It's a bit long, & actually has no connection to recent sermons or current events that I can recall at the moment. It's merely a random passage that struck a chord w/ me & I figured to pass it along. It may or may not carry any weight beyond my own opinions. =)

From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs, & vice is punished.

We have been fortunate enough to live to a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters & sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.

... by 1966, 86-thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany. And still we choke w/ anger here. ... Too few! 86-thousand are too few. And 20 years is too little! It must go on & on.

And during the same period, in our own country, about ten men have been convicted.

What takes place beyond the Oder & the Rhine gets us all worked up. What goes on in the environs of Moscow & behind the green fences near Sochi, or the fact the the murderers of our husbands & fathers ride through our streets & we make way for them as they pass, doesn't get us worked up at all, doesn't touch us. That would be digging up the past.

... in a quarter-century we have not tracked down anyone. We have not brought anyone to trail. It is their wounds we are afraid to reopen.

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers & Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

In the German trials an astonishing phenomenon takes place from time to time. The defendant clasps his head in his hands, refuses to make any defense, & from then on asks no concessions from the court. He says that the presentation of his crimes, revived & once again confronting him, has filled him w/ revulsion & he no longer wants to live.

That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it.

A country which has condemned evil 86-thousand times from the rostrum of a court & irrevocably condemned it in literature & among its young people, year by year, step by step is purged of it.

What are we to do? Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, & then w/ devoted concern we tended them the murderers in their prosperous old age.

It is unthinkable in the 20^th century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted & what constitutes that past which ought not to be stirred up.

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep w/in us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, & it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, & not because of the weakness of indoctrinational work, that they are growing up indifferent.  Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!