Felix calls it parataxis*

And having laid down at eight o’clock to sleep, I wake soon after midnight feeling the summons of Father Nature, sharp. And deciding to ignore Him, return painfully to sleep. And scary visions. And wake again just before three a.m. And feeling His wrath worse than before, immediately I rise to discuss the thing with Father Nature. And having picked up the eyeglasses and iPhone (of me) am deciding to stay up.

And immediately having conferred with Him, I turn on the coffee brewer. And waiting for it to flash “choose product ready for use” I slide open the glass door. And step out onto the balcony. And seeing across the Bay the beam of a searchlight, I move to the balcony rail for a close look. And two green lights, moving together, from east to west. And the sound of a diesel engine loud. And thinking if I had the camera of RevRay this would a great long exposure make, green streak in the blackness. And the white above. And the red and green channel marker lights. And immediately going inside, I get coffee. And return to the balcony. And sit down to watch as tug pushes barge round the channel curve and heads north for Hathaway Bridge out of the sight of me. 

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What I’m doing is reading Mark chapters 15 and 16, prepping for this morning’s Bible Seminar. I'm going back and forth between Mark’s NT Greek, and a Greek-English interlinear that shows the part of speech, case and tense and person of every single Greek word, and the DLNT, an intriguing new English translation, the Disciples’ Literal New Testament: Serving Modern Disciples by More Fully Reflecting the Writing Style of the Ancient Disciples. We are using the DLNT in class so we can better get how Mark (whoever the anonymous writer we call Mark actually was) wrote it. His use of the historic present that makes the story come alive and present better than the flat past tense that other modern translations use. 

 A problem with what I'm doing is that it makes my own thinking drift off into Mark's syntax and eccentricities.

Mark’s frequent use of the word “immediately” that gives a sense of hurry. 

His beginning almost every verse with the Greek word καὶ (“and”) to link sentence after sentence after sentence, making his writing so breathless that by the time you get to the end of a chapter you feel exhausted, that you have been dragged through the story without time to stop and take a breath. 

We should finish reading and discussing Mark this morning --- the climax of his agenda when the Roman centurion, a total outsider, sees in Jesus what those around him failed to see --- Mark’s abrupt ending with the women fleeing the empty tomb in terror and “not saying nothing to nobody” --- the extra ending verses added later by wellmeaning folks who didn’t get it, failed to understand the subtlety of Mark’s clever and brilliant agenda and tried pathetically to make Mark end as conclusively as Matthew and Luke --- and the source of modern snakehandling cults.

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So come and bring your basket of snakes, angry and buzzing. We'll pass them round to show the strength of our faith. First one bitten is a rotten egg. 

We sit down at ten o’clock and open with prayer at ten-oh-five.