🦁 Advent 2-1
Readings: Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; Hosea 6:1-6; 1 Thessalonians 1:2-10.
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Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the eighth day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 85, Hosea 6, and 1 Thessalonians 12. And we are, liturgically, in our liturgical work, we are now looking forward to this coming Sunday, rather than looking back to the prior Sunday, which ended Wednesday.
Liturgical weeks, again, go from Thursday to Wednesday, three days before the crown of a liturgical week on Sunday, and then three days after it. So we switch up the readings going into
And I spoke yesterday about not, not putting too much of our eggs in the basket of institutions, but also don't put all our eggs in, you know, anti institutionalism. And it made me think of that. In the reading from Hosea, the last verse, for I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
And the entire Levitical sacrificial temple system was an institution that was put in place with a specific purpose of keeping God and humanity as close as possible. bUt as humans do, We became too wrapped up in those systems, in the symbols, and the language, the lexicon, the, the, the benefits, the, the pomp and circumstance, and we lost sight of what the function of that system was.
Instead of it bringing us close to God, it became a thing unto itself. Just as the military. Or the church is an institution made up of people who may or may not be connected on a deep, you know, emotional, spiritual level to its ordained purpose. So that's why I sometimes write, I think I put it in Grunt God.
God is a grunt. But if not, I know I've written about it several times. And you can also hear about it in the course Intro to the military or mil 101. That the, the, you know, the military being an institution and people kind of, you know, entering that institution for various reasons, but the institution legally.
Because that's the way our country was founded by the constitution and British common law, etc. Every institution is at least formally bound to its legal function, right? So if you look up the armed services title in the United States Code, there are four different functions, legally defined functions.
And if you think that the military is only about fighting wars, or even primarily about fighting wars, whatever you do, don't read the federal law, the federal code. Because of the four functions going overseas or even remaining here stateside, defending the nation and, and or advancing its ideals, it doesn't even say advancing, but it's actually the fourth of those roles.
are like, you know, enforcing you know, the, the laws of the homeland and the security is something, something, and then following the orders of the commander in chief, something, something. And so the institution on paper, the formal function of the institution is not to wage wars, but to provide for the defense of our homeland.
And that doesn't mean You know, waging wars of convenience. That doesn't even mean waging retaliatory conflicts. That just means making sure that we have everything we need internally to function as a society. Now the military in the modern era, since that was written, has changed and developed. We have total war, we have submersibles, we have secrecy, we have all these other things that our founders probably couldn't have thought of.
That ancient philosophers like Aquinas or Augustine who talked about just war never could have imagined. And so we get lost in the thing that it has become, and we lose sight of what it was intended to be. Similarly with the sacrificial system. The Levitical tribe and the high priestly line of Aaron and then Zadok became corrupt.
One thing that we lose sight of because it occurs in the intertestamental period and is contained in the books of the Apocrypha that not all Christians read is that the Zadokai line, which you could, you could nominally use to think of as whether the high priesthood is corrupt or not, ended before the Hasmonean period, before the Maccabees.
And the Maccabees and the Seleucids who the Maccabees won freedom from. They just began assigning high priests because it was politically expedient. It was a political appointment rather than an ecclesiastical anointment. And you can read more about this in a blog post on the training room titled From Anointment to Appointment.
And so the priesthood became corrupt and everybody knew it. You can't hide the fact that these people were not Zadokites. They didn't have a a rightful claim to the high priesthood. But the Greek Seleucids said, fuck it. I mean, we're just, we want a puppet in the, what appears to us to be the political center of this.
aNd so the Hasmoneans, the Maccabees reinstituted the temple. They, they won freedom from the Seleucids and they reinstituted the high priesthood as best they could and made the priests double as the Kings, as the rulers of Israel, and that's not exactly the judges that, you know, the, the Hebrew scriptures.
Prescribed as a political system, but it's close. They, the Bible does assume that the high priest carries much of the political weight of the people Israel. They're also the ones who perform all the rights on Yom Kippur for atonement, which I spoke about earlier yesterday, I think, or the day before.
And so the priesthood was supposed to be not just this ruler, but it's very servile. They depend on the people for food offerings to eat. They wear these, you know, fancy robes that they have to, you know, there's a lot of responsibility with being the high priest. But when the Hasmoneans lost control to the Herodians during the Roman era that was solidified and forever the priesthood was not associated with Hebrew scripture.
So Caiaphas, for example, who's on Every single buddy in that witnessing that would have known that Caiaphas is a fucking hack. That Caiaphas didn't have any more claim to the high priesthood than some fucking centurion in Fort Antonia. But, everybody plays along because the system is now a system on its own.
Divorced and separated from its institutional foundations, from its purpose. Now that isn't to say that it couldn't have been revived. I mean, I have a lot of faith in God to do whatever the hell God wants. But it didn't instead in the seventies, late sixties into the seventies after Paul is killed, after Jesus has done his ministry, the temple is destroyed completely.
And then we have rabbinical modern rabbinical Judaism on. That has developed on one side of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and Christianity that developed on the other side largely influenced by Saul but founded on Christ. anD so we shouldn't mistake the systems and institutions, whether that's the military, whether that's the church.
I mean, don't get me started on the Catholic church and the pedophilia or even the, the kind of, uh, autocracy. that it had effectively gained by the 12th century that led eventually to the Protestant Reformation. Don't confuse the systems for the functions they were created for, including the military.
If your supervisor, your NCO, or your officer, my battalion commander said, you know, we would drop weapons in order to protect You know, if you shot someone wrongfully, we'll carry AK 47s and we'll drop them to protect you. He said that openly to the entire company or, well, company battery, I can't remember, before what would have been my second deployment.
And it was one of the precipitating factors for me filing to be a CEO. Because if you have corrupt commanders, if you have corrupt priests, corrupt high priesthood it doesn't protect you. It means that. Personal interests are what is driving that institution. So when Micah says, or the, the, you know, the prophets say, on God's behalf, I desire not these systems, not sacrifice and burnt offerings, but what they were intended originally to point toward, steadfast love and knowledge of God.
The military was originally intended to point toward stability, security, defense, consistency. And now, unfortunately, after Two forever Convenience wars and the convenient war of convenience of the century in Vietnam. People rightly have lost trust in the military. I don't blame anybody for blaming these things or you know, getting upset at the military.
But we also can't go on the other side and blame the individuals in a system who joined for a myriad number of reasons. We can't put that moral. Blemish upon them. We have to be able and willing to distinguish the difficulties of working within that system and the individual actions that they choose to take that reflect who they are and how connected they are to the institution's intended purpose, whether that's steadfast love and knowledge of God, or defense of our homeland, and security and peace at home.
