Sermon Central
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Anna's Stories
Contributed by Sermon Central on Apr 7, 2011 (message contributor)
ANNA'S STORIES
A thirty-four-year-old German woman named Anna Rosmus recently told the tragic story of what happened in her hometown in Germany during World War II. Speaking at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee, she told of growing up in Passau, Germany, years after the war. As a teenager, she wrote a school essay about the postcard beauty of her hometown. The town is located near the Austrian border in Bavaria. The essay won her a national award.
The following year, on a similar school project, Anna decided to write about her hometown during World War II. She wanted to write about the stories she had heard about how bravely her town resisted the Nazis, fought against them, and rejected the political machine of Hitler.
What she discovered shocked her and the world. She found in old newspaper clippings that not only did many people in her town sympathize with the Nazis, but they actively worked and collaborated with them. She later found that eight slave labor camps were begun in and around her hometown. The camps were used by the Nazis to work Jewish prisoners to death. Instead of using gas, the Nazis killed thousands by working and starving them. Prisoners were forced to dig their own graves.
Then she learned something even more horrible. As American soldiers were entering her town on May 2, 1945, many of the townspeople were pouring gasoline on defenseless Russian Jews, strapping them to railroad tracks, and setting them on fire.
What were the churches doing during this time? Anna Rosmus stated that the swastika was on daily display in the churches in her town. The churches obeyed and supported the Nazi movement because of the biblical teaching that all authority is given from God and must be obeyed (Romans 13:1-2).
By wrapping itself in the German flag, the church lost its prophetic voice and its soul. It failed to read Revelation 13, which exhorts believers to resist governments which become evil and satanic. Civil religion .... the marriage of church and state .... always makes the church a loser.
Because Anna Rosmus found and told this story, she has been treated with contempt in her native land. She has been knocked down in restaurants. She has even received numerous death threats.
Like Anna Rosmus, we have a story to tell. Even churches have a story to share. Do we share it?
(From a sermon by Bob Joyce, What’s Your Story? 11/10/2010)
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