The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should stop his country’s invasion of Ukraine and “sit at the table of brotherhood” to resolve the conflict.
“I would want him to go back and remember what Isaiah said, ‘Come and let us reason together,’” the Most Rev. Michael Curry told The Washington Times, citing Isaiah 1:18.
If he could speak directly to Mr. Putin, the bishop said he would tell him, “You know, God didn’t make you to hurt children, make you to put anybody else down.”
“I would appeal to the better angels of his nature if that’s possible. Because we can do — we the human race — can do better than this. The old slaves used to sing a spiritual: ‘There’s plenty good room, plenty good room in the father’s kingdom.’ There’s plenty of room for us all on this earth.”
Rev. Curry, who turns 69 on Sunday, encouraged the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom even as Russian forces surrounded the capital of Kyiv in what many experts believe is preparation for an assault on the city.
“Stand up for your freedom,” the bishop said in his message to Ukraine. “Stand up for justice when there’s an opportunity for a just peace. Thomas Jefferson said the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The Lord didn’t make anybody to be under anybody’s boot. Stand up for your freedom.”
He said he would tell Ukrainians, “You struggle for a democratic way of life, in which you struggle for values and principles [that] are truths worth giving your life for. And I will remind them of what the old slave used to say, Oh, freedom, oh, freedom, oh, freedom over me. And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.”
The bishop was one of more than 100 U.S. Christian leaders who signed an open letter to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, urging him to rethink his support for Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine. The letter, sent to Patriarch Kirill on March 11, laments the “tragic and terrible loss of innocent civilian life” and includes an “earnest plea that you use your voice and profound influence to call for an end to the hostilities and war in Ukraine and intervene with authorities in your nation to do so.”
The spiritual leader of the nation’s 1.8 million Episcopalians spoke following a survey this week showing that many nonreligious Americans believe Christians don’t exemplify the teachings of Jesus in their lives. He called for a “love revival” to repair that perception.
He said many were attracted to “the way of love that people sense in Jesus, even if they can’t get specific about it. There’s something about this person that is compelling.”
But for many of those outside the Christian fold, “we the church have often failed. And often [have] been unwilling to acknowledge that we’ve messed up” in reflecting that love to others.
Asked if the church doesn’t also need to call sinners to repentance, Rev. Curry said a call to love was exactly that.
“Love is the antidote to sin,” he said. “I used to think that if you asked me what’s the opposite of love, I would immediately instinctively say, hate. But the more I’m around, the more I’m realizing that the opposite of love is self-centeredness.
“What’s going on with sin, it is self-centeredness, where I am the center of everything, and everybody else, including God, is on the periphery of my self-interest.”
“Selfishness will destroy a marriage. It can destroy churches, synagogues, mosques, communities, nations, a world,” he said. “The United States, this experiment in democracy in this country, is dependent on our capacity to learn to love each other, to actually care about each other. Our democracy depends on it.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.