Traffic. We all agree it’s bad and getting worse. Meg and I have started to avoid Highway 64 between Avon Park and Zolfo Springs because it’s getting too congested and dangerous with people passing and so on. And yes, you heard that right; between Avon Park and Zolfo Springs. They’ve approved 8300 new homes inside the city limits of Lake Wales, which means about 24,000 new people, and the only road construction north to Disney, west to Brandon, south to Clewiston and East to Vero Beach is right here in Lake Wales.

If John the Baptist showed up today talking about making paths straight, I’d be tempted to send him out to 60 & 27. (If you know how to navigate that intersection right now, I’m impressed. But we all know it could change at any time.) Or maybe I’d send him to Champion’s Gate.

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For many years, decades, we took our acolytes to the Acolyte Festival. That always began with a service in our cathedral followed by an afternoon and evening at Wet ‘n Wild, a water park in Orlando that is now closed. And as each of our four children hit about age 7, I would take them up to the Mach 5 Alpha Flight. It had, by far, the longest slides in the park. There were three tracks, so you could race, and you went down on a foam mat with handles on it. While it started pretty high, it wasn’t very steep and it wound a long, long way down until at the end it sent you skittering across a pool.

All four of our kids went through the same process. We’d go up the long set of ramps and steps with them to the top. They would be in a detached fog. Then, when it came time to go, they’d get scared, protest, maybe cry a little. I’d encourage them, tell them how much they would love it. I’d point out the smaller kids who were doing it. Eventually just tell them to hang on and shove them down the track. Then I’d go on another track, knowing I’d get to the bottom first because, well, gravity.

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Today’s Gospel is one of my favorite scenes in scripture, but I think we need to go just one more verse. The very next verse frames the conversation between Pilate and Jesus. Please turn in your Bibles to John 18:38. “Pilate answered him, ‘What is truth?’”

What is truth? There seems to be a growing assumption that the only real truth is fact, that only whatever we can prove by math or scientific experiment is real. The rest is superstition or something. Our world has been improved immeasurably in many ways by scientific and technological advancement, but facts don’t define truth and they don’t define reality.

Most of us have a smart phone. That is a great tool with a ton of brilliant science, engineering and design that went into it. It’s a phone, a camera, a video recorder, and on and on. It’s a computer more powerful than the computers they used to go to the moon. We can find out news from anywhere in the whole world, translate any language, read almost any book and listen to almost any song.

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