​Growing up monolingual, I tended to assume that every English word had some sister word in every other language which basically meant the same thing. So translation, I figured, was a simple matter of figuring out the one to one correspondence from one language to the next.
 
This may be more or less true for words that are simple, literal, and conceptually concrete.
 
“Tree” basically exists in every known language with a possible but unlikely exception if there is a tongue which developed somewhere that trees don’t grow. Beyond that, we might argue about the definition of a tree versus, say, a shrub. But everyone basically knows what you’re talking about conceptually.

Oh? What do I love about 2018? I’m glad you asked. I love that we can laugh about the filioque. It took us centuries to get here.
 
You know all about the filioque, don’t you? Filioque is a latin word which literally means “and from the Son.” It started to showing up in the Nicene creed sometime around the 6th century in the western (i.e. Rome based) region of the church. The original creed that both western and eastern bishops had agreed on read:
 
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.

​A friend of mine recently told me about his decision to leave the massive congregation he had attended shortly after moving here to Orlando.
 
He had spent his whole life in megachurches, and to that point, he had been taught that bigger is always better and that growth equals success. But in his late twenties, on the heels of a career move, which had taken him several states away from family and friends, his own feelings of loneliness and isolation led him to start asking some more serious-minded questions about the purpose of church. Is the point really just to collect as many warm bodies in the auditorium as possible? For what? Should I be getting to know some of these people around me better than just a nod on Sunday morning?

​“The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her.” – Mark 6:26 
 
Have a look at Mark 6:14-29, the Beheading of John the Baptist at the hands of King Herod Antipas. Now answer this question: what is Herod’s major character flaw.
 
When I was a little kid, I was taught that Herod (I didn’t know that there were several of them) was just a moral black hole, raw evil, more a prop for Satan than a person. In many ways, that made his character very dismissible. We don’t really have to wrestle with what went wrong in the case of old Herod, if we assume on the outset that he he is just flatly evil without exception.

​I couldn’t be bothered with generosity of spirit the other day. I was busy rehearsing a sermon.
 
That’s how it goes sometimes. You have to talk about the love and grace of the Origin and Redeemer of the cosmos in a couple hours. So when my friend sends me a nice thought via text—“I just saw a bumper sticker that said ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.’”—what was I going to do? Reflect on it with new eyes? Allow myself to be moved that my friend would think to share a little spiritual gem with me that morning? Enjoy the profound realization that we are not alone in this spiritual journey? That there are travel partners on the road with us?
 
Not this bona fide saint and sinner, specializing in sinner. No no no. The snotty, know-it-all words that spilled onto my iPhone keyboard were “St. Francis was an aphorism machine.”

I snored so loudly that I woke myself up.

Drool was actively falling onto my neck-pillow while on a bus passing through where the Alps jut across the meeting of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria’s borders.  Cliffs and icy mountain tops softened to bright blue rivers and lush meadows – all thriving in the shadow of the summer solstice.  I wondered to which languages the cows and goats would respond.
​
In the presence of such immense natural beauty, my drool wasn’t exactly what I wanted my seatmates or I to experience.  However, I wouldn’t trade that puddle for the encounter I’d had the night before which I already exchanged for sleep.  And I refuse to apologize for missing a couple hours of views on my seven hour bus ride.

​Do we get our beliefs from our Bible or our Bible from our beliefs?
 
This is a pretty urgent question in this twilight zone time in which we’re living, when so many of my pastoral colleagues are being reprimanded by their congregants for “getting too political”—typically by the same congregants who want to see the ten commandments and Christian prayer mandated in public schools and who see no problem with our Attorney General saying in an official statement on an urgent public crisis:

​There’s no science in the Bible.
 
There’s no science in the Bible.
 
Should I say that again?
 
There’s no science in the Bible.
 
Science is a disciplined method of testing observations and hypotheses about the natural world, which was more or less invented over the last few centuries.
 
There is history in the Bible.

You’ll forgive the beggar if he’s turned a bit cynical about people. A lifetime of paralysis will do that to a person (Acts 3:1-10).
 
Or maybe cynical isn’t even the right word. He’s been at this so long, it would be more accurate to say that he’s a realist. He doesn’t hold the resentment of a true cynic, not at this stage. He’s grown very realistic about the economy of guilt. He knows his place, and it is what it is. He knows that few motivators are as reliable as guilt. And by the same token, few are as limited. Guilt is almost always worth a shekel or two, never much more than that. You can’t get from guilt to respect or to honor. There is no progression from guilt to love, certainly not to friendship.