This link may not open, but if it does it’s a fascinating report of SouCal firing Lane Kiffin, decided once and for all during Saturday’s game at Arizona State, and delivered to him in person at LAX by Haden personally as the team bus with Kiffin’s luggage went on back to campus.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/sports/ncaafootball/usc-fires-its-football-coach.html?_r=0 But I vowed no more football. Lied and got caught.  Haden face-fired Kiffin honorably and manly, unlike PennState firing Joe Paterno, also necessary, but shamefully, cowardly, disgracefully by phone. Still chafing from watching UCF rise toward greatness in the Sunshine State and dreading a once obscure AAC nonentity rising and shining as UFla, which for one ludicrously embarrassing week last season stood at #1 by some computer glitch, dangles at #18. It’s bad word time, and I’ve got ‘em, being a naval officer a lot longer than a priest. But why be surprised at AAC UCF: there...

Story, chat in Adult Sunday School this morning to introduce reading and discussion of Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a, the First but not Oldest Creation Story in the Bible. TW+ Let’s pretend, and let me tell a story to set the scene. Play like -- P’like you are Judean, a Jerusalem Jew, and a temple priest. With many other Jews, p’like you recently returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Exile. You arrive home to find the city and temple a mess, a disaster needing reconstruction. And your  job as one of those restoring the temple and the temple cult of worshiping the One True God, the God of Israel seems almost insurmountable. Worse, worst in your eyes as a priest, many of the working class Judean commoners, dirt farmers and   lowly shepherds who were left behind in the Exile -- consorted with Palestinians, worshipers of Baal, and assimilated their pagan religion in which the Baal is god of the fields, and Astarte, his consort for fertility, the Sun is a god, and the Moon is a god...

OH-EFF-EFF USC UCF and Shame, Uncle Bee Long years ago my parishioner Jack had let his house get so run down it was no longer habitable. From the street, looking into the upstairs windows and up, you saw the sky. Holes in roof, floors rotted through, windows knocked out. I asked, let me come visit. He said, "No. I'm right ashamed of it." I'm right ashamed of it. Saturday afternoon, fourth quarter, five minutes to play, or was it three minutes, IDK, score 28-18, safe. Score 28-24, score 28-25, Uncle Bubba rises out of chair in frustration, waving arms, shaking fists, restraint to keep from smashing laptop to floor, blasphemies so vile TG Linda was in the kitchen; sitting back down, realizing UH-OH and rushing upstairs for handfullaaspirin and hot water to dissolve immediately into bloodstream, back downstairs, left family room for a room sans TV, and officially gave up football for all time forever. This is my solemn vow. Where's my old B&W T...

... island home. Yesterday a Facebook friend shared a video titled “Some Strange Things Are Happening To Astronauts Returning To Earth” that, aptly describing itself as profound , shows pictures that are -- the only word is profound -- profoundly moving. Pictures those explorers and pioneers took of our planet from space, from the moon a generation ago, from a space station window, by one or other of them dangling, floating cabled as we have seen them cabled to prevent drifting off into the infinite -- pictures -- with the beautiful earth hanging in black space, vulnerable -- stir one’s emotions incomparably.  My adult Sunday school class is reading and discussing Bereshith, Genesis, our sacred creation myth about our Beloved Creator’s beginning with us. Not tomorrow, but perhaps the following Sunday, we will be into its story of The Flood , in which a disillusioned and brokenhearted Creator becomes punishing Destroyer, returns Earth momentarily to primeval darkness and c...

Enuma Elish “ When on high the heaven had not been named ... ” -- about Tiamat and Apsu and celebrating the victorious, conquering and reigning god Marduk, the ancient Mesopotamian/Babylonian creation epic from earlier Sumerian creation mythology -- and our own later, corrective, “ In the beginning when Elohim created the heavens and the earth ... ” focusing on our One God -- will be our topic in adult Sunday school class this week. We have been discussing Genesis chapters 2, 3 and 4, the ancient campfire stories of how Yahweh made a human to till the ground in the Garden, then split the human in two to be male and female company for each other; then the droll story of how  Nachash the wiley serpent came between  the naked humans and led them to disobey  Yahweh,  causing us to be thrown out of the pleasant Garden so that we now have to struggle to make a living; then how human sin grew to fratricidal murder.  Next we would be discussing the sto...

Who me? Not me. Many years ago I lost the friendship and respect of a favorite young parishioner by mentioning in a sermon that a man had come to the rectory door the prior evening, late Saturday night. I thought he had come for food, which I was prepared to help, but after standing on the front porch listening to him for a few minutes I had sent him packing. There is nothing like judgment. Being judged, that is. The man was tipsy and slurring that he wanted to talk about how he could stop drinking. I told him to sober up and come back and then we could talk, but not ten o’clock Saturday evening. That I never saw him again is not part of this story. Nor is it part of the story that the relationship with that parishioner was foreverafter somewhat reserved, likely in part because of my lingering memory and experience of having been judged as I thought, unfairly. Not uncommonly set absurdly on a pedestal, a minister seems especially subject to the judgment of everybody ...

Brother, can you spare a nut? “Lazarus and the Rich Man” (Luke 16:19-31), Jesus’ story that is our gospel for next Sunday, returns to mind Jonathan Turley’s post “Brother, can you spare a nut?”, the wrenchingly pathetic prairie dog looking up plaintively, beseechingly -- at me. Fourteen years of my life were spent confronting him/her daily at my rectory door, knocking as steadily and persistently and unsurrenderingly as Jesus’ poor widow pestering the judge, or Jesus’ neighbor knocking at midnight after lights out, or Poe’s raven tapping, rapping. He never goes away and there’s no use napping. If 14 x 365 = more than five thousand and he knocked, rapped, gently tapped on average 1.34 times a day those fourteen years, I resignedly faced him almost seven thousand times and easily understand Dives‘ indifference. More later, perhaps. For now, apologies for having been elsewhere. Again this morning, Anu Garg distracted me with today’s word, polysemus. Then his usage example, the G...

Thing Mamoo, my maternal grandmother, whose name was Mamie, had exactly enough grandsons, me, Walt, Bill, Chuck, Lowell, Paul, to be her pallbearers, and we were. But as we and she got older she had trouble naming the one she was speaking to, and she would go through a string of increasing frustration and building agitation -- “Bill, Wilbur, Walt, THING” she would shout, no matter which one of us it was. Sometimes I call Ryan “grandson,” but it’s OK because he’s been sort of my extra-that for the past thirteen years plus his mother started introducing me as “Ryan’s grandfather” a dozen years ago. When people ask, “Grandfather on which side?” I just reply, “Whatever you say.” Sunday I caught myself calling Christian “Buddy,” which I must not do, because there’s a scriptural element of “claiming in naming”, but also a hint of “bonding” that eventually becomes painful. Anyone who thinks “bonding” with a child is not excruciating has never seen a son go off in the Army or droppe...

On my first business trip to Australia some thirty-five years ago, the admiral of the last Navy base I had served before retiring called me and asked if I would take a package down to an Australian naval officer we both knew. John was at sea the day I arrived in Australia, so his wife kindly met me at the airport, drove me round for a bit of sightseeing, and delivered me to my lodgings. It was a Sunday morning, and on the drive we saw flocks of people with baskets roaming hillsides on the outskirts of town. John's wife said they were picking mushrooms, a common weekend outing. I never had the knowledge or courage to pick wild mushrooms, but if you will eat them I will pick them. At that time I was under contract with the Australian Department of Defence, to conduct seminars for their DoD officials and defence industry executives in Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne about how to do business with the U.S. DoD and American defense industry companies. On that visit...

Murder, Football and Redemption In adult Sunday school this morning, if the rain doesn’t keep everyone away, we’ll read Genesis chapter 4, which tells the J story of Cain murdering Abel and begins an etiology of civilization, humans beginning to settle down. Anglicans, Episcopalians, as usual have more questions than answers; which seems good because religion with questions and doubts is interesting to ponder and permissible to question and doubt; whereas religion with all the answers is not only incredibly boring but inevitably wrong. So, come! It makes this morning’s post too long, nevertheless, here’s Genesis 4 (NRSV) followed by some questions and stuff. Come! Cain Murders Abel 1  Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced [ a ] a man with the help of the Lord.” 2  Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. 3  In the course of time Cain brought to t...

QUOTATION OF THE DAY "This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity." Pope Francis, in an interview in which he said the Roman Catholic Church had become "obsessed" with gay people, abortion and contraception. Immediately after he was elected, Pope John XXIII was approached by two women from his family, seems to me it was elderly aunts. They came up to him hesitantly and fell on their knees at his feet, reaching for his hand to kiss his ring. Not one for putting on airs, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli said, “Get up, get up, it’s only me.” That pope, who is quoted as often saying it was time to open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air, convened Vatican II, which brought the church momentarily out of the dark ages into the light of hope. Myself no Roman Catholic except...