Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 23, 2006
Scripture:
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.
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, a book that changed the world. It quickly became the intellectual foundation of a wave of working class revolutions that swept Europe in that violent year. The dominant capitalist regimes of the time ultimately put down those revolutions and restored what passed for law and order in those days. The powers put down the revolutions, but they could not stamp out the ideals for which those revolutionaries fought. Force can’t destroy ideals. Force can’t destroy the human spirit or its dream of a better world. The ideals of the Communist Manifesto survived 1848 and lived to change the world.
Now, it probably sounds strange to you to hear a Christian preacher lauding the ideals of Communism from the pulpit, especially a Christian preacher like me who has a Ph.D. in Russian history and who lived for most of a year under Soviet Communism--more about that anon. Maybe, however, it sounds a bit less strange than it might because you just heard a reading of Acts 4:32-35. In that brief passage, Luke gives us a vision of what life was like in the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem after Christ’s Resurrection. He says, among other things, "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned they held in common." And: "There was not a needy person among them, for a many as owned land or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold." Those proceeds were "distributed to each as any had need." Back in the days of the Cold War you may have heard the famous slogan of Communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." We think of it as Communist, but that ideal comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It comes straight out of the call of the 8th century BCE Hebrew prophets like Amos and Micah, for economic justice for the poor. It comes straight out of Jesus’ call in the Great Commandment for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. And it comes straight out of Acts 4:32-25.
You see, the Communist ideal of which Marx and Engels dreamt is the Judeo-Christian ideal. The ideal is a dream of economic justice for all people and of peace. We don’t think of peace as a Communist ideal. When we think of Communism we think of soldiers in lock step, tanks, and rockets parading through Red Square. We think of Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN and screaming "we will bury you!" We think of Red Army tanks rolling into Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, and Prague in 1968 to enforce Soviet control in Central Europe. All of that is of course reality, but it is not the Communist ideal. That ideal, the dream that attracted so many American intellectuals to Communism in the 1930s, is an ideal of economic justice through the elimination of oppression and peace through the elimination of the economic causes of war. That ideal comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is our ideal. Marx, Engels, and all the others got their ideal from us.
Yet when Communist politicians tried to put that ideal into practice when they eventually came to power in Russia and elsewhere, it all went terribly wrong. I won’t bore you with a lot of statistics and historical details. To get the big picture all you need to know is that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin killed around 40 million Soviet people before the Nazi invasion of 1941. But that’s a statistic, and one so monstrous that we can’t really get our heads around it. To give you a better idea of the society people claiming to work for the Communist ideal of peace through economic justice actually created, let me share with you some of my experiences of living in that society from September, 1975, to June, 1976.
That was the Brezhnev era. The massive, murderous oppression of the Stalin era had ended, but its legacy lived on. I experienced a society in which, on some level at least, everyone was afraid. Let me illustrate with some stories from my relationship with two Soviet journalism students that my late wife Francie and I got to know. I’ll call them Ivan and Katia. For starters, they were rare birds among Moscow State University students because they were actually willing to associate with visiting Western students at all. All but a handful of the thousands of students at that most prestigious of Soviet universities found doing so too risky to their academic and professional careers.
We always met in Ivan’s dorm room. One day we invited Ivan and Katia to come to our dorm rooms, in a different wing of the massive Moscow State University building, for dinner. Ivan asked what floor we lived on. I said 5. He asked what floor Boris lived on. He didn’t have to tell me who Boris was. We all knew. Boris was the secret police spy in the wing of the dorm to which Western students like us were assigned. OK, so he wasn’t very secret. He was still the KGB plant. I said 7. So they accepted our invitation because it was unlikely that Boris would see them.
Then one day when we went to visit them, Katia wasn’t there, and Ivan offered no explanation. I knew enough not to ask. You just didn’t pry into things Soviets didn’t choose to share with you. The next week Katia wasn’t there again, and my curiosity got the better of me. So I asked, putting my question in the form a concern for Katia’s health, saying I hoped she wasn’t ill. Ivan said: "I know that I’m all right, but she’s not the same person I am." He didn’t need to explain. I knew what he meant. He meant: I’m connected in the Party. I have someone who will protect me from a charge of subversion for associating with Westerners. She doesn’t. Some Party stooge had put the pressure on Katia, and she had to stop seeing us. We never saw her again.
These two bright, attractive, curious young Russians lived in fear of their own government and of the Communist Party that ran it. They knew they couldn’t live and work freely. They were journalism students, and they said: It is so hard when they make us write only the good when everything we see is bad. They said: You’re so lucky. You can come to our country to live and study, to learn about us, our culture, and how we live. We will never have the change to travel and live abroad like that. I pray that since the fall of Communism in Russia fifteen years ago perhaps they have gotten that chance after all.
The Communist ideal was peace, and there was no peace. I was in Moscow in August, 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to crush that country’s movement toward freedom. Three years after we left Russia, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It became their Viet Nam. The Communist ideal was of economic justice, and there was no economic justice. The Party bosses lived in luxury while most of the people lived little better than people in the undeveloped Third World. The Communist ideal was freedom, and there was no freedom, no freedom of speech, of the press, or of religion. The Communist ideal of peace, justice, and freedom had been perverted into an Orwellian nightmare of war, injustice, and oppression. What went wrong? Why did the beautiful Communist ideal, grounded in the rich soil of the Judeo-Christian tradition, go so horribly wrong? Giving a complete answer to that question is an enormous task, far beyond the limits of one sermon or, for that matter, of my abilities. But let me offer what I think is a big part of the answer and then address an issues that this question always raises.
A big part of the explanation of what went wrong, I believe, lies in the fact that Karl Marx severed the Judeo-Christian vision of peace through economic justice from its spiritual roots. He, and generations of Communists after him, thought they could keep the earthly vision and evict God from it. Marxism is of course atheistic. It denies the reality of everything but the material. The Soviet Communist regime was aggressively atheistic. It taught atheism to the people, and to a significant extent it worked. Ivan and Katia once asked Francie and me if we believed in God. When we said yes, they just shook their heads and said: That’s the one thing about you Westerners that we just can not understand. The Soviet Communists threw out God, and when they did they threw out all possibility of any moral rein on their actions. Without a morality grounded in God, their ethic became completely utilitarian. People became commodities, and no brutality was too gruesome if it could be sold as necessary for the advancement of Communism. It is that ethic that led to the slaughter of all of those millions of people.
But whenever I discuss this topic with anyone, the explanation that always comes up for the failure of the Communist ideal isn’t atheism. Rather, people say human nature is the explanation. Human nature, they say, is what makes the Communist ideal, what makes the Christian ideal of the Kingdom of God, impossible to realize. At least a couple of the guys at our church’s men’s group meeting last Tuesday said exactly that to me when I was telling them about the sermon I was going to preach this Sunday. This explanation says: People are by nature selfish and violent. Everyone’s out to get his or her own and to hell with the rest. That’s how it is, how it always was, and how it always will be.
And I respond: Maybe you’re right. Maybe we really are that fallen. Nonetheless, I will not give up hope. You see, I’m an Easter person who professes an Easter faith. God raised Jesus from the dead into glorious new life. Jesus’ resurrection is the sign that resurrection is possible for mere mortals like us too. Our call as an Easter people is not to look at how things are and always have been and give up hope. Our call as an Easter people is rather, to quote George Bernard Shaw, to look at things that never were and ask why not. If in fact human nature makes the ideal of the Kingdom of God unrealistic, our call is not to abandon the ideal. Our call is nothing less than to transform human nature. From a Christian perspective that means to transform ourselves into the people God created us to be and that Christ calls us to be. Our call is even to strive to work that transformation in the whole world.
It looks impossible. It truly does; but remember Easter people: It wasn’t possible for God to raise Jesus from the dead either, but God did it. Jesus’ Resurrection gives us hope that the death of the human spirit that we so blithely accept as human nature is not the end. It is not the way it has to be. God brought new life out of Jesus’ tomb, and God can bring new life out of the present tomb of the human spirit too. Our call is not to cynical resignation to the way things are. Our call is to resurrection, to new life, for ourselves and for all of creation. If Christ had not risen, I’d agree that it’s impossible. But this is Eastertide. This is the time for hope, for vision, and, yes, for that much maligned virtue idealism. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Nothing is impossible! Let’s go change the world. Amen.