Your Thirst

Suppose you ask an American what's wrong with the culture and have enough patience to wade through people's anger and cheap sound bites. You'll find surprising agreement across all ideological boundaries: something is broken. Even those hell-bent on defending American exceptionalism will eventually contradict themselves and blame someone for why things are not as great as they should be. People feel a sense of loss. Whatever they believe, no matter how they answer, underneath it all is a deep sadness (often masked by anger) that few can put their finger on. Life is not our property. It does not belong to us. Yet we persist in behaving otherwise. The belief that we are its proprietors controls our treatment of each other and the natural world. It thrusts the insanity upon us that everything exists for us. This belief is empirically insane, yet we accept it and then act confused as the damage around us accelerates. This sin of modern man, who demands obedience from life, was codified in 1996 in the marketing slogan, "obey your thirst." It's unclear whether the saying influenced the culture or expressed what we had already become. In my experience as a priest, when modern Christians talk about obedience, they unwittingly reference this Coca-Cola slogan, not Scripture. "Humbly," they obey their thirst, channeling water away from the oasis to the city, fulfilling their selfish purpose. In God's eyes, on this point, the English language is broken. It is the human being, not the so-called wilderness, that is "wild." It is the will of the human being that must submit to life, not the other way around. From the beginning of Luke, the calling of Jesus is beyond the reach of what our Lord might want from life, what may motivate him (none of which is a topic in Scripture) or what he might choose to do, given a chance. On the contrary, the calling of Jesus is expressed as it is for all human beings, in the assignment of his name, over which he has no control and to which, like Zacharias, he is forced to submit. Richard and Fr. Marc discuss Luke 2:21Episode 462; Luke 2:21The following music was used for this media project:Music: Desert Night by Sascha EndeFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/480-desert-nightLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★