FOR THE SAKE OF TEN RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE

I tried to follow the six week trial in New York City where Donald J. Trump was the defendant.  It just depressed me.  The defendant has a record of having lied or misled his audiences 30,573 times as of January 24, 2021.  In the last month he lied about his legal problems. He said he was not able to testify on his own behalf in open court because of the gag order. The judge went out of his way to assure him and the public that he could. Mr. Trump lied when he said he was unconstitutionally denied a jury in the E. Jean Carroll case when, in fact, his own defense team never requested one. Meanwhile, there were people who testified against him who freely admitted to lying, themselves (including under oath.) I cannot claim that Mr. Trump ever perjured himself (short of a jury verdict for perjury), but he has pleaded the fifth amendment almost 450 times during a single deposition.  And the jury agreed on the felony convictions this week partly on the testimony of another liar (Michael Cohen.) How does anyone find a winner in all of this?  Where–and what–is a truly righteous verdict? And the poor, unfortunate people on the jury had to make the determination of where the truth lies.  Sixteen brave Americans (when you include the alternate jurors) put their privacy, their careers, possibly their very lives on the line to make our system of government work. Interestingly, Judge Juan M. Merchan was born in Columbia and the foreman of the jury who is still nameless was born in Ireland. Yet, they are both Americans and bring a strength of character to these shores that we should all envy. Other prospective jurors interviewed in voir dire asked to be excused from duty because they feared what might happen when the trial was over. Even now those ultra-right wing websites that average Americans are not even aware of are publishing the purported home addresses of the jurors. So, we had one liar in court testifying against another liar who says his accuser lies. Where is the truth here? Just lies and more lies. Nor, regrettably, have I always told the truth in my life.

The charges

Were these indictments that Alvin Bragg brought forward “Mickey Mouse” indictments? There is a (worn out) cliché that in Manhattan you can indict a ham sandwich. I received speeding tickets in Texas for going twenty MPH over the speed limit that I thought were petty, especially since other drivers were going faster than that. A person throws trash from the window of his car and he is ticketed. A parent leaves their child in a car in July for five minutes and gets arrested. A defensive high school football player deliberately knocks down someone from another team after the whistle blows and the offensive player is taken to the hospital. Is that just a another fifteen yard penalty or a criminal offense? And should it be prosecuted? When we break the law, we usually have an excuse for doing it and sometimes we try to shift the blame, as Mr. Trump did.

Joe Biden, of course doesn’t always tell the truth, either.  He claimed that during the pandemic, President Obama sent him on a mission to Detroit to “help fix” that city.  Unfortunately, this was years before the pandemic began. On the same occasion Biden claimed:

“that his expansion of the Affordable Care Act saved families ‘$800,000 in premiums.’ He quickly corrected himself in mid-speech to ‘$80,000 in premiums.’ However, neither number was accurate according to the corrected transcript. According to the White House correction, the number is $800.”

President Biden further stated that his administration was going after “corporate landlords who keep rent down.”  What?  Wouldn’t this be a good thing if true?  But, again, it wasn’t true.  All this (and more) came from a single recent speech to the NAACP.

One of these two people, Biden or Trump, will lead us during the next four years.  He will be the most powerful person on Earth!  It will be either the one with three remaining indictments representing fifty-four charges of felonies against him, or the one who thinks that cannibals ate his uncle during WW II.

I don’t believe Biden willfully lies like his opponent does. More likely, he is confused by his developing senescence. But the effect can be the same. And the fact that I am not a minion of Mr. Trump does not automatically make be a Biden voter.

Who am I?

I am a religious conservative with liberal political learnings.  How strange is that?!  I used to identify as an evangelical, but now eschew that label, so that I’m not confused with my Christians brethren who carry Mr. Trump around on their shoulders and make apologies for him that they would not afford for liberal politicians (say, Bill or Hillary Clinton.) To some, Mr. Trumps marital infidelity is forgivable while Mr. Clinton’s is not.

As a political liberal, I do have compassion for unfortunate people (on either side of our border.)  Maybe it’s just what people with bleeding hearts do? I have the good fortune of having quality health insurance, so that is why I want other people in our country to possess adequate coverage, themselves. I am concerned about climate change because I lived in Texas for forty-three years and I cannot abide with a heat stress index in excess of one hundred and twelve degrees for days or weeks on end.  I expect ethics, integrity, dignity, honesty, humility and selflessness among our elected officials.  Perhaps I should explain these characteristics since they are seldom seen any more in Congress, the White House, and now, tragically, even on the highest court of the land¹. Yet, trashing or trying to overthrow our institutions is not in the way forward here. We need clear heads and reform.

I’m a sexually-straight male who uses masculine pronouns, but if the law doesn’t make distinctions, exceptions or prosecute people who do not describe themselves as I describe myself, then who am I to deny these fellow Americans their rights under the Constitution? Yet, I see a spiritual and moral decline in America, however those adjectives are defined these days.  I see a country where our institutions have been under attack for at least forty years, courtesy of talk radio.  And the threat I see to our nation comes from the extreme left as well as the far right.

When I think of our nation today, I think of the RMS Titanic.  A great nation (England) built a great boat.  But the people lost sight of their humility–and maybe even their humanity–even as our ancestors who built the tower of Babel did.  When the Titanic was launched, there was claims that “God, Himself, couldn’t sink her.”  Yet, before she completed her maiden voyage, she did sink, taking 1,500 souls to the bottom with her.

It took the better part of three hours for the ship to completely slip under the surface of the sea.  As anyone who has read books on this disaster or seen any movies about it, passengers and crew acted indifferently or recklessly in any one of a number of ways.  Some passengers panicked.  Others seemed to be in denial and went back their staterooms or looked for some other amusement on deck.  The ships officers gave out conflicting information.  Some didn’t carry out their duties.  People shuffled about in slow motion as if in a dream.  Is this what is happening to America?  Are we floundering, soon to be swallowed by the abyss?  Is this all a dream?

Does God use ungodly people?

One of arguments I hear from Christian “leaders,” though I’m not quite sure who elected or appointed them, is that the President is not a Pope. Few people would want their priest, pastor or rabbi to behave as Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden do.  They would not be chosen by a search committee to lead a congregation of 300 people, but the candidates have their votes to lead a nation of more than 300,000,000 people. Would a school district hire a principal who had thirty-four felony indictments?! Even a convenience store would not hire a cashier with that blot on their background. But apparently the front door to the White House is open.

Others look to historical figures such as Darius the Great (c. 550 BC –486 BC) to say that God can use ungodly people.  Who am I to argue that point?  When Alexander the Great wanted to cross the Red Sea as he built his empire, his army was able to cross it conveniently because the water level mysteriously dropped². Contemporary historians hailed it as a miracle akin to Moses. The average depth of the Red Sea is 1,500 feet, though at its deepest point it’s almost two miles down.  When Alexander reached Jerusalem, he made a sacrifice in to Jehovah, but then, he sacrificed to the god of every nation that he conquered.  Darius was recorded as having helped the Jews rebuilt their Temple, but does that give him free ride on the highway to heaven?  Herod the Great did the same thing, and then tried to assassinate the baby Jesus, settling on cutting the throats of other babies instead. True, God does say to Isaiah (55:8): “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . .” It is hard, though, for me to understand how God would anoint someone who is so antithetical in his ways to what we know about God, Himself. No doubt, evangelicals would use this same passage to disqualify and discredit Biden.

Granted, narcissism is not in and of itself a sin.  But pride is, and so is bullying people and manipulating them and the truth as well for personal gain.  Paul writes to Timothy in his first epistle (6:10) that “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  This should convince us that we will not be judged in heaven based on our fiscal net worth. But all of this could be forgiven to the person who asks for forgiveness.  Mr. Trump is on record, however, as saying he has no need to ask anyone (most of all his Creator) for forgiveness.  Aside from the issue of abortion, the case against Mr. Biden is that he is simply not capable of serving another four years.  And it’s not just his age.  There are people his age or older who still have the juice and wits.

Let change our tack for a moment.

“The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day” as recorded in Genesis 18:1. The word for “Lord” is יְהוָ֔ה (Yahweh or also here sometimes translated as Jehovah.)  It suggests the presence of the Deity.  In theology this is called a theophany.  God is speaking to Abraham, and Abraham knows who his guest is.  After promising Abraham a son from Sarah, God brings up the messy business of Sodom and Gomorrah.  At this point, the two angels accompanying God resume their trek to towards the two cities.  Estimates of the population of the two cities range from several thousand to half a million, though a conservative number is probably more accurate.  The Deity says he is about to bring judgment on these two cities for their sins.  We need not discuss just what the sins were because they are mentioned elsewhere in Scripture, just that something bad is about to hit the fan.    Abraham has kin living in the cities, so he tries to bargain with God at least for their sake. We do this ourselves today.  When the Mega-millions jackpot reaches a billion dollars, we buy a ticket and promise God ten percent if He helps us win.  I’ve done this myself in the past.

So, Abraham says to God:

Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

God’s reply is “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”  This is actually amazing.  When you were growing up and your father or mother gave you some bad news that directly or indirectly affected you, how often could you say to them “Well, let’s talk about that?”

But Abraham also knew there were likely not fifty, nor even fifteen righteous people in those cities, and he talks God down to ten.  The last we hear from God is where He says “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Except there were not even ten righteous people between those two cities.

The word for righteous is צַדִּיקִ֖ם (tsaddiq) “blameless,” “innocent,” “just.”   God was willing to spare a greater number of unjust, immoral people for the sake of a few who were righteous. The just for the unjust. Can we depend on this benevolence today?

How many blameless, innocent or people do we have in Congress?  In our statehouses?  In America?  I would not dare to presume that I am such a one, but if we as a nation are close to ruin, can we depend on someone like Abraham to intercede for us and ten people to approach the throne of Heaven?  Or, like the people on the Titanic, will we just look the other way? Amazed, like a deer in the headlights.

Four more years?

Life was good under Barak Obama.  I voted for him in 2008 but not in 2012.  I could accept the post 9/11 wars under George W. Bush.  I could get though the second term of Bill Clinton with his sex scandals, though I loathed how he conducted his personal life.  I supported George Bush the elder as President, but did not vote for him in 1992. I even made it through Ronald Reagan’s two terms when the federal debt exploded because of bad fiscal policy and we had the Iran Contra scandal and the largest loss of American soldiers in a single incident that I can remember (October 23, 1983.). I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and in 1980 in spite of inflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis. President Ford was not notable to me one way or the other.  I supported Nixon until the Watergate scandal, and I still have two minds about his terms in office.  LBJ was a tragic figure to me, though I supported his policies, as I did Kennedy’s.  I remember (barely) Eisenhower who had two heart attacks while in office.  He seemed to be a friendly person to all (except to his Vice-President Richard Nixon.)  But the worst of these eleven presidents is ten times the man that Trump is in my estimation.  The only one of these presidents I can compare Biden to is Ronald Reagan whose mind started to deteriorate before he left office as well. But with Donald Trump, life is like living in a house when someone outside is operating a jackhammer. There is a constant drum beat from Mar-a-Largo. Donald Trump “saves” us from the very crises that he, himself, creates. There is a daily deluge of insults, drama and lies from the only President I’ve lived under who had neither a shred of grace, humility or human decency. Not only is he a sore loser, but when he actually wins, he gloats and cackles. One minute he’s repeating how John McCain’s family did not thank him for approving a state funeral for Senator McCain, and the next minute he is disparging veterans as “suckers” and “losers.” He makes sport out of Republicans and Democrats alike with the pejorative nicknames he invents for them, such as calling Senator JD Vance (R) an “ass kisser” or referring to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D) as “Pocahontas.”

In times like those, Deena and I have something to hope for and Someone who doesn’t change with the wind. But I feel bad for all the others who do not if and when this whole system collapses.

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Footnotes

¹As an example, you might ask U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas how much he paid for his Prevost Marathon Le Mirage XL luxury motor home.

²“This . . . focuses on two particular anecdotes transmitted by the historiography of Alexander the Great: a lunar eclipse that predicted the Macedonian victory at the battle of Gaugamela and a miraculous ebb that made the sea recede and allowed Alexander’s army to cross the narrow path of Phaselis in southern Turkey, opening to him the way to Asia. In both cases the extraordinary phenomena are presented as proof of the divine blessing that accompanied Alexander during his Oriental campaign. Consequently, they are attributed to the intercession of a deity and/or demand a religious reaction for the part of the king, as e. g. a sacrifice.” Pajón Leyra, Irene. “Turning Science into Miracle in the Voyage of Alexander the Great”. Recognizing Miracles in Antiquity and Beyond, edited by Maria Gerolemou, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 275-304.