The Lutheran world is like this drought. Nothing much is expected when the forecasts insist on too much sun and too little rain for the future. Many people are watering just to keep the plants alive, and they catch glimpses of the hardiness of Creation.
Rainwater is a precious commodity now. Name With-Held likes to kid me about my rain-barrels, poised to catch every drop from the roof. They are bare, except for a few dead leaves and two filled with stored water for safer watering.
One inch of rainfall will green up the grass, revive all the plants, and give animals a chance to drink and bathe, often in the same water.
I am starting to see genuine expression of love for the King James Bible. I read a little about its history each day. People write to me about their long-held love for the KJV.
One author answered why Moby Dick - a strange novel - continues to be praised in American literature. The novel expresses the music and poetry, the grandeur of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Our English language comes from only two sources - the almost anonymous scholars of the KJV and the Earl of Oxford, pseudonym - Shakespeare.
Today's children are sheltered from both and will largely grow up discussing social media stars, ignorant of the skies above them and the libraries abandoned but close by them.
Quality has a way of lasting, because that is a property of God's Creation.
“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers....
“...being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.
“Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet- ‘out of the belly of hell’- when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean- Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding.
“And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“...Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath- O Father!- chiefly known to me by Thy rod- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
Chapter 9 - The Sermon
