This morning I read portions of a sermon by Martin Niemoller, reflecting on Matthew 21:23-32. In that passage, Jesus tells a story about two sons, one who says “Yes” he will obey his father but then does not, and the other who says he will not obey, only later to repent and obey. The point Jesus was making?: it is better to truly obey after repenting of open defiance, than to disobey while pretending all along that you have never been in defiance of God’s will.

Niemoller’s sermon was preached in Berlin in 1934, amidst the rise of Hitler. His words are no doubt partly autobiographical. He expounds on the danger of saying “yes” to the Lordship of Christ without then obeying him. Niemoller and others were forming the Confessing Church Movement, which rejected Nazism. Yet his sermon struck me not because he places himself and the resistance movement on the side of those who truly obey, but because he puts them in the place of those who have said “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ, those who now are in danger of honoring Christ with their lips but not with their lives.

He is worth quoting at length:

…We call, plead, and cry against the nay-sayers in our concern for the Church and for our people! Do we see the danger? Or do we not notice how increasingly our own will, our own passion, our own stubbornness sneaks into our confession? Do we not notice how our pious self-confidence puts itself in the place of faith? How our need for retaliation displaces love? How our human goals shove aside Christian hope? There is the danger: We confess, we say “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ, but we are rarely conscious of the fact that we only say “Yes” and in reality struggle all the more strongly for our own esteem, for our own thoughts, for our rights, for our program. Suddenly, we are standing where the high priests and elders stood together with those Jesus meant who said, ‘Lord, Yes!,’ and did not go!

It is the great temptation in this hour of darkness that we lose sight of the Lord Christ himself; that our confession sinks into a conflict of the yay-sayers and the nay-sayers while that which is of ultimate importance slips into the background and is forgotten!

…The yay-saying is not accomplished if at the same time it is true that ‘we did not go.’ The entire struggle for the Church then becomes an empty quarrel and a bitter murmuring, unless it is led by a congregation which stands in repentance and therefore acts out of faith and in obedience….In the suffering and struggle of these days, we do not have a truly good conscience until we have humbled ourselves before God with the confession of our own sin and guilt and received from his forgiveness the power of a new obedience which seeks only his will and command.

The struggle does not end there; suffering is not taken from us. Perhaps we must then struggle even harder, and perhaps then we must truly suffer for the first time. To obey the Lord Christ means to struggle and to suffer….Where repentance and faith is, there is the kingdom of heaven, there we have peace with God, there we can joyfully speak, ‘We rejoice in our sufferings’ (Rom. 5:3). So let us ask God for a repentant and obedient heart.

The mainline churches in the U.S., including the PC(USA), have been so captivated with the values and designs of the culture in which we find ourselves that we may be tempted to say the mainline churches have said “No, we will not go,” when called to follow in the way of Christ. And we mainline evangelicals have been quick to call the church back to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But woe to us who say “Yes” to the Lordship of Christ if we do so only with our lips and not with our lives. If so, Jesus said “the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Mt. 21).

We would do well to tremble in the face of this truth. Surely it is right to campaign against those who are campaigning against the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But if we are not ourselves following in the way of Christ – whether the matter be wealth and poverty, power, sex, or following Jesus into suffering – we only make the entire struggle for the Church into “an empty quarrel and a bitter murmuring.”