🐮 Lent 4
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the fourth Sunday of Lent. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from Joshua five, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians five, and Luke 15. I. The Joshua reading is actually right before the conquest of Jericho, which begins the Canaanite campaign, the genocide, what, whatever you wanna call it.
Just the book of Joshua. Anyway and as a setup, they are they've been in the wilderness. Joshua's the only, Joshua and Caleb were the only two people who were born in Egypt who get to see the Promised land. And Joshua. Who had formally been called Moses's assistant has been left in charge. Joshua whose Hebrew name is Yeshua, which is the same as the Mary's kid.
I. He is told that now that you've gone through this time in the wilderness, now I have rolled away the disgrace of Egypt at Lgal, this mountain. And not only has they have they been, you could say, reconciled to God, which is what Paul will later talk about in another passage but. One of the things that this passage points out is that they begin eating normal food like crops as opposed to manna.
And the manna was this thing that would arrive every morning and on the sixth day they were supposed to. Gather a double portion, but if they gathered any more than they needed any day, the rest would spoil and it would go bad. They could only eat what they needed and what they gathered every day, except for the Sabbath.
They would have enough. It would stay good anyway, and it ends in this passage. The desert and all of the time under Moses in the desert is like God's sandbox. It's where God is teaching the Israelites a new economy, a new ecosystem, a new cosmology. And now in the beginning of Joshua, they're being set up to take the training wheels off.
I've taught you everything I can. Now we're gonna see how this. How this works and if you can do the things I've trained you to do and I don't. The violence of Joshua goes from chapter six through 12 and then all of the remaining through 21 or 24 chapters of Joshua, I can't remember which, it's all just divvying up the land.
But to get the land, they have to obey God in doing things that feel morally uncomfortable. Fast forward to two Corinthians five, and here we have Saul talking about reconciliation. And Paul gives this wonderful kind of evocation of what reconciliation is, how Christ is the reconciliation of God and being in Christ means we are the agents of reconciliation for God in the world.
If we are Christians. And before I get to the Luke reading, to me reconciliation, I am a professed hospitality of St. Martin. Which is an ecumenical monastic community in the Episcopal tradition that focuses on prayer, reconciliation, hospitality for all those who suffer from violence, poverty, or war.
And one of our things is reconciliation. And it's a really important thing to take a vow too. That means right relationship to return to conciliatory. Interactions and relationships with both other people with the Earth, et cetera. Reconciliation is hard because it means being vulnerable to someone that you are not sure has your best interests at heart, that may actually be self-interested and may use their power against you.
If you are called to be the agent of reconciliation, you are the underdog. You're the person or the dog that rolls over on their back. And that kind of goes against, like American, certainly masculine capitalistic expectations. That's the last thing you want to do is roll over and expose your belly or the other underdog, which is being dominated by the overdog or whatever.
But that's what reconciliation means. You stop that stupid game of dominance and you roll over. And that's a hard thing to do. It takes vulnerability, it takes humility. It takes hardiness. It takes a thick skin to be hit in the face and turn the other cheek, or to just stand there and be prepared to take another hit on the face.
But that is what Christ does. It is difficult. It is something that violates our morality. If you hit me, I should be allowed to hit you back. In the same way that our moral structures in, American culture in the 21st century, it feels wrong to, to acknowledge violence, to give it oxygen, to look at violence in the Bible, to look at violence in our own lives, in our national security interests and say.
And give it oxygen to explore it because by looking at violence, it maybe sometimes feels like we're legitimating it in the same way we are called to expose ourselves. To be reconciled means to acknowledge our faults, and sometimes if I'm being really honest, we don't have as many faults as people think that we do.
That doesn't mean we don't do it. I'll give you a gr really good example to toot my own horn. A little humble brag. There was a moment when I, we my partner and I had been married a few le less than a year or about a year. About a year. We did not have kids yet, but I think we maybe knew we were pregnant.
Anyway, we're getting this argument and I was, I knew I was right. I could prove it if I needed to in court, but I realized like, what fucking purpose is that? So what? And I made this conscious decision. It doesn't matter that I'm right, it matters that we return to right relationship, and an argument is a fracture of relationship and.
When I accepted that and I accepted that what I really want is not to be right to but to be in right relationship. It allowed me to totally turn over and be vulnerable and accept things for which I really thought that I still to this day, I don't think that I had, that I needed to, I don't think it was right, but it was writing, right?
Like it was in order to. Get past this stupid little disagreement. 'cause all disagreements are ultimately stupid. I had to be not the bigger person, but the more vulnerable person I had to accept guilt that maybe didn't belong to me, which is what Christ did, and which is morally not so comfortable in the modern American West or modern American imagination.
And now we return to the Gospel of Luke or go into the Gospel of Luke. It seems wrong that this douche bag of a kid, this entitled little shit is taking all his money, gets rid of it, and then comes back begging for more. We are the elder son. That is right. That is spot on. The elder son held the moral high ground, but you miss the point.
If you hold on to. Right and wrong as you think maybe it should exist. What is right and wrong? The father has a sense of what's right and wrong. Who the fuck cares how shitty of a person he was? He had the humility to come back and thank God he is back. That's what's important. If I had lost a child, if they'd run away or gotten addicted to drugs and then they came running back and I had some sense, like I, they're back in my arms.
I can help them. What matters that you were there this whole time. The elder son takes for granted and he seems to have some understanding in his mind that he doesn't have access to his father's wealth, even though his father's saying, everything I have is yours. You could always ask, you didn't, but also like you could have.
And so we've, we get into these ways of thinking. We get to these points at which we are convinced. We know what's right and wrong, and we might be right, but what is more? Being right or having right relationship that is the purpose of reconciliation. It doesn't matter. Right and wrong, don't matter.
Or good and evil or something. What matters is human relationship, human flourishing, joy, happiness, you die, mania, nirvana, whatever you want to call it. If that is your overriding interest, who fucking cares if I don't recognize how smart you are or somebody who doesn't recognize how smart and cool kid whatever I am?
Like what matters? It's how you interact with and are able to interact with other people and all their uniqueness and problems and fallibilities. 'cause at the end of the day, you have problems too. You don't need to be perfect or not. Needing to be perfect is both a blessing to yourself, but also a curse if you think that your moral system is the only way in which you can operate in the world.
