Marley was Dead and Jesus was Hungry

There is no doubt that Marley was dead.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. 

The big themes or the beauty of literature is usually lost on me. That being said though; the above two lines from the first chapter of Dickens' A Christmas Carol are some of my favorite in literature. Dickens spends his first few paragraphs detailing the fact that Jacob Marley (played memorably by this goof) is dead; dead as a door-nail, gone for quite a while. He goes to such lengths because if you doubt that Marley was dead, then the rest of the story loses its wonder; its oomph.

This Lenten season I've been struck by two lines in the gospel of Matthew.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. (ESV)

After not eating for 40 days, Jesus was hungry. When you read it in isolation it seems like such an understatement. My stomach is growling now, barely three hours after my last meal. He's not just hungry, he is famished, literally, he is craving food.

We, especially those of us who call ourselves Evangelicals, tend to pass right by this simple statement . We are in such a hurry to show that Jesus is divine, that he is the Son of God who came to die for our sins that we often forget that Jesus was hungry, just as we would be after 40 days with no food. Maybe this is why Lent is often downplayed in Evangelical churches.

We need to stop, we need this to sink in, we need to make sure this idea is stuck into our skulls, that it jumps out at us from the text, because if we don't grasp that Jesus was hungry, then the rest of this story doesn't make any sense. This story, like Dickens' with a living Marley would lose its wonder and its oomph.

If Jesus was hungry, then he could really be tempted by the Devil's offer of fresh loaves of bread; then his desires could be bent into taking up the Devil's dare to leap off a tall building, or into taking the bait of  bowing his knee for wealth and power. We all know that we can do uncharacteristic things when we're hungry. In short, if Jesus was hungry, he was human.

That's the beauty of observing Lent. It reminds us that Jesus was human, and no time is it more obvious then the 40 days he spends fasting in the wilderness. I was speaking to someone recently who is a non-practicing Roman Catholic. He mentioned that he likes the idea of saints (and has a few necklaces with medals of saints that are related to his way of life). I asked him what he likes about 'his' saints, and he said he likes their accessibility, that they are 'real' people. There's a longer discussion about saints that is best left for another time, but you see, this is what we are left with if you breeze by Matthew's statement that Jesus was hungry.

It was also in Jesus' humanity that he overcame the Devil's temptations. He didn't scare off the Devil with some extravagant divine fireworks coming from his fingers. No, he countered the Devil's scripture laced lies with a more wholistic picture of what the scripture teaches. Perhaps that is what we should be about this Lent, imitating Jesus' time in the wilderness, by taking up a thoughtful reading of scripture. Not sure where to start? How about reading an entire book of the bible in one sitting. It can be done. Bounce your understanding of them off of others in the Church. Let the scriptures build up inside of you. 

The Wing and I: AT-ATs

If you're a Star Wars' fan, you don't have to hang around the Bay Area long before you start to see and hear about some oddly StarWarsesque things. For one, there's the Miwok people who lived in the forests of Northern California (sound familiar?) and if you keep a sharp enough eye out it's like living a real life George Lucas in Love.

Well one of the first things that stuck out to me when I first visited Erica back in 2006 were these guys -->

Recognize them?

Do they kind of look like these guys?

I did, and now that I see them up close on the boat, I really do.

Well what are they?

They're shipping cranes, and they're huge!

They sit beside the Oakland/Alameda estuary and load containers onto massive ships that go back and forth from Asia and Europe. When you see them from a distance, altogether, they really do look like an army of AT-ATs bearing down on the rebels.

Now George Lucas has never publicly admitted that these cranes were an influence on him, but then he has been slow to admit other influences in the past.  

The Wing and I: Moving Forward

My latest posts on this blog (nearly a year ago) were lighthearted thoughts about the weather, the Super Bowl, and languages (beside English) that are spoken in the UK. I made a one sentence mention of our concern about my ordination situation in the Church of England, but left it at that.

After March 13, things started to fall apart in that regard. My CoE discernment process (whether they wanted to ordain me or not) unravelled pretty quickly. It was discovered that there were going to be some issues in getting us a visa that would allow me to start my training. We initially thought it was going to be something that just need some extra creativity on our part to reach a solution. With the help of some folks at Cranmer Hall in Durham we were able to be extra creative in designing a course of study that would satisfy the UK Border Agency's requirements, and in theory the study requirements of my sponsoring diocese.

We prayed and brain stormed and came up with an even more creative solution. We were schedule to meet and discuss it with our vicar and the diocese on May 9th at 2pm, Erica's due date being May 12th. When Erica woke up early May 9th in labour, it looked like we'd have to cancel the meeting, but Rory came quick and after seeing Erica stitched up and in a recovery room, I went straight off to Canterbury.
There, we were told that they would not agree to our solution, and thus we would be moving back to the US in approximately 8 weeks time.

Rory's birth took a lot of the sting out of the meeting, but it was still an overwhelming day.

Our church family sent us off with a wonderful farewell party (and a new iPad) at the end of June and on the 4th of July we returned to the U.S.

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We visited my family in Ohio in July and had a wonderful visit where Rory got to meet his Ohio grandparents and we just relaxed. We went west in August and have settled down in Erica's hometown of Napa.

Our initial goal was to earn some money, pay some bills, get our feet back under us and have a long term plan by the end of the year. Our long term plan didn't develop in our original time frame, but we achieved the rest of the goal. Rory smoothly transitioned into our daily life, Erica continued doing her design work, Clive got settled into two-morning-a-week pre-school, and I went to work for Erica's dad.

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Erica's parents had started two businesses and co-owned a third. Their primary businesses are PJ's Canvas, where they make custom made awnings and Adventure Cat Sailing Charters, which takes folks out on the San Francisco Bay, and under the Golden Gate Bridge on a 55' and a 65' Catamaran Sail Boats. They've been doing awnings for over 35 years and the Catamarans for nearly 25 years.

I helped out in the businesses' shared office updating some of their procedures and trying to stream line and modernize at lot of their practices. Then Jay recruited me for his newest venture. The Wing.

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Wind+Wing Technologies is the attempt to offer a solution to two big problems, rising fuel costs and the rise in pollution. What we hope to eventually create is a wind-assisted commuter ferry in the San Francisco Bay. Currently large diesel powered ferries criss-cross the bay delivering commuters and tourists to their various destinations all while burning almost 70 gallons of diesel per hour. Our goal is the same reliable product in terms of transportation while cutting fuel consumption in half.

How are we going to do that? By putting a wing on it.

That is a trimaran with a wing on it. It's a demonstration vessel which we hope will show the effectiveness of the wing and lead to grants and investments to build a full size ferry.The wing has it's own brain with which it senses the wind and puts itself in the best position to harness the wing for maximum thrust. The vessel is wind-assisted, so we can use the engine in low wind situations and back off the engine when the wind picks up.

My current role is to monitor and troubleshoot nearly 40 sensors that are on the boat and help the captain get us on and off the dock. We're out on the bay nearly forty hours a week gathering data ranging from fuel consumption, to wind speed/direction and anything else that will be helpful.

I've learned to tie and few knots and know that on a boat you use the head and not the toilet, but I still have a ways to go, but whatever happens, it is certainly interesting.

The Weather

I'd give you an update on how my ordination process is going, but to be honest, I'm not really sure how to begin going about explaining our current situation. With that being said, we'd appreciate your prayers as we seek to move forward, hopefully continuing to stay in England and ministering within the Church of England.

And now for something completely different.

I picked up a little gem of a book by Richard Mabey entitled 'Turned Out Nice Again: Living with the Weather'. Brits are pre-occupied by the weather and it is normally the first or second topic to come up in a conversation.

This passage from the book sums up British weather pretty well;

We don't have to live with active volcanoes or sudden tsunamis. The temperature has only exceeded 100 degrees three times in the last hundred years. The heaviest rainfall in a single day was eleven inches in Martinstown Dorset on 18 July, 1955. When you compare that with the several feet that can fall in a couple of hours in a tropical monsoon you can get our weather in some sort of perspective. What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you're going to be under three feet of snow every December.

Whimsical is a good term for it, but it's hard to feel very whimsical about the weather when you wake up for church on Palm Sunday and have to scrape your windshield and expect similar for the rest of Holy Week.

The NFL on PBS!

Well not quite, but I'll ask you this;

If the Super Bowl was on PBS (with no commericals, but instead of commercials every break would be the announcers yapping) and your announcers were Don Cherry, a guy who played division three college football turned announcer, and Willie McGinst would you watch it?

I'll Also throw in that the game doesn't start until 11.00pm.

Life in the UK.

Saesneg y frenhines

An example of a Cornish language sign.

Many of our American friends probably realise that not all Brits sound like the queen. What you may not realise though is that the UK has seven non-English indigenous spoken living languages, the BBC supports television channels devoted to two of those languages and that one of these seven even is an official language in part of the UK.

Apart from English, Welsh is the most widely spoken of these indigenous languages and shares official language status with English in Wales. Many over here treat Wales almost as a fictitious place that you might somehow wander into, like you would Narnia, but it's a real place with a real language, with real people speaking it. (It's probably the second most spoken language in the UK, but we'll have to see what the newest census figures show when they're released this week, Punjabi, could pass it up.) Welsh has a type of sing-song quality to it, and just looks ridiculous on signs. The BBC produces Welsh language content for S4C, an independent publicly broadcast station in the country.

The BBC also produces content for the Scottish Gaelic television channel BBC Alba. This puzzles me a bit since Scottish Gaelic, out of the seven indigenous languages is spoken by the second least amount of people. To me, Scottish Gaelic sounds exactly like a language you'd imagine Scots to speak, if they didn't speak English. (Although to hear some of them, you might think that they don't speak English.)

Out of the seven indigenous languages in the UK, four (Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Cornish) stem from the Celtic language. Two are mixed languages spoken mostly by gypsies (yes that's a politically correct term over here) and one is very closely related to English and is considered by some to not be a language, but rather a dialect of English.

Say What?

Clive has a smattering of vocabulary words, most of them you (as generally non-baby speaking adults) wouldn't recognise as actual words. He tries his darndest and he loves to wave and try to say hasta luego, which often comes out as aa-ta.

I'm not concerned though, according to my mom, I didn't speak until I was two and Erica was late on the scene verbally (mostly because as a multiple she could communicate with Allie and Inga and didn't care to talk to anyone else) so it could be in his genes.

I prefer another explanation:

He listens to mom, dad, and his auntie and then listens to all his friends and can't decide which accent he's supposed to use.

:)