The Lutheran Hour

"Solidarity"

#93-19
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on January 11, 2026
Speaker: Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler
Copyright 2026 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: Romans 6:5

If you asked me to explain the meaning of the word, “solidarity,” I’d show you a clip from the 1991 action film, Backdraft.

A backdraft is, I’m told, one of the most dangerous fire events a firefighter can face. It’s an explosive blast that happens after a fire has been hiding in a confined space and burns up its oxygen, making the flames die down, but still hot enough to be dangerous. The fire isn’t visible, but it’s still there, waiting for an opportune time to reignite.ⁱ

Backdraft, the movie, tells the story of a team of firefighters in Chicago. The scene that I mentioned sets up like this: Engine 17 has responded to a four-alarm fire in an old factory. The team is searching for victims trapped in the blaze on one of the upper levels of the structure. Suddenly, the floorboards cave in as the flame-eaten joists below them give way. The floor opens its jaws, and one of the firemen falls into the maw of the fire-breathing beast.

His partner standing nearby throws himself onto the floor, reaching through the smoking, splintered teeth to grab his comrade’s hand just in time. But the weight of the dangling man nearly pulls him down. So then two, three, four more firefighters rush to their aid, clasping hands, hoisting, pulling with all their might as the fiery beast groans and growls to engulf them. As they sweat and strain together, the dangling man, he feels his hand slipping. He knows it’s all over. “I’m goin’!” he says to his partner, who answers him, “You go. We go.”ⁱⁱ

That is solidarity. It’s the alignment of fates, hopes, and futures. It’s unity, harmony, cohesion. It’s the opposite of divisiveness, discord, and self-interest. Solidarity says, “You go. We go.” Solidarity is how Christians understand their relationship to Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus, the Son of God, went where we had gone so that we might go where He goes.

The Gospel, the Good News announced in the New Testament, the Good News we announce every week on this program, is that God’s Son was born a human among the people of Israel, that He was given the name Jesus and the title, Christ, that He was crucified, buried, raised from the dead, and that He will return visibly one day to set the world right, so that we would have solidarity with Him.

For Christians, faith in Jesus is not an accessory, but solidarity. It’s not fire insurance, but God’s gift that binds us to Jesus. We become His partners, His comrades, His people. He becomes our Captain. And we trust Him because He went where we went, so that His story could become our story, His life, our life, His future, our future.

Where He goes, we go.

The apostle Paul, a first-generation messenger and representative of Jesus, explained how this was the plan all along—that God created humanity for solidarity with Him. God created us for life with Him, but we rebelled against God, and the backdraft of our rebellion brought death and disaster on the world. But because of Jesus, our rebellion has not ruined God’s plan. In fact, our sin has indirectly proved the power of God’s love and grace all the more, because, even after we became God’s enemies, even after we would become the people who would murder God’s beloved Son, even then He would seek forgiveness and reconciliation and solidarity with us. As Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, “where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (see Romans 5:20).

But this claim raised a question. If our sin shows off the greatness of God’s grace, then why not do evil so that good will come? Why not keep sinning so we can get more grace? Paul answers the question by reframing it. The person who says, “Why not sin so that grace will increase?” imagines sin like an accessory, like a little fire pit that you keep out back. But this assumes that sin is something you can use when it’s convenient and keep under your control. Paul, however, would have us see sin as a master that owns us, that we were its slaves, that we live under its dominion, stuck inside its burning structure, standing on its flame-eaten joists.

And that’s why Jesus came in solidarity with us. He threw Himself into sin’s jaws. And it killed Him, consumed Him, swallowed Him whole, just like it’ll do to us one day. But then God turned this greatest evil into the highest good. God pulled His Son out of the beast. God raised Jesus from the dead. And by faith in Him, by Baptism in His Name, God unites us with Christ, so that where He has goes, we follow.

Listen to how Paul says it in Romans 6:

“What should we say then? Should we continue in sin so that grace would increase? By no means! How can we, who died to sin, still live in it? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were—we were buried, therefore, with Him, by Baptism into His death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too would walk in new life.

Because if we have been united with Him like this in His death, then we will certainly be united with Him in His resurrection. We know that our old self was crucified with Him, so that the body of sin would be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, because the one who has died has been set free from sin.

Now if we have died with Christ, we trust that we will also live with Him, seeing that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him because the death He died, He died to sin, once for all. But the life He lives, He lives to God.

So also, count yourselves as dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin rule over your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not offer your limbs, your members to sin as instruments for its unrighteous purposes. Instead, offer yourselves to God, as people who have been brought from death to life. And offer your limbs, your members to God as instruments for His righteous purposes.

Because sin will no longer be your master, since you are no longer under the Law, but you are under grace—you are under God’s favor” (Romans 6).

One implication of the Gospel is that human sin, guilt, evil—they have not thwarted God’s good plan for His creation. In fact, sin and evil have only magnified God’s grace. In Jesus, God took what is evil and turned it for good, because that’s what God does. Despite what we have done, God still feels solidarity with us, with you.

But what if you’ve been a part of something so terrible that it feels unforgiveable, that the damage could never be undone? Or, what if you’ve been burned by something someone did to you, and because of the trauma you’ve suffered, it seems that the world will never be right again. And you can’t imagine trusting a supposedly good and loving God who created all this and controls it and promises to overturn everything evil for good for you in the end. If that’s where you are, first, I want you know that I’ve been there with you, and I still find myself going there in my thoughts, even as a Christian pastor and teacher, I can’t comprehend the evil and suffering I see and experience.

What keeps bringing me back to trust in God is the account of Jesus recorded in the New Testament, and also the accounts of how Jesus is still at work in the lives of His people today, even in the worst kind of evil.

I’ll share an example with you that I came across recently, but I’ll warn you: it’s a disturbing story and it may not be appropriate for children. It comes from Denise Uwimana’s book, From Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness. Denise is a survivor of genocide, the mass killings that took place in Rwanda in the spring and summer of 1994. And you can hear some more of her story in a brief interview at the end of the program. Denise opens her book by saying that she has heard how, in the United States, many people still remember exactly what they were doing the morning of September 11, 2001, when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers.

For Denise, she remembers exactly what she was doing in Rwanda the morning of April 7, 1994. But there is this difference: “On September 11, nearly three thousand people [were killed]. In Rwanda, [a country] smaller in size and population than Ohio, the number [killed] was three times that many every day—for a hundred days.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Approximately one million people—men, women, and children—in one ethnic group were brutally killed by another group, often with hand-held weapons. They murdered their neighbors because, after decades of a bitter rivalry fueled by colonial interference, they began to believe there was no longer any solidarity between them.

Emmanuel was one of the many Rwandans caught in the backdraft of this lie. He was just a teenager in 1994. From his home, he could smell the smoke of the fire in the air. A big man in the village was telling Emmanuel and his friends, “Anyone who doesn’t kill is not a man! Eradicate all snakes! And remember, young vipers are as deadly as full-grown ones.”

Emmanuel and five other men came to the home of one their neighbors. Machete in hand, Emmanuel murdered the father and threw him into the latrine. He did the same to five of the man’s children. The mother and two of the children escaped. The militia rewarded Emmanuel by giving him that family’s house. He dismantled it; used the materials to build his own, and he lived there until he was arrested a year later, in 1995. The militia that had incited the killings had been overthrown by then. A new government came to power. The survivors hoped for peace and reconciliation through justice and mercy. Justice included arresting the guilty and imprisoning them. Mercy meant allowing the guilty the opportunity to confess and ask for forgiveness.

For his crimes during the genocide, Emmanuel had been sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 2003, eight years after he was arrested, Emmanuel was invited to take part in a public confession. That day, he told the whole gruesome story before his village, admitting what he had done. For the last eight years, he had subsisted in a filthy, crowded prison. He was continually haunted by the faces and screams of the children he killed. The mental torture had been so intense that he was certain hell could be no worse. He stood before his neighbors that day, sweating, trembling, eyes cast down. He said, “I plead for mercy—mercy from the government, from my village, and from God!”

Reading Denise’s book about the genocide in Rwanda as an outsider, I found myself wondering, “What good is there in revisiting these horrific events?” Half-way through, Denise offers an answer: “If a nation’s shameful deeds are not to be repeated, [then] they must be recognized and remembered—not swept under the rug.”^iv

In other words, if we want to prevent future genocides, Rwandans must remember what neighbors did to neighbors, as Germans must remember what their nation did to the Jewish people, and Americans must remember how our nation murdered Native American peoples and millions of the unborn through on-demand abortion. As Christians, we remember and confess sins, not to blame others, not to claim that one people group or generation is better than any other. Instead, when we confess, we are agreeing with the Bible when it says that we are all alike. We all share a fatal solidarity, trapped under the dominion of sin. Sin isn’t an accessory. It’s not a little fire pit that we’ve got out back, under control. It is the dominion ruled by the devil.

The United Nations general in charge of the failed peace-keeping effort in Rwanda once was asked how he could still believe in God after all he had seen. The general answered, “In Rwanda, I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.”^v

There are explosive moments when evil is unmasked in the world and in our lives. We see sin for what it is, a cosmic power before which human beings are as specks of dust a raging inferno. But much of the time, the fire hides inside our confined spaces, out of sight, waiting for an opportune time, accumulating fuel—small slights of superiority, labels we use to put others beneath us, apathy that extinguishes any hope of solidarity.

We cannot fight this fire on our own. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot escape. We can only plead for mercy, like Emmanuel did before his village. We confess our powerlessness before sin and cling to our Baptism into the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Denise Uwimana, the survivor and author whom we’ll hear from in a moment, she is a follower of Jesus. Because of her faith in Christ, she devotes herself to helping Rwandans heal and rebuild after that murderous inferno of 1994. Denise has walked with her neighbors as they’ve struggled together with questions like, “Where was God during the genocide? Why does He permit such cruelty? How can God use sorrow?”

Denise has found that the questions keep leading her back to the cross where Jesus stretched out His arms in solidarity with the whole human race. Denise says that, when talking with Western Europeans and North Americans, she’s met people who cannot grasp why Jesus had to die: “Couldn’t God have pardoned humankind without that torture?” But in Rwanda, she says, “where we saw evil unmasked, it makes all the difference to know that God’s own Son has been there, too.”^vi He went there because that’s where sin had taken us. He went there for us, in solidarity, to lead us out of it.

One of the people who heard Emmanuel’s public confession that day was the grieving widow of the man he killed, the mother of the children he had murdered. The woman’s name is Cancilde. That day, Emmanuel’s confession reopened Cancilde’s wounds. But hearing him, she also felt sadness for him. After the public confession, Emmanuel was returned to serve the rest of his prison sentence. Cancilde wouldn’t see him again for over a decade.

One morning, he showed up on her doorstep. He had been released from prison a few years early, on good behavior. He came to plead for her forgiveness. He said, “From that day to this, I have felt continual shame.”

Cancilde says it was the message of Jesus that had extinguished the fire of hatred in her heart. Jesus had prepared her to forgive. And her forgiving would have to be built, little by little, day by day, grace upon grace on what Jesus had done to take the punishment and the consequences for every evil act through all time.

The blood of Jesus spoke to her louder than the blood Emmanuel had shed. The blood of Jesus speaks for you. Cancilde stood there looking at the man who had murdered her husband and children. His eyes filled with tears as he repeated his heartfelt plea. “Yes, I forgive you,” she said.

In 2018, when Denise Uwimana was writing her book, she called her friend, Cancilde. She listened as Cancilde updated her on the goings-on of her village, the happenings at the market, the upcoming harvest, the new families, the children building play-houses on the bare red earth.

“And how is it between you and Emmanuel?” Denise asked.
“He’s my son!” she declared. “Every time I go to market, he brings his bike to help.”^vii

And I think, maybe, the next time someone asks me, “What does solidarity mean?” that will be the picture I offer.

i See also, Frederick Stowell, Essentials of Fire Fighting, International Fire Service Training Association, Oklahoma State University (2013), 248.
ii Ron Howard. Backdraft. Universal Pictures, 1991.
iii Denise Uwimana, From Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness. Walden, NY: Plough (2019), 9.
iv Uwimana, 70.
v Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo (2003), xxv.
vi Uwimana, 203.
vii Ibid., 205-

Reflections for January 11, 2026
Title: Solidarity

Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. You’ve heard us, now we’d love to hear from you! Go to lutheranhour.org and pull down the tab that says, “Get Involved.” Once again, here is Dr. Zeigler.

Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. Today I’m visiting with the author of the book that I mentioned in the message, Denise Uwimana. Welcome to the program, Denise.

Denise Uwimana: Thank you.

Mike Zeigler: Denise, in your book, From Red Earth, a Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness, you tell a gripping story about that genocide in 1994 which took the lives of many of your friends and family members, including your husband. Yet, by a miracle of God’s grace, you and your three sons survived. Afterward, however, you faced the challenge of returning to your hometown. Denise, help us understand what made seeing your neighbors in your hometown so difficult.

Denise Uwimana: The most obstacles I had was to live in the area where I lost my relatives, my friends, and all my belongings. And I had also difficulty to trust again people there in my surroundings. It was very hard and very difficult because at that place I was dehumanized, I was called “snake,” like other Tutsi, “cockroaches, spiders.” So I knew all people who were involved in the genocide. Most, I would say most, directly or indirectly. I was wounded, of course, because my church rejected me during the genocide.

Mike Zeigler: Now, in the book you say that your parents had encouraged you to live elsewhere and to find employment in a different town, but you said that you felt that God was calling you to return to the place where all this happened. Would you tell us about how you wrestled with God during this time?

Denise Uwimana: I was in the place where I lost my relatives and there I struggle much, much with God, and there I start to ask God, to struggle with God, why You allowed more than one million people—Tutsi, were murdered and where were You? I was taught God is able, as a Christian, and I was expecting Him to protect the Tutsi or to protect my husband and my relatives. And also at that time I’ll say I was still even so traumatized and all my feeling and my emotions were filled even of hate.

Mike Zeigler: So, you were struggling, seeing these people who had committed these atrocities and filled with hate, but you felt like God had brought you there for a purpose. What did you feel like the purpose for you to be there was?

Denise Uwimana: When I survived I was such a traumatized person. I feel God was very far from me and I started to fast. And I feel again connection to God. And also God spoke to me through Bible verses, Acts of the Apostles 26:16-18. It says, stand up. I prepare you, appoint you to be My servant. I’m sending you to your own people and to foreigner people. You will testify what you have seen and what I’m going to show you. You’ll help them to come from darkness to the light. I saw the love of God, that God does not only love us as victims, He loves also those who became killers or perpetrators of the family, of the killers. He wants to give them a chance to confess their sins. And I will see that God was leading me to forgive them and also to overcome the evil with good.

Mike Zeigler: Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Denise. If you wanted to read more about what Denise experienced with the love of God, even in the most unimaginable pain and suffering, the book’s titled From Red Earth, a Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness. Thank you again, Denise.

Denise: Thank you.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“To Jordan Came the Christ, Our Lord” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.