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Each day this Lent we’re looking at major “turning points” in Christian history – moments or seasons in which the story of God’s people took an important and often unexpected turn.
If heaven is a place where we will finally have a chance to hear all the stories of what really happened in this world – and all the stories that lie behind those stories – then some of most inspiring will no doubt come from behind the Iron Curtain.
They will recount how Christianity, against all odds, survived history’s most brutal, systematized attempt to crush it out of existence.
To date, most of those stories have never been told, for the simple reason that the central players never had the chance to share their experiences before they vanished from the scene.
But a handful of accounts were recorded by some heroic chroniclers. And if they are representative of the whole, we will consider Christianity’s emergence from the blast furnace of communism to be one of history’s great turning points.
For the better part of seven decades in the 20th century, outsiders could only wonder what was happening inside the nations dominated by Soviet and Maoist idealogues.
Before Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in 1917, there were at least 55,000 Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union. By the 1940s, only a few hundred remained. The number of monasteries went from 1,025 to zero. Church buildings were shuttered or demolished. Some became museums or propaganda centers for Marxism.
Maps of the city of Moscow were redrawn so that churches didn’t even appear. Even when visitors were holding those maps and standing directly in front of beautiful buildings, they were told, “There is no church here.”
In a sense, the architects of Soviet communism tried to make religion itself disappear. Jesus was mentioned in history books, but only as a legendary figure. Orthodox bishops and priests were dragged off to the gulags (forced-labor camps), along with political dissidents, artists, and other “undesirables.”
More than a million never returned.
Schoolchildren were indoctrinated into atheism. They were instructed to bow their heads, close their eyes, and pray for blessings from God. After a minute their teachers said, “You see, nothing happened.” Then they were instructed to pray for blessings from Stalin. This time when they lifted their heads there were bags of candy on their desks.
What was the outcome of decades of militant, state-sponsored unbelief?
Author Philip Yancey reports that Stalin unleashed a kind of Marxist speakers bureau – gifted presenters who preached the intellectual supremacy of atheism and the glories of the Communist State at mandatory gatherings around the nation.
One such speaker worked his crowd for more than two hours. Empty, emotionless faces stared back at him. When he asked for questions at the end, there was silence. That’s when a Russian Orthodox priest in the crowd suddenly shouted, “He is risen!” Immediately a majority of those present roared in response: “He is risen, indeed!”
It turned out to be harder to stamp out the flames of faith than anyone thought.
When Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the Soviet empire crumbled 15 years later, missiologists were stunned to discover that Christianity was in fact alive and well in both China and Russia.
The twin lessons? God is faithful, no matter what. And hope is often born in the darkest places.
One of those who suffered in the gulags was a doctor named Boris Kornfeld. Sentenced to years of “re-education,” he kept to himself. He watched his back. He took no risks.
Then something happened that he never expected: He began to trust in God. His heart was flooded with hope.
Kornfeld didn’t tell anyone why, but he began to serve others. He even used his surgical skills to save the life of one of the hated guards. That act of compassion, he knew, would bring trouble. But when one of the vilest prisoners threatened him with death for helping the enemy, he realized he was no longer afraid.
Later that day he performed life-saving stomach surgery on a young man with a sad face. He stayed up all night, sitting beside his patient, who was hovering between life and death.
Suddenly he felt led to break his silence. He talked for hours to the young man about the joy of meeting this God of mercy and grace. He described how God’s love had driven the fear from his heart, and how he had even felt buoyed by meaning in the midst of the gulag’s misery.
The young patient, gripping the doctor’s hand, listened intently as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
Sometime around dawn, Boris Kornfeld was murdered by the prisoner who had threatened him. He had shared his spiritual convictions just once.
But his audience of one, the sad-faced prisoner, lived on. His name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Seized by the words he had heard on that recovery table, he chose to make Kornfeld’s faith his own. He would go on to win the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming one of the 20th century’s most valiant voices for freedom, chronicling how God’s grace is able to break through some of the most grace-challenged places on earth.
During the heyday of Stalin’s reign, crosses disappeared. Religious icons were confiscated. Millions of Bibles were taken from the homes of believers and incinerated.
Not long after the doors to Russia reopened in the 1990s, an American mission team in the city of Stavropol heard a rumor that there was still a warehouse outside of town where confiscated Bibles had been stored since the days of the Great Depression. Members of the team approached local officials and asked permission to look inside.
What they discovered was a mind-boggling mountain of Russian Scriptures. Having received the officials’ consent to distribute as many as they could, the team returned with a truck and some hired hands.
One of them was a Russian college student who made no secret of his cynical dismissal of religious claptrap. The rubles he would earn, however, would come in handy.
As the workers loaded the Bibles, one of the mission team members noticed that the young man had disappeared. Ultimately they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping.
He had secretly put one of the Bibles into his pocket. Then he had slipped away, unnoticed, hoping to take a quick glance at its pages. He was shaken by what he had discovered.
On the first page of the Bible he had randomly picked up, he saw the name and the distinctive handwriting of his own grandmother. Of the tens of thousands of Bibles in the warehouse, he had somehow pocketed the one that belonged to a family member who had never lost her faith.
And who had never stopped praying for him.
Those are two of the stories that originated from behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps one day in heaven, looking back, we’ll get to hear all the rest.
Right now your corner of the world may seem to be a dark, grace-challenged place. But there’s a reason this is called Holy Week.
On the darkest Friday afternoon the world has ever known, the Son of God took upon himself every one of our sins and burdens.
Then he proved that nothing in the world – not communism, not fear, not violence, not your worst failure – has the power to defeat the God who delights in raising the dead.
Nothing.