A Brilliant Piece on War

 This evening I watched a PBS program titled American Heart in World War I, A Carnegie Hall Tribute. At first I couldn’t stop thinking about singing in Carnegie Hall with John Rutter back in 2018. But this program was brilliantly done. It focused on a few individual stories and on one particular battle, the Argonne-Meuse offensive. But it did a brilliant job of conveying the tragedy and loss of war as well as the heroism. It used a lot of music, most of it from around the time of American involvement in World War I, especially the music of a Black composer I’d never heard of named Europe. The program was powerful and heartbreaking. It respected the people who fought in that war, especially those wounded in it, which, I imagine, was just about everyone in one way or another, but it certainly did not glorify war. At the beginning it made it clear that no one really knows why that war was fought at all. It was one of the best pieces on war I have ever seen. I highly recommend it. 

Nonviolence? Really?

 

Nonviolence? Really?

November 7, 2025

Turn the other cheek. Give your coat as well. Go also the second mile. Matthew 5:38-42. Love your enemies. Matthew 5:44. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Matthew 26:52. These verses, especially those from Matthew 5, don’t actually mean what most people take them to mean. They don’t command meek passivity in the face of evil. If you want to know more about that truth see Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be, especially the chapter titled “Jesus’ Third Way.” Still, there is no doubt that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. He never told us to accept evil, but he told us never to resist it violently. Jesus wouldn’t even let his followers use violence in an attempt to save him from crucifixion. Violence is not Jesus’ way. It isn’t Jesus’ way because it isn’t God’s way. It must, therefore, never be our way. I have taught, preached, and written about Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence for decades. I have said that while I have colleagues who see their primary call from God being work for justice or ecological sanity, I see my call from God to be primarily the advocacy of Jesus’ way of nonviolence.

I still believe that to be true, I guess. But. But this morning I saw something that, frankly, has caused me to have my doubts. This morning I received a mass email to which I’ve subscribed from Diana Butler Bass. If you don’t know who Diana Butler Bass is, don’t worry about it. She’s a prolific Christian writer, but who she is doesn’t matter for my purposes here. In this morning’s email she attacked the notion of empire at length, saying, correctly, that Jesus opposed the Romen Empire every way he could (except, I would add, with violence).

Then Bass gave a statistic I hadn’t heard before, citing an article from the New Yorker as her source for it. We all know that early in his current term as president the American fascist Donald Trump brought in the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and together they took an illegal and immoral hatchet to the federal government. Among the unconscionable, sinful things they did was to destroy the American programs that provided vital, life-supporting aid to the poor people of Africa. They basically shut down USAID, and agency that was the primary provider of that aid. I knew they’d done that. I’d heard the predictions of the harm what they had done would cause.

I’d heard, but I didn’t really know. Not until this morning. In Bass’ email I read that since Trump and Musk destroyed USAID, something like 600,000 Africans, most of them children, have died because they lost life-saving aid from the United States. Six hundred thousand men, women, and (mostly) children dead. Men, women and children who would still be alive but for the American fascists Trump and Musk (who, by the way, isn’t actually American but African). That’s the population of a good-sized American city. It’s more than the population of one of our states (Wyoming). It’s more than the number of American casualties in World War II, as horrific as that casualty number truly is.

And, of course, that’s not all the deaths Trump and his would-be brownshirts have caused and are planning to cause. Trump’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic during his first term in office caused an unknown but huge number of avoidable deaths. Now he wants to cut food and medical care off from millions of Americans. After all, to him, if you need a bit of help to live, you don’t deserve to live. The horrors of the two Trump administrations just go on and on, with no end in sight. I mean, we won’t even get to vote against Trump and his MAGA allies again for another year. In the meantime, and probably even thereafter, Trump’s killing of innocent people in service of a fascist ideology and our country’s billionaires will continue.

As I read Bass’ piece this morning and thought of all the other death Trump has caused and has set out to cause in the future I thought: Nonviolence? Really? I mean, millions of Americans support the son-of-a-bitch (no offense to female dogs intended), and the rest of us sit here, wring our hands, write essays no one will read, occasionally go to an anti-Trump demonstration, vote against Republicans when we get the chance, and otherwise do jack shit to get rid of Trump and his fascist minions. Folks, for perhaps the first time in my life, this morning I felt that violence may after all be needful. Perhaps violence is the answer. Perhaps violence is the only answer.

Now, I am not here to advocate violence. I am a Christian. I am even an ordained Christian pastor. Not a Christian Nationalist Christian, for those so-called Christians aren’t really Christians in any meaningful sense at all. A real Christian. A Christian who believes that to be Christian is to follow Jesus in every way we can, and that includes perhaps first of all following his teaching  and example of nonviolence. It means to know it when we can’t bring ourselves to follow Jesus and to pray for forgiveness for our failure to do so.

I am here to say that sticking to Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence isn’t easy. The temptation to resort to violence in an attempt to solve problems to which there seems to be no other solution is strong to say the least. Being nonviolent can make it feel like we’re not doing anything, or at least not doing enough, to fight demonic evil like Donald Trump.[1] And according to the standards of the world, we aren’t.

But here’s the thing. God does not call us to live according to the standards of the world. And though Jesus once said that his yoke was easy, Matthew 11:30, he also said deny yourself and take my cross upon you, Matthew 16:24. There is, of course, nothing easy about taking on an instrument of torture and execution like a cross. And human experience, or at least my human experience, tells me that truly following Jesus is rarely actually as easy as we would like it to be.

We humans always want moral decisions to be easy. We’re much more comfortable with black and white, yes/no questions than we are with most of the question life actually presents us with. Those questions are more often difficult than they are easy. Sure, it’s easy to say don’t murder, and that one is always simply true and has no actual nuance to it.

But never use violence, not even to defeat diabolical evil? That one is nothing but nuance. By that I mean that when we obey Jesus’ commandment never to use violence, there are tradeoffs. We have to give up our human belief that using violence would actually solve the problem. We have to live with frustration that comes from the fact that nonviolence can seem so ineffective as a solution to evil, at least in the short term. We may have to live with the charge from more worldly people that we’re cowards for not using violence. Or that we’re complicit in the perpetuation of evil because we will not take up arms against it.

Today I’m frustrated as hell that I can’t take up a weapon and go to war against MAGA, but I know that I can’t. I know that I mustn’t. I know that I can’t and that I mustn’t because I am a Christian. And so I know that I won’t. I am not by nature a violet person in any event; but, even if I were, Jesus would tell me “Oh no you don’t! No violence, Sorenson. Period.” So I won’t. Ever. No matter what. And I’ll live with what feels like the moral ambiguity of that decision trusting that the decision is not actually morally ambiguous at all but is rather God’s way and therefore must be my way.

So. Nonviolence? Really? Yes really. Yes nonetheless. Yes despite how it feels in difficult times. Yes, despite what can feel for all the world like moral ambiguity. Yes despite what the world says. Yes despite what other so-called Christians say. Nonviolence is God’s way. That really is all there is to it. And because it is God’s way, it must be our way too. That’s all there is to it too. Sticking to nonviolence isn’t easy. In our culture with its mania over guns and the military it isn’t popular. But: Nonviolence? Really? Yes really, So be it.

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[1] Every time I write something like that, my quite extensive knowledge of Soviet history (I have a PhD in Russian history and lived in Soviet Russia for a year doing PhD research) comes to mind. When Stalin ruled the USSR, writing things like that about him would get you sent to the Gulag at best if not get you a bullet in the back of the head. I scream about Trump being a fascist and an existential threat to my country, and he is both of those things. Still, I am glad that saying those things won’t get me imprisoned or killed, not yet at least.

Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong

 

Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong

November 2, 2025

I know a Christian church pastor, no names or other identifying information here, of whom I am quite fond. They are a very good preacher.[1] As far as I know, they are a very good person. They are personable and pleasant. On the whole, I am quite satisfied with them. I mean nothing here as anything to detract from them as a good church pastor.

But. But at church this morning I had not one but a couple objections to what they did, didn’t say, and said. So I’ve titled this peace “Sometimes Even the Good Ones Get It Wrong.” The pastor of whom I write here is one of the good ones. Yet, of course, the best of us make mistakes. I am prideful enough to believe (to know, actually) that I am a much better than average preacher and pastor, but I would never claim never to have made mistakes. I know a whole lot better than that. Like every other preacher and pastor, I’m human. That means I am far from perfect, and so is the pastor about whom I write in this piece. Here, then, are the things to which I object about their service this morning.

Today was a Communion Sunday. The pastor in question presided at the sacrament. I love the sacrament of the Eucharist. Presiding at it has been one of the joys of time as a parish pastor and of the times I have been able to preside at it since my retirement. There are not many ways in which I am a traditionalist, yet I am a traditionalist in at least some ways when it comes to the Eucharist though I will never hold with a closed table. When I preside at the sacrament I always say “This is the Lord’s table, it is not our table, and all are welcome here….” I believe that truth with every fiber of my faith, and I will never deny or reject it.

There is, however, something about traditional Christian liturgy that matters here. In any worship service that includes the Eucharist, the sacrament is, or at least ought to be, the highlight of the service. Everything else leads up to it. After the Eucharist as the climax of the service, the presiding officer may have the people sing a hymn and give a closing benediction, but at that point the service ends and the people are sent out into the world with the good news of Jesus, his teaching, and his resurrection. There’s nothing more to say. Nothing more to do. Putting the sacrament earlier in the service just diminishes its significance, its central role in Christian worship.

Yet at the church to which I refer, the pastors usually, though not quite always, put the Eucharist early in the service. They make it the first significant thing that happens after the people are gathered and called to worship. I know why they do it. They do it because they want the church’s children to be able to participate in the sacrament, and they dismiss the children, such as are there (which usually isn’t many), to what they call “faith formation” and churches usually call “Sunday School” quite early in the service.

When I was church pastor, I always had the children’s education people bring the kids back into the sanctuary for the sacrament near the end of the service. Yes, that’s a bit awkward. Yes, it takes a bit of coordination between the faith formation leaders and the flow of the service. It’s not easy, but it can be done. I’ve done it a great many times.

Yet the lead pastor of the church I’m discussing, not the pastor I’m critiquing here, has established the pattern of putting the sacrament early in the service so they don’t have to coordinate calling the young people back into the sanctuary to participate in it. That’s what the pastor did this morning. I don’t know if they would do it differently if it were entirely up to them. I rather doubt it, but I don’t know. What I do know is that they followed the lead pastor’s model this morning. And I know that that is just flat liturgically wrong. It diminishes the importance and power of the Eucharist, something no Christian worship leader has any business doing.

Then there’s an issue around what we call the “words of institution.” The sacrament and the words that we say when performing it are nearly two millennia old. They connect us with countless Christians who celebrate the sacrament today and with countless more who have celebrated it in the past. The words of the sacrament include what are called the “words of institution.” They are: :”After supper he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them saying ‘Take, eat, this is my body broken for you. So often as you eat of it, do so in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup, blessed it, and give it to them saying ‘Take, drink. This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood. So often as you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.’” In the Roman Catholic ritual there is almost something magical about these words. They are the point at which the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. There isn’t anything magical about them in the theology of my Protestant tradition, but they are still important. They are what makes the sacrament a sacrament and not just a ritual. To me and, I believe, to all sacramental traditionalists, it is important that they be said properly and completely.

This morning, the pastor in question didn’t say them properly and completely. For both the bread and the wine, she left out “give.” She had it that Jesus “took” and “blessed” the bread and the cup, but she didn’t have him giving it to his disciples. I’m sorry, pastor. That’s just wrong. There is a specific movement built into the sacrament. It appears in its full form in reference to the bread. It goes: “Took, blessed, broke, gave.” It’s a four-part movement. It concludes with Jesus giving the bread to the gathered disciples. Without “give,” the disciples aren’t involved at all. Neither are we. Dear pastor, you really shouldn’t have left “give” out.

They we come to the sermon this pastor gave this morning. They really are a good preacher, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But this morning they were talking about the story of
Tamar in Genesis. Look that story up if you’re curious about the details, but the important part of the story for my purposes right now is that in centers around something called the law of levirate marriage. Levirate marriage is an ancient Hebrew law that says that if a man is married but dies without leaving a male heir, the deceased man’s eldest surviving brother shall marry his widow and with her produce a male heir not for himself but for his deceased brother. That male child becomes the deceased brother’s heir, not the heir of the child’s biological father.

This law arose and was practiced (if it was in fact practiced at all) in a highly patriarchal society. In that society and its culture, men mattered, women, for the most part at least, did not. Hebrew scripture is full of admonitions for the people to care for widows, but there was little if any law that dealt with that issue.

The law had many provisions dealing with property rights and inheritance. Under that law, only men had the right to own property. Hebrew culture considered it vitally important that real property remain within the owner’s family, more specifically, in the owner’s direct line of descent. That’s what the law of levirate marriage was all about. Yes, it involved a woman, a widow actually; but it was about a family’s property rights not about the protection of women.

This  morning the pastor in question got the law of levirate marriage all wrong. She did mention the property succession issue briefly, but she talked far more about the law being in place to protect widows. She said its purpose and function were to keep a widow within her deceased’s husband’s family and thus to avoid her becoming alone and without means of support. She said that Tamar did what she did to protect herself by reconnecting herself with her former father-in-law’s family. Perhaps she used the applicable law in that way, but that simply is not what the law was about. This morning, this pastor just got it wrong. It seems to me that she was reading something into the relevant law that she would like for there to be there. I get that. I wish ancient Hebrew law cared about women a lot more than it did, but it just didn’t. Our pastor in question was just wrong here.

Now, of course, all of us preachers make mistakes. I have quite liked the pastor in question in the past, and I still do. But here’s a thing about being a preacher listening to preachers. We all evaluate. We all judge. It’s not so much that we want to. It’s just that we’ve done what the preacher we’re listening is doing. We’re trained and experienced in what she’s doing. We know more about what she’s talking about than most (if not quite all) lay people do. Try as we might, most of us just can’t turn off our judgment function. I didn’t turn mine off this morning. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps we all should be able to, but I’m hardly the only preacher I’ve heard say we can’t do it. So be it.

This morning, this preacher got more than one thing wrong. That doesn’t make them a bad preacher. Most of the time they’re quite a good preacher. It doesn’t make them a bad pastor. I’m quite sure they’re a good pastor. But sometimes even the good ones get it wrong. That’s what this pastor did this morning. God bless her, and God bless all of us who dare to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. God knows we all need grace to cover our mistakes.

 

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[1] This pastor uses “they/their” as their pronouns. I’m old, and I’m old enough that I have the devil’s own time making those pronouns anything but plural, but here they are used as singulars, so I will use them for this person too..

On Consciousness

 

On Consciousness

October 23, 2025

 

Just now I was looking online at someone’s list of the 12 most beautiful cities in Europe. I went through the list and said that I’ve been in 8 of them. But then I thought: What does it mean to say that “I” have been in 8 of them? That feels right, but it was an 11 year old Tom Sorenson who was in Paris. The only one of them I’ve been in since 1975 is Edinburgh. I was there about three months ago on a choir tour. So I ask: What does “I” mean? Who am or what is “I”? I’m not sure even the philosophers or scientists have an answer to that one, but it seems to me that “I” has to refer to a continuance of consciousness. Yes, in a sense, there is also a continuance of physical being. That 11 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body has evolved into today’s 79 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body though those two bodies sure don’t look much alike. Tom Sorenson’s consciousness has changed a lot less if it has changed at all. I think it is that consciousness that is the “I” when I say “I”.

OK, but what is consciousness? Online definitions mostly use the word “awareness” or the phrase “being aware” of something. But what is it that is “aware?” Is it merely a function of the brain? Certainly, the brain is involved. A person can be unconscious and still be alive. Our brain takes us through sleep as an altered type of consciousness, one both our bodies and our minds seem to need though the reasons we need it aren’t at all clear.

Yet the brain is a physical object. It is an organ made up of particular tissues that seem to function in particular ways. And it can stop functioning normally while a person is still alive. Does an “I” cease to be when a person is unconscious, say, in a coma? We wouldn’t say no. We’d think the person in the coma is the same person who was there before going into a coma. Now, perhaps a person in a coma is still conscious at some level. They say such a person actually can hear people talk to them, they just can’t respond. So though consciousness has changed, it hasn’t stopped, it hasn’t disappeared.

How does the brain as a physical object produce consciousness? After all, as far as we know, objects that are merely physical have no consciousness. They aren’t “aware” in any sense at all. Yet animals are all aware at some level, and plants may be too. How does consciousness-less matter become conscious?

The only answer I can come up with to that question is: Spirit. But what is “spirit?” MSN Copilot defines it as “the nonphysical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul,” and “those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person….” So according to these definitions, “spirit” is something nonphysical in a person that somehow functions within the person or the “qualities” that that functioning produces.

OK, but how can something that is “nonphysical” function? How can it do anything? The only answer I can come up with to that question is that “spirit” is an ultimate reality behind every physical thing that is. In ways beyond our understanding, spirit gives rise to physicality while remaining beyond physicality or at least distinct from it. Yet it functions in and through physicality, or at least in and through animate physicality, to produce consciousness. What’s “animate physicality?” Perhaps it is just something physical that has been “animated” by the presence of spirit within it. We could say, I think, that animate physicality is something physical brought to consciousness by the presence of spirit.

Now, there are, of course, unanswerable questions about spirit. We might be able, more or less, to describe it or to describe how we experience it or describe what we think it does. Beyond that, however, we run out of language for it. We cannot even begin to know where it comes from. Did it have a beginning? Will it have an end? Did something, or some force, greater than spirit create it? If not, where indeed does it come from? If so, what is that greater something? Here, it seems to me, we’ve run into the limits of human knowledge, which are the limits of human language. That our knowledge and language have limits doesn’t mean there is nothing real beyond them. It just means that we can never fully know or express in any fully adequate way what the something beyond them is.

Which, perhaps, is why we call that something that subsists beyond human knowledge and language “God.” “God” is indeed our primary word for that which lies beyond human language and human knowledge but which we can nonetheless experience if we are open to experiencing it. It’s not just our primary word for that reality, it is a symbol of that transcendent reality. It points beyond itself to that reality and connects us with that reality in an intimate way, or at least it does those things if we are open to it doing them.

We have another word we use for the reality I’m trying to write about here. That word is Spirit. We say that God is Spirit, and we mean that God is at least an active yet ineffable reality among us. Yet God isn’t just among us. God is within us. So what is consciousness? It is the presence of Spirit, that is, of God in every conscious being. Or if not exactly God in every conscious being, then it is a consequence of God acting on and perhaps in every being.

Now, what I’ve said here amount to this: We don’t know and probably can’t know how inanimate matter becomes conscious, that is, becomes sensate. So we say it has to do with spirit, and spirit is essentially God. In saying these things, we sort of answer my original question about what consciousness is, and we sort of haven’t. We have moved the inquiry from the human brain to God, but who is God? Why is there God? Where does God come from? Those, my friends are simply unanswerable questions. Far too people who say they believe in God understand this truth, but the final answer to every question about God is: We don’t know, and more than that, we can’t know. “Belief” in God is not about having knowledge. It is accepting that there is something, however we may conceptualize that something, so far beyond us that we just can’t know everything we’d like to know about it.

So if “belief” in God isn’t about knowledge, what is it about? It is about trust. It is about trusting that a reality we can’t know but can, if we’re open to it, experience, is in fact real. I call myself a man of faith. Heck, I’m even a seminary trained and ordained Christian minister. But I don’t claim to “know” who God really is. I don’t claim to be able to “know” who God really is. Yet I have experienced a presence in my life that I can only call “God.” So have billions upon billions of other people over the course of human existence. I can’t know, but I can, and do, trust that this experience of a reality beyond our ordinary physical reality is indeed real. I can, and do, live trusting that this experience does not deceive me. That is what faith is. That is where my consideration of consciousness has led me.

There is one line of thought that this analysis raises for me that I want to mention here. It’s this: What is death? It is first of all the cessation of the physical processes of a formerly living being. But is it more than that? Humans have believed that it is more than that for millennia. Humans who have spoken of something more after death have generally expressed their belief that more by talking about “life after death.”

Here's how I’m thinking about it today. Death is consciousness returning to consciousness. Because each person’s consciousness arises from a far more universal consciousness that we call God, each person’s consciousness is inextricably tied to that universal consciousness. To put the same truth another way, each person’s spirit is inextricably tied to universal spirit. And what is universal spirit but God? Because we are conscious beings, we can know that we are inextricably tied to God. When we die, we return to God.

Now, I don’t claim to know what that returning to universal consciousness, or to spirit, or to God actually looks like. No one has ever died, then come back to tell us what death was like.[1] Does the consciousness that returns to consciousness retain our personal identity? I trust so, and I’ve had one experience that tells me yes.[2] I trust that powerful experience too. I just don’t claim to “know” anything about life after death.[3] We can, I think, have a purely human, and therefore purely conditional, certainty about consciousness returning to consciousness when the body dies. That, for me, is mostly what death is—consciousness returning to consciousness.

So what is consciousness? It is the awareness a physical body has of itself and its surroundings (or at least what it takes to be its surroundings). It arises not from physical matter (as most scientists would try to prove that it does by talking about neurons and electrical impulses) but from its intimate connection with infinite spirit, with God. Beyond that, it is that part of a human being that continues throughout the person’s life. My consciousness is why I can say I’ve been to Paris though I haven’t been there for 67 years. That’s where all of my musings and ramblings here have led me. So be it.

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[1] Jesus died and came back to life, or so we Christians confess. But though he did talk to his disciples after his resurrection, he didn’t, as far as we know, talk to them about life after death. As devout Jews, most of them probably didn’t believe in any meaningful life after death anyway. I am also here dismissing “near death experiences” precisely because they are “near death” experiences not death experiences. If you’ve had one that is meaningful for you, great. I’m just not prepared to draw any universal conclusions from those experiences.

[2] Years ago, as I was a complete emotional wreck because I was on my way to have a beloved dog (onto whom I had probably projected a lot of other grief) put down, I experienced my late wife appearing to me for a second or two to say “It’s all right. I’m here waiting for him.” Though this experience lasted but a second or two, it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. It happened something like 14 years ago, and it feels like it happened yesterday.

[3] By “to know” I mean to have absolute certainty about some reality, to have no doubt about that reality. When I say we cannot know God, that’s what I mean. We can never have absolute certainty about God, nor can we ever be free from doubt about God. We can claim absolute certainty, and we can deny having doubt, about God. A great many people do; but if they really believe it when they say it, they are deceiving themselves or not being entirely honest.

Some Thoughts On Division

 

I like Rev. Rafael Warnock a lot. He’s the pastor of a famous church in Atlanta and one of Georgia’s two senators in DC. But I just saw something he’s supposed to have said that troubles me. He said the MAGA idiots, my phrase not his, are trying to divide us so they can rule us. I have two problems with putting the problem we face that way. First, we’re already divided and have been for decades. The divisions have gotten sharper perhaps, though they were awfully sharp during the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war. Trump certainly does want us divided, and he does everything he can to keep us divided. But he doesn’t have to try to divide us. That’s already done.

Second, I don’t want to be united with MAGA, I want MAGA and its fascist ideology destroyed and driven out of American life. Nonviolently, as I always think I have to say, but destroyed and driven out nonetheless. What would it even mean for me to be united with the likes of Donald Trump and his ill-intentioned, incompetent hangers on? I’m sure I don’t know. I suppose I could, at some level at least, respect people who see things differently than I do. I don’t despise Carolyn Eslick though I think her politics are all wrong. But, as far as I  know, Carolyn’s not a fascist. Donald Trump is. All of supporters either are fascists themselves or are willing to sit on their asses while Trump takes the country fascist; and I want nothing whatsoever positive to do with them. I want them crushed, I sure as hell don’t want them to become my allies or I theirs. I will not compromise with fascism, and I will not respect fascists or those who, for whatever reasons, could do something to stop fascism but don’t.

So yes, Trump works to keep us divided, but that isn’t hard. We were already divided when he found us. And at least in today’s America, division isn’t the problem. The fascism of one side of the divide is the problem. Perhaps we could regain what looked more like unity at times in the past, though this country was never all that unified except perhaps in World Wars I and II. But that unity will be bought at an astronomically high price if it doesn’t come in large part through destruction of the MAGA movement and the utter disgrace of Donald Trump.

A New Letter to the Editor

 This is the text of a letter I just sent to the Seattle Times:

If I were to write a letter to the editor of the Seattle Times, what would I say:

President Donald J. Trump is an American fascist, and his administration is a fascist regime that is attempting to impose authoritarian one-party control on the United States of America. Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy worse than anything this country has seen at least since the Civil War. He values neither democracy nor the rule of law and is hellbent on destroying both. Fascists always have one or more a big lies that they use to justify whatever it is they want to do. Hitler’s big lies, which overlapped, were that socialism posed a direct threat to the German people, that the Jews were the cause of all of Germany’s problems, and that the Germans were a superior “race” who had the right to exterminate supposedly lesser “races” including the Jews, all Slavic peoples, and various others for Germany’s supposed benefit. Trump has a couple of big lies too. One is that all people who support social programs that benefit people in need are anti-American. Another, and if anything a more important and destructive one, is that immigrants are the cause of all of the problems Trump says America has, most of which we don’t actually have. Trump uses these lies to justify grossly illegal and unconstitutional attacks on people he targets, mostly people of color and people who speak Spanish, and the use of the National Guard to intimidate if not terrorize people in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland who tend not to vote for him or his preferred candidates. The federal courts, except (tragically) the United States Supreme Court, usually declare Trump’s actions to be unconstitutional and otherwise illegal, but in the end it is only the American people who can stop Trump and his MAGA acolytes and supporters. We must stand up and speak out with one voice against Trump’s fascist takeover of our federal government. Silence is acquiescence. I pray that the American people will wake up even more than we have so far, stop Donald Trump, and preserve our democracy and the rule of law.

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

919 Perkins Way

Sultan, WA 98294

425-268-0649

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.