if you've ever taken a standardized test, you've wondered this. don't try to deny it.

via xkcd

Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse from 317-289 BC:

The historian Justin says that Agathocles was born in poverty but very early in life parlayed his remarkable beauty into a career as a prostitute, first for men, and later, after puberty, for women, then made a living by robbery before becoming a soldier.

[...]

Having banished or murdered some 10,000 citizens, and thus made himself master of Syracuse, he created a strong army and fleet and subdued the greater part of Sicily.

[...]

His last years were plagued by ill-health and the turbulence of his grandson Archagathus, at whose instigation he is said to have been poisoned (by his eromenos, Menon of Ægista, who poisoned the tooth-cleaning quill)

from the wikipedia article. i believe the correct response would be hoots of mocking and not-even-slightly derisive laughter. at least, that was my response.

I think it was Jim Miller who encouraged guilt-ridden, introspective sinners to just “relax…Because you are a lot worse than you think you are.” You know you’re coming closer to understanding the gospel when you’re relieved to see the depths of your own sinfulness. Compassion is not far behind such an understanding.

Rusty Olps

via RoosterCrows

MINISTRY TO DEATH, MINISTRY OF LIFE

by Dr. Peter Leithart

Pastors are specialists in death. Wherever death is, pastors are: Waiting beside the hospital bed, sharing a couple’s bewilderment over their third late miscarriage, reading Psalm 23 as the earth swallows up the casket.

But the pastor’s ministry to death doesn’t stop with the obvious. As a marriage disintegrates, as two who have been one split in two again, trust and love die, and it’s only a matter of time before hope too is a corpse. The Dow plummets, and before they know what happened a couple on the verge of retirement finds a lifetime of restraint and prudence deleted. A company downsizes, and a man whose identity has been bound up with his work stumbles around to find a new self to replace the one he lost. A child’s apostasy wounds more deeply than death.

Whatever form they take, crises are deaths, and to this we can add all the daily deaths that flesh is heir to. Pastors are wherever death is, and in our world death is everywhere.

In all these circumstances, the pastor brings a word of life. To be a real gospel, good news for a world of death, that word has to be a promise of life on the far side of death – or, more properly, the promise of life throughdeath. A message of life that skirts the edge of the grave is not the gospel of Jesus because it is not the gospel of the cross. The word we speak is good news that the Father of Jesus is faithful even to the grave, and yet again faithful. But it has to be at least about God’s faithfulness to death.

Pastoral ministry has a Eucharistic shape: We offer the Bread of life, but only after the bread is broken, after the blood is poured. The Bread of life is the bread that proclaims the Lord’s death until He comes.

At the beginning of Matthew’s Passion narrative, a woman pours oil over Jesus’ head (26:7). It is an anointing, acclaiming Jesus as King and Priest, but Jesus says that it is in preparation for His burial. Jesus is ordained for the grave, anointed to pass through death and out the other end.

This is the great privilege of pastoral ministry, to follow Jesus into the tombs that litter our world to announce the triumph of life.

via Credenda/Agenda

Raymond's in his Sunday best,
He's usually up to his chest in oil an' grease.
There's the Martin's walkin' in,
With that mean little freckle-faced kid,
Who broke a window last week.
Sweet Miss Betty likes to sing off key in the pew behind me.

That's what I love about Sunday:
Sing along as the choir sways;
Every verse of Amazin' Grace,
An' then we shake the Preacher's hand.
Go home, into your blue jeans;
Have some chicken an' some baked beans.
Pick a back yard football team,
Not do much of anything:
That's what I love about Sunday.

I stroll to the end of the drive,
Pick up the Sunday Times, grab my coffee cup.
It looks like Sally an' Ron, finally tied the knot,
Well, it's about time.
It's 35 cents off a ground round,
Baby. cut that coupon out!

That's what I love about Sunday:
Cat-napping on the porch swing;
You curled up next to me,
The smell of jasmine wakes us up.
Take a walk down a back road,
Tackle box and a cane pole;
Carve our names in that white oak,
An' steal a kiss as the sun fades,
That's what I love about Sunday,
Oh, yeah.

Ooh, new believers gettin' baptized,
Momma's hands raised up high,
Havin' a Hallelujah good time
A smile on everybody's face.
That's what I love about Sunday,
Oh, yeah.

That's what I love about Sunday,
Oh, yeah.

by Craig Morgan

the first chorus and second verse. that's what's making me homesick right now.

Q: What’s heaven for you?

A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.

Q: What is a gentleman?

A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.

from an interview with Tom Waits

via StillBeating

via xkcd

note: sometimes this site is scandalous. more often, it's funny.

via Behold the Moon Face

from an interview with Paste

Meanwhile, the Internet was doing its best to make LPs obsolete, pushing Stevens further and further from the kind of songwriting he’s hardly attempted since Illinois. “I’m wondering, why do people make albums anymore when we just download? Why are songs like three or four minutes, and why are records 40 minutes long? They’re based on the record, vinyl, the CD, and these forms are antiquated now. So can’t an album be eternity, or can’t it be five minutes?” He pauses. “I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.”

[...]

This fall, Stevens will release a CD soundtrack of The BQE along with a DVD of the footage and a stereoscopic 3-D Viewmaster reel. In the liner notes, he writes, “And then it hits you: If skyscrapers are the ultimate phallic symbols, then the urban expressway is the ultimate birth canal, the uterine wall, the anatomical passageway, the ultimate means of egress, and the process by which we are all born again. The BQE is the Motherhood of Civilization, the Breast of Being, the fallopian tube, the biological canal from which all of life emerges in resplendent beauty, newborn and newly fashioned with the immaculate countenance of a baby.” And maybe there’s something to that. Illinois is what it is—a necessary part of a creative journey that cannot end in the same place it started. Untethered by musical tradition, the expectations of his fans and the prospect of record sales, Stevens changed direction; he was reborn. It happened somewhere on that treacherous expressway, long after he left Illinois.

whoa. i'm a bit worried about whatever happens next. this is what happens when postmodernity runs riot in the life of a perfectly innocent artist.

In the sermon text today, Jesus is anointed for burial. There are a number of things going on in the passage, but it is worth noting that Jesus is anointed on His head like a King or a Priest for burial. Jesus’ coronation is for death; His ordination is for the purpose of dying. His duty is to die. We too are anointed in baptism, and Paul says that in baptism we are buried with Christ, we are joined to the likeness of His death. Our baptisms are also ordinations. When we are baptized, we are given the same calling as Jesus. We are called to take up our crosses and follow Him. We are ordained to die. The way to life is through the cross; the way to be a King is through dying. And we enact this in numerous ways in our worship every Lord’s Day. But one of the important ways we enact this is through the Confession of Sin. One of the most important ways you ought to think about this Confession of Sin is as a Confession of Faith. As we enter the house of the Lord, we confess that we are sinners in need of forgiveness and grace. We begin worship by dying. We begin worship by telling God and everyone else here that we are failures. This confession of sin is a corporate confession to God and to one another that we are all miserable sinners in need of grace. We come here as priests and kings, having been anointed in baptism and by the Spirit, and therefore we begin by dying to ourselves, by proclaiming that we are failures, we are broken, we are sinners who desperately need grace. And that is what the Church is; it’s a family of people who know that they are lost, know they are empty, they are sick and they are dying apart from the grace and mercy of God. But our hope is in the God of the resurrection, the God who declares the filthy clean. We confess that we are sinners, but we are also sinners whom God declares forgiven. And that declaration of forgiveness is always a call for faith. When we believe that God does in fact accept us, and that He accepts us sinners as righteous in Christ, when we believe that, forgiveness washes over us and we are given grace to forgive one another and to forgive all those who have trespassed against us.

Pastor Toby Sumpter, Call to Worship, Nov. 1, 2009