It is the third Sunday in Lent. Today’s Bach cantata is “Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht” (I will not let go of my Jesus).

Today’s Gospel reading is Luke 13:1-9:

Repent or Perish

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’

“‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’”

The text of today’s piece is available here. It contains these words:

I will not let go of my Jesus,
I will walk beside Him forever;
Christ shall for ever and ever have me
guided to the springs of life.
Blessed, whoever says with me:
I will not let go of my Jesus.

Happy listening! Soli Deo gloria.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

This is a good point:

The Mueller Report could be literally nothing but a narration of already-public facts that have been sworn to under oath, confirmed in guilty pleas, or supported by physical documents and it would be far more damning than conservative twitter triumphalism currently imagines.

— Jacob T. Levy (@jtlevy) March 23, 2019

We don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. Here are a few things we do know.

We know that Joseph Mifsud, a professor with connections to high-ranking Russian officials, told George Papadopolous about “dirt” Russia had on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails when Papadopoulos was an adviser to the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos later lied about the timing to federal investigators to make it sound as if he learned this information before becoming an adviser to the campaign. In fact, Papadopoulos was told this only because he was a Trump campaign adviser. Papadopoulos repeatedly tried to set up a meeting between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

We know that Roger Stone communicated with Wikileaks, which operated as a cutout for the Kremlin. Stone was contacted by Trump campaign officials about future releases from Wikileaks, which falsely denied its communications with Stone. Stone said to someone involved with the Trump campaign: “Spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.” After the Podesta emails were first released, an associate of the Trump campaign official sent Stone a text message saying “Well done.”

We know that Paul Manafort was a lobbyist for Putin-connected former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. We know Manafort was later convicted of filing false tax returns, bank fraud, failing to disclose a foreign bank account, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and witness tampering. He was also the chairman of Trump’s campaign, and in that capacity, with Trump’s son and son-in-law, met with a woman with connections to high-ranking Kremlin officials hoping to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

We know that Michael Cohen wrote letters to senior Kremlin officials pursuing Trump Tower Moscow well into the presidential campaign, and lied about this to Congress to foster a false narrative that the Trump organization was not involved in any attempts to conduct business in Moscow.

We know that Michael Flynn asked a member of Trump’s presidential transition team about what to tell the Soviet ambassador regarding an issue of recent sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration. The transition official discussed the fact that the transition team did not want the situation to escalate, which Flynn told the Russian ambassador. Putin decided not to retaliate. Flynn then lied about all of this to the FBI.

Smells like vindication to you? OK. It probably is vindication on direct collusion in the sense of conspiring to hack emails — something nobody but insane Resistance types ever believed. To many of us, it’s something short of vindication on the issue of queasy connections between a presidential campaign and one of our enemies.

Maybe tamp down the triumphalism a bit there, sport.

UPDATE: Trump organization, not campaign. Fixed. Thanks to Kevin M.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]