A TESTIMONY OF FAITH
II Timothy 1:8-14

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
April 17, 2005 / 4th Sunday of Easter

The first Church that I served as pastor, way back in 1968, was a Church of German Reformed background. There I encountered the Heidelberg Catechism.

A catechism, for those of you who might not know, is a group of questions that a person answers, usually to understand the main tenets of a religious faith. Many of the older Christian traditions have
catechisms: there are Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran catechisms. Generally a student of the religion would be expected to memorize by rote the answers to all of the questions. Some churches will not let a person into full membership unless they can recite the entire catechism.

The Heidelberg Catechism is the one developed in the University city of the same name for use by German and Swiss Calvinist or Reformed Churches. It also became the main catechism for the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands and Hungary. It was written in 1563 by Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus. It has one hundred and twenty-nine questions and answers that students would memorize. It's a little easier than it sounds, since many of the questions name the ten commandments or the words of the Lord's Prayer. But it is still a lot of work.

My first congregation had used the Heidelberg Catechism for years, and many of the older members still knew most of the answers by heart. A few even knew some answers in German. Middle aged people had learned only some key, essential questions. The young people, however, had broken away from memorization. Nonetheless, they were expected to know what the Catechism was, at least read it, and maybe memorize the answer to the first question, "What is your only comfort in life and in death?"

I put the answer to that in the bulletin. It begins, "That I belong - body and soul, in life and in death - not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ..."

I had never recited a catechism in my life, and suddenly - in 1968 - I was expected to teach one! It was quite a challenge.

Now before you imagine yourself too sophisticated to ever be interested in a catechism, let me say some things on their behalf. In olden days, when most people could not afford many books, memorization was the key way to learn something, it is not to be frowned on.

And Beneficent is only a few more generations beyond catechisms. Our first pastor Joseph Snow so loved the Westminster Catechism that he got the town leaders to name a street after it. When this side of the River tried to secede from Providence, Snow and his friends thought we might call this "Westminster, Rhode Island."

All of this is meant as an introduction so that I can tell you a story.

Paul Schneider was a German minister ordained in 1926. He served as pastor, first in the towns of Hochelheim and Dornholzhausen, and later in the villages of Dickensheid and Womrath. He married the same year he was ordained, and eventually he and his wife had five children. Schneider served in the Evangelical Church, which was a merger of Reformed and Lutheran denominations. Some of their formerly Lutheran congregations used Luther's Catechism, some newer congregations chose a more modern document, while many of the old Reformed congregations continued to use the Heidelberg Catechism. Schneider's background was Reformed, and he served congregations that used the Heidelberg.

As a young man he had experienced the First World War, and was given a challenging liberal education. But before his ordination he also worked as a city missionary in Berlin where he was impressed by the dedication of some of the other missionaries. He wrote, "There are actually people here who maintain that they not only intend to know Jesus and seek to follow his teaching, but also to possess him as the living power in their life... [they] leave the impression that they really have delivered their lives over to Jesus, loved only him alone, and that they have really died to everything of their own in wish, thought or feelings.^"1

He had only been seven years in the ministry when the Nazi party came to power in 1933. Many Americans do not know, but Hitler's party promoted an entire theological system called "German Christianity." Similar to their promotion of the idea of a master race, there was a theology that said God was most clearly understood in all things German, and that the nation-state and German culture were therefore of primary importance in promoting their brand of Christianity. It was a kind of political salvation. The Nazi Party then campaigned and worked to take over the structure of many German Churches.

Schneider wrote and circulated a letter that made him one of the first German clergy to oppose the Nazis. He refused to give the Nazi salute, and withdrew from Church groups taken over by the "German Christian" movement. The Nazis at one point got him suspended from his pastorate, and at another point had him demoted to a smaller less affluent parish. On returning to the pulpit after his suspension, he preached a stunning sermon attacking the Nazi position.

He said, "Dear congregation, in the last months no thinking, attentive Christian has failed to notice that in our Evangelical church we are being summoned to battle, to witness, to confession... To be sure many still sleep... they simply want to accommodate themselves to the church regardless of the practice of the 'German Christians.' They must under gird this practice with false teaching: that the foundation of the Church is not the Gospel, the joyful offer of Jesus Christ, the healer of sinners, and the Kingdom of God alone, but rather nationality... Whenever they place blood and race and the history of the people as a source of revelation next to God's Word,... they fall away from the living God...^"2

But the conflict became more than words. Schneider rebuked Nazi officials that used Nazi language at the funeral of a young person. He asked his Church Council to rebuke a Nazi sympathizer who withdrew his son from a catechism class to enroll in a Nazi school, and in the struggle to seek a truly Christian response to the pollutions of a national religion, he encouraged his congregation to fence the communion table from those who did not regularly worship, and who had embodied Nazi philosophy. We can imagine that these steps created controversy in his churches.

But these were not normal times. Schneider was arrested and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. There he refused to remove his cap during the Nazi anthem. He was beaten. When the prison guards murdered two prisoners that had tried to escape, Schneider continually hollered his opposition to the brutal murders. He was continually beaten until he died in July, 1939. He was one of the earlier concentration camp victims, even before the Second War began, and one of the first Christians to die for denouncing the Nazi terror.

St. Paul says, "do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner..."

Schneider was able to make a strong, early stance against the greatest crime of modern times because he knew what he believed. He had a catechism and he thought children should learn it. He believed God was more important that a flag-waving nationalism.

Yet I suspect that there is something in his boldness that might trouble some Beneficent people. He rebuked a person at a funeral. He thought the Church should discipline a parent that did not bring their child to catechism. He thought that his church should make it clear that they were different than the world. In all of our love of inclusion we get troubled by his certainty.

But I must admit a certain longing for a faith like his. Sometimes I think we live in a deep shadow of his times. Think about it: much of religion is contaminated with an incipient nationalism, Many would have us endorse the politics of our country before the Gospel. Just months after Schneider was murdered, Hitler launched a preemptive war against Poland. Political forces battle to take over the structures of the churches. Money is offered to churches.

I do not claim to be a Paul Schneider. I am a coward compared to him. But I wonder what would happen here if I felt we were in a crisis as obvious as the one he saw? Despite Schneider's controversial ideas, the majority of his congregations stood warmly courageously behind him. What would happen here? Would we say that's just the pastor's idea? Would we say we are welcome to all ideas? Would we say Nazism or atheism are welcome, that we really have no beliefs in common?

Even Congregational Churches used to write platforms and statements of faith. Do we have enough courage to write such statements in our time? Would we stand behind them if some might go to prison for their beliefs?

I am convinced that we have to find some way to be about testimonies of faith. We have to find some way to give a united witness to our war-mongering, materialist, arrogant culture. We have to be something more than a group of people who merely say we have agreed to disagree. That might be a nice club. But I am convinced we must be more than that.

Could Beneficent say now - in 2005 - to this community "I know the one in whom I have put my trust," and all agree on the same one? Do we have any "standard of sound teaching?" What is the stance we proclaim in this staggering, confused world?

Amen.

1 - Johnson, Wayne, "Paul Schneider the Martyr of Buchenwald," Leben, (1,Jan.-Mar., 2005) pp.7-8,17; p.7.
2 - Ibid., pp.7-8.