🐮 Lent 3

Readings: Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9. 

Transcript

0:22

Isaiah chapter 55 verses one through nine here, everyone who thirsts come to the waters and you who have no money. Come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk. Without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me. Listen, so that you may live, I'll make with you an everlasting covenant. My steadfast sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Now you shall call nations that you do not know and nations that do not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your God, the holy one of Israel for he has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their way and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them return to the Lord that he may have mercy on them. And to our God, for he will abundantly pardon for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways. Your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts? Psalm 63 verses one through eight. Oh God, you are my God. I seek you my soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary holding your power and glory because your steadfast love is better than life. My lips will praise you. So I'll bless you. As long as I live. I'll lift up my hands and call on your name. My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips. When I think of you on my bed and meditate on you and the watches of the night for you have been my help. And in the shadow of your wings, I sing for joy. My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me. One Corinthians chapter 10 verses one through 13. I don't want you to be ignorant brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness. Now, these things occurred as examples for us that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not become idolaters as some of them did. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and they rose up to play. We must not engage in sexual immorality as some of them did, and 23,000 fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test as some of them did and we're destroyed by serpents and do not complain as some of them did and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happen to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you're standing, watch out that you don't fall. No testing has overtaken you. That is not common to everyone. God is faithful and they will not let you be tested beyond your strength. But with the testing, she will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. The Gospel of Luke chapter 13 verses one through nine. At that very time, there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, that they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you'll all perish as they did. Were there 18 who were killed when the Tower of Sloan fell on them. Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you'll all perish just as they did then he told this parable, a man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the man working the vineyard, see here, for three years, I've come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down. Why should it be wasting the soil? He replied, sir, leave it alone for another year until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, and good, but if not, you can cut it down. Good morning and welcome to the third Sunday in Lent. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings for today come to us from Isaiah 55, Psalm 63, 1 Corinthians 10, and Luke 13. I apologize for getting this episode out late. I was on vacation, but I'm gonna make sure I don't do that again. And the, it didn't seem like the. Isaiah passage was very related, Isaiah 55 talking about coming to the water and doing all these things so that you align yourself with with God. And it speaks specifically to Israel, but the water imagery. And then in one Corinthians, when Saul is talking about the. Israelites under Moses being cut down for worshiping the golden calf. And so this mass killing and the water made me think of the flood. And there's the flood in the Hebrew scriptures is interesting because there are other, there are other flood myths that deal with the idea of a flood differently, and we don't know for sure if we have an actual, like if there was like a flood that happened or whether something else might be the case. I say that because there's a chance that there was some ancient flood, great, whatever, but there's also the chance that. Ancient peoples throughout the Mediterranean, the cradle of human civilization around the Arabian Peninsula and Northeast Africa, that they just like here in the United States, will find seashells in the mountains or at above sea level and trying to make sense of that. So there's two different. Decent explanations for what is going on there and different cultures are going to interpret them differently. I only mention that'cause like why aren't there dinosaurs in the Bible? And it's because they didn't find any ma massive bones. Or maybe they did and that's what explains the Nephilim. But anyway, I digress. The. Water imagery in Isaiah, coupled with the murder or the killing at least of the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf is significant because in that incidence, in Exodus 32, Moses calls the Levites to him and they cut down a thousand or whatever the number is in one Corinthians or Exodus 32. I can't remember. But anyway, in that moment, in Exodus 32, it's when the Levites are ordained to the Lord's service. And so ordination and clerical responsibility is bound up in violence and it's a callback to God, self cutting down the entire world in the flood story in Genesis, and then cutting down a, a significant portion of the Israelites in the wilderness, but then at the end of the wilderness, nobody who left Egypt is left alive. Only their kids, Joshua and Caleb are the only ones who are alive in Egypt who get to see and enter the whole the Promised land in Canaan. And so this juxtaposition of violence and holiness and purification, or even like moral reliability, moral responsibility, are bound up together. You cannot read the Bible without addressing and having something substantive to say about violence about human. About physical harm, I'll say. And then in Luke, we get this kind of close out of the parable of and the fig tree and in it. The the parable at least, is about a fig tree. And the fig tree is kind of Israel's national plant. It appears first in Genesis when it's the fruit that we have that humanity has eaten from, and the fruit from which we draw the leaves to clothe ourselves when we're ashamed of our nakedness. But it's also a really interesting plant because it's, it can be a tree, but it can also be a bush, and it's not really a fruit. It's an inverted flower and all these really cool, weird things. But anyway, the fig is, has, is not being produced. It's not being productive in a, it says a vineyard, but vineyards weren't always just grapes. The Israelites didn't necessarily practice monoculture anyway. And so well, this fig tree is not producing fruit. It's not doing what it's supposed to do. And so what do we do? Are we gonna cut it down or are we going to give it a little bit of an extra chance? And this, to me, at least, again, evokes the Exodus story of there are 10 plagues, not one. If God really wanted to affect their salvation, and the only attention that we should give to the Passover and the 10th plague is to Israel. I think we're missing the point of Exodus. Exodus. That portion of Exodus forces us to wonder why is God being so patient with Pharaoh and why is Pharaoh and the Egyptians by extension getting 10 chances to, reconsider? And then of course, is it that God hardened Pharaoh's heart to prove a point? Or is it that Pharaoh's heart was hardened because he's just a douche bag and these. Important moral questions are deliberately disclaimed, like the text wants you to ask them and wants you to not have an answer. And a while ago I did a textual study on, hardening Pharaoh's heart, and I wasn't as into the language and I could probably double check it, but at least at the time, I found that for every that out of, I think it was literally 10 or maybe it was 12 times, where it says that Pharaoh's heart was hardened half of the time. It was hardened by God, and half the time it was merely a statement of a state of being. For Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and I could be saying like he had a hard heart. But the fact that there was an equal number of Pharaoh's heart being hard and God hardening Pharaoh's heart, you can't. You can't fall on one side of the fence or the other, you've gotta fall right in the middle. And that doesn't give us the answer, the satisfying moral judgment that we want. We don't know. We don't know if God is in this to just screw people over or if God is in this to save Israel. And so as someone who's served in the military and had to ask questions about. The social and individual moral implications of physical violence. I am now in the minority of, we'll say Western civilization, and I'll say English speaking western civilization in which all of the accoutrements, all the good things we get from citizenship, at least in the United States, come at the expense of the sacrifice of the minority, such as myself. We've created an entire civilization or an entire society that is entitled, nobody has to. Nobody is obligated to serve. Everybody is obligated to have freedom, supposedly, but the first people to lose it are the last people to not have it, if you look@gijustice.com, our military families, so we live in this backwards world where the people who are most familiar with the most difficult of human experiences, who could help us illuminate the scripture in some of these difficult ways not only are marginalized, but like the influencers who do have the platform to, who could affect positive change and do a better hermeneutic. Largely aren't, we're avoiding judges and Joshua and the dangerous or the violent parts of scripture. And I take that as a kind of irony that I see right there in the Bible. Are we not going to think about this? Are we gonna cut it down, get rid of violence and pretend that we, that freedom is free or are we going to. Give ourselves more time to look at who we are as a society and how we've gotten to this point where, it's March of 2025. I don't have to say much else than that to do any kind of historical research and find out like, yeah, America's in a pretty messed up state both legally and like culturally yeah, I'll just, I'll leave it at that. So it's important to do our work around violence, to do the thing that we're sometimes afraid of doing. Doing the hard thing of waiting and giving another chance to people that we want to believe have nothing to offer. I've occupy a space in the American. Moral landscape in which I'm supposed to be the most credible narrator of, political costs, and yet the political benefits that I, that freedom is supposed to endow Americans with, I am denied. And so it just, I cannot help but notice. The biblical connotations of our own age and therefore look at the Bible, look to the Bible for inspiration, for guidance, for how we get out of this. And first formation is the place where I'm doing that. So I appreciate all my listeners for following along, and again, I apologize for getting this one out just a little bit late.