Our Trash is God’s Foundation
Joseph was thrown away. Jesus was rejected. God builds on what we discard.
Dear friends —
Letters from Leo is publishing daily Lenten reflections through Easter, available exclusively to paid subscribers.
Each meditation will explore what it means to follow Jesus more faithfully in the midst of American civic and political life — not as partisans first, but as Christians whose consciences are shaped by the Cross.
Lent is a season of repentance, renewal, and resolve.
It is a time to confront our idols, strip away our illusions, and allow the light of God’s redeeming love to search and purify our hearts.
I hope you will walk this forty-day road with me — as your brother and fellow sinner — embracing prayer, sacrifice, and deeper conversion, and allowing the God of liberation to claim every corner of our lives and our public witness in an age of creeping authoritarianism.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” — (Matthew 21:42)
We love telling stories. And we always tell it from the top.
The founders. The builders. The winners.
We chisel their names into marble, print their faces on currency, and teach our children that America belongs to the ones who made it. The American story, as we tell it, is a story about greatness — who achieved it, who deserves it, who gets to define it.
Today’s readings dismantle that story from the inside out.
In Genesis, Joseph — the favored son, the dreamer — is thrown into a cistern and sold by his own brothers for twenty pieces of silver.
He is erased from the family story. Written off. Discarded. And yet it is precisely from that cistern, from that erasure, that God begins to build something the brothers could never have imagined.
In the Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that should terrify anyone in power. A landowner plants a vineyard and entrusts it to tenants.
When he sends servants to collect the fruit, the tenants beat them, stone them, kill them.
When he sends his own son, they murder him too — convinced that if they eliminate the heir, they can seize the inheritance for themselves.
And then Jesus delivers the line that cuts through every empire, every boardroom, every nation that confuses possession with ownership: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
This is the logic of God, and it is the opposite of ours.
