😇 Epiphany 4
Readings: Micah 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
In this episode, I explore how instruction creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders in our faith communities. Drawing on readings from Micah, the Psalms, First Corinthians, and Matthew's Beatitudes, I examine who has the authority to teach, who chooses to be taught, and how genealogy functions as a meaning-making system. The central question isn't just what scripture says, but who decides they belong to the story being told—whether through Moses, Miriam, and Aaron, or through Christ as the bastard child who inverts expectations about insider status.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
I translate "basileos" as "Republic of Heaven" rather than "kingdom" because by the time of the emperors, kings were subordinate to imperial power. "Republic" emphasizes distributed, public power rather than centralized control—Yahweh is a public God who engages openly from mountaintops, not through exclusive priestly channels. In the Beatitudes, I render "pure of heart" as "souls are clear" because purity language typically belongs to temple systems, yet God comes to us in Christ as a baby who shits his pants. The God-fearers were outsiders who sat on the synagogue porch, attracted but not fully committed—the perpetual tension between belonging and remaining outside.
Theological Argument:
Genealogy isn't just biology; it's a chosen meaning-making system that determines whose wisdom we draw from and whose story we trace as our own. Indigenous traditions understand this—they honor seven generations forward while we in the modern West barely think past our children. The Sadducees claimed righteousness through their Zadokite ancestry, but once that system broke, the high priesthood became mere political appointment. Similarly, when we ask who subscribes to our meaning-making system, we're asking about coherency across generations. Christ disrupts insider/outsider categories by claiming that the supposed outsiders—the rural, the poor, the hungry for righteousness—are actually the true insiders in God's republic.
Contemporary Application:
The work of peacemaking changes because humanity changes and evolves in ways God does not. If you find yourself doing the same old thing—clicktivism, getting mad at what everyone's supposed to get mad at—maybe the work needs to change. Some peace has already been accomplished, and now you need to do different work toward the same end. The devil doesn't strike the same place twice. Real work is tiring, confusing, maybe dangerous, but it adapts to accomplish new goals rather than becoming empty liturgy. I learned this returning to Iraq with so-called peacemakers whose work had become choreographed fabrication rather than genuine response to present need.
Questions Raised:
How does genealogy function as both limitation and liberation in forming identity?
What distinguishes God-fearers (resident aliens) from full insiders, and why does that boundary exist?
If purity language belongs to temple systems, what does "clarity of soul" mean for approaching God?
How do we recognize when our activism has become performative liturgy rather than responsive work?
What does it mean that the Republic of Heaven inverts insider/outsider categories through elevating the lowly?
Reflection
All right. Welcome to the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, or E4 Sunday, where my tech fours and terminal Lance is at. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. Our readings come to us today from Micah 6, Psalm 15, First Corinthians 1, and Matthew 5.
You'll see a pattern here. There's instruction. Deliberate instructions. Not "oh, here's some proverbs here and there." It's like clear, direct, to the point. And Micah, a minor prophet, we are reminded in the voice of the prophet of our own history. If we are the people of God, we the people, then we trace our story. We choose to trace our story through Moses, Miriam, and Aaron. And before then, Abram. And before then, Adam and Eve—or the Human and Eve—and then before then, God. And I say that because genealogy is really important. It serves as a bottleneck if you're looking for who and what you are, who you belong to.
You're going to look to your parents' parents, and the parents before them, the generations that preceded you. And I really love indigenous traditions because they don't take for granted not only that they've come from somewhere—the land—and somehow there's the creation mythologies, typically have them arising out of the land where they are. But also the generations that came before them. They keep this wisdom passed on orally. And then a lot of Native traditions now will also explicitly talk about seven generations in the future. How do my actions today affect for good or bad the generations that come later? And that's something I think the Western mindset, the modern Western white mindset, really needs to learn from.
We talk a lot about what kind of future are we leaving our children, but we haven't talked in the West, in the white West, what it means to leave an earth for our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, their grandchildren. Genealogy serves as a meaning-making system. As a Christian—or I'll say as me—I do have Jewish grandparents, but I made a decision, and my parents made a decision how to form me. I didn't go to synagogue or to temple. We went to church because I was miraculously saved from death at three months old. But we made a series of decisions about who and what we are or were, what we wanted to be. And genealogy is a kind of parallel system—the choices we make and the choices that we don't really get to make. We don't get to choose who our parents are. We don't get to choose what land we're native to. I'm native to Southern California in all of its history. I am not a Native American, but I am native to America, and that means I also adopt—I have been adopted into, I've inherited—the story that America tells about itself and where it came from. And we can't distinguish that from the land. And so we also have to be thinking about how Native Americans, indigenous Native Americans, how they tell the story of the land and what the land and prior generations have taught us.
And so in the Psalm, we get another kind of instruction. Evildoers are exposed. The godly people honor the God-fearers. And this is a—FNO, and we'll see that later or related terms—because God-fearers are outsiders who sit on the porch of the synagogue. They aren't circumcised. They don't go inside, but they really like what's going on inside, and there's something stopping them from going all the way inside, whether their own unwillingness to be circumcised or family connections. And Jesus Christ addresses this. Like, "I might split up families." The choice to follow my story, to follow in my story, might break up families. But God-fearers are the name in Hebrew and Greek. In Hebrew, I can't remember what it is in Hebrew, but it's basically like resident aliens or the sojourners amongst you. Because Israel in the exile, they would attract and absorb other people groups. The Gibeonites being one of them, I believe, where they heard about Israel, they didn't want to get defeated in battle. So instead they tricked them into a treaty. And then the Gibeonites became the water bearers, the servants—not slaves, but servants—they became the workers of Israel. And so that's—there's this tension between inside, outside, always in almost every culture: who belongs to us and who do we have power over?
Membership in America—you have membership if you were born in this land, one of the few nations to this day that have land rights, not blood rights. If you were born in our territory, you get rights. A lot of places, you only get rights if you were born to someone who has those rights, including in Rome. That's how they did it in Rome. And so Paul, who has these rights, is different from a lot of the Jews who don't have those rights. It's another conversation. But the tension between insider and outsider is the context within which we talk about instruction. Who gives a shit about what I have to say? People who decide I have authority to say it. There's not very many of you. There's between 15 and 20 who listen to these podcasts regularly, and I'm fine with that. I don't do it for you. I do it for me. I do it because I want to get closer to this thing we call the Bible. And I don't want to privatize whatever benefit or fruit—this fruit that I find doesn't belong to me. That's just not how I believe ideas and truth works. But if you are being instructed by me, it's because you've made a choice to follow in my story.
In First Corinthians, we talk about wisdom and foolishness. And again, we're still talking about ingroup, outgroup. Who counts God's wisdom—meaning law and prophets—who counts that as wisdom, and who counts it as foolishness? Because if you believe in Torah, those other people are going to say the thing that you call wisdom, they're going to call it foolishness. That is how—that's another way to differentiate between insiders and outsiders: who subscribes to your meaning-making system? And next to that conversation is that meaning-making system coherent and productive, or is it not? And that takes time to figure out—several generations. But they may—they, the outsiders—may say what you think is smart isn't so smart. And we might be like, "Yeah, that's okay. That's not why we believe it. But we get it. You don't—you aren't a part of our meaning-making system. You're not a part of our family. You're not a part of our ancestry." That's a great word I heard from one of the—on the reservation from the Grand Ronde tribes. I don't—I won't own it, but I'm sure it's been said elsewhere. Ancestry is a great word.
Anyway, so inside, outside has to do with meaning. It has to do with belonging. It has to do with coherency and linearity. Like, how many can you count among your ancestors? Whose wisdom are you drawing from? Are your ancestors Aristotle? Are they Nietzsche? Are they Paul, or are they Christ? And if they're Christ, it's a particular story: a bastard child born in the rural gentile former lands of Israel. Like, to be brought in, or to assert that those outsiders are actually insiders and that the cool kid insiders that think they're the insiders—they're actually on the outside.
I'll do another post in the future, hopefully soon, about the Sadducees in Hebrew. That was "Zadokite." We are the Zadokite. We are the righteous ones. And it was drawing on an ancestry. Zadok was the priest in charge of building Solomon's temple, and the Zadokite dynasty went all the way through the intertestamental period before being broken. And once it was broken, the high priesthood became a political appointment. They were anointed—you splash them with oil or whatever—but that meaning-making system had lost its coherency because the Zadokite system was gone. Herod would come in later and destroy the temple. He called it remodeling, but he took it down to the foundations. He replaced the foundation stones of Zerubbabel and Joshua's temple. Herod's temple is the third temple. We're waiting maybe on a fourth one. But anyway, the point I'm making is: when we hear these—this is what you should do—you should also be hearing who is "you"? Who is the collective you? Who is Israel? Who are the people who are struggling with God and anticipate prevailing, or at least continuing to struggle successfully with God, keeping God in the mix? Not just wrestling with yourself, not just wrestling with the culture wars—wrestling with God. Who are those people?
And in Matthew 5 and the Beatitudes, we have another instruction. And I've changed "apostles"—or "mathētai" means students, pupils, followers—because if Christ is a rabbi, which means teacher or professor, then the people who draw near to him voluntarily are his students. That's why they're called "mathētai." And we've heard them before. We've heard other English translations of what these Beatitudes are. And sometimes we hear those other translations so much they begin to lose meaning without us knowing it. We need to get back into the meaning-making system by reengaging with those languages, reengaging with that culture.
And so when I say instead of the "Kingdom of Heaven"—which I said I think last week—I instead translate that as the "Republic of Heaven," because by the time you had an emperor, Julius Caesar and Octavian who becomes Augustus, then "king," quote unquote "king," and "kingdom," that's something new. The kings are below the emperor, and so "king," as in the centralizing power—which can be troubling—is no longer the top predator, the apex predator of the political system. It's somehow below it. And "republic" is "res publica"—all things are made public under a republic. It means no private interests are in control, but that the public, governed through democratic processes, is public. Yahweh is a public God. He or they consistently engage with enemy gods like Dagon and calls them lesser gods. They're still spiritual entities—call them gods of our own making, whatever. That's fine. But Yahweh, the Lord of Gods—Yahweh Elohim, Yahweh—asserts themself publicly from a mountaintop where everybody can hear. It's not just Apollo and some of Apollo's priests. No, there's one priesthood because there's one God.
And as we continue through this teaching, this instruction, some of them are still mostly relevant. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—you have that pit in your stomach and you know you need something and you can only be filled by righteousness—you'll be satisfied, you'll be filled.
Another one in verse eight that I did change: "Blessed are those who are pure of heart." I try and avoid purity language because that's usually reserved for God and God's self, and particularly the temple, the tabernacle system approaching. God, you must be pure. And yet God comes to us in Christ in a trough as a baby who shits their pants and pukes all over their parents. Maybe we need to rethink what "pure" means in a divine economy. And so instead I said, "souls are clear." "Katharos" is pure and clean. But I use the language of "clear" because the next one is "those who—they will see God." They will not have any obscurity. They will see what God intends because their souls are clear instead of opaque.
And finally, the peace workers, instead of peacemakers. Like, too many people are claiming the mantle of peacemaking. And if you go to pewpew.ghost.io, or I think I put it on GI Justice, I am in the middle of telling a story about my return to Iraq with, quote unquote, "peacemakers." And how that was really just a choreographed fabrication. And I didn't have the language to extricate myself from—yeah, manufactured liturgy, manufactured faith—and I found myself caught in those systems for a long time. And when it came time to do the work, to do work which you don't necessarily know how to do—if the work becomes routine and mundane, that's liturgy. When it doesn't need to make sense, the meaning is already there, and then you're just doing this from rote memory, that's liturgy or something like it.
Work might change. If you complete one task, the work might be different. If you got detailed out to clean up battalion headquarters and you still have another hour on the clock, they're going to give you something else to do. If you keep doing the same old thing, they're going to be like, "What the hell are you doing? It's already clean. We've already got X, Y, Z. Why are you not doing A, B, C now?" And that's an important part to close with because the nature of the work of God is changing, because humanity changes, evolves. We are trapped in time in a way that God is not. And the work might look different. It's still just work. It will be tiring. It'll be confusing. It might be dangerous. But if you're doing the same old work and you may have already accomplished the goal, maybe you need to update what the work looks like because peace is not static. Just like the dark forces of evil, alienation—that's not static. There will always be people who are alienated. And our work is always about overcoming the forces of alienation and oppression as they change shape to match our own kind of work. The devil doesn't strike the same place twice. And if you find yourself just doing the same old thing—clicktivism, right? Just getting mad at the same thing that everybody's supposed to get mad at—maybe the work needs to change because that's no longer peacemaking. Some peace has already been accomplished, and now you've got to get ready to do a different kind of work to the same end.
