Mark 8:31-38 Common English Bible (CEB) 31 Then Jesus began to teach his disciples: “The Human One [or Son of Man] must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” 32 He said this plainly. But Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him. 33 Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, then sternly corrected Peter: “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.” 34 After calling the crowd together with his disciples, Jesus said to them, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. 35  All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them. 36  Why would people gain the whole world but lose their lives? 37  What will people give in exchange for their lives? 38...

World I live in stirs again my settled soup of longing to have lived life in some prior age. Pick any generation free of wars and hatred, set me down and forget me, I’m gone. Was there ever such, or have we always been human? Or anyplace where the rest of the world doesn’t happen.  No TV. No WWW.  Even Grovers Corners, where we learned about life and love and death and contemplated eternity and the meaning of it all, was defiled by the world. What stirs my soup -- ? watching TV news with my first cup of coffee. Big mistake. So horrific I have to put milk in it. The news not the coffee; the Kona is this morning’s link to sanity.  There goes the Navy, just out my window, steaming out for another day’s hard work at sea. Okay, not steaming , it’s a small craft. Sailing , then. They leave this time every morning M-F and return at the end of office hours. I could go for that sea duty, is there an officer on board that vessel?  Morning’s problem. 45F...

The St. Andrews Buoy  St. Andrews, Fla, Dec 30, 1909 The St. Andrews kids are all envying Mr. A. D. Weller’s little boy, who received a handsome hand-mobile for a Christmas gift. (page 2 in the gossip column “Legal Drift”). +++   +++   +++ Opening email after arriving home from church last evening, I was overjoyed to find two from Mike McKenzie. Introduced here on my blog before, Mike is the dentist in Atlanta who lived here when his family owned my house during the 1940s after WW2, and whose family’s and his wife’s family’s roots in the community are at least as deep as mine, deeper. From time to time Mike sends me pictures, documents (e.g., copy of the deed when my grandparents sold this house and moved away), and photocopies of pages from the early 20th century St. Andrews Bay News . The two emails last evening include both pictures of several early St. Andrews and newspaper pages, including 1915-era pages with articles about “Mayor Weller” when my grandfa...

He was very real. Still is actually, and you can know and love him. If you want to know Tom Sawyer, and who his friends and enemies were and his love and hate relationships with them; and about the girls Tom was smitten in love with; and how Tom thought, his attitudes and emotions and quirks, and how he nearly always got the best of his adversary, and how he aggravated and charmed his relatives; and the social customs and mores of the age that Tom lived in, you must read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Having read him a dozen times, I last read him four years ago in my Cleveland accommodation looking out over Lake Erie, frozen solid. Mark Twain was his pen name, Samuel Clemens his “real name” but we know Mark T. better than we know Sam C. so they are equally real. And he swears most of Tom's adventures really happened. “Real” is what we see and perceive anyway, and what we remember, that Oldsmobile in the garage out back and the fun I had driving it, more than “rea...

What am I doing? Not to be profane, but what the hell am I doing? I am trying to live into Lent, and it is proving to be requiring and demanding. Lent for me has not always been so: there was a time in my life, most of it actually, when Lent (which is the annual springtime season of concentrating on making myself clean enough, pure enough, sufficiently worthy, to participate in the Easter celebration) when Lent was giving up something I liked (a Hershey bar a week for example, which would have cost me five cents, a nickel a week), and as my spiritual discipline prayerfully dropping into a “mite box” one day at a time the five pennies a week that I supposedly otherwise would have spent on the chocolate bar. So that on Easter morning I could bring my mite box to church heavy with its pennies, its “mites,” and stuff it into the mite-box cross as part of the church’s Easter collection for the poor.  That’s still a worthwhile devotion of focused sacrifice.  But it only skirts ...

Seven o'clock last evening I took a plastic bag along the outside walk to drop down the garbage chute. Looking north, St. Andrews was white with fog. Still foggy this morning, but now looking south across where the Bay was, all creation is white. Inside it, within it, my Bay window is like the window seat of an airplane flying through a cloud, it's that thick, close, immediate. Can whoever is piloting this thing see, because not one navigation light is visible, green nor even the red light just off my balcony. Yesterday began, ended, and was peculiar. Truth, life and all days are peculiar, what made yesterday so? Dozing off about six or seven o’clock Saturday evening, I rose, stumbled to bed, crashed. Linda apparently left and went to her “snore room,” I say this because when I woke at 1:15 a.m. and realized that I was “up for the day” she was gone. 1:15 is not a good start to begin with, though the three hour Sunday afternoon nap was good. Not refreshing, but oblivion. Per...

1 Peter 3:18-22 (NRSV) 18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20 who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. 21 And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. +++   +++   +++ Although my preaching preference (I am not preaching today) generally is to base on either the Gospel or the Old Testament reading, this morning’s reading from First Peter might be...

Chilly this morning, still dark, a stiff breeze. Wind in the face looking out into the blackness reminds me of being on the bridge of my first ship, a WW2 destroyer, at night. Underway, the wind was invariably too stiff for comfort, would sail hats away, generally forced the bridge watch to be inside. Our new skipper, a commander who knew ships, summoned the chief engineer to his cabin and ordered him to fabricate and install a -- he called it a "venturi," a long concave shield across the front of the bridge deck, to direct wind up and over. The chief did as ordered, but under protest and insisted on a written and signed order. A new ensign, I asked why he didn't simply follow orders, why so formal. He told me about NavAlts and ShipAlts, that ships were not the property of the skipper, and alterations had to be directed from higher authority, generally from BuShips, as it was called, in Washington. A NavAlt referred to all ships of a class, a ShipAlt to a particular hull...

What a miserable winter I could say, and I do say, although Michigan loved ones who visited yesterday say it's -28 at home this morning. It’s still miserable here anyway, and with light wind coming off the Gulf, bitter. I would say raw, but raw involves damp cold, and at least it isn’t drizzling. What’s going on? This is the longest winter here in my memory, what’s going on? Is this the other side of a climate change coin?  Don’t say global warming. Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it skiing in Colorado. I like it looking across Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico.  Our diocesan convention is underway in Mobile, Alabama. Tomorrow they elect our next bishop from among four candidates, three winners and one loser. Election takes a simple majority in both “orders,” lay and clergy. Then the election goes churchwide to be ratified.  Being a bishop brings to mind Mark Twain’s comment about being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rai...

For several years, every day’s email brings “Days of Praise,” a free online devotional from the Institute for Creation Science, Dallas, Texas. I like having some devotional thought, but’ve never really gotten into my own Episcopal Church’s “Forward Day by Day” publication although I’ve always found it excellent, good writers, thoughtful people, always heartfelt, often moving, sometimes scholarly. No, I enjoy having a different take on things as long as it isn’t downright stupid like the utterances of pseudo-religious politicians who are so desperate to blend with their intended electorate that they go out of their way to embrace ignorance. Sadly, they have become the tail wagging the dog of my political heritage. See, it’s so easy in writing to wander down a thorny trail. But I was talking about “Days of Praise” and their writers. Even though I seldom to never entirely agree with them, they are scholarly and educated, with, as I’ve mentioned before, Greek and Hebrew that far excee...

Hopefully anticipating our hour walk this morning. Wednesday schedule is walk then breakfast, whether it happens depends, like everything else in life. One factor is always the weather: raining, we cancel. I’m up for walking in near-freezing temperature, as about 32F at the moment. We’ll see. Including the Monday/Wednesday walk, the exercise program is part of my fight to stay alive long enough to ring in the Second Coming. Tuesday/Friday it’s work up a sweat at Chuck’s Cardio, but cancelled yesterday because. Mistake of taking the carvedilol sooner rather than later, extreme dizziness even though taken with two scrambled eggs and toast. Whine, whine. Someone said getting old is for the birds. I’m finding it’s for old men. I’m 79. Here’s my picture at 19 just home from my sophomore year at UFlorida. It was 1955, I arrived home from Gainesville with my first crew cut, and mama hustled me off to Olan Mills to immortalize it. My next crewcut was the second day of Navy OCS, Newpor...

Seldom do I do this, only once in a great while do I print a sermon, and always hesitantly. But our Tuesday morning Bible Seminar is studying the Gospel according to Mark (NRSV) by reading through, picking apart, and discussing, and this my homily from a couple weeks ago is sort of an introduction to the subject. TW+ Homily Sunday, 1 Feb 2015 Didactic: teaching on the Gospel Mark 1:21-28 21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and...

1  Blow the trumpet in Zion;     sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,     for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near— 2  a day of darkness and gloom,     a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains     a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old,     nor will be again after them     in ages to come. Ash Wednesday for me begins with sirens, sudden and unexpected, sirens wailing and long like the old time air raid warning to take cover immediately, or the long undulating siren that tells of an approaching tornado. It was the biblical forty years ago, one of the most effective, no it was chilling , Ash Wednesday services I ever attended. At our parish in Pennsylvania. The rector regarded liturgy as art and an opportunity for his creative ge...