Anyone who has read the Gospels will know that Jesus understood the power of rhetoric.  Yet, Christ’s rhetoric (unlike its Greek counterpart) contributes little to the art of formal persuasion.  Jesus spoke often in riddles, parables, and imponderables that re-arranged the human soul, and he spoke with a ‘sword’ that put the ultimate question to all of our artful dodging.  To put it another way, Jesus did not try to win any cultural or religious debates, prop up any regimes, nor, according to the same logic, did he try to ‘win’ any souls over to a purely ideological commitmen

Instead of a footnoted tome, this week’s comments are an example of being a living witness.

“Granny”: An “Ordinary” Church Member

“Granny” was a member of one of my churches. She was in her 70’s, had not finished grade school and lived in the same house in a rural agricultural area for over 50 years. She had been heavily educated in the “University of Life” and her hands exhibited it, gnarled by hard work and rheumatoid arthritis.

“Eeeh, Eeeh, Eeeh, Eeeh,” the car horn blared madly.

Bang!

The elderly woman lay crumpled on the hilly San Francisco street.  A hysteric crowd encircled her while someone shouted, “Call an ambulance, quick!”  Minutes later the limp body was rushed to the hospital. 

Although unable to communicate, the 78 year old Seventh-day Adventist matron strikingly recalled a decades-old conversation in the quiet of the hospital room.

“The work is making wonderful progress, isn’t it?”

TIME magazine had an extraordinary statement on the cover of its February 21, 2011, issue – ¨2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.¨ This prediction was based on the merger of the human brain and a computer.  Computer technology was described as developing at such a phenomenal rate that computers could accomplish in just one hour what had previously taken their entire 90 year history to do.  This suggested to many scientists around the world that computers were developing an “intelligence” (