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By Ethan Sears
February 25, 2022
Speaking for the first time since Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Capitals superstar and Russian national Alexander Ovechkin told reporters he supported peace, but didn’t go as far as to criticize Putin.
“It’s a hard situation. I have family back in Russia and it is scary moments,” Ovechkin said. “But we can’t do anything. We just hope it going to be end soon and everything is going to be all right.
“Please, no more war. It doesn’t matter who is in the war — Russia, Ukraine, different countries — I think we live in a world, like, we have to live in peace and a great world.”
Ovechkin has publicly backed Putin in the past, using his social media platform to declare support for the autocratic dictator. His profile picture on Instagram is with Putin, who sent a telegram that was read at Ovechkin’s wedding reception.
When asked Friday whether he supports Putin, Ovechkin sidestepped the question.
“Well, he is my president. But how I said, I am not involved in politics,” Ovechkin said. “I am an athlete and you know, how I said, I hope everything is going to be done soon. It’s [a] hard situation right now for both sides and everything.Everything I hope is going to end. I’m not in control of the situation.”
Speaking out against Putin is a potentially tenuous step to take for athletes who have ties to Russia or family in the country.
Only following Jesus’ guidance can take us safely through the storms of life.
Jarrod Stackelroth, Adventist Record
I will never forget reporting on the Toowoomba Pathfinder Camporee in Australia in January 2011. Now, in my experience, there seems to be some unwritten rule that whenever you go camping, it will rain. There seems to be no escaping it. But the rain at that camporee was different — it was next level. You may remember the headlines — an “inland tsunami” had swept through the town of Toowoomba.
It was unexpected. It was frightening. Lives were lost in the community.
I remember being out during the day, taking photos when the storm hit. We sheltered where we could, talked with people, and documented how they were coping. Some camps on lower ground were taking the weather poorly, and kids were sheltering in sheds with all their stuff. Lines of food were being distributed as many cook tents had been knocked over or were soggy wrecks. When I got a break, I ran over to check my own gear. I’d been assigned a camp bed in a shed with other camporee staff.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I arrived. Wading through the shed, I soon realized there was nothing I could do there. The water was lapping just under my mattress. Thankfully my bedding and all my clothes were dry — for some reason I’d placed everything on my bed that morning when I got up (I was probably thinking about creepy-crawlies, not water). The water was still rushing, but at least my belongings were dry.
It came up so quickly. It went into unexpected places. It went everywhere. High ground, solid ground was most important.
That’s the thing about floods. They come without warning. They don’t always affect the same place or go where they are expected. You can’t just deal with it on the fly and make changes as you go.
Jesus knew the damage of flooding. Perhaps He’d seen some flash flooding around His home as a boy. He may have helped His father do the carpentry work on houses being built and would have discussed suitable locations, spending time around the Sea of Galilee. Too close to the sea and the sandy soil, they would not have been stable enough. “Nice view of the ocean . . . until you’re sliding into it.”
Jesus knew that if people followed His Way, they would encounter floods that could wash away their faith, unexpected and dangerous events that they needed to be prepared for.
And so, He told the story of the wise and foolish builders.
A Sermon Illustration for the Ages
Jesus has just finished His most famous sermon, known as the Sermon on the Mount. Both Matthew and Luke include versions of His teachings compiled in this discourse, and these teachings are incredibly challenging, countercultural, and deeply personal. He takes everything we knew about God and the practice of religion and calls us back to the core principles, and centralizes love of God and love of others.
“In the Sermon on the Mount [Jesus] sought to undo the work that had been wrought by false education, and to give His hearers a right conception of His kingdom and of His own character. Yet He did not make a direct attack on the errors of the people. He saw the misery of the world on account of sin, yet He did not present before them a vivid delineation of their wretchedness. He taught them of something infinitely better than they had known. Without combating their ideas of the kingdom of God, He told them the conditions of entrance therein, leaving them to draw their own conclusions as to its nature.”1
Right at the end of this sermon, Jesus uses the parable as an encouragement and as a warning.
As so many of Jesus’ parables do, He sets up a contrast of behavior. One man builds his house on a firm foundation, one man who doesn’t. Both build the same house, use the same techniques, and work hard. Those listening would have imagined the common houses that they knew and lived in. They had probably taken part in building their own family house or helped renovate and repair it. They knew how they were constructed and what it took.
Are they the foolish or the wise builder? And what determines the difference? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, suggests the first step is putting into practice what has been heard: “The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it. . . . Only in the doing of it does the word of Jesus retain its honour, might and power among us. Now the storm can rage over the house, but it cannot shatter that union with him, which his word has created.”2
Those in the crowd have just heard the Kingdom Manifesto. They have the blueprint to the kingdom. They have an invitation to be part of God’s great experiment: His new temple built out of humans. Now they are urged to implement those principles.
Faith & Values: Regard no one with partiality. See and respect each other.
By STEVEN H. SHUSSETT
FOR THE MORNING CALL |
A few weeks ago this nation rightly observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day, whose witness means so much to the United States, the world, and the church. Dr. King demonstrated that following Jesus means regarding no one with partiality. No one is superior. All are loved by God.
This past week was bookended by the birthdays of two lights lesser known to many, but that shine no less brightly: Thomas Merton on Jan. 31 (1915) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Feb. 4 (1906).
The lives and work of these two men are too full for just one newspaper column.
Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, directed an underground seminary, participated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and was martyred just before the Allies arrived.
Merton, a convert to Roman Catholicism, became a monk at mid-life, joining one of the strictest orders of the Church. Though seemingly cut off from the world, he became a prominent writer on expected topics like God and prayer, but also an advocate for peace, justice, and reconciliation.
In 2022, these two men share not only a common birth week, but a message that echoes Dr. King’s. A message that this country and this world so desperately need to hear, summed up in the one word, “regard.”
“Regard” can mean to view or see another. Many of us know what it is to avert our eyes so as to not see a homeless person. If we don’t know what to do, it’s easier to pretend that there is not there. But many of us have learned to see, to smile, offer a brief word, so that even if no money is exchanged, at least some humanity is.
For Merton and Bonhoeffer, Jesus’ witness of seeing the poor, marginalized, and different, was not lost. Bonhoeffer studied in the United States, and regularly attended Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, which was largely African-American. In a city full of more familiar churches, he found his spiritual home among persons who, because of the sin of racism, often went unseen.
In Merton’s day, the split between Roman Catholics and Protestants was sharp, where one would cross the street rather than walk in front of the other’s church. Religiously mixed marriages were little different than that between races, family members cut off for either “offense.” It was in that world that Merton developed a range of relationships that would be remarkable even for someone who was not in a monastery. There was hardly a race, religion, or region of the world with which he did not have some connection.
But “regard” also means more than just seeing. It means to respect and honor, and each of these men does the word proud. In 1950s America, Merton was in a place of power: a successful, white, male religious leader. Instead of denying the realities of his day — racism, the Vietnam war, and poverty — he challenged the world’s perspective. In proclaiming that we are all God’s children, he followed Jesus, of whom it was said, “Teacher, we know that you … teach the way of God … for you do not regard people with partiality.”
Bonhoeffer was imprisoned as a traitor but respected as a pastor, not only by other prisoners, but even his guards. It wasn’t because of his title, but because he followed Jesus’ call to “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Even those who would take his life.
Nuremberg: We Need ‘Plain, Honest, Straightforward Men’
Will Alexander|Posted: Jan 24, 2022 8:42 AM 
Source: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
I used to wonder how such a highly civilized nation like Germany could so monstrously scar the record of modern man with the butchery of the Holocaust, with much of it made possible by doctors who, years earlier, volunteered in droves to join the Nazi Party.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote after visiting the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp in April 1945: “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.” It was so overpowering as to “leave me a bit sick,” he wrote.
Gen. George Patton, certain that he’d become sick, refused to enter a room at Ohrdruf where the emaciated bodies of naked men were piled up – killed by starvation.
How could so many brilliant people became complicit either by their support or their silence to Hitler’s atrocities, I remember thinking. Professional people, like doctors and nurses, went from being healers to collaborators in Hitler’s “‘biocracy’ which ultimately murdered millions of innocent persons,” as Dr. Ashley K. Fernandes put it in his essay, Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? They were willing participants in the “medicalization of death.”
Through it all, due to both hatred and fear, Germans remained silent.
“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who railed against Hitler’s euthanasia (T4) program and Jewish genocide. “… [W]e have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; … What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.”
Bonhoeffer, a man who fully “understood what he chose when he chose to resist” (Cost of Discipleship, 1937), was imprisoned, tortured, and hanged by Nazi SS Black Guards in 1945. But fortunate for us, they couldn’t kill his message.
After the befuddling speed at which America has deteriorated over the past year, I don’t wonder about this stuff anymore. No. Biden is not Hitler and America is not engaged, or ever will be, in some sick systematic genocide. The circumstance of that history has its own fingerprint.
But seeing how we’ve mimicked China’s Hitlerian way of dealing with the pandemic, it’s easier to understand how the most advanced nation in history can deteriorate into something unrecognizable. The most important lesson for us is not necessarily the Holocaust itself, but the warped social and political concoctions that caused otherwise decent human beings to create the Holocaust.
With all the disturbing ways that COVID has been used to wreck the country, the most terrifying, for me, has been how the medical profession, willingly or coerced, has collaborated in ignoring natural immunity and mandating an experimental vaccine to every man, woman, and child in America, without informed consent.
Some doctors are refusing to treat unvaccinated patients; nearly all refuse to prescribe safe drugs in early treatment; if drugs are prescribed, pharmacists refuse to dispense them; and still others who tell their patients with rare co-morbidities that the vaccination could be fatal, they’re too afraid to put it in writing as an exception to getting the vaccine.
It’s extremely bizarre.
It’s the first time in medical history, said Dr. Peter McCollough, that all the focus is on vaccinating healthy people, instead of treating the sick ones.
“The all-or-nothing, one-size-fits-all vaccine policies, … where people are coerced in a very heavy-handed way to take the vaccine don’t take into account some basic facts that we have known about COVID for a long time,” said Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was fired from his job as professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine.
Besides the CDC not acknowledging natural immunity, he said, healthy children with a near-zero mortality rate from COVID shouldn’t be treated in the same way as an 80-year-old with co-morbidities. But that’s exactly what’s happening and at the risk of doing more harm than good.
That kind of harm violates their right to informed consent and their right to informed refusal, a centerpiece of medical ethics going back to the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code was created after the infamous Nuremberg Trials to set the boundaries for how doctors practice human experimentation in medicine.
According to Dr. Robert Malone, who helped establish mRNA technology, we’ve long breached those boundaries.
“Our government is out of control on this [COVID response] and they are lawless,” he told Joe Rogan in that now-famous “Mass Formation Psychosis” podcast. “They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common rule. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. … They are flat-out illegal, and they don’t care.”
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