“Watch and Pray” Prayers for the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Watch and Pray”
Prayers for the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
That walls of division today may be overcome

(At lunchtime on 9 November 2009 we met at the pieces of the Berlin wall in the garden of the ecumenical centre. A visitor from outside the house asked so which side was in the east and which in the west? I explained that it would not have been possible to paint the eastern side with gaffitti. This led me to say during our prayers that we were lighting the candles on the wrong side - it was not Helmut Kohl who brought the wall down but people with candles and courage on the other side!
I put this service togther, plagiarising what Stephen has been writing on Holy Disorder. Using also by my own diary extracts from that extraordinary year in the GDR - that's where the idea for using Psalm 126 came from. I also remember Friedrich Schorlemmer at the end of a particularly difficult day simply saying let's close this session by singing the Luther peace hymn which is why I chose Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich to end with. I can remember being very moved by its wonderful minor melodies and the fact that everyone apart from me knew the words. I also love the footnote at the bottom of the love of God is broad like beach and meadow - saying that the GDR government was concerned that the words of the hymn were criticising the state using religious language!)

Wir feiern diese Andacht im Namen Gottes,
der Himmel und Erde gemacht hat.
Im Namen des Vaters, des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geistes.
Amen

Sing: Bleibet hier und wachtet mit mir, wachte und betet, wachet und betet.

Psalms 126
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
‘The Lord has done great things for them.’
The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced.
Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves.

Sing: Bleibet hier und wachtet mit mir, wachte und betet, wachet und betet.

Matthew 26. 36-46 (read in German)
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. Then he said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’ Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Again he went away for the second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words. Then he came to the disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.’

Some memories from the Gethsemane Church in Berlin, October and November 1989
On 2 October 1989, the Gethsemane church, under its inspiring and committed pastor, Bernd Albani, had started a vigil for people who had been unjustly imprisoned after demonstrations calling for change. A month later, on 7 October 1989, as the SED celebrated 40 years of the GDR, demonstrators gathered on the Alexanderplatz and started marching towards the Palace of the Republic where the festivities were taking place. Ranks of police beat them back, arresting and beating demonstrators indiscriminately - the scene portrayed at the beginning of the film "Goodbye Lenin". Many demonstrators then made a U-turn towards the Gethsemane church, about 2 kilometres away, where they took shelter inside the church while the police sealed off the area around the church. For two days there was an uneasy standoff, those who had taken shelter couldn't leave but the police were not prepared to storm the church.
"Watch and pray" - this is the motto for the series of events that has been taking place this autumn in the Gethsemane church to mark 20 years of the peaceful revolution and the felling of the Berlin Wall.
This morning, the Gethsemane church hosted the central ecumenical service for state and religious leaders to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the wall, just a kilometre or so away from where the church is located.
On the evening of 9 November, however, the church is holding another service of public remembrance. The 9 November marks not only the 20 years since the opening of the walls, but the anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" - the night of broken glass or the state pogrom night - when throughout Germany, Jewish Germans and their houses of worship and property were attacked by the Nazis.
9 November was also the day that the German monarchy handed over power to the elected politicians in 1918. Two days later the armistice was signed.

We pray and light candles for overcoming divisions and walls in today’s world

The love of God is broad like beach and meadow
The Love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind and an eternal home.
God leaves us free to seek him or reject him,
The gives us room to answer Yes or No.
The Love of God is broad like beach and meadow,
wide as the wind and an eternal home.

We long for freedom where our truest being
is given hope and courage to unfold.
We seek in freedom space and scope for dreaming,
and look for ground where trees and plants can grow.

The Love of God is broad ...

But there are walls that keep us all divided;
we fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks and mortar of our prison,
our pride of self the prison coat we wear

The Love of God is broad …

O judge us Lord, and in your judgement free us,
and set our feet in freedom’s open space;
take us as far as your compassion wanders
among the children of the human race.

The Love of God is broad ...

Anders Frostenson (1906 - )
Tr. Fred Kaan (1929 - )© Stainer and Bell, London .

In the archives of the GDR State Secretary for Church Affairs there is a paper that expresses concern about this hymn and states that it must not be published in the GDR, describing the text as a means of trying to discredit the state using religious language.

Lord’s Prayer - dans nos différentes langues

Closing prayer
Across the barriers that divide race from race…
Reconcile us, O Christ, by your cross.
Across the barriers that divide the rich from the poor…
Reconcile us, O Christ, by your cross.
Across the barriers that divide people of different faiths…
Reconcile us, O Christ, by your cross.
Across the barriers that divide Christians…
Reconcile us, O Christ, by your cross.
Across the barriers that divide men and women, young and old…
Reconcile us, O Christ, by your cross.

Song
Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich,
Herr Gott, zu unsern Zeiten.
Es ist doch ja kein andrer nicht,
der für uns könnte streiten,
denn du, unser Gott, alleine.

An All Saints and All Souls Day sermon by the Venerable Colin Williams, general secretary of CEC

Chris has taken up rowing again. Back home in Canada it was his main leisure activity. But since he came to Geneva to work as an intern at an ecumenical agency there’ve simply been too many things going on. But these last couple of weeks he’s found his way into the Geneva rowing club. And so it was that last Saturday morning he found himself up early and rowing all by himself on the Rhone. Quite unexpectedly, he found himself caught up with the beauty around him. The intense autumn colours, the silence, the blue sky, the mist rising from the river – it was he said awesome. The beauty of his surroundings took him out of himself and beyond himself He was somehow caught up in something much bigger than himself.

It was the sort of experience captured two hundred years ago by the English poet William Wordsworth. In one of his best known poems he writes about the intense effect that his native surroundings in the English Lake District in the North West of England had upon him:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light ,
The glory and the freshness of a dream

There are moments when particular places particular circumstances take us out of ourselves and point us beyond ourselves. In the Celtic spiritual tradition – the spiritual tradition which goes right back to the first arrival of Christianity in Britain in the decades after Christ’s death and resurrection – places that give us an opening into the wonder and glory of God revealed in his creation are called 'Thin Places’ . There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are always only three feet apart – but that in thin places that distance shrinks so that the two almost touch each other. The present day Irish poet Sharlande Sledge has written about thin places:-

‘Thin places’ the Celts call this space
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between this world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy

Today is All Saints Day – the day when we give thanks for all the saints who from their labours rest.
And so it is a day when we celebrate the thinness of the divide between heaven and earth. We are reminded that Gods will is that the divide will become so thin that it will be broken down by the power of his love. Isaiah expresses that in our readings this morning:………..

In Revelation too the vision is of a new heaven and a new earth meeting and mingling as the home of God is set among mortals ‘and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying ‘ See the home of God is among mortals. Visionary poetic language – expressing a profound reality – that in Jesus Christ the things of heaven touch the things of earth and transform them – water is transformed so that it has the power to reshape our lives, bread and wine are transformed so that in and through them we may feed on Christ.

And in the story of the raising of Lazarus, we see Jesus too demonstrating how in him the thinness between earth and heaven is dissolved. To his dead friend he calls ‘Lazarus come out’ And the barrier between earth and heaven breaks open And the dead man comes out and is set free

All Saints Day is all about remembering that there is no unbridgeable gulf between the things of earth and the things of heaven. In strict Catholic theology the doctrine of the saints itself declares that. The saints spend eternity making intercession for us to the Father so that through their prayers for us in heaven our earth-bound brokenness may be healed. Some if us will buy into that theology. Many of us will not. But whatever our theology there is a much wider agenda on this day. All Saints Day is all about proclaiming that we are called to play our part in revealing the glory of heaven in the humdrum existence of our everyday world – the glory of heaven which admits of no division, the glory of heaven which admits no foes nor friends but one equal communion and identity, the glory of heaven where there is no sound of warfare but the harmony which comes from profound fellowship. In and through the Christian Gospel the boundary between earth and heaven is so thin that that glory bleeds into our world – and our calling as servants of the Gospel is to play our part in making that thinness even thinner

The Christians of the city of Leipzig in the East of Germany knew that 20 years ago. 20 years ago Communist rule in the east of Germany was in its death throes. We know that now with the benefit of hindsight. The Christians of Leipzig don’t know that then. They had no reason to know that within a very few weeks the Berlin Wall would fall and oppression would be at an end. In those October days of 1989 Christian Fuehrer was the pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. His church had become the focus of hopes and yearnings of many citizens of his city for a new beginning. Every Monday evening since 1982 there were prayers for peace at 5.00 in St, Nicholas Church. They couldn’t be publicly advertised. But everyone knew about them. Sometimes the numbers of those attending became very low. But in 1989 the numbers began to grow. At the beginning of September, though the negligence of the authorities, western TV camera teams were able to get footage of what was happening. The following Monday people traveled from all over East Germany to join in.

But there were dangers attached to this. Already in September police had brutally attacked people emerging from St. Nicholas Church, And this was the year of the brutal repression of demonstrators by the Chinese authorities in Peking, an action expressly praised by the East German Leadership.

The crucial date was Monday, October 9 1989. It was known that extra army units had been drafted into Leipzig. 2 days before, demonstrations in Leipzifg had been violently put down. It became known that that weekend beds had been cleared in the Leipzig hospitals in advance of Monday. That Monday during the day many who were known to be participants in the peace prayers received threatening phone calls. Someone rang from one of the local barracks to say that the Communist party chief had given orders that St. Nicholas Church was to be cleared. Schools were closed early. Factories were closed and the workers told to come and occupy St. Nicholas church. The prayers went ahead . There was great anxiety about what would happen as the congregation emerged from the church. Whether they would be fired on. What they discovered as they emerged astonished them. Despite all the threats, 70,000 people had gathered outside the church to offer their support for those making prayer for peace and to protect them by their presence. What struck Christian Fuhrer was that they each held a candle. They were holding it with one hand and shielding the flame with the other. ‘For that he wrote ‘they needed both hands, so that the option to take hold of a candle became the option for powerlessness.’ Together the 70,000 walked the ring road of the city, past the St. Thomas Church where Bach had made his name, past the famous Gewandhaus from which the city orchestra took its name, right round the city. And the message was clear. On that night, the glory of heaven the glory of God’s Kingdom, was too bright to be extinguished by the shoddy power politics of a discredited regime. The boundary between the things of earth and the things of heaven seemed very thin indeed. Through the courage and determination of those people, Leipzig at that moment seemed a thin place .

Our calling is no less clear than it was for those followers of Jesus Christ twenty years ago in Leipzig. To make our community, our city, our world, the whole of the earth a thin place. A place in which not just through the beauty of his creation but also through our action, the things of heaven touch the things of earth and the glory of God’s Kingdom is revealed. Through our action, the poor cared for, racial injustice opposed, the hungry fed, the good ness of God’s creation preserved, the sick and the lonely comforted, through our action demonstrating that heaven is indeed no more than three feet away from earth - and need in fact be no distance at all.

Copyright (c) Colin Williams