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.
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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.