Paradoxes

In today’s Gospel (Luke 9:25), Jesus reveals a paradox:

whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

Holding on to ourselves closes us in and so we die; but letting go of ourselves, losing control, handing ourselves over, can open us to new life.

But there’s another paradox I’d like to share today, the anniversary of the death of A. J. Muste in 1967 at 82 years of age.

“One has to be both a resister and a reconciler to be an effective pacifist. You have to be sure that when you’re reconciling you’re also resisting any tendency to gloss things over; and when you’re primarily resisting, you have to be careful not to hate, not to win victories over human beings. You want to change people, but you don’t want to defeat them.”

Paradoxes teach us that it is not always black and white – and that doesn’t mean that everything is grey. For me, it means that the truth is found in the ongoing dialogue, the ongoing paradox, the living in the midst of paradox and ambiguity.

AJ Muste seems to me to be one who lived with conviction – but int he midst of paradoxes.

Abraham Johannes Muste, born in the Netherlands, was raised in Michigan. After college he taught for a few years at what is now Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. After seminary he served for several years as a minister of the Reformed Church. He would subsequently pass through several denominations, before joining the communist Workers Party.

After several years he returned to a faith based on the Sermon of the Mount and advocated an activist pacifism. He was for several years the executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith pacifist organization.

When he retired from that role, he continued to be an advocate for justice, peace and nonviolence – protesting nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and the draft. A year before his death he was arrested protesting outside the US Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam. A few weeks before his death he visited North Vietnam to see the effects of the US bombing.

One of the most striking photos of A J is his climbing over the fence at a Nebraska missile base.

There is still time

There is still time:
come back to me with all your heart.
Joel 2:12
(from the Latin America lectionary)

 The English lectionary begins today’s first reading differently:

Even now, says the Lord,
return to me with your whole heart…

There is still time.

Conversion can happen at any moment in our lives. In fact, the life of faith is one of constant conversion, continuing opening ourselves to God’s call to be one with God, to be reconciled with God and with others.

Today Thursday March 6 is the fortieth anniversary of the death of the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who is most known for this quote:

When the Nazis came to get the Communists, I was silent. When they came to get the Socialists, I was silent. When they came to get the Catholics, I was silent. When they came to get the Jews, I was silent. And when they came to get me, there was no one left to speak.

Reading about him this morning in Robert Ellserg’s All Saints and in Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday’s Cloud of Witnesses, I realized that here was a man who went through a whole series of conversions.

He was a German U-boat commander in World War I. He was disillusioned by the treaty of Versailles and was found Hitler’s critique appealing. Even though he became a Lutheran pastor, following his father’s example, he was still an ardent German nationalist.

But Hitler’s taking over the German Lutheran Church and the banning of Lutheran pastors of Jewish ancestry, moved him to untie with other pastors in a protest, that developed into the Confessing Church.

Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and spent almost eight years in German concentration camps – as Hitler’s personal prisoner!

But after the war, he recognized the real evil that was Hitler and Nazism and helped formulate a Declaration of Guilt. The evil was more than Hitler’s takeover of the church. As Niemöller said, “The issue was whether one saw Jesus as the highest authority, or Hitler.”

But, as the Cold War heated up, Niemöller had a further conversion – against nuclear weapons and against all war. He became a prominent pacifist leader in Germany and throughout the world.

Not one conversions but many.

Yet, in an interview two years before his death, he shared the root of his life of conversions.

I was a schoolboy of eight when my father often took me along in the afternoons when he went around to visit the sick. One day we went to see a weaver who was dying of tuberculosis. Downstairs was his loo, and my father parked me there while he went upstairs to the sick man’s bedroom. I took in the bare room with nothing but the loom and whitewashed walls.
In one corner I noticed something framed and under glass which was embroidered in pearls – nothing but the question, “What would Jesus say?” I’ve never forgotten it – never. And that’s the sum of Christian ethics.

Robert Ellberg gives March 5 as the date for Niemoeller’s death, while almost all other sources say March 6.