Preaching in a Straitjacket (Gagged)
A Sermon To My Own Soul
Richard Wurmbrand was a Romanian Lutheran minister who spent 14 years in prison (three in solitary confinement) and published ”Tortured for Christ" after his release in the late 1960s.
He later founded Voice of the Martyrs, but son Michael Wurmbrand does NOT recommend VOM’s ministry today. (Read his “Open Letter” about VOM.) Michael runs his own ministry, and has made most of his father’s books (and formerly unpublished writings) available for free!
What follows was excerpted from a “Sermon To My Own Soul”, in Wurmbrand’s book, Sermons in Solitary Confinement. You can read the entire sermon and book for yourself or listen to the audio version of this post on the latest episode of the China Compass podcast. And remember, Wurmbrand tells us that he wouldn’t agree now with all that he preached then.
I can no longer speak to the One who created me. I can no longer cry out to him with my voice. I can no longer speak across the distance to my brothers and sisters.
Today, for the first time, I burst out into yelling cries, for no obvious reason. I have often heard such cries, interrupting for a few moments the deep silence of our prison. We all knew then that one of us had become mad. The cries very soon ceased. I did not know how the guards quietened those whose nerves had cracked. Now I know.
They have put me in a strait-jacket, very tightly bound. They have put a gag in my mouth.
The only one to whom I can speak is you, my soul. David often spoke to his own soul, asking it to praise the Lord, or questioning why it was troubled. But David, too, knew madness. The Bible recounts how he pretended to be a lunatic while living with the Philistines. Psychiatrists tell us that nobody simulates madness unless he has a tendency towards it. I will do what David did. I will now deliver, in utter silence, a sermon to you, my soul…
Don't you see, my soul, how right Jesus was in saying that "man shall not live by bread alone"?1 I get one slice of bread every Tuesday. And what bread! But I don't just vegetate. I live. I sometimes laugh heartily at jokes which I tell myself, being alone in my cell. I think about politics, about how nations which I have never seen should be ruled; I remember works of art; I lead a life of worship. All this is you (my soul). Say, my soul, "I am."
A few days ago a Christian prisoner, unable to bear the tortures any more, and fearing that he would finally betray the brethren, jumped from the window of the third floor during an interrogation. He was healthy. He was not satisfying a need of the body by destroying himself. You know my secret. You know the place where I have hidden some thirty sleeping pills which, taken at once, will ensure that I do not become a Judas. These suicides are acts of love and honor. They protect the Underground church. Love, decency, honor, belong to you, my soul, and not to the body. I am gagged and cannot speak. But because of this, you must speak even more loudly, and assert yourself: "I am."
You saw me dancing when I was in unspeakable pain. You saw me dancing with heavy chains around my ankles. Who was the one who exuberantly rejoiced? It was not my body. My body had no reason to dance. There was no music to incite it to do so. It was you, my soul…
Take knowledge of yourself, my soul, and take knowledge of your incomparable value. The body will die. Around me, prisoners are dying, because of the great hunger, the cold and the tortures. But who has ever seen a soul die? I have lost everything I had in the world, but if you are saved, I shall have kept the pearl of greatest price.
The enemies of Jesus took away everything he had. Naked, he hung on a cross. His foes stood around it, rejoicing. But at the last minute he spoiled their joy by saying: "Father, into thy hands I surrender my spirit." He had one thing which they could not take from him. And by this he lives and rules forever more.
There is no one who can destroy you, my soul.
You, my soul, have made yourself the pivot round which everything else has to revolve. The animals cannot speak, as I cannot because of being gagged. They have interesting things to say. The story of Balaam's ass shows this. How much our dog could have told us! He knew beforehand that I was going to be arrested. He was miserable for two weeks, and barked the whole time. But animals cannot speak. You never used to be worried about the dumbness of animals. You are only worried now that I am gagged.
But the whole Communist camp is gagged. Nobody is allowed to say everything he thinks. I am in a strait-jacket. But some angels are in everlasting chains. How much worse it must be for winged beings, accustomed to fly from planet to planet. I am obsessed only with the suffering of one little insignificant being- me.
Why can't you have a right sense of proportion? Why don't you worry about yourself in proportion to the share of your suffering in the universal pain, and in proportion to what you, an unimportant man, mean in this infinite and eternal universe?
You judge things, events and men according to their usefulness or harm for you, as if the universe existed for you, and not the reverse.
True repentance is a reversal of proportions. God is at the centre. I am an extremely valuable being, but one of innumerable billions of beings, of whom every one has to bear the fate assigned to him by the Creator.
Consider yourself, my soul, as a small detail in a huge mechanism, as one cell in a vast organism. White blood corpuscles are sacrificed in order that the whole body may live and be healthy. You have to suffer for some hidden purpose of God, about which you know as little as the white corpuscle knows why it has to die.
Let it be enough for you that you are suffering for the Kingdom of God2. All suffering serves this final cause.
Jesus looked on his suffering like this. He accepted it willingly and, even on the cross, thought not about himself but about the thief near him, about his mother and about you. Drown your small suffering in the vast ocean of pain. Believe that there is meaning in it, and you will be comforted.
Listen to me, my soul, and praise the Lord in all his doings. Amen.
Matthew 4:4
2 Thessalonians 1:5