Our congregation has started out the new year with a series about the parables in the book of Luke. This is right up my alley, and last Sunday we tackled the parable of the Good Samaritan. Since we're supposed to sit quietly and not ask questions, I have a lot of pent up ideas. Fortunately, I have a website.

For those of you who don't trust me, you can find the full text in Luke 10:25-37, but I'm going to rehash it here. An expert in the law asked Jesus "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" This may be the earliest recorded instance of someone asking this question of a Rabbi, but it became very popular as Jewish eschatology advanced in the following centuries. Jesus, being a proper Rabbi, returned the question to the expert, treating the expert as his student. The man was not deterred and answered "Love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself." Jesus praised the scholar, but the scholar was only coming to his real point. "And who is my neighbor?" he asked Jesus.

This question might seem strange to us, but to the culture of Jesus's time it was a big deal. They were trying to maintain their cultural identity and their unique relationship with God. To do that, you needed to associate only with like-minded people, and Jesus seemed to have a problem with that. He wasn't sticking to the devout Jews only, but had picked up a following of sinners and tax-collectors, and there was some concern that he might even have dealings with less savory characters like Samaritans or Gentiles.

So Jesus tells a story. "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho (probably to avoid going through Samaria), when he was attacked and robbed. His body was left broken and barely clinging to life along the road when a priest, on his way to the temple, passed by. He saw this man and his plight, and quickly crossed to the other side of the road and continued to Jerusalem. Soon, a Levite, also heading for his duties at the temple, came along. He likewise saw the suffering man and crossed the road to avoid him. Finally, a despised Samaritan came up the road. He saw the beaten man and had compassion. He tended the man's wounds and carried him to safety. "Who was a neighbor here?" asked Jesus.

The expert in the law could only reply "The one who had mercy on him."

In the sermon last Sunday we heard about the importance of caring for those in need. We even heard about the need to avoid racism and xenophobia, important messages at times such as these. Yet I cannot believe that was the point of the story Jesus told. I just think the real meaning is something we have a little trouble talking about in Christian circles.

The story is not, as we might hope, about a Jew reaching out to help a struggling outsider. This is a story about the Kingdom of God and how to live out God's will, and like most of Jesus's parables the problem is religion. All Jews knew they should love their neighbor, and this man who was beaten and left for dead was certainly a neighbor in need. The problem was that there were other laws that superseded helping someone in need. In particular, people doing holy jobs, such as this priest and Levite, needed to maintain their purity to do their jobs. Touching a potentially dead body or getting contaminated by blood would rendered them unfit for service. In order to maintain the temple this suffering man had to be left to die. It was only the Samaritan, with no theological statement to make, who could actually get down and help the wounded.

The message to the expert in the law, and to us, is to stop worrying about keeping up our holiness and get down into the trenches with those who are in need. Jesus was not opposing God by reaching out to the unclean of his society. He was doing his will.

I think the relevance of this message is hard to …

My parents live back a series of gravel roads in the lower foothills of the Appalachian mountain range. Their next door neighbor is a country song come to life. He lives in a trailer. His wife left him. His dog died.

To make matters worse, his son and his son's wife had been living in his trailer. He started building a barn-like structure behind the trailer for them to live in once their baby was born, but after the birth of their child and associated domestic squabbles, both left, leaving behind a half-completed structure and five cats.

Not being a man familiar with the concept of house cats, he has done the best he could, setting out boxes with straw in them, and placing food out for them regularly. However, the cats are left, as cats often are, to wander freely wherever their feline desires lead.

The other weekend we went to visit my parents, and while we were playing around their house, Miranda discovered the joys of perspective. She would run near and far, yelling to ask us if she looked bigger or smaller from each new place.

This commotion attracted the attention of one of the cats, who crossed the field between the houses and began to rub against Miranda's legs. Now Miranda loves cats, and to have a cat that actually wanted to play with her was a dream come true. She and the cat spent the afternoon playing hide-and-seek around my parent's house. She even got down on the ground to be more like the cat. My dad found some old dog treats in his house (a story for another day) and let Miranda give them to the cat. Miranda had the time of her life.

But, all good things must come to an end, and eventually it was dinner time. The cat was left to return to its wanderings, and Kelly made sure Miranda washed her hands extra well.

While we were eating, the cat found its way to the glass door by the kitchen table, and began meowing and clawing at the screen door. It wanted its new little human friend to come back out and play, but it was already late and we had to be up early the next morning, so the cat was left without its playmate.

The next morning I got up at six. I went to the kitchen to get a cup of water, and the cat jumped up outside the kitchen door. Finally, the humans were awake and its friend would come back soon, but it was not to be. As we were loading our car for a trip into Pittsburgh, the cat jumped into the driver seat, and had to chased out by Kelly. We left, hoping that the cat would realize that Miranda wasn't going to be around that day.

While we were away, the cat decided that it had found a new home, and bedded down under the steps to the kitchen door. My dad chase the cat out, and blocked off the space under the steps. When we returned late that night, the cat was sleeping under my dad's truck, and jumped into the back seat next to Miranda when I opened the door. I pulled the cat out, and we went inside.

Unsurprisingly, the cat was still outside the house the next morning. We went to church, and the cat was waiting for us when we returned, despite the weather having turned rainy. The cat was still there when we returned again late that evening.

The next morning it was time for us to head back home, and cat watched from under my dad's truck as we pulled away. That cat is still at my parent's house, pining for its little friend, over a week later.

Since God is a father, maybe it would make his day to see his children playing nicely with the other kids, being patient, growing, learning, and happily spending time with him.

I have not, despite all indications to the contrary, died. I have, however, been busier than I ever wish to be again. I make no promises that content will be coming regularly. I just wanted the world to know that Bob is still alive (and for that matter, so are Kelly and Miranda).

I confess I am not a cook. Since I got married, Kelly has taken care of nearly every aspect of meal preparation. I am only called upon for the occasional omelette, bacon, or burger. I am mostly capable of following a recipe, so if something comes in a box with instructions on the side I generally feel competent to prepare it, but foods without such aids are beyond me.

Nevertheless, the other day Kelly asked me to prepare baked potatoes. There is a "baked potato" setting on our microwave, and I have used that with some level of success in the past, but Kelly wanted me to use her easy oven recipe. I preheated the oven to four-hundred degrees, popped any growing eyes off the potatoes, washed them in the sink, and, once preheating was complete, placed the potatoes into the oven. Per Kelly's instruction, I set the timer for forty-five minutes.

At the appointed time, I put on the oven mitt and proceeded to lift the potatoes out of the oven and place them onto a cutting board. The second potato had its own plan. When I set the potato down, it promptly exploded. The skin was separated from the potato and launched onto the still open oven door. Potato shrapnel flew from one side of the kitchen to the other, leaving a trail of white potato shards on the oven, floor, and cabinets. The pulverized core of the potato remained sitting on the cutting board.

And that is why Miranda had mashed potatoes for dinner last night.

The date was February 2nd, 2018. I had noticed that one of Kelly's favorite Chuck Norris movies was curiously truncated to a little over five minutes. No problem. I have been slowly updating our collection from .avi to .mkv anyhow. I put the DVD into my trusty workstation and a few minutes later I had Chuck Norris in better quality than ever before.

All that remained was to copy it to our house's network storage and we would be able to enjoy Chuck from any computer in the house. But something curious happened. My file wouldn't copy. In fact, my network storage device was curiously unresponsive to any input. Finally I rebooted it, to find that it contained no files. Since it has previously housed over a terabyte of music, movies, and documents, that seemed potentially troubling.

It did, however, remind me of something. I had set up our network storage with RAID 1, meaning that there are two hard drives that are identical mirrors of each other. If one fails, I can take it out and put in a new one that will become another identical copy. It's relatively self-explanatory. If you have two copies of the data then as long as both hard drives don't fail at the same time you will never lose your data. There are a few complications, but that covers the basics.

When I had logged into my network storage dashboard before the Chuck Norris incident, I had noted that my RAID array was labeled as "Degraded". I ran health checks on the drives, but nothing appeared amiss, so I eventually learned to live with that label. It wasn't until after my data mysteriously disappeared that I found that "Degraded" in this case meant that, for reasons I still don't understand, the second hard drive had been marked as a spare instead of becoming a copy. That meant I had been using only one drive, which had failed, while the other sat idly with nothing on it.

Not to despair. I had my data backed up on Amazon Glacier. The only problem is that restoring a terabyte of data is either very slow or very expensive. Instead, I took my workstation offline, hooked up the broken hard drive and launched dd_rescue to clone it to the unused drive. After a few days it became apparent that it would take over two months to recover the whole drive.

Fortunately, I was able to install a newer, faster, version of dd_rescue, which cut the recovery time to a month. In the meantime I ordered new four terabyte drives, specifically built for network storage. However, there was no way to make a four terabyte drive mirror a two terabyte one. I was finally forced to set up a new RAID array with the new drives, then attach the old hard drive to my workstation and copy all the files over the network using rsync.

The day that completed, my household server's database crashed and refused to start. The website you're currently reading, along with my Nextcloud instance, Amarok music database, and regular backups stopped. I pulled the flash memory from my server and found that it was corrupted.

By now I was the expert. I fired up dd_rescue and copied the tiny sixteen gigabyte hard drive. Then I swapped in a new flash memory card. That was when I found out that my backups were two months out of date. Fortunately, I was able to mount the disk image from dd_rescue and get newer data, or you would have lost the many exciting developments on this site since December.

Now, finally, I think everything is right in my digital world. Does anyone want a two terabyte hard drive? It's barely used.

It always takes me a bit of time to process a new Star Wars movie, and The Last Jedi more than most. I don't expect that I can add much to the current discussion around the movie, but I don't like the fact that I haven't written anything in a while.

I should point out that I will wander directly into spoiler territory, but if you haven't seen the movie by this point you probably don't care, so I think we should be safe.

Many aspects of this movie have been attacked since its release, and I don't think it makes sense to defend against most of them, since they are nitpicks or personal preference. Star Wars has always been complex. Even in the prequels, if you can get past the horrible dialog and cringe-inducing on-screen chemistry, there is a depth to the subtext that is worthwhile.

One aspect that I think is particularly deep with pathos is the interplay between Leia, Poe Dameron, and Admiral Holdo. A lot of the criticism of their interaction is based on a need to have a good side and a bad side. Depth of character is not needed or desirable. In that mindset, the whole sequence is upside down and badly written. I think that misses the point, and I'd like to share my thoughts on the underlying struggles that I see.

First we must consider the mental state of General Leia Organa. She has just lost her estranged but still beloved husband Han Solo to the futile murderous ambitions of her only son, after seeing a planet full of colleagues and friends incinerated in a senseless attack. The cost of war is becoming more than she can bear, and she says as much to Holdo. In short, she is going soft in her old age.

Enter Poe Dameron, darling of the Resistance and in many ways the son that Ben Solo never was. He is clear-minded and tenacious, personable with a charisma that makes his fellow pilots trust him with their lives. His piloting skills are legendary. Everyone assumes he is on the fast track to a leadership position, and he is a de facto general, even if the rank isn't official.

When a devastating threat appears, Poe does what he has always done, relying on his wits and skills to turn the tide. Although the cost is high for the Resistance, he destroys the First Order's Dreadnought, protecting many others. This turns out to have been especially fortuitous when only moments later the Resistance learns that the First Order is tracking them. If the Dreadnought had not been scuttled, its considerable firepower could have ended their sublightspeed chase before it began.

So the first question that arises is how could Leia demote Poe? He did everything right, didn't he? His attack gave the Resistance a tactical advantage and turned an ambush into a victory. On top of that, Leia is the General of the Resistance. If she had qualms she should have stopped Poe before the attack, not reprimanded him for carrying out an attack she has implicitly sanctioned.

We need to dig below the surface. Poe's star is rising. He is cocky and can get away with it, but he has lost plenty of comrades who were every bit as committed to the fight but not as gifted as pilots. Poe sees the world tactically. Sacrificing half the X-Wing fleet to destroy Starkiller base? A victory. Losing five bombers and a squadron of starfighters to take out a Dreadnought? Worth it.

Leia is starting to see things differently. Even in a galaxy with the Force, luck eventually runs out. His big, flashy, skin-of-your-teeth victories are good for Poe's legend, but they're becoming a liability to the Resistance. Poe did save the Resistance by eliminating the Dreadnought before it could follow them through hyperspace, but he didn't know that when he attacked. He just saw a glorious tale of victory for the people back home.

Leia's choice to demote Poe was calculated, like almost everything Leia has ever done. She recognizes that Poe is popular, and many of the fighters regard him as more their leader than the officers of the …

Imagine a church with two-thousand years of being neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. A group of people who had been held together through every disagreement and outward attack by their unity in Jesus, the counterpoint to the deep animosities that divide the world.

It's not hard to see why Jesus cared so much about the unity of his followers. He never forced anyone to come to him, but if they did, he called on them to put aside their prejudice and join a new family. Yet shortly after his ascension the church was already dividing itself by race and culture. The pattern of the world is hard to break.

At that time, brave people within the church, like Paul, fought to ensure that division could not gain a foothold, even going so far as a direct confrontation with the apostles at Jerusalem. When he heard that the churches were arguing about whose teaching they followed, he made it clear. We are all followers of the same Teacher.

What if the church in our neighborhood was filled with people of different backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs, and yet they all supported each other? If, as one family, followers of Jesus didn't need to hide who they are and chase the world's approval because they know a love that cannot fail?

Imagine that when you moved to a new neighborhood you didn't need to find a church. You didn't need to drive around looking for steeples, search the Yellow Pages for church listings, or get reviews from Google Maps. Instead, the church was already there. They showed up at your house and offered to help you move in. They were your neighbors who occasionally dropped by with food or invited you to come over to visit.

Even if they hadn't introduced themselves, the church would be hard to miss. They would be the neighbors that were always spending time together. Their kids played with each other, rather than spending every evening in a sport or activity. The families spent time together, and no one seemed to ever be alone. Rather than seeing each family out working in their own yard, they would all work together, moving their tools from house to house. Of course, they didn't just take care of each other. They also took care of anyone's house who was willing to accept some extra help.

Although you eventually found out that one was a janitor, another a lawyer, and one was a single mother, they were all taken care of by the others. Everyone had enough, and no one tried to get more. Instead, anything extra they quickly gave to someone in need, and they knew a lot about needs. In their conversations with you, they would always ask if there was anything you needed. And after a while, you felt comfortable telling them, because you never heard them talking about anyone else's needs.

What if you didn't need to find a church, because the church found you?

I've been indulging a fantasy lately. What might the church look like today if it had managed to avoid so many of the missteps (as I see them) since that first Pentecost? What if, when people suggested placing powerful bishops in each city to ensure that heresy couldn't spread, enough Christians had stood up to say that Jesus had taught that they were all brothers, and had one teacher, the Messiah ((Matthew 23:8-10)) ? What if they had pointed to the promise that, under the new covenant, God himself would put the law into their hearts and no one would need to teach another, because they would know God himself ((Jeremiah 31:31-34, Hebrews 8:8-13)) ?

What if, when Constantine had secured his empire and declared it to be Christian, the church hadn't been so demoralized by Diocletian's persecution that they leapt at a chance at legitimacy? Could they have welcomed Constantine with open arms, but told him that the role of King was already taken? What if they told him that within the church there is no slave or master, no Emperor or subject ((Colossians 3:11)) . What if they had said that while a man could repent and follow Jesus, an empire could not?

What if, when some suggested that the church split, either because of some disagreement or so that they could be with people like themselves, the church had said, as Paul did so forcefully in his time, that within the church there is no Jew or Greek ((Galatians 3:28)) ? What if they had clung to Jesus's promise that their unity would be the attribute that set them apart from the world ((John 17:20-23)) ?

I know each of these decisions would have been costly. I doubt I could have done better, and Jesus has shepherded his church through it all, but what if...