🦁 Advent 2-2
Readings: Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 11:19-26.
From the TRNG Room:
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the ninth day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac Broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 85 Jeremiah 4 1 and Acts 11 it's It's noteworthy that an Antioch in Acts 11 Antioch is the place where, Jesus movement or the community first gained this name Christians.
And I thought I'd talk about that because Antioch has reputation for coming up with nicknames and not only in for Christians even you know, kind of painted back onto the story of Jesus. You know, we, we, it's, it's a weird thing what we do with language, right? Jesus doesn't call himself a Christian, he in Mark, the earliest gospel, he's very guarded about calling himself the Messiah, Christos in Greek.
And he wouldn't have said Christos, he would have said something closer to Mashiach, which is Hebrew, but he spoke Aramaic, he was probably familiar with Hebrew, but he was much more likely to, to read and speak Greek in the Septuagint, which had been composed a couple, a century and a half or two centuries earlier.
But it, you know, language gets. Kind of mixed up and jumbled and language is a means to another end, right? And what I mean by that is that language is is only as Useful as those who use it, who speak or write, and those who listen and read, because language is fluid, it changes over time. There's an important distinction between the definition of a word, which is how it is currently being used, And it's etymology, which is where it came from.
And I say that because we live in an age, I think, where language is being exploited, and being used for misdirection and disinformation. And so Christianos is a really important word. It's a, it's a amalgamation, a smashing together of Greek and Latin. The Greek, obviously, is Christos, where we get Christ, meaning Messiah, Mashiach, the, the anointed one, or the smeared one, and Mashiach the verb root of Mashiach, means to smear it appears in Isaiah, where warriors smear their The leather kind of layer on their shield to keep it supple, to keep it from cracking, and to deflect, you know, sword strikes.
But it's just someone who's smeared in oil or, or, or somebody who is, you know, Had oil poured on them and you hear again today the difference in English between anointment and appointment in Jeremiah Jeremiah has been anointed or consecrated since birth, but then he is appointed To go speak on God's behalf to to Israel and to the nations And so I'll throw a link in the show notes to my blog post on anointment and appointment and you'll see that it talks more about Kings and what does it mean, but Anointment was for priests and appointment is a political thing.
So back to Christianos and Christos. The Christian, the, in the, in the Greek or in the New Testament, it's Christianos. And I talked about the first part, Christos, which is the Greek. The latter part of it, the, the suffix, is actually Latin. The ianos in Latin, is, is used to indicate something that derives from or is dependent upon or serves.
And it very frequently had a derogatory meaning meaning a slave of someone. So like, Logianos is someone who is my slave, or something, right? Not always, but very frequently. And so calling someone a Christianos Or Cristiano was to say they are a slave or a servant or a follower, and not necessarily in a nice way, of the, the smeared one, the dirtied one, the sullied one, which in the Hebraic imagination in the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, was good.
Remember, the goat was the one who carried away our sins. The crow was the one who was first released. to probably look for carcasses and clean up the area before a nice dove went out and found dry land. And the goat is more important to festivals and feasts. You know, dirty, grungy, cantankerous goat.
And the sheep, or the, the baby sheep, the lamb, is used for these nice, sweet, gentile kind of visions and, and symbology in the Johannine literature. But it's It's the dirtied ones. It's those who you know, take little care to preen themselves and look good for everybody else. That is the heart of the Jesus movement.
And I think Jesus own life reflects that, right? He didn't take a wife. He didn't own land. He had very little. He talked about how he would travel from, town to town and encouraged his followers to do that, do the same. And so the reputation of Christians was these kind of mendicants, right? And that's why a lot of later mendicant orders, monastic orders, were founded on the, not necessarily the the Pauline theology of the New Testament, but the the messianic example in Jesus in the Gospels.
And so that's why the, the imagery of a grunt is so important to me because even within the military, the grunt is the dirtiest, lowest ranking, most thankless person that gets shit done. And yet the highest ranking brass always is sure to try and align themselves with either being or coming from.
Grunt status or being very open to and and kind of Congratulatory to grunts and the lowest ranking people and Jesus embodies that The title of my third book God is a grunt and more good news for GIs follows out of that like if we think if we are culturally aware with the military community and military families And then we, we kind of import Jesus, his story onto that.
Jesus is a grunt, and not just because he is also God, who is called a warrior repeatedly in the Old Testament but because that lowly status that even his mother Mary talked about, that is what it means to be a grunt you know, kind of outside a military culture lexicon. A grunt, if you look up grunt in the dictionary, it's just unglamorous, of low status, an unskilled worker.
In fact, grunts in the military are very skilled. They're highly trained and they're, these are the people who are most likely to be hurt and killed and sacrifice their lives if and when it, it comes time, you know, for the, you know, the, the rubber to hit the road. So in Antioch is where we get this name.
And it was not used very nicely. And it's a good reminder to not think so highly of ourselves, to not think so lowly of others, but to consider ourselves if we are like Christ, if we are servants of Christ, if we are Christianos then it means we also bear witness to the kind of lifestyle that Christ exemplified.
And we carry that, that heritage inside ourselves and inside our own life stories.
Wait, before we get to the prayer, I want to let my listeners know about my next project that's very daunting and kind of scary, but hopeful and forward looking. I am actively trying to launch a veteran bookstore in Lebanon, Oregon, about 20 minutes from where my family now lives in Albany. And it's also the same city as one of just two state veterans homes in the state of Oregon.
The Chapter House, as I plan on calling it, will specialize in politics and religion, and it will also be kind of a headquarters or a hub for PewPewHQ and any high church low lifes. in the area. Lebanon is a very small rural city. And I want to open up a bookstore there, not just because the veterans are there, a number of veterans are there, but also because I, you know, I think that even tiny rural communities like Lebanon deserve high quality You know, service and products and goods.
But I need your help. I would love for you to check out my GoFundMe at gofundme.com/chapter-house. Or anytime you go to pewpewhq. com, there'll be a window that pops up. That'll provide you a link. To learn more about the chapter house and see what I'm doing. I haven't announced it like formally in my mind on social media or on my sub stack yet, because I'm still negotiating and the location is really nice.
But there's still some things that need to fall into place before I feel comfortable, you know, kind of committing publicly to it. I know I only, you know, have a really awesome. But small handful of committed listeners to the podcast and I wanted to let you all know first. sO I hope you'll check out pewpewhq.
com and browse around until that pop up opens. Or go directly to gofundme. com slash chapter dash house to learn more about this veteran owned and operated bookstore I want to I want to open. So anyway, back to the prayer and the outro. And again, if I haven't said it enough already, thank you for listening, thank you for any support you're able to offer, and keep truckin sound profound.
