🐮 Proper 25
This week’s readings — Jeremiah 14, Psalm 84, 2 Timothy 4, and Luke 18 — remind us that “the good fight” isn’t about winning or dominating, but about humility and love that are strong enough to face the truth.
The Good Fight and the First Impulse
In Luke 18, the tax collector prays, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” I have those words tattooed on my collarbone. They name what I believe should be our first impulse: humility. Before courage, before righteousness, there must be the willingness to admit fault. Courage, when it is real, flows from that humility.
Modern life tells us to be kings of our own castles — to dominate our domains. But scripture’s household language isn’t domus (Latin for dominion) — it’s oikos, the Greek for household or family. True strength guards and guides; it doesn’t conquer. Deborah judged Israel; Jael won honor on the battlefield; love has always been tougher and more complex than control.
Love sometimes demands hard lessons. It may sting — like a parent pulling a child’s hand from the stove — but it aims to heal, not to scar. I learned that the hard way as a soldier. I served a corrupt system and watched how quickly welcome turned to resentment. I had to face my own complicity, to say: I did wrong, and I must learn from it. Mercy isn’t cheap; it’s costly honesty.
When Paul writes of fighting the good fight in 2 Timothy 4, he means wrestling not with flesh and blood but with the powers that bend us toward greed, pride, and despair. The “good fight” is inward and communal — against the lie that some are worth more than others.
Jeff Bezos’s labor is not greater than that of a strawberry picker. Yet our world rewards the wrong fight. Christ calls us back to the real one: to remember that all are created equal, and to love even those who don’t look or sound like us.
That is the fight worth keeping.
That is the humility that begins every true act of courage.
Transcript
Good morning and pro. Welcome to Proper 25. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Jeremiah 14, Psalm 84, 2 Timothy four, and Luke 18. And the readings I am, I'm just struck by the good fight of the faith is always a fun one for.
Military veterans in particular, and Luke 18 for grunts the lowly, servants of society they often find themselves in difficult positions. So in Luke 18, the Pharisee and the tax collector is actually something I have tattooed on my collarbone. In Aramaic, when the tax collector says God be merciful to me a sinner that should be the first impulse of our heart.
It's not the only impulse and I don't think it should be the last impulse either, but it should be the first one because I believe that humility is the cardinal virtue, not courage. Or if courage is, it takes courage to be humble. And it flies in the face of so much of what our modern world believes in the West, and particularly the English speaking west.
We want to believe that we can each be emperors. We can be kings of our own castles in charge of our own domains, our own dous, our own homes. But we forget that in Latin Dous and the potter are famis they are dominating spirit in Latin, which. Is the language of the empire. Domus is not the language that's used in Greek and in scripture, rather it's Kos, which is family or household, and the head of the household is usually a male, but not always.
Deborah is the head of the houses of Israel as its judge. And Ja Ael was the one who received the honor from the day of battle against csra. And the male military commander Barack takes a back seat. But Kos does at times require force. You may have to teach your children a hard lesson.
And I've heard, love is difficult. And one of my favorite lines about love is from the band, th Rice. And there's, I can't remember the name of the song you probably remember. If you've heard of them. And I talk about love, you've already thought of it, but love is not a calling, it is a burden.
Gosh, I'm messing up the lyric. But the difficult. Reality is that because people learn in so many different ways and people experience hardship in many different ways, there are legitimate concerns about having to teach people a lesson. They will learn one way or another, a difficult lesson. Whether you teach that themselves, yourself, or you let nature, you let the environment teach them and we'll take, touching the hot stove, right? A child. My child could learn to not touch the stove by touching it. I want them to learn without pain. But learning is experiential, short of physical pain and scarring and damage. There might be embarrassment that you feel when they reach for the stove and I slap it away.
And I'll tell them, you will burn yourself. Would you rather me slap your hand or would you rather burn your hand? And some people, they like me, they're hardheaded. They have to learn the hard way. Because the truth of the matter is that love is tough. If you're not prepared to be tough in love, that's something short of full love.
And I don't intend to suggest that all hard lessons are legitimate. I think our, my parents spanked me and most of my friends were spanked and there's good reason that we don't need to now. But the other kind of the pendulum, the other end of the pendulum is do you never raise your voice and never expose them to the embarrassment of being called out verbally?
And painfully, emotionally, painfully the Pharisee and the tax collector, the reading is difficult for me because I was a tax collector. I was the one who is doing what was expected of me from a corrupt and corrupting imperial entitled system. I was the person who was protecting those who were corrupt.
I was the one who was forcing the justification of their, of corrupt actions through my strength, my deeds. I was in Iraq in the second rotation and during that rotation I watched as the Iraqis lost faith in us where waves of welcome at the beginning turned into things thrown at us and scowls and dirty looks.
And I know, 'cause I watched my platoon do things that earned them that kind of reputation. So I am inescapably. Implicated in the worst that most Americans can think of. And in being tough with myself, not just going for the lowest hanging fruit in terms of rationale of what, how I ended up there, and how I tolerated that for as long as I did.
I have to be honest, I have to be loving to myself and say I did things that were wrong and that I should have learned faster. I should have seen more clearly. But once I accept that, I don't keep it on myself. When I've learned that I've done things wrong, I seek to make them right and it's never a one-to-one parallel.
I went back to Iraq. Hoping to see or to hear from the spirit what must be done to atone, to return relationships, international relationships to harmony. And I was kept from seeing that. I won't go into all that much detail, but that wasn't my, that wasn't for me, whether I like it or not, and whether the actions of other people that made that true, doesn't matter.
I'm only responsible for my actions. And I say that because one of the things I had to wrestle with was my individual complicity in a social problem, we send soldiers to war, and then we treat them as though everything that went wrong with that war went wrong with each soldier. That's why when Vietnam veterans started coming back after 67, when the popularity and the justification for that war eroded.
We blamed each and every soldier we saw, whether we spit at them, whether we looked side eyed at them, we took our frustrations at a collective wrong and put it upon individual consciences, and that was wrong of our society As a tax collector, as a former soldier, as someone who has done wrong, my first instinct should be shit, I fucked up.
I hope God has mercy on me, and when I learned that God has had mercy on me, the next obvious thing is have mercy on others. The prior reading from two Timothy four I said is really important because it includes this thing called the the good fight. And it's compared with a race because in ancient Western Imaginations competition was parallel with conquering and war.
The same people who were fit to fight were the ones that we in between hostilities, we would watch. Feats of strength, which we think, war is a feat of strength. And so there are these kind of mirror things of sporting and military life. But what does it mean? Is there a good fight?
I think there is, that fight is not against flesh and blood. It's not about our, the people that we dislike and who act improperly, but. Against the impulses, the principles, the characteristics, the expectations, the motivations that certain people choose to privilege, choose to follow. It's okay if you follow other gods.
It's okay if you follow mammon. As long as you abide. By what mam is, abides by. So I say that because like money is supposed to be an equalizing force. We're all supposed to get a certain amount, a fair wage for our labor. This is the thing that goes throughout the Bible, the New Testament.
But we also know that's not true. Jeff Bezos does not work harder than an immigrant picking strawberries in California. In fact, I bet Jeff Bezos, the amount of his labor, his bodily labor pales in comparison to an immigrant picking strawberries in Southern California. And yet our world tolerates that.
And I think there is a fight that people are made equal. I think that's one of the most important statements our country has ever put forth is that. Individual human beings, which we used to call men as a stand in for humanity that all people are created equal. They come out of the womb, deserving the same amount of everything, and as they go through their life, struggle to do the right thing.
The good fight, sometimes they fail, and whether they can face their failures, whether they can face their own complicity and evil, whether they can face the fact that they've sinned. That is not what is often rewarded and remembered. We ignore sins. We ignore the sins of those that look like us and sound like us, and share our interests and motivations.
And Christ calls us to love those who don't look like us, who don't act like us, who don't sound like us, who we may not understand. And that is what the good fight is to remember what we were all born to be, which is equal and good and together.
