With this sermon about the German theologian Dorothee Soelle, Pastor Brooks continued a sermon series on Christian thinkers who can help point us toward God during the lenten season. Listen to this sermon now or read it below.
Scripture Reading—Mark 12: 28-34
During the summer following my junior of college, I worked as a camp counselor for a Christian camp in southern Indiana. As you might imagine, in such a location, I often struggled with the more conservative theology around me. I confided my difficulties in an email to my godfather, who was then a professor at a Lutheran seminary in Berkeley, California. He responded by suggesting that I read a book entitled Theology for Skeptics by a German theologian named Dorothee Soelle. More than any other book, this book helped me to be a Christian at a time when I could have very easily lost my faith. Soelle had this remarkable ability to be simultaneously a critical thinker and a voice of assuring hope. She could cast away images of a patriarchal, authoritarian God, while at the same time present images of a caring, compassionate God. She could reject belief in a bodily resurrection while at same time present an alternative interpretation that was both inspiring and compelling.
In thinking of Soelle, I am reminded of a meeting I once had with the pastor of a church located in a poor black neighborhood of Boston. At the time, I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, and the pastor said to me, “You know the problem with a lot of academic study in seminary these days is that they spend a lot of time deconstructing theology—tearing it down—but they spend very little time reconstructing—building up something that people can actually use.” Soelle was a rare academic who could both deconstruct and reconstruct.
I saw this quality in Soelle again when I read part of her memoir this past week. In one chapter, Soelle reflects upon what she wants to pass on to her children and grandchildren. In classic Soelle fashion, she begins with a critical eye. She wants to make sure we dismantle those parts of our society and our faith tradition that are harmful. She starts by quoting a radical cultural critic named Theodor Adorno who once said, “The very first demand of education is that Auschwitz does not happen once again.” To fully understand Soelle’s perspective and motivation in quoting Adorno, it helps to realize that she lived through World War II as a teenager in Nazi Germany. While her parents privately opposed Nazism and sheltered a Jewish woman in their attic for six weeks, Soelle later observed that she took a rather apolitical stance at that point in her life. Moreover, her own subconscious anti-Semitism became revealed after the war. Upon learning that her father’s lineage was one-fourth Jewish, she felt ashamed and attempted to keep it a secret.
Ultimately, Soelle evolved and became a leading voice among German Christians who were struggling to come to terms with the holocaust. For example, at one point, she delivered a lecture with the provocative title “To Love Bach in a World of Torture.” In this talk, she reflected upon how it was that an SS official could gas Auschwitz prisoners by day and revel in Bach by night. Soelle realized that Bach could be heard in two strikingly different ways. In Bach, an SS official heard music that evoked order, authoritarian piety, and German pride. At the same time, someone like Soelle who also loved Bach, instead heard music that was liberating, life changing, and transcendent. Rather than reinforcing a dehumanizing hate, Bach’s music could inspire an inclusive, outward love of others. For someone who was committed to creating a German society that did not repeat the horrors of the past, wrestling with such questions became a necessity. The weight of history demanded that careful attention be given to removing the stench and filth from one’s own house.
The analogy that Soelle once gave was this: In an ancient Irish fairy tale, a lad seeking to court a princess was forced to clean out a stable in which 120-years of manure were piled high. For each shovelful that he threw out, three more shovelfuls came flying right back through all forty stable windows. For Soelle, such was the task of doing theology in Germany. A similar perspective is shared in a book Soelle wrote as an introduction to theology. In the chapter on sin, Soelle explains how her experiences had led her to reject notions of original sin that conceived of sin as being somehow part of our inherent biological make up as humans. She didn’t believe we were born sinful. However, she did believe that we are born into sin in the sense that we are born into a house in which sin is very much present.
To explain this, Soelle recalls a trip she made to the Netherlands as a young woman. While she was there, she had the experience of people turning their backs on her and refusing to speak to her. These people had relatives who were killed by Nazis. As a German, Soelle represented the source and cause of their loss and pain. In reflecting upon this, Soelle realized that even though she was too young to have “done” anything, she nevertheless came from a society that inescapably lived “in a complex of guilt.” It wasn’t a house that she could exit. It was simply the reality of where she was born. Soelle did not believe it was appropriate to speak of collective guilt, but she did believe it was necessary to have a “sense of collective responsibility for guilt.” She declared, “I am also responsible for the house which I did not build but in which I live.” This made me think of how we consider Lent. Historically, Lent has been viewed as a time of guilt, but what if we thought of Lent as a time of responsibility, as a time for cleaning house.
I mentioned that Soelle wanted to pass along a couple of things to her children and grandchildren. Not repeating Auschwitz was one of them. That’s the weighty one. The other one is more uplifting. She beautifully expressed it in a letter to her children that she read at a celebration the night before she died at the age of 73. She had written the letter a number of years earlier for a German radio program that had asked her to write it. The letter was to convey to her children her thoughts on “what really counts in life.” She was to pass along what had comforted and sustained her and what was not to be forgotten or lost.
In response, she began by recounting a fairy tale she had told her children when they were young. It was about a poor shepherd who is led to a magical, mysterious mountain by a small, old man. Upon arriving at the mountain, it bursts wide open to reveal a vast pile of riches and treasures. Think of the mountain in the Hobbit. The shepherd wastes no time. He goes inside the mountain and begins to stuff his pockets with gold and jewels. As he is doing this, he hears a voice call out, “Don’t forget the best!” Suddenly, the mountain closes back up and all the treasures in the shepherd’s pocket turn to dust. With that, the story ends.
It is an enigmatic story. We don’t really know what exactly “the best” is. Is it a particular treasure? Is it a reference to what really matters in life—something other than treasures? Soelle doesn’t know. What she does know is that “the best” is precisely what she wants to leave with her four children. Her struggle, however, is that for her “the best” is not something that can simply be handed over. It is not as easy as giving them a box with the family jewels inside. In a nod to our scripture for today, Soelle then reveals what it is that she would most like to pass along: “To love God with the whole heart, with all one’s strength, from one’s entire soul.”
Soelle confesses the difficult nature of passing this along. From the beginning, her efforts at raising her children in the Christian faith “had little chance of succeeding.” Soelle was attacked again and again by the institutionalized church. Moreover, she confesses that she herself did not live a devout life of daily song and prayer. Despite this, Soelle writes that she does wish for her children to become “a little bit pious.” “Don’t forget the best,” she says. She doesn’t expect her children to praise God without ceasing like some holy roller. She simply hopes that they praise God occasionally. She simply hopes that every now and then gratitude rises out of them, every now and then they sing “hallelujah,” or let their thanks become expressed in some other way.
Soelle remembers how she and her husband would take their children on trips when they were young. The children would often get dragged into churches. On one occasion, they were forced to enter a church that Soelle herself confessed to be awful. She recalls one of her children dryly announcing, “No God in there.” Soelle avers this is precisely what she does not want to ever be said about the lives of her children. She declares, “God is to be ‘in there,’ at the sea and in the clouds, in the candle, in music, and, of course, in love.”
Ultimately, what Soelle wants her children to have is the joy of faith. She differentiates this joy from the kind that comes from strawberries or the cancellation of school. She explains that the joy she has in mind is the kind that comes without a “why.” There is no explanation for the source of this joy. Its origin is a mystery. As Meister Eckhart said, it is “utterly devoid of why.” This is the joy that Soelle wants to leave with her children. If she could pass that along, she would be content to put aside her other “motherly demands.” She would be content to sit among riches and treasures as she calls out, “Don’t forget the best!” Amen.