🐮 Proper 8
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to First Formation. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings for proper eight come to us from Psalm one Kings 19, Psalm 16, Galatians five, and Luke nine. And in our reading today, the theme is about following, what does it mean to follow Christ who you may know as Jesus, but whose native.
His name is Joshua, and that's important to name because when we say Joshua, we have to think about the sixth book of the Bible and we have to look at our own colonialism entitlement. And that Joshua and Judges is the Hebraic attempt at understanding how they got what they got. And sometimes when someone who's got something illegitimately tells us to follow them, we think, oh gosh, now we're gonna get our hands dirty.
And that's true, and that's also not true. I know a lot about guilt by association because as a veteran and as an artilleryman, I am clumped into a lot of things that I didn't do, like killing babies like bombing hospitals. I saw that, but I didn't do it. I don't think I saw killing babies, but I have heard people accuse soldiers of being baby killers.
It was in Israel the Israeli Defense Forces, but I was there as a protestor in the village of Berlin. Anyway so when we hear someone say, follow me, we wanna know who the F is telling us to follow them. And I think that's a really good instinct, but we gotta be careful not to take it too far as Aristotle said, moderation in everything.
So who and what is this person? Called the Christ. And why is it important to understand who they are and to use their name? Elijah and Alicia is told, elijah's told by God that you'll anoint king over a ram and you'll anoint a king jehu over Israel. And Jehu is actually one of the kings that do well, if I remember correctly.
And you're going to anoint Alicia as a prophet in your place. Here comes your replacement. Get ready for it. And so he goes out and he finds Alicia the most, the last one on the list. He was out plowing his field, which coincidentally. Side note, there's no coincidence. I don't believe in coincidence.
I don't believe in luck. I believe in God. I believe in what I can see and observe and understand and process. It is not a coincidence that there are 12 oxen. There are 12 yoke of oxen ahead of him. And Alicia, the successor was with the last of them, the youngest, the least of the 12. And when you hear 12, you'll think the 12 tribes of Israel.
That's great. When you hear 12 is a Christian, you'll think 12 apostles great. The prophet was with the least of them. That's the youngest, whether that's Benjamin whose mother died in childbirth. And who Isaac refused to name according to his wife's wishes. Benjamin I think means to cry out, but I'm not sure.
The second youngest is Joseph, who had two tribes, and Joseph was the one that was sold into slavery and becomes a prince in Egypt. And I met, I, it's important to point out the last. Of the 12 oxen because it's important that the last are important. So when you hear all this stuff and this is my, I don't know what to do with this.
I don't like to center royalty. I don't want to center. Voices that have already been centered like kings and queens and all the rest. And what I love about the Bible is it forces us to be bridge people. It forces us to translate between the powerful and the powerless. And nobody has no power, but they have less power than kings and queens and the least that's the 12th oxen, the least.
That's Benjamin. And the tribal allotment of Benjamin contains Jerusalem if you wanna say manas in a frame. They have the biggest tribal allotment because they were the most fruitful and multiplied, which kind of tracks with the Hebrew Bible elevating the least. But anyway now Elijah goes by him and throws his mantle, his cape, his cloak over Alicia.
And Alicia knows exactly what's going on. He's oh shit. He's chosen me. To be the next prophet over Israel or not chosen. He's anointing me. He is calling me out as taking his place. And that's a lot. 'cause Elijah is a lot. And so Alicia says he runs after Elijah and he is wait, but let me just say goodbye because my life is never gonna be the same.
And then I'll follow you after I've said everything in order. And Elijah says, go back again for what have I done to you. And Elijah seems to allow it, unlike Jesus, who we'll talk about later, or Joshua. So Elijah, Elisha goes back and he kills the 12 oxen, and he doesn't just kill them, slaughtering them is ritual the, can't remember the word off the top of my head, but it's not murdering them, but they're ritually, slaughtered.
Using their own equipment, he boils their flesh and gives them, gives it as food to the people. And now if I looked up the people, I bet it would say Gentiles or Goam, and they ate. And then, and only then after the people were fed by the 12 oxen, did the two prophets walk off and enter into, at least Alicia, enter into his vocation.
And that's a really hard word because who. Wait, are we killing the tribes of Israel? No. Not exactly. I don't think, of course this is metaphor, but if you like, one of the things that I learned from the military is that death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Everything dies. It's the na nature of life.
The nature, the cycle of life, right? So if you're afraid of death, I'm sorry, there's not very much I can do for you, but to tell you, you better get over your fear because everybody's gonna die. If you're afraid of riding your bike, that's okay. Not everybody has to ride their bike, but if you're afraid of death, everybody's gonna have to go through it.
I'm very sorry. There's nothing I can do. What we do with our death, the reason we choose to live and the reasons we choose to die are important. The worst thing that can happen to you is not dying. The worst thing that can happen to you is spoiling. While you're still alive. 'cause then no one's going to eat you then if you spoil before, it's your time.
No one wants anything to do with you. You smell funky, you look all gross and nobody likes you. Problem is we have makeup departments, we have shiny lights that will like, draw. We have plastic surgery and so you might have spoiled, but you might look great on the outside. And you, nobody will know that you're spoiled until someone takes a bite, until someone wants to know who this person is, who's in front of me.
So let's go back to Galatians and Freedom. And I, Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles. I love a lot of what he does, but I don't worship him. If Paul says something that I don't see. Joshua the Christ saying, I'm going to take with a big old grain of salt, but if they align, as far as I can tell, I'm gonna full throated align with Paul.
I. I like, or I can see the contrast be between flesh and spirit. But if that's all if you don't see the point of being somewhere between that I'm not all flesh. I'm not all Spirit. I'm not without spirit. I'm not without flesh. I'm something in between. I'm a bridge. I am a translation. I'm a hermeneutic.
I'm a point between two poles. Paul really hits on the binary, and that's what I don't like because it, like with Augustine later, he, there's a name for it, manism. There's another name for it. Marcian. If you want all of something that something else is expense. You're not a bridge person, you're just a drawbridge waiting to pull up and avoid any kind of adverse action.
It's just a defense mechanism. To be Christian, to be, to follow the prophets and the law together, you have to be between the powerful and the powerless. You have to be willing to approach power without discarding it, and you have to be willing to let go of all the power and privilege you have without losing hope.
So Galatians talks about freedom. This is the week of July 4th. I didn't know that until my partner reminded me and we went to a church. I won't say which one, but we had a difficult interaction and we left church this morning and it was around my identity as a military veteran, which I chose, but I didn't.
It's the site where I found myself falling into when I didn't have any privilege left to lean on. As a veteran, I'm put up on a soapbox and I'm expected to be a hero. But there are some aspects of my service that I'm not proud of. And in other places in this place this morning, I'm expected to be invisible If I don't fit into other people's boxes about, moral injury and post-traumatic stress, or rah ra mbba warrior July 4th kind of stuff.
If I am in between patriot and pacifist, I better make myself invisible. In order to fit in, because we don't like contrasting voices. We don't like mirrors being held up to us to show us that we are near spoiling. We wanna believe we're doing okay. We wanna believe that freedom is absolute. We wanna believe that we don't really have to work for freedom for anything.
We want something from nothing. By the way I don't believe in creation X nihilo, but that's another story. Freedom comes only at great cost, harmony and justice, and peace and shalom and all these different things. They come at a cost. If you don't see the cost, it means you have privilege. If you refuse to look at the cost, it means you are in enslave.
That means that you're looking at the fruit of my labor and wa, and while you watch me starve military families. Are expected to sit in darkness even though it's their work that brought Americans freedom. And this experience this morning was about being invisible, about being unspoken, and I was unwilling to be in the room just so that people could deliberately not speak about what I represent, and then to go in and hear a sermon about freedom.
I don't think a lot of Americans. Would recognize freedom if it looked him in the face. We might recognize injustice, but we don't recognize freedom. I don't think we want freedom to serve us. We don't want freedom and its costs to look at us. We don't wanna be reminded that Joshua is the name of the Messiah.
So from here on out, I'm not going to justify anymore my using. Jesus's native tongue to his native tongue. Yoshua, we already have an English translation of Yoshua. It's Joshua. We just don't like it. Jerome in the fourth century didn't like that. Joshua is the Hebrewic wrestling with what it means to be an entitled people.
If you can't go to your entitlement, if you can't look in the mirror and recognize you have shit that you haven't earned, you are entitled, you have taken more manna than you deserve, and you have begun to spoil. You cannot recognize the fruits of the spirit if all you ever see is fruits of the spirit and the work of the flesh.
If you only see a binary as an either or. You're not a bridge person, you're not a Christian. You're not reconciling God with creation. You're just enjoying your comfortable life at someone else's expense.
If that makes you uncomfortable, I hope you'll keep listening. I know I'm not the most easy person to get along with, especially if all you do is listen to me. If actually maybe it is easier to just listen to me. But I'm not here to say the nice, fuzzy, warm things. I'm here to speak the truth. I'm here to live truthfully without concealment.
I'm not gonna sit in darkness any longer. And I don't think any military veteran family member dependent soldier reservist, I don't think any of y'all, any of us should be made to sit in the darkness. If it's true that America is this shining light on the hill, it's, to put it bluntly, it's not fair.
And I want what's fair. I want to enjoy the fruit of my own labor. I want freedom. I wanna make sure that other people have it too. I don't think it's a zero sum game, but if I can't have freedom and I'm the one who worked for it, we're just a bunch of entitled little shits or those, we are those of us who didn't do any work to secure freedom and expect it to just keep flowing.
We expect the fruit to just keep producing and then when it doesn't, we get pissy and mad and we curse the fig tree for not producing fruit without asking does it have the nutrients it needs? Does it have the water it needs? Does it have the attention it needs? Do you know that when first fruits are actually bitter.
It's the first fruits of the season are not ones you really want to eat. You want the late in the season. Shit, that's the good stuff. First fruits represent what's coming. I. We are in the season of Pentecost. Pentecost is the old festival of weeks chavo that marks the first grain harvest. The very first harvest of the year is grain.
Your grass dies when it starts getting hot. That is the grass grain is a kind of grass. They're kissing cousins. It doesn't die. It flowers and fruits, and you take the seed and that's what you eat. So Pentecost is it's time to eat grain, fruits, berries, vegetables, all of it's gonna start coming in a time of abundance.
It. It's ordinary, right? As long as we've done the work, we're gonna get fed. If you don't do the work, don't expect to get fed. If you haven't worked for freedom, you do not deserve to be taking it from someone else's plate.
