I finally finished the sermon for Evensong, with a good fifteen minutes to spare. The occasion for the sermon was the last Evensong of the summer before the choir leaves (with me) on a tour of churches in the U.K. and France (stopping in Rochester, Oxford, London, and the American Cathedral in Paris). The service commemorates William Wilberforce, an English abolitionist and social activist.
The readings were Isaiah 2:2-4 (the nations come to Zion, and wars cease) and Luke 10:1-9 (Jesus sends out the seventy disciples).
The homily goes like this:
If Jesus had given the disciples a choice — if he had laid out the options — which do you suppose that the disciples would have selected?
“Listen Peter, John, James, and you sixty-seven others, you may go out two by two, carrying no purse, no bag, no sandals, greeting no one on the road, remaining in the first house that welcomes you, eating and drinking whatever they provide. Or, you can go in houses of five, flying to England and France on a tour that’s been meticulously planned, with a suitcase full of clothes, and a thrifty but convenient budget of $200 for meals and used books souvenirs.”
Apart from the conceptual difficulties of explaining air travel to St. Peter, who was not known for being quick on the uptake, I expect we’d have a near-unanimous decision in favor of joining the choir tour. Although something might go wrong, some unforeseen fortuity may befall us, still the amount of time that the Tour Coordinator has put into making this a smooth and comfortable voyage just has to outweigh the attraction of wandering around Palestine barefoot, hungry, and broke, in a dirty tunic. Once we clarified for the disciples what a 747 was, I reckon that every single one of them would have chosen the choir tour option.
Which makes me a little edgy, because Jesus didn’t give his disciples the option of comfort and careful planning. That’s probably partly because the disciples must not give the impression of being first-century religious swindlers; if they were obviously not making any money on the deal, people could be confident that they were preaching out of faith, not greed. But it’s also partly because Jesus teaches us over and over and over again, because we can’t ever hear it well enough, that our eagerness for comfort stifles our praise of God. We attach ourselves to our comfort, and that attachment drags us down with chain we have made link by link, and yard by yard; we gird it on of our own free will, and of our own free will we wear it. We have the opportunity to stand with Jacob Marley, clutching onto the chains of our privilege and letting them shackle us in spiritual slavery — or of joining blessed William Wilberforce (before whose memorial in Westminster Abbey some of us will soon be standing), who took up his privileges and turned them round to drive open the doors of freedom for slaves in Britain, to shelter the poor and to make the the sound of the Good News of Freedom and abundant life heard all around the world.
Jesus commands us to travel light, sisters and brothers, lest our own comfort tangle us up with the slavers and usurers of this world, lest we become more concerned to protect our privilege than to proclaim the freedom to which Christ has called all God’s children. Jesus begs us to travel light, because we sing a gospel song so tremendous, so true, that no note, no syllable of our song may be muffled by selfishness. Jesus invites us to walk with the empty-pocketed disciples in order that our voices may carry a clear song of freedom to the ears of our sisters and brothers on the streets, in the alleys, in faraway lands where a slave wages build our sneakers and sew our clothes.
That song of freedom must be heard, and nothing may mute our voices: not the hesitancy of privilege, nor the pain of servitude. If we once have caught a glimpse of the day when swords are beaten into plowshares, when nations no longer lift up sword against nation, then for the love of God we will follow blessed William to the mountaintop, to sing out the truth by which many peoples can hear God’s word of instruction, that they may know and remember the notes of the song that rings out the great good news that right here, right now, in our very midst, the Kingdom of God has indeed drawn near.
Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Posted by: George at January 12, 2004 11:05 PMWhen a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Posted by: Lionel at January 12, 2004 11:05 PMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Augustine at January 12, 2004 11:05 PMInside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
Posted by: Matilda at January 13, 2004 12:42 PMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Edwin at January 13, 2004 12:42 PMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Edward at January 13, 2004 12:43 PM