What images come to your mind in this season? For me, it is martyrs and new life. Perhaps nature and spiritual epics are meant to travel together. Below is a 1942 picture of five drafted young Germans in army uniforms waiting to board a train to the Eastern front. 200,000 young Germans would be killed on that front in the disastrous battle of Stalingrad. On the other side of the railing separating passengers from visitors is Sophie Scholl, the 21-year-old sister of one of the men. She is holding a white rose as if it offered some protection from the destructive society that surrounded her. Seven months later, she and four of the young men would be dead but not killed in battle.
The Nazi response to Stalingrad was to rev up a fanatical public acceptance of total war. Sophie and the four young men were part of a secret nonviolent peace group of students called The White Rose. From returning soldiers Sophie learned the truth about the death camps where Jews and others were exterminated. On February 18 The White Rose distributed a flyer urging Germans to disassociate from the Nazis and to end the war. Sophie, her brother Hans, and another friend were discovered. There was a show trial on February 22 and at 5 PM of the same day the three of them were beheaded. We just had the 69th anniversary of that fateful event. And still many questions linger. It is very important to understand that Sophie was an ordinary person. She was the 4th of 6 children brought up in a Lutheran family. Sophie took some aspects of her religious training very seriously, especially the sense that something divine was in every person. From an early age she understood that her faith was not just to be talked about but to be lived out. When Sophie was 14 she began hearing about the discrimination against Jews. She wrote a school essay asking why internment camps were not done away with at once. Later, while performing her required year of service as a kindergarten teacher, she first discovered the practice of euthanizing unproductive people including children with Down's Syndrome. She was told it was now
the law, to which she responded the laws change one's conscience does not. She was now firmly on the path that would lead her to the guillotine. In 1942 she enrolled at the University of Munich majoring in biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans was studying medicine there. She was also introduced to the recently translated works of the British Catholic John Henry Newman who taught, among other things, that conscience was an echo of the voice of God enlightening each person in concrete situations of life. Sophie actively distributed antigovernment leaflets telling students and German Christians they had a moral duty to rise up against Hitler and his government. So what's the point? In these days the name of Jesus of Nazareth will be proclaimed from thousands of pulpits. I think everyone can agree that Jesus was an extraordinary person. People we hear about from high pulpits are to be admired but they're not like us and the others sitting down here in the pews. Around us are just ordinary people. Over there a person who runs a soup kitchen. And there is a man who plays a drum in order to bring music where there isn't any. Turn around and you'll see a woman who has spent many years of volunteering to help terminally ill prisoners. Next to her is a woman who teaches pregnant teens parenting skills. Near the door is the sort of nutty character who drives around handing out blankets to homeless people. That young bored-looking teenager works after school helping prepare
food for very sick people. The nurse just coming in has been to the State capitol to plead for better insurance for all of us. I don't have to go on. You could add many more. Quite possibly you are one of these people yourself. It is with these ordinary people that the battle continues to help all of us live in dignity, to be who we want to be, to let the sacred light in us shine. The way many preachers talk about Jesus at this time of year is like watching an old well-known movie. The challenge coming from Sophie Scholl, and all these other ordinary people who surround us, is as Sophie wrote minutes before she left her cell to be executed; How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us youths are awakened and stirred to action? Well, did it work out? In Germany 200 schools have been named after this nobody, Sophie Scholl. Maybe it's our turn now to cast our eye in search of a white rose. Not in saints, heroes, or political leaders. It is the ordinary people around us who are the hands of God in our time. There we will find the new life in this wonderful season. Brother Toby
The full story of Sophie Scholl can be found in many places. Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. Annette Dumbach & Jud Newborn (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), the acclaimed 2006 movie Sophie Scholl: The Last Days and all over the internet.