The Undead Hand of History

 

The Undead Hand of History

In the Prologue of his book The Red Prince, The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, brilliant Yale historian Timothy Snyder says this about how both the Nazis and the Soviets treated the question of a person’s nationality:

Both Nazis and Soviets treated the nation as expressing unchangeable facts about the past rather than human volition in the present. Because they ruled so much of Europe with so much violence, that idea of race remains with us—the undead hand of history as it did not happen.[1]

Snyder isn’t talking about the United States or about contemporary Europe. He is talking about the jumble of overlapping nationalities in central and eastern Europe around the time of World War I.[2] But when I read these words of his, I immediately thought of two historical developments, one of which we are living through as I write. I’ll start with the older story, then move to the one we’re living through now.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a totalitarian state made up of dozens upon dozens of different nationalities. The Russians, however, were by far the dominant group in that late, unlamented country. The Soviet Union was essentially the Russian Empire minus Finland and part of Poland with a very different, and very much more brutal, government than the Russian Empire proper ever had. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union controlled every aspect of Soviet life. It controlled all publishing. It controlled all public media including radio, television, and journalism. It controlled all education. The extent of the one-party control under which millions upon millions of people lived between 1924, when Josef Stalin took control of the Party, and 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, is hard for most Americans to get their heads around; but it is a perfect example of Snyder’s phrase “the undead hand of history as it did not happen.”

One of the things the Soviet Communists controlled was history. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Marxist-Leninist. That means that he had inherited and believed, or at least taught, a political and economic doctrine grounded in history. Karl Marx (1818-1883) developed a theory of how history progresses. His theory is complete nonsense of course, but the Soviet Communists claimed to be using it and required everyone to study it. In Marx’ theory, history is advancing toward the creation of a universal way of life called Communism. To get there, history  passes through stages called capitalism and socialism. History’s march toward Communism is, supposedly, inexorable. But to convince people of that alleged truth, the Soviet Communists had to make the history of all of the people of the USSR conform to Marxist theory. Stalin complicated matters by also making history laud him and his accomplishments and damn anyone Stalin considered to be an opponent either in the past or in Stalin’s present. The history taught in the Soviet Union was a fabrication created not to discover and convey historical truth but to further the program of the Communist Party.

By the time I lived in the Soviet Union for one academic year in the mis-1970s, few educated people really believed Marxism-Leninism or the propaganda of the Communist Party that was thoroughly grounded in it. Many people. especially educated young people, resented the censorship the Party imposed on every public expression of opinion. They resented the travel restrictions the Party imposed that meant, that while I could go to their country to learn about it and experience it, they could never do the same in my country. They resented the puritanical morality the Party tried to impose on the people.

And there was one more thing they resented. They resented the way the Party had stolen their history from them. The Party had prevented them from learning the truth about Russian or any other history, but they discerned enough to know that that is precisely what the Party had done. They all took history classes at one level of education or another, but what they got was a Marxist-Leninist lie not the historical truth.

I’ll tell one personal story to illustrate the point. In the spring of 1976, when I was doing PhD research in Russia, I got to know a young Russian man who was a 5^th year journalism student at Moscow State University. Soviet journalism was, if anything, a bigger lie than Soviet history was. This journalism student once told me how hard it was for him that everything he saw around him was bad but he was permitted only to report on what was good. I don’t know why this very intelligent young man was studying what they called journalism but what was really propaganda, but he was.

As my time in the Soviet Union was coming to an end, the pastor of the Anglo-American Church that was attached to the American and British embassies gave me a book to pass along to anyone I had the chance to pass it along to and who wanted it. It was a book by Nikolai Berdyaev, the greatest modern theologian of Orthodox Christianity. He was, perhaps obviously, a Russian. He had left Russia after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and died in Paris.

Berdyaev was a leading figure in what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture, a flourishing of all aspects of Russian culture in the years just before World War I. He was also a member of what is called “the Vekhi group.”[3] This group consisted of a number of Russian intellectuals who had once been Marxists of one sort or another but who had abandoned Marxism and returned to the quintessential Russian institution, the Russian Orthodox Church. Berdyaev and all of the members of the Vekhi group were described as class traitors and therefore as great villains if they were mentioned at all in the teaching of Russian history.

My friend the journalism student was an atheist. He made no bones about that fact. He said that having religious faith was one thing he just couldn’t understand about westerners. He surely had no real interest in Russian Orthodox theology. He wasn’t the least bit Orthodox himself. I wasn’t at all sure that he would want a book by Berdyaev.

I offered the book to him anyway. He took it into his hands and nearly broke down in tears. He said, “You will never know what you have done for me.” It certainly is possible that there were aspects of what I had done for him that I don’t know, but I believe I understand a good deal about his reaction to receiving that book. Berdyaev is a significant figure in the history of Russian culture. I’m sure my friend had heard of him, and I’m sure he’d been told that Berdyaev was a traitor to the Communist cause. I’m sure my friend never thought he’d ever be able to read anything by Berdyaev himself. Berdyaev’s work certainly wasn’t published in the USSR.

I understand my friend’s reaction as an expression of what the stealing of real history means to smart, educated people. The Communists had stolen Russian history from the Russian people. They taught history “as it did not happen,” to use Snyder’s wonderful phrase. To quote Snyder again, my friend along with countless other educated Russians felt that false history as an “undead hand” keeping them from learning the truth about their own history, especially any of its good parts, and thereby keeping them from becoming truly themselves. Whenever I remember this friend, I hope that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party’s loss of power he and countless other Russians got the chance they’d never had before to learn true Russian history. Russian intellectual life and Russian culture were never going to flourish if they did not.

The other historical development I think of when I read Snyder’s “the undead hand of history as it did not happen” is the effort currently underway in the American South to rewrite American history, actually, to whitewash American history as it relates to slavery and other aspects of America’s sinful history of racial oppression and segregation. There simply is no doubt that race-based slavery in the American South was a horrific institution that broke the spirits and bodies and stunted the lives of millions of Americans just because of the color of their skin. The American history of race relations is more appalling than most people of my generation were ever taught.

I was educated in a public school system in the 1950s and 1960s. No one ever told me that my home state of Oregon has a truly awful history of racism against both Black Americans and Asian Americans. I didn’t learn of it until I was in law school at the University of Oregon in the late 1970s. No one ever taught me that slavery existed in this country not just in the South but in the North as well. No one ever taught me about the Black Wall Street Massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. No one ever taught me about the brutal racial attacks on returning Black American veterans after World War I.

No one ever taught me just how horrific that Atlantic slave trade was, how it was grounded in kidnapping and how many kidnapped, enslaved people died on slave ships bound for the Americas. Less dramatic but still significant is that fact that no one ever taught me that, while Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr. were big stars in Las Vegas, they were not permitted to stay in the hotels where they performed because they were Black.

No one ever called what white Americans did to Native Americans genocide though that’s what it was. No one ever taught me that Adolf Hitler used what white Americans did to Native Americans as model for what he wanted to do to Europe’s Jews, but he did. No one ever taught me that the US government broke every treaty it ever signed with any First Nation, but it did. No one ever told me that American soldiers used Indian men, women, and children for target practice, but they did. Westerns were popular movies when I was growing up, but in them the whites were the good guys and the Indians were almost always the bad guys though American Indians were simply trying to defend their land and their way of life as white Americans stole the land and tried to turn Indians copies of white Americans. When I was in public school, American history was indeed whitewashed.

In recent times there has been a movement in American intellectual circles to teach the truth about America’s racial history and how truly awful it was. It’s called Critical Race Theory. Black and white Americans are working to wash the whitewash off of that history. Black and white scholars are working to tell the real truth about race relations in America, perhaps in a way that gives white Americans that truth for the first time. It would be perfectly appropriate to call Critical Race Theory “Critical Race Truth.”

A countermovement is afoot in the American South to make sure the whitewash doesn’t come off. Governments and public school districts are prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory. They say don’t teach real history because it makes some people “uncomfortable.” Never mind that the last thing a good historian is trying to do is make people comfortable. These reactionary racists have turned the phrase Critical Race Theory into one of condemnation rather than one of historical honesty.

Some white Southerners say slavery was a jobs program and the slaves were happy being slaves. They deny the brutality of American slavery. They deny the beatings. They deny the rapes. They deny that husbands and wives were sold away from each other and that children were sold away from their parents. Yet all of those things are historical truth. They happened and not in isolated incidents. They were what slavery was.

Russian people were never going to be able to become Russians fully informed about the truth of their history and thus to become fully who they are under the Soviet Communists. The Communists stole Russian history from the Russian people. They gave the people a badly distorted view of their history, one designed to conform to Marxist-Leninist theory not to historical reality.

We Americans are never going to be fully informed about the truth of our history and thus to become fully who we are if the racist reaction against the truth of American history cannot be reversed. Few Americans think history is very important. They think the past is dead and past so that it really doesn’t matter. The undeniable truth, however, is that history is not dead, and it matters a lot. Snyder’s phrase the “undead hand” of history is absolutely appropriate. A people’s history conditions every aspect of that people’s present.

Institutional racism remains powerful in our country precisely because of the history many white Southerners are trying to erase today. We will never begin adequately to address racism in our country if we whitewash the history of the racism of the past. Yet that is precisely what the people opposing teaching the truth about the history of American slavery and racism are trying to do.

We have to ask why they are doing it. I believe that there is only one answer to that question. They are doing it because they are white racists who want to hold onto their positions of power and privilege in American society and culture. They say Critical Race Theory makes them uncomfortable. It does that because it calls them and all of us white Americans on our racism. They are doing it because they know that the truth of American history condemns them and people like them both past and present for that racism. We must defeat today’s efforts by American racists to turn history into propaganda rather than a search for the truth.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says to a group of his Jewish disciples, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:32. False history has never made anyone free. Those who seek to whitewash history always do so because they fear that the truth will indeed make the people free; and free people are hard to oppress. People in positions of power in a society almost always want to oppress other people in that society because doing so preserves the power and the privileges of the powerful. Distorting history can be a powerful element in a policy of oppression. Let us all insist that our schools teach real history not whitewashed history. Then we will know the truth, and perhaps the truth will indeed make us free.

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[1] Snyder, Timothy, The Red Prince, The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (Basic Books, New York, 2008) p. 4.

[2] Though we all know to some extent how brutal both the Nazis and the Soviets were, Synder will show you that they were much worse than you could ever have imagined. Read his book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, New York, 2010). Both the historical overview and the personal stories he gives of eastern Europe between 1934 and 1945 are hard to read at best because they are so violent. They are, however, worth knowing if only because they give us some idea of the depths to which we humans can so easily sink.

[3] “Vekhi” means signposts. It was the name of a journal the group published.

Where Is God?

 

Where Is God?

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

for

Richmond Beach Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

August 25, 2024

 

Scripture: 1 Kings 8:6, 22-30

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

 

I mentioned in my sermon last week that my mother attended First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, for most of her adult life. When I was a child I often attended Sunday worship services at that church with my mother and father. I have a few fairly strong memories of those worship services. The minister was the Rev. Wesley Nicholson, the minister who would marry me and my late first wife years later. I can’t say that I remember anything that he said in those services, though I now know that he was a fairly typical liberal Congregationalist minister, and quite a good one.

There is, however, a bit of music that stands out in my memory of those services. At the beginning of every service we would sing: “The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silent, let all the earth keep silent, before Him.” Of course, we didn’t all keep silent. I mean, you wouldn’t have much of a worship service if no one ever said anything (unless perhaps you were a Quaker). That bit of singing isn’t exactly an invocation. It doesn’t call God to be present. It says God is present there in the church.

Now, I believe that it was true enough that God was present with us there in our church; but I have a problem with those words nonetheless. At least when I was a child, I heard them as saying that God was present with us in church but wasn’t present with us anywhere else. We came to church, I guess I thought, if I thought about it at all (which I doubt), because that’s where God was.  After all, we always sang, “God is in His holy temple,” which I took, correctly I think, to mean God was in the church. We didn’t call the church a temple, but never mind. And I took those words, incorrectly, to mean that’s the only place God was.

Many years later I thought a bit more about where God actually was and is. Put another way, I wondered what God’s physical relationship with the earth and those of us on it actually is. I learned that there are three primary possible answers to that question. One of them is called pantheism. It makes God and creation identical. There is no distance or distinction between them. Another is called classical theism. That’s the old thinking many of us grew up with that puts God up in God’s heaven, distant and separate from the earth though occasionally becoming present in it.

The third is called panentheism. Panentheism asserts that God and creation are not the same thing, but they overlap. God is bigger than creation, but all of creation subsists in God. There’s a biblical basis for it if we need one. There’s a line in Acts that says: “For in [God] we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28. We and all of creation live in God, move in God, and have our being in God. We are not God, but we are in no way separate from God.

Of course, for panentheism, God also transcends us absolutely. If God  transcends us as panentheism says God does, then God cannot be only in one particular place, for God transcends worldly concepts like place. In panentheism, God is both utterly transcendent of creation and intimately present in creation at the same time. That , of course is a paradox. In his great hymn Bring Many Names, Brian Wren, brilliantly, calls God “joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing.” God is indeed ultimately unknowable because God is so transcendent, yet God is also immediately present in creation. Everywhere. All the time.

King Solomon seems to have recognized this paradox in this morning’s scripture reading. In that reading, we find Solomon praying at the dedication of the Jerusalem temple he had constructed—with lots of help of course, including slave labor, but never mind. The first line of this morning’s reading says that during that dedication ceremony priests brought the Ark of the Covenant into the temple and put it “in its place, in the inner sanctuary of the house, the most holy place.”

If you’ve seen the movie “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you know that the ark of the covenant contained God, though God would never be violent the way the power in the ark is in that movie. The ark of the covenant was where Yahweh, the Hebrews’ only God, supposedly lived. That, really, is why the “inner sanctuary,” also called the Holy of Holies, was the most sacred place in the temple. At least in Jesus’ time, only the High Priest went into the Holy of Holies, and he did it only once a year.

Solomon isn’t a priest though he acts like one here. He is praying at the dedication of the temple he has built.. He has had the Ark of the Covenant placed in that innermost sanctuary. Yet he seems to have known that it isn’t realistic to say that that’s only where God is. In his prayer he says: “But will God indeed dwell on earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” 1 Kings 8:27. Solomon got it that, while his new temple may have a most sacred inner sanctuary, and though God was indeed present in that sanctuary, The sanctuary could not contain God.

So where is God? I was recently reading Diana Butler Bass’ book Grounded. At one point in that book she address that very question. She sort of talks in circles, and it takes her forever to get to an answer; but, when she finally does get to an answer, she says that, in today’s world, after all of the horror of the twentieth century, that we cannot blame on God, people are saying: God is right here. God is everywhere.

And that is indeed the answer. God is everywhere! Yes, God was in Solomon’s temple, but that wasn’t because there was anything special about the temple. It was because God is everywhere in creation, and the temple was somewhere in creation. So, at First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, all those years ago, was God in “his holy temple?” Yes, of course God was, for that church was also somewhere in creation, and God is everywhere in creation. Absolutely everywhere. Which, of course, means that God is with us here in this holy temple this morning. Both a comforting and a frightening thought, don’t you think?

I don’t know about you, but, while God may be everywhere, a great many people experience the presence of God particularly strongly in special places. Many people experience God in nature. In the mountains. By the sea. On Puget Sound. I had an experience like that once. It was a long time ago, but it is still so powerful for me that I can hardly speak of it without choking up, so forgive me if I do.

Back in 1986, my family and I had gone to the world’s fair in Vancouver, BC, that was held that year. After we went to the fair, we took a BC ferry to Vancouver Island, then we were taking a Washington state ferry from Vancouver Island to Anacortes. It was a beautiful summer evening. The sea was calm. There was no wind. The ferry approached the San Juan Islands.

I had never seen the San Juan Islands before. As I stood at the rail of that ferry and saw them for the first time I thought: “Now I know where I want to spend eternity!” The scene before me of the water and the islands was so beautiful, so idyllic, that I could hardly believe it. I had been all over much of the United States and at least western Europe and had seen much of the USSR by that time of my life, but I had never seen anything to rival the beauty of the San Juan Islands on that summer evening so long ago.

I’m not sure I thought of it this way at the time. In fact, I’m quite sure I didn’t. Back then I was practicing law in downtown Seattle. If someone had said to me that one day I would go to seminary and become an ordained clergyman, I’d have sought to have them committed for psychiatric evaluation. But in hindsight I know that God was in that place and that I had been touched in an intimate way by God the Holy Spirit. In the beauty of that scene, I was with God. So, where was God for me that evening? On a ferry boat approaching the San Juan Islands.

Another way to think of the experience I had that evening comes to us from Celtic spirituality. That spirituality speaks of what it calls “thin places.” A thin place is anywhere where contact with God is easier than it is at other places. Any place can be a thin place. Nature is sometimes a thin place for many of us. For others of us, perhaps a powerful worship service is a thin place. Perhaps being with someone you dearly love and who dearly loves you is a thin place at times. Any place can be a thin place because God is indeed everywhere.

Now, experiencing God in a thin place in no way means that God isn’t anywhere else. See, God is everywhere. That is a truth we get when we understand panentheism. Everything that exists subsists in God. God utterly transcends us of course, but, like I said, we have a great paradox here. God both utterly transcends us and is intimately present with us at the same time. The utterly transcendent God permeates all of creation. All of it.

And here’s a truth that most of the time I struggle with really getting. God permeates even me, failings and all.  And God permeates you too, though you may find that as hard to believe as I do about God permeating me. God is all around us. God is within us. We are never separate from God. Oh sure. We convince ourselves at times that we are. But we aren’t. We just flat aren’t.

So, the next time God seems remote. The next time you want to cry with Jesus on the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” please know that God has not forsaken you. Please know that God is with you, all around you, and within you, offering you unconditional love, unconditional grace. God is there, always, no matter what, for you to cling to. For you to turn to. For you to lean on. For you to laugh with. For you to cry with.

There is no doubt that God is there. All we have to do to get beyond our belief that God isn’t there is open our eyes, our minds, and our spirits to God’s presence. Pray, preferably in silence at first. Then pour your heart out to God. Pray for what you need. Get mad at God if you want, for God can surely handle and forgive your anger. Give thanks to God for the blessings in your life. Pray for those who are causing you pain. Pray for yourself. Pray for your loved ones. Pray that the Holy Spirit may open your mind and your spirit to the presence of God with you and within you.

Where is God? Everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. No, folks. We are never separate from God. The psalmist of Psalm 139 asks God rhetorically: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” That ancient poet know that the answer to his rhetorical questions was: Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere can we go from God’s spirit or flee from God’s presence. That’s because God is everywhere, absolutely everywhere, all the time. May we all open our hearts and minds and spirits to that incredible divine truth. It makes all the difference. It can get us through. May it be so. Amen.

Bread For the Journey

 

Bread For the Journey

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

for

Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ

Shoreline, Washington

August 18, 2024

 

Scripture: John 6:51-58

 

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

 

I know none of you knew her, but my mother grew up attending First Congregational Church of Valley City, North Dakota. She attended First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, most of her adult life. It’s hard to say how much church really meant to her. She never talked about it. There was, however, one thing people commonly do in church that she would never do. She would never partake of the elements of the sacrament of the Eucharist, the sacrament of Communion. The standard wording of the so-called Words of Institution in the litany for that sacrament has Jesus say: “This is my body broken for you. So often as you eat of it, do so in remembrance of me.” And: “This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood. So often as you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.” Mom must have heard those words at least hundreds of times before she stopped going to church on Communion Sundays. Those are the words that led her to say “Communion is cannibalism.”

I don’t know if Mom ever heard the passage from the Gospel of John that we heard this morning, but, if she did, it would just have reenforced her belief that the Eucharist is cannibalism. I mean, in those verses Jesus says: “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” And: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” It’s pretty easy to react to sayings like that with: “Ick! That’s gross! That’s cannibalism!”

OK, but The Words of Institution—eat my body, drink my blood—are words that Christians have spoken since the earliest years of the Christian faith. They first appear in an authentic letter of Paul that dates from around 55 CE or so. Christians say them all over the world every single day. I have said them many times when I have presided at the sacrament, something that has always been particularly meaningful for me. I have heard other pastors in this church and elsewhere say them many, many times. And I’ve never thought of myself as a cannibal. I’ve never thought of the people I served in the sacrament to be cannibals. I’ve never considered any Christians to be cannibals. So there must be some way to hear those words and not have them gross you out.

I am convinced, and I believe that most UCC clergy are convinced, that those sacred words don’t gross us out because we don’t take them literally. The great Roman Catholic tradition says the elements of the Eucharist are the true body and blood of Christ, but in our Congregationalist tradition we most commonly think of those words as symbols not as mere statements of fact. We understand that when Jesus said “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” he didn’t mean it literally. When he said “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” as he does in our scripture reading this morning, he didn’t mean literally that he was made out of bread. He was speaking at least in metaphors. Actually, he was speaking in symbols.

OK, but what’s a symbol? A symbol is an object or a word that points beyond itself to a deeper truth that we simply cannot express directly with our little human words. Clearly, Jesus didn’t mean literally I am bread, so eat my body and drink my blood. He was using body and blood and bread as symbols for a deep spiritual truth that he could convey to his friends better through symbols than he ever could through literal words. He was using symbols to point to something all of us need, and we don’t need to become cannibals.

So what was he pointing to with his symbols of bread, flesh, and blood? He was, I believe, pointing to a spiritual hunger every one of us humans has and how we can satisfy it. You know, being human is actually a pretty complex thing. We all have physical needs. We all need food and fluids. We die without them. But what far too few people in our culture realize is that we also have spiritual needs. We all long for connection with something that is greater than ourselves. We all long for connection with what in the Christian tradition we call God. To long for connection with God is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. All of the great Christian theologians recognize that truth.

Sadly, we live in a culture in which a great many people don’t believe that they have that longing. We live in a culture formed by the rationalism and scientism of the eighteenth century. Those ways of thinking, when they’re all we do, lead us to deny the reality of anything that we can’t perceive with our normal senses and that we can’t in some way manipulate. We can’t experience God with our normal senses because God is Spirit not matter. We can’t manipulate God because God utterly transcends all of our human abilities while being always present with us at the same time. Christians don’t deny the reality of God. We don’t deny the reality of a spiritual dimension of reality. At least at some level of our psyches we feel that longing for connection with God that humans have felt for as long as there have been humans on this planet.

Humans have found many different ways of making that connection. But we’re Christians, and the Christian way of making that connection is with and through Jesus Christ. That’s not the only way to do it, but it is our way. We can indeed make a connection with God by turning to Jesus Christ. In him we connect with an unconditional, transcendent love that is the reality behind all reality. That is the great blessing we receive as we practice our Christian faith.

And it isn’t really possible to talk about who Jesus is or why he is important to us without using symbols. We actually use symbols all the time. The most prominent Christian symbol is the cross. A cross was, originally, a Roman instrument of terror and death, but that’s not how we think of it. Rather, when we see the cross, if we’ll just stop and think about it, we see Jesus. The cross points beyond itself to the spiritual reality of Jesus’ presence with us and with all people. That’s why it is the central Christian symbol.

When Jesus calls himself bread, and when he tells us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he isn’t asking us to be cannibals. He’s using symbols to convey a profound truth. Through those symbols, he told his disciples back when he was physically alive on the earth, and he tells us now, that connecting ourselves to him, we can satisfy our spiritual hunger. When we connect our spirits with his, we find food for the journey.

And folks, we all need food for the journey of our lives don’t we. I know that I sure do, and I’m pretty sure you do too. Life isn’t always easy, as I’m sure all of you know. We all face challenges in our lives. We all face obstacles in our path. We all know that we’re mortal. We all experience pain and loss at some point in our lives. I know that I sure have, and I’m pretty sure that you have too. I also know that if you haven’t, you will. It’s easy to give up. We can feel that we’re running on empty in our inmost being.

That’s when Jesus Christ can fill us up. That is when he is living bread. Just as literal bread and drink satisfy our physical needs, so Jesus can satisfy our spiritual needs. When we take in his spirit, we are fed. Not physically but spiritually. Jesus Christ nourishes our souls the way bread nourishes our bodies. He is bread more nourishing than physical bread can ever be.

And folks, we need that spiritual nourishment if we’re going to make it through life in one piece. We get tired so easily. We get down so easily. We feel fear so easily. We feel despair so easily. I don’t know about you, but I know the news of the day these days is so horrific that I’ve nearly stopped learning about it because I can’t handle it—though because of Kamala Harris it isn’t as bad as it used to be. We need God with us always, and God is with us always. But it is in those times when our spirits lag, when our spirits fall, that we most especially need Jesus. In Jesus we can find the rest we can’t often find in the world. We can find peace in a world of conflict. We can find strength when our strength fails us. We can find encouragement when our spirits flag. Jesus is indeed bread for the journey.

So all the time, but especially in the hard times, turn to Jesus. Connect your spirit with his. How? Mostly through prayer, so pray without ceasing. When you do connect with Jesus, you will indeed be fed spiritual bread for the journey. Doing it won’t make the hard times go away. After all, they certainly didn’t go away for Jesus. Doing it will, however, give you strength to deal with those hard times without giving up. And for that great blessing, let all the people say: “Thanks be to God!”

On Obeying Orders

 On Obeying Orders 

In his book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder describes horror in the territory roughly bordered by Poland in the west, Ukraine in the east, Estonia in the north, and the Black Sea in the south between the years 1933 and 1945 that is appalling nearly beyond belief. This brief period of twelve years began with the Holodomor, Stalin’s intentional starvation of several million people, most of them Ukrainians. It included the Holocaust, and it ended only with the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, primarily through the forces of the USSR. In those years, two totalitarian regimes, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, intentionally murdered more than ten million people. They shot, gassed, and otherwise killed women, men, and children in simply staggering numbers. I have written here before about how such a thing could be possible. In an earlier post, I said that what it took for it to happen was dehumanization of the other and a secular ideology. I remain convinced that those are two major causes of the horror in the Bloodlands.  

I have become convinced, however, that there was another dynamic at work as well. It is the dynamic of people in uniform or otherwise in an organization that emphasized its members’ duty to obey orders obeying orders no matter how horrific the orders are. Stalin ordered his Communists to starve millions of people to death, and his Communists did it. Hitler authorized the Holocaust, Himmler, Eichmann, and others ordered it, and German soldiers and SS troops carried it out. What is it about Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany that led people to carry out the unspeakably demonic orders they were given? 

Soviet Russia was ruled by a man whose power came from his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). That party proudly claimed its identity as a Marxist-Leninist political organization. It’s the Leninist part of that identity that produced people obeying profoundly sinful orders. Lenin’s major contribution to Marxist ideology was his assertion that the Communist Party represented the most class-conscious elements of the people it ruled. The Party was, for Lenin, the cutting edge of a socialist revolution carried out on behalf and for the benefit of the proletariat, the working class of society. Under this aspect of Leninism, what the Party ordered was by definition done to effect the country’s march first toward socialism, under which the workers ruled, and then to communism, under which no one ruled.  

On paper, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was built from the bottom up. Its base consisted of party members spread across the entire country. There was an organizational hierarchy on top of that base. It led from regional party heads to the Central Committee. The Central Committee elected a smaller group of leaders called the Politburo, shorthand for Political Bureau, and a Secretariat. The Politburo and the Secretariat elected a General Secretary, the top position in the party.  

The Soviet Communists said that this structure was based on the principle of “democratic centralism.” In theory, Party members could initially discuss any issue freely. That’s the “democratic” part of democratic centralism. But once the Party leadership had made a decision about any matter, all Party members were required to support and implement that decision and not to object to it. That’s the “centralism” part of democratic centralism.  

In practice, the office of General Secretary became the dominant position in this structure. That was true to a considerable extent when Lenin held that position. That reality was firmly established under Stalin.1 He succeeded Lenin as General Secretary after Lenin’s death in early 1924. He held that position until his own death in 1953. Under Stalin, the CPSU became a top down organization in which the General Secretary, that is, Stalin, made all the final decisions. The entire Party, and indeed the entire Soviet population, was required to effect whatever decision the Genral Secretary made. Because any such decision was by definition for the advancement of the revolution, any disagreement with or refusal to carry out any such decision constituted anti-revolutionary behavior. Anti-revolutionary behavior was punished by measures ranging from expulsion from the Party to a bullet in the back of the head. Dissent of any kind was not tolerated, and what the Party, that is, the Genral Secretary, ordered had to be carried out under the threat of such punishment. Obeying the orders of the CPSU became the standard of behavior in the Soviet Union. It remained the standard of Soviet behavior until the end of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. 

In the early 1930s, Stalin decided that he had to “collectivize” agriculture in the entire country. Local peasants were to be forced to turn over their property, including their land and their farm animals, to a “collective farm” which would make all of the decisions about crops and harvests. Its purpose was to assure compliance with orders and production quotas from the CPSU. Across the country, peasants objected. They resisted collectivization in every way they could. They even slaughtered their animals rather than turn them over to the collective. Resistance was particularly strong in Ukraine. 

During these years, and indeed up until it declared independence from the USSR in 1991, Ukraine was one of the “republics” of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In reality, it was mostly ruled not by Ukrainians but by Russians. And whatever the Party ordered had the force of law. The Party required both Party members and non-members to carry out its orders. Ukraine’s history is quite different from Russia’s. That history resulted in the reality that Ukrainians consider themselves to be more western than the Russians are. They have long resented being ruled by Russians, but under Stalin they had no choice but to obey orders though they mostly came from Russians not Ukrainians. 

Stalin decided to overcome Ukrainian resistance to Russian rule and collectivization by starving the Ukrainians to death. He ordered Party operatives in Ukraine to take all food away from peasants and to prohibit any food being imported into Ukraine. Those operatives obeyed his order. They confiscated grain harvests. They took farm animals. They forced their way into people’s homes and took whatever food they found there. Famine became widespread in Ukraine. People began starving to death in enormous numbers. Still, all through 1933 and into 1934, Stalin kept his orders in place. He knew millions of people were starving to death, which was precisely what he wanted. That’s what his Party underlings effected. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but perhaps as many as four million Ukrainians starved to death before Stalin lifted his order and allowed Ukrainians to possess food again. 

With the Germans, it’s almost become a joke. “I vas just following orders!” Indeed, a very large number of members of the Wehrmacht and especially of the SS carried out orders to kill millions of people in the Bloodlands between 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and the end of the war in 1945. The Nazis had a long-term plan that that would eventually include killing most Slavs, though not immediately, through starvation, and reducing any who remained to slavery. Hitler saw the broad plains of the USSR and especially the fertile soil of Ukraine as “Lebensraum,” living space, for the Germans. His plans included removing all Jews from the territory he intended to occupy. At first, he did not plan to kill all of them. He had various schemes in mind for deporting them from their land so Germans could move in. One scheme involved deporting eastern Europe’s Jews to Madagascar, but the British navy made that impossible. He thought that perhaps he could relocate them in Siberia east of the Urals. That became impossible when he failed to conquer the USSR.  

So he decided he had to kill all eastern Europe’s Jews if he were to have any hope of executing his plan for German expansion. Of course, he also hated Jewish people. He saw all Jews as subhuman but nonetheless responsible for all of Germany’s problems. There were actually few Jews in Germany itself. But to the east of Germany there were millions. Many Jews had moved there centuries earlier when Spain and other western European nations expelled them all. The Spanish did it in 1492, a year famous in the Americas for something else. Beginning with Catherine the Great (ruled 1962-1796), the Russians moved all Jews in the empire to western regions, mostly of Ukraine and Belarus, into what was called “the Pale of Settlement.” There were fewer than 200,000 Jews in Germany itself, but Poland and the Pale of Settlement had become a homeland for an enormous number of Jewish people. 

Beginning in about 1942, Hitler changed his plan for the Jews from deportation to extermination. The death camps the SS constructed and operated at Auschwitz and elsewhere are famous, and a great many Jews died in them. But most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were shot not gassed. German forces would compel the Jews of a particular area to dig pits, then they would shoot them so that their bodies fell into the pits they had dug. An area that had been rich with Jewish people, Jewish faith, and Jewish culture to this day is an area with very few Jews. Hitler didn’t kill all of the Jews in eastern Europe, but he came damned close. 

German citizens carried out orders to murder millions of people. The explanation of how they could do it has both similarities with and differences from the reasons Soviet citizens did essentially the same thing. Germany had a long history of militarism. Beginning in Prussia, German military forces had played major roles in any number of European wars. Germans highly valued the military. Their emperor, the Kaiser, often strutted his stuff as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, the German army. Discipline in the German army was strict. Orders were to be obeyed. Orders were to be obeyed even when they were orders to commit genocide. 

Obeying orders is, of course, expected in any military organization. They’re all based on a hierarchy of authority. People at a lower level of authority must obey orders from people at a higher level of authority. The purpose of any military is to kill people and destroy property. Soldiers routinely obey orders to do precisely that. I’m no military expert, but I suppose no military could function as a military without a hierarchy of authority and a rule and an ethic of obeying orders.  

Then there was the Nazi party. It wasn’t as organized as the CPSU was, but it had at its top a man called “der Führer,” the leader. The Nazi party was essentially the party of Adolf Hitler. Hitler had established a totalitarian regime in Germany that tolerated dissent no better than the CPSU did. He created two instruments of terror. One was the Gestapo, an acronym for the Germans words that mean the secret state police. At least one of the purposes of the Gestapo was to arrest anyone who publicly expresses any kind of opposition to the Nazi regime. The other was the SS, the Schützstaffel, the “protection squadron.” The members of the SS were Hitler’s especially brutal and especially effective killers. They shot many if not most of the Jews the Nazis executed with bullets rather than gas. They ran the death camps. They were particularly willing to commit unspeakable atrocities like genocide. No one wanted to come to the attention of either the Gestapo or the SS. Those organizations crushed all dissent. They enforced compliance with Nazi law. Crossing them was no safer for the Germans than crossing the CPSU was for the Soviets.  

In the years 1933 to 1945, Soviet and German citizens obeyed orders to kill millions of innocent people. The horror of what they did is beyond comprehension, or at least it’s beyond my comprehension. I said here earlier that dehumanization of the other and a secular ideology explain how it could happen. I need to add a third factor, the factor of people’s willingness to obey orders even when they are orders to commit crimes against humanity. I also, however, need to make a distinction here. In freer societies, people in uniform may obey orders because the law and military regulations says they must. They may also, however, believe that it is their patriotic duty to participate in the military the way the military says they are to participate. They may obey both out of compliance with rules and regulations and out of a sense of duty. 

People in totalitarian systems may obey orders in part for those same reasons. After all, Nazi Germany was still Germany, and most Germans were very patriotic. The Soviet Union was, in effect, still the Russian Empire albeit with a far more brutal government, and the Russian people will always fight to the death to defend “Mother Russia.” But in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there was an additional incentive. It was terror. It was legitimate fear of the consequences of disobeying an order. In both systems, disobedience could get you a bullet in the back of the head.  At the least, it could get you a long prison sentence in a prison that was hell on earth, especially in the USSR. I don’t mean to excuse either the Holodomor or the Holocaust. Both are atrocities most people couldn’t even have imagined until they happened and are utterly inexcusable. I just want to make my distinction between freer societies and radically unfree societies like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. 

In the United States today, we may be on the brink of a crisis around our military obeying orders. In theory, soldiers may disobey illegal orders, but, frankly, I think that is unlikely to occur except in a few isolated instances. The crisis will almost certainly be upon us if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. He has said he will use the military against open demonstrations of which he disapproves. He may well intend to use the military to round up immigrants here without proper documentation. He will no doubt order the military to suppress any real open opposition to him or to his policies. Federal law prohibits the used of the armed services against civilians. There is one federal law that the president can invoke that may make doing so legal, but the tradition in this country is that soldiers must not obey illegal orders. 

There is no doubt that Trump would give the US armed forces illegal orders. Would American soldiers carry out such orders? I fear that the answer is, “Yes.” The obligation to obey orders is so deeply entrenched in American military culture that it would, I fear, occur to very few soldiers to disobey any order. Yet soldiers disobeying illegal orders may be the only recourse we have to stop Donald Trump from becoming the American dictator he so badly wants to be. Perhaps our hope lies with the highest levels of military command. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might be willing to refuse to pass an illegal order from the president to the troops who would have to carry it out. We can at least hope that to be true. 

The United States is neither the Soviet Union nor Nazi Germany. I don’t think even Donald Trump would give an order to the military to kill millions of innocent civilians, though he might very well give it an order to round up and detail an enormous number of immigrants. When Trump was president, we came as close as this country has ever come to a president issuing a clearly illegal order to the US military. We will certainly be in that position again if the American voters are stupid and fearful enough to put Trump back in office. May it not be so.