VENERABLE OR VULNERABLE John M, Buchanan
Acts 4:1-12 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 6, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

Elie Wiesel is a European Jew who lived through the horrors of a Nazi concen-
tration camp, Ever since he has committed his considerable literary talents to the
task of keeping the wemory alive, He writes about the Holocaust - regularly and well,

In one of his intriguing stories, The Town Beyond the Wali, a survivor of a
concentration camp ig obsessed with the desire to visit the Hungarian village from
which he had been deported as a boy of fourteen, One particular memory has haunted
him overt the years, As he stood at the Railroad Station in the early morning, along
with all the other Jews, to be herded onto boxcars, he turned to take one last look.
at the town, His eyes came to rest on the building across the street, In the second
story window he saw a face, a passive expressionless face watching the tragedy belov,
That is the memory that haunts him - that face. And when he returns years later -
after the war - be walks to the Station, turns and looks up ~ and the face is still
there.

It's just a story, of course, But Wiesel writes: ‘How could one remain in-
different? The executioner I understood, The victims I understood, but with more
difficulty. But those others, all those others, who were neither for nor against;
who sprawled in passive patience; those who said the storm would blow over and all
would be normal again; those who thought themselves above the battle; those who were
permanently merely spectators; those were all closed to me, How can one remain a ~
spectator indefinitely? How can one continue to embrace the woman he loves, to pray
to God with fervor if not faith, to dream of a better tomorrow after seeing all this?"
(Robert Doom, “Consider the Holocaust", Presbyterian Qutlook, 4/23/79, p.14). The
question of how it was possible continues to haunt us, How possibly could one of the
most civilized cultures in the world produce such a demonically evil phenomenon as
Nazism?

How could people who produced Bach and Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Martin
Luther - also produce a Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebels? How could a whole nation
turn its eyes as its entire Jewish population was exterminated?

Some of the best scholars of our generation have asked and are asking that
question, Hannah Arendt, for instance, brilliantly in her classic study, Eichmann:
The Banality of Evil, suggests frighteningly that there is no single, horrible
ethical flaw in the German character, She portrays Eichmann as an uncomplicated,
terribly ordinary middle-class professional man who simply did a good job at what-
ever he was told to do, Arendt suggests that mass evil is always a possibility when
people are willing to suspend individual ethics in order to obey the commands of
the authorities.

Herman Wouk, in his current best seller, War and Remembrance, comes to the
same conclusion, in agoniaing detail. The people who did it were not monsters: they
loved their families and grew flowers and Liked classical music and went to church,
They were motivated mainly, by ordinary self-interest,

Wiesel asks how it is possible to love, pray and hope after seeing what he has
seen, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein in an angry book, After Auschwitz, holds that it is
no longer too plausible even to think about God after the Holocaust,

~2-

For ma, at least, a more difficult question is how to believe in the church?
How could the church ~- Christian people individually, and the corporate institution
simply have turned its head the other way? The haunting question remains; would ve
have behaved differently? Could it happen here?

Dr, Franklin Littell, Church Historian at the University of Chicago, writes,
"The meaning of the Holocaust for Christians must be built inte the confessions of
faith and remembered in the hymns and prayers, That was the turgn in the road that
most of the churches missed, and many of them are still plodding down a dead-end
trail that leads away from the Kingdom of God," (Ibid).

The German Church was a venerable institution - much too venerable to become
vulnerable, Much of the church was simply too involved in the culture to be critical,
The culture succumbed to demonic anti-Semitism, and much of the church played it
safe, excusing its cowardice with very respectable statements like “religion and
politics don't mix", ‘The exceptions ~ the heroic instances when the ehurch did not
crumble, when it stood tall and brave and vulnerable ~ preserved German Christianity,
For as long as Christian saints are remembered Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Under~
ground Confessing Church of Germany will be among them,

Venerable or vulnerable? Two vords that look very similar. Venerable means
"worthy of honor and respect by reason of prolonged testing", We like that word
and that idea, Ve Presbyterians, particularly, like to think of our church and its
traditions as venerable, Vuinerable, on the other hand, means something altogether
different, Vulnerable means capable of being wounded, exposed, open to attack or
damage, The word and idea are not nearly so attractive. Vulnerability is semething
we try to avoid. Venerability is something we try to achieve over the years,

The disciples of Jesus, in this respect, were no different, Given a choice
they would have elected to be venerable hands down over vulnerable. Their natural
inclination, as it is with all of us, was to seek safety and security, to go for the
sure thing rather than the Long shot, to avoid taking unnecessary chances, But more
and more, since those momentous events of the Passover weekend, the friends of Jesus
felt themselves becoming vulnerable, It seemed that the more committed to the Gospel
they were, the more open to attack, the more exposed to danger they became,

In our text this morning the disciples of Jesus are still in Jerusalem after
Easter, but they are not hiding behind locked deors any longer, Ever since the day
of Pentecost they have been moving about freely, telling the story of what had
happened to them to anyone who would listen, Several weeks before they had acted
like frightened men: now they were behaving fearlessly, almost foolishly, They

were becoming very vulnerable,

In the text this morning Peter and John have healed a man outside one of the
Jerusalem Temple gates,and attracted a crowd. Peter seized the oceasion to tell the
story of Jesus, ‘The crowd got larger. They remembered Jesus, It was just a feu
weeks ago that He had come into the Temple Himself and upset the tables of the money
changers, They remembered how the authorities were upset, how they hounded Him and
finally persuaded the Romans to execute Him on the day before the Sabbath, And here
they were again, two of His friends, telling the story and claiming now that their
Jesus was the Messiah, the one promised from antiquity, These fellows were asking
for trouble, deiiberately making themselves vulnerable,

-~3-

In the middle of Peter's sermon,the police arrive and haul Peter and John off
to jail, ‘The police, in this instance, are the Sadducees, Temple priests and
Temple guards,

The next morning the Sanhedrin gathers for a kind of hearing, during which
Peter and John are warned to stop telling the story, and at the conclusion of which
they refuse - in Peter's words "we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard,"
(4:20), The irony here, as is the case with so many Biblical texts, is that vuiner-
ability wins and venerability loses, From the perspective of history we know that
the lowly will be exalted, the losers will be winners, but mo one knew that at the
moment, The Sadducees had the real political power in the first century Judea, The
New Testament is more interested in the Pharisees because of their commitment to
the law, But the Sadducees were the aristocracy, the House of Lords, the landed
gentry, They were, that is to say, venerable, They had Peter and John arrested be-
cause they were disturbing the peace, and the next thing you kmow the Roman soldiers
would be back to establish order - and nobody wanted that, They had made a career of
avoiding vulnerability, They represented established religion, government and
justice, decency, law and order and they knew how to protect their flanks,

The two disciples, in this scenario, on the other hand, are aimost pathetically
vulnerable, They have absolutely nothing to lose, They have no property to protect,
no political power, no prestige, reputation, position in the community. They aren't
venerable at all, What they are is free - which means vulnerable, They are aiso,
the Christian faith maintains, fully human, They are, in their freedom and vulney-
ability, living life as God intends it to be Lived,

Christians ought to become vary of their own venerability, Christians ought
to become uncomfortable when their churches are venerable, Venerability greatly
reduces your options: venerability means protecting your flanks and not taking
chances, It's hard to be venerable and follow Jesus,

Church history is uncomfortably instructive here, The greatest days of the
church were, without exception, vulnerable, dangerous days, The church has never
been more vital, more energetic and creative than when it has been persecuted, The
more the Romans tried to stamp out Christianity, the more rapidly it spread. Pro~
testantism thrived in the Reformation era because it was illegal. Our Scottish
forbearers built their strong church on the blood of their martyrs, The Covenanters
were regarded as outlaws because of their insistence on the Presbyterian way, and
their aversion toward the established church of England, Their custom was to
gather out-of-doors for worship, high in the hills, at some remote spot, with the
constant danger that English troops would discover them, When that happened a
massacre ensued, ‘The Borders Region of Scotland is dotted with monuments to the
Covenanter martyrs; vulnerable but invincible. I was moved last week, on the
Campus of Oberlin College, to see a beautiful memorial to a group of American
missionaries murdered in Citina in the Boxer Rebellion, moved by the selflessness of
their loyalty - but also the vigor of the church that produced them, And today,
throughout the world, Christianity is most vital, most energetic in precisly those
places where it is vulnerable, exposed to attack: Russia, §, Africa, Korea, Brazil,

The reverse is also true, history teaches us, The more venerable a church
becomes the Less vital and influential it is. Some of the saddest days in church
history have 4-2 those when we vere respectable and powerful and wealthy,

~&-

We American Christians, I think, have to learn something about vulnerability.
Thank God we have not been forced to confront the issues which faced our German
brothers and sisters a generation ago, and pray God we never will, Yet we need to
learn again that God calis His church to a willingness to spend itself in obedience
to His will, to risk its own life in carrying out His mission, We American Christians
need to learn again that God is not intexested in venerable institutions: what He
wants ig a community of people willing te be vulnerable for His sake,

We are learning that vulnerability is one of the keys to strong and creative
human relationships, Something sad happens to many of ug on our way through life,
We extend our love, our time, our money, our loyalty ~ to a person, 4 child, a cauge,
a political party, We put ego, pride, self on the line, And sometimes we lose: the
hurt is exquisite, Our pride is shattered, We learn the vulnerability of Love and
some of us vasolve never to risk that kind of hurt again, And so our relationships
are truncated, superficial, because we are guarding our own flanks, protecting our~
selves, avoiding extending ourselves into any area where We might be vulnerable,

Life-givins relationships happen when people make themselves vulnerable; when
people are willing to risk the inconvenience and the hurt that involvement with
another means, it was no model of faithful marriage but there was much that was
good about the movie "Same Time Next Year", The movie telis the sequential evolution
of a relationship between a man and woman who meet one weekend per year - over
several decades. Each-several years they change in remarkable and familiar ways.

In the mid nineteen~sixties he is an obviously successful business executive; pin
stripes, vest, wing tip shoes, attache case - anti-acid tablets and sleeping pills.
He has become venerable, She is wearing jeans, beads, head band, sandals, eating
health food and flirting with the peace movement, He is a Hawk on Vietnam, bellig-
erent angry - they talk for a while but something is obviously wrong. He's hiding
something, And after heated words, it comes out, His own son has been killed in
Vietnam, The acknowledgement makes him vulnerable, something he has been desperately
trying to avoid, and he weeps, deeply, one has the impression ~ for the first time.
It is a poignant scene ~ and the viewer knows that his vulnerability is necessary,

Dutch Catholic Henri Nouwen wrote a book with the fascinating title, ‘The
Wounded Healer'', in which he proposes that human relationships are only possible
between people who are courageous enough to risk getting hurt; people, that is to
say, who are vulnerable,

At the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the utterly amazing assertion
that God himself is vulnerable: that He for whom the word venerability is perfectly
suitable, chose vulnerability instead, He came into life in the vulnerable process
of human birth, He exposed himself to life, human life with all its joys and dangers,
laughter and tears, He made himself vulnerable to the venerable politicians and
religious leaders of Jerusalem, And, He took on himself the universal human vul-
nerability to death,

He did all that, we dare to believe, because He loves us, and because there
was no other way to show us how much He loves us. He did it, we believe, because
He wanted to show us how to love one another: to show us that in order to love
we would have to be vulnerable, We believe that there is salvation in that: that
we may be healed, made whole - by a love thet became vulnerable for us,

-5-

ist God calls us to a new vulnerability. The promise is a
simple one: life is gained as it is given away: fullness is the revard when a
person is willing fo be empty: happiness is what you feel when you have given
everything to make someone else happy: and venerability ~ the only venerability
that matters is what you get when you learn, in the name of Jesus Christ to be

vulnerable,

In Jesus Chr

Amen.

Almighty God, forgive us for cuarding our possessions, our pride, our

so caxefully, Teach us to be vulnerable, Give us

for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,

dignity - even our church,
the courage to be vulnerable,