The Collect Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Judges 4:1-7 The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, after Ehud died. So the Lord sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor; the commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-ha-goiim. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help; for he had nine hundred chariots of iron, and had oppressed the Israelites cruelly twenty years. At that time Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the Israelites came up to her for judgment. ...

It must have been at the Seattle World’s Fair. NYT reports this morning that a Time capsule was buried, sealed, at the Space Needle in 1982 and was supposed to be opened in 2002 but everyone forgot about it. I didn’t open the NYT report because in my cheapness I get to open ten articles free a month, and that isn’t going to be one of them, I’m saving up my ten, watching and waiting for the Apocalypse.  But the Time capsule triggered massive imagination and memories, Timeo in a Bottle. In 1982 I was Navy retired for four years, a middler (second year) at Lutheran Theological Seminary Gettysburg and a year from ordination, traveling 80 percent of my Time including to Australia and defense plants all over the US, living in HarrisburgPA, WashingtonDC, and United Airlines Clubs at airports across the country, driving 35 thousand miles a year,  teaching graduate courses in defense acquisition management for the Political Science Division at the University of West Flo...

No night person, when I drift off to sleep at six o’clock in the evening and Father Nature jumps up and down on my abdomen just after midnight, stirring me to pay homage, I often cannot go back to sleep, so rise and read, write, or study, with cup of black and square of dark, only to start my blogpost, doze off after an hour or so and, waking to find myself asleep and unable to continue, go back to bed. - - - that’s what happened at two-thirty, back into bed until a late-rising five-thirty.  Dude, nobody’s interested in the sleep eccentricities of an old man, go somewhere else. Okay, but it was my last time crashing in that king-size bed that overflows the Beck bedroom, as Ray’s supposed to come over and get it this morning so Sleep Center can deliver a suitable size sleep thing Tuesday, making the room more usable.   Du-u-uude.  Okay, this is where I started off to in the first place. A friend who has an old car collection has just added ...

Friday journal, intent if not yet solid plan, walk & breakfast, drive to Apalachicola, retrieve friend Jean Purdy’s ashes from funeral home, couple stops, late lunch?, home to 7H.  Weekend bodes busiest, culminating in Sunday afternoon high priestly nap.  What? if ever there was in the first place, we have lost our buffalo, buffaloes, America, us, the South, TEC, me, world, earth, peoples of the Middle East. The changes are a base of the violent struggles going on here and there. In a captivating presentation Tuesday evening, a friend talked about a society’s cohesive center (not his precise wording), how when that center is lost, vanishes, is taken away, the directionless wandering, confusion, bewilderment, perplexity and anarchic chaos that ensues. His metaphor was Indians of North America whose cultural, food, clothing, shelter, religious center was the plains buffalo (his topic was Joseph Campbell), American bison that so sustained them for centuries that the anima...

Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. “… and the Second is this: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Constantly contemplating, not always loving much less liking, the sheep, lamb, qyick-tempered and profane, soap-lathered sinner who glares disgusted and repentant from the mirror mornings.   Lovely outside, Orion and his pet dog hanging in the west, ship passing close by 7H heading in, we watched it arrive at the Pass a few minutes ago, too dark to tell but could be an offshore support vessel although no tug is standing by, so almost conceivably a Navy vessel except no stern light showing. In the east, moon in cradle crescent with Venus and Jupiter below about to fade into...

Lovely morning we had before dawn, clear black sky littered with stars, Sirius never brighter, 48°F 77% light breeze, fall, autumn at last, thought it would never come, that sliding open 7H porch door would forever blast headache-hot, humid air in my face. But fall at last here the middle of November. In my mind fall came sooner, the first week of school, September after Labor Day, feet creeping slow to school, hands in pockets, cherishing a summer gone forever. A month from now we should be into fog season, a low-lying cloud on the Bay chill, damp mornings.   Breakfast: two cups hot strong black and a warm slice of bread from EfM dinner last evening, toasted crisp and two thick pats butter.  Enormous swarm of ducks, hundreds of ducks flying by low and settling a hundred yards offshore of 7H. They duck into the Bay, gone for qyite a few seconds, then pop back up. Thus, I reckon, “duck,” IDK. Duck. My first Peking Duck was in a restaurant in Taiwan, fall 1965 or wi...

Judges, unable to go back to sleep I was early up this morning reading about Judges, an OT work that has intrigued me as long as I remember. The judges of Israel were not simply jurists but shofetim, heroes of yore who rose to the situation and through charismatic leadership were used by Jahve to bring Israel back to salvation. I’ve been fascinated with them ever since reading and discussing some of the stories together with my brother Walt and our first cousin Bill in his Boys Sunday School Class at East Hill Baptist Church, Pensacola in the 1940s. Especially Samson and Gideon, but there are other stories too, including the gruesome story of Ehud and Eglon, and Sunday’s delightfully repulsive story, almost eqyally grisly, of Jael and the tent peg, if only the framers of our lectionary would let us read the whole thing. But then, there may be children, eh? Nevertheless, the whole thing below (scroll down) so that we know the rest of the story.   Judges 4:1-7 The Israelites a...