Sin, Salvation, and a Shaggy Goat

Well, you see, the angora goat got to reading the Old Testament--especially those parts in Leviticus and Deutronomy and such--which called for the sacrifice of a shaggy goat, and that made him nervous, so he took off.

The trick had been telling the goat it was just a Christmas pageant in the front yard of Bethlehem Church in Fergus Falls, but it didn't take a High Priest to figure out that somebody was going to end up on the table.

The runaway first thought to find a vegetarian religion, but it is tough to ask catechetical questions when you are running at top speed. Jim Aakre, the owner of the almost-sacrificial goat, chased the critter for two hours before giving up. He says the lack of snow made it difficult to track the beast.

It is a little difficult to know what the good people of Bethlehem Church were thinking. Jim says he also provided a llama and two puppies for the event. Bethlehem probably is using one of those new translations of the Bible.

Mari says she has a lot of sympathy for the goat, since she once was staked out in a similar creche, together with her husband and two kids. At Good Shepherd, it seems to have been the opinion that the Baby Jesus had an older, asian brother, which might explain a whole lot about the cockamamie claim about a virgin birth. Joseph must have begun to wonder about it later, because the marriage didn't last. Actually, that may have had nothing to do with how things worked out. Probably.

I cannot find the article, but the word from up in Fergus Falls is that they finally corralled the shaggy goat by agreeing it didn't have to be religious, and anyway, they still had a Biblical llama and two puppies, should any great sins need to be atoned for, which wasn't likely: nobody in Fergus Falls has admitted to doing anything wrong for years. Not really.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

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