Disappointment in my alma mater...

My alma mater, West Virginia University, did no better than 4th on this year's list of 'best party schools'.

And that after several years of being in the top 2! WVU is where people burn couches on the street when the football team wins...I'm talkin' about serious 'party-time'!

And who squeezed them out of NUMBER ONE, you might ask...that's where the embarrassment and disappointment comes in.

In third place was UCal Santa Barbara. Ok, lots of sun and surf and no sports teams to speak of...why not party? I can get that.

In second place, though, the University of Iowa! Iowa, Jesus/Mary/and Joseph--a place that flat and dull, in the part of America most of us only fly over? Help me with this...maybe it's the flatness and dullness that drive them to drink and party, who knows?

And the 1st ranked Party School in America...give me a break...Syracuse University...one of WVU's top rivals until college sports went crazy and WV is playing in the Southwest as part of the Big Twelve and Sryacuse--hundreds of miles from the Atlantic--is playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Syracuse? Give me a break? How can the Orange party? Well, it is cold as hell up there and those long winter nights drag on and on...OK, I get it.

At least we're still number 4. When Providence or Southern Methodist get ahead of WVU, I'll seriously start worrying about the party vibes in Morgantown.....

My sermon today

(Here's the sermon I gave today at St. James in Higganum. I really didn't prepare it very much--since I've been doing this forever and think I know what I'm doing....The thing was, the way it turned out sort of astonished me. I never meant to go where I went. Maybe the Spirit led me and maybe I'm getting 'a tad off' as we would have said where I came from if someone was slipping into dementia. I even sent it in an email to Bea at the Cluster office to forward to Cluster members with the notice that it was preached at Emmanuel instead of St. James! Don't tell Bern, we have a running total of reasons the other should be 'in the home'!)

Matthew 14.13-21

The gospel today about the feeding of the multitude is interesting in several ways.

First of all, it is one of only three stories told in all four gospels. In fact, Mark likes it so much he tells it twice! Chapters 6 and 8--look it up.

The other two stories in all the gospels are the cleansing of the Temple and the Anointing. John puts the cleansing story near the beginning of his gospel and the other three have it near the end. And all four versions of the woman anointing Jesus with expensive oil is very different in each of it's telling--no one agrees who the woman is  and what the moral of the story is.

But the five telling's of the Feeding are remarkably alike--differing only in minor detail. When we get the same story told five times it, we should ponder it's meaning carefully.

It takes place in what Matthew calls "a deserted place"--though anywhere where there are five thousand 'man', plus ever how many 'women and children' there were is difficult to think of as 'deserted'! It's time to eat supper and the disciples urge Jesus to send the crowds to villages to buy food, but he tells them 'feed them yourselves'. Feed this mob, he says, with five loaves and two fish. Right, Jesus!

People are always trying to explain this miracle. I had an assistant once who preached on one of the Feeding stories and said the people were so moved by Jesus' faith that they pulled out the food they had brought and shared and that's where the leftovers came from. She and I had quite a conversation after her sermon. I couldn't see why she just couldn't be satisfied with it being a miracle--five loaves, two fish...everybody eats and twelve baskets left over....

One of the reasons this story is so provocative is that eating is one of the most basic of human needs. Stop eating and you'll die. We all know that.

Besides, how do we celebrate as human beings? Holidays and special occasions a observed by sharing a meal with loved ones and friends. Not only is eating vitally important, it is our way of acknowledging and celebrating important events.

Plus, this story points to what we do at that Table up there when we gather. We eat and drink. Not filet mignon and fine wine--rather bad Port and bread more akin to fish food. But that wine and that bread is the very blood and body of Christ. It fills our hungers, our needs, our longing.

We 'hunger' after much more than food. We hunger after hope. We hunger after joy. We hunger after peace. We hunger after safety. And most, most of all. We hunger to be 'whole'.

Was it Pascal who said 'there is a God-shaped hole in each of our hearts'? We can never be 'whole' until that hole is filled in. Jesus never said we should be 'good'. But he said over and again we should be 'whole'--complete, full, finished....

Let me tell you something that might give you pause about coming to this railing in a little while: when you leave here you will be carrying Jesus within you--literally! You will have taken his Body and Blood into yourself and will carry him out the door.

Can you imagine what truly understanding that would mean? It would transform our lives! What if we were totally aware that when we leave this place we are carrying Jesus into the world. What a difference that would make in how we meet people and 'be' in the world. Our 'God shaped hole' would be filled in. We would be 'whole' and would carry that 'wholeness' into our daily lives.

What a difference that would make! It would transform our lives and the lives we lead.

Ponder that. Ponder 'carrying Jesus' into the world.

Try to imagine....

amen.

This is August in Connecticut?

We have windows open at 10:13 p.m. and air conditioning off!

I'm astonished by the summer in New England this year. We usually get 90's and 95% humidity in July and August. So far there's only been one day that I would consider Summer In New England. We sit outside and read most every day, Bern and I. I haven't cursed the gods of summer once yet.

So what's this about?

It tried to rain all afternoon but couldn't, yet there was a cool breeze and it wasn't humid.

I'm beginning to feel like I live on a mountain though Cheshire is probably about 300 feet above sea level--if that.

I'm not complaining...far from it...if this is August in New England I'm glad I live here!

I just don't get it.

But I'm not complaining...not a bit...keep August coming like this....

David is dead....

David Bolton, a priest of the church, died on July 19. He was 85. He lived on an island off Maine but I knew him in New Haven.

David was Rector of Christ Church, the great Anglo-Catholic parish in New Haven. I was Rector of St. Paul's, the left wing broad church in New Haven.

When he retired, sometimes between 1980 and 1985, I took him to lunch to say good-bye.

He told me, during lunch that he had prayed for decades for God to speak out loud and in English to him and 'tell him what to do'.

It was an interesting and odd story until he told me that God had answered that prayer.

I dropped my fork full of seafood salad and gaped at him.

"What was that like?" I asked, full of confusion and wonder.

"Well," David told me, "he had a Mid-Atlantic accent...."

"No!" I said, not caring what God's accent was (though I should have cared, I believe), "what did God say????"

David took a bite of good French bread and chewed it and swallowed it. Then he said, "He told me, 'David, do whatever comes next,' in a slightly exasperated tone.

Jesus, the only time I get to hear what God says out loud and in a Maryland accent, it is that banal--"David, do whatever comes next."

Maybe David exasperated God with his decades of prayers. And maybe God answered his question the only way that made sense.

Maybe that's what happened.

But a Maryland accent? I'm not even sure what that means besides saying 'Bal-ti-mor'.

I send a prayer to God for David's soul...he was a good, a very good man. But God probably already knows that since God spoke out loud to David, in English, with a Maryland accent and told him the most reasonable thing: 'David, do whatever comes next.'

May David's soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

So I don't often do this...

I read a lot. 5 or 6 books a week, from Cheshire's library. I am a library rat.

I read dozens of books without recommending one.

But I want to.

Carolyn Barkhurst's novel The Nobodies Album is definitely worth a read.

It is a remarkable story and the stuff that will annoy you at first turns out to be the best stuff of all.

I recommend it highly.

On the other hand...

OK, I'm hard on Israel, I admit it. And there is another side of the story that needs telling.

Hamas is perfectly aware of Israel's tendency to strike back to attacks with gusto. That's what Israel does, always has. Israel is surrounded by people who hate them. And Israel has the firepower to respond brutally. And they will.

So, Hamas lobs rockets into Israel that, to this point,  have done next to no damage, knowing full well that Israel will respond with a heavy hand. There is a sense in which Hamas is playing a cruel and cynical hand, provoking Israel to strike back, knowing many innocent people will die, hoping to garner world opinion against Israel's over-whelming response to the provocation.

I know that is true. The people of Gaza 'should' rise up against Hamas and trust in people who would carefully and painfully negotiate a  "separate state" solution to the madness in Israel. But, again, they probably won't turn against Hamas because people they love are being killed by the Israelis.

It is a cruel and cynical gambit by Hamas. But, ironically, cruelty and cynicism often prove successful.

I think it is next to impossible for any American to 'understand' the Middle East since we are so prone to apply Western psychology to any far-flung conflict. That's why I call it Western psychology--the only people who attempt to explain human behavior by psychology are the folks from Western Europe and North America. Psychological 'thinking' doesn't dominate in the rest of the world. No wonder we are so inept at figuring out what to do about issues in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe. the Arab world and South America.

Most of the world, beloved, doesn't 'think psychologically'. (Unfortunately for them, many Israelis DO! So they don't understand their enemies at all.) Our categories and evaluations are based on our assumption (false!) that everyone thinks like we in western Europe and North America do....And they don't.

The way the rest of the world thinks isn't less subtle or less sophisticated than we think--it simply doesn't have its foundation in Freud and Jung and Adler. ("Psychological thinking" is just over a century old...it is amazing how totally we in the West have bought into it!)

God help us if we ever meet intelligent creatures from another Universe--we'll start wondering about 'depression' and 'anxiety' and 'bi-polar disorder' and they won't have a clue what we're wondering about.

I think as psychologically as the next person--but I do recognize that as a defect when trying to understand people who don't.....

So when is 'enough' enough....

Sanity and reasonableness if unraveling each day. Ukraine, thousands of children at our southern boarder, mass kidnappings in Africa, and the chaos in Israel.

This will not make me friends--but I'm old enough that I have enough friends already--when will the world tell Israel 'enough is enough'.

Hamas lobbing rockets into Israel is like Mississippi throwing rocks into Georgia and all the power of the US armed forces being aimed at Mississippi.

Israel has an armed force just inferior to ours. Israel could wipe out the Middle East in a week or so--Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia--all of it. Their restraint in not doing that is admirable. But the carnage they're unleashing on Gaza is beyond all belief. A thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians, killed and 4 times that many wounded while a handful of Israeli soldiers and 3 civilians have died--that is far beyond an 'eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' that the Hebrew Bible allows.

Gaza is, I believe, about the size of New Haven County. Imagine the Marines by land, the Air Force by air and the Navy by sea attacking New Haven County!

It is incredible to me that Israel has a 'get out of jail free' card to play in this latest deadly game of War Monopoly.

How many Palestinians equal one dead Jew? Eight hundred, a thousand, ten thousand? Hamas can't damage Israel in any significant way--it's like Mississippi vs. the US government. No contest.

When will someone say to Israel, "this isn't right...you can't extract this punishment for what are, in essence, 4th of July fireworks fired from Gaza toward you."

How much is 'enough'? And when will some one tell them to stop this madness?

The attacks on Gaza smell of Holocaust. I'm sorry to say that and regret that I wrote it. But at some point Israel has to be brought to task for the literal 'overkill' they always inflict for lamentable offenses against them.

Of course, if Mississippi were launching rockets and lobbing mortars into Georgia, reprisal would be expected...but there is a limit to the size of reprisals that would be tolerated.

There's no such limit on what Israel does when attacked.

There should be. Enough is enough....