🦁 11th day of Christmas

Readings: Psalm 110; Proverbs 3:1-12; James 4:11-17.

From the TRNG Room:

Reflection

 Good morning and welcome to the 11th day of Christmas. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Psalm 110, Proverbs 3, and James 4. And I sometimes have to remind myself that this isn't just exegesis first formation. But also I really do want it to be inclusive, inclusive of prayer and peripheral activities.

And I saw Mikel Zeck up there and holy garments, and got my little brain thinking about, you know, how these connect to other things. But then I read James. And it reminds me about some of the deeper things that are going on in the text and the importance of paying attention to those as well. At the end of James, James is, I, James is my favorite book of the Bible.

We don't know for sure, but it was probably written by James the Just, also known as James the Lesser. Who's the brother of Jesus and he becomes the Bishop of Jerusalem. We hear from him in Acts five and later, and he presides over the council at Jerusalem where they decide that non Jews entering the faith, this thing that Jesus does with Judaism in their mind that the only restrictions or requirements are that they not sleep around or eat any food.

Dedicated to idols, and they mention specifically things that are strangled which evokes the snake of the Garden of Eden, because snakes are the I think the only things I can think of that actually strangulate their prey, they prevent them from breathing. Anyway. So James very possibly could have written this letter.

It has some language that suggests James doesn't know about anything after his death. It takes the same kind of tack character wise as some of the testimony about James from like Josephus and apocryphal gospels and pseudographic novels gospels. aNd so it very well could be Jesus's brother writing this stuff.

And he's very like Mark who has this very short gospel, short and to the point, or I'm thinking of Luke over Matthew and the Beatitudes where one says poor in spirit, blessed, poor in spirit. And the other says, just blessed are the poor. And James is very much like this. Ladder kind of example, very frank, direct, pragmatic, simple and yet this author who very may well be Jesus's brother is able to kind of provide nuance in ways that I think in certain ways, I think that Saul, or Paul, doesn't always get right.

Saul loves theology and systematics and putting things together. James is all about relationships and people. And so he says, he's very frank and pragmatic about the issue of sin. And sin You can, you can infer from James's line, whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it for him, it is sin.

It feels kind of relative, but it's actually really kind of complicated. And I say that, I say that You know, reflecting back on my time in service, thinking I was, you know, kind of sort of had it together and realized, you know, I was almost as bad as everybody. But also some of the guys that I served alongside, like I just, they just weren't all there and I couldn't imagine them doing certain things with malice.

anD so for James there are people there, there's a gradation of ability to know. You know, if, if they know the right thing and they fail to do it, then it's sin. But if they don't know, it's something other than sin. Maybe there's, you know, gradations of sin too, but I think that's an important thing to point out.

Not only, like, the conscientious kind of level of it, of, you know, can someone do Something evil if they don't know or if they can't fully grasp their actions like children or people, you know, like some people have neuro divergent abilities or, or disabilities that make it, make the ability to comprehend and put together knowledge or, or experiences is different, right.

I think like psychopathology where. People don't understand emotions. They just mirror them to other people. I find James's attention to human, humanity in this point, very important for another application survivor's guilt. It, you know, I think the kind of proverbial case of, you know, a guy, two battle buddies walk along the road.

One of it gets, one of them gets blown up. The other one goes, lives with survivor's guilt the rest of his life saying, you know, could have done more. We shouldn't have done this, that, the other thing, but they don't really have the control, the agency. Yeah. The ability, the knowledge which for the, you know, for the Greek world, the Hellenistic world from which the, you know, the New Testament kind of is grounded knowledge and experience were two sides of a singular coin techne and phronesis.

So not having some experience could also be said to have not had some kind of knowledge. anD so, Survivor's Guilt, to me, I think there's, there's the danger of believing that you had more control and agency and knowledge than you really did. Sometimes we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that something just happened.

And that it couldn't have been prevented, or that we couldn't have prevented it in any way. And that's a really scary thing for, you know, an American to imagine. A modern Western American, because we like to think we're in control. We like to think we have more control than we really do. And that's the, kind of the dark side of of a survivor's guilt, like we don't really have as much control as we'd like.

And if that's true, that means we're not culpable for as many things as others might tell us that we are. I, it makes me think of a woman who does things very much like I do at the intersection of veterans and the church. And she was in Iraq around the same time I was, never met. I just followed her on social media.

And she said, you know, one of her, the story she shares in a book of hers I'm not going to give her name or the title because I don't know. I don't know how she'd take it. I'm only, I only have what she shared. I'm comparing it to my own experience. I haven't really, you know, reached out to her to learn more, and that's why I'm not giving her name and other information.

But, she got the same briefing that I got at the head of of a, of a convoy. You know, kids can be used as human shields or diversionary tactics. If you see a kid and they dart into the road, you don't, Put the brakes on, you run them over, I mean, you try to avoid them as long as you don't endanger the people in the back, but like you don't, you don't you don't stop.

And I hear that, you know, it was relatively entitled young man. And I thought, yeah, that's not going to happen. I'm going to fucking stop. Everybody in my fucking truck knows what they signed up for. Some little kid, I don't care. Even if they're into it, for lack of a better word, I'm not hitting them. I had no problem with that 'cause I knew I wouldn't and I knew what my boundaries were and I knew I didn't give a shit, you know, who got hurt if it were a kid.

And that was a really a clear, and like, I'm very aware at the moment like, this is not gonna happen. Well this woman who was there around the same time, got the same briefing and that really tore her up thinking, I imagine, I assume man, if some, if a kid jumps in front of my car, in truck, in front of my truck, my hum.

I've got to hit him, but to me it was like, no, it's no, that's not going to happen. And so the experience, her experience and my experience are different. Leading up to that moment, I had a certain amount of agency as a dude where I could think like, that's horseshit. And it's not going to happen.

And I've, I, I'm only assuming, but I imagine the experience of being a woman and then also being a woman in the military, you follow a lot more orders. tHen I think, you know, young, stubborn, idiotic kid from Southern California would. And so the, the idea of you objecting even to that. Order might be further from reality, right?

Like you actually might do it and that causes trauma like I don't I don't have I shouldn't say that I shouldn't say I have no trauma from it but I don't have any trauma from remembering like You're not going to get me to run over a kid like Check one to the terrorists because they're going to win that one.

I'm not running over a kid and so the to bring it back to to bring it back to James's, you know One last line that I found so moving, obviously, like there is a relationship between knowledge and experience and sin and trauma. It's, you know, it's, it's not a one to one formula. It's not something that we can easily tamp down.

But like, I'm sorry, the, the seven year old who gets shoved in front of a Humvee. Hasn't sinned, right? And I'm sure as shit not going to be baited into sinning by kind of perpetuating that's, this, you know, sin cycle or something. And so sin and experience or knowledge they are interconnected. It's not, you know, it's not something that's cut and dry and, and even if we want to believe that we have or don't have control, we often find out that we don't.

And I don't, you know. Survivor's guilt is much more complex than a single kind of moral equation, but I would like to think. That, that connection between experience and guilt or sin is such that I, I, I would hope that people who are struggling with that can find some solace in, in, I hope they can discover.

The kind of, I don't know, confidence I suppose I felt in that moment of, no, you don't have that control over me, or I don't have that control, like, knowing precisely what agency and control you have and that being a part of, Our experiences and processing them and resolving you know, what we've done and what we've not done and not letting other people tell us that we're sin.

We have sin for things that we haven't. We you know a careful consideration of of the context would show otherwise and so it's this two way two way street double edged sword of knowledge and experience heighten you know that that kind of awareness and I want to say ezekiel teachers bear the greatest burden because they're next to judges that if you're teaching somebody else something and you have some knowledge like There's a greater burden on you to get it right.

And I think that very much is reflected in James and his understanding of the, the just deeply nuanced and complex relationship between experience and, and sin.