A Blog: Being an Assortment of Random Things That Get My Attention

  The Unknown God   Paul is trying so hard to be clever, up there on what the Romans called Mars Hill. This was a location dedicated to Ares or Mars, the god of war. Paul has a learn è d audience to try and get through to. The guys in the Areopagus meeting were some of the most respected philosophers in Athens. They were defenders of the status quo, which in this case meant polytheism. But they were also curious about this stranger who was talking about ideas that were new to them. Athenians, according to verse 21, were always interested in discussing the latest ideas. Paul thought he had a great angle to argue from. He had seen an altar, among the city’s many altars and shrines to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, one dedicated to an Unknown God. Hey, he said, I know who that God is. That God isn’t unknown at all. Let me tell you about the Creator of the Universe, who is not like any of your usual gods, who can’t live in an image made by human hands and doesn’t need tem...

  Don’t you love it when the Lectionary starts with a line like, “Six days later”? In case you were wondering what happened six days ago, it was when Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God…and shortly thereafter got on Jesus’ case for saying he would have to die and got called Satan for his trouble. So stuff is getting real at this point in the story. Jesus is getting ready to head for Jerusalem where, he knows, death is waiting. The New Orleans custom called Second Line expresses the ultimate joy of earthly death, that even when we are gone from this world, resurrection awaits. If you like, we could think of Palm Sunday as a kind of Second Line, a demonstration of jubilation in the face of doom. This was a critical idea for Black people in Louisiana for so many centuries. When your daily walk is through the valley of the shadow of death, it is healthy to believe that this abysmal world with its cruel masters and massive oppression is not the last wo...

  Bait   You are thinking about Spiderman And Mama’s pan de yuca , But there is no cassava here, only Broccoli with worms and greenish water, And you wish you were Spiderman. You would Catch all the bad guys in your web And let all the children and daddies go free.   You were thinking about Spiderman And pulling down the tassles on your Bunny hat to make the ears flap up when The car door opened before the engine had stopped And Daddy shouted WHAT THE HELL As two thick white hands Smelling of stale coffee and gunpowder Unclasped the buckle at your crotch And pulled you from your car seat, And the hands were attached to a man Whose face was covered up to his eyes, which Sparkled with loathing, his middle fat With thick vest and bristling black weapons, And he stood you on the driveway And pulled your arms through the straps of your Spiderman backpack And there were more men who looked just the same, Who smelled just the...

  “Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble?” Habakkuk, prophesying shortly before Judah was conquered by Babylon, looked at his world around 600 BCE and saw violence and trouble and wrong-doing on all sides, including an imminent war that his country was going to lose. Two and a half millennia later, I look around at my world, and I see environmental destruction and political violence, strife between citizens here, and contention over land and resources there. And God doesn’t have to make me see it. I can doom-scroll at 3am all on my own. It’s bad news, as far as the algorithm can see. Everyone is blaming someone else as the law becomes slack about the crimes of the rich but tightens its noose around the poor. It becomes a toy in the hands of the ambitious, and the wicked surround the innocent in search of someone or something to punish for the problems they themselves often created. Yet the psalmist tells us not to fret ourselves. They use that phrase three ti...

Poetry in the Stocks   I quite enjoyed today’s Lectionary readings. They appeal to the English major in me. First, there’s that ripping great yarn about the enslaved fortuneteller and the jailbreak that wasn’t—talk about opening the gates!—and then a succession of poetic bits attributed to John. First about the Paul and Silas story. I love that it all started with this girl annoying them. They didn’t rebuke the spirit out of love for the slave but out of exasperation. She was driving them up the wall. The love of God can work with our exasperation, and so she was released from her bondage to the divination spirit. Of course, the enslavers were upset, and that landed Paul and Silas in jail, a place they were probably becoming familiar with by then. One thing I find remarkable about in this story is that not just Paul and Silas but all the prisoners stayed put when the walls came down. The jailer assumed they would all leave. I mean, wouldn’t you? He was ready to commit hara-kiri...

  “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” Today's lesson from the Acts of the Apostles is a story about speech, about the authorities trying to hush it up and the Apostles speaking anyway. Their civil disobedience could come with a high price, as Stephen was soon to discover. Yet they kept on speaking, accusing the powers that be of doing away with an innocent man and asserting that this man was the Messiah, the Son of God, and that he had returned from the dead. Human authority these days is also trying to muzzle dissent, ordering scholars not to express any opinions contrary to what the current administration wants to hear. Our authorities will imprison or deport people for their words. It will hold research hostage for promoting inclusion. It will even delete any mention of diversity or the climate from its own websites so as to pretend that discrimination and global warming don’t exist. A college friend of mine, Queer Theology professor Peter Carlson wrote this ...