🐮 Lent 3
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the third Sunday in Lent. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings for today come to us from Isaiah 55, Psalm 63, 1 Corinthians 10, and Luke 13. I apologize for getting this episode out late. I was on vacation, but I'm gonna make sure I don't do that again.
And the, it didn't seem like the. Isaiah passage was very related, Isaiah 55 talking about coming to the water and doing all these things so that you align yourself with with God. And it speaks specifically to Israel, but the water imagery. And then in one Corinthians, when Saul is talking about the.
Israelites under Moses being cut down for worshiping the golden calf. And so this mass killing and the water made me think of the flood. And there's the flood in the Hebrew scriptures is interesting because there are other, there are other flood myths that deal with the idea of a flood differently, and we don't know for sure if we have an actual, like if there was like a flood that happened or whether something else might be the case.
I say that because there's a chance that there was some ancient flood, great, whatever, but there's also the chance that. Ancient peoples throughout the Mediterranean, the cradle of human civilization around the Arabian Peninsula and Northeast Africa, that they just like here in the United States, will find seashells in the mountains or at above sea level and trying to make sense of that.
So there's two different. Decent explanations for what is going on there and different cultures are going to interpret them differently. I only mention that 'cause like why aren't there dinosaurs in the Bible? And it's because they didn't find any ma massive bones. Or maybe they did and that's what explains the Nephilim.
But anyway, I digress. The. Water imagery in Isaiah, coupled with the murder or the killing at least of the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf is significant because in that incidence, in Exodus 32, Moses calls the Levites to him and they cut down a thousand or whatever the number is in one Corinthians or Exodus 32.
I can't remember. But anyway, in that moment, in Exodus 32, it's when the Levites are ordained to the Lord's service. And so ordination and clerical responsibility is bound up in violence and it's a callback to God, self cutting down the entire world in the flood story in Genesis, and then cutting down a, a significant portion of the Israelites in the wilderness, but then at the end of the wilderness, nobody who left Egypt is left alive. Only their kids, Joshua and Caleb are the only ones who are alive in Egypt who get to see and enter the whole the Promised land in Canaan. And so this juxtaposition of violence and holiness and purification, or even like moral reliability, moral responsibility, are bound up together.
You cannot read the Bible without addressing and having something substantive to say about violence about human. About physical harm, I'll say. And then in Luke, we get this kind of close out of the parable of and the fig tree and in it. The the parable at least, is about a fig tree. And the fig tree is kind of Israel's national plant.
It appears first in Genesis when it's the fruit that we have that humanity has eaten from, and the fruit from which we draw the leaves to clothe ourselves when we're ashamed of our nakedness. But it's also a really interesting plant because it's, it can be a tree, but it can also be a bush, and it's not really a fruit.
It's an inverted flower and all these really cool, weird things. But anyway, the fig is, has, is not being produced. It's not being productive in a, it says a vineyard, but vineyards weren't always just grapes. The Israelites didn't necessarily practice monoculture anyway. And so well, this fig tree is not producing fruit.
It's not doing what it's supposed to do. And so what do we do? Are we gonna cut it down or are we going to give it a little bit of an extra chance? And this, to me, at least, again, evokes the Exodus story of there are 10 plagues, not one. If God really wanted to affect their salvation, and the only attention that we should give to the Passover and the 10th plague is to Israel.
I think we're missing the point of Exodus. Exodus. That portion of Exodus forces us to wonder why is God being so patient with Pharaoh and why is Pharaoh and the Egyptians by extension getting 10 chances to, reconsider? And then of course, is it that God hardened Pharaoh's heart to prove a point?
Or is it that Pharaoh's heart was hardened because he's just a douche bag and these. Important moral questions are deliberately disclaimed, like the text wants you to ask them and wants you to not have an answer. And a while ago I did a textual study on, hardening Pharaoh's heart, and I wasn't as into the language and I could probably double check it, but at least at the time, I found that for every that out of, I think it was literally 10 or maybe it was 12 times, where it says that Pharaoh's heart was hardened half of the time.
It was hardened by God, and half the time it was merely a statement of a state of being. For Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and I could be saying like he had a hard heart. But the fact that there was an equal number of Pharaoh's heart being hard and God hardening Pharaoh's heart, you can't. You can't fall on one side of the fence or the other, you've gotta fall right in the middle.
And that doesn't give us the answer, the satisfying moral judgment that we want. We don't know. We don't know if God is in this to just screw people over or if God is in this to save Israel. And so as someone who's served in the military and had to ask questions about. The social and individual moral implications of physical violence.
I am now in the minority of, we'll say Western civilization, and I'll say English speaking western civilization in which all of the accoutrements, all the good things we get from citizenship, at least in the United States, come at the expense of the sacrifice of the minority, such as myself.
We've created an entire civilization or an entire society that is entitled, nobody has to. Nobody is obligated to serve. Everybody is obligated to have freedom, supposedly, but the first people to lose it are the last people to not have it, if you look@gijustice.com, our military families, so we live in this backwards world where the people who are most familiar with the most difficult of human experiences, who could help us illuminate the scripture in some of these difficult ways not only are marginalized, but like the influencers who do have the platform to, who could affect positive change and do a better hermeneutic.
Largely aren't, we're avoiding judges and Joshua and the dangerous or the violent parts of scripture. And I take that as a kind of irony that I see right there in the Bible. Are we not going to think about this? Are we gonna cut it down, get rid of violence and pretend that we, that freedom is free or are we going to.
Give ourselves more time to look at who we are as a society and how we've gotten to this point where, it's March of 2025. I don't have to say much else than that to do any kind of historical research and find out like, yeah, America's in a pretty messed up state both legally and like culturally yeah, I'll just, I'll leave it at that. So it's important to do our work around violence, to do the thing that we're sometimes afraid of doing. Doing the hard thing of waiting and giving another chance to people that we want to believe have nothing to offer. I've occupy a space in the American.
Moral landscape in which I'm supposed to be the most credible narrator of, political costs, and yet the political benefits that I, that freedom is supposed to endow Americans with, I am denied. And so it just, I cannot help but notice. The biblical connotations of our own age and therefore look at the Bible, look to the Bible for inspiration, for guidance, for how we get out of this.
And first formation is the place where I'm doing that. So I appreciate all my listeners for following along, and again, I apologize for getting this one out just a little bit late.
