Juneteenth, Wednesday 19 June 2024 and my third day into the Wilderness, trekking on to let the desert find me. Books to read, magazines to read, hot & black to sip and cheese to nibble - - this morning on crackers, Sweet Grass Dairy's Green Hill, a soft ripened double cream cow's milk cheese.  But the desert: I'm 19 minutes into an online 3 hour and 41 minute read through the Book of Enoch. If you've not read Enoch, give it a miss, take a pass and take credit for Uncle Bubba having read it in your name, as the Pharisees made a scrupulousness of keeping every aspect and facet of the Law so that other Jews might go about their daily lives. Trust me, you do not need to read Enoch, I've got your back, using my desert space and Time to cover you. It's not likely to be one of the questions anyway.  ++++++++++ Anu Garg's word for today is balderdash, probably not much use for it; but his thought for today bears minding, as it pretty much says it all: A THOUG...

  Below (scroll down) is the gospel reading appointed for the upcoming Sunday, June 23. Except for five Sundays in July and August when our gospel readings will be from John chapter 6, the Bread of Life, we'll be reading through Mark the rest of the summer and fall 2024; and we will see the development of Mark's agenda that his disciples, including The Twelve, the people nearest Jesus cannot see who he is. Sometimes they look really dumb, but that's only because Mark has already told us the readers who Jesus is.  In Sunday's reading, called a "nature miracle," Jesus calms a storm at sea and those in the boat with him puzzle, "Who is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" We may think, "well, duh!" But it isn't that the disciples are stupid, it's that the Bible student has to get in Mark's mind and see what Mark is doing, Mark's agenda. The story is not about obtuse disciples, Mark is using the disciples' perfectly norma...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sitting here Sunday afternoon of Fathers Day receiving news flashes about lightning nearby and hearing distant thunder, watching the gray sky darken to black as the whatever-it-was that tried to become a tropical system but never managed to get it together circles in over us from the Gulf. It may not show on the still screenshot, but in motion it's circling ashore counterclockwise, a low of sorts and a threat lest we relax.  Sixteen days into Hurricane Season 2024 we're warming up and getting there. We've made a list and checked it twice and shopped the things we should have in Linda's car in event of hurricane evacuation. Main thing is a case of bottled water, but we've gathered other recommended articles as well.  Where would we go? Depends on the situation including forecasted track. Most every household has their hurricane history, ours in this iteration of life goes back nearly forty years to summer 1985, when we had three hurrica...

A nice crowd at both services this morning. For what it's worth, my homiletic endeavor is below, I tried to relax and so did a lot of ad-libbing in both sermons at both services, so any resemblance between lip and print is intentional.  Reminded that our homiletics (preaching) professor at theological seminary told us two key things. (1) never print your sermons after you preach them; and if you cannot avoid printing them, make sure that what you print is what you intended to say and should have said, rather than what you actually did say (however, the electronic age has completely overrun that escape mechanism); and (2) never brag to your congregation that you had to fight with the text all week long, because they will always see that you struggled with the text and lost. I did fight with this text all week, and my purpose was not to win, but to get Jesus out of a corner that Mark had painted Him into, it's your call how well or bad I did, eh?  My supervising rector for my tr...

This early, dark, predawn morning I am busily occupied with last minute efforts, still working to convert from nonsense to sense, what I hope to say from the pulpit to the folks at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church later today.  There's a lot to think and rethink, so I won't blog long. My sermon on Sunday, April 28 was to be my last preaching assignment; but here I am, trying to sharpen a skill that I wore down and out over the decades, especially the final years, when so much about me advanced into extreme old age, and I went farther and more costly into that proverb that was on the lintel over the library door at my theological seminary, "Seek the Truth, Come whence it may, Cost what it will" - - and its corollary caution, "No amount of belief makes anything True." I remember my theology professor in seminary admonishing us, "it's really true, never say, 'it's TRUE FOR US,' it's really true." But I also remember him warning us no...

  Just before two o'clock yesterday afternoon the U S Coast Guard arrived to remove the post with flashing red light that they put up a couple years ago to mark the location of the wreck, the shrimp boat that burned as we watched that night, April 10, 2022. It burned all night long and was still burning when I got up before dawn the next morning. (Below: not my photo, John Darrah snapped it from their apartment right above us, his photos turned out better than mine). It's a beautiful Saturday morning, and we've already been to the church to take my vestment and pick up bulletins for tomorrow, and to go in the church office, print my sermon notes, and pick up a couple more belongings that I left in my office - - one of my clocks, a couple of framed things, a notebook with old EfM chapters on Genesis. There's too much of my stuff there, I'll never get it all out, and there's not space for it  here in 7H anyway.  On the way home we stopped and walked around the Far...

  From Time to Time, Linda goes through her silver flatware, sorts it, may make changes to what we use every day, cleans and polishes, then stores it either with pieces of chalk or that anti-oxidant cloth that jewelers use. She has more silver than cloth, so we just ordered three yards of that online, 58" wide anti-oxidant cloth, and she can cut it into whatever size pieces she needs. Linda has her silver flatware patterns, and I have mine which is fiddle, thread, shell because I like the shells. Linda's is a mix of what we got for our wedding and her mother's and her grandmothers'. The girls didn't like Linda's fancy silver patterns, but she's given Joe either three or six table settings each of hers and of her mother's. If Joe wants more, it's here. And there's still lots besides a couple dozen of the usual table settings of knife, fork, salad fork, and teaspoon. Counting interesting pieces this morning, I came across 21 demitasse spoons, 11 b...