Being thrown to the lions: A call to prayer and action in support of the people of Georgia
Photograph by Rama Krushna Behera via Unsplash
Rev. Sean Cornell
It’s been a year and a half since my visit to Georgia as a guest of the Evangelical Christian Baptist Church there and their Metropolitan Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili. While I was there I saw the beginnings of the ongoing protests against the Georgian Dream Party, their rigged election, and Georgian Dream’s attempts to move Georgia back into the Russian sphere of influence and away from the European Union (despite the fact that the goal for Georgia to gain full EU and NATO membership is enshrined in the Georgian constitution). I stood with the members of the Baptist Peace Cathedral on Good Friday as we held our red crosses up before the Georgian Parliament building and prayed for a just resolution to the country’s issues. Sadly, our prayers were not met with a favorable response. The reaction of the Georgian government against the protestors has been horrific: beatings, masked attacks, police officers threatening women with sexual assault. All this has been going on for the past year and a half since my visit.
Then, on Monday, December 1 I received a video link from Metropolitan Songulashvili to a BBC investigative piece on the water cannons the government has been using against the protestors. In the course of that investigation, which covered the entire span since my visit to Georgia, the BBC investigators determined that the Georgian government had been mixing chemical agents into the water, and they identified the primary chemical agent as camite. Camite is the military name for this material; the chemical name is bromobenzyl cyanide.
The Georgian government is spraying its citizens with a cyanide solution.
This is a World War I chemical weapon that is so caustic that it hasn’t been used since the 1930s. I’ll spare you the details of what this chemical does and how it fits in with the wider abuses by the Georgian authorities; it’s all very graphic and disturbing.
Despite being an overwhelmingly Christian country (over 85% of Georgians identify as some sort of Christian and the Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia Ilia II, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, is the most trusted and respected man in the country), the Georgian government and its departments (the police, the courts, etc.) have so missed the core of Jesus’ teachings that they think spraying civilians with a cyanide solution is a good thing. They think that poisoning civilians and leaving them with terrible lingering medical maladies is a good thing. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). It’s hard to have an abundant life when your health is destroyed by a chemical weapon.
American Christians need to stand with our Georgian kin who are suffering injustice at the hands of the Georgian government, just as the apostolic women stood with the Lord Jesus as he suffered injustice at the hands of the Roman government.
This sort of behavior cannot stand. Our Georgian siblings in the faith and cousins in the human race cannot be left to be tormented like this. Which means that we American Christians (and Western Christians more generally) cannot be like the apostles who (with one exception) abandoned their Lord and God to a torturous death on the cross. We must take up the part of the women who followed their Lord to Calvary — Mary Magdalene, Salome, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Mary the wife of Clopas, the blessed Virgin Mary and the others. Personally, socially, and in most other ways they could do little for their suffering Lord, but what they could do, they did.
We American Christians — across denominations — need to do likewise and to stand with our Georgian kin who are suffering injustice at the hands of the Georgian government, just as those apostolic women stood with the Lord Jesus as he suffered injustice at the hands of the Roman government. Like them, we can and must pray for those being hurt. Like them, we can and must provide what comfort we can (in their case caring for our Lord’s burial, in our case donating to the support of those in need through the Evangelical Christian Baptist Church of Georgia or some other means). And like them, specifically like Mary Magdalene, we can and must speak the truth to those in authority (in her case by witnessing to the apostles of the Lord’s resurrection, in our case writing to our representatives and bringing this tragedy to their attention and calling on them to pressure the Georgian Dream Party to respect the human rights of Georgian citizens).
Remember that the Lord Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The Georgian people are being attacked by their own government with some of the vilest chemical weapons we as humanity have ever developed. I think they qualify as siblings of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ who stand in need. Therefore, our Lord’s question to the cowardly apostle Peter is being addressed to us here today: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” If so, then, “Tend my sheep.” (John 21:16).
Rev. Sean Cornell (they/them) is the pastor of Immanuel UCC, Plymouth, Wisconsin.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
If you can support the protestors in Georgia, financial contributions can be sent to the Evangelical Christian Baptist Church of Georgia through the Alliance of Baptists here in the United States. The Georgian bishops who have been active on the front lines of the protests will see that your gifts are put to good use.
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