Dionysus on a Bike

Isaiah 55:1-5 – 8/2/2026 – The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Deleuze puts it roughly this way. Why do some people fight for their own oppression as if it were their salvation? Why do we work and toil in suffering in order to procure things that are meaningless and do not bring happiness? Why, in consumer culture, do we waste what we have on empty things, conveniences and status symbols, instead of caring for ourselves and others?

Why do we participate in our own misery? Our own oppression? Our own unhealthiness? Why are we bent on self-destruction, on not looking out for our own best interests and the best interests of those we supposedly love and care for? Christianity calls this seeming paradox the fall or original sin, a constitutive, though acquired, flaw at the heart of our being. Freud called it the death drive, the tendency of all life to return to its inert, merely material form. Early Marx, the Existentialists, and Nietzsche would call it a kind of alienation, a separation from our authentic, intuitive, instinctive self, as Nietzsche says, “Life against life.” Again, a kind of paradox. Making our human situation more grim, for these thinkers the self in question is constituted by its very alienation and so becomes alienated in its very being. We cannot be whole and unified; there is a split at the heart of who we are.

Returning to the theological answer to this question, that humanity is in a fallen state of sin, the question of what fall is and what original sin means remains open. What is the mechanism or process by which otherwise self-interested creatures “spend money for that which is not bread”? In other words, why do we waste our lives away in suffering on things that do not matter and do not bring happiness?

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 8/2/2026, The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost:
Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis