Sermon for Holocaust Memorial Day 2012
There is a wonderful passage in the Hebrew scriptures about time – it describes how there is a time to do different things:
A time to be born and a time to die
A time to plant and a time to uproot
A time to kill and a time to heal
A time to pull down and a time to pull up
– and it goes on to say
A time for silence and a time for speech
A time to love and a time to hate
A time for war and a time for peace.
‘A time for silence and a time for speech’. Pastor Niemoller’s powerful poem written just after the Second World War is a poignant reminder of what can happen when we keep silence when we should speak out. After not speaking out for the communists, the trade unionists, the Jews and the Catholics, he laments, ‘Then they came for me and there was no-one left to speak out for me’.
Sometimes silence itself can of course, be very powerful. I remember when I first visited South Africa in the dark days of apartheid, outside the government building in Pretoria a group of white middle-class women kept vigil. They simply stood in silence around the building and wore black sashes to express their opposition to apartheid – and this ‘black sash movement’ was a silent protest to remind the white leaders of South Africa of how some people felt about apartheid.
For Jews, Christians and Muslims the pursuit of justice is one of the major aims. For Christians, it is certainly at the top of the list. Jesus said, ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice and everything else will be given to you’.
The prophet Micah writes, ‘God has told you what is good; and what it is that the Lord asks of you? Only to act justly, to love loyalty and to walk humbly before your God’. The Koran is equally clear when we read ‘God commands justice and fair dealing’. The sad truth is that we have not always lived up to the teachings of our faith. The Holocaust took place in so-called Christian Europe and saw the deaths of 6 million Jews and millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities and political opponents – more than 11 million people in all.
Rwanda is often quoted as one of the great examples of Christian missionary success in the last century with the vast majority of the population converting from animism to Christianity and yet it also witnessed a genocide that killed over 800,000 people. As one Rwandan bishop put it, ‘We can get people into the church; the challenge is to get the church into the people’.
Most dictators and leaders of oppressive regimes develop a policy to silence those who may speak out against them. In Cambodia, it was illegal for people to possess a radio, as it was for the Jews under the Nazi regime. Newspapers and radio stations are placed under strict control and voices of dissent are silenced by imprisonment, torture and death. For those who understand the pattern of domestic violence it follows a similar pattern. It begins with isolating people, then intimidating them with power and then abusing them. Today we see such behaviour in North Korea, Syria and elsewhere.
History, of course bears witness to people who spoke out and many of them suffered death as a result. Dietrich Bonheoffer, the German pastor was killed, as was David Kato, a Ugandan gay rights activist who was killed a year ago on this very day.
Speak Up, Speak out is the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day and never before have we had so many means of speaking out. We live in a free democracy where we can protest, write letters, join demonstrations and sign on-line petitions. We can start social media campaigns - we can tweet, twitter and text and perhaps even more importantly we can learn not to make offensive remarks ourselves – there is a time to be silent’ and we can learn when to challenge remarks made by others that are discriminatory, racist or sexist – there is a time to speak out.
We can also become more aware and attentive to where abuse takes place – woman and girls are still the main victims of abuse in the world and even in our own society. The abuse of animals is largely hidden in intensive farming plants and laboratories and battery chicken cages. But each time we go shopping we make moral decisions by what we buy – buying Fairtrade goods is one way of bringing justice to poor people, and buying organic meat and free range eggs is one way of avoiding animal cruelty.
In the UK two women a week are killed by their partners and one in four women will be victims of prolonged abuse. Did you know that 3.8 million experiments causing death or suffering were carried out on animals in the UK in 2010?
It is the strong who oppress the weak and we need to recognise that we in the West are the strong. Jesus said that people should not attempt to remove splinters from the eyes of other people when they have planks in their own! If we are exploiting, that is preventing justice, for poor people and animals we are hardly in a position to criticise others. Speak up! Speak Out – but we may need to listen to ourselves first. If you feel bad about not buying those fair-trade bananas and coffee, so you should!
It is of course, not just individuals who give voice to the voiceless, good governments do the same. In Wales, we should be proud of having a Children’s Commissioner and a Commission for Older People who can act as advocates for young and old. And there are organisations that give support to those with mental health needs and learning disabilities. There are organisations that provide support for survivors of the Holocaust and genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia and in Darfur.
World Holocaust Day is a reminder to us all not just of the horrors that were carried out under the Nazi regime of hatred, but also of the potential that all human beings have to exploit those who are weaker than themselves. It is a time to stop and think of the kind of society in which we live – and it is a time for the religions of the world to practice what they preach and to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. It is a time to Speak Up! Speak Out!