This morning we will be on our way home from Atlanta, where yesterday we proudly attended the commencement ceremony, Kristen receiving her bachelor's degree from Emory University. Keynote speaker for the graduation was Salman Rushdie, an author whose fiction is exquisite with intricate detail. Midnight's Children, a long novel following and interweaving the lives of several people, strangers to each other, all born, with special almost occult powers, simultaneous with the independence and partition of British India into Pakistan and India at midnight August 15, 1947, is one of my most gripping books ever. Rushdie's talk in the Emory quadrangle yesterday morning, prodding the graduates and jabbing sharply at the world's ignorance, prejudice and stupidity, was caustic perfection for the commencement address at this private multicultural institution of excellence and intellectual freedom. Parts of his speech had me shaking uncontrollably with laughter. I hope it will...

Each year on the Thursday that’s the fortieth day after Easter, the Church celebrates Himmelfahrt Christi, the ascension of Christ into heaven as told by Luke at Acts 1:1-11, from Mount Olivet outside Jerusalem. It needn’t bother us that Luke tells it differently at Luke 24:50f, with Christ ascending the evening of Easter Day. Or that Matthew 28 proclaims something happening on a mountain outside Galilee. Looking at our New Testament canon of Scripture, Gospel John evidently didn’t hear about it, or perhaps John or Lazarus was among the doubters cited at Matthew 28:17. And of course with a different agenda altogether, the Gospel according to Mark ends with the frightened women fleeing the empty tomb at Easter dawn and saying nothing to anyone. Much has been made of it in Himmelfahrt art over the centuries, my favorite a 16th century German painting popularly called “the disappearing feet” first introduced to me by our theology professor at LTSG back in the 1980s.  Not ...

Okay, this is pretty futile for me, because I hardly know what I’m doing. By no means a Greek scholar or a New Testament scholar, and aware and quite conscious that at this age my ability in all things mental slips, slips, slips, I nevertheless enjoy picking through this stuff, and the picking through works best for me if I jot things down. The gospel for this morning, John 15:9-17. For myself, I’ve lined up two columns so I can compare them, English (NRSV) and Greek (SBLGNT). With four choices of Greek (two TR), I prefer this one because it has the accent and breathing marks so I can pronounce it better even just moving my lips. The NRSV text is printed below. From the Greek I’m picking out three words that interest me at the moment. Someone else might pick out five words, or four, or one, and different words entirely. But lifted from the text, my words are ἀγάπῃ (love), φίλοι (friends), and δοῦλος (slave). First of all, in the passage the word translated “love” is the NT Gre...

Acts 10:44-48  Gentiles Receive the Holy Spirit While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days. (NRSV) Through the Easter season, instead of a lesson from the Hebrew bible we are reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, tomorrow Acts 10:44-48. An interesting little snippet, it’s actually part of Luke’s (the anonymous author of the Gospel according to Luke apparently also wrote Acts) story of Simon Peter traveling around the Judean countryside proclaiming Christ crucified and raised. At the moment, T...

for love of Maddy Shrimp boat moving rather noisily east in the near channel, a Florida night perfect for May: clear sky, moon waning from full and nearly at zenith, 67F and 96% humidity, slightest hint of air movement, just enough to make pleasant sitting out here on the balcony porch. I could get used to this. What I do have to get used to is caution. All the furniture legs are in place out here, and having jammed the long toe on the left foot into a chair leg early Wednesday morning, I’m learning to move slowly in the darkness. Sermon there. Sermon and/or life lesson, minding the legs as well as the gap. Moving slowly in the darkness. A slight accident that causes an inconvenience, a sore toe irritating movement and slowing gait in the Wednesday morning walk, makes me think of the one admiral I enjoyed, Chet Heffner in all those years. He was death on lost time accidents, when an office worker left a desk drawer open and banged a leg against it or tripped over it the...

May 7, 1912 Linda and I go a few minutes early and catch the end of children’s choir practice before our worship service starts at 5:30. Folks who don’t come to Wednesday Evening at our church have been missing the best of the week. Worship is informal, with the children serving the Bread and Wine, supper is served afterward, and fellowship is warm. It’s the agape’ meals that Saint Paul writes about, except that instead of everyone bringing food to share, James prepares the meal and has it ready for us when eucharist ends with the Peace, so that it’s actually a continuation of the evening's gathering. There’s a program in Lent and Advent, other times we simply enjoy having supper with our church family. Entering church, I light a votive candle or two. One votive last evening was blessing and thanksgiving for my mother on her birthday, May 7. Louise Gentry Weller, she was born this day in 1912, in Bluff Springs, Florida, north of Pensacola up toward the Alabama line. Early,...

"Emily, look at that star. I forget its name."* Still bothering me: according to the online piece in New Scientist, the yellow circle of a tiny segment of our Milky Way Galaxy shows all the stars that can be seen from here as I look up, out and around me. Who or What are You, Mind of the Yahwist Who Walks in the Garden in the Cool of the Evening?  And Where -- galaxies, planets and stars? This fragile earth, our island home? Hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe; in each galaxy hundreds of billions of stars like our sun, circled round about with billions upon billions of tiny floaty things like our earth. Grösser yet: notions of other universes in a grand multiverse, ever exploded and ever exploding anew with instantaneous Big Bangs of their own in an eternal process without size or time, before time, after time and forever, endless, measureless. On the screen: a changeless and unchanging steady state of logos speaking word, humming the tune and singing th...