Below is our second reading for this coming Sunday, Easter Day. I don't have to agree with St Paul when he says, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."  Paul, who, along with Gospel John (and the early church councils under the Roman emperors), basically set in concrete the theology of the Christian church, teaches that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the first act of the general resurrection when all living and dead will meet Christ in the air for judgment in the process of populating the new kingdom of God on earth with Christ as Lord reigning for God.  Paul's theology is that those who place themselves under the "umbrella" - - the mercy - - of the God of Jesus Christ will be forgiven of sins by the shed blood of Jesus and saved into the new kingdom of God, people with spiritual bodies - - Paul's experience with Jesus having been vision or visions encountering Jesus' spiritual presence. The sign...

Yes, it's the Tuesday after, but I am still taken with our Second Reading for last Sunday, what we call the Christ Hymn in Paul's letter to the Philippians: Philippians 2:5-11 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,  who, though he was in the form of God,  did not regard equality with God  as something to be exploited,  but emptied himself,  taking the form of a slave,  being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,  he humbled himself  and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him  and gave him the name  that is above every name,  so that at the name of Jesus  every knee should bend,  in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  and every tongue should confess  that Jesus Christ is Lord,  to the glory of God the Father. +++++++ Kajillions of words have been written, and sermons preached, about this passage and the various...

  Food for Wiggles is poison for humans, and so Linda will not eat anything I prepare unless it's steak. I cook hers medium and mine rare. But not what I had for breakfast this morning, a MarshWiggle breakfast of a small bowl of cottage cheese with milk and sugar.  It was a standby staple my growing up years, always available for such as a peaceful Sunday evening. Through WW2 we had military folks living in the two bedrooms upstairs, a different family, person, or couple on each side and sharing the bathroom - - and I remember the first Time they came into the dining room where we were having cottage cheese for supper, the shock they expressed that something they ate on lettuce with a half a canned peach or a slice of pineapple, we were eating like corn flakes, with milk and sugar. We were grossed out at the thought of eating cottage cheese any way but ours, which we told them was how we Southerners ate cottage cheese. In retrospect, we may have been the only ones. Always Yank...

Over the almost 2025 - 2010 = 15 years that I've been writing these +Time blogposts, there are several, I don't know how many, not a lot but at least a few, blogposts that I've written but then either pressed Publish on +Time but not linked on Facebook, or that I've pressed Publish and then immediately gone back and pressed Revert to Draft and never published. IDK, this could be one or the other, it's going to be obtuse, probably, too stupid to let anyone read and draw conclusions about me. I mean, one can tell too much about oneself, nomesane?  This issue of +Time is my thoughts about what I've been doing this morning, starting at 3:41 dark-thirty when Father Nature finally forced me to get up and turn on the coffee. For early breakfast snack I had one of my standard favorites, half of it pictured above, Roquefort cheese on a saltine cracker. There are many cheeses that I like, my two blue cheese favorites are English Stilton and French Roquefort; the Italian b...

In a recent situation of pain, sickness and dying of a loved one, I was asked, "Where is God in this?" It may be the question asked the most by believers, the faithful, when we are in extremis, a crisis of life where nothing seems to help and we wonder about our all powerful all loving God after all.  Not only a Jew at Auschwitz as fumes begin to fill the gas chamber, but any husband whose wife is dying of cancer, any parent hearing the phone ring or a police knock at the door in the dark night, any patient hearing the doctor's dreaded terminal prognosis.   Mindful that we hope and expect God will intervene to heal and save in response to our prayers, I am still and nevertheless always mindful of a prayer I heard at Episcopal summer camp as a teenager seventy-odd years ago. The teenager told our small group that her youth group at home always ended their Sunday evening sessions with the prayer, "God has no hands but our hands to do his work today ...". To me, it...

  Gators 65 Houston 63 for an NCAA championship win. Did you watch it all the way, Robert? Robert was our Cove School class of 1949 basketball star, and I've watched him sink a jump shot from half-court at over 75 years of age. Robert, who will turn 90 in May, and may the Lord add his blessing. My Laughing Place under the cedar tree across the street down at the Bay's edge evaporated ten and a piece years ago when we sold the Old Place and moved to 7H. I was tentative for a while, but have come to peace with it upon finding just the right arrangement:  this spot in 7H by a living room window shutter looking out across St Andrews Bay, at a table my mother had made for me after my father died, in my favorite office chair that I brought from my office at HNES, the Bill Lloyd Building upon my retirement as school chaplain in, what?, must have been 2007? I retired when Kristen graduated from HNES and went on to high school.  Holding the numbers in my head - - they seem to slip...