Sunday: observed as the Lord's Day

Sunday morning, 12 October 2025: rose at two o'clock then immediately back to bed hoping to go back to sleep, but lay there pleasantly for just over an hour before rising for a mug of hot & black, and to stay up this Time.

Work? Nothing productive, read online that my principal raging issue, not paying active duty military during the Government Shutdown, has been addressed and they will be paid. Many junior level military, both enlisted and officers, including service members who are deployed and their families home alone, live paycheck to paycheck; leaving military folks to agonize about how their families back home can possibly get by is unconscionable. It's being addressed. 

Red and Blue, both sides blaming the other is how things are done these years. Do we need a different kind of government? IDK, there was a Time when I thought we should have a parliamentary system so the bums could be tossed out on the spur of the moment, but look at France &al. What we need is our representatives in government working together for the common good instead of fighting each other and churning hatred. 

How about a one party system? No, although America is fast heading that direction, it leads to dictatorship with the legislative simply affirming and financing whatever the executive orders. 

My POV: I was here for the best part and now is a good Time to be ninety &c, nomesane?

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Opening and reading email instead of working toward beginning this morning's session on Mark and his Gospel, I came across a line in an email from scholar James Tabor about his new book on Mary, mother of Jesus and others. The Catholic newsperson who was reviewing Tabor's book was obviously having trouble, agreeing with other things Tabor says about Mary, while "demanding proof" so to speak, of what Tabor says about Jesus' siblings that are out of synch with Roman Catholic teaching. It reminds me once again that religious convictions are not the same as recorded history, which the term Heilsgeschichte takes care of. Holy history, sacred stories. If you understand the concept of Heilsgeschichte, you don't have to wade out into the Sea of Galilee looking for a sandbar for Jesus to have walked on. Or in the ocean for a fish sufficiently commodious for Jonah to have live and contemplated in for several days. 

Poor Jonah: he finally gave up and did what God sent him to do, but he never really "got it."

Anyway, what struck me well in Tabor's email was his assertion that "early Christians reshaped Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God had arrived on earth into one about finding salvation in heaven." Which is largely where Christianity is today, not a faith to live by but a religion to die by, with certain things that one must think or say or do that will make one, in the words of the late Rev Jerry Falwell, "as sure for heaven as if you were already there." I watched and heard Jerry say in numerous Times: it no longer disgusts me like it once did, a self-centered religion.

WWJD? He wouldn't accept himself as personal savior so he could go to heaven, he'd reiterate the Summary of the Law, Love God Love Neighbor. Where "neighbor" is best illustrated by Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan. Your neighbor is the person whom you hate, and who hates you but treats you with lovingkindness anyway.

I need to find a picture, don't I. Oh, I know one.

RSF&PTL

T90