A Dual Disaster

A Dual Disaster

We are living in extraordinary times. None of us has seen anything like it. We are living with a dual disaster, two disasters at once; and one of them is making the other one worse than it had to be. We all know about the first of them. It is the novel coronavirus pandemic. People all over the world are having their lives disrupted at best and ended at worst by a thing so tiny you can’t see it, a thing that while it has protein and either RNA or DNA is not really alive and is very hard to kill. We call it the novel (or new) coronavirus. That name isn’t very specific, for there are other kinds of coronaviruses as well. It produces a disease called COVID-19. COVID-19 symptoms mimic more common flu symptoms, but it is much deadlier than common flu. Most people who get it survive it, but many don’t. Older people, defined for this purpose as anyone over 60 (which otherwise really isn’t all that old anymore) and people with underlying health issues are more likely to die from it than others, although most of them survive it too. The novel coronavirus is however sufficiently deadly that governments all over the world are ordering people to stay home to slow the spread of the virus unless perhaps they work in a business considered “essential” like grocery stores, emergency services, medical services, pharmacies, etc. In my home state of Washington Governor Inslee has issued a stay at home order. There are lots of exceptions to it, but most of us now are supposed to leave home only to go to one of those essential businesses that can stay open. I haven’t been out of my house except for short walks in the neighborhood for five days, and I don’t expect to go anywhere for the foreseeable future. One of the things that makes this situation so stressful is that we don’t know what “the foreseeable future” is. Most of the stay at home orders are time limited but can be extended. Governor Inslee’s order is for two weeks only, but I’ll be dumbfounded if it isn’t continued far longer than that. Like I said, none of us has ever seen anything like it. We’re coping with it as best we can, learning a new reality that we hope and pray will not become a permanent reality.

That’s the first disaster. The second one has a personal name, Donald J. Trump. Trump is an absolute catastrophe as president in this time of national emergency. How do you know when Trump is lying? His lips are moving. He thinks his hurting hotel business is more important than our lives. At first he called the coronavirus crisis a hoax and a Democratic scheme to discredit him. Then he started taking it more seriously, but reports say he’s getting impatient with Dr. Fauci, his best medical adviser. Fauci tells the truth. He corrects Trump when Trump says something that is medically false, which Trump does all the time. Trump says there are effective drugs available to treat COVID-19 when there aren’t. He says’ there no shortage of respirators and personal protective equipment when there is. He has supposedly activated the Defense Production Act, but he hasn’t ordered any company to do anything. He’s not getting more respirators. He’s not getting more personal protective equipment for medical service providers. He fiddles while Rome burns. The man should be removed from office immediately as utterly incapable of fulfilling the duties of president and unwilling even to try to do so. The coronavirus pandemic would be a very difficult situation in any event, but Trump could have helped. He could have lessened the impact and helped the American people survive it. He didn’t. He’s made it worse. We already knew he was the worst president in modern American history. Now we see how destructive a really bad president can be. Our country and the world will survive both the coronavirus and Trump, but that doesn’t excuse Trump’s heartless incompetence. We’ll get through. I just hope Trump’s presidency doesn’t.

An Assault on the Rule of Law

President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr are engaged in all out assault on the American value and tradition of the rule of law. They have seen to it that our proud and professional Department of Justice will not function as it should when the subject of its activity is a friend of President Trump. Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and political operative, was lawfully tried for and convicted of obstructing a federal proceeding, making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. There is no reason to believe that the federal prosecutors who brought those charges against Stone and secured his conviction acted an any way improperly. But Donald Trump cares nothing about that. Roger Stone is his man, so for Trump he should not be subject to the same law and the same legal proceedings that the rest of us are. Under Donald Trump the rule of law, if not quite dead yet, is under serious attack. We cannot allow this assault on a bedrock of American liberty to stand. Attorney General Barr must resign. If he doesn’t he must be impeached. There probably isn’t time to impeach Trump a second time before the November election, but if there were the House would have to impeach him all over again. If the American system of freedoms and rights is to survive we must remove Donald Trump from office next November. If we do not we will have no one to blame but ourselves for the destruction of our liberty grounded in law.

The Parable of the Whistleblower

The Parable of the Whistleblower

Matthew 25:14-30

It’s one of Jesus’ parables that most of us intensely dislike. In it Jesus says it is as if a wealthy man went on a long trip. Before he left he gave one of his servants (or slaves) five talents, that is, five valuable coins. To another he gave two talents, and to a third he gave one. While the rich master was away the servant with five talents traded with them and got five more. The servant with two talents did the same and got two more. The servant who had one talent however was fearful of the master. He said that he knew that the master was a harsh man who reaped where he had not sown and gathered where he had not planted. So he dug a hole and buried his one talent. When the master returned he praised the servants who had increased his money, but he condemned the servant who had hid the one talent in the ground. He said that servant should have invested the talent with the bankers so that the master would have gotten back his one talent plus interest. He says take the one talent from this servant and cast him into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, for to those who have much more will be given, but to those who have nothing even what they have will be taken away.

On February 9, 2020, the Rev. Leah Bilinski, lead pastor of Fauntleroy United Church of Christ in West Seattle, preached on this parable at First Congregational UCC of Bellevue, Washington. She said that there are two possible interpretations of this parable, one most of us have heard and one we may well not have heard. The one we have heard says that in the parable the master represents God. God expects us to take the gifts God has given us and increase them. This God gets mad at and punishes those who just keep what God has given them and return it to God without having increased it. This God takes what they have from those who have little and gives more to those who have much. This God casts people God doesn’t like into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. That’s the exegesis of this parable I’ve always understood and accepted. Yet I’ve known that that reading of the parable creates a very unappealing image of God. God becomes a wrathful judge who condemns people God doesn’t like and casts them out of God’s presence, presumably for eternity. Because that’s how I’ve understood the parable I’ve always said well, that’s Matthew not Jesus and avoided preaching on it.

Leah give us the other exegesis, one I’d never heard before. She said it comes from the book Parables as Subversive Speech by William Herzog. That book was published in 1994, so this interpretation has been around for a while. Still, I’d never heard it. Leah, apparently relying on Herzog, called this parable “the parable of the whistleblower.” When I saw that title in the bulletin for the day Leah preached and saw what her text was I was puzzled. It did occur to me that perhaps the servant with one talent who tells the master that he is a jealous man who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not planted was blowing the whistle on the master, but I didn’t have time to think that notion through any more than that. It turns out that that is exactly what Leah was going to tell us.

She said that we need to get over thinking of the master in this parable as God. Rather, he represents the oppressive economic system of Jesus’ time—and of ours. He takes what he has not earned. He takes the fruit of other people’s labor. He has done nothing to deserve the increased money the first two servants give him. The third servant, the one with only one talent, does indeed call out the master as benefiting from what he has not earned and does not deserve. The master then boasts that the oppressive economic system he represents will take away what little the poor have and give even more to those who have much.

Understood this way this troubling parable isn’t about a harsh and judgmental God at all. It is about the injustice of existing economic structures. It is a condemnation of the wealthy living off the efforts of others and treating the poor unfairly. It is a cry for economic justice, for the poor being treated fairly, and about no one living at the expense of others. Leah said in her sermon that understood in the traditional way this parable doesn’t sound like Jesus at all, and she’s right about that. Understood as the parable of the whistleblower, however, it sounds exactly like Jesus. It sounds exactly like Jesus speaking for the voiceless, condemning unjust economic and other systems, and demanding justice for the poor. Chatting with Leah briefly after the service I said that her interpretation makes the parable usable rather than one to be avoided. Understanding this parable that way gives it a prophetic voice that it certainly does not have when understood in the traditional way.

So thank you, Leah. You have opened my eyes to a new way of understanding this parable. You have also reminded me that no matter how long I’ve been studying the Bible and preaching from it there are always new lessons to be found in it. That, I suppose, is why the Bible is still alive for us so long after its numerous texts were first written. Thanks be to God!

A Sham Trial

This is the text of a letter I sent to the Everett Herald, our local daily newspaper: The Herald published it on February 14, 2020.

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump was a sham from the beginning. It wasn’t a sham because Trump didn’t deserve to be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. He did., and he does. It was a sham because the Republican Senators were never going to do the right thing no matter what information about Trump’s misdeeds came to light. In the end only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted to convict on one of the two articles of impeachment. This verdict means that tribalism has triumphed over justice. Party has triumphed over the nation. The Senate’s acquittal of President Trump proves beyond any reasonable doubt that our political system is broken. It no longer works the way it should. I mourn for my country. We have descended to a political depth I never thought I’d live to see. Shame on the Senate. Shame in particular on the Republican senators who refused to convict the obviously guilty president. They have violated their oath of office and the oath they took at the beginning of the impeachment trial. They have ignored both the facts and the law. How very, very sad for our poor country.

An American Tragedy

Unless a miracle happens the Senate will not convict Individual-1 of the charges the House has brought against him and remove him from office. The Senate vote is scheduled for next Wednesday. Unless a miracle happens it will be a strict party line vote--53-47 for acquittal. It's easy to look at that vote and see both sides acting for their political advantage rather than on the basis of the facts and the law. Strict party line votes like this one tell us nothing about what's right. To get to what's right we have to look at the facts and, in case of an impeachment at least, the law behind the vote. When we do that in the case of Individual-1's impeachment we find that both the facts and the law lead to only one defensible conclusion. Individual-1 is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and must be removed from office. He solicited and was prepared to accept a violation of campaign finance law by getting Ukraine to give him something of value for his reelection campaign. In that effort he used nongovernmental people--Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and others--and worked outside normal, legal diplomatic channels. He forced a career foreign service officer serving as ambassador to Ukraine out of her post not because of any legitimate policy issue but because he believed she hampered his solicitation of that illegal aid. He violated the law on impounding funds lawfully appropriated by Congress.. He violated his oath of office and did everything he could to hamper Congress' investigation into his wrongdoing. None of these facts is in dispute. They are what he did. The consensus of constitutional scholars is that impeachment does not require a violation of the law, although of course we have violations of the law here. All of that adds up to only one thing: Congress must convict Individual-1 of the charges the House has brought against him and remove him from office. That it won't is one of the great tragedies in the history of American politics.

Light for the World

Light for the World

January 26, 2020

For Prospect UCC Seattle

Scripture: Psalm 27:1, 4-9; Isaiah 9:1-4

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Friends, I need to tell you that I do not find it easy to preach these days. When we Christian preacher types preach we think we’re supposed to offer the people joy, peace, and hope. Challenge too, and maybe some other things, but mostly joy, peace, and hope. I know that’s what I’m supposed to do up here, and these days I find it almost impossible to do it. I mean, the state of our nation and of God’s world certainly isn’t bringing me peace, or hope today. Even less is it bringing me joy. It’s hard if not impossible for people like me who don’t want to deceive you to bring you things that I’m not feeling myself. So when Louise asked me if I’d preach here today I said yes, but I knew when I said it that finding something worth saying to you that would feel authentic to me would not be easy. Here’s the best I’ve come up with.

I’m sure I don’t need to chronicle for you the sorry state of our nation and of God’s world these days. You already know as much about it as I do. We all know the world’s a mess. I’ll just mention a few of the lowlights. War and violence rage across the globe from Syria to America’s inner cities. We’re hellbent on destroying the environment of the only planet we’ve got. Fascist nationalism, exclusionism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry are on the rise and in many places, including the good old USA, and are becoming more socially acceptable than they’ve been in decades. The world went mad with most of these things in the first half of the last century at a cost of tens upon tens of millions of lives, or more; and today it looks like the world has learned little or nothing from those decades of hell on earth. So yes, I know what I’m supposed to preach; and yes, I find doing that very difficult to do these days. And if I find preaching joy and hope and peace difficult, perhaps you find those things as hard to find these days as I do.

So what are we to do? The only thing I can think to do is to keep returning to the foundations of our Christian faith. Of course the Bible is not the only foundation of our Christian faith, but it is certainly one of the most important of them, a truth that coincides very nicely with the fact that we Christian preacher types, if we’re doing our jobs right, mostly preach from that very same Bible. For this week the readings in the lectionary turned out to be very helpful to me, and I think perhaps two of the readings I found there may be helpful to you too. We just heard them. Here’s some of what I take from them that I think speaks to the despair that I find it so hard to avoid these days.

First, a few verses from Psalm 27. They begin with a startling declaration: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” The word Lord here is actually Yahweh in the Hebrew original. We can take it to mean God, though it doesn’t mean Jesus. This wonderful psalm has other striking verses in it too. It says that God “will hide me in [God’s] shelter in the day of trouble.” These verses speak powerfully to me in these difficult days. I certainly experience our days as days of trouble. I sometimes find fear hard to avoid in the face of an overheating planet and right-wing hatred that seems to rise all around us. I certainly experience our times as a time of metaphorical darkness, and the world sure seems to need a lot of salvation. The psalmist of Psalm 27 powerfully expresses the response of faith to difficult times like these. God is light in the world’s darkness. We need not be afraid. God protects us in our time of troubles. Salvation is available to us and to the world, and that salvation comes only from God. The ancient unknown author of these words spoke profound truth indeed.

Then we have our passage from Isaiah. We read: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” And: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken….” These verses probably originally referred to events in the ancient history of Israel, so we need to ask: Do they mean anything to us? I mean, it’s not like everyone in our present darkness has seen a great light. It’s not like the yoke of the burden of our current context has been broken. These verses say God has done that, but it sure doesn’t look to me like God has done that for our country today. So do these verses mean anything to us at all? I think they do, and here’s how I think they do.

God is light in our darkness, and I think it is precisely as light in our darkness that God lifts the yoke from our shoulders. Scripture tells us that our present darkness, the burden we’re all feeling these days, is not God’s will for us. When Isaiah says God have lifted our burden I hear the text saying that while darkness and burdens persist they are not God’s will. They are not what God wants for God’s creation. When we combine that notion with the profound truth that God is light in our darkness we learn that God is present in that darkness shining the light of God’s truth into the world and calling us always toward God’s light and away from the world’s darkness. And because God is present in that darkness we can have hope. We can have faith that God isn’t going to give up on God’s world or on us. Thanks be to God!

So Ok. That’s all well and good in theory I suppose, but what good does it do us in our daily lives? Every day we get bombarded with the bad news. Our president’s claim that he could shoot someone on 5^th Avenue and his supporters would still vote for him seems to be borne out by the continued support they show him in the polls. We hear of environmental regulations being repealed nearly every day. Thousands upon thousands of children remain separated from their parents at out southern border. The rich get richer and millions of others struggle with little hope of improving their lot in life. I won’t go on. You all know these things as well as I do.

Is that message of God’s presence with us under our burdens and God’s light in our darkness really any help in the face of all that bad news? I don’t know about you, but I hear the world’s bad news a lot more than I hear God’s good news. The bad news is all over the TV. I’m aware of no good theology on TV. If I’m lucky I hear good preaching once a week, not more.

So here’s what I think we need to do. Pay more attention to God’s presence and light in our darkness than I at least usually do. Connect ourselves to God more frequently and intentionally than I suspect most of us usually do. Give God’s good news as much airtime in our lives as we give the world’s bad news. How? Pray. Pray hard and often. Study scripture. Practice spiritual disciplines like meditation and observing sabbath time. And please realize: I’m talking to myself here as much as I’m talking to you. I need to hear these words as much or probably more than you do. None of that is going to make the world’s bad news go away. It can however make God’s good news more present to us. It can give us something to hold onto when we feel ourselves falling. It can lift us up when we’re feeling crushed. It can light our path when we feel lost. It can give us hope when all we feel is despair. It can get us off the couch and out doing something good in the world when we feel immobilized by hopelessness. Frankly, people of good will and good intent doing that is the only way the hope God offers us becomes real in the world.

So yes. We can find the light in our darkness of which Psalm 27 speaks. We can experience God lifting some of the yoke from our shoulders as Isaiah says God does. But we won’t find the light, we won’t experience the lifting of the yoke, if we just sit and wait for it to happen. Seeing the light requires work—from us. Feeling relief from the burdens of the day requires work—from us. So let’s get on with it shall we? I hope I will. I hope you will too. Amen.

On President Trump's Impeachment Defense

On President Trump’s Impeachment Defense

President Trump’s impeachment defense team has filed its brief in response to the articles of impeachment against him and the arguments the impeachment managers made in their brief a couple of days ago. News reports say that the trump defenders argue basically two things. First, the president did nothing wrong. Second, that the allegations against him in the articles of impeachment do not amount to impeachable offenses. They are so obviously wrong on both counts that it's hard to know where to start to rebuff their arguments. In holding up aid to Ukraine in an attempt to force that nation's government to announce an investigation of the Bidens Individual-1 violated the 1974 act on disbursement of funds approved by Congress and solicited a bribe in return for release of those funds. He solicited a violation of campaign finance law by seeking something of value from a foreign government for use in an American election. He obviously and undeniably did at least these things wrong. His defense team's argument that he did nothing wrong is simply absurd.

I think the argument that what he did is not impeachable, while false, is less facially inaccurate than the argument that he did nothing wrong, especially with regard to the obstruction of Congress charge.[1] When a president is faced with an impeachment on undeniable facts, as Bill Clinton was, the best argument the president has is that those facts do not establish an impeachable offense. As lawyers say, when the facts are against you, argue the law. That’s all that Trump really has at this point, to argue the law.

The question of whether or not what Trump has done amounts to an impeachable offense turns on the meaning of the Constitution's phrase "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." The consensus among scholars seems to be that this language does not require a criminal violation of the law. As Lawrence Tribe, the nation's premier constitutional scholar, says, when the Constitution was adopted there were no federal criminal laws. This language could hardly require violation of something that didn't exist at the time it was adopted. Trump did violate several laws as I noted above, but it seems to be relatively well established that impeachment does not require a criminal act.

The first of the two impeachment articles against Trump charge him in effect with abuse of power. That is, he used the power of his office in an unacceptable way. Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s lawyers, has said publicly that abuse of power is not impeachable. Yet how can that be true? Surely the framers of the Constitution intended to protect the republic against a president who disregarded the constitutional provisions on presidential power to the detriment of the national security or other vital national interests. That is precisely what Trump has done. Congress established that providing aid to Ukraine in its battle with Russia is in our national interest. It really doesn’t matter for our purposes here whether that finding is correct or not. It is the law of the land. Trump used the power of his office to thwart the implementation of the policy Congress had established, however temporarily. It simply is inconceivable that the framers of the constitution did not intend such actions to be impeachable. They are. They must be.

Under any more or less objective factual and legal analysis the arguments Trump’s lawyers make against his impeachment and removal from office fail. They are factually and legally untenable. Sadly that does not mean that the Senate will remove him from office. Because the Republicans are the majority party in the Senate, because they care more about keeping their party in power than they do about anything else, and because removing him from office requires a vote of two-thirds of the senators, they almost certainly will not. They should, but they won’t. How sad for our suffering republic that we have descended to this level.

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[1] The weakness of the second article of impeachment charging obstruction of Congress is that while Trump certainly did obstruct Congress, Congress’ remedy for that obstruction was to take Trump and his people to court to enforce their subpoenas. The House impeachment committees didn’t do that. Certainly doing it would have taken far too long, which is why those committees didn’t do it. Still, in theory at least they had a remedy for Trump’s obstruction that they did not pursue. That they didn’t is a stronger defense against impeachment article two than any argument Trump has against article one.