Aphorism of the Day September 30, 2015
The story of Job is an inspired story to counter simplistic formulaic theology which says if you are good and you obey God and have faith then God will guarantee your wealth, health and good fortune. It is a celebration of freedom and personifies the forces of freedom in the heavenly council when the most High God gives Satan permission to do whatever he wants to the good man Job to test him to curse God when all of his good fortune is removed. The message of Job is that no one is exempt from the conditions of weal and woe which can occur in this world. The writer of Job is asking us to abandon simplistic platitudes about control of cosmic circumstances in causality and at the same time to live with hope. If hope is a sure and valid human impulse pertaining to present and future good, then the belief of the extra-human great Being God would also imply that such a great one would have to at least possess a superlative degree of Hopefulness to prove that humanity can be hopeful because God is Hopeful. But hope includes the respect for freedom of what can happen because genuine freedom implies that no one knows the future as actual. From the story of Job one can imply that wise probability living is called for and that faith and disciplined lives can be preventive living against many predictable woes to avoid them. Job remind us that good fortune should not be the occasion to tout that we are God's favorites; rather good fortune should inspire us to convert our favor into comforting acts toward those who for various reasons do not experience the conditions of their lives as favor but as expressive of the curse of "bad luck." If my weal can used comfort you in your woe and not make you angry or jealous, then the match of Freedom is complete.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2015
On Michaelmas Day many might question the existence of angels and place them in the category of gnomes, sprites, fairies and unicorns. The safest position is to adopt the position of love as stated by St. Paul, "love believes all things." Such Omni-belief would mean that we believe everything which can come to language even though not everything has the same discursive reality in human experience, i.e., not everything comes to language in our lives in the same way. Modern science has helped us erect a barrier between inner of life and outer life such that if the inner life projects corporeal figures into our outer world we become eligible for being designated as plumb crazy. Angels do have their discursive reality in language because experience and language are co-extensive when it comes to trying to categorize and name experience. Mystics may cleanse or open the doors of their perception in what they are able to "see" as well as those who dream or those who use mind altering drugs. It could be that angels are the personification of helpful hermeneutic forces in a peaceful relating of our inner lives to the exterior world. They personify "symbolism" or bringing together of unlike entities with metaphorical peaceful union. The demons are the opposites of the symbolic forces, in that they are "diabols" =diabolic=diablo. They rend the peaceful transition of the inner life and the outer life with the traumatic events of the soul. May all of your angels be peaceful today and have the propriety of the good Hermes, the god of hermeneutics/interpretations in bringing good interpretations of the flow between your deepest inner life with all of the words and deeds and events of your outer life. And may the great Michael cast down the dragon of the interior life who would disrupt the peaceful flow of one's interior to one's exterior.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2015
All of the words in the Bible exists as traces in language and each came to be in contexts of real human situations of writers and editors who continually re-worked and retraced the word traces in the formation of their communities. We are foreign to the contexts from which the biblical words were generated and we assume that we are still connected by continuous succession of communities. But this succession within communities does not guarantee the sameness of meanings for us in our contexts today. Contexts and multivalent contextual thinking "deconstructs" or reveals the inherent ambiguities of any texts because different people are experiencing and appraising each event in different ways. We try to generalize from precedence in community practices but there are so many choices to choose from to establish models for current community behaviors. Over-simplifying can seem to cement community identity and practice even while it creates idolatrous fixations on things which should be regarded as the exigent pragmatic decision for people living in community at a point in time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2015
Salt is a main "spice" to accompany the foods of life and make the experience of eating a more memorable experience. Jesus said, "Be salty or be spicy" in our Christian living. Do we live in such a way that makes other people experience life as more tasty and zestful? Find Spirit, activate charisma, put that spark and twinkle in your eye, and live that secret in such a way that others will ask the great Waiter of Life, "I'll have what she's having, I'll have what he's having."
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2015
Jesus is already presented as an ecumenical Christian in the first Gospel written, the Gospel of Mark. His disciples were concerned that others were casting out demons in the name of Jesus and Jesus said, "Do not stop them." This is evidence perhaps of the early differences between communities which looked to Jesus as their founder and leader. The oracle of Christ in a least one early community said, "Don't worry about it; there is enough room for everyone who wants to do Christian goodness." We should rejoice in all goodness done and be humble and make no presumptions of "omnicompetence" of our own particular ways of "doing good."
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2015
There are states of mind so terrible and so unasked for and whose derivation are unknown that the diagnosis of "demon" came to be a common diagnosis during a particular time of composition of the New Testament writings. The word demon had evolved from the classical Greek "daimon" meaning "controlling impulse" even while it could also refer to an interior soul friend or angel-like figure. The great Socrates had a daimon. There are arisings of tempests of the interior life which result in out of control behaviors. In the mapping of the human being, each part physical and non-physical seem to get personified and so interior entities seem to have personalities of their own when forces gain behaviors over which the volitional agency of a person does not seem to have control. Events of uncontrolled behaviors disrupt the life of the person as well as their community and there does exist people who have great gifts in whispering souls of those who experience such events of loss of personal control. Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels was presented as a very Great People Whisperer. This life would be a much more peaceful life if everyone could find some serendipitous matches with the people who whisper them the best.
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2015
What is the biblical probability practice on health? Health is a matter of degrees with the lowest degree of health expressed in the event of death which is the loss of "living" health. In the community of faith, resurrection salvation or health is applied to the condition of the afterlife. On this side of death there are many states and degrees of health with many different factors which bring them to be known, experienced and defined within community. The Bible consisted of communities which had their own views of "public health" just as every society has devised its own ways of defining health and how to maintain it. The community of faith has always believed in the holistic notion of health which means that the state of mind and spirit are important factors in the maintenance of health. So the moral notions of sin and forgiveness within community factor into the health of the community. Mind over matter factors in life can make one vulnerable to the always already germs which are there and so the healthy practices of spirituality are meant to promote the orientation toward health, which means having wisdom and courage to do the preventive practices of health even while we know that we are not exempt from having disease events.
Aphorism of Day, September 23, 2015
Sometimes temporary fast or full time fasting is the solution to learning self control. Jesus the verbal riddler used hyperbole to make this point: If your eye offends you pluck it out, if your hand offends you, cut it off. Why let the lack of control over one member or area of life destroy one's entire life. The philosophy of AA means that full time fasting is sometimes the only solution to sobriety. Each person needs to have wisdom to choose when, where and how long to use a fast to bring or restore order to one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2015
The most frightening notion of hell is not burning in a lake of fire or demons of Hieronymus Bosch's imaginations; the most frightening imagination of hell is the literal Gospel word for hell, Gehenna-Valley of Hinnom, or the place for burning and rendering the carcasses of dead animals, i.e., the garbage dump. So what is the literal meaning of hell? Wasting one's life, the lives of others and the life of the things of this world. Pitch forks and pointed tails are rather tame to living the conditions of a "wasted" life. Wasted life? Fear that!
Aphorism of Day, September 21, 2015
We may eschew the practice of healing when it included the exorcism of demons even while we must acknowledge the inexactness of the healing arts in our own time characterized by the mandatory recitations of the counter-indications of a particular medication, e.g. the antidepressant which may cause suicidal thoughts? We perhaps have reduced health to economic decisions today and isolate disease to the individual or to the individual's body part which needs to be "fixed." As the church we need to understand health as a community issue. In a country where we probably glorify the "individual" more than anywhere else in the world, we end up requiring the individual to be "omni-competent" in taking on health issues for oneself. The more we can make health and healing a wider community issue the more we are likely to see preventive behaviors begin to be practiced. While we might not find it satisfying to blame mysterious disease behaviors on demons, there are social forces of unhealthy behaviors which prevent good health being the practice of the community. Health and healing from a Gospel perspective involves seeing each person within a community which is interested in the health of each person.
Aphorism of Day, September 20, 2015
For those who believe in a really free market, the criteria for how one uses one's choices in the free market become crucial if one wants to honor one's commitment to Jesus and His values. Tout the free market by all means, but don't call oneself a Christian if one does not make the Christ-like choices in the market to take care of everyone. Perhaps we need to confess to being on the way to becoming Christians as we try to convert the free market with the right choices on behalf of the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2015
The definition of greatness by Jesus as a life of service is not the acceptance of slavery and servitude of exploited labor; it is using the strength of one's life through transformation and checked ego to do the things which one does when one serves. Service is the expression of personal power; it is not being forced through oppression to do something that one has to do for the master. If one has the power to choose to serve, then it become the perfect transformation of the gifts of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2015
One could make the case that Jesus was very much a child advocate. His closest followers did not appreciate his regard for children and tried to forbid children having access to him. Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, to such as these belong the kingdom of God." Losing our access to the child aspect of personality may actually be the adult excommunication from the kingdom of God. Adults often try to revive their child aspect through excesses of drinking or sports. A spiritual practice is the quest to revive the child of wonder in oneself even back to the memory of one's birth and know it as a rebirth. Knowing the deep memory of one's birth can actually be the occasion for re-birth into having joy for no reason at all in the midst of all of our adult angst.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2015
Having language as the crucial meditating element of human life means that everything gets mediated through human language and so people are constituted by language as constituted "subjects" who then use language to present continuous "versions" of life and those versions through memory and technologies of memory create a continuous reservoir of traces to reuse in the present. In the beginning was the word and all things were created by the word means that we cannot escape the play of words. The play of words creates us with a degree of freedom in how we articulate the words of our lives which we inherit passively or we consciously choose to use in the shaping of our versions of life. The very nature of language is "communal" and so how we live together is perhaps the crucial judgment of language use from the perspective of faith, love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2015
The Gospels present the disciples as those who do not understand the ministry of Jesus in his own time. One can find this to be a literary device by the Gospel writers/preachers to use the example of the disciples to exemplified the issues of understanding and misunderstanding of the significance of Jesus in the lives of those in the early church who were choosing to embrace an interpretation of who the messiah is and which community of people they should join because of their choice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2015
The child motif is a chief trope found in the words and teachings of Jesus. The child aspect of personality needs to be accessed to keep us in the state of wonder to complement all of the adult drama involving the brute facts of life. The brute facts of life can easily reinforce the ascendancy of our adult minds, our scientific minds and limit the modes of truth which we know in the sublime events under other discursive practices. One of the errors of biblical literalists is to try to present the discursive practices which are the inspired literature of wonder and make them into adult scientific discourse. The result is that they ruin their child-likeness by making the mode of interpreting the Bible "childish." And so many people dismiss our literature of faith because it is mostly presented in a childish way rather than in the artistic sublime mode of a literature which awakens the truth of wonder.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2015
In the riddling counter-speak of Jesus: "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all." Quotes such as these influenced Nietzsche to write that Christ transvalued the important values such as the "will to power" being the primal motivation of life. Such a phrase seems counter to social Darwinism of the fittest as those who are supposed to survive/thrive. Does this riddle of Jesus eliminate competition as the useless pride of misdirected people? Or is Jesus hinting about changing the focus of competition into competition with oneself? The surpassing self in excellence is the one with whom one is striving to compete. Such a view is not incompatible with community excellence as we are also exhorted to outdo one another in love and kindness. Choose your chief field of excellence today: love and kindness, or wealth and power.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2015
Ideas function in different ways at different times. People apply ideas for different purposes at different times. What is more universal, an idea being equally relevant in the same way forever or for ideas to have multiple utilities based upon the situation of their application? Apparently people of the early church argued about the meanings of the messiah and there is comfort to know that the messiah suffers with us. There is also comfort in thinking that a messiah could bring relief of all suffering with the ability to perform intervening justice. It is harder today to conceive of a end of the entire universe by some catastrophic event even though we know things could happen with causes of our own making to end our human lives as we know them. The function of a having a final intervening hero at some "end" to bring justice and end suffering partakes of the primary naivete of our child aspects of personality in the experience of just wanting everything to be secure. Having the sense of security and safety always needs visualization narratives. This hoping for security and safety is more universal than the endless stories of how it could be realized in any "final" way in Time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2015
The writer of the book of Proverbs called the incarnation of the divine in the world, Wisdom. Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, is presented as a metaphor of seduction in establishing the basis of a "natural theology" or the ability to know God without the aid of "special revelation." Wisdom is the natural ordering and structuration the world and She tries to seduce us to the marital union of completing our vows with her by the performance of the covenant of our worded lives of speaking, writing and doing the right ways of justice and love with our body language. Wisdom coaxes us to moment by moment propriety as we apply wisdom's strategies in the context specifics of the fluid situations of our lives knowing that one wisdom strategy does not fit all situations.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2015
The messianic confession of Peter is coupled with a rebuke from Jesus, "Get behind me Satan!" This dialogue portrays the dueling notions of the messiah that were present in the early Christ communities. Some adhered to the notion of a more kingly and intervening figure in establishing freedom in Israel. The followers of Jesus held to the view of the suffering servant messiah as was instantiated in the death of Jesus on the cross. The more kingly appearing messiah in Christian eschatology was to be delayed until his return when he would be a returning Davidic superhero. Christian eschatology was an effort to unite and reconcile the two notions of the messiah. One could also note that the need to have imminent proof of a kingly messiah probably helped drive the expectations of many for a quick return of Jesus. One can see today that the manifestation of the defuse messianic in the events of justice achieved is the transformation of messianism from the dramatic singular big event to the quotidian. Let messianic justice be everyday in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2015
How can what came to language yesterday and is preserved as a trace in some form of memory technology be interpreted today in the same way in which it came to language in its original context? This issue is why one needs to understand Spirit as dynamic agent of interpretation who is able to inspire new and fresh meaning in new times with the same old words. How does one honor the complete difference of each occasion and at the same time honor continuity with that traces of the past? It requires faith for both.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2015
I would call "auto-anthropomorphism" the habit of making one's body parts into personalities with apparent independent freedom of their own. This is seen in phrases such as "the heart aches," "my tummy hurts," "my ears are burning," et. al. The writer of James in a like hyperbolic use of language makes the tongue into an independent entity with a "mind" of its own. But why attack the tongue as an independent entity; shouldn't one go to the very source of the personality, the one in the volitional driving seat who controls the tongue? It could be that the writer is referring to how the learned habits of sins can make our individual body parts seem to have independent lives of their own and apparently be out of control.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2015
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is associated with the phrase "leap of faith." God tells Abraham to sacrifice is son Isaac. Abraham tells no one and sets out to obey. He has to suspend his ethics regarding the killing of his son in having faith in God who is one who will resolve in a worthwhile way this ordeal. He temporarily "suspends" his ethics by making a leap of faith into the religious and ambiguous sphere of suffering and loss in the hope that there will be a redemptive outcome. (hence teleological suspension of the ethical). Today, one might not want to defend Abraham with such ethical contortionism. One would say Abraham's receiving mechanism for what was he thought he heard God telling was just plain crazy. In the grander narrative, one can regard the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac as indicative of a time in human history when people came to believe that God did not require human sacrifice to placate the "angry" justice demand of God. The era of allowing the substitution of animal sacrifice in the place of humans was viewed as a great creative advance in understanding God. The most creative advance in understanding "sacrifice" has to do not with the death of humans or animals; God does not need human blood or the blood of animals, God does require the sacrifice of doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly. The worthy sacrifice involved is the continual checking of one's ego at the door to be a part of the Symphony of God and humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2015
Labor Day: May God grant that each find their joyful calling in the fulfillment of their work and labor and may each and every person find a match of their gifts with their employment to the benefit and support of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone. May God give us the grace to make the market truly free in making choices for the common good instead of choices and actions for the just temporary profits for the few. May God teach us that the market is only truly free when all of God's people are properly cared for. Amen.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2015
The writer of the epistle of James states that to act with partiality is a sin. How does one achieve the state of impartiality in one's behavior towards everyone? This is the goal and the ideal of justice. Justitia, the goddess of justice is depicted with blindfolds as one who weighs the merits of a case without regard to appearance, wealth or social status. Is impartiality the equivalence of "having" to like everyone? It seems that it is very natural to treat differently the people for whom we have an affinity. The charge to love one's neighbor as oneself which is also stated in the Golden Rule to do unto others as you have have them do unto you, does not equate the love of justice with the love of liking or preferring. Love expressed as justice means that there is an honor for the dignity of each person and the expression of that honoring of dignity results in activities which promote well-being in the immediate local situation. We often get caught off guard in context specific situations when our "knee jerk" responses are the results of being coded by the limits of our affinities. Rather than despairing of our littleness of heart, let us take comfort in the largesse of the heart of God who is giving us plenty of room to stretch our hearts in the right direction.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2015
When we write history we cannot be in the past and we look to the past to find the developmental links in how we got to where we are now. So history is a function of the present. And it become even more reflexive when we write about the history of histories and try to make a collage of how people have reflected differently upon the links of causality of events. The Gospels, in part are theological histories and histories about history in that each writing stage involves preachers trying to make sense of their present using a reconstruction of where they believed the direction of the teaching of Jesus was going even in his own own time. How could a predominantly Gentile church be understood as being completely prefigured in the life of Jesus in his setting as a rabbi with distinctive call for reform of his own tradition? How could Gentile Christianity be written into the Gospel narrative of Jesus without the appearance of blatant anachronism? We should not be critical about anachronism because it is unavoidable in the effort to transmit and translate the traces of the past into the present. And when traces of the traces of the traces of the traces....of the past are trying to be transmitted the humility of "not knowing because we weren't there" is easy to admit.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2015
Great paradigms become great because they gain a following. Christianity happened because the genius of the message of Jesus was adaptable to the urbanization which was happening in the cities of the Roman Empire. The early leaders of the church had to redefine what the separation of religious holiness or piety would mean in the urban situation. Would the separation continue to be the ritual purity separation which characterized the ritual identity and segregation required by Jewish ritual practice or would the leaders decide to ease up on the ritual practices to accommodate the success which the people inclusive paradigm of love associated with the person of Jesus Christ was having? The Christ paradigm gained success because while they practiced a distinct separation from Roman polytheism and Emperor worship cult, the separation markers for Christians was not to be found in their dietary rules or ritual purity practices. The Christians gave up the ritual purity practices of Judaism as a way to accommodate the diverse persons needing a different community and theological orientation within the cities of the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2015
Theological debates express the contextual limitations of the people who argue. Are we saved by grace through faith or by our works? In a linear time-space universe where heaven had a specific physical location with actual streets paved with gold and being saved only referred to where one was going to spend one's afterlife the grace and faith argument had a different meaning. But if one understands salvation as the current performance of the grace of God in how one lives a "healthy or saved" life now then eternal life is a quality of life which has location within us now. Too much of eternal salvation thinking is a really about preachers saying that their own view of God and salvation is the right view and reading of the Bible and they can proudly say that the afterlife is going to prove them and their side to be the correct view of salvation. This attitude is probably not expressive of the "work" of salvation grace.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2015
The Gospel often portray Jesus as one who did not want to be noticed but people still found him. Irresistability of the good news is a Gospel theme. It is so good it can't be resisted by those who find it so and this expresses the self-surprise of the early church: why did we survive and why is it that the message seems to be what an ethnically diverse group of people need? Since the Gospel portray a narrative of Jesus in his own time, the Gospel writers write the "Gentile" church into the Gospel narrative as those "outsiders" who make an extreme effort to overcome the cultural divide and approach Jesus the itinerant Jewish Rabbi. Faith is seen as the effort to seek good news even from a "foreign" and culturally inaccessible source. The Gospels portray Jesus as accessible to everyone except those parties of people who do not understand his mission and ministry and so they reject and deny his relevance to their lives. This dynamic expresses what was happening in the early Christian mission as the Jesus Movement found its identity in a gradual separation from the synagogue communities. If we do not understand this dynamic we end up reading the Gospel in crassly literal but wrong ways.
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2015
When one watches cinema or reads a novel one makes an easy adjustment for the literary narrative time-lapsed time which allows lots of things to happen in the reporting of events in time even while the actual time of viewing or reading is but an hour or so. Modern science has tricked many people into forgetting the narrative and time-lapsing which occur in the Bible as literary art. Since blow by blow description characterizes modern journalistic accuracy based upon empirical accuracy and "reputable" sources and has become the "standard" for truth, many people of faith have surrendered to this limited notion of meaning and truth and have felt compelled to read the Bible as being the same limited meaning. This has resulted in a denial of the faith-evoking purposes of the biblical writers. In such a reading we are to believe that the uncanny violation of all sorts of natural laws is the standard of what faith experience is supposed to be even though we really live under the true "gravity" of our own lives following natural laws and being fully down to earth and feet on the ground in what happens to us and our friends and our world. The Bible plays to the truths and meaning of things that we call hope, love, faith, health and healing and justice because if we can awaken enough of all of these we will have the attending analgesic to the facts of all of the losses which occur in the experience of time, aging and in our deaths when we leave lots of on-going life behind. We need not apologize for the analgesics of the Bible in serving us multiple visions of utopia as a affirmation that faith, hope, goodness, health, love and justice are normal and so the normal is the target for which we aim as we negotiate our way, survive, tolerate and re-configure the energies which force upon us the many situations of the deprivation of the normal because of the great truth of God and humanity, Freedom.
The story of Job is an inspired story to counter simplistic formulaic theology which says if you are good and you obey God and have faith then God will guarantee your wealth, health and good fortune. It is a celebration of freedom and personifies the forces of freedom in the heavenly council when the most High God gives Satan permission to do whatever he wants to the good man Job to test him to curse God when all of his good fortune is removed. The message of Job is that no one is exempt from the conditions of weal and woe which can occur in this world. The writer of Job is asking us to abandon simplistic platitudes about control of cosmic circumstances in causality and at the same time to live with hope. If hope is a sure and valid human impulse pertaining to present and future good, then the belief of the extra-human great Being God would also imply that such a great one would have to at least possess a superlative degree of Hopefulness to prove that humanity can be hopeful because God is Hopeful. But hope includes the respect for freedom of what can happen because genuine freedom implies that no one knows the future as actual. From the story of Job one can imply that wise probability living is called for and that faith and disciplined lives can be preventive living against many predictable woes to avoid them. Job remind us that good fortune should not be the occasion to tout that we are God's favorites; rather good fortune should inspire us to convert our favor into comforting acts toward those who for various reasons do not experience the conditions of their lives as favor but as expressive of the curse of "bad luck." If my weal can used comfort you in your woe and not make you angry or jealous, then the match of Freedom is complete.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2015
On Michaelmas Day many might question the existence of angels and place them in the category of gnomes, sprites, fairies and unicorns. The safest position is to adopt the position of love as stated by St. Paul, "love believes all things." Such Omni-belief would mean that we believe everything which can come to language even though not everything has the same discursive reality in human experience, i.e., not everything comes to language in our lives in the same way. Modern science has helped us erect a barrier between inner of life and outer life such that if the inner life projects corporeal figures into our outer world we become eligible for being designated as plumb crazy. Angels do have their discursive reality in language because experience and language are co-extensive when it comes to trying to categorize and name experience. Mystics may cleanse or open the doors of their perception in what they are able to "see" as well as those who dream or those who use mind altering drugs. It could be that angels are the personification of helpful hermeneutic forces in a peaceful relating of our inner lives to the exterior world. They personify "symbolism" or bringing together of unlike entities with metaphorical peaceful union. The demons are the opposites of the symbolic forces, in that they are "diabols" =diabolic=diablo. They rend the peaceful transition of the inner life and the outer life with the traumatic events of the soul. May all of your angels be peaceful today and have the propriety of the good Hermes, the god of hermeneutics/interpretations in bringing good interpretations of the flow between your deepest inner life with all of the words and deeds and events of your outer life. And may the great Michael cast down the dragon of the interior life who would disrupt the peaceful flow of one's interior to one's exterior.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2015
All of the words in the Bible exists as traces in language and each came to be in contexts of real human situations of writers and editors who continually re-worked and retraced the word traces in the formation of their communities. We are foreign to the contexts from which the biblical words were generated and we assume that we are still connected by continuous succession of communities. But this succession within communities does not guarantee the sameness of meanings for us in our contexts today. Contexts and multivalent contextual thinking "deconstructs" or reveals the inherent ambiguities of any texts because different people are experiencing and appraising each event in different ways. We try to generalize from precedence in community practices but there are so many choices to choose from to establish models for current community behaviors. Over-simplifying can seem to cement community identity and practice even while it creates idolatrous fixations on things which should be regarded as the exigent pragmatic decision for people living in community at a point in time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2015
Salt is a main "spice" to accompany the foods of life and make the experience of eating a more memorable experience. Jesus said, "Be salty or be spicy" in our Christian living. Do we live in such a way that makes other people experience life as more tasty and zestful? Find Spirit, activate charisma, put that spark and twinkle in your eye, and live that secret in such a way that others will ask the great Waiter of Life, "I'll have what she's having, I'll have what he's having."
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2015
Jesus is already presented as an ecumenical Christian in the first Gospel written, the Gospel of Mark. His disciples were concerned that others were casting out demons in the name of Jesus and Jesus said, "Do not stop them." This is evidence perhaps of the early differences between communities which looked to Jesus as their founder and leader. The oracle of Christ in a least one early community said, "Don't worry about it; there is enough room for everyone who wants to do Christian goodness." We should rejoice in all goodness done and be humble and make no presumptions of "omnicompetence" of our own particular ways of "doing good."
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2015
There are states of mind so terrible and so unasked for and whose derivation are unknown that the diagnosis of "demon" came to be a common diagnosis during a particular time of composition of the New Testament writings. The word demon had evolved from the classical Greek "daimon" meaning "controlling impulse" even while it could also refer to an interior soul friend or angel-like figure. The great Socrates had a daimon. There are arisings of tempests of the interior life which result in out of control behaviors. In the mapping of the human being, each part physical and non-physical seem to get personified and so interior entities seem to have personalities of their own when forces gain behaviors over which the volitional agency of a person does not seem to have control. Events of uncontrolled behaviors disrupt the life of the person as well as their community and there does exist people who have great gifts in whispering souls of those who experience such events of loss of personal control. Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels was presented as a very Great People Whisperer. This life would be a much more peaceful life if everyone could find some serendipitous matches with the people who whisper them the best.
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2015
What is the biblical probability practice on health? Health is a matter of degrees with the lowest degree of health expressed in the event of death which is the loss of "living" health. In the community of faith, resurrection salvation or health is applied to the condition of the afterlife. On this side of death there are many states and degrees of health with many different factors which bring them to be known, experienced and defined within community. The Bible consisted of communities which had their own views of "public health" just as every society has devised its own ways of defining health and how to maintain it. The community of faith has always believed in the holistic notion of health which means that the state of mind and spirit are important factors in the maintenance of health. So the moral notions of sin and forgiveness within community factor into the health of the community. Mind over matter factors in life can make one vulnerable to the always already germs which are there and so the healthy practices of spirituality are meant to promote the orientation toward health, which means having wisdom and courage to do the preventive practices of health even while we know that we are not exempt from having disease events.
Aphorism of Day, September 23, 2015
Sometimes temporary fast or full time fasting is the solution to learning self control. Jesus the verbal riddler used hyperbole to make this point: If your eye offends you pluck it out, if your hand offends you, cut it off. Why let the lack of control over one member or area of life destroy one's entire life. The philosophy of AA means that full time fasting is sometimes the only solution to sobriety. Each person needs to have wisdom to choose when, where and how long to use a fast to bring or restore order to one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2015
The most frightening notion of hell is not burning in a lake of fire or demons of Hieronymus Bosch's imaginations; the most frightening imagination of hell is the literal Gospel word for hell, Gehenna-Valley of Hinnom, or the place for burning and rendering the carcasses of dead animals, i.e., the garbage dump. So what is the literal meaning of hell? Wasting one's life, the lives of others and the life of the things of this world. Pitch forks and pointed tails are rather tame to living the conditions of a "wasted" life. Wasted life? Fear that!
Aphorism of Day, September 21, 2015
We may eschew the practice of healing when it included the exorcism of demons even while we must acknowledge the inexactness of the healing arts in our own time characterized by the mandatory recitations of the counter-indications of a particular medication, e.g. the antidepressant which may cause suicidal thoughts? We perhaps have reduced health to economic decisions today and isolate disease to the individual or to the individual's body part which needs to be "fixed." As the church we need to understand health as a community issue. In a country where we probably glorify the "individual" more than anywhere else in the world, we end up requiring the individual to be "omni-competent" in taking on health issues for oneself. The more we can make health and healing a wider community issue the more we are likely to see preventive behaviors begin to be practiced. While we might not find it satisfying to blame mysterious disease behaviors on demons, there are social forces of unhealthy behaviors which prevent good health being the practice of the community. Health and healing from a Gospel perspective involves seeing each person within a community which is interested in the health of each person.
Aphorism of Day, September 20, 2015
For those who believe in a really free market, the criteria for how one uses one's choices in the free market become crucial if one wants to honor one's commitment to Jesus and His values. Tout the free market by all means, but don't call oneself a Christian if one does not make the Christ-like choices in the market to take care of everyone. Perhaps we need to confess to being on the way to becoming Christians as we try to convert the free market with the right choices on behalf of the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2015
The definition of greatness by Jesus as a life of service is not the acceptance of slavery and servitude of exploited labor; it is using the strength of one's life through transformation and checked ego to do the things which one does when one serves. Service is the expression of personal power; it is not being forced through oppression to do something that one has to do for the master. If one has the power to choose to serve, then it become the perfect transformation of the gifts of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2015
One could make the case that Jesus was very much a child advocate. His closest followers did not appreciate his regard for children and tried to forbid children having access to him. Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, to such as these belong the kingdom of God." Losing our access to the child aspect of personality may actually be the adult excommunication from the kingdom of God. Adults often try to revive their child aspect through excesses of drinking or sports. A spiritual practice is the quest to revive the child of wonder in oneself even back to the memory of one's birth and know it as a rebirth. Knowing the deep memory of one's birth can actually be the occasion for re-birth into having joy for no reason at all in the midst of all of our adult angst.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2015
Having language as the crucial meditating element of human life means that everything gets mediated through human language and so people are constituted by language as constituted "subjects" who then use language to present continuous "versions" of life and those versions through memory and technologies of memory create a continuous reservoir of traces to reuse in the present. In the beginning was the word and all things were created by the word means that we cannot escape the play of words. The play of words creates us with a degree of freedom in how we articulate the words of our lives which we inherit passively or we consciously choose to use in the shaping of our versions of life. The very nature of language is "communal" and so how we live together is perhaps the crucial judgment of language use from the perspective of faith, love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2015
The Gospels present the disciples as those who do not understand the ministry of Jesus in his own time. One can find this to be a literary device by the Gospel writers/preachers to use the example of the disciples to exemplified the issues of understanding and misunderstanding of the significance of Jesus in the lives of those in the early church who were choosing to embrace an interpretation of who the messiah is and which community of people they should join because of their choice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2015
The child motif is a chief trope found in the words and teachings of Jesus. The child aspect of personality needs to be accessed to keep us in the state of wonder to complement all of the adult drama involving the brute facts of life. The brute facts of life can easily reinforce the ascendancy of our adult minds, our scientific minds and limit the modes of truth which we know in the sublime events under other discursive practices. One of the errors of biblical literalists is to try to present the discursive practices which are the inspired literature of wonder and make them into adult scientific discourse. The result is that they ruin their child-likeness by making the mode of interpreting the Bible "childish." And so many people dismiss our literature of faith because it is mostly presented in a childish way rather than in the artistic sublime mode of a literature which awakens the truth of wonder.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2015
In the riddling counter-speak of Jesus: "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all." Quotes such as these influenced Nietzsche to write that Christ transvalued the important values such as the "will to power" being the primal motivation of life. Such a phrase seems counter to social Darwinism of the fittest as those who are supposed to survive/thrive. Does this riddle of Jesus eliminate competition as the useless pride of misdirected people? Or is Jesus hinting about changing the focus of competition into competition with oneself? The surpassing self in excellence is the one with whom one is striving to compete. Such a view is not incompatible with community excellence as we are also exhorted to outdo one another in love and kindness. Choose your chief field of excellence today: love and kindness, or wealth and power.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2015
Ideas function in different ways at different times. People apply ideas for different purposes at different times. What is more universal, an idea being equally relevant in the same way forever or for ideas to have multiple utilities based upon the situation of their application? Apparently people of the early church argued about the meanings of the messiah and there is comfort to know that the messiah suffers with us. There is also comfort in thinking that a messiah could bring relief of all suffering with the ability to perform intervening justice. It is harder today to conceive of a end of the entire universe by some catastrophic event even though we know things could happen with causes of our own making to end our human lives as we know them. The function of a having a final intervening hero at some "end" to bring justice and end suffering partakes of the primary naivete of our child aspects of personality in the experience of just wanting everything to be secure. Having the sense of security and safety always needs visualization narratives. This hoping for security and safety is more universal than the endless stories of how it could be realized in any "final" way in Time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2015
The writer of the book of Proverbs called the incarnation of the divine in the world, Wisdom. Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, is presented as a metaphor of seduction in establishing the basis of a "natural theology" or the ability to know God without the aid of "special revelation." Wisdom is the natural ordering and structuration the world and She tries to seduce us to the marital union of completing our vows with her by the performance of the covenant of our worded lives of speaking, writing and doing the right ways of justice and love with our body language. Wisdom coaxes us to moment by moment propriety as we apply wisdom's strategies in the context specifics of the fluid situations of our lives knowing that one wisdom strategy does not fit all situations.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2015
The messianic confession of Peter is coupled with a rebuke from Jesus, "Get behind me Satan!" This dialogue portrays the dueling notions of the messiah that were present in the early Christ communities. Some adhered to the notion of a more kingly and intervening figure in establishing freedom in Israel. The followers of Jesus held to the view of the suffering servant messiah as was instantiated in the death of Jesus on the cross. The more kingly appearing messiah in Christian eschatology was to be delayed until his return when he would be a returning Davidic superhero. Christian eschatology was an effort to unite and reconcile the two notions of the messiah. One could also note that the need to have imminent proof of a kingly messiah probably helped drive the expectations of many for a quick return of Jesus. One can see today that the manifestation of the defuse messianic in the events of justice achieved is the transformation of messianism from the dramatic singular big event to the quotidian. Let messianic justice be everyday in our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2015
How can what came to language yesterday and is preserved as a trace in some form of memory technology be interpreted today in the same way in which it came to language in its original context? This issue is why one needs to understand Spirit as dynamic agent of interpretation who is able to inspire new and fresh meaning in new times with the same old words. How does one honor the complete difference of each occasion and at the same time honor continuity with that traces of the past? It requires faith for both.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2015
I would call "auto-anthropomorphism" the habit of making one's body parts into personalities with apparent independent freedom of their own. This is seen in phrases such as "the heart aches," "my tummy hurts," "my ears are burning," et. al. The writer of James in a like hyperbolic use of language makes the tongue into an independent entity with a "mind" of its own. But why attack the tongue as an independent entity; shouldn't one go to the very source of the personality, the one in the volitional driving seat who controls the tongue? It could be that the writer is referring to how the learned habits of sins can make our individual body parts seem to have independent lives of their own and apparently be out of control.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2015
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is associated with the phrase "leap of faith." God tells Abraham to sacrifice is son Isaac. Abraham tells no one and sets out to obey. He has to suspend his ethics regarding the killing of his son in having faith in God who is one who will resolve in a worthwhile way this ordeal. He temporarily "suspends" his ethics by making a leap of faith into the religious and ambiguous sphere of suffering and loss in the hope that there will be a redemptive outcome. (hence teleological suspension of the ethical). Today, one might not want to defend Abraham with such ethical contortionism. One would say Abraham's receiving mechanism for what was he thought he heard God telling was just plain crazy. In the grander narrative, one can regard the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac as indicative of a time in human history when people came to believe that God did not require human sacrifice to placate the "angry" justice demand of God. The era of allowing the substitution of animal sacrifice in the place of humans was viewed as a great creative advance in understanding God. The most creative advance in understanding "sacrifice" has to do not with the death of humans or animals; God does not need human blood or the blood of animals, God does require the sacrifice of doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly. The worthy sacrifice involved is the continual checking of one's ego at the door to be a part of the Symphony of God and humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2015
Labor Day: May God grant that each find their joyful calling in the fulfillment of their work and labor and may each and every person find a match of their gifts with their employment to the benefit and support of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone. May God give us the grace to make the market truly free in making choices for the common good instead of choices and actions for the just temporary profits for the few. May God teach us that the market is only truly free when all of God's people are properly cared for. Amen.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2015
The writer of the epistle of James states that to act with partiality is a sin. How does one achieve the state of impartiality in one's behavior towards everyone? This is the goal and the ideal of justice. Justitia, the goddess of justice is depicted with blindfolds as one who weighs the merits of a case without regard to appearance, wealth or social status. Is impartiality the equivalence of "having" to like everyone? It seems that it is very natural to treat differently the people for whom we have an affinity. The charge to love one's neighbor as oneself which is also stated in the Golden Rule to do unto others as you have have them do unto you, does not equate the love of justice with the love of liking or preferring. Love expressed as justice means that there is an honor for the dignity of each person and the expression of that honoring of dignity results in activities which promote well-being in the immediate local situation. We often get caught off guard in context specific situations when our "knee jerk" responses are the results of being coded by the limits of our affinities. Rather than despairing of our littleness of heart, let us take comfort in the largesse of the heart of God who is giving us plenty of room to stretch our hearts in the right direction.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2015
When we write history we cannot be in the past and we look to the past to find the developmental links in how we got to where we are now. So history is a function of the present. And it become even more reflexive when we write about the history of histories and try to make a collage of how people have reflected differently upon the links of causality of events. The Gospels, in part are theological histories and histories about history in that each writing stage involves preachers trying to make sense of their present using a reconstruction of where they believed the direction of the teaching of Jesus was going even in his own own time. How could a predominantly Gentile church be understood as being completely prefigured in the life of Jesus in his setting as a rabbi with distinctive call for reform of his own tradition? How could Gentile Christianity be written into the Gospel narrative of Jesus without the appearance of blatant anachronism? We should not be critical about anachronism because it is unavoidable in the effort to transmit and translate the traces of the past into the present. And when traces of the traces of the traces of the traces....of the past are trying to be transmitted the humility of "not knowing because we weren't there" is easy to admit.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2015
Great paradigms become great because they gain a following. Christianity happened because the genius of the message of Jesus was adaptable to the urbanization which was happening in the cities of the Roman Empire. The early leaders of the church had to redefine what the separation of religious holiness or piety would mean in the urban situation. Would the separation continue to be the ritual purity separation which characterized the ritual identity and segregation required by Jewish ritual practice or would the leaders decide to ease up on the ritual practices to accommodate the success which the people inclusive paradigm of love associated with the person of Jesus Christ was having? The Christ paradigm gained success because while they practiced a distinct separation from Roman polytheism and Emperor worship cult, the separation markers for Christians was not to be found in their dietary rules or ritual purity practices. The Christians gave up the ritual purity practices of Judaism as a way to accommodate the diverse persons needing a different community and theological orientation within the cities of the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2015
Theological debates express the contextual limitations of the people who argue. Are we saved by grace through faith or by our works? In a linear time-space universe where heaven had a specific physical location with actual streets paved with gold and being saved only referred to where one was going to spend one's afterlife the grace and faith argument had a different meaning. But if one understands salvation as the current performance of the grace of God in how one lives a "healthy or saved" life now then eternal life is a quality of life which has location within us now. Too much of eternal salvation thinking is a really about preachers saying that their own view of God and salvation is the right view and reading of the Bible and they can proudly say that the afterlife is going to prove them and their side to be the correct view of salvation. This attitude is probably not expressive of the "work" of salvation grace.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2015
The Gospel often portray Jesus as one who did not want to be noticed but people still found him. Irresistability of the good news is a Gospel theme. It is so good it can't be resisted by those who find it so and this expresses the self-surprise of the early church: why did we survive and why is it that the message seems to be what an ethnically diverse group of people need? Since the Gospel portray a narrative of Jesus in his own time, the Gospel writers write the "Gentile" church into the Gospel narrative as those "outsiders" who make an extreme effort to overcome the cultural divide and approach Jesus the itinerant Jewish Rabbi. Faith is seen as the effort to seek good news even from a "foreign" and culturally inaccessible source. The Gospels portray Jesus as accessible to everyone except those parties of people who do not understand his mission and ministry and so they reject and deny his relevance to their lives. This dynamic expresses what was happening in the early Christian mission as the Jesus Movement found its identity in a gradual separation from the synagogue communities. If we do not understand this dynamic we end up reading the Gospel in crassly literal but wrong ways.
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2015
When one watches cinema or reads a novel one makes an easy adjustment for the literary narrative time-lapsed time which allows lots of things to happen in the reporting of events in time even while the actual time of viewing or reading is but an hour or so. Modern science has tricked many people into forgetting the narrative and time-lapsing which occur in the Bible as literary art. Since blow by blow description characterizes modern journalistic accuracy based upon empirical accuracy and "reputable" sources and has become the "standard" for truth, many people of faith have surrendered to this limited notion of meaning and truth and have felt compelled to read the Bible as being the same limited meaning. This has resulted in a denial of the faith-evoking purposes of the biblical writers. In such a reading we are to believe that the uncanny violation of all sorts of natural laws is the standard of what faith experience is supposed to be even though we really live under the true "gravity" of our own lives following natural laws and being fully down to earth and feet on the ground in what happens to us and our friends and our world. The Bible plays to the truths and meaning of things that we call hope, love, faith, health and healing and justice because if we can awaken enough of all of these we will have the attending analgesic to the facts of all of the losses which occur in the experience of time, aging and in our deaths when we leave lots of on-going life behind. We need not apologize for the analgesics of the Bible in serving us multiple visions of utopia as a affirmation that faith, hope, goodness, health, love and justice are normal and so the normal is the target for which we aim as we negotiate our way, survive, tolerate and re-configure the energies which force upon us the many situations of the deprivation of the normal because of the great truth of God and humanity, Freedom.
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