🐮 Proper 20

Readings: Amos 8:4-7; Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13.

To Do:

• Get your #GruntGod Season Pass

• Attend GruntCon on October 25th in Albany, Oregon

Reflection

 Good morning and welcome to Proper 20. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter House in Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come from Amos eight, Psalm 1 13, 1 Timothy two, and Luke 16. And if you are an active listener the weakness is coming out. You know what happened? Was it last night?

A memorial for a proclaimed martyr. And the events of the last several weeks have really upped the contrast for thoughtful Christians to engage with what the Bible says and what the Christ does and what his name is and why, but. This one in particular, the reading from Luke six, I'm sorry, 16 God and Wealth, or God and Mammon.

I, it's a complicated picture because wealth money is something I'm thinking a lot more about lately in terms of power and the problem with money in our day and in. Christ's day is that money proposes to be the thing, which is also a symbol in itself. In other words, money is supposed to stand in for what?

Is it gold? Is it labor? Is it power? It's supposed to be a universal currency. Coins, and now paper money, they're supposed to encapsulate value. But there's no real value. It's just a piece of metal. The thing is a, an engraved piece of metal. The symbol might be work, the symbol might be power. The symbol might be influence.

The symbol might be any number of things, and power itself is not the problem. It's what we do with power and it's what we do with the product of our work and thinking that we can work and therefore be powerful. We can become like God at best. Money is supposed to represent labor because everybody's capable of doing some kind of labor, whether it's intellectual labor or physical labor.

And the more you contribute to. A project, the more value you've invested and that's supposed to come back to you in terms of cash money. And instead of you having ownership in that thing that you built, all you walk away with is money. It makes me think of the military wear, like you put six years of your life on it.

In my case and back in the day, they would give you a $500 check and a ticket home and that's it. Now you've got the VA benefits and quote unquote entitlements and. But they're all supposed to be representations, signs of other things. My VA disability compensation is supposed to be a sign for the effect that service had on me to deprive me of the ability to work.

That's why it's called disability income. And I got it right away. I got went into the military right out of high school. And I spent six years in and it took me two years wrestling with the VA to finally get a rating. And from that day forward, I've had monthly income. And that is because it assumes the military assumes that I have been made unable to work as a direct result of my service.

And so it's compensation. The money is a sign of the labor that I put into in the labor that labor prevents me from doing in the future. And whether that's, bone stuff or PTSD or muscular, like that's the sign, that's the thing that the money points to. Now, the richest person in the world or the richest people in the world are not the ones that work the hardest.

I've never seen any dirt on their hands. I've never seen sweat on their brow. Ever, even in like photo shoots or photo ops, and that speaks to something that everybody knows, but is not supposed to say that money is not really a credible representation of value or labor because some people hoard it. Some people take more money than their work equally produces, and the end of Luke.

16 says you cannot serve God and wealth. And I think we sometimes get a little confused and think that money is the problem and money is not the problem. It's our systems of meaning that transcend or transgress into the real world. Money is a piece of paper or a coin, but our systems of meaning say no.

Money is supposed to be buy you access because you, everybody should be able to work to gain access to a library, to education, to food, to healthcare. But we, it's not true. We all know that the emperor has no clothes, but we're all afraid of saying it because we don't have as much clothes as we need either.

If the emperor is naked, we might be naked too. And there's this recurring, I think, confusion in the capitalistic post-industrial Christian English speaking west around money. And it's evident in another really important parable of the talents, I think, where the bad guy. Is the one with the money saying you are a horrible servant, and the good guy is the one who treated money as though it had some inherent value.

You want it to grow something more than what it is. You want fruit from a seed. Okay, I'll bury it. But Dave Rams, he got into our head and said no, you need to save money. That's what this parable is about. That is the furthest thing from what that parable is trying to say, and I don't like, money is not the problem.

I will continue to accept my disability. Compensation, not only because it's true, I did acquire certain injuries that prevent me from operating as easily in this world as civilians, but I'm also not going to hoard it as though that is what is going to get me what I want, and it frankly, what I want can be a problem.

Maybe I want more power, maybe I want more influence. Maybe I want, but. Whenever I've sat long enough with myself and with people I trust, I've discovered that what I want is meaningful relationships, and those are hard to come by because in the world that we see right now, it's been polarizing for a long time and I've had difficulty falling into these little human cliques, little, private communities that we construct.

And whether we call them churches, whether we call them cliques or friend groups, like I just don't fit well. I don't like fitting into one little spot. I'm seeking meaningful, reliable, trustworthy human relationships, and I found those in the poor. I found that in some people who have more than they probably need, but the money part is not the problem. I have friends who have a lot of money and they've been more faithful to our friendship than people with less money than them who have further to climb on the social ladder. And so the money is not the problem. The lack of meaning behind our symbols is the problem or the confusion of meaning behind our symbols.

It's what do we mean when we say friends, right? I've had friends who will claim to have been friends and who would have no answer to my accusation They left, that they left me high and dry in a time of need. What kind of friend is unable and unwilling to help someone in dire need of assistance?

And they will have no answer. They might explain it away or they might have different perspective, but like they're not friends. I know it and I think they know it, and I think it makes 'em uncomfortable because sometimes. In order to preserve the meaning behind our symbols, sometimes it costs something.

Freedom is a great example of a symbol that everybody takes for granted. People think freedom is free, even though we say freedom is not free, even though we make big statues and pillars and engravings and stone about freedom isn't free. A lot of people get freedom without a single cost. A lot of people lose things and think that they deserve them because they have some divine right to something.

No, we have freedom and democracy and in part because enough people for, I'll say the majority of our nation's life, have been willing to, I was about to say enforce the meaning, but it's like the inversion of enforce. If you want to have freedom and you accept that it's not free, it means you are going to have to pay something for it.

Money or the thing which money points to, whether that's sacrifice or labor or on discomfort. The you're gonna have to pay the piper at some point if you are not going to live into the meanings of our words. Within that's what I think of when I hear like a land of unclean lips. We have, there's no coherency to the things we say and there hasn't been for a long time.

Progressives talk about progress and freedom and democracy and blah, blah, blah. But like the progressives I'm finding another the other day somebody came into the shop and saw the bookstore and. Saw the ally stickers with the rainbow and the no guns on the door because this is private property.

I can tell anybody I want to, that they cannot carry a gun in here, including police officers because that's the law. But she saw the military stuff and I shit you not. She said, yeah, I like this and that and the other thing. But then I saw this poster for what was Grunt Con and she said, and I just, the military, ew.

It's literally all she said, and I knew exactly what she was saying, that she thinks that the military has lost whatever compass or what it's it. The thought of it disgusts her and I spent six years in there and it doesn't disgust me. What disgusts me is the number of military people who are taking their lives and whether or not we really believe that is.

Real and important and that it says something about our own society. Like people will say, Ew, about transgender youth, or youth in general. Like we've forgotten what it means That community. Community is not free. Communities aren't private. If they are, they're gonna crumble. Communities are accessible, they're public.

Especially that's why I think. The republic that we have is disappearing faster than democracy. A republic is something, is a form of government that says all things of substance are free. Race Publica, the thing is public. That means, in contrast to private interests, moneyed interest money because it's a currency, can close the door as easily as it can open it.

Your money is no good here. This is not, we won't take your money. Like I said earlier I would, I might kick people outta my shop because I have that right, and that is not a faith value that I have, but that is a right that I have. And I don't know if I would actually exercise. I didn't kick the woman out.

I, she stayed in this space and her three kids played in the kids area in the chapter house. Like she's benefiting not only from my. Labor to secure her freedom, but literally I built the children's space where she had her kids playing and I was, and whether I like it or not, remain military.

Don't get lost on money. If it's lost, meaning if it's not working, it means that our symbols of meaning aren't working. Whether it's because, we went off the gold standard or what, like that is what I think we should be careful about is what does this all mean? I'm holding a piece of paper.

You're here to tell me that this piece of paper will get me four sodas and a high five. Okay, I'll take those. Oh, that you're not gonna take my dollar regardless of what you say. The, a dollar's supposed to be the great equalizer. Like you may not have influence, but you have money.

So you're turning down influence just to entertain your own bias. That's why I think money is one of those things in the Bible, especially in the Christian new Testament that it's a canary in the coal mine. If we have lost. Our ability to interpret some of these parables that are obviously about money.

It might be our own symbols that are becoming in incoherent, not the Bibles. And I say that because there's a lot of people on Reddit who don't like religion and that I have a bunch of religion titles used, titles I've been collecting for the last decade, and they may never come in here because.

Religion did something to them that I haven't ever done. I've never met some of these people. And so we live in these difficult times where yeah, I'm ready to say if what I saw the other night at a big nationalist memorial for a martyr, if that's big C Christianity. I'm out, I'm on the outside.

I'm about to find a new system of meaning or dig deeper to find where that meaning was lost in order to recover whatever we can. 'cause I'm not gonna throw the baby out with the bath water. Religion is all reli. We all are religious. They're the rituals that we engage in to provide meaning in our lives.

Civil nationalist religion. Is not Christianity. It may take Christian language, but you'll know that it has lost all meaning because it won't make sense when we look at them and we look at the Bible. Money in the Bible it's about economics, and economics is about family. Economics is about relationship.

And if you want words without relationship to meaning, that's the first signal that you're in a dangerous time and. The loss of meaning is precisely what's at heart of, at what's at heart in discovering and interpreting and finding inspiration in, these really difficult texts that we call sacred.