In the early 1990s, the U.S. author Tim O’Brien published a collection of short fiction about the Vietnam war. In the book’s opening chapter, entitled “The Things They Carried” (also the title of the book), O’Brien goes into breathtaking detail about the various items of military gear and personal items “humped” by soldiers in a rifle platoon in the Vietnam war — the things they carried.

            Some of those things were carried out of sheer necessity, regardless of how excruciatingly heavy they could be in the dank blanketing jungle heat — for instance, a five pound steel helmet, vitally necessary in an environment in which hot metal projectiles, moving literally faster than the speed of sound, can suddenly come at you out of nowhere. And — to discourage those who were launching said projectiles — an 8-pound weapon, and the ammunition to feed it. In a rucksack on your back, there were also the basic necessities for survival: food, water. And so on.

            Some of the things they carried, they carried out of duty and necessity, each one an exact copy of others. And some of the things they carried were intensely, even absurdly, personal: photographs utterly meaningless to anyone outside a tight knit group of friends back in the States, pieces of a loved one’s clothing, a pebble discovered on a New Jersey beach in a more innocent time. And, yes, in one man’s ruck, a copy of the New Testament, with the cover mostly gone.

            Items as personal as personal can get, some of them also necessary; others not so much, and are eventually burned or jettisoned. Ultimately, each one’s journey defined what that individual soldier needed and what he didn’t.

            But what is going on in today’s scripture reading, besides rote descriptio

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