🐮 Proper 24
Readings: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8.
Learn More: Isaac v. Manning et. al
Wrestling Toward Justice
This week’s readings — Genesis 32, Psalm 121, 2 Timothy 3-4, and Luke 18 — meet me where I am: limping. Jacob wrestles through the night and rises renamed, wounded yet blessed. I’ve been doing my own wrestling lately, with a sore back and with systems that bend the soul far worse than muscle.
I’ve always found comfort in the lectionary, even when its logic escapes me. It reminds me that faith isn’t something I invent; it’s something I inherit, wrestle with, and hand on. Someone long ago chose these texts, trusting that the Spirit would keep them alive in new circumstances. Four years from now, the same readings will sound different again.
Jacob’s limp speaks to me because pain has a way of revealing dependence. He refuses to let go until he receives a blessing. I, too, have refused to let go—through military service, through activism, through years of trying to make American ideals real. Yet the struggle has shifted. I used to fight for others. Now I fight for my own community, for military families who quietly carry the cost of freedom while being denied its rights.
Luke 18 tells of the unjust judge who ignores the widow’s cries. That, to me, is the face of our public life: institutions deaf to the pleas of those who’ve already paid the price. Veterans and their families are told our sacrifice bought liberty, only to learn that liberty can be revoked behind closed doors. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act names us a protected class, but unenforced law is no protection at all.
My limp isn’t only physical; it’s the toll of ten years wrestling for justice. Still, I won’t quit. My current federal case against state officials is one more night by the river, refusing to let go until daylight breaks. If service members can lose our civil rights in court, then no protected class is safe. The struggle for justice is collective or it isn’t justice at all.
Freedom was never free—it was earned, often by those who bled for a promise others took for granted. If we benefit from that promise, we owe something back: service, solidarity, the courage to wrestle. Jacob walked away limping, but he walked away blessed. May we do the same.
Transcript
Good morning and welcome to Proper 24. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. Our readings come to us today from Genesis 32, Psalm 1 21, 2, Timothy three and four, and Luke 18. The read I flip back and forth between the thematic reading and the chronological reading.
So I hope you'll excuse me for following along. I. I don't make any sense. I take the readings, which there's two options and four readings in each option. But the crossover, anyway, the RCL does not make sense to me, but I want it to, and so I'm just gonna keep doing it to the best of my ability. But there's certain ecclesiastical kind of structures that I've only ever seen from the outside, and the RCL is one of them, and I appreciate that because I don't choose the reading.
And because I don't choose them, it is left up to forces I cannot control. And it allows me to be humble while also being confident that somebody else's somebody else knows this thing. And one of the things I'd love to do is to create lectionary for grunts for grunt workers. And it's one of the things like proper is 24 and it has like a 29 after it.
If you're like me and you're a high church, low life, like you find comfort in these. Rituals, these structures, these liturgies, and you don't have to understand them completely. I know enough to know that somebody has chosen these readings a long time ago. And as we encounter them in real time, in real life, current events influence how we read them.
And I take that, I take great comfort in knowing that there is something that came before me that was laid and paved the way for me. And allows me to walk it in my own time over and over again. So in four years there'll be an, there'll be a new set of contexts and circumstances that allow me to read this with new and fresh eyes and ears again.
But I did choose this one today because it's the one about Jacob getting a limp and my back has been out. For basically two weeks straight. I have a sore back. It's not out. I think I know the difference. I think, I think this is just basically a sore back. I was painting and shelving and uns shelving and re shelving books two weeks ago, two weekends ago.
And it's been bad ever since. And in this reading, jacob, who is about to be renamed as though he were born again because you only receive your name at birth in Hebrew, indigenous Imagination. And he knows something's coming, and I didn't read ahead in the earlier verses, but he knows enough to know that something's coming, something important is happening.
So he prepares his wives, his servants, and his 11 children. Because two haven't been born yet. It might be Joseph and Benjamin who would be by his favorite wife, Rachel. So that hasn't happened yet. I wonder if he only fathers Benjamin and Joseph as Israel, not as Jacob, and I would have to look that up.
But anyway, he meets this man. It doesn't say anything. Jacob is just alone and he wrestled with a man. And the interpretation is this is God in human form, and that's important because God does not give Jacob a name. When Moses asks later in this story in Exodus, which comes later Moses is given not a name so much as a reference.
God says, tell them I am that I am has sent you, and that it's used as a name and it's it's good enough to be a name. But I find that really important because God speaks to a human community, that God will later instruct them to go out and improve the rest of the world, which assumes a kind of, anticipated influencer right to be chosen to be Jewish is to have been chosen by God as a people to write the world in some special way. And that assumes you have an audience, assumes you are an influencer. What kind of influencer is important? Anyway. God cannot reveal God's name in writing without being a public God.
And there are other public gods. The Greeks had gods, the Romans had Gods other ancient ne East cultures had gods, and many of them attempted to assert themselves publicly. And there's this one episode in probably Genesis, no Exodus. Actually, maybe even further with the Persian God or the Syrian God, Dagon, and they they're like in, they're in quiet battle.
But all we know is that Dagon is left broken on the floor after this tete with Yahweh, Hebrew, Israel's God. And this passage in Genesis spoke to me because I'm limping and that's the. The point of electionary, just as I said earlier I chose this one because it speaks to me.
I am limping all over. I've gotta go to the chiropractor first thing tomorrow. And the only the only connection that I have with it is, it's not only, but it's a deep connection. Not whenever you limp, you're in pain. And this limping can also sometimes. Be used in Hebrew as p it isn't here. But the limping before God is something that's important.
It's said elsewhere that Jacob or Israel continues to limp the rest of his life and that he's buried, or he, his life ends in Egypt where they with Joseph welcoming his entire family to Egypt, where he has ingratiated himself magically into the Egyptian political system. But the other reading, the other readings struck me as the Luke 18.
It's one of those that really hits me right now because I have several, I've gone through several iterations of the same system, of the same not judicial system, but. The system of meaning and morals that we set up for ourselves. The things we're told to expect, the places we're told to look to for justice and support.
They've been taken away from me and I'm the kind of person that, I can take a beating, but I won't tolerate and I can't tolerate when other people are beat up by this, by these systems. Before I discovered that I needed. Deliverance, salvation from immoral and corrupt systems. I served in the military to bring the idea of democracy and liberty and justice for all to other places because we were told we had it at home.
And I came home and I continued to apply that same labor to people with less privilege than me. And in 2016 or 2017, or really, there was never one moment, but over time I realized. As much privilege as I have as a veteran, all of that can be taken away in the most disgusting and hypocritical double take gut check.
I learned that military families are deprived of the rights, their service secures, and then it was time to fight for myself and not just for other people, fighting for myself and my community. Has been something I've been doing pre overtly for the last 10 years. It was no longer something that I was doing with my privilege for others.
It was something that I was trying to exploit my privilege, use it, squeeze it for every ounce I could in order for my own community, for my own self benefit, and the uniqueness of military families and American culture. And the legality that I discover, the illegality, the lack of civil rights that I discovered, it's been true for generations at least.
When we ended the draft, we created a caste system where we expected those from the bottom of our society who needed any leg up that they could possibly get. The military offered them a stepping stone, and then we sent them to Forever Wars. We didn't care. We, we and I say as a people, we accepted or we tacitly tolerated an absolute on its face lie to bring us to Iraq after absolutely decimating the place that was responsible for nine 11.
We allowed that. We continued to allow it for 20 years, all while military service members. We're seeing their own rights being taken away quietly, silently, behind closed doors in Congressional records. It was being taken away from us in reality, even as in theory, we were getting more. And by that the Hate Crimes Prevention Act that gave us protected status has never gone enforced.
It's this. Disgustingly imbalanced system where here's this token law, let's throw an extra thing on that nobody really knew actually was needed. Let's just throw it on. But then when it comes to enforcing it, we're not going to, so the pain in my back, the limping is a direct result of the stress of 10 years of fighting and more.
If you count my military service, my activism on behalf of other. Populations in Iraq, veterans against the war and other anti-war and social justice activism, that wasn't as far as I could tell. For me it was for others. It was me picking up. After I came home from fighting, I picked up and kept fighting for those that thought they had to fight for their rights, and they were right.
I'm not, I don't mean they thought wrong. But I didn't realize that I would have to wrestle for my own privilege, for my own freedom, for my own rights. And so in the Luke 18 reading, it's a very important reminder. This is not the parable of the persistent widow, it's the parable of the unjust judge.
And the judge is the entire American society that either is aware of and ignores or just ignores. The cry of the oppressed, the cry of those in pain, the cry of those committing suicide 17 times a day. The cry of those who thought that they had already paid a large sum of money for freedom and for citizenship only to be told that their money was no good.
Their sacrifice was not enough. Their limping wasn't enough to convince their neighbor that they needed help. They had to limp while slinging around the spiritual weapons of war in order to squeeze the unjust powers that be for an ounce of justice. And so this work is tiring. This work is brutalizing.
I'll keep doing it as much as I can. I've got a federal lawsuit right now against multiple politicians. If you think the town halls were bad where people were getting dragged out for questioning politicians, I had the state police called on me and come to my door. At the Capitol Police calling me at my cell phone number, telling me that I had been accused of making threats, that I had some ulterior motive other than justice.
But this federal lawsuit is the la this is the hill that, that my fight ends on. And it's either gonna go my way, which is our way, which is toward justice and liberty and for everybody, or it's gonna go. Bad. And when my rights as a protected class are successfully rolled back in a federal court of law, that means any and every other protected class can then have their rights taken away.
Because if you can do it to service members and veterans, if you can do it to military families. They can do it to anybody because military families were the first protected class. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go out and buy God as a grunt and more good news for GIS Frome in 2022. Or subscribe to the season pass at pew pew.com/merch.
And there you'll find chapter 13 and 14 where I talk about civil rights activism and celebrity activism that gave us. Partial justice, but because it didn't see what was going on with military families within the movement, because the movement could ignore the cries and the pain of military families, it had already sown the seeds of its own dissolution.
We're seeing the 1964 Civil Rights Act that Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King helped pass. It is coming undone. And it's because of our own ignorance. It's because of our own failure to look at the people in pain in our own society and to stop treating them like just tokens of our own free freedom.
If freedom is not free, it means someone is paid the cost. If you haven't paid the cost for freedom, then you need to. You need to get up and start earning your freedom. It sucks because we're told we're not supposed to have to earn it, but that was, that idea was created in a time where every able-bodied male would be expected to do their part.
In other words, conscription. We now have a democracy where you can go your entire life and eat the fruit of someone else's labor while you watch them starve. You can take freedom while depriving it of military families and call it justice. That is the, that is fundamentally an unjust system, an unjust nation.
An unjust people. And until we do the, until we commit to doing what is just paying our fair share, whether that's in military service or social activism, I don't care. But if you take up activism without doing the work of realizing where we got these rights from black veterans coming home from World War I, world War II and saying, no.
If anybody deserves freedom, it's us because we are the ones who fought for it. And now because they didn't, close that loop, close the gap. They, in 1964 is not when military families became a protected class. It was in 2009 on the back of another marginalized community. The gender minorities and sexual minorities, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 is what?
Got that element over the finish line, but we're not there yet because we're, we'll become incensed and upset if a gender minority, a young gender minority, is killed. But we know that people are committing suicide every day, and we continue to remain silent.
