🐮 Epiphany 5
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the fifth Sunday after the epiphany. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Isaiah six, Psalm 1 38, 1 Corinthians 15, and Luke five. And something that stood out to me was in the reading from Saul or Paul and Saul.
The epistles of Saul are some of the earliest Christian writings we have. And it's interesting to see, to think of them as appearing before the Gospels. Because we likely didn't have them and it was just this guy going around giving form to something that had taken shape after the son of Mary had created this movement.
And he refers to Cephas in verse 5, who is, Cephas is the name that the Messiah gives to Simon. Cephas means rock or Cephas the rock. And he's certainly the most boisterous of the apostles. And I mention the apostles because that's what jumps out at me is that in 15, What Saul remembers, or has been told, is that he's buried, was raised on Thursday in the Course of the Scriptures, and then he appears to Peter, and then to the 12, then he appeared to 500 people, some of whom apparently were still alive and could verify or deny that it had happened, then he appears to his own brother, James, then to all the Apostles, Apostolos, and this is the name or the word that he uses to describe himself, I'm the least of the Apostles, unfit to be called an Apostle because I persecuted the Church of God, but Unless there's been some redaction or later editing, he appeared, Joshua the son of Mary appears to Peter, then to the Twelve, then he appears to James, then to all the Apostles.
So Apostles, let's just assume for a moment that there isn't some major redaction, or even if there was, that the early church didn't really seem to care that much. And so the Twelve and quote unquote Apostles, or Apostolos, seems to be, If not overlapping they do seem to be distinct because the 12 certainly must be his closest disciples, his closest students, his closest as pupils, people who are dedicated to him to learning from him.
And then the apostles mean something slightly different, maybe wider. And these, this is the group that Saul identifies with, not with his closest followers like Kephas or Jacobus which is James. But something like those that appeared after James. And of course, last of all, he counts himself as having been visited by the risen Christ.
And What Saul doesn't remind the Corinthians is that he doesn't appear to Saul in bodily form. He appears in a vision. And of course he's been talking about, Christ appearing to all these other people in bodily form. And so he makes an equivalency between bodily form and what he sees on the road to Damascus.
But it's very clearly, this bright light, a voice, a vision, an epiphany, and we are in the season of epiphany, but he counts that on par with these other visitations. He may be last, But what he received from Christ was no less than a bodily visitation that was visited upon everyone. And I say that stuck out first, and I, Saul calls Peter Kephas quite a bit, and this is the adopted name, just Yehoshua was Hoshea's adopted name under Moses, Joshua, before he was Joshua, he was Hoshea.
And Moses in Numbers 13 says, I'm going to call you Josh Hoshea, Yehoshua. And he has this adopted name. Similarly with Saul, he doesn't change his name. Luke says, the guy's name, Shaul, Who is also Paul or Paul in the to the Romans doesn't say, he converted and he changed his name. Paul is a Roman name.
That is the equivalent of Saul, the Hebrew name, and that's why I use him interchangeably and I put a little S in a, in parentheses between the P and the A when I write it out, like a psalm because his name is Saul, just like the first king of the United Kingdom and if you go, reverse order, then you have King David or Jesus, and after that you have Solomon or, John the Baptist and there's this recurring thing of threes, start human literature, not just Hebraic or or even Hellenistic.
But anyway, I mentioned Kephas and him being so boisterous because of this call story from Isaiah and Isaiah's call story in chapter six is the only one of Maybe all the prophets, but certainly the major prophets whose call story does not begin in chapter one. Ezekiel, Daniel Jeremiah, they mostly begin one or two, the first chapter or so of their books.
But in Isaiah, it's in chapter six. And we get this context for Isaiah before he's taken up in a vision where he sees these seraphs, seraphim. And I wanted to look that up and I kept saying angels, but I would be interested to figure out what the Greek and Hebrew are. But, they're circling around the temple and the Lord is so big and overwhelming that just the coattails of his cloak are like making the pillars of the temple shake.
And this would have been Solomon's Temple because it was before the Babylonian Exile. I think I'd have to double check. But anyway and I mention it and I, it makes me think of Kephes, because Kephes makes some big mistakes and when Isaiah realizes what's going on he sees the angels, they're crying holy, and he's oh shit, which is what I translated, woe is me, nobody says woe is me anymore.
Oh shit, I'm fucked, for I'm a man of unclean lips. And if you think unclean lips has anything to do with the words that you use, you might not be. You might want to keep reading, right? Unclean lips is to lie. To keep your lips clean is not necessarily to eat the right thing but to make sure that your heart only speaks out of the overflow of the heart, not the the contraction of the will, unclean lips is very often used to describe people who are worshiping a false god or who are being untrust untruthful. It's not about the words you use. It's more about your choice of words and whether they testify to a God who is truthful and real and genuine and reflects the best in human nature.
It makes me think that with all, I don't have to go too far on this, but with all this stuff around AI and deep sea, because it's in the news, I try not to keep the news in first formation because I try and keep it relatively generic, but we've, we're afraid, humanity is afraid of what we'll create because AI might turn on us.
It might be true that the most that we are, in fact, our own worst enemies and getting rid of ourselves, or getting rid of us, if you're AI, might be to the most benefit, or might benefit the most on Earth, right? All these apocalyptic robot, shows, iRobot and everything, where we're afraid of AI, it's because, almost to a T, our creation will look at us with cleaner eyes and see that we are the problem.
And that's not the nature of God. God in Isaiah looks upon creation and knows from the moment it's conceived that it has the propensity to harm each other and therefore to harm God. The first time any entity suffered was when God gave up omnipotence to create a free creature. A fully free creature, not instinct like the animals, but will, desire, appetite.
That is what sets humanity apart. The ability to lie. The ability to say something and to act in ways that are to our own self interest, rather than the interest of our community. Unclean lips. The worry is that, my God, Have I messed up in a way I don't realize? Because if God is perfection casts out imperfection.
There's this wide standing belief that, and it's supported in biblical literature, that if you witness God, you will instantly die. If you touch God, you will instantly die. If you do the wrong thing in the temple and you're the high priest, you will instantly die. And one of the things as a service member I learned dying is not the worst that can happen.
The worst that can happen is you don't even know the depths of your own sin. And when it comes time to close out the chapter that you call your physical life, a reasonable person would look back on it, and the only thing that they could say is that you'd ruined your own life. You'd wasted your own life.
Because you're pursuing things that Felt like they were good for you, but in fact corrupted your soul and bent it in toward itself. And KEPHIS Peter in my eyes and Isaiah are one of those people that reflect the best of humanity that makes them noteworthy. The keis is the rock because he makes the biggest mistake.
He's given the opportunity to confess Jesus' Lord or Joshua's Lord, and he's no, I don't know. But he's still not condemned. Saul, who persecutes the church, is not ultimately condemned. He has the opportunity to turn from his ways, and he does, saving not just the lives of others, but his own life by acting in harmony with the way that the world was created by this God whose name means I am that I am by living in ways that operate in tandem rather than in opposition to the divine order.
That is what it means to live with clean lips, to live with a clean heart, to live with a clean and less corrupted soul. And so this week after the presentation of the Lord It's fitting that we have this deep humanity, that if Jesus was fully human, if Joshua was really the son of Mary and also the son of God, then we have to wrestle with the fact that even God is not above the consequences of sin.
And if we think we're above the consequences of sin, if we think that we can't do any wrong, we're not really human. And we think that makes us gods, but that makes us something less than what we really can be and should be. And we're made to be.
