Living Under Fascism

 

Living Under Fascism

September 25, 2025

Until recently, I had never lived under a fascist regime. I have, however, lived under s communist one. People tend to think that fascism (or Nazism) and Marxist communism are polar opposites, but they aren’t. They may be at opposite ends of some spectrum, but the spectrum isn’t a straight line. It’s more like a nearly complete circle. Fascism is at one end, communism is at the other; but because the spectrum is a circle, they end up being very close to each other. When I say fascism in this piece I will mean both fascism and communism unless the context dictates otherwise.

When fully developed, fascism produces totalitarian regimes. It produces, that is, a governmental system that claims complete control over all aspects of the nation’s life and even over the private lives of the nation’s citizens. Fascist regimes both prohibit criticism and any statement or action that is negative toward the government. Or toward the ruling political party, for fascist regimes have only one ruling political party. All other political parties are either prohibited or forced to operate under the control from the regime. In fascist systems, citizens have essentially no civil rights the regime must respect.

Perhaps most significantly, fascist regimes create existential fear in at least most of their citizens. The fear comes from the way the regime encourages or even requires citizens to report any other citizen they think has said or done something critical of the regime. People cannot trust anyone, not even their own family members, because anyone could be a government operative. Anyone could make up a story about them that would bring the wrath of regime down on them, report that story to the authorities, and wait for the authorities to take that person out of the picture either through imprisonment or execution. Communist, and perhaps some fascist, regimes may claim to be the freest system in the world, but both of them create the exact opposite of freedom. They produce frightened, subservient citizens who, publicly at least, mouth support for the regime and sing the praises of the regime’s leaders.

I spent the 1975-1976 academic year in the Soviet Union. My wife, our young son, and I lived in a dormitory wing of Moscow State University. I was there under a cultural exchange treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union to do research for a PhD dissertation on a topic from Russian history. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (which the Russians always called the KPSS) ruled the country with an iron fist. Not as heavy a fist as it had been under Stalin, but the Party had changed none of the institutions Stalin had created in any meaningful way. The KPSS was the only legal political party.

Most significantly, it had not changed the KGB, the Committee on State Security. That secretive organization had two functions. One was to gather foreign intelligence. Many Soviet spies worked for the KGB. The KGB’s other function was to keep Soviet citizens subservient to the KPSS and the government it had created. It had spies everywhere in the country. It had enough of them to keep the Soviet people under strict control. Though we lived in a wing of the main Moscow State University building, a Russian man we got to know agreed to come to our place for dinner only when I assured him that Boris lived on the seventh floor and we lived on the fifth floor. Everyone knew that Boris was the resident KGB spy. I’m not sure how everyone knew that he was a KGB spy, but everyone knew that he was. My dormitory was hardly unique in having a resident KGB spy. KGB spies were everywhere, and no one could be sure that any person they were interacting with was not one of them.

The communist Soviet Union was, for the most part, a dull, gray, depressing place. Nearly everyone who worked with the public in any capacity was gruff, short-tempered, and even mean. Except perhaps in some restaurants, actual service was hard to come by. There were severe shortages of nearly every consumer product.[1] Most Americans who knew anything about Soviet reality, including not just me but the diplomats at the American embassy, thought that the Soviet Union was this immense, stable, inert structure that would last for a very long time. We turned out to be wrong about that “would last for a very long time” bit, but that was the general opinion of the place at the time.

The people of the Soviet Union were not free, and at least some of them knew they were not free. A couple of stories about that Soviet student we had invited to dinner will illustrate the point. He was a journalism student at Moscow State University. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow he felt much freer to associate with Americans than most Soviet people did. He felt freer to express negative opinions about his country to foreigners than all but a few people in the country in the country would have. He probably had connections at a level of the KPSS high enough to afford him protection. He said two things to me, and had a reaction to one thing I did for him, that are quite informative about Soviet reality.

Like I said, he was a journalism student. He once said to me that it was so hard because they only let journalists write good things about the country when everything they saw was bad. And indeed, Soviet journalism was nothing like western journalism, or at least not like western journalism is supposed to be. Here are a couple of example from my personal experience.

I was in the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study program of Indiana University, of the America’s primary Russian studies centers. We were in Moscow in August of that year. One day, as we were on a bus going somewhere or other, one of our group shouted for all of us to hear: “Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!” And indeed they had, but that was not what our fellow traveler had read. That’s not what the Soviet press said. It said that the Soviet Union and other fraternal socialist countries (the Soviets called themselves socialists as well as communists) had responded to a plea from the people of Czechoslovakia, a Soviet satellite country ruled by a communist regime, to intervene to protect them from a counterrevolutionary plot being run against them by the American CIA. That’s what our fellow would have read. There was some truth in what he read, for the Red Army had indeed entered Czechoslovakia. But everything else about that event in the Soviet press was a propagandistic lie. Soviet journalists had to say that a very bad thing was actually a very good thing. That’s how Soviet journalism worked.

During my academic year in the USSR, we experienced one two-week period of extraordinarily cold weather. The Russian winter really is everything it’s reputed to be. It’s not hard to see how it defeated both Napoleon and Hitler. The dorm rooms in which we and many other Americans and other western students lived were heated by radiators heated by central heat. They worked well enough most of the time, but they could not adequately counter the external temperatures of -30 degrees or lower that we had during that two week period. My family and I were lucky. We had a corner unit, which meant that we had two radiators in one of our two little rooms while most units had only one in each little room. The temperature in our room with two radiators probably didn’t get below 50 degrees F or so. In the rooms with only one radiator, water left in a glass overnight would freeze. Heating systems were failing in this way all over Russia.

Which you could learn from the Soviet press, but only if you knew how to read the Soviet press. The Soviet press reported that workers in the United Kingdom were suffering that winter because the capitalists would not supply enough coal for them to keep warm. That, of course, was a lie, but you learned to read between the lines of the Soviet press. That story told many Russians that there was inadequate heat in Moscow and perhaps elsewhere in Russia. The press couldn’t say that directly, so it said it very indirectly. The lies of the Soviet press could point to truth if you knew how to read them, but they were still lies.

Then there’s the other significant thing my journalist student friend said to me. He said: You can come here, live with us, and learn about our country firsthand. I will never be able to do that in your country. And, indeed, he never would be able to do that as long as the KPSS ruled the country.[2] Travel abroad, and especially travel to western countries, was tightly restricted in the USSR. Soviet people did travel to the west on occasion, but only select people were allowed to do so. They were people the regime was confident would come back. They were people the regime was confident would give a good impression of the Soviet Union. They often had to have family members who stayed behind because that would make it more likely that the person would come back. There were Soviet students studying in the US under that same treaty that allowed me to do research in the Soviet Union, but the same restrictions applied to them as applied to anyone permitted to go to the west. I was free to travel almost anywhere in the world I wanted to see. My friend most definitely did not have that freedom.

Then there is the way he reacted to something I did for him. I had become a parishioner and friend of the pastor of the Anglo-American Church in Moscow. It wasn’t open to the Soviet public. It was attached to the American and British embassies. Shortly before I was to leave the USSR for home, this very good man gave me a book. It was in Russian. It was written by Nikolai Berdyaev, the most prominent Russian theologian of the twentieth century. I don’t remember which of Berdyaev’s books it was. My friend had told he was an atheist. He said the one thing he could not understand about Americans is how they could believe in God, as my wife and I had told him we did. Yet when I gave him this book by a Russian Orthodox theologian, he nearly broke down in tears. He said: “You will never know what you have done for me.”

I can’t be sure, but here’s what I think I had done for him. Totalitarian regimes like that of the Soviet Union control the study and teaching of history very tightly. All history writing had to conform to the ideology of the KPSS. In the context of Russian history, that meant that it had to extol the virtues of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It meant it had to portray capitalists and capitalism as enemies of the people. It had to contend that history was moving inevitably toward the establishment of true communism or at least not to contradict that nonsense in any way. It meant that history writing had to condemn the Russian Orthodox Church as reactionary and as an oppressor of the Russian people throughout its existence.

I think my friend must have heard of Berdyaev, Berdyaev having been one of the leading lights of what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture. That’s the ten years or so before the outbreak of World War I. He was a member of what is called “the Vekhi group.” Berdyaev and several other writers had published a collection of essays titled Vekhi, which means “mileposts.” Each of them had once been a Marxist and thus a revolutionary of one sort or another. They had all left Marxism behind and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in which they almost certainly had been raised. Berdyaev is perhaps the most famous of them. My friend almost had certainly heard Berdyaev condemned as a class traitor who had sold out to the capitalists and become an enemy of the Russian people. Berdyaev was nothing of the sort, but never mind. That is certainly how Russian historians had to depict him if they depicted him at all.

Now, Berdyaev was both an existentialist philosopher and an Orthodox Christian theologian. My friend was an atheist. Why did he react so strongly to my giving him a book by Berdyaev? I think it was because, despite what he may have been taught about Berdyaev, he knew that Berdyaev was foundationally Russian. He was a prominent figure of Russian culture both while he was still in Russia and after he fled communist Russia and lived in Paris. The KPSS distorted Russian history and culture horrifically, but it could never stop Russians from being Russians. It could never destroy the Russians’ interest in and commitment to Russian culture. When I was in Russia in the mid-1970s, there was a slight revival of the Russian Orthodox Church underway. I don’t think that was because more Russians were becoming Christians. I think it was because the Russian Orthodox Church was the most quintessentially Russian institution in the country. It was also the only institution in the country of any great significance whose commitments and aims were different from those of the Communist Party.[3] That, I think, must be why my friend reacted the way he did to my giving him a book by Berdyaev. Berdyaev was a theologian, but he was nothing if not Russian. I had given my friend access to an aspect of Russian culture he never would get from anyone in his own country. The rulers of his country had molded Russian history to fit their ideology, thereby distorting that history beyond recognition. I have many more stories from my time in Russia, but enough is enough.

Now I ask: What about the United States? Does any of this talk about Soviet communism have anything to say to us in the United States? Tragically, it has a great deal to say to us here in the United States. We are not threatened with communism, but we are most definitely threatened with fascism. The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is an American fascist. He has turned the Republican Party, or at least most of it, into a fascist party. He has turned at least most of it into a cult of personality loyal only to him, and both fascist and communist parties are often cults of personality at some point in their development.[4] Trump and his supporters have taken significant steps in the direction of turning the United States into an authoritarian or even totalitarian fascist country,

In explaining those steps, I’ll start with history. The KPSS distorted Russian history beyond recognition. Trump and his supporters are trying to do the same thing to American history. Trump has ordered the Smithsonian Institution to remove all references to slavery from its exhibits. His supporters in Oklahoma, Florida, and elsewhere have the state dictating the content of public education and forcing it not to tell the whole truth about the history of those states and of this country, most especially not to tell the truth about slavery. They claim to be Christians, and, at least in Oklahoma, they are forcing every public classroom to display the Ten Commandments, the First Amendment to the US Constitution be damned. Distorting history is a thing fascists always do. Trump and his acolytes want history to speak only of actual or supposed good things in our country’s past. Never mind that that past is rotten with racism and other ideologies of hate and that we need to come to terms with that truth if we are ever to overcome ideologies of hate in our country.

Trump is trying to establish one party rule in this country. To Trump, the Democratic Party is not as much the political opposition to Trump as it is Trump’s enemy and therefore an enemy of the American people. It seems quite clear that Trump would ban all opposition to him if he thought he could. He can’t, at least not yet. In the future? Who knows.

Trump is leading a campaign against the rule of law. Fascist countries have laws. The Soviet Union had a constitution that said it guaranteed the people’s civil rights. It had a judicial system that worked reasonably well most of the time. But the laws were often essentially meaningless. People were not allowed to raise the constitution’s guarantee of civil liberties as a defense to a claim the government had brought against them. Especially in criminal cases, the system ceased to work altogether when the KGB expressed an interest in a case. The KGB always got the result it wanted. The upper echelons of the KPSS followed the law when they wanted to, but they certainly felt themselves free to disregard the law when they wanted to. That was especially true under Stalin, but it was true to some extent up to the end of the USSR.

Donald Trump does not believe that he is bound by the law. He has said as much quite explicitly. He’s perfectly happy with the courts when they rule the way he wants them to rule. He’s mad as hell at them when they rule in a way he doesn’t want them to rule. If he could, he surely would remove from office every judge who ever ruled against him. His agents, especially ICE, violate the law at will, and Trump supports them in doing so. The law means something to Trump only when it serves his purposes. When it hinders those purposes, he says to hell with it: I don’t need no stinking laws.

Trump is trying to abolish the separation of powers that the US Constitution creates as part of the federal government. His attacks on the courts that I just mentioned are part of that effort. In addition, because the American people have given him Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, he has turned Congress into his lapdog. Under the Republicans, Congress has simply abandoned its constitutional oversight function. It has become an institution that implements Trump’s policies every time rather than make its own decisions after due deliberation.

Moreover, Trump thinks he can legislate by executive decree. He has issued executive decrees that he has no constitutional power whatsoever to issue. On the day he was inaugurated for his second term he issued one that purported to abolish birthright citizenship, something the Fourteenth Amendment grants to every person born in this country and under this country’s jurisdiction. Trump thinks his executive orders have the force of law, which, as a legal matter, they do not. I don’t know that Trump would abolish Congress if he could, but he would, at the very least, turn it into something like the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, nominally a legislative body that in fact just rubber stamped whatever the KPSS wanted.

It seems quite clear that Donald Trump would revoke the First Amendment to the US Constitution, especially its guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press, if he could. He has called the public media of the country enemies of the people. He calls any reporter who asks a question he doesn’t like “stupid.” He has threatened to revoke the federal licenses of the major broadcast media because they say things he doesn’t like. He thinks the First Amendment does not protect criticism of the president, which it most obviously does. He was delighted when CBS took Steven Colbert off the air and ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel because they had said things Trump didn’t like.[5] For Trump, we are all free to praise him. We are not free to criticize him. That, folks, is simply and undeniably fascism.

Trump’s fascism is plainly seen in the way has made a hero of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was a right-wing lunatic who had a substantial following on some public media. Frankly, I had never heard of him until he was murdered. I do not celebrate his murder. Murder is a crime and a sin no matter who it is who is murdered. I will never, however, see Kirk as a martyr and certainly not as a hero. His murderer is himself a right-wing extremist not any kind of leftist. Kirk was a bigot in just about every way it is possible for a person to be a bigot. He said he didn’t hate his enemies; but he was a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, and a man who thought the deaths of school children were worth it to preserve the Second Amendment. Yet to Trump he was a hero. Trump ordered all American flags flown at half mast to honor him. He has declared that he will award Kirk the Medal of Freedom posthumously, but as of this writing he hasn’t done it yet. Even in his saying that he will Trump had dishonored and abased the Medal of Freedom in a purely fascistic way.

This is hardly a complete list of all of Trump’s fascistic statements and actions. It is, however, undeniably clear that Trump is an American fascist. He will make our national government as fascistic as he can. He will take as much power for himself as he can. He will disregard the rights of American citizens as much as he can. He will disregard all law as much as he can. He will continue to incite violence against people who oppose him. He doesn’t have his own Brown Shirts the way Hitler did, not yet at least. He would surely love to have them if he could, and there are any number of armed “militia” ready to go to war for him against other Americans.

The examples of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany are red flags waving before us to warn us of the dangers of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in short, of fascism. Fascists kill people at will. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany killed millions of them the Germans because they thought  them to be subhumans standing in Germany’s way, the Soviets in an attempt to get people to accept policies they deplored and opposed.[6] Fascists give not one good God damn about the law when it gets in their way. Fascists trample the rights of the people at will. They stifle public discussion of most issues by allowing only speech that praises them. Most of all, fascists rule through fear. They terrify people into obeying them. They make people afraid not only of the government and its enforcement agencies but of each other.

Fascists make people’s lives miserable for the fascists own purposes. Sure, fascists sometimes do some good. It became a cliché to say that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Hitler built freeways and brought out the Volkswagen Beetle. The Soviet communists created a universal literacy that Russia had never had before. They were first into space. They produced world class scientists and other academicians (though not historians or literary scholars). We have no need to deny the good things that fascistic regimes have done on occasion.

We have a screaming need to point out the horrific things that most characterize fascistic regimes. We have a screaming need to speak up in defense of the precious things fascists hate. Things like freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom of assembly. Freedom of association. The freedom of religion. We need to speak out loud and clear against the violence that always characterizes fascistic regimes.

Perhaps most of all, we must do everything we can to prevent the creation of a fascist regime grounded in fear in our country. Our country has numerous flaws. It is still far too racist. It is still far too addicted to guns. It is still far too classist. It has other faults too. And yes, some of our people have lived in fear for centuries. Black Americans lived in fear as enslaved people or as the victims of Jim Crow until recent decades, and, I suppose, some of them still live in fear of white people. Today, mostly because of Trump, millions of people with brown skin whose native language is Spanish live in fear of ICE. But most of us Americans have never lived in fear of our government. Sure, we might fear a tax audit; but that fear is from the kind of fear the people of the Soviet Union lived under.

Donald Trump, the American fascist, is out to create a regime of fear in our country, fear in every part of the country’s population. He wants people to like and respect him (hard as it is to believe that anyone could like or respect him), but he wants people who don’t like or respect him to fear him. He tries to make people of the public media and others afraid to criticize him. He acts as much like the ruler of a banana republic as he can, which makes us fear him because we don’t know what the hell he will do next.

Folks, we cannot let Donald Trump and his Republican toadies turn our beloved country into a fascist nation. We’ve always had our flaws, some of them very serious. But, except perhaps with regard to race in the south, we have never been fascist. Back in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, many Americans thought we truly were threatened by communists; but we have never been communist, and there were never enough American communists to present a real threat to the country. We cannot let Donald Trump make journalists say we have to write only the good, but everything we see is bad, the way my Soviet friend did. We cannot let Donald Trump so to cow the media that they do nothing but lie to us and avoid truth at every step (which, of course, some of them, like Fox News, already do far too frequently). No fascism is a good thing. Donald Trump’s fascism is far from a good thing. It is, in fact, a very evil thing.

We must stop him. Because I am a Christian, I am committed to our doing it nonviolently; but we must do it. We must speak out. We must shout out. We must proclaim the truth every chance we get, indeed even when we think we have no chance to do it. We must vote, and we must not vote for Trumpist Republicans. If things get much worse, we may have to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, or at least many of us may feel, correctly, that they have to do it and are willing to do it themselves.[7] Trump has not squelched all freedom of speech. If he had, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words. He will squelch all freedom of speech and every other civil right we have unless we stop him from doing it. Trump is a megalomaniac. He is a narcissist. He is emotionally unstable. He is a sexual predator and probably a pedophile. He is a threat to us in more ways than we can count. So let’s do it. Let’s stop him before it’s too late.

 

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[1] Except sugar. There was lots and lots of sugar available. I always figured, without really knowing, that was because the Soviet Union was supporting the Castro regime in Cuba.

[2] I lost touch with this fellow decades ago, but I have often hoped that once the KPSS was no longer in control of the country and before Putin made it an international pariah he got that chance after all.

[3] There were a few other religious institutions in the country of which that was also true; but in Russia at least, they didn’t amount to much. I don’t know enough about that status of Islam in central Asia and certain parts of Russia to comment on its status, but there certainly were Muslim people in the USSR. There were members of many other religions there too. It is also true that the KGB had infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church and that some Orthodox priests were actually KGB agents. That appalling situation, however, did not change the foundational beliefs and aims of the Russian Orthodox Church, which definitely were not those of the KPSS.

[4] The Fascist Party of Italy (which is where the word “fascist” comes from) was a cult of personality around Mussolini. Nazi Germany was one around Hitler. The Soviet Union wasn’t so much a cult of personality when I was there, but it had most definitely been one under Stalin.

[5] As I write, on September 25, 2025, Colbert’s termination has not been rescinded. Kimmel’s has though some conservative media companies refuse to air his show.

[6] The Holocaust the Nazis perpetrated is relatively well known in our country. What the Ukrainians call the Holodomor isn’t. The Holodomor is a period of a couple of years in the mid-1930s when the KPSS, under Stalin, intentionally starved around four million Ukrainians to death in an effort to force peasants to give up their land to the collective farms Stalin was out to create.

[7] I put that caveat about being willing and able to engage in civil disobedience in here because I’m 79 years old and not always in the best of health. I don’t think I’m much a candidate for doing it myself.

Damn It! I May Be a Prophet

Damn It! I May be a Prophet!

September 24, 2025

There’s something I’ve known about myself for a long time. It’s something I have to confess myself to be and something I need to be a peace with. It is the truth that I am a prophet. I’m a prophet in the way most of the Old Testament prophets were prophets, though I don’t expect to have anywhere near the impact they had and still have, nor do I expect my words to be preserved for millennia the way theirs have been. Here’s the story of how I came to realize that prophet is what I am. Or at least that a prophet is what I may be. But first I need to discuss just what a prophet is.

Most people, I think, have the wrong idea of what the Old Testament prophets were all about. They think their primary function was to predict the future. And it is true that the Old Testament prophets did predict the future, or at least many of them did. The future that prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah predicted was one of death and destruction for the two Hebrew kingdoms before 722 BCE and for the one, Judah, that remained after 722 BCE. They said that the Hebrew kingdoms would be destroyed and the people either dispersed or driven into exile because that was God’s punishment for the faithlessness of the people’s rulers and, at times at least, of the people themselves. Both Hebrew kingdoms were destroyed by foreign powers. The people of the northern kingdom of Israel were dispersed, and there wasn’t another Jewish state where that Israel had been for millennia. The southern kingdom of Judah was conquered, and its people were marched off into exile in Babylon. Jerusalem, the capital city of Judah, would, however, remain a center of Jewish life to this day. That these predictions turned out to be correct is, no doubt, part of the reason why they have been preserved in Hebrew scripture.

Yet a true prophet is not one who correctly predicts the future. Rather, a prophet is one who speaks God’s truth in the world. The Hebrew prophets often begin their prophecies by saying something like, “The word of the Lord came to me.” That means that the prophet was convinced that he (almost all of the Hebrew prophets were men though Exodus does call Miriam a prophet ) had received a message from Yahweh, the one god the prophets were all convinced the Hebrew people were to worship. The prophets believed that God was calling them to convey that message to the people and, most especially, to the people’s leaders.

The Hebrew prophets believed that God had given them two things for which to condemn the people and  their rulers. One was their idolatry. To these prophets, idolatry meant worshiping a god other than the god Yahweh. Before the mid-sixth century BCE, Hebrew religion was not really monotheistic. It was henotheistic. That means the people believed that there was more than one god, but the Hebrew people were to worship and seek to follow only one god, the god they named Yahweh. The prophets condemned the people for falling away from Yahweh worship and worshiping other gods instead, in particular the Canaanite god Baal.

It’s not hard to understand why the people did that. Yahweh was primarily a war god. They called him the “Lord of hosts,” which means the god of armies. The people were to worship Yahweh primarily because he had freed them from slavery in Egypt, something that was a military act because in involved drowning the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea. The first prayer the people said after they were safely out of Egypt was: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:21. (This is the passage is which the text calls Miriam a prophet). The people’s understanding of Yahweh would evolve into seeing Yahweh as the one true God of all creation, but their understanding of Yahweh didn’t begin that way.

Baal, on the other hand, was not a war god, or at least Baal was not only a war god. Baal worshipers believed that Baal controlled the weather. Baal brought rain. Israel was, and is, quite an arid place. In ancient times, the people relied entirely on rain coming at the right times and in the right amounts for their agriculture to produce what the people needed to survive. Baal could give them that rain, Yahweh couldn’t. Like I said, that understanding of Yahweh would change, but the Hebrew prophets were nearly all active between the eighth century BCE and the early fifth century BCE. Most of them were active, that is, before the people’s faith had become truly monotheistic. So many of the Hebrew people and their leaders worshipped Baal rather than Yahweh. The Hebrew prophets said God was angry and was going to punish them for doing so.

The other charge against the people and their leaders that the prophets brought from God was that they had oppressed and failed to care for the most vulnerable people in their midst. They sometimes referred to these people as “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” The prophets condemned the people’s rulers for oppressing rather than providing for the people among them who were not really able to provide for themselves. They sometimes had God rejecting the people’s sacrificial worship, but they said that Yahweh rejected that worship not because it was wrong worship but because it did not lead the people to lives of justice for the poor. Yahweh, they said, was going to punish them severely for this failure to follow Yahweh’s way.

The ancient Hebrew prophets didn’t have it easy. The worlds to which they prophesied mostly rejected what they had to say. Sometimes the rulers against whom they prophesied locked them up. Sometimes they sent armed forces after them to kill them. That happened to the prophet Elijah after he angered King Ahab with his prophesy. The world, mostly, does not want to hear God’s truth. God’s truth calls people to change, and people don’t like to change. God’s truth calls those with power to give up their power or at least radically to change the way they use it. People with power don’t like giving up power or changing how they use it. Being a prophet will always prompt resistance. Sometimes that resistance is violent. So be it.

OK. So that’s what an ancient Hebrew prophet was, but I must now ask two questions. First, how in God’s name did I come to believe that God may have called me to be a prophet in today’s world? Second, what does it mean to be a prophet in today’s world. I’ll consider those two questions in that order.

I’ve told this story many times before, but I’ll tell it again here. Way back in 1994, some thirty-one years ago, I was an attorney-at-law. I was trying to run my own law practice, and I had a law office. I was starting to burn out on law, thought I didn’t fully realize at that time that I was. I just knew that I was having a hard time making myself actually do legal work. So I did a Jungian psychological exercise I had learned of called active imagination. I sat down, tried to calm myself and clear my mind, and asked myself why I was having that hard time. Immediately, and I mean with no time having elapsed at all and without my consciously having had this thought at all, from deep within me an answer came booming: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was shocked. Of course I was a lawyer. I said to myself you’re sitting in a law office. There’s a sign on the front door that says “Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney-at-Law.” My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. Of course I’m a lawyer! Whereupon the answer came booming back again: “You’re not a lawyer!”

So I asked this voice, whatever it was and wherever it was coming from: “OK. So what am I?” Again with no time having elapsed at all came the answer: “You’re a preacher!” Talk about being shocked! A preacher? “Preacher” wasn’t even a word I used. I might refer to my pastor, or to my minister, but not to my preacher. This answer was patently absurd, or so I thought at the time. So I ended the exercise and went on for several more years practicing or attempting to practice law.

Eventually, I went to seminary, something that I had never thought I would ever do. At the time, I didn’t know why I was going to seminary. I just knew I had to do it. Eventually, I became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, something it had never occurred to me that I would ever be. Eventually, I served a congregation in that denomination as its pastor, something it had never occurred to me that I would ever do.

But here’s the thing. Leaving the practice of law and becoming an ordained minister saved my life. My beloved wife at the time, Francie, was dying of breast cancer. Before she became too ill to say much of anything she said to me: “I am so glad you finally are who you really are.” She was right. I finally was who I really am. I’ll never forget walking into my office at the church I was to serve as its pastor for the first time and knowing beyond a doubt that I already was a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer.

OK, but that’s pastor not prophet. Well, once again, here’s the thing. Ordained parish ministry has three primary functions. We call them the three Ps. They are the priestly, the pastoral, and the prophetic. The priestly function is to lead worship and preside at the sacraments. The pastoral function is to care about and for the people you serve as pastor. These are important and rewarding aspects of being an ordained parish pastor. Doing both of them filled my soul with faith and a satisfaction I had never felt before.

And suddenly I really was a preacher. I preached to that congregation fifty or more times a year for nearly thirteen years. I preached to a second church that I served for three years after that. Not to be immodest, but I’m a really good preacher. I have my own style, as I suppose all preachers do. I’ve been told that my preaching has a lot of teaching in it, which I take to be a good thing not a bad thing.

And my preaching, and the teaching I did during my years as a parish pastor, both had prophecy in them. What does that mean? In other words, what does it mean to be a prophet in today’s world? It means basically the same thing that it meant to be a prophet in ancient Israel. It means to speak God’s truth to the people and those with power over them. Which, of course, requires a couple of basic things. One is to have a way to speak to people. More importantly, the other is to believe that you know what God’s truth is.

Now, a caveat is necessary here. We mortals can never fully know what God’s truth is. I once saw a Peanuts cartoon that states it well: Snoopy is sitting on top of his dog house typing. Charlie Brown comes by and says: “I see you’re writing a book. What sort of book is it?” Snoopy replies, “It’s a theology book.” Charlie Brown asks: “Do you have a title?” Snoopy says,” Yes, Has It Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?” That is a caveat everyone who writes theology must always have in mind. Everything we think we know about God might be wrong. Even if some of what we think we know is right, we can never fully know God or God’s will. God transcends us humans infinitely, and we are not capable of understanding the infinity of God. So yes, it has occurred to me that I might be wrong. I rely on God’s grace to accept me even if everything I say about God is wrong.

And I forge ahead anyway. Anyone who writes theology knowing that they might be wrong forges ahead anyway. So how can I claim that what I say reflects God’s will and ways? I can say because I begin with Jesus Christ. We Christians confess that Jesus taught us God’s will and ways more fully and more truthfully than anyone else ever has or ever could. When we boil it down to its essentials, what Jesus taught us is love. That God is love, love that completely transcends our ability fully to understand it. He taught us that justice is love in action in the world, action toward true justice, and that we are called to work for such justice. He also taught us that God is radically nonviolent and that God calls us to be radically nonviolent too. God requires us to do whatever we do nonviolently.

Now, an awful lot of Christians think they know what Jesus was about. They think that Jesus was about how our souls get to heaven after we die. Folks, that absolutely is not what Jesus was about. He was about something he called the kingdom of God. Many of us today don’t much like the word “kingdom,” and sometimes we change it to “realm.” I’ll use “kingdom” here because that’s how our English translations usually render the Greek term in the ancient manuscripts that they translate.

Jesus’ kingdom of God is not something that exists in heaven or only in heaven (if you believe in heaven). It is rather God’s vision of how life on earth would be if we humans lived according to God’s will and ways, as best we are able to understand them, rather than by our own, flawed, selfish, and violent wills and ways. It is a vision of a world in which justice is fully realized. It is a world at peace brought about through justice achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil. It is a world in which our human ways are turned upside down. In which the last are first and the first are last. In which leadership is service not rule. In which the peacemakers not the warmakers are blessed and, indeed, in which there are no warmakers.

It is a world in which the poor are so blessed that there really would be no poor. And no ultrarich either, for people being ultrarich is one of the things that keep other people poor. A world in which everyone truly loves everyone else as they love themselves. Thus it is a world in which there is no racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, nationalism, or anything else that separates people from people on the basis simply of who people are or what their station in life is.

Jesus teaches us that the best way to know God’s ways is to take the ways of the world and turn them upside down. Turn hatred into love. Turn violence into nonviolent action. Turn exclusion into inclusion. Turn nationalism into universalism. Turn oppression into freedom. Turn racism, classism, and all the other hateful, divisive things we humans so cherish into liberty and justice for all. Yes, the Bible, in both of its Testaments, has statements that confirm the ways of the world. However, it also has statements, lots and lots of them, that turn the ways of the world upside down. We know that those statements express the ways of God precisely because they reject the ways of the world.

So what is the call of the prophet today? It is the call to speak truth to power. It is the call to proclaim God’s truths to the world and, especially, to the powerful in the world. The politically powerful. The economically powerful. The religiously powerful. The socially powerful. The militarily powerful. To anyone and everyone who claims power over other people. Who defends the world’s destructive and oppressive ways. Who advocates violence and hatred against anyone. The prophet’s call is to proclaim those truths. To proclaim them loudly and often. To proclaim them in every way the prophet has available to her or him.

Now, the prophet has to realize that proclamation is not action. It intends to prompt action, but it is not itself the action that changes things. Yet prophecy is absolutely essential for any person or movement that seeks to bring about transformation in the ways of the world. The world desperately needs to hear God’s truth. The world desperately needs to hear God’s call to the transformation of the world. To the building of the realm of God. To an end to violence, oppression, discrimination, and all injustice. People say action is more important than ideas, but we cannot really separate actions from ideas. Actions arise from ideas. Thought is foundational for all human action. Theology is thought. Bad theology produces bad actions. Good theology produces good actions. That’s really how you tell good theology from bad theology. What does the theology lead people to do? If it leads them to lives of self-giving love, it is good theology. If it leads them to join in the building of the realm of God on earth, it is good theology.

And I believe that God may well have called me to be a prophet of these divine truths. To shout them as loudly as I can. To shout them every chance I get. To seek chances to shout them. To stick with them when the world resists them, which the world always does, sometimes violently. Never to compromise with the evil that prophecy seeks to overcome. Never to accept or respect evil opinion just because everyone has the right to their own opinion. No, my prophecy will not change the world, but I am not free to abandon it. I believe that God calls me to proclaim it. That’s something I have been trying to do for decades. It is something I will continue to do as long as I live.

I have already encountered resistance. I’ve been called un-Christian and even an apostate because I don’t hate gay people. I’ve been asked how I could be a Christian pastor if I proclaimed the things I have proclaimed. So be it. The ancient Hebrew prophets didn’t let resistance stop them, and neither will I. So damn it! I may indeed be a prophet. Whether I am a true prophet or not, I will continue to preach and proclaim what I understand to be God’s truth to a world that desperately needs to hear it. So be it.

Trump and Free Speech

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Everett, Washington, Herald, my local paper:

President Donald Trump is conducting a campaign against free speech, a right the US Constitution guarantees to every one of us. He has compelled CBS and ABC to cancel popular late night talk shows because their hosts, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, insist on telling the truth about him and his administration. Trump has said that broadcasters who speak out against him should lose their licenses. Freedom of speech means nothing if it doesn't apply to people and voices one doesn't like. I spend the 1975-76 academic year in Soviet Russia. I saw a freedom of speech guaranteed by the Soviet constitution mean nothing because the regime permitted only voices that supported it and suppressed voices that sought to criticize it. That wasn't freedom in Soviet Russia, and it isn't freedom in the United States of America. We will all surely lose our right of free speech, and other rights as well, if Donald Trump gets his way. We must, somehow, nonviolently, make sure that he doesn't.

Christ the Power of God

 

Christ the Power of God

for

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

September 14, 2025

by

Rev. Tom Sorenson

 

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 1:22-24

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

It really is strange when you stop to think about it, isn’t it. I mean, we’re a Christian church, which means we worship and seek to follow someone named Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians confess to be the Christ, God’s Anointed One, and indeed even to be God Incarnate. We call him Lord and Savior, or at least some of us do; but here’s an undeniable historical fact: Jesus’ itinerant ministry around Galilee and eventually Judea in what we call the first century CE ended in dismal failure. It’s easy enough to look at what happened to him and say he was a fool who didn’t understand the world in which he lived. He did, after all, die a horrible death on a Roman cross, the Roman cross being an instrument not only of death but also of terror directed against all the people. Criminals, especially political criminals, got themselves crucified. Decent people didn’t. From a worldly perspective, there is only one thing we can call Jesus: Loser! His ministry ended in disaster. He ended up being executed in a horrific way as a political criminal.

And yet. And yet the cross, that instrument of suffering, death, and terror on which Jesus died, became the central symbol of the Christian faith. And Paul speaks of that cross in the text we just heard. In our passage from 1 Corinthians this morning, Paul calls Christ crucified “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” The obvious response to that claim seems to be: Say what! A man nailed to a cross has or is the power of God? A man nailed to a cross has or is the wisdom of God? That doesn’t make a lick of sense! And, of course, from a purely worldly point of view, it doesn’t.

But God doesn’t work from a worldly point of view. God works from a point of view that so transcends our human way of seeing things that we can never fully know just what God’s point of view is. Yet one way to make sense out of Jesus’ seemingly senseless crucifixion is to consider just how Christ crucified could indeed be the power and the wisdom of God. That’s what I want to try to do this morning.

According to worldly wisdom, Jesus’ crucifixion should have been the end of him. But what happened regarding Jesus after he was crucified and, of course, after he was resurrected? His movement didn’t die with him as had the movements of many other would-be messiahs. Instead, his followers, or at least some of them, stayed together. His followers, or at least some of them, began to proclaim Jesus and his teachings to be “good news,” “gospel,” indeed to be the best news there ever was or ever could be.

At first there weren’t many of them, certainly less than one thousand and perhaps less than one hundred. At first they were all Jews, and nearly all other Jews rejected their declaration that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. At first, very few gentiles would have understood anything Jesus’ followers were saying. For the Jesus movement is rooted in Judaism and doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know Judaism, which only very few gentiles of the time did. The earliest Christians should have gotten nowhere when they proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ to non-Jews.

But they didn’t. It took awhile, but by around three hundred years after Jesus’ death, the new faith that claimed him as its founder became the official faith of that Roman Empire that had so brutally executed him. And from there, Christianity spread around the world. Today, it is by far the largest faith tradition in the world. Christians have spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to every corner of this little planet we live on.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know perfectly well that the tradition has gotten Jesus wrong more than it has gotten him right. I know perfectly well that Christians have been guilty of sin after sin, the sins of hatred and the sins of violence. It’s easy enough to dump all over Christianity and call it all horribly misguided, for a great deal of it has been and is horribly misguided. I’ve written plenty of condemnation of what Christianity became and is myself, as have countless other people.

But here’s something of which I need to remind myself and perhaps need to remind you. The horrible parts of the history of the Christian faith are only part of the story. They’re only part of the story because the Christian faith does and always has contained within it not only darkness but also great light. Great spiritual light. The light of peace. The light of hope. The light of love. Indeed, the light of God. And countless people over the last two millennia have found all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in and through the Christian faith. I have found many of those gifts in my Christian faith, and I hope that you have found them too. Jesus’ crucifixion, of which Paul speaks so powerfully, should have been the end of him. It wasn’t.

But what do we see in the way the Jesus’ movement didn’t die with him? We see that God works through the Christian faith in the world, though not only through the Christian faith. We see that God works through Christianity and indeed in the world generally in ways we humans find hard to understand and usually consider to be weakness rather than strength. God works through people and only through people. God works quietly. Almost always behind the scenes. God has immense power, but God doesn’t use that power to intervene directly in the world to compel change. Rather, God works slowly. God bends the arc of the universe toward justice, but God does it slowly and in almost imperceptible ways, and sometimes that arc reverses course and moves away from justice. Yet, with time, God does draw justice out of oppression. God draws peace out of violence. God draws hope out of despair. Maybe we don’t often see God doing those things in the world, but God is there doing them through God’s people nonetheless.

And folks, isn’t that very, very good news today? We live in a world and in a nation that have gone badly off course. In our nation today the sin of racism is on the rise. That despicable thing we call white supremacy is becoming socially acceptable again. Our cherished democracy is under assault. The environment of the only planet we have to live on is under assault, and those in power in our country not only don’t do anything about it, they make it worse by denying that the assault is real. The health of all Americans is under assault by a Department of Health and Human Services that denies the efficacy and safety of vaccines. The welfare of the most vulnerable among us is under assault by a government that slashes the amount of money to assist them while giving massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy. Yes, indeed. We live in a nation that is pretty thoroughly messed up.

But see, the world has always been pretty thoroughly messed up. Tragically, Christians have done more than their share to mess it up, but the Christian faith has also always also been there, through at least a minority of Christians, speaking God’s truth and working to bend the course of history in the right directions. And over long periods of time, the Christian faith has, at least some extent, succeeded in doing so. The world today, messed up as it is, is nowhere near as violent as the Roman Empire was in Jesus’ day. And though injustice and oppression are intolerable realities among us, they are far less prevalent in our world than they were in Jesus’ world. And God has done and is doing a good deal of that work precisely through the people who claim Jesus as their Savior.

There really is no way of seeing Jesus other than as Christ crucified, just as Paul says. And Christ crucified has been the power and the wisdom of God at work in the world, in God’s own ways, ever since that unjust crucifixion that took place so very long ago. We can, and indeed we must, continue to trust that God is at work in God’s own ways in our time just as God as always been at work in God’s own ways throughout human history. If we will look beneath the surface of Christianity’s horrific history and, in many ways, horrific reality today, we can see Christ crucified as indeed the power and the wisdom of God. Therein lies our source of hope. Therein lies our only source of hope in today’s troubled world.

So let us cling to our faith in Christ crucified. Let us hold onto that faith as the solid rock on which we can stand. Let us trust with every fiber of our being that God has not abandoned us any more than God has ever abandoned people who truly understand Jesus Christ and the ways of God he teaches us. The ways of nonviolence. The ways of peace. The ways of justice. The ways of love. If we can hold onto that trust, we can make it through these difficult times, and we might even be able to help our nation make it through these troubles times. May it be so. Amen.

Come On Home

 

This is the text of a sermon I gave at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA, on August 31, 2025.

Come On Home

for

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

August 31, 2025

Rev. Tom Sorenson 

Scripture: Psalm 81:1, 10-16 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our sustainer.

 I suspect that we all know that there are books in the Old Testament named for prophets. If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. There are also prophetic voices elsewhere in the Old Testament including in the psalms like the one we just heard. This morning I want to start by asking: Just who were the ancient Hebrew prophets? What were they all about? I suspect that most people think that they were people who could predict the future. And yes, they did predict the death and destruction for Israel and Judah that actually happened, but that truly is not what they were primarily about. They were primarily about speaking God’s truth to the people and to the people’s rulers, They did that mostly in a context which, frankly, isn’t that different from our own context. They believed that the Hebrew people, who once had followed God, had turned their backs on God and on what God wanted from them. Prophet after prophet condemns them for doing it. Prophet after prophet says God condemns them for doing it. They say God condemns them for worshiping other gods and for being unjust toward those in need, especially the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, those people being among the most vulnerable among them.

But of course, falling away from God and God’s ways is hardly a problem restricted to ancient Israel, is it. Friends, we are living in a country that is, tragically, a classic example of a country falling away from God. This country has fallen away from God virtually from its very beginning. Yes, there are good things about our country, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, or at least most of it, primary among them. But that doesn’t change other facts of history like this one. Our country was founded in racism and has remained racist to this day. Europeans brought enslaved Africans to America starting in 1619, one year before the Pilgrims, our Congregationalist forbears, landed at Plymouth Rock. Race-based slavery didn’t become illegal everywhere until 1865. In the South, white supremacists did everything they could to reduce Black Americans to a status as close to slavery as they could get. It was a bit different in the North, but the North, and our Northwest, were always nearly as racist as the Jim Crow South. This racism is still very much with us, and our federal government and the MAGA movement that supports it are essentially today’s expression of white racism and white supremacy.

Racism is not the only way our country has fallen away from God. We have done it in much the same way the ancient Hebrews did. We have failed and failed massively at truly caring for the vulnerable in our midst. The social safety net of many other countries puts us to shame. We have never had an adequate social safety net, and our government today seems hellbent on making it even worse than it already is. See, for example, their drastic cuts to the Medicaid on which my badly disabled twin brother depends.

And in our country today we see other ways that we have strayed from God. Strayed, that is, not from bastardized religion like Christian nationalism but from the true God of justice and peace for all people. The powers in our country truly have turned away from God. They follow their own counsels, as our psalm puts it. They follow their own counsel into policies and practices of violence and of gross injustice. They have our federal government serve the ultra-wealthy among us and deprive the poor and needy of even the most basic social services. They seek to install themselves in power permanently through unjust voting laws and armed soldiers in the streets. Yes, folks, our country has strayed from God. Sometimes it tries to cast that straying as actually following God, but it most definitely is not following God.

Yet the MAGA movement isn’t actually the cause of our deepest problems. It is a symptom of problems much deeper than the MAGA movement itself. Problems like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia,  and excessive, even radical, individualism. A mania about guns that shocks and appalls the rest of the world, a mania we saw the consequences of tragically on display last week in Minneapolis. A patriotism so radical that it has become destructive nationalism often covered by what its adherents call Christianity. MAGA doesn’t cause those things, it is a symptom of those things. Our country has strayed from God in many ways from its very beginning, and the movement that supports its government today strays from God in more ways than I can count.

That’s the bad news. But even in these difficult times there still is good news. We hear that good news in scripture, including from the prophets and from prophetic psalms. We can come back. We can come back to God. God may well be leaving us to our own counsels at a time when those counsels turn against God, but that doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us completely. God hasn’t abandoned us completely any more than God abandoned the ancient Hebrews completely. We hear this promise in this morning’s psalm: “O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways!” If they would, the psalm says, God would satisfy them with “honey from the rock.”

God was still there for the ancient Hebrews, and God is still here for us. God is calling all of us back. God calls to everyone who has strayed from God: Come on home! I will welcome you the way the father welcomes the returning prodigal son. I have not given up on you. I have not left you for good. I don’t believe that you have left me for good. So come on home! Come back to God. Folks, if our country would do that, MAGA would quickly become a distant memory not a current reality. With God’s help, we really can turn our country around and bring it closer to God than it has ever been before.

Now one enormous, necessary caveat. What I just said doesn’t mean everyone has to become Christian. It doesn’t mean we need to turn the United State into a Christian nation, something MAGA claims it is but it has never truly been. God doesn’t call just Christians to return to God. Christianity is not the only faith that preaches God’s ways of justice and nonviolence. The separation of church and state is one of the very good things about our nation.

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t let our Christian faith guide our political views and actions. The gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not political. Jesus’ primary image for God’s will for God’s world is “the kingdom of God.” And “kingdom,” of course, is a purely political concept. We don’t live in a kingdom, though we may be threatened with our country becoming something very like one today. But Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God apply to us today as much as they applied to the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

So let’s call and help our country to do what the ancient prophets called their world to do. Return to God. And return to God doesn’t mean make the country Christian. It means steer our country back in the direction of what Jesus called the kingdom of God. Steer our country away from racism, away from radical individualism, away from guns, away from so many other problems we face. Steer it toward peace attained through nonviolence. Toward true distributive justice for the ones Jesus called “the least of these.” Toward the creation of a truly meaningful social safety net for people in need. Away from xenophobia and fear of immigrants. Away from white supremacism and Christian nationalism. All of those things, and indeed many more things about our country, contradict the gospel of Jesus Christ. They contradict the moral teachings of every great religion, and even many secular atheists advocate kingdom values.

I don’t have any magic answers to the question of how we do it, and I know that many of you are already doing what you can to help turn this country around. Here are some ways we can do it that have occurred to me. We can do it through our vote, at least for as long as we still have one. We can do it by joining mass demonstrations against the MAGA movement and the damage it is doing to our country and to God’s world. We can do it by speaking out in every way we can.

And we can do it through prayer. Prayer brings us closer to God than anything else does or can. Prayer by itself isn’t enough to turn this country around. But Pope Francis said that you pray for those who are hungry, then you feed them. That’s how prayer works. So let us pray for our country. Let us pray that she turns around. That she turns away from violence and injustice and toward God’s ways of nonviolence and radical justice for everyone. Let’s pray, and then let’s act. It is indeed what God calls us Christians to do. It is indeed what we must do if we are truly to be disciples of Christ. May it be so. Amen.

Light in the Darkness

 This is the text of a sermon I gave at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA, on August 24, 2025.

Light In the Darkness

for

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

Rev. Tom Sorenson

August 24, 2025

 

Scripture: Isaiah 58:9b-14

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

You know, I don’t get the chance to preach all that often anymore. I’m retired. I’m old. In many ways, I’m old-fashioned. But you have extended the invitation to me to preach with you today and three more times before my wife, your Pastor Jane, returns from sabbatical. And as I start to prepare a sermon these days, I find myself always running into the same tragic reality; and I usually can’t convince myself not to preach on that reality. Mercifully, scripture has hundreds of verses that confront that reality directly, so it isn’t hard to find a text on which to base a sermon. So that’s what I’m doing today. Please excuse me if you’ve heard it before, which I know you have. Our present reality as a nation is so dire that we can’t hear God’s word against it often enough.

One of the Bible passages the lectionary that I use gives us for today is the one you just heard, Isaiah 58:9b-14. In those verses, Isaiah is addressing a situation seemingly not unlike the one we face in our country today. He is addressing a society in which people speak evil. In which some people are hungry. Many people are afflicted and oppressed. Isaiah uses the image of a yoke to represent that state of his community. It is a yoke of evil that is holding the people down. Their present condition is a weight upon their shoulders, and Isaiah is addressing what they need to do about it. Folks, we are living under Isaiah’s yoke too, and boy do we need to do something about it.

Isaiah mentions several things the people need to do get out of their dire circumstances. Those things, he suggests, will lift that yoke of evil from their shoulders. Most importantly, Isaiah says something that our country is forgetting today. He says, in effect, take care of those in need. He says, “offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” We aren’t doing anything close to doing that, are we. Offer food to the hungry? No, we’re cutting food stamps and making food so expensive a great many people struggle to afford it.

Satisfy the needs of the afflicted? Well, hardly. Who are the afflicted among us? They are the unhoused. They are the immigrant of color documented or not. They are sexual orientation and gender identity minorities. They are people who can’t afford health care because they can’t afford or can’t get health insurance. They are people nearly in a panic about what we are doing to the only planet we have to live on.

And folks, we are doing precisely the opposite of satisfying the needs of the afflicted. Our federal government is slashing funds for food stamps and school lunches. Our leaders say they will reduce the price of food, then they do things like impose tariffs that will only drive food prices up. The federal government is slashing funds for the states to address the needs of the afflicted. We have the means to provide housing for all the unhoused, but instead of doing it we make the housing crisis worse by creating and tolerating a real estate market in many parts of the country, our part included, that makes housing simply unaffordable for a great many people. Our federal government has set out to deprive millions of Americans of health insurance who have health insurance today, leaving them to the mercy of a medical and pharmaceutical industry that makes services and drugs prohibitively expensive for nearly everyone who does not have insurance. Our federal government is virtually at war against God’s transgender and nonbinary people. It wants to throw them out of the military. It wants civil rights laws not to apply to them. Our federal government denies the reality of the climate crisis and does any number of things to make it worse. Satisfy the needs of the afflicted? Hardly.

And our federal government is afflicting something else on us. It gives us a government that does not believe in the rule of law. It thinks the president doesn’t have to obey court orders, not even Supreme Court orders. It sees the law only as an obstacle to it doing to our democracy what it wants to do to our democracy, namely, destroy it. And on the issue of law and order, our federal government is dreaming up crises of crime in “blue” cities, then sending in not more police but the National Guard. The National Guard is a military force not a law enforcement force. It’s members train for war not for patrolling city streets looking for crime that isn’t nearly as prevalent as their commander-in-chief tells them it is. We may soon all face the additional affliction of living under occupation by our own military.

A bleak picture, isn’t it. It’s easy to feel helpless and hopeless in the face of it. But here’s the thing. We are a Christian church. At least most of us here consider ourselves to be Christians. We look, or ought to look, first of all to Jesus for guidance in times like there. What did Jesus do? Minister to the wealthy? Minister to the powerful? Tell the Romans to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the empire? No! He sought out those Isaiah calls the afflicted. The ones Jesus once called “the least of these.” The poor living at a subsistence level. The ill and physically disabled. The sinners. The seekers. And he told all of them that they are God’s special favorites.

And he tells us that we must treat all who are genuinely afflicted as God’s special favorites too. Jesus’ land didn’t have any social safety net for those folks. It left them entirely on their own. That is the system Jesus preached and acted against. And he tells us to preach and act against our system too. Sure, we have something of a social safety net, certainly more of a one than Jesus’ world did. But it has never been adequate, and now our government is obsessed with making it less adequate than it already is. Our federal government and the MAGA movement that supports it are working directly against the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We need to oppose them. We need to stop them if we can, nonviolently of course. In Isaiah, God promises us that if we do those things our “light shall shine in the darkness.” What, or rather, who is the light in our darkness? For us Christians, it is Jesus Christ. Jesus lights the ways of God, and Jesus calls us to live in that light. Both Isaiah and Jesus promise us that if we will work against systems of violence and  oppression God will be with us. God will light our way. God will, in God’s own way, lead us to the end of those diabolical systems.

That’s the promise we have. That’s the promise God calls us to follow. I know that many of you are already following it. I try, in my own very limited ways, to follow it too. So as you continue to follow it, or begin to follow it, look to the light. Yes we work in darkness, but there still is light. There is light, there still is hope because God is with us. God will guide us. God will save us. And for all of those divine truths, let all the people say, Amen.

Once More on Russia and Ukraine

 

Once More: On Russia and Ukraine

August 21, 2025

I’ve written about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine before; but, after having disappeared from our news broadcasts for a while, Russia’s illegal and grossly immoral invasion of Ukraine is once again making our headlines. So here’s a recap of what I know about that relationship. And I’ll remind you that I have a PhD in Russian history.

First of all, let’s recognize an undeniable truth. Russians and Ukrainians are closely related linguistically and culturally. Or at least many Ukrainians are closely related to the Russians in this way. Linguists recognize Russian and Ukrainian as closely related but distinct East Slavic languages. At least in the eastern parts of the country, Ukrainians and Russians share an adherence to the Orthodox Chrisian faith. The Orthodox Ukrainians sometimes, but not always, have belonged to Orthodox churches tied to the Russian Orthodox Church. At least the eastern parts of what today is Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union from the late eighteenth century to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The history of today’s Ukraine, however, is quite complex. Ukraine did not exist as a distinct political entity until the early twentieth century, and then only briefly until 1991. For most of the time before the Russian Empire absorbed it, the eastern parts of today’s Ukraine were ruled at times by the Turks and at times by autonomous people usually called the Cossacks. The western parts of today’s Ukraine were ruled by western powers. Part of that land was once part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Other parts of it were occupied and ruled for years by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a major Roman Catholic western power for over two hundred years from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

There are several important results of this history. One is that eastern and western Ukraine are different in some important ways. Ukrainians in the western part of the country, the principal city of which is Lviv, consider themselves to be westerners. While many of them were, historically speaking, Christians of the Orthodox rite, many of them belonged to churches that recognized the authority of the Pope, which, of course, true Orthodox Christians do not. Most Ukrainians in the eastern parts of the country do not think of themselves as Russians, but they are culturally and linguistically more closely related to the Russians than are Ukrainians in the west. In eastern Ukraine, especially in the region often called the Donbas in the far eastern part of the country, the demographics are complex. The population there is mixed between Russians and Ukrainians. There is no geographic distinction between these two populations. They intermix and have lived together for centuries. Many, though perhaps not all, of the Russians in this region actually speak Russian as their primary language but consider themselves to be Ukrainians.

While some rulers or forces in the history of Ukraine allied themselves with the Russians, thereby ending up with their lands being part of the Russian Empire, no Ukrainians ever became part of any Russian political entity voluntarily. Instead, over the course of a century or more, Russia simply expanded to the south and incorporated much of what today is Ukraine. Russia took the Crimean Peninsula from the Turks, for example, in the late eighteenth century under Empress Catherine the Great. The western parts of Ukraine were not part of the Russian Empire at that time.

Throughout the last century of more of the existence of the Russian Empire, the Russians had to deal with the claim by the Ukrainians not to be Russians but to be a distinct people with their own language, culture, and history. The imperial Russian government dealt with that issue by refusing to recognize the Ukrainians as a people distinct from the Russians. The imperial Russian government never recognized Ukrainian as a language distinct from Russian. At times they outlawed the use of Ukrainian in publishing, public administration, and education. There was no distinct Ukrainian political entity in the Russia Empire. Most of what today is Ukraine was just a part of the Russian Empire the same as any other part of the Russian Empire.

The Russian Empire ended in 1917, when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated early in the year. In October, 1917 (old style, November new style) the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin staged a coup and took control of the Russian government. A protracted civil war ensure. During that war some Ukrainians briefly claimed to have established an independent Ukrainian state, but the Russians, under the Bolsheviks, quickly conquered all of Ukraine that had been part of the Russian Empire.

In 1922, the Bolsheviks, by then calling themselves Communists rather than Bolsheviks, established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. One of the original so-called soviet socialist republics was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Communist regime of the USSR set its boundaries. I don’t know if they were aware of the demographic problem of intermingled nationalities or not, but the border they set put many Russian people, especially in the far east of the country, in the Ukrainian republic. When the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established, it included the Donbas, but it did not include Crimea or the westernmost parts of today’s Ukraine.

Ukraine suffered horribly under the Communists, most of whom were Russians. Stalin’s murderous purging of so-called enemies of the people took place in Ukraine as it did in the rest of the USSR, but Ukraine had it worse then most of the rest of the country. In the early 1930s, Stalin, who by then had established himself as essentially the dictator of the whole nation, decided to collectivize agriculture everywhere in the country. That meant he had to get peasants who owned and farmed their own land to give up that land to a collective organization. Marxism has never dealt well with peasants. It is based on an economic model of capitalists employing proletarians, mostly in factories. Peasants don’t fit that model. Stalin wanted to make Soviet agriculture fit that model better, so he set out to eliminate private land ownership by peasants, private land ownership being taboo in a Marxist society.

Not surprisingly, most of the land-owing peasants in the USSR resisted. Resistance was perhaps particularly strong in Ukraine. Ukraine has some of the richest farmland in Europe. In the nineteenth century it was called “the breadbasket of Europe,” the Russians then being able to export so much Ukrainian grain. Most Ukrainian peasants were having none of Stalin’s collectivization, so Stalin decided to force them into submission.

He did it through mass, intentionally induced starvation. The Ukrainians call this policy the Holodomor. It didn’t apply exclusively to Ukraine, but Ukraine bore the brunt of it. Something like four million Ukrainians starved to death. Stalin made it happen. He knew it was happening, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was forcing Ukrainian peasants into collective farms, and, eventually, he succeeded.

Next came World War II, which the Russians call “the Great Patriotic War,” or “the Great War of the Fatherland,” either translation fits the Russian. Some Ukrainians so hated the Russian Communists that they were willing to ally themselves with the invading Germans against them. It is commonly thought that Hitler might have been able to defeat the USSR had he accepted the Ukrainians and other non-Russian Soviet people as allies. He, however, though all Slavic people were subhuman; and he wanted to exterminate them so he could settle their land with Germans. The Soviets, of course, defeated the Germans; and Ukraine remained part of the USSR under Russian domination.

One significant event in the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations occurred in 1954. Nikita Khrushchev was a Stalinist functionary who had worked mostly in Ukraine. By 1954, he was the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and thus essentially in charge of the whole country. In 1954, for reasons no one is entirely sure about, he transferred the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Crimea had been part of Russia for well over one hundred years by that point, and the Russians mostly thought of it as theirs. After 1954, it technically wasn’t. It was part of Ukraine.

Come 1991. On December 25 of that year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist. The powers in Ukraine had been working toward national independence for some time by then, and on that date at the latest Ukraine became a fully sovereign, independent nation. Both the Russians and the rest of the world recognized it as such.

When Ukraine became an independent nation, something like one-third of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was situated in Ukraine. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up those nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. In the treaty establishing that agreement, Russia committed to “refrain from the threat or use of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Ukraine sent all of the nuclear weapons on its territory to Russia.

On January 1, 2000, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became the President of Russia. He was largely unknown to most of the world at that point. He had been a minor KGB officer, though Russian president Yeltsin had made him the head of the FSB, the Russia successor to the Soviet KGB. President Yeltsin then made him his Prime Minister, and, when Yeltsin resigned as president at the end of 1999, Putin became the president. He has served as the head of the Russia government either directly or indirectly ever since.

Putin has always dreamed of Russia becoming the power on the world stage that the USSR had been. He has called the dissolution of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.” As he developed his rule, Putin began to adopt the old Russian imperial attitude toward Ukraine. He began to echo the old imperial contention that Ukrainian is not a language distinct from Russian. It is, he said, only a dialect of Russian. He has asserted that there really is no such thing as a Ukrainian, all so-called Ukrainians being really Russians. He began not to recognize Ukraine as an independent, autonomous nation. He began to make wild accusations against the Ukrainian government, calling it "fascist," which it definitely was not.

In 2014, Putin began to incorporate Ukraine back into Russia. He engineered a peaceful Russian takeover of Crimea and declared it to be part of Russia. The international community on the whole has never recognized the legitimacy of Russia’s takeover of Crimea. Ukraine, of course, has never recognized Crimea as part of Russia, considering it still to be part of Ukraine. The status of Crimea has long been complicated by the fact that the Crimean port of Sevastopol has long been the homebase of first the Russian, then the Soviet, then again the Russian navy. Nonetheless, the international community has never recognized Putin’s annexation of Crimea as in any way legitimate.

Russian invasion of Ukraine

Then we come to February 24, 2022. The world knew that Putin had been massing military forces on Russia’s border with Ukraine for some time. What we didn’t know was if Putin would really commit the illegal and grossly immoral act of actually invading Russia’s neighbor, one of the largest nations in Europe. Most of us were shocked and outraged when he did it. He sent massive Russian forces into Ukraine in an attempt to conquer the country, remove its democratic government, and make Ukraine once again part of Russia, as it had been in the old Russian Empire.

Frankly, I, and a great many experts with more knowledge of the matter than I had, expected Russia to defeat Ukraine militarily in a matter of weeks. We were wrong. The Russians and Ukrainians are today still engaged in a brutal, bloody war. Russia has taken some Ukrainian territory, and other parts of Ukraine have gone back and forth from Ukrainian control to Russian control and back to Ukrainian control. Estimates I have seen in the press put Russia’s casualties as high as one million soldiers killed or wounded. Russia’s vaunted machinery of war has not performed anywhere near as well as the world expected it to. The European Union and the United States have poured massive amounts military aid into Ukraine, and that aid has certainly played a major role in Russia’s inability to defeat Ukraine so far.

So what Putin is up to, illegal and immoral as it is, is not hard to understand from a historical perspective. Russia controlled Ukraine, in both the imperial period and the Soviet period, from the eighteenth century until 1991. The tsars told their people that Ukrainians were really Russians who just spoke a dialect of Russian rather than their own language. The Soviets didn’t necessarily make that claim, but, while the USSR was, to some extent, organized on ethnic lines, everyone knew that it was the Russians who ran the show. Putin is out to reestablish Russian control over a region that had been part of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The fact that Ukraine had become an independent nation recognized as such by the whole world should have stopped Putin from invading. It didn’t. Putin’s primary agenda is the reestablishment of the Russian Empire, or at least the establishment of Russian dominance if not direct political control in all of what had been part of the Russian Empire. To do that, he has to control Ukraine, the largest and richest of the former soviet socialist republics other than Russia. So he invaded and now is stuck with a war he can’t seem to win but isn’t exactly losing either.

How will that war end? There’s no way to know. The Russians may eventually wear the Ukrainians down to the point that they have no choice to surrender. Or Putin may come to his senses and pull his forces out of Ukraine. Or Putin may lose control of Russia, with a successor either ramping up Russia’s war in Ukraine and eventually winning it or ending it by pulling out.

A compromise between the Russians and the Ukrainians is very hard to imagine. Their aims in the war are diametrically opposed to each other. One suggestion that has been made, however, is, I believe at least worthy of consideration. This solution would have Ukraine cede the Donbas and Crimea to Russia in exchange for an end to the war and security guarantees for Ukraine from Russia and perhaps the western powers as well. This solution makes some sense ethnically. There are at least substantial Russian minorities if not majorities in both Donbas and Crimea. Those eastern parts of Ukraine have a different history than the western parts of the country do. They are more aligned with Russia culturally than are the western parts of the country. This proposed compromise might actually work.

Except for one thing. Every time I have heard this solution mentioned, someone says “Chamberlain.” Someone says, “appeasement.” Someone says “Munich, 1938.) These references are, of course, to the agreement Neville Chamberlain and the French made with Hitler that allowed Hitler to invade the part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland without opposition from Britain or France in exchange for Hitler’s promise never to take any other land by military force. With historical hindsight, we all know how disastrous that agreement was. Hitler had no intention of complying with it other than by invading the Sudetenland, which he promptly did. The world called the Munich agreement appeasement, and appeasement has become a buzzword for how you do not deal with a militarily aggressive dictator.

And yes, the proposed settlement that I am considering here would, to some extent, appease Vladimir Putin. There would, however, be at least two difference between that agreement and Munich, 1938. The first is that the Czechoslovaks, whose land was to be invaded, were not even present at the Munich conference. The Ukrainians would be very much present and involved in any negotiations that led to this proposed settlement of the war. The Russians, the Europeans, and the Americans might well all pressure Ukraine to accept the deal, but Ukraine would be free to do so or not, at least technically.

The second difference is that in the Munich accords, Britain and others agreed to let Hitler start a war that he had not yet started. The Russian-Ukrainian war has, of course, most definitely been started. It has gone on for over three and a half years. It has cost an enormous number of lives on both sides. It has destroyed a lot of Ukrainian property, and the Ukrainians have also destroyed some Russian property. Allowing a war and stopping a war are not the same thing.

Do these differences make a difference? To some extent yes, but they probably don’t make enough of a difference to make this settlement of the war feasible. This settlement would indeed reward Putin for having committed the gross violation of international law  and of common human decency of invading Ukraine. It wouldn’t give him everything he had hoped to achieve by invading Ukraine, but it would give him at least part of what he had hoped to achieve. Thus, there would be significant appeasement of Russia, the aggressor and law violator in the invasion of Ukraine. It seems likely that the world would never accept such appeasement. Neither would Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has said loud and clear that it will never agree to cede any Ukrainian territory to Russia. Of course, in international relations, noes like that don’t always remain noes, but that is where the Ukrainians stand today. So far, the Russians have given no indication that they would accept this settlement either.

And there’s one further problem with this settlement. Neville Chamberlain was a fool to believe anything Adolf Hitler said. Hitler was a murderous dictator with an agenda of conquering and inhabiting all of central and eastern Europe. His entire regime was based on a lie, namely, that the Jews were the cause of all of Germany’s problems. He wasn’t about to admit that his hatred of Jews was grounded in a lie, nor was he ever going to give up his desire to exterminate all Slavs, whom he considered to be non-human, and replace them with Germans. It was indeed foolhardy to believe him when he said he would stop with the Sudetenland.

Vladimir Putin is also a murderous dictator. He too has an agenda, though one quite different from Hitler’s. His agenda is to reestablish Russia as the dominant power over all of the land that was once part of the Russian Empire or of the Soviet Union. (The territorial extent of the Russian Empire at its height and the territorial extent of the USSR at its height are nearly but not quite identical.) Putin lies with impunity. He kills opponents with impunity. He has proven his willingness to use the Russian army in a way similar to the way Hitler used the German army. There very probably is no more reason to trust anything Putin says than there was to trust anything Hitler said.

So, it seems to me, that Ukraine and Russia, and indeed the whole world, are stuck with a problem to which there is no obvious solution. The histories of Russia and of Ukraine have led us to this point, and no one can understand the Russian-Ukraine conflict without knowing those histories. US president Trump is trying these days to broker a settlement between Russia and Ukraine, though he is doing it quite ineptly, as one would suspect he would. It seems unlikely that he will succeed. Putin can manipulate Trump to do anything Putin wants, which means Trump is unlikely to get the Ukrainians to agree to whatever proposals Trump makes. I wish I had a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian war. I don’t. I don’t think anyone does. Putin won’t give up, and Ukraine won’t give in. That’s what the whole world has to deal with. I wish the whole world good luck in trying to do so.