Last Monday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day we remember not only the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but the other five million human beings who were also slaughtered in the death camps. Eleven million people—each one a child of God, created in God’s image.

Yet so were the Nazis. So was Hitler. All of them were children of God made in God’s image. One aspect of being in the divine image is that we have the freedom and capacity to chose to do good. But we also have the freedom and capacity to chose to do evil.

I have visited two concentration camps—Dachau, outside of Munich, and Terezin, in the Czech Republic. Both were terrifying and both were sobering. I thought of what it must have been like to live in one of these camps.

But my visitation to these camps will have been useless if I don’t remember that the humanity in the inmates of these camps was the same humanity that was in the guards and commanders. The human darkness we call sin is in each and every one of us. My ancestors came from Germany, and I, no doubt, had distant cousins who shoved the hapless victims into the gas chambers and closed the doors.

Acts of anti-semitism are rising rapidly in America today. It can happen again because we are still human beings capable of performing great evil.

If you haven’t signed up already, join us as we visit the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum on Saturday, February 8, at 1:00. We will have dinner at El Fenix afterward, which will give us time to reflect.

The most dangerous thing we can believe is that it could never happen again. We need to remember…

Pastor Jane