đź Proper 22
Readings: Lamentations 1:1-6, Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10.
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Lament, Power, and Radical Humility
Good morning from The Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. Todayâs readingsâLamentations 1 & 3, 2 Timothy 1, and Luke 17âare heavy. Together they show us a through-line from Jeremiah to Jesus to Paul: what happens when Godâs people trade humility for power, and how God calls us back.
Jeremiahâs Lament
Lamentations is attributed to Jeremiah, the âweeping prophet.â Unlike Jonahâwho preached destruction to his enemies and saw them repentâJeremiah had to preach judgment to his own people, and they did not repent. He watched Jerusalem fall, the temple and its sacred objects destroyed.
This devastation was not an accident. Scripture says God allowed Jerusalemâs corruption to collapse. Before David centralized worship in Jerusalem, Godâs house stood in Shiloh, a modest town where the Ark once rested. Moving worship to a royal capital was the first step away from Godâs sovereignty toward human sovereigntyâa monarchy bent on surplus, security, and self-protection.
Faith Handed Down Differently
In 2 Timothy, Paul reminds Timothy that his faith came not from his father but from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. Paul, a âHebrew of Hebrewsâ from the tribe of Benjamin, knew the temptation of power firsthandâhe once tried to crush the early Christian movement. Yet he calls Timothy to courage, not cowardice, and to a faith handed down matrilineally, not patriarchyâs default inheritance.
Jesus Exposes Our Illusions
Luke 17 finds JesusâJoshua in Hebrewâcutting through self-righteousness. Godâs people knew the law of Sabbath and Jubilee (releasing debts and slaves every seven or 49 years) but failed to live it. We often want God not to transform us but to make us look better than we are. Like Solomon threatening to cut the disputed baby in half, we prefer a quick settlement over the hard work of justice.
Jesus asks who among us would invite a servant to sit and be served. Jubilee canât wait; justice canât wait. Yet our systems and egos push it off indefinitely. In truth, apart from Godâs image placed in us, we have no inherent rank over one another. It is we who create slaves and masters, we who build the idols of our own ego.
Living as Freed People
Christ enters the world to free us from our own mistakes and the mistakes done to us. Remembering that we were once slaves should shape how we treat those we are tempted to look down on. God gives us the benefit of the doubt; how can we do less for others?
The call of Proper 22 is this: live as though every day belongs to God. Refuse the baby steps toward corruption. Refuse to project your own bondage onto your neighbor. And practice the radical humility of welcoming even those over whom you have power to sit beside you at the table.
Transcriptâ
âGood morning and welcome to Proper 22. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter House in Albany, Oregon. Our ratings come today. Come to us from today from Lamentations one and three, uh, and two Timothy one and Luke 17. And all of these are heavy readings for today. Um, Lamentations. Is attributed to the prophet Jeremiah known as the weeping prophet, which you can read about on somewhere on the internet.
I did a presentation on Jeremiah at a, a University Chapel Hill, or, yeah, United Methodist Church that served the Chapel Hill, North Carolina community where Bart Airman and some other religious scholars are. And Jeremiah was like, Jonah told to go out and preach destruction. And Jonah was told to preach destruction against his foes, and he was excited about doing it eventually, and he was let down because his foes, repented and righted their own ways.
Jeremiah, however, was told to preach destruction to his own people. And unlike Jonah, his people did not repent, and so he watched as his people, his tribe, his family. Uh, were laid waste. The northern tribes had already been destroyed, um, and Jerusalem, the home of, uh, commanded or volunteered by David had been destroyed and all the elements within it, um, the Tree of Life in the Menorah, the, the Molten Sea, um, everything was gone and.
I've said this before, but we, you may sometimes hear this phrase, the prophet's death and almost no prophet in the Hebrew Bible dies by murder. Almost all of them die of old age. They're given a command. They do it with varying degrees of success, varying degrees of breadth or scope, but almost all of them fill out their days.
Watching their people and wondering if they'll do the thing that God expects them to do in Lamentations is Jeremiah's letter to his own people, how lonely our capital is. She has been desolated by our enemies and the roads are all roads of mourning. Her enemies are in charge of us. And they prosper because what God has done, God did this.
God destroyed Jerusalem. God was tired of the bullshit and the corruption in which it sat was destroyed. And Jeremiah probably knows that Jerusalem really isn't the center of the universe before Jerusalem. Before David. The Tabernacle was in Shiloh. It was in this modest little town. It's still there. You can find, uh, tell Shiloh, and they found the remnants of what was likely where God's house stood.
But that wasn't enough for David. That wasn't enough for the monarchy. They needed to legitimize their Judaic supremacy, the supremacy of the House of Judah. And so. David got this idea to build a temple, and it was the first step away from God's republic and God's sovereignty toward human sovereignty, human freedom from God to centralize its own power for its own sake, to acquire its own surplus goods, energy, food, fill in the blank, which is exactly what Egypt did.
They were afraid of the weather. Turning sour, which only God is in control of. And so they took matters into their own hands. David, for whatever reason, wasn't happy going to Shiloh to worship God and the temples and the, the local temples, the synagogues and their holy items were destroyed as, as idols, feminine aspect of the divine were destroyed.
For centralizing worship in Jerusalem, the temple of which was less than a third, the size of Solomon's temple. So you can see how this story was faded to unfold from the very beginning. And so we have this reading from Saul to Timothy. Just remember your faith. A faith by the way, which he carries not from his father's.
But his grandmother, Lois and his mother Uni, and now him, Timothy, a man who learns from women, who inherits from women, not Patrilineal, matrilineal. And Saul is aware of this tension, of this dichotomy. A man, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Benjaminite just like King Saul, whose name is the same as Saul's. He's aware of the corruption that he can be tempted to and was tempted to.
He sought out and tried to destroy the early Christian movement, which called itself the way hodo, the doers, the walkers, the marchers, the light infantrymen who are doing the bidding of God, not just talking about it, who are trying to take one step at a time in the darkness. Following, not the spirit of cowardice, but a spirit.
And it's not an easy calling. We don't know for sure what happened to Saul. We don't know if he was martyred or just suffered the prophet's death of aging out far from home. Just like Jeremiah, who after Jerusalem was raised to the ground, he was rescued, uh, taken with. Allies to Egypt, and he watched from afar from his own exile as Jerusalem faded into obscurity or so he thought the exile that the rest of the people experienced in Babylon by the rivers of Babylon being mocked, not openly, but being told.
Let me hear one of your happy songs. Even though you're sad, give me one of your spirituals so that I can dance to it so that I can abuse and appropriate your experience, the poetry and the songs that you need to lift yourself up out of the shit and the mud that we put you in. We want to dance on the graves of your friends.
We want what we haven't worked for. We want to inherit. What doesn't belong to us? Give it to us. And what are the, be it from a slave to stand up to its master, right? And the gospel reading from Luke, Jesus, whose name is Joshua, calls it like it is, you think you're so good. You think you do what God would have you do.
Everybody knows what it is is every seven years or every 49 years you release the slaves, but that doesn't happen, does it? We need Jubilee in Leviticus 25. We need God not to help us be better, but to prop. We need God as a foil, as a crutch. Not to help us do better, but to make us look better than we really are.
The Sadducees in Greek, there were Zaes, Zoc being the Hebrew word for righteousness. Zoc being the name of the high priest who oversaw the construction of David and Solomon's Temple. The same priest who watched as Solomon preached wisdom that was embedded with violence. It wasn't wisdom. He didn't work for it.
It. He asked for it and God gave him something. And the way that Solomon used that was to scare people into doing what he thought was the right thing and may have been the right thing. I'm thinking of the, the baby that, uh, two women bring to him and he says, well, let's have a settlement at any cost. It's not the good thing.
It's not the hard thing. Just get it over with. Cut the baby in half, and sure the person who is more invested in that child will forgo their own desires, will forgo justice. If it means desecration is averted. We take tiny steps toward corruption, thinking that and knowing that they're good intended well intended.
But we keep making these tiny moral sacrifices. Our entire soul will eventually be corrupt. There's only so many baby steps you can take on the road to hell before you're there. And Joshua, the Christ knows, eh, none of you would get up and serve your servant. You'd have your servant serve you, Jubilee be damned.
Jubilee can wait. Justice can wait. Not seven years, not 49 years. Fuck it forever. Who among you would say to them, come sit next to me, you who serve me. Take your seat beside me at the table. Not to serve, but to be served. And the irony is Saul and Joshua both know. That before God existence apart from God.
When God commands, we have no choice but to obey. Do you think, or I'm sorry, do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? No, but should you? Of course you should, because that is how God treated us when we were slaves, when we were bound. By mistakes. Our mistakes, the mistakes of others, Christ God in Christ comes into the world to liberate us from not only our own mistakes, but also the mistakes of others.
Inviting us to live as though our entire lives were sacrificed to God to live every day. In the memory of we were once slaves. We are not better than our neighbors.
We before God are worthless slaves. We don't exist. We have no value. We have no dignity apart from that which God put in us simply by being born, being an image of God's self. We've anything that we've done, we do because we know that this is God's world. That our, our actions could but done because they are in accordance with, they fit with the goodness that God instilled in creation.
Our slaves, our servants, the people underneath us, our our equals. Let's be really honest, it's us that make slaves and it's us that build up these expectations that. Have us believe the false idols of our own ego.
Who among you would say to somebody that you hate, to somebody that you have power over, control over somebody. You get to Lord over Who among you would say, you know what? I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to be the worst possible. You know, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt because I know God has given me the benefit of the doubt.
Though I am a slave, though I am nothing, God loves me and whoever I think less of, that's just me trying to project my own s slavery, my own mistakes, my own temptations, my own ego. I'm just trying to put it on you, and if God doesn't do that to me. Far be it for me to do it to others.
