🐮 Proper 15

Readings: Jeremiah 23:23-29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56.

To Do:

• Get your #GruntGod Season Pass

• Attend GruntCon on October 25th in Albany, Oregon

Reflection

 Good morning and welcome to Proper 15. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Jeremiah 23, Psalm 82, Hebrews 11, and Luke 12, and it was an interesting read. Hebrews 30 1132 kind of stuck out because I'm, a biographical virtue, ethics, who.

Is this author naming that we should notice? And Gideon is one of the earliest judges After Deborah Barack was with Deborah Sampson was the kind of anti judge who was a, not the greatest person, I wanna say. Jeff Thaw was one of the, he must have been one of the judges than David and Samuel. Does not mention Saul or Solomon.

And Samuel is one of the last judges, also a prophet. Possibly a priest, almost certainly not the high priest, but who they're naming and why. And the point that they're using or the point that they're trying to make, naming them is what I notice. And first they've got them out of order. Brock came before Gide.

And I want say Jeff, the came first, but I'm not sure. I've gotta look up who Jeff tha is. But if you notice in my work, both in grunt God, which is ongoing right now, but also for God and country in that order, my second book with Harold Press in 2013 I follow people 'cause I think people are the most, are the windows to the divine that we have access to here on earth.

Yeah. If we are made in God's likeness, if you want to find God, go find other people. Learn their stories. Figure out what it is that you can learn from them and about them, especially the these people, these characters, these saints, the Christian kind of imagination might call them so long as you don't look at them in isolation.

Or maybe too hard and too long to make them celebrities. But when we look at them I think the, and earlier we have the cloud of witnesses, which I believe was from Luke, if I'm remembering right. But the, it's people that matter. When I was a master's student at St. Andrew's, I, my thesis, or they call it dissertation there, but it's flipped anyway.

I was looking at Kazoo Street, which is essentially the adjudication or the, how do I describe it?

There's a study that found that if there were a group of people selected at random, let's say a large sample size, and they gave a bunch of hypothetical generic information about situations, people would get all caught up in. Trying to get more details to help them make decisions that is contrasted with kazoo Street, which in my mind and in my training means something like beginning with the details and figuring out what you can about what is right from the details rather than operating from a bunch of principles.

What if we start by. Looking at human beings and expand outward. What do we know about good communities that have healthy relationships? And then we look at those healthy communities and figure out how to be like those healthy communities. And any healthy community, if it's honest, also has unhealthy members like Samson.

I'm not gonna take s Samson off the Saints list. I'm not gonna take judges 13 through 15 out of the Bible. We need the counter examples of what it means to be a faithful and healthy, Phi Driss community. We cannot exclude the members that we don't like, whether that's Samson or Saul or for me, Solomon.

Or for others, maybe they're soldiers. We can't exclude the people we don't like or we're not getting the whole picture. And I'm finding myself increasingly lately being caught up in philosophical conversations, which I love. I've been waiting to do this since I started in seminary and got outta the military.

And anyway, I've been finding a lot of the higher level philosophical discussions I get into with the people that I've surrounded myself with typically are based on apathetic. Frameworks. What's let's figure out God by looking at violence, let's figure out what's good. By looking what's bad, let's figure out what is by looking at what isn't, or being afraid of what isn't.

And I think when that's like the idea or the game that we try and play, when we try and create rules in isolation without any context, thinking everybody's equal. Everybody is not equal. If you accept that everybody is not equal for good and for bad, and you draw your assumptions or your deductions based on what's real, diversity being a force of nature, that there's going to be some bad apples on the tree, but you don't cut down the whole tree, like when you start with the particulars, you can come up with a general sense of what is good, even as.

The monotheistic impulse in humanity is still upheld in I'd say and I'll say in the Abrahamic faith, and that's why I'm so drawn to the book of Hebrews. And frankly I really loved that this list of people just gives us some insight into who this author thinks are we're supposed to look at.

He doesn't give us why sometimes he does. By faith. Samson had faith. He had faith when he screwed everything else up. And he asked something of an all powerful, compassionate God universe. And that universe answered in the affirmative giving. S Samson, whats Samson asked for? Give me one last bit of strength so I can kill my enemies.

And that's a cry that I don't particularly like, but I felt. Barack didn't believe that he could win with a woman in charge, and so women received the honor, whether that's Debra or Ja Ale. So we have to do the work of figuring out why some saints are dirty, why some saints have maybe even more than a little dirt under their fingernails.

I won't get into, I won't name names, but there's some saints, some American saints that I have a deep problem with, and that problem I have is deepened or exacerbated because we don't talk about it and we go on whitewashing these people and then we forget about the people who are truly good, who. Didn't do something for the attention or for the accolades or for the rewards, because it was simply the right thing to do.

And what was more important to them was that they tried, that they could put on their gravestone. I tried. I did the best I could. And you look at their life, this is Ralph now. Ralph Abernathy is one of my favorite people in the world. And he tried. You know that he got a lot of successes through 64, 67 and 68.

We lost King, but he kept trying and the movement didn't always agree with his efforts, but what he put on his gravestone is undeniably true. He tried. Gideon tried. He was a little fainthearted. Samson tried. He was a little egotistical. Barack tried. He was a little maybe centric. But they tried. That is what faith means, and when we are able to look at the people, the individuals, the particular circumstances, we can get a sense of what is good.

And that's why I'm bringing this up because to close with verse chapter 12 verse two, looking to Jesus the pioneer, Joshua, the pioneer and perfecter of faith to try who, for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross. So the author of Hebrews is saying, Jesus goes to the cross knowing what the reward is, knowing obviously what the consequence is.

He doesn't have to state the consequence clearly, they're going to kill you. It's true that violence exists. It's true fear and loathing and lusting and all the other bad, evil, isolating things are real. But what do we get by focusing on them? What do we get by focusing on the rewards? What happens when we don't get them?

The last thing Jesus said was dad, why have you forsaken me? Something more like Daddy. Daddy Eloy, L-O-I-L-O-I, Lama Akani disregarding the shame of death. The shame of the cross, the shame of violence. The shame of isolation and evil, disregarding it. It was only because it was right because the Messiah had his eyes on something longer and deeper and broader than the things that we're afraid of.

And to see that clearly we have to start with the people on our street, we have to start with the people who are our neighbors, who are near us. And only once we can truly be in community with them, can we be in community with God and with others outside our immediate borders.