🦁 Proper 28 👑

Readings: Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Mark 13:1-8.

Reflection

Good morning and welcome to Proper 28. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings this Sunday come from Daniel chapter 12, Psalm 16, and the 13th Gospel of Mark. And those of you who are familiar with RCL will know that there are other optional readings. I go by the complimentary readings.

Um, there's also continuous readings that lead you from Genesis to Revelation. I like complementary because I like to see what the spirit, which is to say the incorporeal collective decisions of a church that we are both a part of and yet have no power over. What I mean by that is these lections were set a long time ago and they repeat every three years.

What that doesn't take into account is the historical context within which the later church, the future church, will encounter these. So we have just, I'm recording this on Veterans Day because, uh, all of my Sunday reflections spend a week behind a paywall before I release them to the public. And, uh, Veterans Day fucking sucks.

I'm just gonna say that up front. I hate Veterans Day. I wouldn't, I don't want to go. Uh, I'm fucking tired of it. Because. At some point you realize that Veterans Day is not for veterans. It's for civilians. Same way, thank you for your service. It's for civilians. It is liturgy. It is ritual that has been so sucked fucking dry of any heart and soul that you look at it and you know, everybody knows this isn't about veterans.

This is about patting ourselves on the back. In blind, rote memory of things that have lost meaning a long time ago.

But, I'm reflecting on readings for next week, because Christians are people apart from time. Uh, we live in the his in history and we live into our future. And so it sucks that I'm reading this shit on Veteran's Day and I have to reflect on it, but I'm actually doing it, um, the week ahead for proper 28, uh, which is gonna be what, November.

I can't remember. Uh, it's hard for me to keep some of these things in mind. Uh, the 17th, November 17th is when this will be read, when these elections will be read in church. And these elections are important. Um, if you think it's bad, if you think the election is bad, and all these wars and rumors of war that are going to be, you know, coming our way, if you think that's the end, those are only the birth pangs.

Those are only the very beginning of what you can imagine we're going to go through. And I say that because I was not surprised that the less qualified, untrustworthy, totally despicable candidate was elected. I wasn't surprised. I was disappointed. I was sad. Uh, I, I wished something else would happen, but I'm not surprised.

And I feel like Dave Chappelle from that SNL skit in 2016 where he and Chris Rock, who made this surprise appearance, are like, Talking with a bunch of white people about Trump on election night, like, you really don't think that we're still that racist? You really don't think that we're still not that sexist?

Like, of course we are. If you think we can't elect someone like Donald Trump, hold my beer, right? If you think that we have listened to the poor among us, which is what Christ tells us to do, I'm sorry. You, you will be sadly mistaken. And I, for one, have a sense of when that departure began as a veteran, when the civil rights movement was more invested in the celebrity of its activism than about the hard, you know, humble work of securing the actual rights, right?

That's, I think, when we started to miss the mark. Um, I, I, that's not the only interpretation, but like, that's mine. I know about the civil rights movement that started not in 1960 or 55, the one that started in 44, 45, 46, when black soldiers and black veterans were being shot in the back in uniform, were being denied their rights after having come home from fighting for democracy overseas.

Like, that's when it started. It was a Double V campaign, the Double V for Victory campaign, where black soldiers and veterans were coming home from fighting. As W. E. B. Du Bois said, only to come home fighting. We returned, we returned from fighting, we returned fighting. And that's still true. We've had something like three or four wars now, and those service members that fought have not had the same civil rights civilians had by 1964.

When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, nobody could have imagined that in just three years, Americans could have been assaulting veterans and service members coming home from a war that they did not choose, as though it's their fault that we went to Vietnam, and then the, the, the, the, offense of losing, we pile on them.

You talk to any Vietnam veteran, they'll tell you exactly how they were treated. And then with my wars, the forever forgot, the forever wars, all of a sudden, thank you for your service is supposed to like compensate for that? That's a shitty consolation prize. Because either a monster or a hero, the devil or a demigod, neither of those are human.

We don't want to treat people as human, and when civilian is Became the normative assumption in society. What you, what once was had the, the tail has begun to, the tail began wagging the dog when we didn't require that everybody put their lives on the line for these stupid ass convenient wars. That's when all of a sudden we had a warrior cast.

And instead of treating them like human beings, we treated them like shit. And then we started shoving hot air up their asses. And in between that, those, you know, two extremes on the pendulum, are 23 million human beings who are probably sick and tired, like me, of getting treated like caricatures and stereotypes.

I had a civilian make some fucking idiotic remark about My work and trying to sell using a word hawking to that typically denotes like a snake oil salesman like me trying to offer my writing for free to other veterans is somehow exploiting them or like calling forth this far less than acceptable, uh, you know, connotation, right?

You don't hawk, you know, the cure to cancer. You don't hawk. Beautiful poetry. You hawk it when you don't like the thing being sold. You call it hawking when you don't understand the value that it should have. Because we live in a society in which the people who come home from war, instead of calling them to recount what they've done, so that we can all be edified and better informed of what we all are responsible for, We put them in boxes.

We put them in hurt lockers. Um, and it's, it's tiring. It's really tiring. And if you, I started on this diatribe because, um, this is only the beginning. Trump will have full power, probably the House is going his way, for at least two years. And some of the most powerful things we have in our society are a constitutional amendment, congressional legislation, um, and the courts.

That's it, folks. The courts are constrained by the Constitution. The Constitution is constrained by legislative activity, which, assuming we have representatives who represent us, They're supposed to be these checks and balances, but it became imbalanced when we took the sacrifice required for democracy out of the equation and put it on the poor.

Um, I, there's so few Psalms that, um, speak to me in this torment, I feel. Um, 28 is not one, or I'm sorry, 16 is not one of them. Um, but it is this point where we see one of the few times in the Hebrew Bible where the place where the corrupt dead go, and that is Sheol, or the pit. Um, in the reading from, uh, Daniel, it talks about how some, We'll go to shame and everlasting contempt, which we can assume will be Sheol, or the pit.

And I don't think that is for people who have done what we think of as evil. I think that the pit of contempt that we might experience after our physical body expires is our own guilty conscience. And until we can say the things out loud that we all think, until we can process our experiences collectively, we will not be a people.

We will not be a nation, right? And nations have not been around forever. Uh, I think it's in our Mark reading where, um, yeah, where Jesus is talking about, um, since before there were nations. Um, and he's talking at first in Mark about the temple. And when he, when he says not one stone will be left here upon another, we think, oh yeah, that's when the temple will be destroyed.

In 67 to 70 by the great war, the Jewish revolt, but he's also coming pretty goddamn close to quoting Josephus, who talked about how Herod raised Joshua's second temple, Zerubbabel and Joshua built the second temple. It was very modest. It wasn't ornate. That was the second temple. Herod brings it down and even pulls up the foundation stones.

Not a single stone was left upon the other. Herod's temple was the third temple. And Herod built it, not Joshua. And so he's not just saying, Oh, this is going to happen in the future. But if you haven't been looking at our own history, you won't be able to recognize our future. You're doomed to repeat it because you can only see in one direction.

Either you only see in the past, or you only look to the future. But for humans, who embody the present, who are, one could even say, captive to the moment, We have to do both. We have to keep in mind that if we do not check our rearview mirror sometimes, that our future will look like shit. And if you think it's bad now, this is just the beginning.

We have to be able to look at one another and have difficult conversations about it. mutual complicity in war, in political corruption, in turning our face from the poor. If we can't do that, you'll never see God. If you can't look back and down into the pit of despair of where we've been, you'll never be able to look up With clear eyes and see the glorious dawn of the sun when it begins to rise, we'll always be trapped in the coldest, darkest moments right before the dawn because we won't know any better than that for the sun to rise we have to go through, we have to go through that dark, cold, wet place.

I say wet because I remember field training exercises when I was at, Fort Liberty, and I always heard it was always coldest and darkest for the before the dawn. I didn't really think that I just thought it was the same, but it's real. It's true. It gets cold right before the dawn. If you think this is bad, just wait until how cold it can get.

And if we cannot get our language, right, if we can't look constructively at our own history, we're going to be repeating, uh, those painful moments that we've, that we thought we'd gotten through.