After church Sunday dinner, a superior hotdog with coleslaw on deer sausage and an ice cold Land Shark followed by my High Priestly Nap, this one from 12:30 to 4:30. The four-hour nap may be a record for me, but it followed getting up early, an intense but gratifying morning with extraordinary people; plus, the unrelenting CHF is bringing on epic exhaustion not experienced since October 2010.

Supper last evening, a mug of ice cold Japanese barley tea with a sandwich of chopped liver on extra thin whole wheat bread. If you thought liver pate was only for delicately dipping with a chip of some sort, you are mistaken.

All my world needs now is a trip back to whoever will set a tray of two-dozen cold salty oysters down in front me - -

that and my Coffee Club edition for April - May to arrive. The regular email notice has already come, so my anticipation is building.

What's on my mind this 15 April Monday of 2024 other than those miserable wretched years in Harrisburg when, having procrastinated until the absolute last minute to prepare it, I got in the long line of cars at the downtown postoffice, to hand my federal income tax return to a Postal Service employee, guaranteed that it would be postmarked before 12:01 AM 16 April. After a series of IRS audits, including a random one where they required my birth certificate, my drivers license, my marriage certificate, my dependent child's birth certificate, and GOK what else, I finally wised up and handed the task over to a CPA firm. CPAs are my heroes and offer the greatest worry relief known to man. My 2023 Federal Income Tax Return was filed early and the IRS has already cashed my check.

So what else is new then? I'm remembering that every year, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is Good Shepherd Sunday, reflected in the Propers for the day:

The Collect

O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm 23

1 The Lord is my shepherd; * I shall not be in want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures * and leads me beside still waters.

3 He revives my soul * and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

4 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; *for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

5 You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.

6 Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, * and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

John 10:11-18

Jesus said, “I AM the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I AM the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

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That's for next Sunday. We usually say the 23rd Psalm in unison; so, although it's not my Sunday in the pulpit, if I can head it off at the pass, I'll try to substitute the KJV Twenty-third Psalm in our worship bulletin for the Lectionary version. It's tradition to commit to memory the KJV of the 23rd Psalm, and if we substitute a different version, folks have a sense that something is not as perfect as it might easily have been.

My other comment about the Propers for next Sunday concerns the gospel reading. Writing later with an entirely different perspective and agenda, Gospel John is in several ways quite distinct from the synoptic gospels Mark, Matthew and Luke.

Gospel John portrays Jesus as the Lamb of God, even uniquely both Lamb and Shepherd, both the Host and the Bread.

Gospel John has Jesus tie himself personally to God the Father by what we call "the I AM sayings," one of which appears in our gospel for next Sunday: Jesus saying, "I AM the good shepherd." In the Jewish culture of Jesus' surroundings, "I AM" (whether in Hebrew or in Greek) was the unspeakable Name of God, for which one substituted Adonai (the Lord) or haShem (the Name). Inside Gospel John's story, for Jesus to say "I AM" is a cause for outrage among pious Jews; for his intended audience and us readers outside the story, Gospel John means for it to be a revelation to us, central to his agenda of Jesus as the Word of God.

If you are offended by the word "agenda," grow up and get a life. Every writer has an agenda, whether it's to earn income or to tell a story. Gospel John's agenda is to persuade his readers that Jesus is God the Son, divine from all eternity. And he does it masterfully, leaving little room for the doubts that remain in the other gospel stories.

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This morning I am also taken with an online article about Salman Rushdie, a most brilliant fiction writer. I've read his incomparable book "Midnight's Children" and a couple of his others. Years ago, I started reading his "Satanic Verses," but it begins with a couple of passengers having a conversation as they float or plunge to earth after their plane exploded, which was so unbelievable for me that I put it down and didn't continue. For what was perceived in Islam as blasphemy, the book was condemned and a fatwah put on for Rushdie's execution. I'm not Muslim, and I didn't read the book, and I don't understand that, but I do understand their aversion to mishandling The Koran and would never intentionally offend them or their religion, just as I might hope they would never seek to offend mine.

In Jesus' Time, saying "I AM" was an offense, and the idea of relating it to himself personally would have been, and was, a capital offense. So, in that regard, although some bible scholars point to Gospel John's writing as "anti-semitic," Gospel John did not write his story to offend Jews, but to convicnce us Gentiles, who are not offended.

More --> I loved watching, listening, hearing, appreciating, as Salman Rushdie delivered the commencement address at Kristen's graduation from Emory Univerithy in, I guess it was May 2015. Perhaps coming across as overbearing, opinionated, arrogant, he was fascinating to hear, and we were sitting near enough to the podium that I watched him up close, from his right side. An at least underlying subject in my blogpost here this morning is the matter of offending and taking offense; and, as Rushdie knew full well that he was addressing a university with Christian origins, and with MDiv theological seminary students in the graduating audience, I thought he was deliberately offending, and people gasping as they took offense; but I was feeling honored to be there, I was happy that Kristen was graduating, and I was delighted with Salman Rushdie's somewhat blasphemous address.

Christians don't do fatwahs though, except possibly here in the boneheaded southern Bible Belt.

He Was Blinded in One Eye, but Salman Rushdie’s Vision Is Undiminished

The author’s new memoir, “Knife,” addresses the attack that maimed him in 2022, and pays tribute to the wife who saw him through. “I wanted to write a book which was about both love and hatred — one overcoming the other,” he says.

Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was blacked out, because his right eye had been blinded in the assault. But anyone wondering whether the author was still his old exuberant self would have been immediately reassured by the way he began his remarks, with a racy impromptu joke.

“I want to remind people in the room who might not remember that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ was published in the same publishing season as Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’” he said, riffing on an earlier speaker’s mention of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler. “And when Jacqueline Susann was asked what she thought about Philip Roth’s great novel” — with its enthusiastically self-pleasuring main character — “she said, ‘I think he’s very talented but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’”

It was classic Rushdie, improvisational literary wit deployed during a solemn occasion, in this case his acceptance of the organization’s Centenary Courage Award. It was also a triumphant signal that his brush with death — more than three decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder over the novel “The Satanic Verses” — had dampened neither his spirit nor his determination to live life in the open.

Copy and pasted sans permission from NYT Mon 15 Apr 2024