I have resisted the temptation to weigh in more than I already have on the Donald Trump phenomenon because we are saturated. Television news and the newspapers can’t keep their eyes off of him and I confess that I watch the 7:00 a.m. news because I don’t want to miss the latest outlandish thing he has said or done. I am changing my mind about writing because I heard a superb sermon yesterday by the Rev. Shannon J. Kershner, at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. Shannon skillfully inverted the traditional interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow and unresponsive judge who finally gives the widow the justice she is pleading for simply to make her stop asking and go away. Shannon said that maybe God is not the judge here. We are the judge. God is speaking through the widow, persistently urging and pleading to us for justice and compassion. Then she tied that intriguing suggestion to the matter of sexual aggression, exploitation, and abuse of women. Without mentioning Trump by name she told us that God wants the accepted tradition of sexual aggression and abuse to stop and wants us all to speak up about it. “I am a woman and the mother of a daughter and I cannot remain silent,” Shannon said. The large Sunday morning congregation erupted in long and sustained applause, something that is not exactly routine in Presbyterian worship. Finally someone from within the church had named it and courageously condemned it.

There is much about Donald Trump that I find abhorrent, making fun of a physically disabled reporter to cite maybe the most abhorrent. Last week’s revelation and repeated playing back of a recorded sequence in which he demeaned women in the crudest way possible and then tried to excuse it as “locker room talk” pushed me over the top. I have a wife and two daughters and three daughters-in-law and nine granddaughters, and I cannot remain silent either. Mature men, quite simply, do not talk like that. Spoiled, indulged, immature adolescents do, but not men. I’ve been in locker rooms all my life and I never heard anyone talk like that. Ever. Then, as always, Trump maligned the victims of his aggression, intimating, in a final descent into indecency and plain cruelty, that some of these victims were not attractive enough to warrant his attention.

The great mystery is not how a man can be that grotesque. Christians who worship regularly and pray a Prayer of Confession know about the potential for sin within each one of us. Christians are saddened, not surprised, when it surfaces. The greater mystery by far is why sane, sensible people are still supporting him, actually imagining him presiding at a White House State Dinner, addressing the United Nations, engaging in delicate, critical diplomacy with allies and foes. Sensible, intelligent Republican leaders will carry this cowardice and shame for a very long time to come.

In a new biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler – Ascent/ 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich, the author revisits the mystery of how a civilized nation that produced Bach and Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller and Luther could have enabled a Hitler to rise to power and authority. After hearing Shannon’s sermon, the last sentence of a review of the book in Sunday’s New York Times, stopped me in my tracks. “What is truly frightening in Ullrich’s book is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seem to be waiting for him.”

Donald Trump has lifted the lid off a darkness in our humanity that always lives in tension with our good instincts, what Abraham Lincoln called our “better angels.” Those good instincts surely include respect for one another, compassion for the suffering, protection for the vulnerable, seeking always for the good and just and noble, working always to attain it and share it with all. Trump has brought into that tension the worst in us: selfishness, arrogance, greed, racism, angry paranoia, bullying, meanness, sexism of the worst sort, crudeness, and consistent dishonesty.

Every one of us must ask ourselves in the next three weeks: Is this what we want, or for some reason will settle for, in our president?

God help us, God help this good and beautiful nation, if the answer is “yes.”