Tired feet.

Maundy Thursday (Gründonnerstag) 2023 as ‚Visiting Pilgrim‘ at Halifax Minster

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come. Amen 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ!

„How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” Isaiah 52:7

Tired feet.

Tired pilgrim’s feet on Maundy Thursday – the first step in the so-called Easter triduum, the sacred period of three days between Maundy Thursday and Easter Day. 

Tired visiting pilgrim’s feet. Feet carry us to other places. Sometimes even to a foreign one.

So here I am. Well, Halifax Minster is of course not foreign to me. And I am happy to be here. With Max. And with Ture. And we’ve met old friends. 

And yet, this land to which we have made our pilgrimage has become stranger. The hurdles are more noticeable. The distances feel greater. Our limbs are more weary.

Personally I’ve been on pilgrimage for a while this year. Due to circumstances. And due to opportunities. 

In February, I served as a pastor in the „Haus der Stille“, the „House of Silence“, the meditation centre of our Rhineland Church.

There was much silence and prayer. The motto was: „I am tired. Tiredness as a spiritual entity“.

There is reason enough to be tired: The exhausting time of the pandemic. The devastating floods in the summer of 2021, which badly affected parishes not far from me in Germany. The war that is on our doorstep. Dramatic changes in the relevance of our churches to the society we live in.

The feet feel the burden they have to bear.

In March, my pilgrimage took me to a small North Sea island together with vicars from the Rhineland, Westphalia and Switzerland. We found ourselves in East Frisia, on the isle of Spiekeroog, part of Mesolithic Doggerland – an area of land, now submerged that once connected Britain to continental Europe. Now right on the border between the mud flats and the open sea, between late winter and early spring. Snow, rain, sun. Plus howling winds. And the vastness of the sky. The watchword here was „Catch your breath“. To feel God’s breath, which breathes life into us. 

What sustains me at these transitional points in ministry, in life?

Here, too, I felt the pilgrim’s feet in the sand, in the sea, in my personal story.

Finally, footsteps on the way to Halifax. We stopped in Cambridge on Tuesday. I was ordained there almost exactly 30 years ago.

We visited the place where Martin Bucer was buried in Great St. Mary’s. Martin Bucer, contemporary of Martin Luther, one of the great Church reformers – he also worked in the Rhineland. In the 16th century, he drafted a church constitution for the Electorate of Cologne, which was rejected. Political circumstances prevented the ideas of the Reformation from taking hold in Cologne and the surrounding area. Bucer had to flee Germany because of danger to life and limb, and found asylum in England. Thomas Cranmer, who was Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII, ensured that he could continue his reforming efforts here in safety. He brought the Cologne Church Order with him. And it seeped into the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, drop by drop.

Another small footprint: a booklet, dated 1815: Laudes Britanniae Magnae, de Germanorum libertate.

It was written by one of my predecessors, Maximilian Friedrich Scheibler – like me, a Lutheran pastor in Monschau. In 1815 he praised Great Britain for supporting the Prussians, Austrians and Russians in their war against Napoleon. In Germany, the booklet was lost in the bombing raids of the Second World War. At Cambridge University Library it survived. After years of research I held it in my hands excitedly and gratefully. 

So this is how we discover footprints of the common past of our countries and churches, lives and personal stories – footprints that connect.

And now – here we are.

Refreshed this morning at the moving and powerful Chrism Mass at Wakefield Cathedral. The promise, pledged in ordination, renewed. 

The weary pilgrim’s feet, bearing the burden of the past years, decades and centuries, will be fortified tonight. Foot washing as a sign of hospitality in a distant land after a long journey through time.

This week, may we be strengthened in our pilgrimage as we journey with Jesus through time. 

We will of cause pause at intervals. Listening to how exhaustion finally overcomes us. Insufficient faith paralyses us. Fear overwhelms us. We will experience how Jesus precedes us into death. How, in suffering, he bears all burdens on our behalf, takes away our guilt. We will hear that we are not yet lost. 

On Easter morning than, the path of fear to the empty tomb. The path of joy from the tomb to the good news of life, against all expectations. 

But – we have not yet reached the end of our pilgrimage. We still have to struggle on and catch our breath.  

Our feet require strength, just like those of the disciples. If they had continued to wander on as they thought fit, they would have become hopelessly lost. But because God did not abandon them, they stayed on track. 

And this also applies to us: reconciliation and forgiveness, love that unites, feet that carry us into a foreign land – and remind us that we are all God’s creatures, great and small, family, friends, strangers and outsiders.

It is part of the nature of the God in whom we believe that God is one who led his people out of oppression, out of slavery in Egypt, into freedom. The commandment to protect is therefore also explicitly rooted in this story of liberation.

„Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.“ (Ex 23:9). 

This leads us directly to the essence of Jesus‘ ethics.: the Golden Rule: „So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.“ (Mt 7:12).

When we on our pilgrimage gain insight into the situation of vulnerable foreigners, and empathise with them, it becomes evident to us they should be treated with esteem and respect. 

When we see „foreigners“ around us in need of help, we can truly feel what the Golden Rule means – being on a pilgrimage together. 

Tired feet in a foreign land, and yet together on the path of discipleship – the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!

May the reigning God help us recognise this as true and life-giving, most especially in our troubled times. Amen.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Maundy Thursday, 06.04.2023 at Halifax Minster, Jens-Peter Bentzin

Sermon Remembrance Day 2018

Halifax Minster

Jeremiah 8:4-7 and Romans 8:19-26 

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

May the LORD give us a heart for His word and His word for our heart.

Dear sisters and brothers!

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

This is how St Paul in Romans 8,22 tries to convey a sense of what he and his fellow contemporaries experienced as cruel reality – as they looked into a world that from the very beginning was, and still is, full of pain, violence, injustice, war and agony. The pains of childbirth – it’s a powerful metaphor. A metaphor I would like to explore with you on this very special Remembrance Day 2018.

So let me take you on a journey into the past – and beyond.

I still remember very well the birth of our sons – 2½ years apart. 

I was there in the delivery room both 10 and 13 years ago. I remember the labour, the pain, the long wait as a powerless father. And finally that very special moment when they were there. 

I looked at them for the very first time. I heard them screeching with their tiny, sweet voices – I picked them up and held them gently, listened to their breath, I felt their little hearts thumping, counted their fingers and toes, looked into their eyes. 

And I thought that whoever witnessed a wonder like this, the birth of a child, could not in all seriousness want a war. Never! 

On the contrary – I thought that after such an experience, people would instead defend human life to their last breath, would surely sacrifice everything for the sake of peace – wouldn’t they?

But what kind of world have our children been born into? In what kind of world are they growing up? Is it really a world that bears witness to the sanctity of life?

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

I remember a field trip that some ministers from our Aachen Church District went on four years ago. Some of them are here today, which is very moving. It was to Ypres in Flanders, a town that witnessed appalling suffering during the whole of the First World War. Hardly scarred land. Countless cemeteries and war graves. The Last Post at Menin Gate. We’ve been to the site close to the Yser Canal, where John McCrae wrote: 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

And finally we arrived at Vladslo, a nearby German war cemetery. 

Before our visit I’d learned about a young man who lived 100 years ago, – and shared my surname: Bentzin. His first name was Friedrich. He is buried in Vladslo. I didn’t know much about him. Just his name, his rank and date of death. So I had to imagine what happened to him – and in secret I began to call him uncle – ‚Onkel Friedrich’.

100 years ago, I imagined, he had been employed as a farmhand on one of the huge estates east of the River Elbe, close to the Baltic Sea. In fact all my ancestors who bore the name of Bentzin actually came from a hamlet in this area – that is, Pomerania. 

I imagined that as a farmhand Onkel Friedrich knew all about horses. So he was drafted into the Mecklenburg Dragoons. During the hot summer days of late July 1914 he was loaded on a train along with his comrades and horses. They were transported southwards for days, right across Germany. 

At Aachen – a place he’d probably never heard of before – they disembarked. On August 4th they crossed the border into neutral Belgium, the reason Britain declared war on Germany on the very same day – a war driven above all by Germany’s ambition to pursue world power, at all costs…

A week later, on August 12th, roughly 50 miles northwest of Aachen, near the Belgian town of Halen, the dragoons launched a cavalry charge with sabres and lances – an operation they had trained for intensively back home. 

Everyone turns to his own course, like a horse plunging headlong into battle.

There they were met by an elite unit of the Belgian army – state-of-the-art equipped with bicycles and – machine guns. The dragoons fell like flies in a matter of minutes – the horses fled in wild panic. This cavalry attack, one of the last of its kind on the Western Front, ended in carnage, a bloodbath. The two cavalry divisions involved lost by evening 501 men and 848 horses. Onkel Friedrich survived – outwardly probably unharmed, but most certainly shattered and traumatised.

His regiment marched on into France. But after the First battle of the Marne had been lost to the Allied armies – I learned the ‚Dukes‘ took part in this battle too -, the dragoon Friedrich died on September 11th, probably killed during the battle’s aftermath, the so-called ‘Great Retreat‘. Only five weeks into the war, his body was lowered into a grave somewhere between France and Flanders and later transferred to Vladslo. With 25.000 others. Far from home, far from his parents, his family and loved ones. 

Four years ago we followed Onkel Friedrich’s footsteps. We gathered around his gravestone. We held a brief prayer service. Remembering.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old… 

Vladslo – an atmosphere of great sorrow and loss haunts this place.

This is made even more plain when we look at the pair of sculptures in the cemetery, entitled “Grieving Parents” by Käthe Kollwitz, a notable German artist of the time. It took her 18 years to complete the sculptures as a tribute to her youngest son, Peter, who was killed a few weeks after Onkel Friedrich – in October 1914. Peter, just like Friedrich, is buried there in Vladslo. 

The figure on the left of the sculpture is of Peter’s father, Karl. He gazes stoically at the ninth stone before him, on which Peter’s name is written. His arms are folded, his hands grip his arms as if he is shoring himself up against the sheer weight of his grief.

In contrast, the self-portrait of Peter’s mother Käthe stoops in pain, retreating into herself and clutching her cloak to her chin as if protecting herself from an icy wind. Like her husband, her hands convey almost as much emotion as her face.

Käthe Kollwitz once wrote about her work:“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.”

The groaning in the pains of childbirth – and the stultifying grief and agony and pain when your child dies, your sibling, a parent – the anguish of knowing your loved one will never return. 

In St Paul’s metaphor these pains are intertwined.

And I feel Jeremiah’s question emerging: Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? Why is it that my people know not the rules of the Lord?

Is it because the world as it is – then and today – is all too often frightening? Fear is of course a natural feeling. Fear is a signal that something alien and potentially dangerous is creeping up on us.

But fear alone is not a good counsellor.

In our time we are yet again witnessing the unexpected rise of fear.

And today’s answers to those fears seem all too familiar.

We see all over Europe and beyond the rise of exclusion, increasing social polarisation, the enticing offer of black and white solutions to complex issues.

Real and imaginary walls are being erected in an attempt to urge people to distinguish themselves from others, to think in sweeping terms of ‘us’ (good) and ‘them’ (bad), to underline differences rather than ask what we have in common. 

People are turning to just such a ruptured vision of the world, despite our tragic and not so distant history, especially in Europe. And this discourse is no longer the exclusive rhetoric of fringe and extreme sections of our society. 

And I would argue that the predominant source of this cancer is indeed fear. When we are afraid, we often switch off rational thought processes and take refuge in our instincts, even the darker ones. It leads to all kinds of bedevilment and dangerous delusions. 

Fear can make us vulnerable to those who exploit it for their own advantage. It leaves us groaning in pain about how the world seems to evolve again and again. And it leaves us speechless, and agonising in despair. It’s part of our weakness. Germany’s history is indeed full of examples of these weaknesses.

St Paul writes: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Dear brothers and sisters, as we four years ago gazed at the sculptures in Vladslo and experienced the unspoken misery carved in dark stone – a misery indeed too deep for words – we felt the Holy Spirit had done its part.  

Such intercessions open up a chance for healing. And peace. And hope.

For in this hope we were saved, St Paul writes.

And yes, dear brothers and sisters, there is hope – there is hope in the midst of a sea of darkness and uncertainty. Each childbirth bears witness to God’s hope for our world. 

And on occasions such as this today a ray of hope flares upwards.

We from Aachen are here today with you on the centenary of Armistice and Remembrance Day to admit the blame that we have inherited, and the burden of human error. We must face the distressing truth that our forefathers inflicted immeasurable pain and caused immeasurable grief. In such circumstances, we may not know how to start to pray as we should.

So we sink our heads in shame and humility. We remember the victims and bow before them.

We shoulder both the blame and the responsibility, and mourn together the tragic loss of young and hopeful lives on both sides of the trenches, whether Friedrich or John, Giles or Peter, Joshua or Kareem. 

Deeply moved, we perceive that today – just like you did already four years ago – you are stretching out hands in reconciliation, friendship and joint lamentation – and we humbly embrace this gift…

…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 

So let us build on this hope and – with God’s aid – continue to build a common, peaceful and just future for the children of God. In Halifax, Calderdale and Aachen, in Britain, Germany, Europe and the world. Amen.

And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.

11.11.2018 

Halifax Minster

Jens-Peter Bentzin, Pfarrer