ЧTO ДEЛATЬ?

ЧTO ДEЛATЬ?

The Russian title of this essay transliterates as “chto delat’?” It translates literally as “what to do?” It is the title of a work by Vladimir Lenin that is usually translated as “What Is To Be Done?” Yes, I know. It probably isn’t wise to quote Lenin about anything. He did after all institute a brutal regime that was bad enough during his lifetime and that became under Stalin after Lenin’s death one of the most brutal and oppressive political and economic regimes in human history. Yet I always think of Lenin’s title if not of much else from him when I am faced with what appears to be an intractably bad political situation in my own country. No, the United States in 2018 is not Imperial Russia in the first years of the twentieth century. We don’t have an ineffective tsar who holds his title by inheritance and who is utterly incapable of dealing with his country’s many problems like Nicholas II. We don’t have a largely illiterate population like Russia did. We aren’t struggling with a transition from an inefficient agricultural economy to an industrial one like Russia was. We have great power pretensions like Russia did, but ours are less likely to destroy our economy than Russia’s were. We aren’t struggling with the tensions between a largely Asiatic foundation and an overlay of western culture like Russia was. So no, we are not late imperial Russia.

We are, however, faced with what seem to be intractable political, economic, social, and cultural problems. All of those problems have coalesced around one person. They have coalesced around Donald Trump, the forty-fifth President of the United States. He represents the worst of America. He was put in office by a minority of American voters in the 2016 presidential election under the undemocratic electoral college system of the United States Constitution. He represents the racism of white Americans fearful of the country’s demographic trend of becoming more brown and less white. He represents poorly educated workers who have lost their jobs in dying industries like coal mining and steel production and who are unable or unwilling to retrain for jobs in the new economy. He represents the resentment of sexist men toward the growing freedom of women in the US economy and US culture. He represents a nativist xenophobia that blames immigrants, especially immigrants of color, for the country’s problems. He represents American anti-intellectualism, a destructive strain of American culture that looks with suspicion rather than respect at highly educated people and their contributions to American life. In all of these ways and probably more Donald Trump represents and is a product of the wrong side of the many divides and strains in American life.

Yet while he represents the worst of American culture, he is actually worse than the worst of American culture. The men and women who put Donald Trump in the White House thought they were doing a good thing. They are not fundamentally immoral people. By that I don’t mean that they always stand for what is right. Much of the time they don’t. I mean rather that they at least operate within the concepts of right and wrong. They operate within the concepts of true and false. They think they stand for what is right. They think they believe in what is true. Donald Trump is different. He simply does not operate within the categories right and wrong, true and false. Right and wrong have no ethical or moral meaning for him. He operates rather within the categories works and doesn’t work. It appears never to occur to him to ask if a statement he is going to make is true or false. All the available evidence indicates that those categories just don’t matter to him. How else could he make false statements, including easily demonstrably false statements, as he does? As with questions of right and wrong he asks only will a particular statement have the effect he wants. Yes, he is a liar, but he’s a liar because the categories true and false never occur to him. He never asks is a statement true or false. He asks only if he thinks it will produce some effect he wants. He isn’t so much untruthful (though he usually is) as he is a-truthful. Truth just doesn’t matter to him, and that is a much more serious problem than is a president who knows if something is true or not and says something that isn’t true anyway like say Richard Nixon was.

Author Brené Brown gives us a useful distinction in this regard. She distinguishes between lying and what she calls “bullshitting.” She says that lying is “a defiance of the truth” and bullshitting is “a wholesale dismissal of the truth.”¹ A liar knows they are saying something untrue and may even feel a bit bad about about saying it. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether what they say is true or not. It never occurs to a bullshitter whether what they are saying is true or not. It only occurs to them whether the thing they are saying is advantageous to them. “Bullshitting” is Brown’s coarse term for what I have here called “a-truthful.”

Donald Trump is a bullshitter in Brown’s sense. That’s why there is no reason to take anything he says seriously. For example, he more or less denied that he called Haiti and the countries of Africa “shithole countries” as reported. That he denies it tells us only that he denies it. Because truth is not a category within which he operates his statement tells us nothing at all about the actual facts of this or any other matter. He is a-truthful. Truth and falsehood just don’t matter to him, and that makes him especially dangerous. It makes him especially dangerous because there is nothing he will not say if he thinks saying a thing is advantageous to him. Much of what he does is immoral, but he does immoral things because he is fundamentally amoral. The question of good and bad doesn’t occur to him, only the question of advantage or disadvantage, and that usually only for himself personally. Because neither truth or morality matter to him, there are no limits on what he might do. The most dangerous personality is one who operates outside the accepted moral and ethical norms of the person’s society and culture. We have precisely such a person serving as President of the United States of America. That we do creates immense danger for our country and indeed for the world.

So to return to the title of this essay: What is to be done? What can we do to remove Donald Trump from the presidency and restore a sense of right and wrong and of truth and falsehood to the highest levels of our government? That is not an easy question to answer. It is not an easy question to answer because the Republican politicians in Congress and in Trump’s administration are as yet unwilling to use either of the two Constitutional means of removing a president from office. Those are impeachment and removal under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. The Constitution as originally written provides that Congress may remove a president from office through the process of impeachment. In this process the House of Representatives approves “articles of impeachment” that accuse the President of what the Constitution calls “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Senate then holds a trial of the president for the misdeeds specified in the articles of impeachment. If it finds that the House’s articles of impeachment are established the president is removed from office.

No president has ever been removed from office through impeachment, and only two presidents have ever had articles of impeachment voted against them. In both cases, the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the vote of the House to impeach was quite clearly only a political act done by politicians who didn’t like the president’s policies. That is not a proper use of impeachment. Impeachment is not a parliamentary vote of no confidence. It is a political act in that it is carried out by the Congress, a political body by its very nature. It focuses however not on political disagreement but on actual wrongdoing by the president. That Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses is beyond doubt.² He has lied to the American public about matters of great importance in our life together. He has endangered the United States and the world with his reckless talk about using nuclear weapons. He may have cooperated with Russia in undermining the American electoral system. He has disgraced the country and betrayed her core values by expressing admiration for anti-democratic leaders, especially for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He may be guilty of money laundering for Russian oligarchs. The Mueller investigation is far from completed, but it is already apparent that grounds exist for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump if Congress wanted to do it. So far it doesn’t.

The other Constitutional means for removing a president from office is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Section 4 of that Amendment provides that the Vice President and a majority of Cabinet secretaries may declare a president unable to perform the duties of his office. If they do, the Vice President becomes the acting president. The president may in effect appeal the declaration that he is unable to perform the duties of his office to the Congress. If two-thirds of both houses of Congress find that the president is unable to perform the duties of the office the Vice President shall continue to serve as acting president. If they don’t, the president resumes the office of president.

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has never been invoked. There is one situation in American history in which it may well have applied had it been in effect at the time. Toward the end of his second term President Woodrow Wilson was so incapacitated by the effects of a stroke that he could not serve as president. It appears that his wife Edith was actually performing some of the duties of the office and delegating others to appropriate people. It seems unlikely that the Twenty-fifth Amendment will be invoked in the case of Donald Trump. Many of us believe that Trump is unfit to be president, but the Twenty-fifth Amendment doesn’t speak of unfitness. It speaks of inability. It doesn’t define inability. It clearly would apply in a case like Woodrow Wilson’s, but under what other circumstances it might apply is unclear. The Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy. It seems likely that Section 4 was intended primarily to deal with the situation that would have arisen had President Kennedy survived being shot but had been rendered physically unable to serve as president by his wounds. The language of the Amendment does not limit it to that situation, but by its terms a president must be “unable” to serve before the Amendment applies. Donald Trump serves very badly, but absent a finding of mental or physical disability I don’t think we can say he is “unable” to serve. It is less likely that a Congress controlled by the Republicans will find him unable to serve.

So: What is to be done? Since it is unlikely that Trump will be removed from office by Constitutional means, what else is left to us to get rid of him? The only answer that doesn’t involve violence (and I will never advocate violence) is massive public pressure. I doubt that any amount of public pressure will ever get Trump to resign, but sufficient public pressure might get Congress to rein him in and prevent or mitigate his most egregious actions and statements. The first opportunity we will have at the ballot box to show opposition to Trump is the 2018 Congressional election. I find it irritating in some ways that I do not have a Senator or Representative who supports Trump to vote against, but a great many Americans do. We must employ every legal means at our disposal to encourage them to do so.

Beyond that, the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees our right to assemble peacefully and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Donald Trump surely is a grievance by his mere presence in office. The people have the right, however, to assemble as a means of demanding government action. We can march to demand impeachment. We can march against destructive policies advocated or implemented by Trump and his benighted allies in Congress and his administration. Such a march is scheduled in many cities across the nation on January 20, 2018, the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. That one is however billed as a women’s march. We need more broadly based demonstrations in every village, town, and city in this country to demonstrate that the American people simply will not tolerate Trump’s outrages. We will not tolerate Trump as our president. Most of us didn’t vote for him. His approval ratings are lower than those for any other president during his first year in office. He doesn’t represent our country. He surely doesn’t represent the best in our country. He is a manifestation of the worst aspects of the United States—racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and essentially every other evil that besets us.

So what is to be done? Get out in the streets. Demonstrate. Engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Go to jail if need be, but don’t take Donald Trump lying down. Donate to political organizations like MoveOn.org and legal organizations like the ACLU that work to counter Trump’s policies and to make sure he doesn’t get reelected in 2020. Support elected officials who oppose Trump and make sure they know you support them. If you are the praying sort pray that he may be removed from office and that our country and the world will survive his efforts to destroy them. If you are a church person get your church on record as opposing his policies, his language, his lying, and so many other negative things about him. The IRS says nonprofits like churches can’t endorse candidates, but we can and must oppose policies that harm people and damage God’s good earth. The gospel of Jesus Christ leaves us no choice about that. Our duty as American citizens leaves us no choice but to do everything we can, nonviolently, to blunt Trump’s destructive policies, to show the world that he does not represent us, and if possible to remove him from office before his term expires. May it be so.

1Brown, Brené, Braving the Wilderness, The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, Random House, New York, 2017, p. 90.

2That statement is a change from an earlier position of mine expressed elsewhere. The evidence of impeachable offenses committed by Trump just keeps piling up. It’s time to say it straight: Trump has committed impeachable offenses.

By Another Road

By Another Road

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

January 7, 2018

for

Kirkland Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Scripture: Matthew 2:1-12

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.

First of all, before I actually begin this sermon, I want to say a warm and heartfelt thank you to you members of this church for supporting me in the four way covenant that we had while I was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Maltby from January, 2015, until last Sunday. You don’t know me, or most of you don’t; but you agreed to accept me as a member though I would virtually never be here, and you agreed to be one of the parties of that four way covenant that preserved my UCC standing while I was serving that non-UCC church. For that I am most sincerely grateful; and I look forward to getting to know you as I attend here as a retired pastor and member of this this church. So once again, thank you.

When Ryan asked me if I would be willing to preach today he told me that he had planned an Epiphany service for this first Sunday of the new year. So as I thought about what I might say to you this morning I poured over Matthew’s story of the visit of the magi to newborn baby Jesus. It is a mercy of the preaching profession that sometimes something in a text jumps out at you as you ponder what you could possibly preach on out of that text. When that happens for me I always, well, usually, pay attention. That happened for me as I was considering Matthew’s story of the visit of the wise men to baby Jesus. What jumped out at me was the line “they left for their own country by another road.” To get at what that line might mean for us let’s take another look at that story and the details of it, some of which may strike us at first glance as merely coincidental. Actually, very little in any Bible story is merely coincidental, and I don’t think the way Matthew has constructed this story has anything coincidental in it at all. The story goes like this:

The wise men, called magi, see an unusual star “in the east.” I always used to wonder how a star that they see to the east could lead them west, which is how they went. I finally figured out that Matthew means they saw the star while they were in the east, not that the star was to their east. Somehow they discern that this star heralds a newborn king of the Jews. Why these Gentile, probably Persian, sages should care about the birth of a new king of the Jews isn’t at all clear, but they decide to go see this newborn child anyway. The star leads them. But it doesn’t lead them directly to Bethlehem where Jesus has been born. They’re looking for a newborn king, so they go first to see the reigning king of the Jews, King Herod, known to history as Herod the Great. He’s a mere Roman puppet and a very brutal one at that, but King of the Jews is his title, so the wise men go see him first. They go first to the seat of political and religious power in that part of the world. Their first road takes them to a representative and wielder, indeed a symbol of, worldly power.

Then they go to Bethlehem and enter a house where they find Jesus and Mary (though apparently not Joseph, or at least he isn’t mentioned). They kneel before him and “pay him homage.” Kneeling before him is a sign of recognition and of subservience. To show homage means to show respect or reverence, and I suppose these magi showed both respect and reverence for Jesus. They give the baby their symbolic gifts: Gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, and myrrh for one who one day will die. I’ve heard it said that if there had been wise women rather than wise men come to see Jesus they would have given blankets and diapers, but never mind. Then apparently they find a place to sleep because what happens next is that they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod. Matthew doesn’t tell us here directly why they would be warned in a dream not to return to Herod, but the reason soon becomes clear enough. Matthew’s next story is the story of the massacre of the innocents, the order from King Herod to kill all the children in and around Bethlehem of approximately Jesus’ age at the time. The magi take the warning to heart. They “left for their own country by another road.” This morning I’d particularly like us to notice the movement of the magi in the story: From a foreign land to the center of political and religious power in the region, to the representative of empire in the region, the puppet king of the great and violent Roman Empire. Then to the birthplace of the one we call the Prince of Peace. Then home by a different road. Their movement is home, the representative of violent empire, Jesus, home by a different road.

There is a great lesson for us in the way the magi move in Matthew’s story. An encounter with Jesus even when he was a newborn baby changed them. It changed their direction. They traveled one way, encountered Jesus, then traveled a different way. The movement of the magi in this story is a symbol of the transformative power of encounters with Jesus. Encountering Jesus turned them around, or at least aside, from the way they had been traveling. Traveling across the countryside yes, but presumably also traveling in their lives. After they met Jesus they had no need of Herod and went home by another road.

His story of the magi is Matthew’s first tale of Jesus transforming people, but it certainly isn’t the last story of Jesus’ power to transform in the Gospels. Encountering Jesus turns men who made their living fishing for fish into men who lost their lives fishing for people. Several times in the Gospels encounters with Jesus give blind people their sight and make sick people well. They make demonically possessed people whole and healthy. They even make dead people alive. Christians sometimes speak of the transformative power of encounters with Jesus using the language of being born again, language many of us don’t much like to use because of its misuse by so many other Christians but when properly understood language that speaks powerfully of a life transformed, a life made new, by an encounter with Jesus. When we truly encounter Jesus and understand who he is and what he means, we too go home by a different road.

Yet there’s more meaning in the way the magi go home by a different road than that. The road the magi travel is changed, and it is changed in a most particular and meaningful way. It is turned away from empire. An encounter with the one who rules by justice and nonviolence turns them away from the ones who rule by violence and injustice. The Magi's encounter with Jesus even as a newborn infant turns them away from the ways of the world, the ways of violence, greed, exploitation, and injustice. In Matthew’s story they just go home, and we don’t know what they did after they got there. Still, there is great symbolic meaning in the way Matthew has them go home by another road. They go home differently. They go home changed. They go home transformed.

Now, that would be interesting I suppose even if the story of the Magi were merely a story about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. But see, the great Bible stories are never merely about things that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us. If they weren’t about us we’d never have heard them. They’d be of interest only to scholars studying ancient literature. Just think for a moment about what going home by another road, a road that leads away from the powers of the world, might mean to us today. We live in a most uncertain and disturbing time. We live in a world with enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over, and an unstable American President and an unstable dictator of North Korea keep threatening to use them. We live in a world of drastic climate change that threatens to disrupt and harm life as we know it, and the powers (in this country at least) keep refusing to do anything meaningful about it. We live in a country angrily divided by race, gender, class, and other human characteristics, and the struggle for justice goes on seemingly without end. The list of our current difficulties could go on for a very long time.

Jesus spoke to a world with great difficulties, and some of the difficulties (though not all of them) are similar to the difficulties we face today. The Roman Empire ruled his world and maintained its rule through the liberal application of violence. It taxed the people into abject poverty. It let Jesus’ Jewish people follow their own faith and customs as long as they didn’t threaten Roman power in any way, but Jewish people kept rebelling against Roman rule; and they kept being crushed by the Roman legions when they did. Class division, poverty, and violence were at least as much a problem in Jesus’ time as they are in ours.

Jesus spoke God’s word to all of those problems. He said the poor are blessed and the rich are sent away empty. He said the peacemakers are blessed, and he rejected all use of violence in the struggle for peace and justice. Time and time again Jesus turned the values and expectations of his world on their heads, and he does the same with the values and expectations of our world. Matthew’s Magi went home by another road, and Jesus sends us home by another road too. He turns us away from the ways of the world just like the Magi went home avoiding King Herod.

Folks, our world needs to hear and follow Jesus’ word of another way today as much as it ever has. Few people listen to Jesus these days. Even most Christians don’t think he’s primarily about transforming the world. Trust me, I just resigned as pastor of a church that told me they didn’t want the world coming into the church. And I suppose many see the last line of Matthew’s story of the Magi as meaning only that these wise wanderers wanted to avoid telling King Herod where Jesus was. Yet that line means so much more than that. It calls us to go home by another road too. It calls us to turn from the ways of the world, the ways of violence and injustice, and to turn to the ways of God, the ways of peace, justice, and nonviolence. Are we prepared to listen? Are we prepared to be a voice in the world for the ways of God over the ways of Jesus? Are we prepared to be that voice when we stand alone and when the whole world turns against us? For that can happen to those who speak up for God in a world gone mad with power and oppression. Are we prepared? May it be so. Amen.

Reflections on the Siege of Leningrad

Reflections on the Siege of Leningrad

I have been to the city that was then called Leningrad several times. I was first there in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour from Indiana University. I spent the better part of five weeks there doing dissertation research in the spring of 1976. I was last there later in 1976 when my late wife Francie, our son Matthew (two years old at the time) and I spent a few days there on our way out of the Soviet Union because I really wanted Francie to see it.¹ It is of course Peter the Great’s city of St. Petersburg, the city he built on the Neva river near the Gulf of Finland to be his window to the west. It is one of the world’s great cities, more European than Russian in many ways though it was the capital city (or one of them, Moscow being the other) of the Russian Empire for roughly two hundred years. It is Russia’s second largest city after Moscow. In 2012 its population was five million, though it wasn’t nearly that big during World War II. St. Petersburg, as it is now again called, holds a place in my heart because of the time I spent there and because the city and its environs are replete with sites of crucial importance in the history of Russia, the field in which I hold a Ph.D.

It was during my first visit there in 1968 that I first learned of the Nazi siege of the city and the utterly unspeakable horror the residents of that great city suffered. Today I am learning more about that horror from the book Leningrad, Siege and Symphony by the British author Brian Moynahan. This fascinating book weaves together the story of the suffering of Leningrad during the siege with the story of Dmitrii Shostakovich writing his 7^th symphony, which came to be called the Leningrad Symphony and which was performed there at the height of the siege. The Nazis effectively blockaded the city for 872 days from June, 1941, to January, 1944. During that time the only supply route into the city was across Lake Ladoga, a large freshwater lake northeast of the city. Even when supplies of food and other essentials were carried across the frozen lake during the winter much of the material never got to Leningrad because the only access to the city from the lake’s western shore was by a wholly inadequate rail line. During the roughly two and one half years of the Nazi siege something like one million people in the city died, most of them from starvation. Cannibalism was not unknown during those years. In reading Moynahan’s book I am learning how death was a constant companion of everyone in the city during the siege. Moynahan makes it sound like people simply became resigned to it, for there was no escaping it. Life in the city was so miserable that many people welcomed death as a blessed relief from the suffering. The sight of dead bodies in the streets became commonplace. In the winter, of course, people also suffered from the cold. In December, 1941, and January, 1942, temperatures got as low as -30 Celsius. That’s -22 Fahrenheit. Most dwellings had little or no heat. The bitter cold of course only made the people’s suffering worse. The Germans shelled and bombed the city from time to time, but they never mounted an all-out assault to capture it. They were contend simply to blockade it and wait for it to starve to death, which it very nearly did.

There was essentially nothing the Soviets could do to break the blockade. Most of the Red Army was occupied fighting the Germans and their allies farther east and south of Leningrad. Stalin on occasion ordered what amounted to suicide assaults on German positions in an attempt to break the siege. The army had neither enough men nor enough munitions to have any hope of succeeding in those assaults, and the men who carried them out and died in them in their thousands were themselves suffering from malnutrition and often near the point of death before the Germans even shot at them.

The German soldiers ordered to enforce the blockade didn’t have it easy of course. They didn’t have the cold weather gear that the Russian soldiers, or at least some of them, had. The extreme cold of the winter stopped tanks and other military vehicles from operating. In warmer weather that equipment got stuck in the mud. Yet the Germans suffered nothing like the Russians did. They weren’t supplied well, but they didn’t starve to death. Moynahan quotes one German soldier as wondering why they were besieging the city. He didn’t understand what his country so wanted from the Russians that they invaded in the first place. The soldiers were of course just soldiers following orders, as were the soldiers of the Soviet army. In following those orders they killed one million innocent civilians and achieved no worthwhile military objective.

During the Nazi siege one of the world’s great cities suffered as few cities ever have. That suffering was inflicted wholly by other humans. Most of the suffering was inflicted by the Germans, but the Soviet authorities actually made the situation worse. They couldn’t supply the city. We can’t really blame them for not doing so. They did what they could. Yet in the midst of mass starvation and death from hypothermia the Soviet terror apparatus continued to operate. The NKVD (the Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrinykh Del, the National (or People’s) Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the predecessor of the better known KGB) remained active. Anyone who complained or expressed pessimism was likely to be shot on the spot. Doctors were not permitted to do research into malnutrition or hypothermia. They were not permitted to list starvation or malnutrition as a cause of death on a death certificate. Still, the NKVD was the one institution that had complete information on just how bad things were in the city. They had complete statistics on deaths, but they suppressed that information and only a handful of people had access to it. Anyone suspected of sabotage or even just of having a negative attitude was likely to be arrested and summarily shot or shipped out across Lake Ladoga to the camps of the Gulag farther east and north.

All in all the story of the Nazi siege of Leningrad is one of the saddest, most tragic stories of modern times or perhaps of any time. Yes, people everywhere in the Soviet Union suffered under Communism and especially under Stalin. Stalin famously said one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic. He starved more people to death in Ukraine than died of starvation in Leningrad during the siege. He killed more people in the Gulag than starved to death in Leningrad during the siege. Other Soviet cities suffered as much under different circumstances, especially perhaps Stalingrad (originally called Tsaritsyn and today called Volgograd). Nonetheless the siege of Leningrad produce a level of horror that I don’t think those of us who have never experienced anything like it can even imagine. People simply did not expect to survive, and most of them didn’t. Memories of the siege were still fresh in many people’s minds when I was first in Leningrad in 1968. That was, after all, only twenty-four years after the siege had been lifted. Many remembered the siege. The psyche of the whole city had been scarred by it just as the psyche of all Russia had been scarred by the German invasion. Being in that place where it all happened was a bit eerie. The city had recovered a good deal by 1968, but the horror of the siege was still very much a part of its reality.

Many thoughts come into my mind as I read Moynahan’s book. I remember having been at some of the places he mentions. Nevskii Prospekt, the main street of the city. The cruiser Aurora, a ship that fired (ineffectively) at the Winter Palace during the Bolshevik coup in 1917. She’s moored in the Neva next to the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace itself, now the Hermitage Museum. Walking along the river itself and crossing it to one of islands Moynahan mentions where Leningrad State University (now St. Petersburg State University) is located. I remember the first time I landed in an Aeroflot plane from Copenhagen at the Leningrad airport and seeing the big sign on the terminal building that read, in Russian of course, “Welcome to Leningrad, A Hero City.” The Soviet government designated the city a hero because of its suffering during the siege and because it never capitulated.

Another thought that comes to me is that the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a war between two of the worst systems of human social organization diabolical human minds have ever created. I think most Americans know more about the horrors of Nazism than they do about the horrors of Soviet Communism. That’s probably because we’ve heard so much about the Holocaust, but we’ve heard less about the Gulag unless we’ve read Solzhenitsyn. It’s hard to say whether Nazism or Soviet Communism was worse, and I suppose we don’t really need to decide that question. They were both unspeakably murderous, oppressive, destructive, and cruel. Yes, the Soviets were our allies in World War II. We supplied them with a good deal of equipment during the war, and many American sailors died from German U boat attacks along the run up the coast of Nazi occupied Norway to Murmansk, the only route we had for getting supplies to Russia.² Moynahan mentions Studebaker trucks, for example. There was more specifically military material too. That the Soviets were our allies, however, does nothing to mitigate the monstrous character of Soviet Communism. Our alliance with them was purely a matter of having a common enemy in the Germans. Scholars estimate that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of twenty or more million Soviet people before the German invasion of 1941. Despite its diabolical nature, the Soviets were the ones who truly defeated Hitler’s Germany, but most of the Russian soldiers in that war weren’t fighting for Stalin or for Communism. They fought for Mother Russia despite the way that she was being so degraded and humiliated by Communism. It is good that the Germans lost. It is a mixed blessing that the Soviets won.

Yet there is another thought that predominates in my thinking about the siege of Leningrad. All the horror of the siege was entirely human caused, as indeed is most of the horror of all wars³. Humans ordered the blockade of the city. Humans established it and enforced it. Humans kept food from reaching other humans so that tens of thousands upon tens of thousands (or perhaps better hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands) of them starved to death. Humans kept medical supplies from reaching other humans so that an untold number of them died from curable diseases. Humans ordered the siege, then sat by while one of the world’s great cities starved to death. I read the book. I hear the stories, and my heart is close to despair. How can it happen? How can we human beings do such things to one another? Anyone who has ever fought in a war knows that war is hell, as General Sherman famously said. (He should have known. He certainly inflicted enough hell on Georgia and other parts of the Confederacy.) We say it is hell. We know it is hell, and we keep doing it to one another over and over and over again. Wars never cease, or at least they never cease for long. In war people do things they would never do during peacetime and call them good. They do things that are serious crimes during peacetime and call them honorable. People who in civilian life would never kill anyone kill and are proud that they did their duty. Both Christian just war theory and Islamic theology of jihad prohibit killing civilians, but armies all over the world do it all the time without reservations. Civilization thinks war is normal. Empire thinks war is good, or at least it thinks the wars it chooses to fight are good. We convince ourselves that war is necessary, and we are brilliant at maneuvering ourselves into positions where that seems to be true. Or at least we sit by and let situations develop to the point where it seems to be true. I ask, no, I cry: Why? And I get no answer. War came with the rise of civilizations millennia ago. Civilization still engages in it and calls it good. Calls it honorable. Calls it the call of duty. Why? I wish I knew.

I believe in, preach, and teach Christian nonviolence, and people call me unreasonable, too idealistic, too pie in the sky naive to think nonviolence could ever work. Well, all I know is that I have dedicated my life to following Jesus of Nazareth as my Lord and Savior, and he preached and lived nonviolence. He called his followers to preach and live nonviolence, and for the first three hundred years or so they did. It was only when Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE that Christians began to justify and engage in violence. We’ve been justifying it and engaging in it ever since. And all I know is that Jesus would have none of it. Jesus resisted empire in what he said and in what he did, albeit nonviolently. Imperial Christianity has embraced empire and the violence that always comes with it for nearly seventeen hundred years. In doing that our religious establishments and the people who participate in them have been profoundly un-Christian.

We are entering, indeed we have entered, a time when Christianity is no longer the de jure or de facto established religion of empire. It is way past time for us to stop thinking and acting like the religion of empire and to return to our non-imperial, indeed anti-imperial roots. Those roots include a radical commitment to nonviolence. Is nonviolence practical? Does it “work”? Maybe. It has on occasion. Maybe not, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we follow a nonviolent Lord and Savior who taught us a nonviolent God. Either we follow Jesus and his teachings or we don’t. Yes, we have to be critical of his teachings. They were given in a context very different from ours, and some of them don’t apply today like the did in his day. His radical prohibition of divorce is one example. But Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence was absolutely foundational for him. It was foundational for him because it is foundational for God. The older I get and the more time I spend working as a Christian pastor who sees the world for what it is and comes to know Jesus ever more deeply the more convinced I become that being Christian means being a disciple of a nonviolent Lord who calls us always to nonviolence. Maybe that isn’t practical. If not, it’s way past time for us to become radically impractical. Only in that way can we change the world.

The siege of Leningrad was one of the many enormous tragedies of human history in which some humans inflicted the tragedy on other humans. Let us study the horror of that siege and of all war. Let us enter into that horror deeply in our imaginations or, for those who have been there, in our memories. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop calling war honorable. Let’s stop saying our military is defending our freedom when they are doing no such thing. Let’s stop thinking we have a duty to go to war. As Christians our duty is to a higher power than any power that says go to war. It is to a God who says make all war cease. Let Leningrad be a lesson. Let all war be a lesson. Then let’s start thinking and living the way Jesus calls us to do. Let’s simply stop killing each other. Let’s at long last truly become nonviolent.

1Francie and Matthew didn’t go with me when I went to Leningrad in the spring of 1976 but stayed with Matthew in our rooms at Moscow State University because Leningrad State University didn’t have family housing for us and because the water supply in Leningrad was contaminated with giardia, a nasty intestinal parasite. As I understand it, it still is. Just why the Russians don’t treat the water to get rid of it I don’t understand.

2The Soviets won the war in part because they were able to move their military factories east of Urals where the Germans couldn’t reach them. Today no place on earth is safe from ballistic missile attack. Who knows how the war would have turned out had the Germans had today’s missiles.

3I say most of the horror not all of the horror because people die in war from causes other than military violence. In the conditions of military life diseases can reach epidemic proportions. The diseases aren’t human caused, though the conditions under which they spread may well be.

The Great Denial

The Great Denial

As we enter the season of Advent I always pity the poor people who create lectionaries. Advent is the season of anticipation of and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ as Christmas.  Of course those who create the Revised Common Lectionary or other lectionaries for the churches want to give us scripture readings that fit the theme of Advent. They have, however, a big problem when they set out to do that. The simple truth is that there are very few biblical passages that fit the theme. Yes, the Gospel of Luke has a rather complex story that leads up to the birth of Jesus, but that’s about all there is. So our poor brothers and sisters on the lectionary committees resort to a solution to their problem that really is no solution at all. They give us readings that really have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and they do it in two different ways. We see both of those ways in the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary for the first Sunday of Advent in Year B, the second year of that lectionary’s three year cycle. Since I began writing this essay on the eve of that Sunday let’s take a look at those readings to see what I mean.
We see the first way in which the Revised Common Lectionary solves (or rather doesn’t solve) its Advent problem in the first reading it gives us for that Sunday. It’s Isaiah 64:1-9. That passage dates from after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon in the late sixth century BCE. It begins with a prophetic plea for God to break into the world and solve the world’s problems. Verses 1 and 2 read, in the NRSV translation:

O that you would tear open the
  heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would
    quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
  and the fire causes water to
    boil—
to make your name known to
    your adversaries,
  so that the nations might
    tremble at your presence!

It is quite obvious that this passage has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. First of all, it was written more than five hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Beyond that, Jesus’ birth hardly caused the mountains to quake. No nations trembled at his presence except maybe for King Herod in Matthew’s version of his birth story.
Third Isaiah here is giving us a brief example of the “day of the Lord” prophecy of the ancient Hebrew prophets. We see an earlier example of that sort of prophecy in chapter 5 of Amos. There we read:

Alas for you who desire the day
    of the Lord!
  Why do you want the day of
    the Lord?
It is darkness not light;
  as if someone fled from a lion,
  and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested
    a hand against the wall,
  and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the Lord
    darkness, not light,
  and gloom with no brightness in it? Amos 5:18-20

These day of the Lord passages from ancient Hebrew prophecy are explicitly about the coming of the god Yahweh into the world to judge and to punish. They are not about the coming of the Lord Jesus into the world to reveal God’s unshakable love for and solidarity with humanity and all of creation. Yet the lectionaries give us some of them in Advent because, I suppose, they at least are about the coming of God into the world in some sense, which is about as close as scripture gets to texts about the coming of Jesus.
We see the other way the lectionaries try to solve their Advent problem in the Revised Common Lectionary’s Gospel reading from this same first Sunday of Advent, year B. This lectionary gives us as the Gospel reading for that day Mark 13:24-37. Chapter 13 of Mark is known as the “little apocalypse of Mark.” It is set during Jesus’ last week on earth, not in the period before his birth. It is about a supposed second coming of Jesus, not about his first coming. In that passage four of Jesus’ disciples ask him when “this” will be, referring apparently to Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple at Mark 13:2. Jesus replies:

‘Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.’ Mark 13:5b-8

In the part of chapter 13 the Revised Common Lectionary gives us for this Sunday we read:

     ‘But in those days, after that suffering,
    the sun will be darkened,
      and the moon will not give
        its light,
    and the stars will be falling
        from heaven,
      and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then they will see ‘the Son of Man, coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Mark 13:24-26

What that has to do with with birth of baby Jesus escapes me. It clearly refers back to the ancient Hebrew day of the Lord prophecy I mentioned above. It bears no real relationship to the birth of Jesus at all. The reference to the coming of the “Son of Man” is taken from the book of Daniel. See Daniel 7:13-14. Jesus used the phrase “Son of Man” as a term of self-reference, but Jesus didn’t come in clouds with great power and glory. He was born as a helpless newborn infant with no power at all. As with the passage we’re given from Isaiah, Mark’s little apocalypse is in some way about the coming of God, or of the risen Christ, into the world, but it has nothing to do with the first coming of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas.
Yet the way the lectionary gives us second coming language for Advent raises an even bigger question for me than the question of how to preach during Advent. It is the issue of the Parousia, the second coming of Christ. There is no doubt that the earliest Christians expected Jesus to return in power and glory and that they expected him to do it soon. We see that expectation in the oldest writing in the New Testament, namely, First Thessalonians. There, referring to the belief that no Christians would die before Christ returned but also to the reality that some had died and Christ hadn’t returned, Paul writes:
     But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16

The earliest Christians did indeed believe that Jesus was coming back. As we see in this passage Paul apparently believed that Christ would return during Paul’s lifetime.
Yet 1 Thessalonians was written nearly two thousand years ago, and Jesus still hasn’t come back, at least not in the way those earliest Christians thought he would. So it seems that we today must ask: Why did our earliest forbears in the faith believe that something would happen that still hasn’t happened roughly two thousand years later? Yes, they put words about his coming again into his mouth, but it seems virtually impossible to me that Jesus of Nazareth, who saw himself mostly as a prophet, would ever have said any such thing. So I don’t think they spoke of a second coming because Jesus had spoken of a second coming. I can think of only one reason why they would have believed in Jesus’ second coming, namely, that they were profoundly disappointed with his first coming. John Dominic Crossan even calls belief in the second coming the great denial of the first coming. I am convinced that he is right about that. So I want to consider here why the earliest Christians would have been disappointed in the first coming and thus believed in a second coming of Jesus Christ.
To understand why the earliest Christians would have been disappointed in the first coming of Jesus Christ we need to consider who Jewish people of Jesus’ time expected the Messiah, the expected deliverer of Israel, to be. There were different views on that question, but the main one was the belief that he would be a person who would drive out the Romans and restore the kingdom of David through military violence. Borg and Crossan quote scholar John Collins as saying about the messianic expectation of the first century CE: “This concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of Israel and institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era….”1 The Messiah was to be a descendant of King David who would defeat the Romans militarily the way David had defeated the Philistines militarily and who would establish a Jewish kingdom like the one David had (as they believed) established one thousand years earlier.
The earliest Christians confessed Jesus as the Messiah, but of course Jesus was not that kind of Messiah. He hadn’t raised an army to fight the Romans. He hadn’t even tried to raise an army to fight the Romans. Indeed, he had preached nonviolent resistance to the evil of the Roman Empire. The main reason for the earliest Christians’ disappointment with Jesus and for their belief in a second coming was that, while Jesus was indeed the Messiah, those damn Romans were still there. Neither the political nor the economic situation of these people’s world had changed. Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence had not rid them of the Romans with their oppressive military occupation, heavy taxation, and other harmful policies. God’s people were still ruled by a Gentile power, something that the Hebrew people had always considered wrong, indeed had always considered to be a kind of divine punishment. Clearly Jesus had left the Messiah’s mission unaccomplished. He needed to come back and accomplish it.
Put another way, Jesus needed to come back and do it our way this time. To all appearances his nonviolent approach to overcoming the Romans hadn’t worked. His strategy of changing the world by changing individuals from the inside out was taking too long.2 Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again, and those damn Romans were still there. Clearly, people thought, something more had to be done. In typical human fashion they decided that that something more was violence. Human violence of course wouldn’t do it. Rome was too strong. So what was needed was divine violence. God breaking in as conquering force, that’s what they thought was needed. So you get a revival of the old Hebrew prophetic notion of the “day of the Lord.” You get things like the little apocalypse of Mark, Mark. Finally you get the most violent book in the Bible, either Testament, the book of Revelation, in which there is massive violence; and it’s all done by God.
All of this violent second coming stuff comes down to this: Nice try God. Jesus was nice and all. Lovely really. But those damn Romans are still here, so send him back to do it our way this time. Cure him of his naive belief in nonviolence and send him back to smite the Romans the way we want them smitten, with massive violence.
And all of that adds up to what Crossan so aptly calls a denial of the first coming. Early Christians viewed the longed for second coming as essentially the opposite of the first coming. No baby born and laid in a manger. No teaching of nonviolence. No love your enemy. No turn the other cheek. Never mind inner personal transformation. What we want is outer world transformation, and we want it done fast. So, God, use violence to do it please. Belief in a second coming of Jesus Christ advocated the opposite from what Jesus advocated. It was, and is, indeed the great denial of the first coming.
In this Advent season as I write this essay we are preparing to celebrate that first coming. We talk about our anticipated joy at the birth of the Christ child. We say we are preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. We say we are preparing to revel in the love of God revealed in baby Jesus. We say all that, then some of us still say to him come a second time and do it our way.
That is not what God calls us to do. Maybe Jesus will come again some day. We can’t know for sure that he won’t; but it’s been nearly two thousand years since he left the first time, and he hasn’t come back yet. We can’t really know if he ever will come back, but we do know that he came once. He came as a Jewish man living under the Roman Empire. He came bringing a new way of understanding who God is and what God wants from us. The Romans killed him, but his followers experienced him as still present with them. He taught love. He taught nonviolence. He taught care for people in need, compassion and help for the least and lost. He taught that the way you free yourself from imperial oppression is to start by transforming your inner self from living the ways of empire to living the ways of God. We don’t know if he’ll ever come again, but we know those things about him.
So let me ask: If God simply wanted us to sit around waiting for Jesus to come again why did Jesus bother teaching us about God and revealing God to us the way he did? Christians have been so good at ignoring his teaching. We ignore it when we say that all he was about was believing in him so our souls will go to heaven when we die. We ignore him too when we say we needn’t be concerned about this world because he’s going to come back and change it (or maybe end it). Why would God have sent Jesus with all his teaching about and demonstrating a new understanding of God (albeit one solidly grounded in Jewish tradition) if God didn’t want us listening to him and then striving to live as he called us to live? I sure can’t think of any reason why God would do that.
So let’s be done with this nonsense about a second coming. Let’s be done with demanding that God come and clean up the world our way. Let’s realize that God has already shown us in Christ Jesus how God wants to clean up the world, by cleaning up human hearts and minds one person at a time. Then let’s get on with living into Christ’s first coming instead of sitting around fretting about some supposed second coming. If we will do that we’ll finally be following Jesus the way God wants us to follow Jesus; and if we can do that we may actually transform the world.

Impeachment as a Vote of No Confidence?

Impeachment as a Vote of No Confidence?

The United States does not have a parliamentary system of government. The parliamentary system of government developed in Great Britain, and I’ll use that country’s system as typical of parliamentary systems generally. In a parliamentary system the head of state, in England the monarch, asks one particular political party to form a government. That party is usually though perhaps not always the party with the most seats in the country’s parliament or other legislative body. The government is then usually made up of members of parliament from that party or other parties with which that party enters into a coalition government. The head of government (as opposed to the head of state) is the Prime Minister, the member of parliament the majority party designates as its leader. In Great Britain the parliament may in effect force the government to resign and hold new elections through what is called a “vote of no confidence.” A vote of no confidence is held in parliament when the members of parliament belonging to the governing party object in sufficient numbers to the policies the government is pursuing. It could also result from a belief that the ministers of that government have committed immoral or illegal acts, though the commission of such acts is not necessary for a vote of no confidence to be in order.

In the United States of course the government is not appointed by the majority party in Congress. Instead the President is elected through a process specified in the Constitution. The President may or may not belong to the party holding a majority of seats in either or both houses of Congress. The President appoints the members of his or her government, with the appointments usually requiring confirmation by the Senate. The President of the United States is both the head of state and the head of the government. The United States Constitution provides that Congress may remove the President (or any other member of the government) from office only through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. It specifies that impeachment is appropriate when the President or other governmental officer has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Article Two, Section Four. Only two Presidents of the United States, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have ever been impeached; and both were acquitted in the Senate and not removed from office. Richard Nixon of course resigned his office to avoid certain impeachment and conviction. There is no provision in the United States Constitution for anything like Britain’s vote of no confidence.

We are faced with a situation today that in any other democratic country would result in a vote of no confidence in the head of government if such a vote were available to the country’s legislative body. Donald Trump may or may not be guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” I suspect that he is, but it has not yet been proven that he is. It is however undeniable that Trump threatens the security and wellbeing of our nation with his pandering to right-wing extremists and his irresponsible, incomprehensible actions in foreign relations. Because of his bluster we face a greater possibility of nuclear war than we have faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis more than fifty years ago, albeit with North Korea rather than Russia. Because of Trump’s rash and poorly considered statements and actions we have lost the respect of most of our allies in the world. Trump pursues economic policies that can only be called fascist in their toadying up to large corporations and the wealthy people who run them and benefit from them. He legitimizes hate groups and violent actions against minority people of numerous sorts. Any responsible legislature in the world would vote no confidence in President Trump, but our Congress (to which I’m not at all sure the word responsible applies) does not have that option. It only has impeachment.

Would it be possible or desirable for Congress to begin to use impeachment as in effect a vote of no confidence? It would probably be possible. It is unlikely that the federal courts would ever overturn a vote of impeachment on the grounds that there was no evidence that the person impeached had in fact committed “bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The courts would certainly leave the judgment on that issue up to Congress. So Congress very probably could begin to use impeachment as a vote of no confidence.

The more difficult and interesting question is whether Congress should begin to use impeachment in that way. Some Democratic members of the House of Representatives have drafted articles of impeachment against Trump even though it has not yet been conclusively established that he has done anything that meets the constitutional criteria for impeachment. Those representatives may in fact be using impeachment as a de facto vote of no confidence, for they seem to be jumping the gun if the issue is truly impeachment as set out in the Constitution. It is easy enough for those of us appalled and frightened by Trump to wish that we had a vote of no confidence available to us as a means of removing him from office, but we don’t. We live under a constitutional system of government that does not provide for such a vote. As much as I hope that Trump will be forced from office before the end of his term, I cannot support turning impeachment into a vote of no confidence. It is theoretically possible to amend the US Constitution to provide for such a vote; but that hasn’t happened, and certainly won’t. Impeachment is what the Constitution gives us, so impeachment it must be.

There are multiple investigations underway that could well lead to the impeachment of President Trump. The most promising of them is Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, with which General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, is now cooperating. Various committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are also conducting investigations. We do not yet know where any of those investigations will lead, though it seems unlikely that they not produce indictments and possibly even impeachment proceedings. So we sit and wait. We watch. We hear the news. We pray that Trump will not do irreparable damage to our country and the world before he leaves the White House, however he eventually leaves the White House. If he is impeached we’ll get President Pence (also a terrifying thought, though Pence is apparently at least more emotionally stable than Trump is) unless Congress impeaches him too. But impeachment it is if it is to be anything that removes Trump from office. The Constitution does not create a vote of no confidence, so let’s not turn the Constitutional process of impeachment into something it is not.

Parable or Myth?

Parable or Myth? Reflections on Borg’s and Crossan’s Use of Parable

I have been reading the book The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.¹ I have a small group of people from the church I serve reading the book as we approach Advent and Christmas, 2017. In the book the authors explore the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke. Early in the book they ask a crucial question, namely, what kind of stories are these? They lead up to their answer to that question by positing that for most people today there are only two possible answers to it. The stories can be fact or they can be fable. The assumption behind these two possible answers is that if the stories are not fact they are not true. They use Borg’s categories of “precritical naiveté” and “conscious literalism” to explain why both people who insist that the stories are factually true and those who insist that they aren’t both believe that facts are true.²

Then the authors propose a third way to answer the question of what kind of stories these are. They say they are “parables.”³ They say they base their understanding of the birth stories as parables on the parables of Jesus. No one, they say, claims that the events recounted in Jesus’ parables really happened, and no one thinks the truth of a parable depends on the parable recounting facts, that is, events that actually happened. Everyone, they claim, understands that parables are about meaning not about fact. No one worries about whether there ever was a Samaritan who stopped to aid a victim of a violent robbery on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Everyone knows that isn’t the point. The point is not did it happen but what does the story mean. Fair enough. No one, or not much of anyone, worries about whether the events in one of Jesus’ parables ever happened.

By calling the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke parables Borg and Crossan hope avoid the question of the stories’ factuality and to lead readers to ask of those stories not did they happen but what did and do they mean. That is a worthy goal. I can’t tell you how many times I have said to church people don’t ask if this story happened, ask what it means. If calling the birth stories parables helps someone get beyond the question of factuality to the question of meaning that is all well and good.

Yet whenever I read Borg, or Crossan, or the two of them together using words like parable or metaphor (which Borg in particular used a lot) to characterize biblical stories I am brought up short. You see, in using words like those, these two popular authors are intentionally avoiding using the theological term that truly names what these stories are. They are not metaphors. They are not even parables. They are myths.⁴ Myth is the technically correct term for what these stories are. A myth is a story that acts like a symbol. That is, a myth is a story that points beyond itself to God and works to connect us with God. A true myth conveys truth about God and God’s relationship with us by telling a story. A true myth mediates between us and God. It has a foothold in our created reality and in the reality of God and acts as a bridge between those two realities. A myth does not depend on factuality for its truth. It deals in truth far deeper, more important, and more powerful than mere fact. The stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke aren’t parables, they’re myths.

And Borg and Crossan consistently avoid using the word myth to characterize any of the stories in the Bible. They do linguistic cartwheels in their efforts to avoid using that word, and it is not hard to understand why they do. There is an enormous problem with using the word myth today to mean something that is in any sense true. That’s because the word myth has taken on another meaning in popular usage. Today when people call something a myth they mean that it is precisely not true. In popular usage a myth is something that someone thinks is true that in fact is not true. Someone says Sasquatch is real. Someone else will deny that statement by saying “that’s just a myth.” They could just say that’s not true. Or they could say you’re lying. But they are also very apt to say that’s a myth, and everyone will understand that they mean the assertion that Sasquatch is real is false. There’s no truth in the statement at all.

I have experienced this difficulty with the word myth first hand. When I was having an adult ed group at the first church I served read the manuscript of Liberating Christianity my use of the word myth in that book was the one thing in it that some of those good folks just couldn’t understand or accept. No matter how many times I told them to use my technical, theological definition of myth not the popular definition they just couldn’t do it. Myth has so come to mean something that isn’t true that asking people today to accept that it can mean instead something that is deeply true may be asking too much. Borg and Crossan clearly think it is asking too much of their popular audience.

None of which changes the fact that the technically correct term for what the birth stories of Jesus are is myth. They aren’t parables because they aren’t introduced as parables and they aren’t little stories that Jesus tells to make a point. They aren’t metaphors because they don’t say a thing is one thing that it isn’t in order to make a point about it, or at least that’s not all they do. They are myths because they tell stories intended to make a point about the divinity of Jesus and other aspects of his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. They are told to connect us with the truth of Jesus’ divinity, a truth that may not be factual but is nonetheless powerfully true. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke seek to convey faith confessions about Jesus in the way the first century Greek and Jewish worlds mostly conveyed deep truth, not by writing theological essays like this one but by telling stories. The fact that general audiences resist this theological meaning of the word myth doesn’t change the fact that the technically correct term for the stories of Jesus’ birth is myth.

So if thinking of the stories as parables, or as metaphors, works for you, OK. I won’t insist that you call them myths. But I hope you understand that that’s what they are. I hope that you understand that Borg and Crossan are avoiding the use of that term not because the term isn’t correct but because they don’t think they could get their large and largely lay audience to understand its technical meaning, a meaning that is essentially the opposite of its popular meaning. And I do find the loss of the technical meaning of the term unfortunate. When we understand the Bible’s stories precisely as stories that do, or at least can, work deep in our souls to connect us with ultimate reality, with our God Who utterly transcends our reality (and that means Who utterly transcends mere fact) we find a depth and power of meaning that only myth can give. That’s what true myth gives us, and no, that’s not an oxymoron. That’s why I so wish we could resurrect the word myth, not that I expect that to happen any time soon.

1Borg, Marcus J. and Crossan, John Dominic, The First Christmas, What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, HarperOne, New York, 2007.

2For an earlier discussion of mine of Borg’s scheme of precritical naiveté, conscious literalism, and postcritical naivete see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. 39-41.

3The First Christmas, p. 33

4For a more detailed discussion of the nature of symbol and myth see Liberating Christianity, pp. 23-29.

The Demon Named Legion

The Demon Named Legion

The story of Jesus’ exorcism of the demon named Legion is one of the most important stories in the Bible. If we will take it to heart it will change everything. The oldest version of the story that we have appears at Mark 5:1-20. It goes like this. Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee to a place the text calls “the country of Gerasenes.” This means that Jesus and his disciples have entered a Gentile region not a Jewish one. A man comes from an area of tombs to encounter them, and he has “an unclean spirit.” His unclean spirit makes him uncontrollable. The people of the area have tried to restrain him with chains, but he breaks them. No one could subdue him. He would spend time “howling and bruising himself with stones.” We would say he had a severe mental illness, but the ancient world of this story knew nothing of mental illness as a disease process. So it said people like this man were possessed by an unclean or demonic spirit. The man sees Jesus and runs up and bows before him. He shouts at Jesus: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” Mark tells us that the man said that because Jesus had already said to the demon “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”

Up to that point this could just be another exorcism tale about Jesus, but then it takes a crucial turn. Jesus asks the demon: “What is your name?” If we think about it that question will probably strike us as odd. The demons Jesus exorcises from people don’t usually have names. Beyond that, why would Jesus care what the demon’s name is? It seems that what really matters here is that the demon come out of the possessed man, that the man be restored to his right mind and made well. Jesus, who of course has power over demons in these stories, doesn’t really need to know the demon’s name or even if the demon had one before he heals this tormented man. Still, he asks the demon: “What is your name?” The question is so odd that we should sense that something important is coming next, and indeed it is. The demon replies: “My name is Legion; for we are any.”

Two important things have happened here. First, it turns out that the man was possessed not by one demon but by many. Second, these many demons have but one name, and that name is Legion. To understand what this story is really telling us we have understand the name Legion the way the first audiences for this story would have understood it back in the first century CE. What did the word Legion (or legion) mean in that world? I think we can already sense the answer. We’ve all heard of the Roman legions. Mark’s audience so long ago would have known immediately what a legion was. For us the word has come to mean only many, a great number of anything. If we say someone’s troubles are legion we mean the poor soul has many of them. In Jesus’ world (and in Mark’s) the word legion had a much more specific meaning than that. A legion was a unit of the Roman army. It was a large unit numbering in the thousands. A Roman legion was something like today’s army division, a large, primary unit of military organization. Today we may miss the association of the word legion with a military unit and specifically with a Roman military unit. Mark’s original audience would not have missed that association.

The next line is telling too. Mark states: “He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.” Note the odd confusion of the singular and the plural here. This sentence refers to the demon both as “he” and as “them.” A Roman legion was made up of individual soldiers, but it acted as a unit; and surely the important thing for the people being subjected by a Roman legion was how it acted as a unit, not how the individuals in it behaved. Mark’s use of the word “them” in his sentence again emphasizes that we are dealing not with an individual demon but with demons collectively. The demon(s) ask(s) Jesus to let them go into a herd of swine grazing on a hillside. Remember that the story is set in Gentile territory. That’s why there could be a herd of swine in the area, something you’d never see in Jewish lands. Jesus agrees, whereupon the “the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank and into the sea, and were drowned.” The demon named Legion drowns in “the sea.” The story says that the possessed man was then restored to his right mind. Legion has been removed from inside him, and he is sane again.

To understand the deep meaning and power of this story we must next consider the cultural context in which it was first told. It is set in a Gentile area, but it is a story about a Jewish man (Jesus) told to and for Jewish people. In the first century CE, the time of Jesus and the time of Mark, the world of the Jews was a world of poverty and oppression. Israel lived under Roman occupation. The Romans with their legions had occupied the area of Israel in 63 BCE. They or their successor the Byzantine Empire would occupy the region for centuries thereafter. In the first century CE Roman occupation was not a pleasant thing. Because the temple authorities for the most part collaborated with the Romans the Romans more or less left Jewish religious practice alone. There was no attempt like that of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanis IV in the second century BCE to impose foreign, gentile religious practices on the Jews. The Romans didn’t interfere with Jewish religious practice, which they respected in some ways because it was so ancient. What they did care about was taxes. They taxed the Jewish population heavily, so heavily that they kept most people in abject poverty. Not that most people would have been wealthy without the Romans. They wouldn’t have been. But Roman taxation was a heavy burden on most Jewish people in the first century CE. The Romans also cared about law and order. They wanted the people of the lands they had conquered and occupied to be peaceful subjects of the Empire. They oppressed any resistance to their rule with brutal force.

Perhaps most galling of all to most Jews was the reality that they were ruled from abroad by a Gentile, pagan power. They had to be obedient to Gentiles who were in the eyes of many unclean because they offered sacrifice to gods and goddesses who weren’t real and made their emperor in some way divine, if not during his life then after his death. Jewish people had to use coins with images of one emperor or another with words that said he was somehow divine. The Jews found Roman occupation so unacceptable that they rebelled against it from time to time. They had done so in 4 BCE when Herod the Great, the Romans’ puppet king, died. They did it again with some temporary success in 66 CE, a rebellion that resulted in 70 CE in the Roman destruction of the temple and the scattering of the people across the world away from Jerusalem. For the most part the Jews hated the Romans and the way Rome occupied their land.

Because the Jews so hated the Romans there arose various movements that identified as messianic. Many Jews hoped for the coming of a figure called the Messiah. Our English word Messiah derives from a Hebrew word that means “anointed.” In the ancient Hebrew kingdoms a king wasn’t crowned as king, he was anointed as king. That is, he had oil poured on his head. He was anointed with oil as a sign of God’s favor and even of God’s selection of that person to be king. In Jesus’ time many Jews longed for the coming of a long promised new Messiah, a new king chosen by God to rule the people and to reestablish their independence and glory. People did not see the hoped for Messiah as divine. The notion that a human being could also be divine was (and is) one Judaism could never entertain. The Messiah was to be a king who would raise an army, drive the Romans into the sea by force, and reestablish the kingdom of David. For many Jews Rome was out there in the world, their world, and they had to be driven out of it.

Christians proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, but he certainly was not that kind of Messiah. He never raised an army to fight the Romans. He never even thought about raising an army to fight the Romans, or at least as far as we know he never did. Yet he too knew that Roman occupation was an enormous problem for his people. He, however, understood the real problem with Roman occupation very differently than most of his Jewish contemporaries did, and we see quite clearly how he understood the problem of Roman occupation in the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion.

Legion, the symbol of the Roman Empire, was inside the possessed man Jesus healed. Legion made the man insane. Legion made the man something other than his true self, something violent, something ugly, something people could not control and so tried to avoid. The man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, outside of him. His problem was that Rome was inside him, in his mind, in his heart, in his soul. We know that this is a truth this story is telling us because the demon that possessed the man had a name, and the name was Legion. The name was Roman army. The name was a word so intimately associated with Roman occupation that no one in the first audience for this story would have missed the connection. Rome was inside this man. That was his problem.

So Jesus got Rome out of the man. He exorcised the demon named Legion, but he didn’t just exorcise the demon. He granted its (their) request to enter a herd of pigs. The original audience for this story must have loved that part of the story. The unclean Romans entered unclean animals. How appropriate! Then the pigs possessed by Legion ran into the sea and were drowned. It was the Sea of Galilee not the Mediterranean; but it was still a sea of sorts, and most of all the hated Roman Legion died in it. That is exactly what so many Jews longed to see happen to the Roman legions that occupied their land and oppressed them. Get them out of here. Drive them into the sea. That’s what people wanted, and that’s what happens to them, metaphorically at least, in this story.

Notice once again, however. Where was Legion? Not out there. Not outside the possessed man. Inside him. In his mind. In his heart. In his soul. This story makes a powerful and central point about how Jesus saw the world’s problems. The man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, outside him. The man’s problem was that Rome was in here, inside him. The man’s problem was that he had internalized Rome. He had internalized empire. For Jesus the solution to Roman occupation wasn’t to raise an army. It wasn’t to look outward at what Rome was doing in the world, it was to look inward to see what Rome was doing to your soul. At least that’s where the solution to the evils of empire had to start, in the mind, heart, and soul of every person living under empire.

Like every great Bible story the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion isn’t just about something that happened to someone else a long time ago in a place far away. It is a story about us too. It is a story for us. It is a story that points us toward the real problem in our lives, indeed toward the real problem with the life of the world. The world’s problem is the reality of empire, but the problem is less that empire is out there than that it is in here. It is in our minds, our hearts, and our souls every bit as much as the demon named Legion was in the mind, heart, and soul of the possessed man in Mark’s story about Jesus. We too have internalized the ways of empire.

Now, a great many people today are going to find that statement puzzling at best, or at least wrong, or even as downright offensive. We don’t think we’ve internalized empire even if we have some notion of what that statement means. We think the ways of empire are just the way things are. But to understand what it means for us to have internalized empire we must start by understanding what the ways of empire are. The ways of empire are the ways of violence, oppression, and injustice. Empire always functions for the benefit of the wealthy not the benefit of the people. We know that a great many Americans have internalized the ways of empire when we see how they support policies that are essentially imperial. When our nation goes to war we say that all Americans must support the war, or at least support the troops and probably the politicians who sent them to war. Richard Nixon’s war crimes in Viet Nam and Cambodia aren’t what eventually drove him out of office. Polls showed that most Americans supported his policies there. No one has prosecuted George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Condaleezza Rice for war crimes in Iraq though they are clearly guilty of them. Only the internalizing of the ways of empire can explain those undeniable facts.

Today (November 16, 2017) one of the issues before us is the proposed tax legislation in Congress. Republicans control both houses of Congress, and the tax bill they are advocating is a clear statement of Republican beliefs and priorities. That bill benefits the wealthy and big corporations. It does nothing or next to nothing for middle class Americans, and it certainly does nothing for poor Americans. It actually raises taxes on some middle income people. The Senate’s version even has a provision in it repealing the universal mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Polls show that most Americans just don’t care about that bill or the issues it addresses. How can people not care? That bill is an embodiment of gross injustice. How can we not care about it? We don’t care about it because we have internalized the ways of empire. Empires always benefit the wealthy not the people. When we internalize the ways of empire we accept policies that benefit the wealthy not the people simply as reasonable, simply as the way things are. We even believe that they will be beneficial in ways in which they clearly will not. Likewise we accept environmental policies that destroy the earth but make the rich richer simply as reasonable, simply as the way things are, the way things have to be, the way things will always be. We accept a criminal law system that incarcerates Blacks at a rate far higher than whites because whites are dominant. For empire the dominant matter more than the powerless, and we have internalized the ways of empire. The examples of how we accept grossly unjust and violent policies because we have internalized empire could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. We have internalized empire. Legion is inside us.

Jesus knew that Rome, that empire, was inside the people of his day as well. He wanted people to be liberated from imperial oppression as much as the leaders of violent revolts against Rome did, but knew a couple of things that they didn’t. He knew first of all that God is nonviolent and calls us to be nonviolent. Beyond that, he knew that the Jewish people had no hope of defeating Rome militarily, and the history of the Jewish rebellions against Rome after his time prove that he was right about that. He knew that Rome was oppressive and unjust, but he knew better than anyone else how to deal with it. Not by hopeless, violent rebellions but through personal, inner transformation. Liberation comes from the inside out. Free your mind, heart, and soul from Rome, and you will be free.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus passively accepted the dominance of Rome in the world. He didn’t. He wanted Rome gone from Israel as much as anyone else did. He preached an equality that was radically anti-Roman. He preached nonviolence, again something that was radically anti-Roman. He lifted up those Rome oppressed. He chastised Rome’s accomplices in Jerusalem. He was no friend of the Romans, and the Romans knew it. They, after all, were the ones who executed him. No, Jesus didn’t accept the dominance of Rome in the world. He just knew better than anyone else how truly to get rid of it. Work from the inside out. Transform enough people from the inside out, and Rome will disappear. It will no longer have enough people to go along with its brutal policies. Get Rome out of your heart and mind, he said, then Rome will no longer be a problem.

Folks, we Americans live in the Rome of the 21^st century. Far too many of us, probably all but a handful of us actually, have internalized the ways of empire, for we all grew up in the world empire of our day. We all grew up being taught both explicitly and implicitly that the ways of empire are just how things are and that on the whole they are good. At least we were taught that they are good if the empire in question is the American empire. Our country needs a revolution. A peaceful revolution. Don’t ever forget the peaceful part. Don’t ever get violent, for violence is the way of the structures we need to overcome. We need a revolution, a turning, away from the ways of empire and toward the ways of peace and justice. Call this revolution what you will. Socialist. Or Christian, for socialist and truly Christian are very similar. Call it social democracy or democratic socialism. Call it Christian socialism. It doesn’t much matter what we call it, though of course it must benefit all not just Christians. What matters is that we bring about a nation devoted not to the ways of empire but to the ways of peace and justice.

Jesus told us how to do it. The Gospels tell us how to do it in the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion. Don’t get violent against the institutions of empire. Get intentional about cleaning empire out of your own person. Stop thinking like empire wants you to think. Stop pledging allegiance to what empire wants you to pledge allegiance to. Learn God’s will and ways from Jesus. Analyze the world through the lens of God’s will and ways. Reject violence. Reject injustice. Reject oppression. Reject prejudice. Reject anything that denies or diminishes the value of any human being. Reject anything that harms God’s good earth. Reject anything that harms any of God’s people.

But don’t just reject. Support and work to elect politicians who stand for peace and justice. Give money and work with organizations that promote peace and justice. Speak truth to power. Model your life on Jesus’ life. Love. Care. Take care of. Forgive. Expunge all hatred from your heart. Be at peace in your soul and you will be at peace in the world. Jesus knew that if enough people will live that way empire will fall. Empire will fall because it depends on hatred and violence for its very existence. So love don’t hate. Resist evil assertively, creatively, but never violently. All of that will exorcise the demon Legion from your mind, your heart, your soul. If we will do that, we can change the world.

Addendum

My friend and colleague Rev. Norm Erlendsen, a Congregationalist pastor in Connecticut, read this essay and sent me some additional information. Citing a source for the material, Norm told me that the Tenth Legion of the Roman army was stationed in Syria in the first century CE and that some of it was stationed in Galilee. It's emblem was the boar. Mark sets the story of the demon named Legion on the Syrian side of the Sea of Galilee. He has the demons enter a herd of pigs. A boar is of course a swine, related to domesticated pigs. Mark's symbolism would have spoken even more powerfully to the first audience for this story than I thought. The place where the story is set was occupied and oppressed by a boar, a pig, the Tenth Legion of Rome. This additional historical information makes my analysis of the story stronger, much stronger, than I ever thought it was. Thanks, Norm.