🐮 Lent 2
Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35.
Further Reading:
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the second Sunday in Lent, uh, for the Luke in Year the Ox Year Sea. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from Genesis 15, Psalm 27, Philippians three, and Luke 13. Um. I, the reading also prescribes for Luke nine, but we read that last week and it's about the transfiguration.
Um, or the week before last, I can't remember. Um. And in the reading today, there's one of the things that kind of sticks out to me. I love the Genesis stuff where we get the kind of mythic origins of Israel's identity and there's certain things that stand out like the, in this original covenant with Abram, it's a heifer, a female goat.
Uh, which, um, if you read ahead in judges Ja Ail, who's responsible for killing the general csra, um, her name, Ja Ail means mountain goat and she's a woman, right? Female goat. The, the oldest stories of the Bible. One of, if not the oldest is in, uh, judges four and five with Ja Ale, Barak, the commander from Naftali, a holy city in Naftali.
Um, and Debra, the, uh, one of, one of the first, uh, judges. I don't know if she was the first, I don't think she was. Anyway. And um, then a ram, which is a male goat, a turtle dove in a young pigeon and. There's an important distinction between sheep and goats in the New Testament, and the goats are the ones that are the, the Yom Kippur sacrifice.
Uh, they're also, uh, acceptable for the Passover Seder. Goats are what I call think of as like after things, you know, there's after thoughts, which you don't think of at first, and then those things that you don't think of at first, but are. Things rather than thoughts are after things and. When, you know, there's a, a number of after things that go through my head.
Um, one of them is the raven or the crow, which is the first one to go out, um, to search for land when, um, Noah is looking for dry land after the flood and stop. Because the raven, uh, is an omnivore that can eat meat as well as vegetables or, or plants. They're going out to look for dead bodies. And they'll eat them and they'll stay there.
Maybe that's why the raven didn't come back. When the pigeon goes out or the, the dove, they are nesting, okay, now that all the dead bodies are gone, can we make a life in this destruction that God has wrought? So, uh, goats are an after thing. We Christians often put the lamb, the sheep, baby sheep first. Um, the Lamb of God is not a thing that takes away the sins of the.
World that's a goat. The, the raven rather than the dove are the, are the ones that relied on first. Um, and then you can even think of like the ass or the donkey rather than the horse. These kind of underlings, these underdogs, um, in which, if you think about it, underdog is the dog getting a. Screwed. Right.
The, the, the dominate, um, and the first things and the first thoughts. Those are the cool kid things like the horse, the lamb, uh, the oxen, right? But God leans on these after things. Because they know their place. And if you're an agrarian and you have this kind of, uh, agricultural imagination, the first fruits that's actually a, a fig has these things called, uh, BBA fruits and their last year's shoots producing fruits and they're bitter and they don't taste very good, and you'll usually cut 'em off.
Um, and then the second fruits, the after. Uh, harvest, at least figs, um, are much sweeter and they're the, the, the, the full crop or the full fruit. Um, and so the second things, the after things sometimes are. Better than the first things. And you, if, you know, you could think of in human terms, prima genitor, the idea that the first male gets everything is challenged frequently in the Bible.
Um, it's usually the youngest, like David, the youngest of eight kids, Jacob, the younger of two twins. Um, you know, it's these after things that come first in the kingdom of God. And in this. Um, Abrahamic Covenant. There are these after things, and even the turtle doves and pigeons. Um, when Jesus goes to turn over the temple, money changers tables, he is told, or he tells the, the pigeon, you know, merchants and the bird merchants, Hey, I.
I'm, I'm watching you, but I'm not gonna turn your table over. And that may be because the pigeons and the dove, or I'm sorry, the pigeons were the cheapest to afford if you needed to make a sacrifice. But if you are a bastard child in a broken home, you'd be lucky if you could afford the pigeons for your obli, obligatory, um, sacrifice.
So Jesus is probably identifying with these after things, whether it's the birds. As opposed to the, the ram or the, the, the oxen that's sacrificed. Um, he identifies with these second after things. Um, and the, the challenge in reading later in Philippians, Saul, is addressing a community that is made up of first things and former first things, which is to say.
Retired Roman military families. And so they're used to being the best of the best. And Saul is here to tell them, actually you are, to be you, you are to become like an after thing. You are to become like your slave. You are to become like your, your wife, your servant, your your domesticated animals because.
In the reign of God. It's not dous, which has all this power. You know, it's not that we domesticate animals, but we grow our family by familiarizing unlike things. When the the lion will lay down with the lamb, it's because it has take, it has become familiar with each other. If you've ever held a. My family got a rabbit recently, and I've learned to pick it up and I've learned to how to interact with the rabbit to reassure it that I'm not going to eat it.
I'm a, I'm an omnivore, which means I can eat meat just like the raven. Um, and it knows it. And at first it'll kick, kick, kick, kick, kick until it realizes I'm not gonna eat it. And when it realize that it's gonna kick, kick, kick, kick some more because it knows it can. It just wants to be put down. It doesn't like to be held.
And I. I tell it, look, you're part of a family. We're gonna hold you. We're gonna feed you. That's the exchange. You may not like being held, but if you like food and you like water and you like the comfort of a home, you're part of our family. I'm going to familiarize yourself with what it means to be in a social organism that is non-threatening.
That is non predatory. Um, and so as Saul is riding to the, the Christian community of Philippi, they're used to being predatory. I was a soldier and we are predators. Um, you know, we, you know, we're lucky 'cause we can eat whatever. But like our, our stance, our posture before the world as soldiers is.
Predation, we need to be ready to act first or be acted upon. We are the overdog, we are the dog humping the other dog to show its dominance. Um, and that is one of the most difficult things with militaries and the church is like, if you think that's your normal composure, you're in for a rude awakening.
Um, when I was trying to be a better Christian, one of the first messages I got was, you can't be an artillery man. You can't be an infantry, you can't be artillery. You can't do all these other things without making some significant, um, adjustments in how I comported myself before the world. 'cause my weapon in Iraq and elsewhere put me in charge.
It put me in a power position over someone else. In other words, I was the dog humping the other dogs thinking that that made me better than the other dogs. Um, whereas Christ is the underdog. Christ was killed, Christ was penetrated. Christ was, uh, had every opportunity to be the overdog to Colin legions of angels.
But that is precisely the antithesis of what it means to be like Christ, to be a Christian. Um, and getting into the reading in Luke, um, the problem is you're going to be killed. And Jesus does not reject that. Jesus never says I'm not gonna be killed. Um, in fact, in the passage it's said, I am gonna be killed because I'm a prophet.
And prophets wear uncomfortable clothes like camel skin, uh, loin cloths, and they eat wild things like insects and. Honey from bees or dates like that is what a prophet does. A prophet is not out there dominating. A prophet is out there perfectly comfortable being the one fucked and knowing that God has got their back.
A prophet is the person who has acquired the language from God and the character through their experience to unify the past and the present. Um, and. The powers that be, the overdog, the first things they don't like that they don't like being reminded, Hey, you're a little insecure and that's why you're humping those other dogs.
That's why you can't keep it in your pants. And one of the things that did stand out to me, and I'll close with this, is, um, I think it's in, yeah, in the Philippians reading the first things, their end is destruction. Their God is the belly and their glory is in their shame. These are all coded language. Um, the word for war, uh, LHM or laha, um, in, in Hebrew it says, anyway, laham.
Means to fight, but it also means to eat, to be over fed. So the war is the thing that devours war is the thing that does not know the limits of its own appetite or has no limits to its appetite. Whether your appetite is in your pants, whether your appetite is in your head, and you need to be in control.
You need to be smarter than everybody. That is what? Saul it means, and what the gospel means when destruction and belly and shame are all wrapped up into one. If you ever look at a dog humping another dog, it's like. Yeah, that fucking dog is insecure. Um, and underdogs react differently. Our dog doesn't know what to do.
Yogi, our, our dog, has been humped before by a dog that doesn't know what the heck is going on because she does not have a secure attachment, a secure family, and she's just trying to figure out everything works. And this other dog bit, our dog Yogi. And I had to rush out and, you know, kind of scold the dog and scare the shit out of it.
But also, like, not, not harm it. Um, that dog, when it was humping, our dog, was trying to make sense of the world, was trying to reach a sense of meaning that it wasn't getting at home. In my, in our home Yogi, our dog is below the other human creatures and we make that clear. That doesn't mean that yogi is less than, it means that we are the responsible party.
We feed her, we pet her. We give her the things that she needs, and she gives us us. She gives us things that we want and we need, um, and we don't need to rip it from her. Like a, a predator does a pray. But in the, to be conformed to Christ is to be familiarized with an order that is good. And secure and loving and non predatory.
And that scares a lot of people. That scares people who think the only way I can get what I need is to scare other people, to take it from other people. Um, and to be Christian means to live in such a way to reflect. A system, a world system, a cosmology that does not grab things because that's the only way to get it.
It might scare people. I've scared a lot of people, um, and sometimes I've, I've learned that the people most afraid of goodness are the ones who cannot stand to be reminded that they're capable of good. The people who are most afraid of me. I, and this is my interpretation of my own experience, but the people who are most afraid of me are the ones who on some level know that my actions and my decisions, my moral decisions, are a reminder that they too are not beyond being good.
They could do the right thing. It, it's difficult. It requires some sacrifice, but you're not so fucked up that you can't do the right thing and doing the right thing scares. Some people because that means giving up something that they didn't deserve. Um, if you don't know how to limit your own appetite to take only that which you need and leave the rest to everyone else, just like the manna in the desert, when you take and take and take and you devour things, it's not the manna that spoils it's you.
