🐮 Lent 2

Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35. 

Further Reading: 

• FW-H3898 (fight)

Transcript

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Genesis chapter 15 verses one through 12 and 17 through 18. After these things, the word of the Lord cave to came to Abram in a vision. Don't be afraid, Abram, I'm your shield. Your reward shall be very great. But Abraham said, oh Lord God, what will you give me for a continued childless? And the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. And Abram said, you've given me no offspring. So a slave born in my house is to be my heir. But the word of the Lord came to him, this man shall not be your heir. No one, but your very own issue shall be your heir. He brought him outside and said, look toward heaven and count the stars if you're able to count them. Then he said to him, so shall your descendants be, and he believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Then he said to him, I'm the Lord who brought you from the earth, the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess. But he said, oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, bring me a heifer. Three years old, a female goat, three years old, a Ram, three years old, a turtle of, and a young pigeon. He brought him all these things and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other, but he did not cut the birds in two. When the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying to your descendants, I give this land from the river of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates. Psalm 27, the Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When evil doers assail me to devour my flesh, my adversaries, and my foes, they shall stumble and fall though an army and camp against me, my heart shall not fear the war rise up against me, yet I will be confident. One thing I ask the Lord this, I seek to live in the house of the Lord all my days to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple, for he will hide me in a shelter In the day of trouble, he'll conceal me under the cover of his tent. He'll set me high as on a rock. Now my head is lifted up against above my enemies all around me, and I'll offer his 10 in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy. I'll sing and make melody to the Lord. Hear, oh Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me. Come my heart says, seek his face, your face. Lord, do I seek? Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger. You who have been my help. Do not cast me off. Do not cast me off. Do not forsake me. Oh God, of my salvation. If my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up. Teach me your way, oh Lord. And lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries for false witnesses, I have rise, have risen against me, and they're breathing out violence. I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong and let your heart take courage. Wait for the Lord. Philippians chapter three verses verse 17 through chapter four, verse one. Brothers and sisters, join me in imitating me. Join in imitating me and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. I've often told you of them, and now I tell you, even with tears, their end is destruction. Their God is the belly, and their glory is in their shame. Their minds are set on earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven. It's from there that we are expecting a savior. The Lord Jesus, Joshua Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters whom I love and long for my joy and my crown stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved, the Gospel of Luke chapter 13 verses 31 to 35. Yes. At that very hour, some Pharisees came and said to him, get away from here for Herod wants to kill you. He said to them, go and tell that fox for me. Listen, I'm casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day, I'll be on my way. I must be on my way because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones, those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen, gathers her brood under her wings and you are not willing? See, your house is left to you, and I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes. When you say blessed is the one who came, comes in the name of the Lord. Good morning and welcome to the second Sunday in Lent for the Luke in Year the Ox Year Sea. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from Genesis 15, Psalm 27, Philippians three, and Luke 13. I, the reading also prescribes for Luke nine, but we read that last week and it's about the transfiguration. Or the week before last, I can't remember. And in the reading today, there's one of the things that kind of sticks out to me. I love the Genesis stuff where we get the kind of mythic origins of Israel's identity and there's certain things that stand out like the, in this original covenant with Abram, it's a heifer, a female goat. Which if you read ahead in judges Ja Ail, who's responsible for killing the general csra her name, Ja Ail means mountain goat and she's a woman, right? Female goat. The oldest stories of the Bible. One of, if not the oldest is in judges four and five with Ja Ale, Barak, the commander from Naftali, a holy city in Naftali. And Debra, the one of, one of the first judges. I don't know if she was the first, I don't think she was. Anyway. And then a ram, which is a male goat, a turtle dove in a young pigeon and. There's an important distinction between sheep and goats in the New Testament, and the goats are the ones that are the Yom Kippur sacrifice. They're also acceptable for the Passover Seder. Goats are what I call think of as like after things, there's after thoughts, which you don't think of at first, and then those things that you don't think of at first, but are. Things rather than thoughts are after things and. When, there's a number of after things that go through my head. One of them is the raven or the crow, which is the first one to go out to search for land when Noah is looking for dry land after the flood and stop. Because the raven is an omnivore that can eat meat as well as vegetables or plants. They're going out to look for dead bodies. And they'll eat them and they'll stay there. Maybe that's why the raven didn't come back. When the pigeon goes out or the dove, they are nesting, okay, now that all the dead bodies are gone, can we make a life in this destruction that God has wrought? Goats are an after thing. We Christians often put the lamb, the sheep, baby sheep first. The Lamb of God is not a thing that takes away the sins of the. World that's a goat. The raven rather than the dove are the ones that relied on first. And then you can even think of like the ass or the donkey rather than the horse. These kind of underlings, these underdogs in which, if you think about it, underdog is the dog getting a. Screwed. The dominate and the first things and the first thoughts. Those are the cool kid things like the horse, the lamb the oxen, right? But God leans on these after things. Because they know their place. And if you're an agrarian and you have this kind of agricultural imagination, the first fruits that's actually a fig has these things called BBA fruits and their last year's shoots producing fruits and they're bitter and they don't taste very good, and you'll usually cut'em off. And then the second fruits, the after. Harvest, at least figs are much sweeter and they're the full crop or the full fruit. And so the second things, the after things sometimes are. Better than the first things. And you, if, you could think of in human terms, prima genitor, the idea that the first male gets everything is challenged frequently in the Bible. It's usually the youngest, like David, the youngest of eight kids, Jacob, the younger of two twins. It's these after things that come first in the kingdom of God. And in this. Abrahamic Covenant. There are these after things, and even the turtle doves and pigeons. When Jesus goes to turn over the temple, money changers tables, he is told, or he tells the pigeon, merchants and the bird merchants, Hey, I. I'm watching you, but I'm not gonna turn your table over. And that may be because the pigeons and the dove, or I'm sorry, the pigeons were the cheapest to afford if you needed to make a sacrifice. But if you are a bastard child in a broken home, you'd be lucky if you could afford the pigeons for your obli, obligatory sacrifice. So Jesus is probably identifying with these after things, whether it's the birds. As opposed to the ram or the oxen that's sacrificed. He identifies with these second after things. And the challenge in reading later in Philippians, Saul, is addressing a community that is made up of first things and former first things, which is to say. Retired Roman military families. And so they're used to being the best of the best. And Saul is here to tell them, actually you are, to be you are to become like an after thing. You are to become like your slave. You are to become like your wife, your servant, your domesticated animals because. In the reign of God. It's not dous, which has all this power. It's not that we domesticate animals, but we grow our family by familiarizing unlike things. When the lion will lay down with the lamb, it's because it has take, it has become familiar with each other. If you've ever held a. My family got a rabbit recently, and I've learned to pick it up and I've learned to how to interact with the rabbit to reassure it that I'm not going to eat it. I'm a, I'm an omnivore, which means I can eat meat just like the raven. And it knows it. And at first it'll kick kick, kick until it realizes I'm not gonna eat it. And when it realize that it's gonna kick kick, kick some more because it knows it can. It just wants to be put down. It doesn't like to be held. And I. I tell it, look, you're part of a family. We're gonna hold you. We're gonna feed you. That's the exchange. You may not like being held, but if you like food and you like water and you like the comfort of a home, you're part of our family. I'm going to familiarize yourself with what it means to be in a social organism that is non-threatening. That is non predatory. And so as Saul is riding to the Christian community of Philippi, they're used to being predatory. I was a soldier and we are predators. We, we're lucky'cause we can eat whatever. But like our stance, our posture before the world as soldiers is. Predation, we need to be ready to act first or be acted upon. We are the overdog, we are the dog humping the other dog to show its dominance. And that is one of the most difficult things with militaries and the church is if you think that's your normal composure, you're in for a rude awakening. When I was trying to be a better Christian, one of the first messages I got was, you can't be an artillery man. You can't be an infantry, you can't be artillery. You can't do all these other things without making some significant adjustments in how I comported myself before the world.'cause my weapon in Iraq and elsewhere put me in charge. It put me in a power position over someone else. In other words, I was the dog humping the other dogs thinking that made me better than the other dogs. Whereas Christ is the underdog. Christ was killed, Christ was penetrated. Christ was had every opportunity to be the overdog to Colin legions of angels. But that is precisely the antithesis of what it means to be like Christ, to be a Christian. And getting into the reading in Luke the problem is you're going to be killed. And Jesus does not reject that. Jesus never says I'm not gonna be killed. In fact, in the passage it's said, I am gonna be killed because I'm a prophet. And prophets wear uncomfortable clothes like camel skin loin cloths, and they eat wild things like insects and. Honey from bees or dates like that is what a prophet does. A prophet is not out there dominating. A prophet is out there perfectly comfortable being the one fucked and knowing that God has got their back. A prophet is the person who has acquired the language from God and the character through their experience to unify the past and the present. And. The powers that be, the overdog, the first things they don't like that they don't like being reminded, Hey, you're a little insecure and that's why you're humping those other dogs. That's why you can't keep it in your pants. And one of the things that did stand out to me, and I'll close with this, is I think it's in, yeah, in the Philippians reading the first things, their end is destruction. Their God is the belly and their glory is in their shame. These are all coded language. The word for war LHM or laha in, in Hebrew it says, anyway, laham. Means to fight, but it also means to eat, to be over fed. So the war is the thing that devours war is the thing that does not know the limits of its own appetite or has no limits to its appetite. Whether your appetite is in your pants, whether your appetite is in your head, and you need to be in control. You need to be smarter than everybody. That is what? Saul it means, and what the gospel means when destruction and belly and shame are all wrapped up into one. If you ever look at a dog humping another dog, it's yeah, that fucking dog is insecure. And underdogs react differently. Our dog doesn't know what to do. Yogi our dog, has been humped before by a dog that doesn't know what the heck is going on because she does not have a secure attachment, a secure family, and she's just trying to figure out everything works. And this other dog bit, our dog Yogi. And I had to rush out and, scold the dog and scare the shit out of it. But also not harm it. That dog, when it was humping, our dog, was trying to make sense of the world, was trying to reach a sense of meaning that it wasn't getting at home. In my, in our home Yogi, our dog is below the other human creatures and we make that clear. That doesn't mean that yogi is less than, it means that we are the responsible party. We feed her, we pet her. We give her the things that she needs, and she gives us. She gives us things that we want and we need and we don't need to rip it from her. Like a predator does a pray. But in the, to be conformed to Christ is to be familiarized with an order that is good. And secure and loving and non predatory. And that scares a lot of people. That scares people who think the only way I can get what I need is to scare other people, to take it from other people. And to be Christian means to live in such a way to reflect. A system, a world system, a cosmology that does not grab things because that's the only way to get it. It might scare people. I've scared a lot of people and sometimes I've learned that the people most afraid of goodness are the ones who cannot stand to be reminded that they're capable of good. The people who are most afraid of me. I, and this is my interpretation of my own experience, but the people who are most afraid of me are the ones who on some level know that my actions and my decisions, my moral decisions, are a reminder that they too are not beyond being good. They could do the right thing. It's difficult. It requires some sacrifice, but you're not so fucked up that you can't do the right thing and doing the right thing scares. Some people because that means giving up something that they didn't deserve. If you don't know how to limit your own appetite to take only that which you need and leave the rest to everyone else, just like the manna in the desert, when you take and take and you devour things, it's not the manna that spoils it's you.