🐮 Proper 9

Readings: Isaiah 66:10-14; Psalm 66:1-9; Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20. 

Transcript

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Isaiah chapter 66 verses 10 through 14. Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her. All you who love her. Rejoice with her. Enjoy all you who mourn over her, that you may nurse, and be satisfied from her consoling breast that you may drink deeply with. Delight from her glorious bosom. For this says the Lord. I'll extend prosperity to her like a river and the wealth of the nations, like an overflowing stream. And you shall nurse and be carried on her arm and bounced on her knees as a mother comforts her child. So I will comfort you. You shall be comforted in Jerusalem. You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice. Your body shall flourish like the grass, and it shall be known that the power of the Lord is with our servants. And his indignation is against our enemies. Psalm 66 verses one through nine, make a joyful noise to God all the earth. Sing the glory of our name. Give to him glorious praise, say to God, how awesome are your deeds? Because of your great power, your enemies cringe before you all the earth worships you. They sing praises to you. Sing praises to your name. Come and see what God has done. He is awesome In her deeds among mortals, she turned the sea into dry land. They passed through the river on foot. There we rejoiced in him who rules by his might forever, Keep watch on the nations. Let the rebellious not exalt themselves. Bless our God o peoples. Let the sound of her praise be heard. Who has kept us among the living and has not let our foot slip. Galatians chapter six, verses one through 16. My brothers and sisters, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another's burdens and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ for if those who are nothing think they are something they deceive themselves. All must test their own work, then that work rather than their neighbor's work will become a cause for pride for all. Must carry their own loads. Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked for you. Reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you'll reap corruption from the flesh. But if you sow to the spirit, you'll reap paternal life from the spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right for we will reap at harvest time if we did not give up. So then whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all and especially of those of the family of faith. See what large letters I make when I'm writing in my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh, who try to compel you to be circumcised only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised, that they may boast about your flesh. May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything but a new creation is everything. As for those who will follow this rule, peace be upon them and mercy and upon the Israel of God. The Gospel of Luke chapter 10 verses one through 11 and 16 through 20. After this, the Lord appointed 72 others and sent them on ahead of him in pears to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. I'm sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry, no purse, no bag, no sandals and greet. No one on the road. Whatever house you enter first, say peace to this house. And if a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on that person. But if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house eating and drinking, whatever they provide for. The laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you eat what is set before you cure the sick who are there and say to them. The Kingdom of God has come near to you. But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome, you go out into its streets and say, even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off and protest against you. Yet know this, the kingdom of God has come near. Whoever listens to you, listens to me, and whoever rejects you, rejects me, and whoever rejects me, rejects the one who sent me. The 72 returned with joy saying, Lord, in your name, even the demon submit to us. He said to them, I watch Satan fall from heaven, like a flash of lightning. Indeed, I've given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, don't rejoice at this, that the spirit submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Good morning and welcome to Proper nine in the season after Pentecost. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings come to us today from Isaiah 66, Psalm 66, Galatians six, and Luke 10, I think I'm in shoot sixth year of doing this. And throughout most of that time, my main kind of website where I put this stuff was PPHQ. I didn't have a name for it. QPHQ was just I knew it was. What I wanted my URL to be, check it out. PP hq.com. And lately I've given it a name and it's, I'm starting to coagulate the the brand. And PPHQ is becoming Grunt Works. It's gonna stay PP hq.com. But Grunt Works is the, yeah, the brand, the name, the website the aesthetic. And I get that from a long time ago when I was an undergrad at 26 years old or something. I'd gotten outta the military. And I took some time to a couple of gap years because why not? And then I started my undergrad degree If I had gone anywhere but Hawaii, I would've lost almost a year of transfer credit. So I stayed there. But when I was there, I read Catholic Social Teaching, which are these encyclicals that began in the 1890s. In 1890s, post Civil War, the early industrial. Era. And the Catholic church at the time saw this as a problem that the alienation of workers from their work and the hard and fast distinction between the means of production and those who, whose work, whose labor is required to produce, this new industrial age of stuff. And so there's a series of knowledge. If you know this, great. If not, just know that there, it was the Catholic church at the time trying to catch up with social justice and it did it through the lens of labor and work. Fast forward a couple of decades and we, in the twenties, the Great Depression, world War I has come and gone, and there's a big. Social movement, demand for justice. This is when the bonus march occurred in the summer or the Yeah, the summer of 1930, I think. And in 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Morin created the Catholic worker, which began as a newsletter. And then Catholic worker was Peter Morin in particular. The ideas were his, but Dorothy Day put them into practice and, ran with him, became the spokesperson for the Catholic worker. And it was a medium between popular communism and socialism, which was taking hold in Russia and had some friends here in the States. The Catholic church was not communist. And hasn't really supported what is called communism, but Peter Morin, born Pierre Mora he saw some correlations between the communalism and the social and cyclicals, the Catholic social teaching. And so the Catholic worker was a middle ground even between Peter Morin's ideas, which he called, he wanted to call the paper the Catholic radical. And maybe you've heard of a book that I wrote for God and Country in that order, faith and service for Ordinary radicals. Ordinary radicals was this tagline that Shane Claiborne started with the, Irresistible revolution. And Shane, let me use that tagline. Ordinary radicals right at the root of things, and ordinary is supposed to be mundane, but ordinary and liturgical traditions like the Episcopal church means ordin end the, or the ordered nature of time in ordinary time. Devoid of feasts and fasts, just like level playing field, right? Morin. Peter Morin wanted to call what became the Catholic worker, the Catholic Radical, and he wrote a book about it and he wrote these easy essays that are just really great. They're like short parables. But anyway. Grunt Works is modeled in my mind off of the Catholic worker, but I'm not Catholic. I thought about becoming Catholic back when I was in seminary and some stuff was going on that convinced me like, no, I'm not gonna enter that fight. And I ended up becoming an Episcopalian confirming Episcopalian. And so that's the works side. It names the ancient Greek laora, which means the work, the collective work of everybody. And it laora is a a compound word between layoffs, which means the regular people, the masses, and then Argos, which means work of the people or just works plural, right? The grunt piece of that came from the army for me. In the army, A grunt, capital G grunt is 11 bravo an infantryman and that's it. Not 11 alpha an infantry officer, not 11 Charlie infantry mortar man. 11 Bravo. And when you got enough rank, you were no longer a grunt because you didn't have to do all the thankless dirty work at the bottom of the heap. And I was an artilleryman, I was an artillery Ford observer. Because I had joined before nine 11, I got to see the pre nine 11 military for a year at Fort Bragg, now called Fort Liberty. But I was as an artillery Ford observer. I was the odd man out in my infantry platoon before nine 11 and before combat in OAF two where I deployed from Hawaii. The artillery ate, slept shit, showered with our artillery units. I lived at the artillery barracks I was assigned to and formed up with an artillery unit. We go to combat. I didn't see my artillery. I saw my artillery exactly twice in 14 months. In the meantime, I was, I di I initially deployed with a headquarters unit that I got pushed down to Bravo Company first of the 14th. And I was one of the fos for in a line infantry platoon. And the problem of that is I'm not one of them. I'm not a grunt. I haven't been with them before combat. And here I am. They're just supposed to trust some new guy who like has anyway. They did, they had reason not to trust me. I was not a grunt. And yet I stood in formation in Kirk Cook Airbase FOB Warrior so that they could get their combat infantryman badges. And I stood next to our platoon medic and we both audibly laughed because we do everything that they do. I do it with heavier equipment. The medic did it with more training but we didn't get A-C-I-B-A combat treatment badge. I later got a. Combat action badge and it was this whole thing. But anyway, so I'm not a grunt, and yet there's a little g grunt that of course I was, I carried more material than they did. I went everywhere. They did. I sucked through all the stuff they did. The, my platoon sergeant, our i platoon sergeant had me dry for'em, so I like did even more than that. So it's never enough, right? You get this sense of I'm always on the inside looking out and the outside looking in and. As my mind or whatever matured. As I matured, I came to see that I, that if you're always on the outside and yet you have access, you're a bridge person you can go back and forth between worlds, the world, the infantry, the world of pogues personnel other than grunt. Those. That is what Grunt Works is about. And I mentioned that this morning because Saul and Galatians is really clear, like this is about work. One of my main gripes, is that we live in a society that expects something from nothing. We believe in this doctrine called Creatio X in the Hilo creation from nothing. we expect that everybody has the same freedom. But the reality is that some people work a great a lot in order to get what other people take for granted. In Acts 22, Saul and the centurion of the Jerusalem cohort is gonna have Saul beaten, and Saul is now, da. I'm a Roman citizen. And the Tribune is wait, what? How are you a citizen? You're just some lowly, itinerant. Preacher dude, and I am a centurion in the Roman army, but I had to great pay a great sum of money for my, the word is pulia, which some translations render into freedom. Some of them render into citizenship, but it's pulia. I'm a political entity. I have political rights, and the Tribune, whose name is Claudius Lys does not have the same power as this seeming outsider. And so it doesn't surprise me that in Galatians, which is a more, mature Paul likely, who knows for sure, but he's look, he may remember that inter interaction with Claudius lys, where it's oh, you know what? I didn't do the work required of freedom. And so I need to be aware that everybody should be pulling their load. And he's also naming this dichotomy between the, what he is calling the Judaizers where they are assuming and expecting other Christians Saul is no, actually what Christ does is break open the faith for the whole world. And sure, if you want to get circumcised as a gentile, great, but that's not a requirement. Like we weren't required, when we came to God or when Abraham came to God, it wasn't a requirement. It was a sign of a, of an agreement, a covenant. And so Saul is not only. Doing battle with these cultural stereotypes and expectations of the Jews. He's also having to wrestle with his own privilege and his interaction with and access to Roman freedom, Roman citizenship, and how that puts him on the outside, even as he's an insider, both to the Hebrews, he calls himself a Hebrew of Hebrews, but he has also got more power, more citizenship, more freedom than a Roman Tribune. It's important to note not only the importance of work and to remember that, freedom is not free. Someone is always paying the cost. But also if you're going to follow Christ. In some way, shape or form, you are a bridge person. You are called expected, assumed to be willing and able to go into the difficult dark places as well as to the bright sunshine, puppies and rainbows spaces. If you can't, that's okay. It doesn't make you less of a Christian, but don't expect to get the benefits. Of a bridge person without doing the work. and I'll close with this. one of the things that the early Christians called themselves, identified themselves as distinct from Jewish customs was the way the way I'm following the way. It was a tongue and cheek of. Way of saying Christ because Christ was absolutely Jewish, but a lot of Gentiles were catching this fire. But there's something about the way if you're following the way, you're not standing still. You're marching, you're moving, you're going in a direction. I don't know what direction it is'cause I don't know which way the spirit moves, in everybody's life. But you are doing some work. Your feet are moving. If you think that you can get the benefits that you expect as a Christian without doing the work, be very careful because you may find that, as Saul says, James says as well. If you're not working, you're not eating make sure that you are both sewing, planting as well as reaping. Don't just reap. Don't expect to just reap and also call yourself a Christian.