🦁 Advent 1-6

Readings: Psalm 79; Micah 4:6-13; Revelation 18:1-10.

TRNG Room links:

• Learn more about God and gender in chapter 11 of God is a Grunt. 

Reflection

Good morning and welcome to the sixth day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 79, again. Micah 4 and Revelation 18. If you're paying close attention to the readings we're going chronologically with Micah and Revelation.

We just read some earlier passages yesterday, and that is kind of the standard before Pentecost and Pentecost, or after Pentecost. Ordinary Time Following Pentecost, the longest liturgical season. We'll have two options. One is complementary readings, which I follow, or the other is chronological readings, or semi chronological, canonical, I guess.

anD I like the complementary readings because it It suggests there's some unifying theme, but outside ordinary time following Pentecost, we read relatively canonical stuff. So if it seems, as I kind of thought for a moment that we're repeating the same readings, it's actually not the case, especially within a week, a liturgical week, which runs from, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

Those, that time frame will often have very similar readings. Yesterday I spoke a little bit about Micah and some of the nuance there in the beating swords to plowshares thing that it shares with Isaiah and how we seem to have left off part of it. And today the Revelation reading I'm really interested in political theology.

You know, what the Bible imagined the system should be. The biblically ordained system of governance should be. And you learn very quickly, and I think I mentioned this yesterday, that the, the instinct or the desire for monarchical rule is something that humans want, that God never intended. The most the most memorable element in the Bible is 1 Samuel 8, where it's explicit.

That the people reject God and they want to be all, like all the other nations. And the, the difficulty or the problem of that is, is compounded by the fact that the Gentiles, the goyim, literally the nations if you are not the goyim, you are not like the other nations. You're literally the non nationed people.

And Israel had a very unique political structure. In, in its idyllic you know, kind of idealized past. And some of it is likely to be true. Much of it is probably true. buT it, it, when it was recorded and put down to paper was when they were in the unified kingdom. So the And that political system was headed by judges, Shofat, and these judges were non hereditary.

They were charismatic leaders like Gideon. Samuel was is considered the last judge because You know, the people rejected God and wanted a king, and they were warned what kings would do. And this word, Melech, in the Bible is also a suffix. So, like Abimelech, as I talked about yesterday it's, the word king is in his name.

And abi means son of. or, I'm sorry, father of, and so this bad character, this kind of bad actor, his name literally means father of kings. It's like you can't really couch it in any more obvious terms. I mention this in Revelation because on the one hand, the narrative story, the story of Israel, Insofar as we can trace it historically, seems not only to have begun with judges, but as I mentioned earlier, or yesterday, the first judge, the oldest part of the Hebrew Bible we have, mentions a female judge, Deborah, a woman of lapidote a fiery woman, or a woman of torches, is literally the translation.

She has no dude that she's attached to, no man that she's attached to. But scholars have still taken this, this name and title, Deborah Issa Lapidote, and said, oh, Issa, which means woman, it also means wife, and it can, I'm not doubting that. But the assumption is that Issa here means wife, and it, it doesn't necessarily mean wife, it literally means woman, and Lapidote is literally the plural form of a torch, the same thing that Gideon uses in some of his campaigns.

And so this first. You know, ruler, judge of Israel, the earliest that we can trace is a woman, which is odd because a lot of ancient and modern societies tend to favor male kings or, or rulers. So not only does Israel have female, unattached, sovereign rulers. And I say that in not necessarily the monarchical sense, but if you've read my work on, on political theology, you'll know that ruler has two, two meanings, right?

We think of a ruler as one who wears a crown, but it's really just, it rules things, it measures things. It helps establish a standard by which the rest of us can you know, define and understand and structure things. But anyway, I mention all this, you know, the, the oldest historically reliable ruler of Israel is a woman.

There's also a sovereign queen Queen Athalia, who is the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. The, of the Northern tribes, but who married into the kingdom of the Southern tribes. And in the process of doing so, she ruled on her own for, I want to say, Five or six years, but she was another bad actor, like at Bimlach.

She kills her family to get power and she is then overthrown later. So it's not that women, that, you know, that men are doing it wrong. And so women are, should be the rulers. It's that women have always held positions of power, and that they can be as corrupt as men, but they can also be as reliable and trustworthy as men.

aNd I talk about this a little bit in a chapter of God is a Grunt and More Good News for G. I. s where I talk about Joan of Arc and gender and command. And that's where I talk about Deborah as well. But the, the problem or the, the unfortunate thing in Revelation is that the Hebrew Bible has these, You know, these breadcrumbs, right, like Deborah, to remind us that it's, you know, rulership should not be dependent upon gender even if, you know, human institutions make it that way.

And God is frequently undermining these human institutions like primogeniture, the practice of giving all of the inheritance to the eldest male son. Or the eldest male child. God is undoing that. Not only with gender, but also with the ordering of who gets what, right? David was the youngest son. Jacob was the youngest son.

Abel and Seth were the youngest sons. And so God is also undoing this gender stuff. He's undoing the political theology stuff. But we still have these human writers. And as I read Revelation, noticed that the, the figure of Babylon, word I prefer not to use, fornicator is this technical term but the, the woman of Babylon, the representation of Babylon, takes herself to be a ruler.

In verse 7, I rule as queen, I am no widow, and I will never see grief. The epitome of an unattached woman, which is an affront to the ancient male psyche, right? That women may not need men to get by, but in the, in the, in that affront, in the ancient mindset, we have and we do kind of Take our, like, offense and bias, and paint it with immorality.

So if we don't know much about soldiers or soldiering, we just assume that all soldiers kill. We don't know or understand much about, you know, the feminine mind or whatever, and so it must be bad. It must be dangerous and hysterical. It must need to be controlled because, don't you know, men can control their passions.

I'm being facetious, of course. And so it's this unfortunate thing that, in Revelation, we see this outgrowth of human bias. That, you know, these kings are certainly a problem, but the epitome of evil in the biblical or the New Testament imagination, or we can say Johannine imagination, that this figure of evil must also be a woman, because I think the Bible fairly uniformly criticizes unchecked power.

And so it's not that, you know, we, there's already this anti monarchical anti authoritarian streak in the Bible, but then to also cast gender on that burning pile of shit as well or women specifically also seems. And I'm sure that these texts have been used to diminish the role of women in church, to diminish the role of anybody and anything that we don't think that we can control.

That's really unfortunate. But the plight of all marginalized people, women, soldiers and veterans, people of color there is Hope in, right in the same texts that that can be so difficult and so marginalizing. You know, the, the rejection of kings is a hope in God, but the rejection of, of women is also the rejection of You know, half of all creation or half of all the human creatures on earth.

And so I find it difficult, but also very, I don't know, mundane or human. Like if we, we both want to seem to want to emphasize our humanity. And say, woe is us, we screwed up, but also like, we can do it on our own. And so the, the, there are these two sides of the coin, of like, what do we do with our fears, but give them to God.

And then also, in the process, sometimes re inscribe those same fears. And cut ourselves off from God by losing sight of the goodness in which and for which God made our world. So I know that's kind of all over the place. I hope that it makes sense to, to enough of you. But don't take the, you know, things as literally as they sometimes are depicted.

That it, you know, sometimes humans inspired, divinely inspired humans make choices that don't reflect that divine inspiration. And it's difficult, but we always, I think, must keep that, that inspiration in mind and in our hearts and to try and keep from falling into these same old patterns. These same old biases that that God is and has been trying to undo since the, you know, the, the birth, the origins of, of humanity.

And I hope that we can it's hard, but we have to hold both at one time. Our own brokenness as well as our, our goodness at the same time.