Sat Mar 7 5:50 PM
Sat Mar 7 4:26 PM. My blogposts and Facebook posts have always been public. As I said fairly recently, though, my blogposts are getting thousands of views daily in Singpore, and slightly less, a few thousand or hundreds, in China - - all of which makes me uneasy. Especially since the Time a dozen or so years ago when I received an anonymous threat from someone in the Middle East.
So, I've decided to revert all fifteen years' worth, currently 5,132 posts, to DRAFT, which makes them inaccessible to anyone but me. Only the blogpost for the current day or so will be accessible. I'll continue to remove within a day or two each blogpost link that I post on Facebook. This management effort will be a nuisance, but I'll see if it cuts down on the foreign monitoring. If it doesn't I'll do something else.
At any event, I can't imagine that such a volume is legitimate, well-intended attention from overseas. For me, blogging is essentially my lazy person's private journaling, my thoughts, someTimes a Bible lesson or theological comment, someTimes a despairing political observation, someTimes a memory from long ago; nearly always a stream of consciousness in which I may now and then write things that were better left unrecorded for public viewing.
Anyway, there you go.
+++++
Saturday breakfast after a patronage visit to Tarpon Dock Seafood yesterday morning: half a dozen raw oysters. Saturday supper: the picture above, one of my favorites, oysters slightly baked in the toaster oven then forked onto crispy toast and enjoy before the toast goes soggy. Our years in Apalachicola when I bought a well packed gallon of oysters for $50, it was a frequent, major breakfast that I first started when we lived in Pennsylvania and I could buy Chesapeake oysters at the Saturday farmers market, from the folks at the Pennsylvania Deutsch booth. I remember the first Time I bought them I ordered "a quart of oysters" and the Amish proprietor asked, "What in the world are you going to do with a quart of oysters?" That was 1976 to 1984, the end of my Navy years and start of my business, adjunct college professor, and theological seminary years.
What I remember about the Amish those years is their ongoing squabbling that made television and front page news in our daily newspaper, The Patriot. The father of an Amish family had refused to obey an order given by church superiors and they had ordered his shunning, social isolation that required all other Amishto ignore him, even members of his family, his wife, his children, his parents, siblings, aunts and uncles were all absolutely forbidden to speak to him. It clarified for me what had been my initial sense that the Amish were kind and gentle people: they are under wicked religious control the same as all other bullying religions with rules to enforce on their members. Thinking today, of course, of Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Pakistan to an extent, Ireland when it was controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, England in the Reformation era, several early colonies later states of what became the United States. And frankly, right wing Christian Nationalism today.
Enough, eh? - -
++++++++
Gospel reading for tomorrow, Lent 3 - - among other preachable things, Jesus proclaiming himself as Messiah (a key feature of Gospel John's work), and Jesus opening the kingdom of God to outsiders, respecting the dignity of every human being.
John 4:5-42
Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”