The Newspaper in One Hand...

Rev. Kate Braestrup
Sermon: The Newspaper and the Bible
February 9, 2025
LK. 5:1-11

When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.

Well, the story we heard from Luke this morning makes one thing pretty clear: Jesus wasn’t a vegan. Nor was he worried about overfishing and possibly crashing the Genessaret fishery; no bag limit for Jesus! (And if there’s no bag limit in heaven…that will be heaven indeed for fishermen, if not fishers of men...)

It’s funny, isn't it, how easily we project our own priorities onto Jesus, and make of God a deity who sees the world the way we do? Again and again, Jesus confounds this presumption when it arises in the minds and words of his followers, and the stories about him in Scripture should confound the presumption in us as well.

There is nothing in the Bible that records Jesus’ opinion on the political issues of his day, for example. He fed the poor and healed the sick, but was silent as to the systems that distributed healthcare unequally, and “the poor,” he said, “will always be with you.” The Messiah, whose arrival was anticipated in his time, would be a political leader—a King—and, knowing this, Jesus repeatedly told his disciples not to declare him Christos or Messiah. And however oppressive the Roman Empire might have been, Jesus did not incite the people against it—this was one of false charges brought against him at his trial, one to which he vehemently pled “not guilty.” When Jesus spoke of “truth,” his interlocutor—very much a politician—responded, “What is truth?”

A colleague of mine recently quoted Barbara Brown Taylor, saying that a Christian, and especially a Christian preacher, must “hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

The quote actually comes from the famous, and by today’s standards very conservative, Swiss theologian Karl Barth. Back in the nineteen thirties, Barth was among the pastors who formed the Confessing Church to resist the Nazification of German Christianity. Hitler and his National Socialists were attempting to drag the troglodyte Christians into the modern world and into alignment with what they described—using these words—as a revolution for social justice. Many, perhaps most German Christians, their pastors preaching with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper (the Volkischer Baobachter) in the other were on board.

Aware that the Bible was still (as Barack Obama once put it) “in the mix,” the Nazi Party platform declared itself to be fine with the Christian churches so long as they did not “jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race."

The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession. It combats the [Jewish-] materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within, on the basis of the common good before individual good.

Hitler was a nationalist and he was a socialist, but he wasn’t really a Christian. In modern parlance, he was a recovering Catholic and with the zeal of the convert, he loathed and feared the Catholic church: Neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. This trans-nationalist church was a dangerous power, providing Germans with an alternative identity; and Germans could not be permitted to identify as anything other than German. No institution —not the church, not the family, not even the boy scouts—would be permitted to challenge the absolute ideological hegemony of the state.

So Hitler planned to destroy the Catholic church once he’d dealt with the Jews and conquered Europe. Christianity as a whole would become irrelevant—that milquetoast, lovey-dovey faith, with a Jesus who turned the other cheek and refused to get involved in politics. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said. Well, the Third Reich was absolutely of this world—of it, and over it: Deutchland uber alles.

Christian pastors under Hitler, hoping to remain relevant, did what frankly all of us are perennially tempted to do: Recast Jesus in their own image. They would make of this Jewish man an Aryan and an anti-Semite, and declare Hitler his successor. No challenge to the State—- We have no King but Caesar!

Did you know, by the way, that the word “Heil” is a theological term? It means salvation. German theologians will speak of “Ewiges Heil,” or eternal salvation…so when Germans said “Heil Hitler” they were literally naming, over and over, Hitler as their savior.

He wasn’t. Obviously.

Or rather, it seems obvious in retrospect.

Christians and Christian leaders, who must live and work in the here and now, have an inherent need and even a responsibility to be relevant. The truth, if it is truth, must certainly be applicable to real life, whether in the year 1, the year 1933 or in 2025. And it is, indeed, the task of the preacher to bring the truth of Christ, God, and the Bible into conversation with the lives and concerns of living, breathing human beings. And some of those concerns—not all of them, but some—are reflected in what can be read in the newspaper.

So yes, the Bible… and the newspaper. But there is a risk here, isn’t there? The newspapers available in Germany in Karl Barth’s time had the following headlines: “UNHEARD-OF ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA!” “JEWISH GANGSTERS RULE AMERICA!” “150 MORE PRIESTS UNMASKED AS SEXUAL CRIMINALS!”

We do not, thank God, live in 1930s Germany, but as we've learned of late, even reputable and venerable news organizations have not necessarily offered all the information we need in order to form even the simplest understanding of our local, national or global situation; let alone to presume our understanding is equal to, shared and endorsed by God.

So the full quote from Karl Barth seems more useful to me. In Time Magazine, back in 1966, Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

Not the other way around! The alarming story told in bold type in Time Magazine today may be quietly retracted tomorrow. Verily, verily I say unto you, what the Bible holds today it will hold tomorrow. No shadow of turning, with God, as God hast been God forever wilt be. Christians are called to attend, listen to, wrestle with and rely upon Scripture as the lens through and by which truth may be glimpsed and even humbly acted upon. It won’t be “our truth”—- Jesus’ words and ministry tell us that much! Not the truth we expected, identified with and even desired: Not our truth, but His. It is our faith that His truth will set us free.

Amen.