riviera UCC

The Holy Ghost Calls from the Holocaust

a sermon based on: Psalm 36

given at Palm Bay, FL April 18, 2010

by Rev. Scott Elliott

We come together in this Sacred space at least one a week to worship and praise God, to discuss all that is Sacred, to try and find answers, and to even revel in the mystery of that which cannot be known.

Many times we celebrate that which is good in creation, but sometimes we also ponder – even mourn – that which is not good.

Today’s sermon may at first seem to be all about that which is not good, because we are going to consider for a bit one of the darkest events in the history of mankind – The Holocaust– but in the discussion we will also consider where God was in the awfulness of that dark, dark time in history; we will consider the Light’s presence in that darkness and how the Holy Spirit still calls to us from the Holocaust over a half century later.

The Holocaust is a part of today’s service because this past week including today has been the 2010 “National Days of Remembrance” of The Holocaust.

Many of us in this room were alive during the Holocaust or were born shortly after it occurred – to my never ending amazement the Holocaust ended only a dozen years before I was born. So the Holocaust is not some ancient bit of history, but is an all-too real event in the modern world.

Whether old or young or somewhere in between, the Holocaust that ended sixty-five years ago has shaped all of our lives and it will continue to shape the lives of future generations . . . this is especially so if we take time to remember that it did indeed happen, and that it is indeed possible for humanity to act so unGodly.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC has a lengthily definition of the Holocaust – a part of which I want to spend a little time reading to help us remember. The Holocaust was:

...the systematic, bureaucratic, state‑sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in . . . 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so‑called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and . . . (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," . . . Although Jews . . . were the primary victims . . . other victims included some 200,000 Romas (Gypsies). And at least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients . . . were murdered in the so‑called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe . . . [b]etween two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of . . . maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non‑Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor . . . where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years . . .German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents . . . and religious dissidents . . . Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

Sobering words.

In seminary our Biblical Theology class toured the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum and attended a lecture by a concentration camp survivor.

As I walked from display to display, as I listened to stories from that survivor, I felt that actual evidence from hell had been placed before me.

There is no liking the topic of the Holocaust. It’s dark and ugly and just mentioning the name “Holocaust” alone sets off vibrations in the mind of hate and evil of the worse kind.

The Holocaust is awful because it was NOT the work of an otherworldly devil afoot; it was the work of humans doing awful things to humans. That is a very hard thing to face.

One of the things that makes it difficult is that we tend to picture God as big and powerful and in charge of things. The Holocaust begs the question Where was the God during this hell?

Our inclination is we want to turn and run from the issue because that’s a fair question, and we fear there’s no answer.

Professor McCann, who took us to the Holocaust Museum, restated that scary question for all of us wannabe pastors. His rephrasing, (based on Rabbi Irving Greenburg’s work), was this: “No theology is credible unless it is credible in light of burning children at The Holocaust,”1. Meaning as Christians we have to grabble with the darkest part of depravity and God’s location in it.

Our professor’s powerful restatement actually contains the starting point of a credible theology. We can feel God in our discomfort with the horror of the phrase “burning children.”

That phrase vibrates with a profound disturbance that shakes our very core – and it is God who is doing the shaking. God calls us to what everyone in this room knows - that children deserve protection from harm, not exposure to it. The call to protect children is innate, planted by God; it is a part of God.

Indeed as I toured the Holocaust museum the photos of the children most of all broke my heart, as did the survivor, Mendall Rosenthal’s, poignant recollection of his youth spent in concentration camps.

We are hardwired by God in a protect-the-young way that makes it very hard for us to objectify and make children faceless “others” and thus God’s image in humanity is easier to see –or harder to hide from – in children. Children in their innocence and vulnerability, and in their suffering, most especially have God’s (and our) attention. Jesus suggests this in his embrace of children in the Gospels (Lk 18:16; Mark 9:36-37).

Theologian Terence Fretheim (TF) in this book The Suffering of God notes generally that “God . . . having entered into [our] suffering . . . experience[s] what [we] are having to endure . . . God enters into the hurtful situation and makes it [God’s] own” (TF 128).2

This is especially so with the suffering of children and so it should not be surprising that through the records of children suffering in the Holocaust I felt God’s presence so strongly, or that the words “children burning” shake us up. God was there in the children and the Holy Spirit remains deeply ingrained in the Holocaust photos and images and memories – and in our responses to them.

Of course God was not, and is not, just there in the images and stories of the children. God’s presence vibrates in the faces and stories of all the victims. It is just more pronounced for most in the vulnerability and innocence of children, and their closeness to God (cf., Lk 18:16; Mark 9:36-37).

There is a photo from the Holocaust entitled “Leave-Taking Before Deportation.” In that picture the presence of God is captured in both a child and a parent sharing a tender moment while being separated by a fence as they are about to be cut off from one another presumably forever as they head off to concentration camps. In the photo as the family sits on the ground in the worse possible situation, you can sense love. Love in the face of the mom as she plays with her young child on the other side of the chain link fence. Love in the child as he dotes on his mom oblivious that she is soon to be absent.

God is in that captured moment in so many ways. In the Love being shared. In the suffering, and in the grief, that resonates right off photograph. Fretheim powerfully points out that grief “is always what the Godward side of judgment looks like” (TF 112).