🐮 Epiphany 2
Reflection:
Good morning and welcome to the second Sunday after epiphany or epiphany to. A K a E as in private. I've you'll notice if you're, if you go to pupa H. q.com. Works website. And go find the listing for all of these. There'll be a unique. A URL for each I've liked made this code. That I discovered that the first days of ordinary time of the calendar year, Because there are apifany and we get six or seven of them there. It begins. up to E six or seven, depending on how many weeks or are in a Tiffany. Which is an ordinary time between Christmas and apifany on the one hand and then ask Wednesday and lent on the other. Anyway, I say that because as a former enlisted person, like the fact that we begin. The year with Iwan. is. Makes, I don't know, just makes so much sense to me. And our readings today come from Isaiah 62. Psalm 36 first Corinthians 12 and John two. And the wedding in Caina is the first. Of, I want to say. A handful of miracles. That John kind of traces. Joshua. In. Joshua doing in his gospel. And the first one was changing the water to fermentation or wine. And that he does. So in the way. That. Is like the peak hospitality. And I think hospitality is an important word. To remember, not just because I'm a Hospitaller of St. Martin. But also because I think that's one of these fundamental. Character traits that Christians should be. Attentive to. And notice John is he's called the fourth gospel. The spiritual gospel is the Eagle because he flies high. These really lofty, enduring ways of talking about. The Messiah. And he wants everybody to know ahead of time Jesus or Joshua is about to make really incredible claims and provide proof and miracles. And so of course he and his mom already know. And when Mary says to, to. To her son. Hey, why don't you help them out? Her son, Josh was like, but it's not time yet. Are you sure? Should I use my special powers before my time? So it's like foreshadowing and John. But this morning, one of the things that stood out to me and is the reading from Isaiah. And the more I dig into the Hebrew Bible. And the more enthusiastic I find myself become for the Greek and the Hebrew and figuring out like the earliest, the oldest manuscripts that we have are in Greek. There's reason to believe that some of that dead sea scrolls might be older than some version of step two again, but. Those were written Aramaic. And. Hebrew and Greek, I can't remember what the dead sea scrolls are, but I say that because. Through. Trying to figure out some very basic questions. Does. What is it about Nazareth? You, I realized that mark is the first. Literature and history to give that little tiny village a name. And the name that mark gives it is in Greek, almost identical to this word. Nazarite. And I won't go into too much now, but the NAZA right. Then the Zaire in Hebrew. The Septuagint doesn't like stumbles through transliterating it and translating it sometimes. It translates. It Hoggy on most or, the holy one, if you take a value or a holy one other places it tries to trans literate it. NAZA riles. And that comes in like judges 13 with Samson and. NAZA RHIOs. And all of these. Suffixes and conjugations of this one. Word that seems to be translated. Ready from Nazir. Number six. I mentioned all this because the Nazir. What's so important is their head, their consecrated head. And it is sometimes the Nazir is sometimes referred to as the consecrated head. And so when I read That you will be a beautiful crown in the hand of the Lord and a Royal diadem in the hand of your God and 62 verse three of Isaiah. The beautiful crown makes me think. Not only the high priest who has the turbine, which is inscribed holy to the Lord. But the Nazarite who is this hyper priest? Is called holy to the Lord and number six. And the diadem, which is synonymous in the Greek with the beautiful crown. The diadem is a piece of the high priests. Crown golden crown. That is inscribed with holy to the Lord. And so it's evoking, not just. NAZA rights or Nazir. Ms. Zeraim. From maybe. But also the high priest. And also the priestly garments, which are these holy garments that makeup and are paralleled with the armor of God and the divine warrior. And all of this is coming from, one verse of Isaiah. So if you think that, These are all just coincidence is Isaiah writing hundreds of years after the time of judges and the Exodus, where they get the instruction about the Nazir, the Nazarites. Like they've clearly read this and they're playing with that imagery deliberately. And particularly with the. The divine warrior and armor of God motif. I think Christians today are very uncomfortable about violence. The violence we're capable of in the last century. Is just unimaginable. Even just in say the first temple period, which we know is historically, like it happened. Like to think that you could have a bomb or a nuclear bomb or a machine gun and automatic weapons, we are rightly disgusted by violence and it's. Capabilities and our own capacity for violence. But. Before the industrial revolution like violence was something more. It didn't have the same. Diurnal to it. We could not, as we can literally now and all life on earth. If you had a sword, like good luck with that, that'll take you a while. At least. But now we've industrialized violence and what we're capable of. As a species, as a human race of course we're uncomfortable with violence. But to then ascribe our own the. The abilities that we've invented and come up with to ascribe them to God and be uncomfortable with a God that we think is violent and be unable to have a conversation about that. That gods. Human incarnation and the proximity to violence. I think we miss out on a lot. The same instinct, which is again, Perfectly reasonable given what we're capable of. Of stewing, all violence. Being, a total pacifist or diehard passers w toxic pacifists. That does our theology and our hermeneutics a disservice because we can't exit GTE the text. If we're if we're ISO eating it at the same time, I said, Jesus. To put something in the text X or Jesus has to take something out. We are taking. Hour. Unqualified deadly. Legitimate and justified. Disdain for what violence is capable of. We're putting it on the text and we're blaming God as though God is the one that invented gunpowder or something. I don't know. And so when I read Isaiah. 62 in particular. We get some of the strongest imagery for the divine warrior and Isaiah 59 and all three, four chapters from 59 to 62. It's 64. Really. These are. Not all the same, but they're all hovering around this imagery of the divine warrior. And how the arrival of God. In Christ. Is a signifying event that tells humanity. Here I come. I am going to do the thing I've always said, I'll always do, which is to save you from oppression. And if we think that, there's two different ways to go about that, we say, oh no, we don't need a savior because. You know that where it's coming from is corrupt. The old Testament. God is the violent God, we don't want the old Testament. Messiah. Or we say, you know what? Yeah, put that sword in my hand. I'll be. Here. I am send me as long as I have a sword in my hand like the crusades. And both of those instincts are wrong. And I can say that because I've been all the way up to the point of violence in combat, in war. And I don't think that the sensationalism. That we put around some of these things. Military service combat even. I don't think it's valid. And I think when we see everything in a hyperbole. You don't like John's revelation is. We should take it literal, like the left behind series. Do you really think that little beetles are going to come with human faces and torment us? And I laugh, but like some people really think that. And that's a product of this hyperbole that we're putting into the text. And what I do and what I notice. Comes through me. XOG reading the text in search of a God and a religious system that can bear the weight of my experience. Not because it's hyperbolic, but because it's. War and military services. So morally dense. And the arguments that I've encountered around military servants and violence from people who haven't experienced it directly. R so shabby. And light and. Weak. And I haven't found the thing that I'm looking for within the institutional church. With them. Organized religion. And so this next three years, if you follow me on the next liturgical cycle, For first formation where I'd cover the Sundays. I'm going to begin taking my experience to, the Sunday readings I did the daily readings for three plus years. And that kind of got me comfortable with the text and comfortable with my own experience. And so I appreciate you listening in and being a part of what I'm doing by. Encountering the Bible. And God's incarnation again. For what seems like the first time.
