🦁 Advent 3-2
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the 16th day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 126, Habakkuk 3, and Philippians 3. And I kind of hammered home on Philippians yesterday, and I wanted to point out just briefly today this striving or straining toward the goal.
In the ancient world, there is this parallel between athletes and soldiers, and the straining or fighting is kind of, is made synonymous. The straining or striving with fighting or struggling. In Arabic, it would be jihad. But the soldiers and athletes of Christ are sometimes synonymous as well.
And Saul notices this. He uses this language because the association with competition and games with battle was symbolic, but it was also part of your training. aNd the other thing to point out about Philippians this morning is he knows he's talking to military families because he addresses the men.
In plenty of letters, he addresses women and men, often women coming first. But he seems to pick up on the fact that the men typically were the heads of the household in the ancient world. For military cultures in particular, one thing that I, I try and point out with military families and dependents is that there is a difference between a domus, which is like the household that's sometimes used in Greek literature to almost kind of symbolize a political, but a, a very hierarchical family structure and you can think of it dominating the Lord of the house, domus.
And then on the other hand, there's the Italian famiglia, which is often related to and translated into or from the Greek word oikos, which is a looser, more inclusive term for family or house and oikos was a reference that was, you know, gender kind of neutral and also power or politically We.
malleable. The servants might be called oiketes, which is a word that Saul uses elsewhere. And the word OTAs is used for the slave or the servant of Cornelius in Acts 10, who accompanies some of the soldiers of his unit as well as Cornelius's family, Kos or, or OTAs is what the servants are called.
But, I also wanted to speak really briefly about geography since I talked about Philippi and its situation. Yesterday something to point out when this, I really like this psalm, it's, it's kind of moody and hopeful but it mentions the, the streams in the Negev and the Negev or the Negev is the desert.
That made up a lot of the southern area of Judea, you know, the tribe, the tribal allotment of Judea and Simeon. It's in southern Israel today it's where a lot of the fighting is going on between Gaza and Israel. And so it's important to understand the differences in geography. Elsewhere in the reading from Habakkuk, Timan is a, a town in ancient Arabia.
The, the biblical authors would have seen it as part of the land of Edom. Edom was where Esau's descendants lived. They were related, but not really Jews. And it's also the nominal source, the source of the name of the Edomites, but also the Edomians, which is what Herod was. And so it's kind of ironic that in Jesus time the Edomians, through Herod, are ruling over the, the Jews of Judea.
Essentially, Esau has come to rule over his brother Jacob. And you might not know that if you don't understand the relationship between the names of people and their tribes and the land itself. MOunt Peron was was believed. to be east of the Jordan, so it's synonymous with the wilderness. So these other places that Habakkuk talks about, Timan, Mount Peran but in a broader sense, and I won't get into too much detail here but in a broader sense, there's a, a class type distinction between the north and the south.
And a lot of the south was thought of as the wilderness. It's It's more arid it's almost like a desert, much of it is a desert. And north of Jerusalem was the Galilee, was ancient Samaria, which was at Jesus time called Sebast the capital of the old northern kingdom was hillier, was more temperate, had you know, better land for farming.
It wasn't necessarily flat, but it was, it received more rainfall. aNd the northern tribes, even though they had more resources, Judah and Benjamin, I believe, I, I, I need to think about that, Benjamin and Asa, or Ephraim, Ephraim, are, is, they held Jerusalem in the southern area without much resources, but somehow managed to Be more wealthy than the northern tribes by the time jesus's, you know family was on the scene The north was considered kind of, you know, the galilee was looked down upon Isaiah 9 talks about how it was a land of deep darkness and those who dwelled there sat in darkness and the If, if Judah was kind of the nominal head of the southern kingdom and the, the, the two or three tribes that became the southern kingdom, the nominal head of the northern tribes was Zebulon and Naphtali, and both of them were the soldier clans of Israel.
They fought at Mount Tabor under Deborah and Barak. They fought with Gideon and so the north had this military association and yet. Even if they had this, what we would think of as this prestigious heritage with the military clans and they had all these resources because they received more rainfall, somehow they were always the, you know, the, the little brother to the southern tribes, much like Esau, even though he's older, he was He lost the birthright and then he's kind of like an exile.
The reversal of these relationships, I think, does not escape God's notice. Jesus is born to one of these disgraced tribes, or he, he, he takes up shop and he makes his home among the disgrace, disgraced. Tribal lands of Israel and the in particular the disgraced military tribes of Israel When Jesus begins his ministry Isaiah 9 is quoted, you know that the land that dwelled in darkness the that was carried off by a Syria And that their tribes, you know vanished in the in the wind the reversal of bad fortune the reversal of human fallibility and bias is what God is about and it takes place, we can see it in the land not just in Philippi where, you know, it's supposed to be this big important city and it's full of veterans and Paul, it's the first European city, you know, what we modern moderns think of as the continent of Europe.
It's the first place that Saul begins his ministry work, and it's to military families. It's like going to Fayetteville, North Carolina, or Jacksonville, North Carolina, or Oceanside, California, or you know, Waiwa, Hawaii. These are the kinds of towns, and the kind of culture, and the kind of associations that God is It's lifting up, you know, raising the valleys and making the mountains low.
It's a two way street and it is not in any way divorced or separated from the relationship of people to their land and the stories that they tell about the land and the people that they don't know, that God sees and God knows. And God often exonerates from, from shame and, and disgrace. And so that's part of what's going on throughout the Bible.
And in particular, Jesus's life here on earth which begins and is the majority of his work. is takes place in these disgraced military lands in the north and he only travels down to Jerusalem kind of sparingly when he has to. So it's important to think about the relationship of land and story and economy and class because it's, these are issues and themes that the Bible does not ignore and neither should we.
