Kaj Munk was a Danish Lutheran pastor and playwrite – and was a strong opponent of the German occupation of Denmark(1940–1945). Several of His plays were direct attacks on Nazism. Despite friends who urged Munk to go underground, he continued to preach against Danes who collaborated with the Nazis.
The Gestapo arrested Munk on the night of 4 January 1944, a month after he had defied a Nazi ban and preached the a sermon at the national cathedral in Copenhagen. Munk’s body was found in a roadside ditch the next morning.
Munk preached and wrote against the injustice of his time. He said, “What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer: ‘Faith, hope and love’? That sounds beautiful. But I would say ‘courage.’ No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth.
Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature. We lack a holy rage – the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth – a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth, and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God.
And remember the signs of the Christian church have been the lion, the lamb, the dove and the fish, but never the chameleon.”
Munk’s words have been echoing in my brain the last days. The question is whether we Christians in the year 2020 are brave enough to speak against injustice in our own time. In a world burning with racism so many still want to ignore the flames or say that the fire was out a long time ago. However, placid messages of faith, hope, and love are profoundly vacant right now. The word the church needs to be preaching and hearing and witnessing to the world in these days is clear – we need to hear the cry for racial justice. Those of us who are white need to admit the ways we have knowingly or unknowingly been complicit in furthering injustice. And we must speak up in an ongoing lament for and a piercing assault against what we have been. We must vow to do better. Church, the Holy Spirit is summoning us, pointing at her watch, and saying “the time is now”. Speak up now. It is not time for peace, church. Now is the time for holy rage.
May this fire in our nation mold us into something new. No longer complacent. No longer content with what we have been. Dissatisfied with the futility of trying to be color-blind and instead striving only becoming color-amazed. Let’s be that. Let’s only be content when we get to that brilliant mosaic of color-amazed. Stir us, shape us, melt us, mold us Holy Spirit.