So when, in the first years of World War II, when he began to hear of atrocities committed by German troops against the Jews, he was torn between his ancestral obligations and the words we heard a few moments ago from the Prophet Ezekiel: “if you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked man from his way, the wicked man shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death.”
So, with his friend Yorck, Helmuth gathered together a small group of intellectuals, theologians and aristocrats to dream and plot what Germany might look like once the Nazi Reich had met its inevitable end.
But those meetings were never enough to quiet Helmuth’s nagging conscience, as he wrote to his wife Freja in 1941: “How can I know all of this and yet sit her at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty as well?”
So he did what he could, subverting the state through his work for the intelligence service, he used to smuggle out resistance pamphlets, which the Americans would reproduce and drop from the sky on major German cities. He urged all his Jewish clients and friends to flee Germany, reminding one of them, “Remember, Holland is not far enough!”
But still none of it was enough to satisfy Helmut’s nagging conscience.
“What shall I say,” he wrote again to his wife, “What shall I say when I am asked And what did you do during that time?” “Since Saturday,” he went on “the Berlin Jews are being rounded up. Then they are sent off with what they can carry...How can anyone know these things and walk around free?”
So he continued to speak out and do what he could, until he was arrested and eventually charged with treason. He was executed in 1945.
And I suspect that with his last breath, his final thought was not unlike those which troubled him throughout his life: What more can I do? How can I not speak out?
For Helmuth understood our obligation to speak the truth, despite the cost. He knew what Saint Paul meant when he lamented “Woe to me if I fail to preach the Gospel!” And he understood what Pope Francis calls the danger of “comfortable and silent complicity” which can lead us to hell just as surely as the original sin.
That’s what the people came to learn that Christmas night in a small New England town as the Priest, standing in the pulpit to give his homily, noticed that most of the them weren’t looking at him. They seemed to be looking past him at a single candelabra that was placed just inches from the flowing sheer fabric that provided a backdrop for the manger. As he began to speak, he later wrote, he was perplexed. “What did I say? What’s going on with these people?”
And then above five minutes into his homily it happened. The vents blew the fabric into the candelabra and the flame traveled quickly up the cloth, followed by running, shouting, and the holy water bucket being used as a fire extinguisher.
The fire didn’t do much damage, except to the consciences of those who had stared for so long, but sat there silently afraid to be the first to interrupt the homily. They all saw it coming, but everyone was silent.
And we do it all time. We prefer to hide under a bushel basket, rather than blow the trumpet of warning.
Was anyone ever better at blowing the trumpet against injustice than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964, less than 2% of the African Americans in the county where Alabama’s Edmund Pettis Bridge stood were allowed to vote. Indeed, as Dr. King wrote from the Selma jail, “There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
And so, as you have no doubt heard, they marched across a steel span bridge named after a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Klu Klux Klan. It did not end well, as was predicted by Dr. King, when the night before he preached a powerful sermon in which he reminded the congregation that when a man stands up against evil, he will inevitably suffer. His home may get bombed, he may lose his job, or get shot, or beatan down by state troopers.
But, he continued, the just man stands up to evil anyways. Because “a man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
For silence kills the soul.
The silence of one who suspects a child is being abused and looks the other way.
The silence of the one who sees an intoxicated colleague walk out to his car and does nothing to stop him.
The silence of one who sees a friend strike his wife, but doesn’t want to get involved.
The silence of one who knows his best friend in school is taking drugs, but doesn’t want to get him in trouble.
The silence of the girl watches as a bully makes another girl cry, and refuses to get involved.
The silence of the one who delights in the juicy rumor rather than coming to the defense of an innocent victim of malicious gossip.
Lotsa silence kills. For, as a wise man once said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
