Sermons
Gideon
“Gideon” Psalm 31:1-5 and Judges 6:15-16, 7:2, 8:23
It is Advent, a time when we join with those in our faith tradition who have yearned for God to take action to transform the world. This Advent, I’m going to preaching from a book entitled “Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich.” Unfortunately, the book seemed topically appropriate. Others before us have faced the circumstances of trying to be faithful to God and follow Jesus in the midst of a society crumbling under the pressure of authoritarianism AND a nation where religion is being co-opted to support the authoritarianism.
So, it seems worth hearing how others have faced this sitatution.
The first sermon is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I have known primarily as a Christian leader so faithful that he choose to return to Germany when he was offered asylum elsewhere, in solidarity with those in concentration camps. Truthfully I’ve been meaning to read his books for decades, but my to-read pile is … well… high.
He was, of course, more than my trivial biography remembered. Bonhoeffer was very well known as a brilliant scholar, one who got his doctorate at 21 and whose thesis is STILL being read and discussed. This is particularly notable because Germans had the corner on great theological scholarship at that point in history, and he was one of their shining stars. In 1930 he came to the United States and studied at Union Theological School in New York City where he connected with the African American community in Harlem. Getting to know people who were minoritized helped him see his own society’s treatment of Jews more clearly. He was also exposed to and formed pacifism while here in New York. He returned to Germany and taught in an underground Protestant Seminary in the “Confessing Church” movement which stood in opposition to Hitler’s attempts to use the churches to propagate his agenda.
Let me translate: Bonhoeffer was a professor in the hidden underground seminary that prepared clergy to follow JESUS and reject that age’s “White Christian Nationalism.”
The seminary was closed by force, and the students taken into Nazi jails in 1937. Bonhoeffer was given ways out, he came to the US, but then returned home to be part of a group trying to assassinate Hitler. He went to England, but came home again. He was arrested in April of 1943, and wrote letters from prison, refusing to allow confinement to silence him. “By special orders of Hitler, Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945, just days before Germany surrendered.”1
The sermon we are working with today is from 1933, the year Hitler. took power. Dean Stroud, the editor of the volume writes about it:
Hatred of jews and preparation for war were daily fare for Germans. When Bonhoeffer preached his first sermon following Hitler’s coming to power, he surely must have known that Jewish Gideon would present a sharp contrast to German rhetoric against Jews and for war. His repeated emphasis on Gideon’s lack of military forces in the face of greater military strength must have made an impression on the congregation. Also, the talk of altars reflected the altars in German churches that had been profaned with Nazi flags and pictures of Hitler. The sermon on Gideon offered Germans in the new Reich a radical choice between the Judeo-Christian God of tradition and Germanic paganism.2
That said, I’ll be honest. I had to review the story of Gideon from Judges 6-8 in order to make sense of the sermon. It just isn’t a story I’ve spent much time with. The story is this:
Ancient Israel was in the promised land, but the neighboring Midianites had beaten them down and dominated them for 7 years, including by destroying all their crops and livestock so people were hungry. Gideon was off dealing with some wheat they’d managed to grow in secret when “the angel of the Lord” appeared and told him “the Lord is with you, mighty warrior” and tell s him he is to defeat the Midianites. Gideon is skeptical, full of excuses, and told to do it anyway.
He asks for proof, he gets it. So, he gathers an army. Then he asks for more proof, and even more. He’s clearly a little nervous. God, on the other hand, makes Gideon cut his forces from 32,000 to 10,000 and then to 300!! Finally, they go and attack the Midianite camp, and defeat them soundly, all 120,000 of them. Eventually the people try to make him king, he faithfully refuses reminding them that God is their King.
And this being a story in Judges, all is well as long as he lives and the trouble starts again after he dies.
ALTSo what does the renowned scholar and man of faith Dietrich Bonhoeffer have to say about Gideon in the beginning of the Third Reich?? Well he starts by saying, “This is a passionate little story about God’s derision for all who are fearful and have little faith, all those who are much too careful, the worriers, all those want to be somebody in the eyes of God but are not. It is a story of God’s mocking human might.”3 Well, OK then, I guess we see where this is going.
He does, also, take issue with something happening in a lot of churches where altars were being decorated with Nazi flags and images of Hitler. I have to say, that I dearly wish this was not something that resonates today. But it is. So let’s here his take down:
In the church we have only one altar – the altar of the Most High, the One and only, the Almighty, the Lord, to whom alone be honor and praise, the Creator before whom all creation bows down, before whom even the most powerful are but does. We don’t have any side altars at which to worship human beings. … Anyone who wants to build an altar to himself or to any other human being is mocking God, and God will not allow such mockery. To be in the church means to have courage to be alone with God as Lord, to worship God and not any human person. And it does take courage.4
Gideon becomes this beacon of courage because he does what is asked of him, despite his many misgivings. He relies on God and not on himself. And, crucially, he doesn’t accept the power others want to give him. He declines kingship, and redirects people to God. Bonhoeffer says, “The picture of someone who has learned to have faith has the particular quality of always pointing away from the person’s own self, toward the One in whose power…he or she is.”5 Bonhoeffer also doesn’t fail to notice that is a story of Israel’s redemption from bondage, which it clearly IS, but was itself a noticeably radical fact that upset the anti-Semitic apple cart of the day.
Bonhoeffer speaks to a church that feels too small to do what is asked of it. A church that experiences itself “without influence, powerless, undistinguished in every way”6 and thus burdened with the call from God to “set the people free from the chains of fear and cowardice and evil that bind them.”7 And this man who has the courage of which he preaches says, “And then suddenly the call comes to us: Put an end to the bondage in which you are living; put an end to the mortal fear that gnaws at you, to the power of human desire that is burning you up, to your tormented and self-satisfied keeping to yourself. Put an end to your fear of other people and your vanity and set yourself free.”8 Well then, I have to say, this guy is making me think I haven’t been PREACHING recently.
Bonhoeffer asks:
“Is this a tall tale like all the others? Anyone who says so has failed to understand that Gideon is still with us, that the old story of Gideon is being played out in Christendom every day. …[In the story God says] ‘If you have faith, lay down your weapons, I am your weapon. Take off your armor, I am your armor. Put away your pride, I am your pride.’ Do you hear that church of Gideon? Let God alone; let the word and the sacraments and the command of God be your weapons; don’t look around for other help; don’t be frightened. God is with you.”9
He concludes:
The people approach the victorious Gideon with the final trial, the final temptation: “Be our Lord, rule over us.” But Gideon has not forgotten his own history, nor the history of his people…. “The Lord will rule over you, and you shall have no other lord.” At this word, all the altars of god and idols fall down, all worship of human beings and human self-idolization. They are all judged, condemned, cancelled out, crucified, and toppled into dust before the One who is alone Lord. Besides us kneels Gideon, who was brought through fear and doubt to faith, before the altar of the one and only God, and with us Gideon prays, Lord on the cross, be our only Lord. Amen”
Bonhoeffer thus reminds me that to proclaim Jesus crucified as the Messiah is the most ridiculous and radical of statements from the perspective of the world because most of the time people don’t want to follow condemned criminals and most of the time people are afraid of the power of violence to kill, and most of the time people are self protective but Jesus wasn’t and actually Gideon wasn’t and God calls the church not to be either.
Beloveds of God, I do not know what the future holds. I do not know what may be asked of us in the future, I do not even know what God is asking each of you today. I do know this: God is always with us and we need not be afraid. That doesn’t mean that things are OK. They’re not. It doesn’t mean that the horrible things that happen to people are OK. They’re not. But it does mean that we can take courage, and let go of fear. Those who want to do harm also want to keep us off balance. But God is with us, and God can do amazing things, and we are able to face the world unafraid.
So God speaks to us today, through an ancient story and a modern prophet, who remind us that God is God and we are not and that’s good. Thanks be to God, Amen.
1Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich, Dean G. Stroud (Grand Rapids: William B. Eardman, 2013) Quote from 53. Prior paragraphs 51-53.
2Ibid, 53.
3Bonhoeffer, 55.
4Ibid 55-5.
5Ibid, 56.
6Ibid, 57.
7Ibid, 57.
8Ibid, 57-58.
9Ibid, 59.
Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
Nov. 30, 2025