Is Russia European or Asian?

Rev. Dr. Thomas Calnan Sorenson

© Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2020. All rights reserved.

A little while ago my adult daughter, knowing of course that earlier in my life I had earned a Ph.D. in Russian history, asked me: Is Russia European or Asian? I answered: Yes. I meant by that perhaps cryptic answer that Russia is both European and Asian. There is of course a geographic component to that answer. Although the continents we call Europe and Asia are only one landmass (of which Africa is also a part), we usually place a dividing ling between them at the Ural Mountains. The historical homeland of the Russians is on the European side of that line. Over the centuries, however, Russia expanded to the east. Russian control came to extend to what is now the US state of Alaska. So for at least the last several hundred years geographically speaking Russia has had one foot in Europe and one foot in Asia. In that geographic sense Russia is indeed both European and Asian.

There is however another aspect to my answer that Russia is both European and Asian that is actually more important. That aspect of my answer is cultural and historical rather than geographic. I mean cultural here in the broadest sense. It includes things like art and religion, but I intend it also to include the political aspects of a people’s life. In this broad cultural sense Russia has always been a bit hard to define. There are and long have been both European and Asian aspects to Russia’s identity.

I wish here to explore those aspects of Russia’s identity, but before I do I need to explain what I mean by European and what I mean by Asian. I mean no value judgment in what I say here. Of course I have my personal preferences and opinions. They are however irrelevant here. I will try to leave them out of my discussion of Russia’s identity in this piece.

By Asian, or Asiatic, at least as it applies to Russia, I mean primarily the sociological and political elements of culture. Asian political systems, at least until quite recent times and still in China and elsewhere, have been authoritarian or even totalitarian. Most people have had few or no rights the government had to respect and no meaningful participation in their government. Asian cultures have had no tradition of individual freedom. The collective has always been more important than the individual. Independent civil institutions are largely unknown in traditional Asian cultures. There were no institutions that could act as centers of opposition to the state. The people have been a mass that the government governs but usually not for the benefit of the masses but only for the benefit of a small, wealthy elite. Most of the people by far were impoverished peasants working land they didn’t own. Asian cultures for the most part may have been influenced to some degree by the great developments in European culture, but until recently they haven’t much participated in those developments.

It is those great developments that distinguish and define European culture. They begin, more or less at least, with the Roman Empire. Western Europe inherited Rome’s traditions of a standardized legal code and a practical, rational way of thinking. The Roman Empire was gone by the sixth century CE, and western Europe entered the so-called Dark Ages. It’s not that nothing happened in those centuries. One important development was the creation in the year 800 CE of the Holy Roman Empire, with Charlemagne as its first emperor. It was neither holy, Roman, nor a true empire, but it was a political institution separate from the church and often in conflict with it. Those supposedly dark centuries also saw the beginnings of what became western Europe’s nation states, especially in France. Those embryonic states were also independent of and often in opposition to the church.

Beginning in roughly the eleventh century CE western Europe entered what we call the High Middle Ages. Those centuries saw the rise of cities as centers of commercial and cultural activity. Roman Catholic culture blossomed, as seen particularly in the spectacular Gothic cathedrals the emerging cities constructed. Those magnificent structures express a soaring of the human spirit and a faith in the future unlike anything seen before.

One of the major cultural developments of the High Middle Ages was western Europe’s rediscovery of Aristotle. That great philosopher of ancient Greece and forerunner of modern science had been unknown in the West. His works and thought were preserved by the Islamic cultures of the time, which for centuries had far surpassed western European culture in virtually every cultural realm including architecture, theology, science, mathematics (there is a reason we call them Arabic numerals), and philosophy. Arab scholars translated Aristotle into Arabic. In Muslim Spain Christian scholars translated those Arabic translations of Aristotle in to Latin. These Latin translations found their way from Spain into France and other parts of western Europe. They played a major role in the development of scholastic theology. Epitomized by intellectual giants like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, scholastic theology introduced a highly rationalized way of thinking into western culture. That way of thinking would find its fullest development centuries later in the European Enlightenment. Scholastic thought differed from Enlightenment rationalism in that it accepted the supposedly revealed truths of Christianity as given and unassailable, but it was rationalistic in the extreme in the way it worked with those truths.

The High Middle Ages were quickly followed, quickly in the historical sense at least, by the Renaissance. Beginning in the fourteenth century in Italy and then in other areas of western Europe as well, western Europeans rediscovered the centrality of the human being that had characterized ancient Greece. Western European culture became humanistic in ways it never had been before. Look, for example, at Michelangelo’s magnificent depiction of the male human form in his David or at the way Renaissance painters created realistic portraits of individual persons.

Not long after the flourishing of artistic culture in the Renaissance western Europe experienced (or perhaps suffered through) the Protestant Reformation. Protestant thought developed the humanism of the Renaissance in the terms of Christian theology. For our purposes here the most important thing about the Reformation is its contention that each individual person has her or his own personal, direct relationship with God with no need for intermediaries in the form of saints or priests. Protestantism raised the individual from a status that required religious structures for salvation to the level of autonomous individuals free from the dictates of Rome.

Then in 1637 the French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Rene Descartes wrote, first in French, “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think therefore I am, better known in its Latin form of Cogito ergo sum and often referred to as simply “the Cogito.” The world hasn’t been the same since. Descartes’ contention that because he experiences himself thinking he can know that he is, that he exists, is purely rationalistic. (It’s also incorrect, for his experience that he is sitting there thinking could be deceiving him, but never mind.) He reached his world-changing conclusion by setting out to doubt everything he could doubt. He concluded that he could doubt everything except that he was there doubting. He could not doubt that there was an “I” doing the doubting. Ergo Cogito ergo sum.

In the Cogito from 1637 we see the beginnings of what was and remains the most radical and important shift in thinking in human history, the European Enlightenment. In the Enlightenment human reason displaced divine revelation as the source and standard of all truth. The rational came to rule the day. People reasoned their way to new insights about politics, economics. ethics, and every other realm of human life. A new reliance on the human mind as the source of truth produced the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and thereafter. Truth was reduced to fact. People came to believe that if something could not be proved to be factually true it wasn’t true in any sense at all.

All of these developments in western Europe produced some fundamental understandings that characterize western culture to this day. West European culture (and that phrase includes the dominant cultures in the United States and elsewhere) values the political and economic rights of the individual to an extent that no other human culture does or ever has. West European culture relies on science as the sole source of knowledge and truth to an extent that no other human culture does or ever has. The leading edge of western culture may be moving beyond some of the verities of the Enlightenment, but those verities remain the mainstays of western European culture to this day.

So: Is Russia European or Asian? The answer has to be I think that despite its original geographic location Russia in its origins was almost exclusively Asian. Throughout its history Russia was untouched by most of the historical developments discussed above that establish western culture. There was no Roman Empire. There was no High Middle Ages, no Renaissance, no Reformation, and no indigenous Enlightenment. At no time until very recently did the mass of the Russian people have any rights that the state was compelled to respect. Over the centuries most of them became serfs tied to the land and hardly better off than slaves. Serfdom didn’t end in Russia until 1861. At least until very recent times at best Russia has never had any civil or religious institutions that have stood in opposition to the state. In 988 CE Russia became Orthodox Christian when Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to that faith. It did not inherit the tradition of church-state antagonism that was so important in the history of western Europe. Following the pattern of the Byzantine Orthodox Church from which it sprung, the Russian Orthodox Church became a bulwark of the state and never stood in opposition to it, not even to any meaningful extent during the decades of Communist rule when the state, at times at least, was aggressively hostile toward the Church and would have destroyed it entirely had it been able to do so.

There never was any other civil organization that did or ever could become a meaningful center of activity or values apart from the state. Even in Vladimir Putin’s Russia of today the state works hard to keep civil organizations under its thumb. Russia has never had any tradition of popular participation in government. The country today is nominally democratic, but President Putin so controls the country’s political processes that meaningful opposition is virtually impossible. Some who have tried to lead an opposition have ended up murdered. Given Russia’s history that reality is certainly understandable, but it means that politically Russia remains largely Asiatic to this day.

Which is not to say that western European culture has been unknown or without influence in Russia. Quite the contrary. Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725), is well known for his attempts to “westernize” Russia. He introduced western styles of dress and grooming to Russia and compelled the people of his court to comply with them. He build a new city on empty swamp land along the river Neva near the Gulf of Finland. He gave it a German name, Sankt Peterburg, rather than a Russian one. (The Russian version would be Petrograd, which is what the name was changed to during World War I.) He intended that it look European not Russian. It looks more western European than any other Russian city to this day. He built a summer palace on the Gulf of Finland to the west of the city and intended it to challenge and in some ways to imitate Versailles. It is a truly magnificent structure, but it would look more in place in France than it does in Russia. Peter was intrigued by western Europe’s advanced technology, especially shipbuilding technology. He traveled, supposedly incognito, to Holland to study that technology. It’s hard to imagine that as a 6’8” tall Russian he wouldn’t stand out, but never mind.

Peter did have some lasting effects on Russia. The Russian imperial court looked more western than Russian from his day until its end in 1917. He reorganized the Russian government on western models, although he intended that reorganization to improve the efficiency of the government and to increase the tsar’s control of the country rather than to decentralize it or give any power to anyone else. He abolished to Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a collective body overseen by an Over Procurator appointed by the tsar. It came to function much like an imperial ministry of religious affairs. So Peter the Great did have some significant effect on Russian life.

Yet we must say that that effect always remained superficial at least in its westernizing aspects. In Peter’s day and thereafter the Russian upper classes took on a western appearance. They began to create art and music in the western style of their day. They would come to write some of the greatest literature in western forms. Think of novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or the plays of Chekhov for example. Tchaikovsky and other great Russian composers wrote some of Europe’s greatest music. The upper echelons of Russian society became westernized and made significant contributions to western European culture. Beyond these developments certain circles of the Russian elite accepted aspects of western political philosophy. Some of them adopted western liberal ideas and began to hope that Russia would somehow become a western style parliamentary democracy.

Others were drawn to Marxism, a thoroughly western ideology that claimed to be perfectly scientific. Russians and people of other nationalities within the Russian Empire, most notably the Georgian Josef Stalin, who claimed to be Marxists seized control of the country between 1917 and 1922. They claimed to be creating worker’s paradise on earth on a Marxist model, never mind that Marx’s political and economic analysis was based on and addressed societies far more industrially advanced than Russia was. The Soviet Marxists, who came to call themselves Communists, actually created a totalitarian hell that was thoroughly Asiatic in its total disregard of the rights of the individual and of individual human dignity and worth. They did some things more grounded in western thought than were their political structures and actions. They created universal literacy. They developed western science to a high degree especially in the fields of engineering, rocket science, and weaponry. Yet they did all that under political and economic systems that looked far more Asiatic than European.

The Soviet system collapsed and was officially abolished in late 1991. Both in Russia and in the west there was hope that a new Russia would emerge patterned more on western institutions than Russia ever had been before. That did happen to some extent. Russia today has a parliamentary form of government, or at least on paper it does. Russian citizens have more rights and more personal freedom than they have ever had before. Moscow, the essential Russian city, looks a lot more like a western metropolis than it used to.

For all that, however, Russia today is hardly a model of western European politics. Vladimir Putin has concentrated political power in his own hands in a perfectly Russian way. Some call him Russia’s new tsar for good reason. Russia holds nominally free and fair elections, but Putin and his party always win by suspiciously large margins. The state has once again cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church in a very Russian way, even writing some Orthodox social teaching into a proposed new constitution. In the Soviet years Russia had a legal system that worked reasonably well in cases in which the Communist Party took no interest. When the KGB took an interest in a case however, it always got the result it wanted. The Russian legal system works the same way today. When Putin wants to silence an opponent the courts are always happy to oblige.

Perhaps the most important development in Russia’s history is what didn’t happen. Russia didn’t participate in most of the major developments of western European history. Russia had no legacy from Rome. It had no High Middle Ages. It had nothing like the Italian Renaissance. The Protestant Reformation was meaningless to it. The elite upper classes of Russia dabbled in the thought of the European Enlightenment. Catherine the Great even brought some of the major minds of the French Enlightenment to Russia. The Enlightenment, however, had no significant effect on most of the Russian people. Peter the Great may have been a westernizer, and Catherine the Great was German not Russian. Neither they nor any other Russian ruler before Alexander II in the 1860s, however, even tried to make Russia’s foundational social structures more western. Enlightenment political thought had no real effect in Russia until at least the mid-19^th century.

So is Russia European or Asian? Yes. Russia is actually both. Over the last three hundred years it has taken on many aspects of western European culture. Yet at heart it remains Asian especially in its political culture. Russia has no meaningful tradition of democratic government or respect for individual rights. Yes, in the first decades of the twentieth century some western countries descended into totalitarian systems as destructive as the Soviet one, but in those countries totalitarianism was an anomaly. After the nightmare of Nazism Germany, for example, became a model western democracy. After the Soviet nightmare Russia didn’t. It won’t for a long time if ever. Such is the power of history, and Russia’s history is far too Asiatic for that to happen. So yes, Russia is European and Asian. It is likely to remain so for a very long time.

We Shall Not Want

We Shall Not Want

Rev. Dr. Thomas Calnan Sorenson

March 22, 2020

Scripture: Psalm 23

We are living in difficult times. Not the worst times people have lived through or that some people are living through now, but times like nothing any of us have ever seen before. Like so many people around the world I am self-quarantined. I rarely leave my house except for brief walks around my neighborhood that I can do without getting too close to anyone other than my wife, who walks with me. On the very rare occasions when I do go out I am careful not to get too close to anyone else, to use hand sanitizer, and to scrub my hands as prescribed as soon as I get home. My calendar is empty. It usually has at least what were my five weekly commitments on it, two lectionary groups, two choir rehearsals, and in person worship on Sunday morning. They’ve all been suspended until at least the end of April and probably longer.  I have one appointment at the end of this month. It isn’t essential, so I will probably cancel it. Life for most of us just isn’t what it used to be, and we don’t know when it will return to what it used to be or indeed whether it will ever do that at all.

So far I’m handling my domestic exile fairly well, but I’m lucky. I’m retired. There isn’t anywhere I have to go. I live with my wife, not completely alone like so many do. My Social Security and United Church of Christ retirement automatic deposits keep coming. My wife is still employed, albeit half time with about a one-third time compensation package. We’re OK. We’re lucky. A great many of my sister and brother human beings aren’t. Many have lost or will lose all of their income because of the way our national life is shutting down. Our federal, state, and local officials tell us to maintain a good distance from other people. Several state governors (including the governor of my state) have issued stay at home orders. Various levels of our government may do something to help at least some of the folks who are suffering economic hardship because of the coronavirus, but it won’t be enough. A great many people face loss of their housing or other calamities because of the current pandemic. I wish I could help them all, but I can’t. I frankly have no idea what they’re going to do.

I don’t know what people are going to do to meet their financial and physical needs. I do know that difficult times like these can be difficult in ways other than financial and physical. They can be emotionally draining and spiritually deadening. Fortunately I have a good idea of where we can turn for help with at least our spiritual needs. Fortunately I do know where we can turn when we are feeling spiritually drained and emotionally dead. Especially those of us who live our lives within a faith tradition but really everybody can turn to the world’s great religious faiths for comfort and support. All of those faiths offer that support in one form or another. Buddhism teaches peace through meditation and non-attachment. Islam tells us that no matter what God is closer to us than our jugular vein. Qur’an 50:16. And those of us who live our lives with God in either the Jewish or the Christian tradition can turn to the prayer book of ancient Israel, the book of Psalms, for comfort and support.

There we find, among many other wonderful things, Psalm 23. I suspect it is most people’s favorite Psalm. (My favorite Psalm is Psalm 139, or most of it, but never mind.) Many of us memorized Psalm 23 in Sunday School, in times past probably in its King James Version translation. Scholars can pick this Psalm apart and say that it doesn’t really mean quite what most of us take it to mean. I’ve done that myself in my book Liberating the Bible. I’m not going to do that here. Scholarship has its place, but sometimes we need to read a biblical text for what it says to us, not what it may say to some scholar or other. These times are those times. In times like these Psalm 23 speaks powerful words of comfort to us. That’s what I want to talk about here.

Psalm 23 has a lot of powerfully reassuring lines in it. God provides us green pastures and quiet waters. God restores our souls. God walks the darkest valleys with us. The Psalm however begins with what is essentially a topic sentence, one that succinctly states its premise: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? It is wonderful, but like so many wonderful lines in the Bible it raises questions as much as it comforts and reassures us. When I read this line the first thing I want to ask is: What does it mean that I shall not want? After all, in these difficult times I want many things. I want my former life back, and I suspect that you do too. Is God going to satisfy that want and give us our former lives back? Someday maybe, but not now. Not soon. I want COVID-19 to go away. Will God take it away? Someday maybe when we have developed a vaccine against it, but not now. Not soon. I could name a lot of other things I want, but these two related wants are at the top of my list these days. There are a lot of things that I want and shall want.

I don’t think God is just going to give them to me, at least not now, not soon; so is Psalm 23 lying when it says we shall not want? I don’t actually think so, but to understand the truth of “I shall not want”  we have to understand just what God does and doesn’t do for us in this life. I do not believe that God intervenes directly in the external circumstances of our lives so as to address and heal those external circumstances. Yes, I know. You can find passages in the Bible that say otherwise. Still, I am convinced that human experience proves beyond any reasonable doubt that God doesn’t do that, or at least God doesn’t do it consistently for everyone. Instead God does something that is even more important given the nature of human life. When life gets hard, and life does for all of us sooner or later, God is there with us loving us and assuring us that no matter what we are existentially safe with God. Yes, we may suffer physically. Yes, our lives on earth will end. No matter, for in all that we are held in God’s hands and are safe there. Not necessarily physically safe. Spiritually safe. Not only in this life. Safe beyond this life too.

So if you’re feeling down in these difficult days. If you’re afraid of what might happen to you or your loved ones. If you’re frustrated because you have to stay home and can’t go about your normal life, please understand. God is with you. Turn to Psalm 23. Read how God is your good shepherd and how with God you shall not want. Read, and take heart. With God there really are green pastures and still waters for you and for me.  With God we truly shall not want. Thanks be to God!

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.