Message from God

Driving home this afternoon I passed an interesting graffitti. Someone had taken white spray paint and whited out a large rectangle on the face of a large billboard. Then in black spray paint they posted this message "Sambo, I love your Mambo." Not sure what that means.

But the interesting thing is that the message was signed with a dash and the four letters, in caps, "YHVH." Those four letters are (almost) the four letters known as the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God. The four letters are usually rendered as YHWH, but the W is pronounced the German way, as a V, so YHVH is an understandable variant. When you fill in the consonants you get the name Jehovah, although I learned in seminary that a more accurate rendering would be Yahweh, pronounced "Yah-Vay."

So God loves the way someone named Sambo dances the Mambo. Not surprisingly because God is love (John 4:8). And I remember from a song I used to sing in Methodist Church Camp that Jesus is "Lord of the Dance."

The Billboard with the graffitti message, by the way, rises above the St. Francis of Assisi Parish School in Silver Lake. Perhaps God favors them, or perhaps a student who paid attention in his religious studies class is playing a joke.