I am not a theologian, and I have no training in exegesis. I believe The Just Word invited me to write this reflection because, for several years, I have studied the Catholic Church’s teaching and action on care for creation through the lenses of organization theory and the sociology of religion. With this caveat in place, one way that I read this week’s readings is as a comment on the extraordinary activity of upholding the distinctiveness of the world’s oldest institution, against modern logics that cannot help but attempt to reduce it to their own terms.

In the first reading, the Israelites’ success is not determined by strength or strategy, but by whether Moses is holding his hands up. The lives of the combatants and the outcome of the combat are determined by a gesture so subtle that one might even perceive it as arbitrary, at least from outside the biblical context. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, philosopher Émile Durkheim galvanized the sociology of religion by arguing that religion inscribes some things as sacred, and others as not. In the first reading, there is obviously something about Moses raising his hands that is sacred, and that also renders the wider situation sacred. We infer this through the help that God offers the combatants (also the subject of this week’s psalm). However, one can also interpret the reading as foregrounding the fragile and outwardly arbitrary nature of such sacral inscription. The help that God offers recedes when Moses lowers his hands and returns when he raises them – the sacredness of the situation vacillates with the gesture. 

I make a leap here to a rather more metaphorically embattled Catholic way of thinking that defends Catholicism’s specific notions of the sacred against the many other ways of making sense of the activities of the Church in modern society, whilst also coexisting alongside them. One might call these incompatible ways of understanding the world competing “institutional logics” in contemporary organization theory parlance. With Moses’s hands up, parish giving is an expression of faith, sacrifice and virtue. With hands lowered, it is the main revenue stream for funding the Church’s operations. With hands up, the Church building is a consecrated sacred space understandable as part of the body of Christ. With hands lowered, it is a legal space understandable through condition surveys and the building regulations of the temporal regime it exists in. In The Heretical Imperative, sociologist Peter Berger argued that the presence of alternative understandings of the Church, made especially available to us by our extraordinarily connected and polyphonous moment in history, force us to actively choose to inscribe the Church as sacred, where we might once have taken its sacredness for granted. In a world where market, legal, and scientific logics pervade much of our working life, the presence of persuasive ways of seeing the Church as something other than sacred forces us to decide to see it as such.

One can see the choosing and maintaining of the sacred in such a context as a kind of effortful work – “institutional work” in the modern organization theory parlance. In the reading, Moses’s gesture is in fact loaded with the weight of the sacred – no wonder he has to lower his hands sometimes! So, to assist in the work of maintaining the sacred, we build structures. In the reading, Aaron and Hur build a literal structure around Moses from their own bodies and stone, which literally upholds the sacred embodied in Moses’s raised hands. Making an analytic leap to the “social structures” through which we maintain the sacred today, one might consider the institution of the Church itself. However, although the structures of the Church exist to maintain the sacred, they require maintenance themselves, and this is also work. The second reading is from 2 Timothy. In 1 Timothy, Paul instructed Timothy on how to organize the Church. In the reading from 2 Timothy, Paul is now exhorting Timothy to continue to participate in the maintenance of those structures. This exhortation would not be necessary if the work of maintaining and reproducing the sacred through the maintenance of the Church was not work. Indeed, in the context of the stories of Paul’s and Timothy’s martyrdom, the second reading alludes to the idea that the maintenance of the Church in the face of alternative logics is an exceptionally demanding undertaking.

I now invite you to look for interdependences between the sacred and the non-sacred (or profane) in your own socially engaged religious practice. Perhaps you care especially about issues like migration, labor, or environment from a Catholic perspective? Perhaps you have a different cause? 

Have you, as I have, noticed any aspects of your Catholic cause that rely on an interdependence between the sacred and the non-sacred? In my case, this was the interdependence between elements of the technocratic paradigm and the Catholic perspective on ecology. In your case, this might be an interdependence between a Catholic cause and a market, legal, professional, national, community, or family logic that is at once in tension with your cause, and perhaps also in some way supportive of it.

If you can think of such an interdependence, consider writing it down and describing the paradox. Consider whether being aware of this paradoxical interdependence will help you communicate about this cause with others.