purity of heart and Hitler

In a recent sermon, I spoke about hospitality.  I commented on a line from the Rule of Benedict: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.”  I said, “Every time we encounter someone, there’s the invitation to welcome them as Christ…  No matter who is standing in front of us, the point is to remember that it’s Christ we’re serving.”  (Mind you, I didn’t claim by any stretch of the imagine that’s an easy thing to do!)

There’s something in Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season I find quite powerful.  It’s in the chapter “Lion and Lamb,” where she’s going through the Beatitudes of Jesus.  On purity of heart, she reminds us of the scriptural witness that the impure of heart cannot see God and live.  Here’s what she says:

“It is one of the burdens of living in a fallen world that each generation has its war.  For Hugh [her husband] and me it is World War II, and in one of the stories coming from this war I find my image of that purity of heart which allows a human being to see God and live.

“This story concerns a Lutheran pastor in Germany who could not reconcile his religion with the Third Reich, which pretended to protect the religious establishment as long as those who belonged to it were pure Aryan (forget that Jesus was a Jew) and were willing to heil Hitler.  This pastor had met with Hitler, who liked him, and wanted to give him preferment.  But the choice was as cut and dried for the pastor as it was for those first Christians when they were asked to burn a pinch of incense to the divinity of the emperor.  And he did not have celibacy to make his choice easier.  He had a wife and children and he loved his family and he did not take lightly his responsibility to them.

“But he could not betray everything he believed, everything that he stood for in his ministry; he could not burn that pinch of incense.

“He and his wife and children were sent to a concentration camp, and the wife and children died there.  Like Anne Frank’s father, he was the only one left.

“When it was all over, when Hitler’s megalomaniac kingdom had fallen, and the world was trying to put itself back together and return to everyday living, it was remembered that he had seen Hitler.  Someone asked him curiously, ‘What did Hitler look like?’

“He replied quietly, ‘Like Jesus Christ.’

“And that is what it is like to be pure in heart and to see God.”

Are we able to do that, even for someone who cuts us off in traffic?  Remind yourself that they look like Jesus Christ!