Sacramentality of the Scriptures

My soul is consumed with longing for your just decrees at all times. Psalm 119: 20.

This is just one passage that demonstrates how in the Psalms and everywhere in the Scriptures the Word of God is less a book of information and more a book of life. It contains information, facts, histories, doctrines and the like, of course, but for the believer, it functions as a life giving sacrament. It imparts and gives that very thing which the faithful cannot live without : the very presence of God. So the believer longs for, aches, yearns to hear and be filled with the Word of God. Much of the liturgy of the church is built around this understanding : that we are not simply "learning", that to come into contact with the words of the Bible is not primarily an academic matter but rather a existential and salvific one.

On a side note: the modern phrase "Bible Study" is such an inadequate, modernist, rationalistic word for what Christians do when they hear and read and, indeed, study the Scriptures. We do not study the Bible as if we were reading a chemistry textbook. We hungrily consume, we are joined to, we take into ourselves the very life giving presence of the God and Savior Jesus Christ who speaks to us in this Word.

He just crumbled into oblivion, and died

F. Scott Fitzgerald, that is, after a lifetime of drinking:

This practice of constant mythmaking and denial offered Fitzgerald perhaps the most painful decline of all the great novelists. He wasn’t so much a victim of alcoholism as the very embodiment of alcoholism—or the stages of alcoholic recovery, in reverse.


The real subject of Fitzgerald’s particular brand of alcoholism is the long sink from the ebullient down to the dregs of the bottle, and at last when it empties and crashes to the ground.

The man who was being paid $4,000 per piece by The Saturday Evening Post in 1930 was fetching only $150 a story from Esquire. His total book royalties in 1936 amounted to about $80. Soon he would go to Hollywood as a failure of a screenwriter, completing his fall. “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise,” he wrote.

Read the rest of this interesting take on alcohol and Fitzgerald here.

Facebook looks like Times Square in the 1970s

Reasons why Google plus is a viable alternative to Facebook.

Google + : The Messiah App

Apparently, it will change everything. Now if I only knew what a "social backbone" was.

Church year and repentance, faith and new life

Random thought : the church year corresponds to the classic Lutheran pattern of contrition, faith in the Gospel and new life.

Both halves of the calendar do this:

Advent : contrition
Christmas: faith in the Gospel
Epiphany: new life

Also ...

Lent: contrition
Easter: faith in the Gospel
Pentecost: new life


Simplistic and maybe obvious, but I was thinking on it.

Fifty Miles of Elbow Room

What a great song. It is on the Anthology of American Folk Music. It has been covered numerous times by folks like the Carter Family, Iris Dement, Gilian Welch, Hank Locklin and others.

This original version, though, by Rev. F. W. McGee is the greatest version by far. It is based on the dimensions of the new temple mentioned in Revelation 21. The idea is that heaven will be so spacious that we who endure cramped and crowded misery will have space to stretch out. The do-it-yourself-just-sing-it feeling on the song matches the feeling one gets in a lot of folk and early bluegrass and country music and also punk rock from the 1970's. The music is simple even primitive but the union of person, sentiment and performance is so complete that the song just grabs you and does not let go.


Listen to it here.


Some other notes on the song from various internet sources:

The Reverend F.W. McGee was a preacher (and choirmaster) in the Pentecostal denomination Church of God in Christ; he moved through the South with some frequency, establishing churches and leading revivals. One of his closest acolytes was a blind pianist named Arizona Dranes, who would later achieve some renown on her own as a recording artist. Despite the absence of her name in the recording credits for this song, she can be heard just as clearly as the good Reverend on this 1930 recording, and deserves individual credit for her powerful singing and playing.

...

The song was written by Herbert Buffum (1879-1939) a very prolific gospel song writer (who claimed to have written thousands of gospel songs). He was a Holiness/Pentecostal evangelist and lived and worked in California.

...

Here are the lyrics:

Twelve-hundred miles, it's length and breadth
That four-square city stands
it's gem-set walls of jasper shine
they're not made by human hands

One-hundred miles it's gates are wide
abundant entrance there
with fifty miles of elbow room
on either side to spare

When the gates swing wide on the other side
just beyond the sunset sea
there'll be room to spare as we enter there
There'll be room for you and room for me

For the gates are wide on the other side
where the fairest flowers bloom
on the right hand and on the left hand
fifty miles of elbow room

Sometimes I'm cramped and I'm crowded here
and I long for elbow room
I long to reach for altitude
where the fairest flowers bloom
It won't be long before I pass into that city fair
With fifty miles of elbow room
on either side to spare

Knoxville is a pretty place, Memphis is a beauty ...

... Wanna see them pretty girls, hop to Chattanoogie.



"Old Plank Road" by Uncle Dave Macon is a folk classic, an excellent precursor to country music.


"My wife died on Friday night, Saturday she was buried
Sunday was my courtin' day, Monday I got married."


Listen here.

I love maps that move

I love maps that move. Here is one that shows that the center of population in the United States over time. It is pretty cool. Here is the map and the description from the US census.




Each decade, after it tabulates the decennial census, the Census Bureau calculates the center of population. The National Mean Center of Population based on the 2010 Census is near Plato, Mo., an incorporated village in Texas County.

The center is determined as the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all residents were of identical weight. In 2000, Edgar Springs, Mo., was announced as the new U.S. population center.

Historically, the center of population has followed a trail that reflects the sweep of the nation's brush stroke across America's population canvas. The sweep reflects the settling of the frontier, waves of immigration and the migration west and south. Since 1790, the location has moved in a westerly, then a more southerly pattern. In 2000, the new center of population was more than 1,000 miles from the first center in 1790, which was near Chestertown, Md.

Trapped in the Limbo of an Eternal Present

Trapped in the Limbo of an Eternal Present ... is a blog post by Dr. Larry Rast, President of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, on the value of memory and cases of living without it. Interesting post.

Here is just a tiny bit:

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life.

Law and Gospel ...

Law and Gospel ... "do not describe how God sees sinners but how sinners perceive Him as He comes to them in the preached Word."

Dr. David Scaer, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace, p. 20.

Going Downtown

Here is a song called "Going Downtown" by Joe and Odell Thompson, fiddle and banjo. There is something very appealing about this song. It is from a album called "Eight-Hand Sets and Holy Steps: Early Dance Tunes and Songs of Praise from North Carolina's Black Tradition." It a a collection of North Carolina, African American, fiddle, Gospel, and dance tunes in what sound like field recordings. It was released in the 1970's.

"Going Downtown" by Joe and Odell Thompson

If you remember this song or show from its original run, you are ... old.