Advent: Christmas is coming
An ideal taste treat with my magic mug of hot & black this morning would have been whole fig preserves on top of cheddar cheese on a saltine cracker. If you've not tried it, don't knock it. Unfortunately, it's not possible this morning because I dare not open any cooling device here to look for the cheese. We have fresh food items tucked in three different places as we deal with last Saturday morning's failure of our three-year-old Whirlpool refrigerator. There are things out that will spoil, and we're trying to feature them as meal items right away before they go bad. An opened jar of whole fig preserves from Tanya's Garden is one such item. So, I ate several of the figs while coffee perked, but forwent the cheese on crackers.
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Our Advent Year C gospel readings yesterday and next Sunday are from Luke chapter 3, stretching vss 1 to 18, and focus on John the Baptist.
We are taken with John partly because of his strange diet, locusts and wild honey, which is said in Mark 1 and Matthew 3 but not in Luke 3 and not in the Gospel according to John. And which the noncanonical Gospel of the Ebionites, https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/gospelebionites.html a vegetarian group, has as cakes and honey https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelebionites.html#google_vignette.
Discussing the issue of whether John the Baptist ate AKRIDES (locusts) or EGKRIDES (cakes), here is a copy-and-paste lifted from the blog of Professor Bart Ehrman, one of my favorite sources. If it shows up too small, it should get larger and more readable if you tap it. Dr Ehrman, who has a fascinating personal history of faith travel, far more scholarly than my own journey, is a biblical studies professor at the Univ of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
I have no illusions that many folks who might read my blogposts have my same kind of interest in Bible study, especially as part of "seeking the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will," but someone may find Ehrman's blog and his writings and textbooks as helpful as I have over the years; so I mention him in case anyone might be.
But back to the coverage of John the Baptist in all four canonical gospels. By the Time our gospels were written (likely 70 AD for Mark, maybe 80 to 90 AD for Matthew and Luke, 90 to 100 or a bit later for Gospel John) there had been and were disciples of John the Baptist acclaiming him, not Jesus, as Christ, the Messiah. A literary technique in all four gospels is to dispel that notion right up front by having John the Baptist himself deny it, John himself renouncing any claim to be the Messiah, and to lay the messiahship on Jesus.
Competent study of the Bible doesn't go into the Bible with head bowed reverently, hands folded piously, and reading softly and fearfully respectfully, but realizes that the bible is literary material with authors, and that every writer has agenda and techniques. Learning to search beyond the words on the page is part of the competence. As said, an early agenda item in all four gospels is to deal with John the Baptist, and all four evangelists (gospel writers) use the technique of having John the Baptist himself renounce messiahship.
Anyway, Dr Ehrman's interesting blogpost about the diet of John the Baptist follows:
along with my recommendation of his blog and all his writings.
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Here at 7H, all our plans for this week have been stiff-armed by the catastrophic failure of our Whirlpool refrigerator last week, and our having to see to preservation of both fresh and frozen items until arrival of the replacement new LG refrigerator, delivery currently scheduled for this coming Saturday.
Pic: our Christmas tree set up in the front living room of the Old Place in December 2014 (even though we had already moved into 7H) because everyone wanted to have one last Christmas morning there in the old family homestead. I think the tree looks as lonely as the house itself felt abandoned and unloved those days.
A personal memory is that when I received the acceptable offer to purchase my house, the Old Place that my grandparents built 1911-1912, and where my father spent the first half of his childhood and the rest of our family lived and loved from 1962 to 2014. Ashamed to cowardly accept the offer away from the house, I drove from 7H down the street to the Old Place to sign my acceptance of the buyer's offer. I walked in the back door and through the house, through the dining room where my grandparents and their children ate, into the living room where my father, in December 1962, showed me where his brother's casket stood in February 1918, an event that changed everything about my family's history and course in life; took the paper contract out onto the front screen porch and, perhaps shamefully for an old man, in a breakdown moment of anguish, broke into uncontrollable sobs as I read the buyer's offer again and signed my name, contracting to sell my birthright. This is my memory ten years on this month, eh?
Ten years on and are we glad we sold out and made the move, relocating from the Big House to Harbour Village? Indeed yes, yes indeed, happy and glad by all means. It had gotten down to just Linda and me at the Big House, with two floors, unstairs and down, seven bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, a huge kitchen, and a living room at each end of the house. Here in 7H we have the same view that we had there, of St Andrews Bay but far better than before and enjoy from the seventh floor instead of ground level; next door to a nice city park; and looking out the other way on downtown St Andrews where I worked in my father's seafood business from age nine until I went away to university at age eighteen. I could not possibly be more at home than I am now!!
RSF&PTL
T89&c
