Death is Swallowed up in Victory

Sigurdshof, Remembrance Sunday, November 26, 1939.

This sermon was a homily for the celebration of the Lord's Supper on Remembrance Sunday, when congregations especially remembered those who had died. The service was held at Sigurdshof, a farm belonging to the von Kleist estate in Tychow, where Bonhoeffer and his students moved after they had to vacate the parsonage at Gross-Schlönwitz. The house at Sigurdshof had no electricity, and water was obtained from a pump at the edge of the forest. During the winter, they were snowed in there. World War II had begun that summer, and the Confessing Church was at such a low point that the ordination course was deprived of all support. Yet, despite these conditions, Bonhoeffer preached on this text-given here in the King James Version, which is closest to Luther's Bible-in which the apostle Paul recalls Isaiah 25: 8 and Hosea 13: 14, that death is swallowed up and the faithful are redeemed from its power. Bonhoeffer begins with two lines from Luther's Easter hymn "Christ Jesus Lay in Death's Strong Bands," and toward the end mentions an account of the death of a nineteenth-century pastor, Johann Christoph Blumhardt. The statement of faith that follows comes from the Apostles' Creed, confessed by Christians worldwide.