James Ogley

New Wine and New Brooms...

New Wine started yesterday, A's there with K, M and M and it sounds like they're having a good time, the weather notwithstanding. I did all three services yesterday, starting a series on Elijah for over August. Being targeted at All-Age Worship at St P's, they'll not be online as they don't work well in a purely audible format.

I'm taking advantage of an empty house (CJ is staying with P&T) and cleaning it. I've done all of upstairs today and tomorrow, downstairs will get what's coming to it. I'll be heading over to Somerset on Wednesday (thanks to K lending me her car for the week) and then doing the outside of the house on Thursday.

Wednesday

Final midweek communion before the August closedown this morning. I did something that we used to do occasionally in Gamston - when we got to the epiclesis, we paused in silent prayer, waiting on the Holy Spirit for equipping and anointing. I used Prayer D where it is worded "Send your Spirit on us now ..." for this reason.

A haiku for this evening (a rather lazy haiku admittedly):

Curry, curry, rice
Curry, curry, curry, naan
Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Lazy blogger - bad! Bad!

So, when I don't blog much in a while, I get hassled by some people. Some people do it nicely, others are all like "so, why aren't you blogging then?" (see how "street" I am?) I've not blogged much in July so far because I haven't had the time or frankly, the inclination. Sometimes one just needs a rest from broadcasting what's going on in one's life to the whole world.

Anyway. Yesterday, I basically got sent home from our church prayer meeting by the various people who saw me as looking pretty rough (which is indeed how I was feeling). It was just as well too because almost immediately after I got home, CJ embarked upon what is now a 19 hour or so bout of sickness and it was definitely a two-person job to clean him and comfort him. We thought he was over it this morning but he started again after his nap so A's taken him to the doc's.

Adam - male?

In my sermon on Sunday, I made reference to the possibility that in Genesis 2, where Adam (prior to Eve's arrival) is called the man in English translations, it's perhaps not a great translation and that "he" may not be male until woman arrives. I invited people to ask me about it afterwards and people who have seen me have done so but here's some thoughts on it (and I hope the Hebrew script shows up okay):

A lot of recent biblical scholarship suggests that "the man" is not the best way to translate האדם (ha-adam) in Genesis. There's another Hebrew word איש (eesh) which is the usual way of indicating a masculine "man" (as opposed to a woman - אשה (ishah)). In verse 23, when we are told "she shall be called 'woman' for she was taken out of man, the distinction is made and she is אשה and he is איש. The two words share the same root in Hebrew.

The most helpful suggestions of how to describe האדם in Genesis are either "the human" or "the groundling" - I prefer the former as it makes it easier to see that Adam is the archetype for the whole of humanity.

It's also worth noting of course that some of the scholars who take this line are less kind to poor Adam, one even translating it as "the clod" (of earth presumably) - they tend to be working from a feminist perspective with which I have no inherent problem but which - sadly - sometimes lose some academic rigour in their hermeneutics.

Update: I think the Hebrew script now works - it certainly does for me in Firefox on openSUSE 11.0.

Sermon: Genesis 2.4-25 - On Earth as in Heaven

Recorded Sunday at St Paul's. 23 minutes long including reading and response. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

No presentation this week but some reflections coming on the question I threw in as an aside about Adam.

Sermon: Philippians 3.17-21 - Citizens of Heaven

Recorded yesterday at St Paul's. 32 minutes long including reading and response. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

PDF of accompanying presentation and more information about the Vanity Fair story I mention.

I'm so offended

Andrew:

I'm just sooooo offended

Announcing the Polish version of Planet SUSE

In addition to the existing German and Spanish language versions of Planet SUSE, I've added a new Polish version.

If a Polish speaker wants to give me a translation of the sidebar contents, I'd be very grateful.

Wordle

Wordle. A strange name for a cracking site.

Thanks to Cornelius for the Wordle of Planet SUSE:

Here's one of my site:

Server performance

People reading Planet SUSE (or indeed my site) over the last few days will have noticed it was responding really slowly. I don't know how long this had been the case with being on retreat but after about 24 hours of debugging and investigation, I've identified and resolved the issue.