Festive service in the St. Johanniskirche in Waserthaleben Sunday, 26.09.2010
Dear community! Dear guests!
We have gathered here today in St. John's Church in Wasserthaleben in great numbers to celebrate a festive service together. We Wasserthalebeners are a small congregation and we are outnumbered as hosts today. Numerous guests from all directions and some from very far away have made their way to us today. Among them are our guests from our partner community Schlat, a village in the Swabian Alp, who have been visiting us for many years and always support us in every possible way. Since Friday evening the Schlat people have been our guests and we have again spent a weekend of mutual encounter with each other.
Among our guests today there are also a particularly large number of descendants of the Zahn parish family. From 1710 to 1857, four pastors of the Zahn family held the pastorate here in Wasserthaleben in uninterrupted succession: Johannes Michael Zahn, Volkmar Christian Zahn, Johann Gottlieb Zahn and Friedrich August Zahn. I am struck by how long a pastor usually worked in those days - often his whole life long - in almost 150 years only four pastors have worked - but how fast-moving and changeable our time is today, where pastors often change to the next pastorate after only a few years.
For 150 consecutive years, the Zahn pastors taught the Word of God here. They did not lead an easy life. Of the extremely numerous children of these pastors, many died in infancy or at a young age.
Zahn's descendants worked in numerous learned professions, among others also in the pastorate for a long time and they spread beneficially all over the world, one can say, already within Germany, e.g. to Sondershausen, Halle an der Saale, Erfurt, in the Thuringian Forest, Dresden and many other locations, but also in the USA and South Africa. At the last-mentioned location, South Africa, a beneficial social and missionary work can be seen before our eyes to this day. All this goes back to Gustav Adolf Zahn, the son of the Wasserthaleben pastor Johann Gottlieb Zahn. Gustav Adolf Zahn received an inner call to become a missionary at an early age. At first he was not taken seriously, but then the Rhenish Mission in Barmen provided him with the necessary training. They then sent him to Tulbagh on the Western Cape in South Africa. There he teaches, accompanies life and imparts values among the people entrusted to his care. One of his main focuses was teaching the "Hottentots" and slaves in the mission school. After the abolition of slavery, he took care of the freed slaves who wandered around without residence, property, work and above all without roots and built the Steinthal settlement where they could find a home. To the present day, there is a children's home for needy children at the site, as well as a school/ or vocational school. Even today we have guests among us from this branch of the Zahn family.
The fact that our church here in Wasserthaleben is in a structurally quite good condition is largely thanks to our guests - the partners from Schlat and the descendants of the Zahn parish family, who found the church in a deplorable condition back in the 1980s. In the subsequent large-scale building project, especially around the tower, interior and organ, our guests played a decisive role. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks.
The Zahn family is in possession of a family coat of arms, which you can see printed in the leaflet accompanying the service. This coat of arms goes back to Johannes Michael Zahn, the first pastor of the Zahns here in Wasserthaleben. He had added Christ to the cross in the center of the coat of arms. His grandson Franz Ludwig Zahn, however, replaced it with the serpent struck on the cross. This requires a detailed explanation. Franz Ludwig refers to the biblical text from Genesis 4, which was already heard earlier, to the story of the erection of the brazen serpent: The Israelites had once again lost all trust in God and in the messenger Moses during their wanderings through the desert. They rebelled against God and Moses, reproached Moses, so God sends them, the ingrates, a plague of snakes as punishment, which costs many their lives. But Moses once again stands up for the people of the Israelites and asks God for his people. God hears his prayer and has a bronze serpent made and erected. Whoever looked at it remained alive.
Thus the snake becomes the symbol of the life, it, which was represented nevertheless often enough in the Bible as the cunning adversary of humans. In this story, it becomes, so to speak, the saving antidote to make the poison of the other snakes harmless. This may seem almost magical - the look at the snake is enough to make the poison in your own body ineffective. But no magic or sorcerer was at work here, but God, the Almighty, who again and again miraculously saves his people from destruction, even during the hard time in the desert, on the way to the Promised Land. This story in the fourth book of Moses leads us to a parallel passage in the Gospel of John, which was also heard earlier, and which shows us even more clearly the direction in which Franz Ludwig's interpretation of the Zahn family crest may have gone.
We dive there into the interesting discussion of Nicodemus with Jesus. Nicodemus, one of the learned Pharisees visits Jesus by night, so urgent is a conversation with Jesus to him, he feels, yes, he knows that Jesus is uniquely sent by God, because no one can do the signs that he does. Jesus disturbs Nicodemus by trying to bring him down from his previous thoughts. He tells him about the new birth of man out of water and the Spirit, which makes possible the entrance into the Kingdom of God. And he reveals to him his mission on earth, which is more than just teaching people God's will. His mission ends in his exaltation on the cross. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." Here it becomes clear to me what message lies behind the serpent symbol of the coat of arms, namely, "Look to Christ and you will live!" (just as the people in the desert looked to the serpent and were allowed to live). Look to Christ, and you will live! - This looking is now again from John more than purely sensual looking, but it has something to do with trust, yes with devotion:
John summarizes this in the word: faith,... so that all who believe in him may have eternal life. Faith is the only thing that man can "accomplish", but not in the sense of an achievement, but in the sense of an attitude of existence: "I entrust myself completely to You"- the "rest", better, the actual thing is done by Christ, the Son of Man. He leads us to life. Look to Christ, and you will have life, which may be like a shield against the hostilities of life and the world - that is how we see the cross with the serpent on a shield in the family coat of arms. And now we come to the Greek script that surrounds the family crest of the Zahns. There it says "Mesitees Iesous moi Zan". The first letters MJMZ point to the founder of the coat of arms Magister Johann Michael Zahn and in the translation of the Greek text the message comes to light: The mediator Jesus is my life. This sums up everything that has gone before. The mediator Jesus is life to me. Jesus mediates between heaven and earth, between spirit and flesh, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, between God and man. And the result is life. The life that goes far beyond the biological, changeable, imperfect and transient life of our earthly existence.
And we are all allowed to share in this, quite independently of the family structures and roots in which we are at home, this message clearly applies to all of us who have gathered here today in the name of Jesus. So today the coat of arms of the Zahn family may be for us even more than a family coat of arms. It may become for us a sign of encounter of all who are here today. Its profound message shows us the center of the Christian message of salvation: Look to Christ, and you will have life. Do not always look at others who are supposed to do everything better. Do not always look at yourselves as in a mirror, whether out of doubt or pride in yourselves. Do not be confused by the countless impressions of this world, they distract you from the real thing. Do not rely on things and people who are unreliable by nature, but look to the One, look to Christ, and you will live. Amen
