Good Evening -- Or Is It Morning? -- This Rosh Hashanah!

So since the Jewish New Year celebration of Rosh Hashanah began at sundown last night and continues to sundown Friday night – it's two days, am I reading that correctly? – is it the evening or the morning of the first day right now? It's one of those question I'm happy to wait until I get to heaven and can ask God Himself (but if anyone here's got an idea, drop me a line); in any event, how many of my friends can say that along with me they're alive in the year 5774? Anyone reading this, for by the Jewish liturgical calendar that's the year we have just started. (Though for most other purposes, we'll stick with today being September 5, 2013.) And don't get me started on the young-earth creationist idea that our world has six thousand years allotted to it before “the end of the world”, for wouldn't that put the apocalypse in the fourth decade of the twenty-third century? And as I've been reading lately, THAT would disappoint a lot of people … don't trust date-setters.

C-3PO Now is the summer of our happiness
Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!

I may write some things irritating, but let me never be irreverent. Now take a moment with me and travel to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … or as the Bard of Avon put it, “In time so long ago begins our play,/In star-crossed galaxy far, far away.” True, Ian Doescher was likely not channeling the spirit of Shakespeare while writing William Shakespeare's Star Wars (ISBN 9781594746376) – though that's an interesting anachronism to think about – but I have to say I haven't had this much fun reading a book in a long time. And parts of this I couldn't help reading out loud! You don't have to be a major fan of either Shakespeare on Star Wars (the 1977 film with Luke and Leia Skywalker and their dad Vader – wait, we're not supposed to know that yet; not the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative of the United States that essentially conned the Soviet Union to spend itself on defense into dissolution) to appreciate what went into this, especially the asides!

Our ship is under siege, I know not how.
O hast thou heard? The main reactor fails!

Jeffrey's taken his first spelling test today, and Martha and I have spent the last few days working with him on the words and improving his writing. It's coming along very well, thanks, and being at the house with our nieces Breanna and Josceline as well as our own kids – I am more thankful than you can imagine that Martha was able to take the week off from both her employers to be able to pick them and Sarah up from and take them to school (well, taking them every other day) and that she who I am so proud and blessed to be married to is just fun to spend time with. I'm finding it so – really, we do not spend all our time hooked into electronics or let brain cells die watching the television. (I'm trying to find a really compelling argument for renewing DirecTV once our contract expires …) I get tired at night not long after the kids do! Who knows what we'll hear and what's sequestered by the time Martha's parents Robert and Sharon and her sister Mary return from Washington D.C. next week!

We shall most surely be destroy'd by this,

I'll warrant madness lies herein!

This weekend among many other blessings we found many clothes that would fit Sarah and Jeffrey at an area yard sale as well as at our newly open Kohl's that Sarah has had a $25 gift card to since last Christmas. And Jeffrey got a $10 gift card from Sharon last weekend before they left so he picked up one or two things too … and of course I also picked up a few books, one of which proved to be strangely familiar to me, the play Luther by John Osborne. I'd first read it in my History of Western Civilization class, Fall 1990 at Stetson University, but like most required college reading I just didn't get it. And even now – oh yeah, copyright 1961, Signet Book identifier T3371 (no ISBN numbers until the 1970s) – when I'm a member of Bethany Lutheran Church where a good many of this sixteenth-century monk's teachings get integrated with Scripture from the pulpit, about to the point where he's the thirteenth apostle (which I don't believe he is, thank you) he's a slippery character.

R2-D2 –Beep beep,

Beep, beep, meep, squeak, beep, beep beep, whee!

The play essentially focuses on Martin Luther never having planned to start the Reformation, the historical event he's most associated with, but getting carried away by events around him. What started out as a protest against indulgences – essentially, vouchers you could buy in the Christian world while living to reduce the time you spent in purgatory, the limbo between heaven and hell, or outright forgiveness for every sin you did and will commit throughout your lifetime – became the opening salvo of a “holy war”. The ugliness we're seeing in the Islamic world right now (think Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and occasionally Iran among others) could be the result of there having been no moderating figure, no Luther-like figure (a point made in a post-September 11 attacks TIME editorial, I recall) to seriously post questions to the radicals on both sides.

C-3PO – We're doomed.
The princess shall have no escape this time.

See, I can be a Christian and see more than one side of the question, and at least see the basic outlines of said question. I can accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God and not delight in seeing those who don't believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior that burn for eternity in hell. Maybe it's the Ultimate Question from The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, where you can know the answer but not the question at the same time. (In physics, this is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, where you can know the nature of a particle but not its direction; that is, the less you know of one, the more you know of the other.) And admittedly I don't know enough about Islam, other than from an evangelical point of view (where they are the ones who need to be – and this distinction is important – witnessed to, not converted). It's easy to blur that line when people don't make the choice we want, but from my point of view converting and convicting anybody of their sin is the Holy Spirit's job and not mine.

Shanah Tovah (and we can all escape, no matter what Threepio says), David