I’m currently making my way through The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland. The book tells the story of Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg) who escaped the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 and then detailed the atrocities happening inside the walls of the camp. While a prisoner at Auschwitz, Vrba utilized the gift of his prodigious mind to memorize the statistics of horror that he witnessed. From the time he entered the camp, Vrba realized that the most effective way he could respond justly to the evil injustice of the Nazi regime was to escape and then warn the world about what was happening at Auschwitz, because the world outside was in many ways blind to the gruesome realities within the concentration camp. This drive to escape and announce the heinous injustice of the Nazi regime was Vrba’s motivation to survive in a place oriented only towards death.
Reading this book has roused many questions for me as a Christian, especially since many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were self-professed Christians. It brings up the larger question of how any Christian could justify the hideous actions that occurred in the Holocaust. Indeed, vile injustice is rampant among us even today, much of which we are not aware. Undoubtedly, there are people responsible for such injustice who purport to be Christian. How is this so?
And this causes me to think about Christian worship. Worship is not a means to an end; it is the end, but the end should have a transformative effect on our lives. Because of what God has done for us, we can only respond with adoration and praise. And yet. . . there are ethical dimensions to our worship. So, what does it mean when some people attend church faithfully but do not act in love towards their neighbors? What does it mean to be in church every Sunday (or more) and not feel the stirrings of change within oneself? Worship should eventually turn our cold hearts of stone into warm hearts of flesh, on fire with love for God, self, and neighbor. How can one not be changed by the efficacy of the sacraments administered and received? A sacrament might be valid under the right conditions, but what does its efficaciousness look like?
Much of this is a mystery that we will never know, but it behooves us always as Christians to be mindful of the way worship does and should shape our lives. For centuries, many Christians have turned a blind eye towards injustice. Many still do. Christian discipleship demands that we be prepared to let any dissonance between what we profess and what we do disturb us. We are always called to repentance.
On Friday, January 27, we will be holding a Holocaust Remembrance Service at 7 p.m. This is deliberately not an interfaith service because the focus will be on Christian repentance for complicity in injustice. While it may not seem entirely integrous to ask for repentance for those heinous crimes we did not personally commit (such as those in the Holocaust), each of us is always at risk of turning an blind eye to injustice. It is no secret that antisemitism is currently alive and well across the world, and recently it has been given more of a public platform in this nation. Tonight’s liturgy will invite each of us to examine our own sinful behavior and proclivities towards ethical apathy and to ask for God’s forgiveness where such forgiveness is due. This evening’s service will follow the Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for Worship in the Evening,” which has a similar pattern to the evening Office. As permitted by the prayer book, we will say together the Litany of Penitence, found in the Ash Wednesday liturgy but also allowed on other penitential occasions. This evening is one such occasion.
My prayer for the Church of the Good Shepherd is that our robust schedule of liturgies will not become a perfunctory performance of mindless rituals but instead work on us in slow and subtle ways, to shape us and mold us into people who are truly alive in God. Perhaps the words of the prophet Micah, which we shall hear in Mass this Sunday, says it best: “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle Babin