Routine: Interrupted

   My own story is dull, even pedestrian, but it will serve to make the point. I have settled into life here in Dallas: new home, new diocese, new parish, new friends. Settling in meant finding a new routine of life that works in this new place. I get up about 5 o’clock, say Morning Prayer and maybe also a bit of Bible study on the readings. Then I go out onto the Katy Trail, run just over a mile to Starbucks. I take my journal with me, and there I sit for a half-hour or so and write, thinking back over the previous day and what good things happened, what bothersome things happened, and what sins I should name.
    The journal quickly evolved into a time of conversation with God. It’s my checking in with him, and through writing it I try to discern his voice in my head (amidst the storms and noise) and his hand in my life and in the people and events around me.
    That done, I run back home, and start my day.
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    It’s been a good pattern, but the blankety-blank virus has messed it up. This week when I went to Starbucks the store was open, but the chairs and tables were gone. I got my coffee, and enjoyed a bit of a chat with one of my familiar baristas (the clientele was absent, apart from me). And then I had to run back home. I did write in my journal once I got back home. So, this interrupted morning pattern will work. It’s actually a very small thing, as I said at the first, even dull and pedestrian. But it’s a sign.
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    More dramatic memories occur. Twenty years ago, following a lunch, walking back to the car, my wife was slow. I was impatient but also thought her brain, which was diseased, might need a challenge. So I went off in front of her towards the car. Then I heard the thunk. She had fallen face down on the concrete. Her glasses were broken. She was not responding to speech.
    An ambulance arrived; twelve hours or so later, she was released from the emergency room. Diagnosis: concussion.
    One wants, in a situation like that, to rewind the film, to go back to that ill-fated decision. Would that I had stayed beside her, letting her hold my arm! Would that she had never fallen! But life is not a film with a rewind button.
    The afternoon, the evening, the days that followed: Interrupted.
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    Deeper than our sense of guilt, deeper than our good desire for a settled routine that advances health of body and soul, deeper than anything else in this world is the reality of interruption. There is nothing we hang on to, and no plan that we make, that will not be interrupted in the end. Death is the Great Interrupter. All other interruptions, from a closed coffee shop up to an emergency room visit, are just practices.
    Your life, everyone’s life, has been interrupted in unexpected ways in the past few weeks. These interruptions are practice exercises. They are opportunities for us to be ready to face, whenever it comes, the Great Interruption.
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    On the web. My sermon on Job 2:7-13, given at St. John’s in Montgomery, Ala., on March 4, is here (both audio and text): https://stjohnsmontgomery.org/audio/lenten-wednesday-noon-sermon-march-4-2020/

    The bishop of Tennessee, John Bauerschmidt, has collected some pertinent prayers for our current time, from older Prayer Books as well as the current BCP. He reminds us that a fundamental practice for us is to pray! https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2020/03/17/the-coronavirus-and-the-book-of-common-prayer/
    July at Nashotah: July 20-24, I will be teaching a one-week course at Nashotah House, "Theological Anthropology: What's the Good of Being Human?" There will be some advance readings. You may audit for a reasonable fee, or take it for credit and do some writing assignments before and after. A week in Wisconsin in July, with daily worship at our historic Anglo-catholic seminary: what could be better? Drop me a line if you’re interested, or go to nashotah.edu
Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Ten Brothers and Three Days

The Lion and the Ass: Reading Genesis after Babylon, by Robert D. Sacks (ISBN 9781888009521) is my go-to commentary. I have been studying it (and its earlier versions) for more than a decade, with the result that I have grown ever fonder of the first book of the Bible. I recommend it heartily to everyone: from first-time Bible readers to Hebrew scholars. And here is an example of why.
    Earlier this week, our morning lesson was Genesis 42:1-17. The scene: It’s a decade or so after Joseph has been sold into slavery by his brothers. There is famine in the land, and Jacob, the father of twelve sons, tells them they should go down to Egypt and get food. In verse 3, we read: “So ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt.” The next verse will tell us that Jacob held back Joseph’s full brother, Benjamin, from going with the others—for fear that harm would come to him also, as (he thinks) had come to Joseph earlier.
    But Sacks notes that verse 3 could be saying “ten” not in comparison with “eleven” but with “nine.” That is to say, verse 3 is silently telling us that Judah had rejoined his brothers.
    Judah, earlier, had tried to save Joseph from his brothers’ evil intentions, and was unsuccessful. In the next chapter (Gen. 38) we are told how Judah left his brothers and had an independent life. (This is the chapter left out of the daily office lectionary!) Judah married and had three sons. The oldest son married a woman named Tamar, but he died before children were born. The next son took his sister-in-law to wife, and died also. Judah tried to save his third son from death and sent back his daughter-in-law to her father’s home. She dresses as a harlot, Judah (not knowing who she is) goes into her, and she becomes pregnant. When all is revealed, Judah repents of his sin. It is the son of Judah by Tamar—Perez, the first of the twins to be born—who becomes the ancestor of David.
    What we didn’t know at the end of chapter 38 is what Judah would do. Would he stay away from his brothers, or somehow return to the obligations of transmission? He seems to have learned from personal experience that the obligations of transmission of the “new way” of the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are what he must take on. He is not Jacob’s eldest son, but he does seem to be the natural leader, and also to have been wise enough to learn leadership. And as it were silently, the text lets us see that he has done just that, when it says in Genesis 42:3 that “ten” of Joseph’s brothers went down to Egypt.
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    At verse 17, the ten brothers have appeared before Joseph (not knowing who he is) and asked for grain. Joseph affects indignation and puts them all in jail for three days.
    Sacks asks us to consider the meaning of "three days" in the Bible. “This is not the first time the reader has sweated through a period of three days,” he says. It took Abraham three days to go with Isaac to the place where he would have sacrificed him. Joseph (in ch. 40) had interpreted dreams that involved three days, and the men who dreamed had to wait three days for their rescue or death. Later, Moses asks Pharaoh to allow the people to go on a three-day journey; there will be a three-day journey for water; Samson will give the Philistines three days to solve his riddle; and so on. "Three days," Sacks notes, is always, in these scriptures, “a period of doubt and wonder.” From which observation it is not far for us to recall another three-day period, begun with an execution outside Jerusalem.

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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