Mark 13

November 15, 20015 - Last Day for Donuts

Mark 13. The first eight verses are this week’s lectionary passage. I don’t know how many sermons I’ve heard on it – a dozen maybe, or the same sermon a dozen times! We don’t know when the end is coming; no one knows; but we should be ready every day.

Last Day for Donuts

I have taken even more liberties with rendering the passage than I usually do. What the heck: I’m not a scholar, though it’s not as if scholars don’t take liberties, as if they don’t (also) try to make passages – and even particularly this passage - say what they want it to mean.

          Don’t we all know just what Jesus all about? Really! And we know, however he warns us about not being so damn sure and smug about it. How can we know, if he isn’t always entirely sure. That’s what makes him human, incidentally, even if we may think he is also divine (all that hypostatic union stuff): God may be sure, but he, Jesus, is not.

          Jesus does seem to have a pretty good idea, though, about what he wants his followers to do. He tells them in the sermon on the mount, references to which I’ve borrowed into this passage, though I know I shouldn’t have.  (I know that much.)I also get him to quote Lucan, which has to be way, way out of bounds. But so what? This is the TRV – the Ted Riich version; it’s not something God wrote on gold tablets and I simply transcribed.

          So, don’t blame God for it – not that you would. And don’t anyone else for it. I did it, and there’s no committee of scholars brave and true or misguided wretches craven and blue I can hide behind. I’m not hiding. Selah.

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For links to more stories from the TRV, click here.

Jack fell down AND broke his crown.

Apopsicle

“It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people.”

Does no one else find this strange? – Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians: "I’ve heard from a faction among you that there are factions among you." It’s like your mother saying, “Well, that’s what your brother said, and I believe him.” That’ll contribute to family harmony.

Naturery

November 7, 2015
Naturery 

The nature columnist for the weekly paper in Froyd County, LoriAnne Woods – I get her columns third hand. Axel Sundstrøm’s hippie sister Sigrid cuts them out, very neatly, puts them in an envelope to Axel. He passes them along to me. I enjoy the columns for the most part; the most part of me admires the columnist’s simple earnestness. But I’d enjoy them more if I could discern in her the smallest sense of humor, which seems to be lacking, in her and in her friends. She writes about her friends often, and they seem as solemn as she is, not so much friends as colleagues in earnestness.

     There is much to be earnest about. To put it in Axel’s terms – he agrees with me: Is there any reason to make preparations for the coming of the bridegroom, if there will be no heaven-and-earth for him to come to?

Cow Knob salamander with
frackery sauce and onion on white.

In the column he handed me yesterday, LoriAnne is writing about a 2011 discovery that indicated that homo sapiens sapiens might well have been in Britain far earlier than we thought, coexisting – even cohabitating – with homo neanderthalensis: How much were we responsible, then, for the extinction of the wooly mammoth and the wooly rhino and a species of horse? Perhaps more than we thought. 
     This has to do with biodiversity, as if this was the first, or maybe only one, step toward the planet’s ruin, because it led from gathering to herding to farming to the industrial age, which led to smoke, which led to fire, which burned us up, so when the bridegroom returned he found only a smoldering cinder.

     Enter the Cow Knob salamander found only in certain dark corners above 2500 feet in the Shenandoah and North Mountains on the border of Virginia and West Virginia. but near a section where The Power Company plans to build a pipeline to bring frackery down from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and the Eastern Shore. LoriAnne has talked to C. K.’s representatives, who have declared he doesn’t like pipes. She can’t blame him.

* * * * *

I am never quite sure why we embrace evolution and then want to interfere with it. Or I think I understand the reasons why, but I am never completely convinced by them. There seems to me something awry with the logic, though I’m not logician enough to say what.

Revelation rant

from Jon Bill Swiftmahr’s commentary on Revelation (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2014, p. 21) –

They’re just minding their own d--- business, the Laodiceans, when this shows up in the communal mailbox.

III. Write to the Laodiceans: Here is what I’m saying, the Amen, the Witness, the Beginning of everything –

   ¹⁵ I know how you are, not hot and not cold. Tepid.  ¹⁶ So because you are, lukewarm, I am spitting you out of my mouth.  ¹⁷ You say you’re rich and you don’t need much so you don’t need anything more. I say you just don’t know: you’re miserable, poor, blind, naked, in prison.  ¹⁸ So, let me tell you: I will sell you my gold and then you’ll be rich; I’ll sell you white robes I made, then you’ll have clothes; I’ll anoint your eyes with my salve, then you will see.  ¹⁹ I’m telling you because I love you, “Repent, you stupid lukewarm sh--s. Repent!”  ²⁰ Right now I’m standing at your door; I’m knocking, do you hear it? Then open it. I’ll come in. We’ll eat together.  ²¹ Pay attention and you can sit on the throne of the one that is going to judge the world and condemn to hell people like you, if you don’t repent. Selah.

Commentary

So, I’m up whether I want to be or not. I make my bed. I wasn’t going to, but I do. I stumble down the back stairs. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, cursing the cricket in my left ear. I’m no less angry than when I went to bed last night, and that anger was enough to keep me awake I don’t know how long.

          Crappy instant coffee, because I don't care enough to make real. A slice of toast. I wash my meds – except what I put up my nose – I wash my meds down my throat so they can lie in my stomach, swim in the coffee and the jagged shards of toast and the blades of anger swallowed through the night rather than spewed out of my mouth as John Patmos’ god, AMEN, did the poor Laodiceans, who like me were only trying to get along, practicing as best they could the moderation Aristotle had taught them and who was John that he knew better? – a cracked pot, religious fanatic, writing from his closet that all the world that hates him and has mistreated him all his miserable life is now is f--ked – now-and-ever-shall-be smoldering, catching flames that will be rising higher-higher, burning hotter-hotter, for d--- ever. “You’ll catch fire, soon enough, you sh---holes, and you’ll never stop burning. RIW (rest in [eternal] warfare.) Signed: Your friend, John P.

          Bite your tongue, after you’ve taken a deep breath, Laodiceans. Yes, breathe. Put the letter back in its envelope, put both in the shredder, put down your pen. Don’t write back. It can’t make matters better. You’re dealing with a loon; it could make it/him worse. Breathe. Not that you care anyway.

          I look out the window to see if the world really is coming to an end, if John Patmos was right and it is already smoldering at the edges and soon the ground will be like the fiery side of Mercury. The oceans won’t surge and wash over us, they’ll boil away; they’ll become dry as tinder, and the flames will wash through them, and the seas and the sky will be alight. But not yet. Right now it’s gray and lowering; I smell rain. I lift my cup to the Laodiceans and they return my salud: “Sometimes we get what we deserve, lukewarm and faithless servant.”

Six ha'thoughts in search of a proposition

Six ha’thoughts in search of a proposition –

1. At the root of impudent is pudendum, translated into Old English as scamlim (“shame-limb” or “naughty bits”).

2. Where does Nietzsche say, “The will to a system is a lack of integrity”? Because systems always 

Nietzsche by m ball

have something to hide, that jot or tittle that refuses to fit.

3. What’s-next is not certain. Fudge. Take a leap sideways.

4. (a) Moral prescriptions do not work. How can anyone write ahead of where he or she lives?

    (b) Prescriptions require a prescriber, who is really saying no more than, “Be like me.”

5. Of all philosophies and religions, only slapstick has its feet on the ground.

Therefore,

6. An Antick first principle: No explanation is better than any.  
                                                                              
 

Pundits, Pollsters, and Jonathan Swift; Virginia Woolf and Jesus

October 30, 2015

Pundits, Pollsters, and Jonathan Swift; Virginia Woolf and Jesus

If you follow this blog at all, you’ll know that what The Ambiguities does is try to preserve . . . ambiguities, especially from those that try to explain them and, if not also explain them away, at least rub the shine off*: pundits, politicians, pollsters, and preachers; sociologists, psychologists, and scientismists; analysts, anal-ists, Laputans.

   Bill W., you asked me some time ago what I was trying to do with the blog, and all I could say then was “Read it.” Now, you can get off, if you must, with reading just the paragraph above.

Here is another story of Jesus,** particularly for my preacher friends about whom I have said more than once that they don’t know when to sit down (before they’ve rubbed all the shine off). This is an observation from below, not an accusation from on high.

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 * These are people that buy lottery tickets to scratch them.

** This Sunday’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary, Mark 12:28-34.

For links to other stories from the TRV (Ted Riich Version) of the Hebrew, Baalist, and New Covenant Scriptures, click here.