A Martin Luther King Jr Day lecture by the Reverend Dr. Chris Erdman, Davis Community Church, Davis, California. January 17, 2022
1. Tyranny and Resistance
Tonight, one of my goals is to introduce you to the relatively new book by Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” I’m not going to teach the book but rather to try to inspire you to read it and use it in the months and years to come so that we can do what Christians have often found themselves doing in the past—resisting those who have consolidated power in the few and often violently enforced their version of life on the many. Many of you already have the book. Some of you have just purchased it. Others will buy it. But I don’t want you just to buy or read it; I want you to do something with it. Tyranny is on the rise again in our world, and it must be opposed. But it must be opposed wisely, creatively, and energetically. A sloppy resistance is unhelpful, sometimes even counter-productive.
Snyder says:
“The [Founders] tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experiences.”
Tonight, I hope we will learn enough to turn us toward action—individual and collective. That's another goal I have tonight—that we will take action and heal our democracy.
So, tyranny and the Christian responsibility to resist it, that's my theme tonight.
The first thing I have to say is that there is a problem when we use the word, “tyranny.”
“Tyranny” is so easily invoked. One person’s tyranny is another person’s salvation. This of the thirteenth century, Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace, who was to many Scots a true patriot but to other Britons was a terrorist. And just last year, the mob of violent insurgents who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were, in their own minds (and in the minds of many other Americans) revolutionaries who were resisting “tyranny.”
A "tyrant" is defined as: “A cruel or oppressive ruler.”
"Tyranny" is defined as: “A cruel or oppressive government.”
Many of the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers also see themselves as freedom fighters resisting the tyranny of a cruel and oppressive government.
So if you’re on the political or social Right, the Democratic party and Administration are tyrants that ought to be resisted.
If you’re on the political or social Left, those on the conservative wing of the Republican party are tyrants that ought to be resisted.
We also know that a parent can be a tyrant. A toddler can be a tyrant. So can a boss, a pastor, or a spouse. Religions can be tyrannical.
So, “tyranny” can be too quickly invoked and too easily used to manipulate the masses.
This is why we need to be cautious; we need to be rigorous in our assessment of tyranny. And that’s why the little book, On Tyranny, is so important.
Three Christmases ago, I bought this book for all my adult children. And whenever the topic of the vulnerability of our democracy comes up, I recommend the book.
The reason is that in this little book, Snyder, not only defines what true tyranny is, he illustrates it in history. He’s not merely using the word, as we often do, to call out some form of ideology, government, or person whose ways we don’t like, which we feel is oppressive.
Here’s what he says about tyranny:
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As the Founding Fathers debated our Constitution, they took instruction from the history they knew. Concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit. Much of the succeeding political debate in the United States has concerned the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example.
It is thus a primary American tradition to consider history when our political order seems imperiled. If we worry today that the American experiment is threatened by tyranny, we can follow the example of the Founding Fathers and contemplate the history of other democracies and republics. The good news is that we can draw upon more recent and relevant examples than ancient Greece and Rome. The bad news is that the history of modern democracy is also one of decline and fall. Since the American colonies declared their independence from a British monarchy that the Founders deemed “tyrannical,” European history has seen three major democratic moments: after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989. Many of the democracies founded at these junctures failed, in circumstances that in some important respects resemble our own.
We learn what tyranny is from history, from the mistakes we've made. The things and people and institutions that happen to annoy us on a daily basis do not necessarily qualify as genuinely tyrannical, despite what anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and Trumpian insurrectionists might believe.
My goal in this lecture is to commend the book to you, individually—that you’ll read it and be instructed by it to support democracy here and elsewhere. I also hope that groups of you might sit together, talk about the book, and explore real actions you might take this year to protect democracy from the many threats we face—threats, like those to voting rights, that are cataloged in this book. And I also want to explore the advocacy for democracy and the resistance to tyranny from a decidedly Christian perspective. I believe that Christianity, like other religions—those often hijacked by despots and tyrannical movements and acolytes to tyranny—has a clear ethic, drawn from our understanding of GOD and the universe, to resist tyranny and lend a strong hand to democratic political expressions.
My path is first to explore the Barmen Declaration, a statement by a section of the Protestant Church in Germany in the early 1930s that catalyzed the Christian resistance to Hitler and Nazism.
Second, I’ll tell the story of three twentieth century Christian resisters: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran), Dorothy Day (a Roman Catholic), and Martin Luther King Jr (a Baptist).
Third, and last, I’ll give you an overview of what’s in Synder’s book and I’ll urge you to read it. I have no plan for what you can or should do next. I simply pray that you don’t do nothing with it. I pray you do something, but trust you to ask GOD to guide you in what you do. If you have ideas for what we can do here at DCC, let me know what’s coming to you and I’ll see if I can help. If you’re part of another church, I hope you’ll find others to gather with and consider responsible actions.
I begin with a prayer from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, whose legacy we remember today:
“Most Gracious and all wise God; Before whose face the generations rise and fall; Thou in whom we live, and move, and have our being. We thank thee for all of thy good and gracious gifts, for life and for health; for food and for raiment; for the beauties of nature and the love of human nature. We come before thee painfully aware of our inadequacies and shortcomings. We realize that we stand surrounded with the mountains of love and we deliberately dwell in the valley of hate. We stand amid the forces of truth and deliberately lie; We are forever offered the high road and yet we choose to travel the low road. For these sins O God forgive. Break the spell of that which blinds our minds. Purify our hearts that we may see thee. O God in these turbulent days when fear and doubt are mounting high, give us broad visions, penetrating eyes, and power of endurance. Help us to work with renewed vigor for a warless world, for a better distribution of wealth, and for a brotherhood that transcends race or color. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen.”
2. Christianity as resistance:
Christianity has always had a tensive relationship to the state. From the early persecutions in Palestine to those faced under Roman tyrants like Diocletian, Nero, and others. Christianity has always been suspicious of what the New Testament often calls the “principalities and powers,” entities, material and spiritual, that can set themselves up as oppressive forces.
In the fourth century, what many lauded as a positive move for Christianity, the Constantinian fusion of Christianity with the Roman Empire, was seen by the wise as a dangerous liaison. The sixteenth century Reformation was a revolt, an act of resistance—theological and political—against the church-state fusion. It was very messy. Those movements resisting tyranny often then became tyrannical, as in Calvin’s Geneva or Scotland under the Presbyterian heirs of the reformer, John Knox.
Nevertheless, the resistance to tyranny is what America’s Founders were about; resistance to tyranny was a main principle upon which our nation and democracy was founded. It is what, in part, our Constitution and Bill of Rights intend to protect.
This is why Christian support of true democracy is vital and why we must always be suspicious of efforts to consolidate power. In our own congregation, this intention to protect democracy in our life together is why a pastor is not the president of a congregation; it’s why we have a balance of power in the congregation (a balance between what we call “teaching elders” (the pastors) and “ruling elders” (our elders) who sit together in a council called “the Session.” Our form of government is set up in order to protect and advance our small experiment in democratic community. We do this not only to manifest what GOD desires for our church’s life, but in order to manifest a way of life in the larger community and advocate for political processes that are egalitarian among the many and suspicious of the consolidation of power among the few.
3. Some 20th century witnesses to resistance
The Theological Declaration of Barmen
is a short statement that is part of our church’s Constitution. Part of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church USA is made up of a handful of key historical “confessions”—documents written at times of crisis over the past fifteen hundred years and that help us know how our forebears kept the faith in their own particular contexts. I’ll be reading from our Constitution, Part 1 (excerpted from the PCUSA Book of Confessions):
“The Theological Declaration of Barmen was written by a group of church leaders in Germany to help Christians withstand the challenges of the Nazi party and of the so-called “German Christians,” a popular movement that saw no conflict between Christianity and the ideals of Hitler’s National Socialism.
“In January 1933, after frustrating years in which no government in Germany was able to solve problems of economic depression and mass unemployment, Adolph Hitler was named chancellor. By playing on people’s fear of communism and Bolshevism, he was able to persuade the Parliament to allow him to rule by edict. As he consolidated his power, Hitler abolished all political rights and democratic processes: police could detain persons in prison without a trial, search private dwellings without a warrant, seize property, censor publications, tap telephones, and forbid meetings. He soon outlawed all political parties except his own, smashed labor unions, purged universities, replaced the judicial system with his own ‘People’s Courts,’ initiated a systematic terrorizing of Jews, and obtained the support of church leaders allied with or sympathetic to the German Christians.
“Most Germans took the union of Christianity, nationalism, and militarism for granted, and patriotic sentiments were equated with Christian truth. The German Christians exalted the racially pure nation and the rule of Hitler as God’s will for the German people.
“The chief item of business was discussion of a declaration to appeal to the Evangelical churches of Germany to stand firm against the German Christian accommodation to National Socialism. The Theological Declaration of Barmen contains six propositions, each quoting from Scripture, stating its implications for the present day, and rejecting the false doctrine of the German Christians. The declaration proclaims the church’s freedom in Jesus Christ who is Lord of every area of life. The church obeys him as God’s one and only Word who determines its order, ministry, and relation to the state.
“The declaration was debated and adopted without amendment, and the Confessing Church, that part of the church that opposed the German Christians, rallied around it.”
The form of the Barmen Declaration influenced a more recent statement by the Reformed churches in South Africa in their struggle against Apartheid. That statement has also become part of our Constitution. It’s called The Belhar Confession. It was written in 1982 and finally adopted by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in 1986.
The point I’m making is that Barmen (and Belhar) are models for the way Christians have taken up their responsibility to resist tyranny in our last century. They were communal expressions that were initiated by Reformed churches (our Presbyterian kind) and expanded into ecumenical movements of resistance to tyranny.
Now I want to tell some stories about individuals who have stood out in the twentieth century. Note that none of them were isolated. They also operated in communities. Communities gave these individuals courage and comfort. And these individuals instructed and inspired communities.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who died on the gallows at the age of thirty-nine at the concentration camp of Flossenburg, just days before the camp’s liberation by the Allied forces. Bonhoeffer was a political prisoner who’d been arrested for his role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. A pacifist whose nonviolent convictions were based in the gospel of Jesus, Bonhoeffer, nevertheless, chose a path of violence, a path at one time in his life, unimaginable. About his decision, he wrote: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Bonhoeffer was a member of the Confessing Church. He was the leader of an underground, anti-government seminary, training young pastors for gospel-based resistance (a seminary not far from my own family’s home in northern Germany).
In June of 1939, he was serving as visiting faculty at Union Seminary in New York City. His American friends had gotten him out of Germany just as the Nazis were bearing down on him. At one point, while giving a talk on Germany radio about the dangers of Hitler and the Third Reich, the Gestapo pulled the plug on his program and his voice went silent in mid-sermon. It was then that he and his friends, in Germany and across the Atlantic, knew he was a marked man.
The escape had saved his life, but he had mixed feelings.
Finally, he decided to return to the lion’s den. “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America,” he wrote to his friends. “I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
Bonhoeffer was unwilling to draw on his privilege and the luxury of his connections outside Germany. He had no intention of returning to die. He returned to aid in the resistance to the menace of tyranny, National Socialism and the German Christian ideology which blended religion and nationalism in a dangerous, heretical, and toxic soup of horror to any who opposed it.
When he returned to Germany, he used his family's upper middle class connections to obtain a position in the Abwehr—Germany’s arm of military intelligence. His brother in law, Hans Dohnanyi, held a high-ranking position in the Abwehr. Together they helped lead the clandestine conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.
But in 1944, after the assassination attempt failed, the Gestapo uncovered the trail of resisters and that trail led to Bonhoeffer. He was detained and ended up at Flossenburg. On April 8th, 1945, he was leading a prayer service with other political prisoners—Russians, French, English, Italians and other Germans.
One of them, an English officer, later wrote:
“Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near. On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and the resolutions it had bought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, ‘Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.’ That had only one meaning for all prisoners—the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me aside: ‘This is the end,’ he said, ‘but for me it is the beginning of life.’ The next day he was hanged.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one more in a long line of Christians who embraced and embodied their responsibility to resist tyranny in the name of God, for the sake of our common humanity, and with the power of love.
About our responsibility to resist tyranny, Bonhoeffer wrote:
“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.”
May we follow in his steps.
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897. Baptized as an Episcopalian, she had very little Christian formation and no real connection to the church. In fact in college she rejected Christianity and religion as irrelevant to the cause of justice. She ran with anarchists, communists, artists and intellectuals who all considered religion to be the “opium of the people.”
When Dorothy Day died in 1980 she was identified by many as “the most influential, interesting, and significant” person in twentieth century American Catholic history.
In 1926, she was writing radical papers and participating in leftist protests when she found herself pregnant. Her encounter with the child growing inside her stirred a profound change. She was living on Staten Island with a man she loved, but her Bohemian lifestyle and general aimlessness opened her to the reality of God. She had a profound experience of what she called, a “natural happiness.” For some inscrutable reason she wanted her child to be baptized as a Roman Catholic. A year later she too was baptized.
This threw her into a crisis. She felt this deep longing and connection with God, but her radical associates and the man she loved wanted nothing to do with her religious experience. She also worried that she was being irresistibly drawn into the church which she still believed was irrelevant to the concerns of the oppressed, and that her conversion (which she felt unable to resist) was a betrayal of the cause of the poor and marginalized.
After nearly five years of prayerful searching for answers for ways to reconcile her faith with her concerns for justice, she met Peter Maurin, a radical philosopher and Catholic who asked her to use her journalistic skills to start a newspaper that advocated for a solidarity with marginalized workers and to do so from the vantage point of the gospel of Jesus.
The Catholic Worker was born on May 1, 1933 and didn’t merely denounce injustice, but announced the vision for a new social order that practiced a radical and embodied faith experience that recognized Christ in the face of our “neighbor.”
Dorothy Day believed that the Sermon on the Mount showed the way toward a new humanity through nonviolence, civil disobedience, and opposition to war, unfettered capitalism, and other powers of injustice.
Intensely and almost conventionally pious, she was sustained in her daily work among the poor by the practices of the daily liturgy, Holy Communion, and prayer as well as intentional community. Her commitments to poverty, obedience, and chastity were as disciplined as any monastic. But she was fully immersed in the world around her.
Her enemies denounced her as a communist not a Christian. She was jailed, shot at, and, like Martin Luther King, was hounded by the FBI as well as by the Catholic authorities who were suspicious of her radical associations. She liked to say that “servants are not greater than their master,” and felt she was clearly following in the way of Jesus. Some people called her a saint during her lifetime. She resisted, “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” She didn't want to be idealized. Rather, real change for real people on the real ground is what mattered for her.
Dorothy Day is one more in a long line of Christians who embraced and embodied their responsibility to resist tyranny in the name of God, for the sake of our common humanity, and with the power of love.
About our responsibility to resist tyranny, she said:
“Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints who would change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?”
May we walk the path she walked but walk it in our own way and for the times in which we live.
Martin Luther King Jr
On December 2, 1955, Martin Luther King Jr was serving a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was just out of graduate school in Boston, and only 26 years old. The day before, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, had been arrested after refusing to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man who wanted it.
Her refusal immediately kindled the tinderbox of racial inequity. The black community called for a bus boycott. King, just new to the church and the city, was put in the position of leading the protest committee.
The church was packed that night. He faced the crowds and began with the words, “My friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.”
King gave an electrifying speech that night and it galvanized the struggle in Montgomery and launched King’s career as a mobilizer of the struggle for freedom against racial tyranny in America. Following the victory of the freedom campaign in Montgomery, the nonviolent tactics King advocated for were applied and extended throughout the South. King was a mighty orator, a skilled political organizer and strategist. He was also living in line of the Christian resisters to tyranny throughout history.
In 1959, he faced a decisive moment. He and his family were being threatened. He feared for the lives of those he loved. One night, King got a death threat: a caller on the phone. He’d been threatened before. The hatred wasn’t new to him. But that night the strain weighed heavy. And the threat to his family left him rattled. He went into the kitchen and, dejected, poured himself a cup of coffee. He prayed, “Lord, I don’t know if I can do this.” Then, he wrote later, “Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice. ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” After that encounter with God he said, “I was ready to face anything.”
His house was later bombed He was jailed frequently. Once he was stabbed, nearly fatally. But his conviction held. He stayed on course. Nonviolence was the way. Not just a political tactic, it was the way of the gospel of Jesus, an unfailing principle of life.
In 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” It was his clearest articulation of his vision of the political power of love, his dream for the universality of justice:
“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, blacks and white, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
King went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, spoke against the Vietnam War, challenged the political power structures in the American government. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, called King the most dangerous person in America and fought a covert war to destroy King and the civil rights movement.
In 1965, King articulated his vision for opposition to every form of tyranny and taught us never to give up, never to give in. His vision is grounded in the Christian story of death and rebirth, the indomitable power of life and truth, beauty and justice. Listen as his words ring with the imagery of Holy Week:
“Truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long! Because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long! . . . Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown stands God within the shadow, keeping watch over God’s own. How long? Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr is one more in a long line of Christians who embraced and embodied their responsibility to resist tyranny in the name of God, for the sake of our common humanity, and with the power of love.
On April 3rd, 1968, King was in Memphis to offer his inspirational support to the strike of the city’s sanitation workers. It was his last speech—his, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. The next day he was assassinated.
“The nation is sick,” he proclaimed, “trouble is in the land, confusion all around. . . . But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."
May we rise up and serve the cause of true freedom through democracy.
4. Saving Democracy
Democracy is messy. It’s often slow. It can feel dysfunctional. It requires collaboration. It resists the binary us/them, either/or mentality. It demands transparency and abhors secrecy. It trusts there’s an abundance we can leverage rather than a scarcity that requires us to pillage. It celebrates community over individualism. It puts the common good of the many before the rights of the few. It trusts that innovation comes best through deliberation, cooperation, and participation by all, and is enriched by the struggle required by a bottom-up process over the simplistic solutions dictated by a fiat from the top down.
This is why in times of crisis, there are voices that want to dispense of democracy. But we do so at our peril. We must avoid the hurried and reckless rhetoric of those who want to lodge power in a totalitarian order.
And this, in particular, is the danger in the way too many today want to limit the right to vote and hide their political power-grab in the lie of election fraud. In lesson three, “Beware the one party state,” Snyder writes:
“The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.”
Here’s a lesson we can apply immediately. Protect and expand the right to vote. Limited voting is anti-democratic.
I’ll end by simply reading the twenty lessons we can learn from the democratic failures of the twentieth century:
Do not obey in advance. [make up your mind to resist]
Defend institutions. [democratic]
Beware the one-party state. [support democratic elections]
Take responsibility for the face of the world. [Symbols like swastikas shape minds]
Remember professional ethics. [stay ethical]
Be wary of paramilitaries.
Be reflective if you must be armed. [a lesson on guns]
Stand out. [Think Rosa Parks]
Be kind to our language.
Believe in truth.
Investigate.
Make eye contact and small talk. [lessons on being a good citizen]
Practice corporeal politics. [put your body into the work]
Establish a private life. [lessons on internet security from surveillance]
Contribute to good causes.
Learn from peers in other countries.
Listen for dangerous words. [on weaponizing words]
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
Be a patriot.
Be as courageous as you can.
Timothy Snyder is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He has written several books, including the best-seller, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His most recent book is On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Inspired by my retelling of the stories of Christian resistance, I hope you’ll read the book and put it into practice. And I hope it helps stir an ardent pro-democracy movement that can keep democracy growing and evolving and flourishing for the good of all.
Snyder gives us twenty lessons from the twenty-first century. I’ll add a twenty-first based on this retelling of Christian resistance these last one hundred years.
21. Draw on the Spirit. For it’s not possible to do the outer work the Divine desires without the inner life that work requires.
And so, to honor the Spirit, I end with prayer, a prayer by Martin Luther King:
“Our Holy Father, we confess the weakness and sinfulness of our lives. We have often turned away from thee to seek our own desires. And often when we have done no evil, we have undertaken nothing of good, and so have been guilty of uselessness and neglect. From this sin of idleness and indifference set us free. Lead us into fruitful effort, and deliver us from profitless lives. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.”
[sources consulted: Presbyterian Church USA Book of Confessions, and All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time by Robert Ellsberg]