College Hill Presbyterian Church, Easton, PA

Above all, thank you for your prayers and support for me.

I have the privilege to work as Presbyterian World Mission’s regional liaison for Central and Western Europe, and I am right now on a two-month tour to tell my story to PC(USA) congregations.

Many people ask, “Why should Europe be a mission field?”

The answer to that question has to do with what mission is.

Is there something different between old-fashioned, frontier mission and how we are involved in Christ’s mission today?

The answer is “yes.” There was a different concept in the past.

It was a concept that went along with Europeans and North Americans colonizing the world, in many cases for our own benefit.

When I talk about mission today, I see mission rather differently.

I see mission as relationship-building for the equal benefit of all involved and thus for the glory of God.

So, I see myself as a bridge-builder. We urgently need a dialogue to foster solidarity between us and our sisters and brothers in the Global South.

Let me give you a few examples …

I was born in East Germany and lived half of my life behind the so-called Iron Curtain.

At the peak of the arms race in the early 1980’s, each November we celebrated ten days of “Ecumenical Prayers for Peace” in my church, as did many other East German churches.

I remember that many of us in the East and West were dreaming of unilateral disarmament with the following goals: Both sides would stop targeting each other, stop wasting resources and stop creating nuclear overkill capacities.

It was obvious that this could not happen overnight. But once you become aware that security in our era of mass destruction cannot be achieved by striving for security against each other, you know it can only be organized as common security, the kind of security that can only be achieved in a step-by-step, gradual, unilateral process.

What had been escalated in a step-by-step process had to be deescalated in a step-by-step process that was unilaterally initiated by people of goodwill.

As Christians, we knew that the ideology of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth had to be interrupted and finally broken. Just as Christ told us …

I remember a worship service in my home congregation in Petershagen during our “Ecumenical Prayers for Peace” days in the mid-1980s during which we put on a play symbolizing the escalation by building a wall from cardboard boxes — box by box — each with a symbolic word like fear, lack of communication, militarization, arms trade, etc.

And later in this play we dismantled this “wall” by taking away each “stone” — each box — one after another …

Last year, I was on the Italian island of Lampedusa close to Libya on the North African coast.

I visited the island to participate in a worship service commemorating the more than 300 refugees who had drowned on Lampedusa’s coast on October 3, 2013.

And I had deja vu: The ecumenical worship in 2017 used the image of building a wall between those who live in relative comfort on the one side of the Mediterranean and those living in relative discomfort on the other side of the Mediterranean.

They were using (as we had in East Germany in the eighties) cardboard boxes to build a wall made of greed, injustice, slavery, exploitation, selfishness and militarization. And they dismantled the wall just as we did in the eighties.

And, suddenly, it dawned on me: This is the new Iron Curtain.

Yes, I remembered I had seen a literal iron curtain a few months before when I had visited refugee camps on the Greek islands, an iron curtain has been installed by Europeans in a new place.

It’s our responsibility to tear down this new Iron Curtain slowly, carefully, gradually, but also very, very soon.

The American Declaration of Independence uses the term “We the people ….” Yes, to quote an American president, “We the people … need to tear down this wall.”

I believe that churches and Christians have a specific role to play in tearing down the wall.

The words of the Prophet Micah remind us what we do wrong when he says, “Their leaders judge for a bribe and their priests teach for a price and their prophets tell fortunes for money.”

And he also shows us his vision “that they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

We in the East German peace movement adopted the Old Testament image of “Swords into Plowshares” as our symbol using a picture of a statue that stands in front of the UN Building in NYC.

I must say that our authoritarian government didn’t like it and ripped it off our parkas and everywhere else they could find it.

Now — again today — some governments call us “do-gooders” or “starry-eyed idealists” because we want to tear down the walls they have built.

One of the most destructive features of the dictatorship in the East Bloc as well as in the Nazi regime was the lying that became very normal for many.

In both cases, the dictator and his party leaders told blatant lies every day in part to put up a smokescreen to hide other things, and in part to manipulate people by implicitly communicating that there is no such thing as objective truth, that truth is relative.

In the end, what they were saying is that “the party,” the Nazi Party or the Communist Party, believed in and allowed only one truth, namely the truth that kept them in power, and in both cases that truth was grounded on the fear of our enemies.

The dictators’ cronies and the media, which were forced to follow the official line, followed what they were told without questioning and without letting anyone think they might doubt any of it.

And in our culture of “official” lies, lying became normal for many.

The family that switches the radio or TV station when someone rings the doorbell from a critical radio station to a station that praises the dictator in order not to show which TV channel they watch.

Vaclav Havel, the underground poet and first freely-elected president of what was then Czechoslovakia, wrote a book after the Velvet Revolution titled “To Live in Truth.” To him, the most important change that needed to happen was for people to begin acknowledging what was really true.

And today untruth returns. It’s a two-edged sword for manipulation that gets along well with Big Money and Big Data.

In Europe, we face a new type of populism that tells us there is no truth beyond our own narrow interests. What this new populism aims for is to destroy solidarity.

We Christians know better. We need to change the agenda and the narrative.

In Germany, as in many countries in Europe, support for right wing party campaigning comes from dubious anonymous donors inside and outside the country. Our election law has a glitch when it says campaigns cannot be supported from abroad in the “real world,” but it doesn’t stop manipulation in the “digital world.”

Internet companies harvest personal data to be used to tailor election campaigns or polls. This has happened in England during the Brexit campaign, in Greece and Macedonia during their recent plebiscite to normalize relationships between those two countries. It has happened in voting in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and in my country, Germany.

But you and I know that truth is a sibling of justice. When truth is withheld, justice is withheld from the vulnerable, the strangers, the widows, the orphans.

We Christians know truth cannot be separated from justice. Truth serves justice. Truth is not about our narrow interest, truth is not even just about being literally correct, though that is essential.

Truth is not the truth of cronies, or scribes or Pharisees.

But truth is with those who challenge the cronies and the scribes and the Pharisees, who are brave enough to speak truth to power, who dare to protect the vulnerable.

Now to quote Proverbs 31:8-10: “Speak out on behalf of the voiceless for the rights of all that are vulnerable. Speak out in order to judge with righteousness and to defend the needy and the poor.”

And truth cannot be separated from love and solidarity. Gioconda Belli says, “La solidaridad es la ternura de los pueblos.” Solidarity is the tenderness of the peoples.

Let me translate Paul’s word “love” in first Corinthians as “solidarity.”

Solidarity does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Solidarity does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

One of the counterstrategies of liars is to say criticism is fake news.

The right-wing protesters in Germany use a Nazi word to defame free speech: they call the media “Lügenpresse,” the fake press.

One of the tactics used is to talk about migration not as an historical fact and phenomenon, but in terms of a flood, a conspiracy, a planned foreign domination.

When you look at a map, you realize that most refugees are either internally displaced, which means they live in their home countries, or they live in a country very close to where they come from.

The bulk of the refugee crisis is not being born by Europe or the US.

I learned from my Christian friends in Spain, where memory of the Franco dictatorship is still fresh: Europe doesn’t face a refugee crisis, but a crisis of human solidarity.

I learned from the Waldensian Church in Italy, whose strength when they had to hide in the Alps facing persecution by the medieval Roman Catholic Church was in the schools they built: Europe doesn’t face a refugee crisis but a crisis of critical education.

I learned from friends in Greece who breathe the air of the Mediterranean light and colors that creativity is the key for overcoming trauma and reestablishing control over your life: Europe doesn’t face a refugee crisis, but a crisis of unity in cultural diversity.

I learned from all those who advocate against racism and discrimination against minorities and the power of big money and big data: Europe doesn’t face a refugee crisis, but a crisis of social justice.

And I learned from my friends in Central and Eastern Europe who went through their Velvet Revolutions that hope is not a cheap belief that everything will be good in the end, but rather the confidence that there will be meaning whatever the end will be: Europe doesn’t face a refugee crisis, but a crisis of hope.

Traveling for weeks in this country, the U.S.A., I found myself sometimes wondering whether you might face similar challenges. If so, let’s be in this learning process together.

Amen