Responsibility

Genesis 41:41-57

2 Corinthians 11:23-30

2 Timothy 4:1-5

Luke 17: 7-10

John 21:15-17

Responsibility

Memorial Day weekend. For most people it means the start of summer, a long weekend of picnics, maybe a parade, and to most of us it means grills, food, family, and fun. For a few people, it means going to the graves of deceased loved ones and remembering those who have passed away who fought for our country.

Reverend Martin Niemoller’s confession in 1945 carries a warning for us all:

“In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I was a Protestant so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for me... by that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.”

These words sound like they came from a man who was too afraid to stand up against what was happening around him. However, the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”

Martin Niemoller had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to Hitler’s taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model for his service in WW I. But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod and became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.

From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistently trashed everything the Nazis stood for. Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. He was found guilty, but perhaps due to foreign pressure he was initially given only a suspended sentence. However, then he was almost re-arrested almost immediately on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution.

Martin Niemoller, despite all that he did to speak out against the Nazis, accepted a share of responsibility for what happened in Germany during that awful period from 1933 to 1945. He felt he could have spoken out more.

We live in a time when too many people do not assume their responsibilities, as parents, as workers, as citizens of this nation, as members of human kind, as Christians. People are too quick to say, “It isn’t my job.” We live in a time when too many people want to let others take responsibility, when too many people want to blame others for problems. A person cannot live a fulfilled life always blaming others for the way things are. A person cannot be a Christian without assuming responsibility for their life and what happens to them.

Some years ago a former American astronaut, Frank Borman, took over as head of a major airline, determined to make the airline’s service the best in the industry. Frank Borman was the astronaut who read from the Bible while in route to the moon during Christmas in 1968. One day, as he walked through a particular department, he saw an employee resting his feet on a desk while the telephone on the desk rang incessantly. “Aren’t you going to answer that phone?” the Borman demanded. “It isn’t my job-- this isn’t my department,” answered the employee nonchalantly, apparently not recognizing his new boss. “ I work in maintenance.” “Not anymore you don’t!” snapped Frank Borman. The young man lost his job.

Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his or her grasp to shape the clay of personal life into the sort of thing he or she wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, “This I am today; that I will be tomorrow.”

It has been said, life is not really worth living until you have found something worth dying for. For anyone who seeks life that matters, we must find something worth our very lives.

In 2 Corinthians Paul tells about all he has suffered in following Jesus. He recalls frequent imprisonments, whippings, beatings, stonings and a shipwreck. He's been betrayed, he's been left exposed and starving and he's undergone sleep deprivation. And yet he keeps on going. Paul was a man with a purpose, a man with a clear sense of mission. At the time he wrote the second letter to Timothy he was an old man, scarred by stonings, beatings, shipwrecks, and disappointments.

What fills Paul with a sense of vocation and purpose and meaning, even in the face of persecution, is the good news of Jesus' coming into the world, his historic death, resurrection and ascension, which the Lord himself had commanded Paul to preach to the world. He tells Timothy: "God's grace has been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

Life is not worth living until you have found something worth dying for. It is also true, life is not worth living until you have found something truly worth living for. If something is worth our lives, it is worth everything. But we also want meaning to life. People want to live lives that matter. Responsible commitment to a goal or ideal that matters provides that significance. Paul understood this and affirmed it with his entire life.

One of the greatest problems facing our children, youth, and adults is not that they are apathetic. The problem is that they have not found something that makes like worth living. They are looking for something to which they can give their lives.

These days the world teaches that nothing really matters, that no life makes a major difference. The world teaches that responsibility is not important because ultimately nothing truly matters. Mother Teresa said, “You think that what you are accomplishing is a drop in the ocean.  But if this drop were not in the ocean, it would be missed.”

In 1944-45, Dr. Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Europe. While observing hundreds of fellow prisoners during those terrible years, he made a startling discovery: People could live through even the most deplorable conditions as long as they had a clear purpose to hold on to. That purpose for living could be anything from planting another garden, to holding a loved one's hand, to finishing a piece of art. As long as prisoners felt they had some tangible goal to live for, they could tolerate incredible doses of emotional and physical trauma. But once they lost their picture of a positive future, it wasn't long before they were at risk.

"It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future" wrote Frankl. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost." 

 Fulfilling responsibilities brings discipline into our lives and lets us spend our life on things that count.

The world’s true heroes are those who fulfill their responsibilities every day. They are the people who work hard at being good parents, turn out to vote in every election, express their thoughts and needs to elected officials, stand up against poverty and speak out against those who would diminish our rights, and the rights of people around the world.

Being a Christian gives us certain daily responsibilities:

We are to advance the gospel of our Lord Jesus together. We will  pray for those who need God’s presence in their lives. We will reach out to those who need our help.

We will work with integrity and diligence in our jobs and domestic situations and honor the name of Christ in all we do.

We will seek to speak of our trust in Christ to others in a kind and relevant manner, and invite them to learn more about Jesus, and to worship.

We will become servant leaders and assume leadership when it is needed and when we have the talent to do what is needed.

And we will do all this in the knowledge that God will give us the strength and the grace even in the face of adversity and ridicule to feed his sheep.

Responsibility makes life rewarding. God rewards responsible followers. We may not get rich. We may have to endure hardships. But God’s reward is eternal life. God has promised us that if we assume the responsibility of feeding his sheep, he will be there with us through every trial, every problem, even through death.

We will never be perfect in our following of Jesus. But Christ counts all our efforts to be responsible as if we did our work perfectly. If we do our best, God counts it as perfect. God will use our efforts on his behalf to do wonderful things. When we are responsible in what God gives us to do we discover something worth giving our lives for, we gain life worth living .

If men and women are willing to volunteer to join our Armed Forces and go into harms way, if they are willing to die in uniform for us, because they have found something worth dying for, how can we not honor them by finding something truly worth living for?  And what is more worthy of living than living our faith in such a way that others will come to know Christ and God’s love?

Perhaps if we live reaching out to others, as Christ did, to love them as God does, then men and women would not have to take up arms and die.

Amen