God’s Secret Agents
Sermon by Susan Palwick preached on August 23, 2026 at St. Paul’s, Year A, Proper 16.
On January 28, 1945, a man named Erno Spiegel led thirty-six boys away from the newly liberated concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The boys were twins, as Spiegel himself was. Most children who arrived at the camp were promptly sent to the gas chambers, but twins were spared at the command of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who had slated the children for brutal medical experimentation.
Spiegel and his twin sister Magda had been deported to Auschwitz when they were 29. When they arrived at the camp, Magda was sent to the gas chambers, but Mengele learned she was a twin and pulled her out of the line. Mengele then put Spiegel in charge of about eighty male twins. If anything were to go wrong, Mengele said, Spiegel would be killed on the spot.
Spiegel found food for the boys. He taught them math and geography and history. When he discovered that two brothers were not twins, he falsified records to give them the same birthday. When a new Nazi doctor tried to send all the twins to the gas chambers, Spiegel demanded to see Mengele, who reversed the order. Mengele’s laboratory, however hideous, was better than the ovens. And when the camp was liberated, Spiegel led the surviving boys thousands of miles home, on foot and by truck and train, across a war-torn Europe.
I don’t need to tell you how dangerous all of this was. After watching a PBS documentary about Spiegel called “The Last Twins,” I found a doctoral dissertation noting that Spiegel hadn’t always been so brave. His dedication grew gradually. I suspect his courage strengthened in direct proportion to his love for his charges.
After the war, he remained silent about what he had done for twenty years. In the 1980s, he told his story to Life Magazine and was reunited with some of the men he had saved when they were children. That gathering must have been full of both joy and tears.
Spiegel’s story resonates powerfully with today’s Scripture readings. Like the Hebrew midwives and Pharoah’s daughter, he disobeyed direct orders from a tyrant determined to murder children. Like them, he used deception to shield his charges, lying in the service of life. Spiegel’s journey across Europe recalls Moses’ journey to the promised land with the Israelites, which was possible only because Moses had been pulled from the river. Saving endangered children assures the survival of those who can ultimately save others.
The risks Spiegel took sharpen our awareness of the danger faced by the Hebrew midwives and Pharoah’s daughter. The midwives could have been tortured or killed if their deception had been discovered. Pharoah’s daughter surely would have faced fearsome punishment from her father. All three women were operating as God’s secret agents, risking their own safety — and quite possibly their own lives — to protect infants marked for death.
The Hebrew midwives had a calling to protect babies, and the babies they were ordered to kill belonged to their own tribe. They feared God more than they feared Pharoah. These facts do not diminish their courage, but they help explain it. The risk taken by Pharoah’s daughter raises more questions. Moses was three months old when she rescued him. How did she explain her adoption of the child to her father? She knew Moses was one of the Hebrew boys, but all we’re told of her motivation is that “she saw he was crying, and took pity on him.”
Pharoah was probably never in direct contact with the babies he ordered murdered. He didn’t have to look at them. He didn’t have to listen to them cry. It’s very difficult not to respond to the cry of a frightened, hungry infant. Pharoah’s daughter acted out of pure humanity. She acted out of love, and that love put her in danger.
When rulers are bent on oppression, love often puts us in danger: physical danger if we respond to the needs of those being oppressed, and spiritual danger if we don’t. These aren’t comfortable lessons. They aren’t reassuring. But they’re important.
“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks his disciples in today’s Gospel. Other people have called him by other names: John the Baptist, Jeremiah, Elijah. But Peter answers correctly: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Because Peter knows Jesus’ true name, Jesus names him, too: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”
The church is built of people who name Jesus the son of the living God. In return, the church names us. We are those who seek and serve Christ in all persons, in the least of these. We are those who honor the dignity of every human being. We are those who strive for justice and peace for all people. We are those called always to act in love of God and neighbor. All of this means that we are called, when necessary, to be God’s secret agents against oppression.
We are also those who pray, every week, not to be led into temptation. I don’t ever want to find out what I’d do if I were in Erno Spiegel’s predicament, or in the position of Pharoah’s daughter. I’d like to imagine that I’d be as brave as they were, that I’d automatically respond in heartfelt love. But none of us can know how we’d handle such a crisis until it happens.
I used to think I was brave. And then the Covid pandemic happened. I was a chaplain at Renown at the time, and chaplains — along with doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists — were the only people still allowed into patient rooms. We didn’t have vaccines yet. Staff had died. The danger was very real. My colleagues leapt at the opportunity to comfort these patients, so scared and isolated, unable to receive visits from family and friends. Of course they’d put on fifteen layers of PPE to make these visits! Where’s that PPE? Give us a list of patients!
I did not leap. Can I talk to them on the phone? I asked. I’d be happy to talk to them on the phone. I was guiltily relieved when patients were sleeping. When I did visit Covid patients — unable to hear them or myself over the noise of my respirator — I was miserably terrified of coming down with the illness. My self-regard, my faith in my own courage, plummeted.
I survived. My courageous colleagues survived, just as the Hebrew midwives and Pharoah’s daughter and Erno Spiegel did. But many others who have walked into danger, from Biblical times onward, have not. “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you keep me safe,” today’s Psalm promises. There are several kinds of safety: the physical safety of bodily survival, and the spiritual safety of doing God’s will. A mere five verses after the end of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
Today’s Epistle offers some reassurance, reminding us that we all have different gifts. Not everyone is called to walk boldly into danger. But all of us are called to be agents of Christ’s love whenever neighbors are threatened with injustice and oppression.
There’s a story I’m sure many of you have heard, about a group of people walking along the bank of a river who see babies being carried downstream by the current. Horrified, they wade into the water again and again to rescue the children, until finally one man begins to walk away. “Where are you going?’ the others demand. “How can you walk away from the babies?”
“I’m going upstream,” he says, “to find out who’s throwing the babies in the river.”
Maybe the best way to ensure that we will not have to measure our courage against murderous tyranny is to fight that tyranny at its source, before it has become fully entrenched: by voting, by witnessing, by advocating for liberation and justice in ways that ensure sustainable, healthy futures for children and parents, for everything and everyone on the planet. Such action can itself be dangerous: Jesus’ challenge to the oppressors of his day led to the cross, after all. We have to pray that if we are called into danger, we will be so filled with the love of Christ, the love for all God’s children, that — like the Hebrew midwives, like Pharoah’s daughter, like Erno Spiegel — we will find the courage to act as secret agents of liberation. And we have to remember, always, that any road leading to the cross also leads to resurrection, to the empty tomb and the glory of Easter morning.
Amen