Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2016
As much as we wished that Jesus had not told parables about slaves since he should have been more enlightened before his time in our post-resurrection view of him as some superhero, Jesus and his words were constituted and mediated by the cultural codes and practices of his time. Jesus as incarnation of God is the anthropomorphic principle of people exercising the right to know the more than human, suprahuman Being of God limited and emptied into human contexts. It begs the question as to if human practices at any given time "soil/diminish" the transcendent principle of the divine perfect being. In Pauline language, the "kenosis" or emptying of divinity into the less than the divine mode as a way for the less than divine to know the divine, is the assumption behind all encounter between God and the human experience of God. It is true that what is perfect always get humanized through human approbation, for indeed, we are always, already, "all too human."
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2016
As if size matters, the disciples asked Jesus, "Increase our faith." Jesus replied if you had the faith of a mustard seed, implying that the disciples could increase their faith by adding the quantity of individual deeds of faith. Through the continual practice of faith, faith becomes the character of one's life and then the uncanny becomes normal.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2016
Uncanny faith outcomes? With "mustard seed" faith one can command a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea. What would be comparable in "real" life? An obscure prophet named Jesus crucified to become out of sight, out of mind, has his teachings take over the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2016
The quotable Jesus? Uprooting mulberry trees and planting them in the sea? Seems like a rather fantastical goal for one's faith. Come see what I've done by faith: I've planted a mulberry orchard in the lake. How about something more useful like solving world hunger and world peace? Perhaps the hyperbolic point of Jesus is that through deeds of faith the seeming uncanny can occur.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2016
When what is normal and good and healthy becomes valorized as being heroic it is an indication of how far general practice has slipped. Charity today is regarded as doing extra heroic giving. A generous person gives us a million dollars and we want to be congratulated for having the grace and the intelligence to take it. The sign of a pampered generation is when people want to be perpetually congratulated for doing things which are good and healthy for their own well-being. That might be okay for children in training but as adults we are supposed to be child-like in meekness, not childish in behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2016
Jesus told a rich man to sell all he had and give it to the poor. Francis of Assisi was from a wealthy family and he left his wealth to become poor and help the poor. Jesus said "Blessed are you if you who are poor for the kingdom of God is yours." It is rather ironic for wealthy Christians to sell religion to people who are already poor and bless them for being poor. If wealthy Christians take to heart the words of Jesus they would realize that they are not in the state of blessedness because of their wealth. Being poor is the attitude switch that we all need in that we should acknowledge our "poverty" of ownership over anything in this life. We brought nothing, we take nothing from the world. While we are here we borrow or administer what is given. How do we administer what we are given? Does our administration of what we are given include the creativity to make sure everyone has enough? The inequality in the distribution of wealth in the world is the greatest human failure in creativity. How is it that feeding the people of the world is never regarded to be the most creative work of humanity?
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2016
"There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it." Godliness and contentment involves a return to the traces our "birth" state. A baby comes into the world with "nothing" in not knowing or caring what he or she is to possess. The metaphors of being "born again" or receiving the kingdom of God as an infant or child perhaps refers to the ultimate regression therapy of Christian mystagogy, namely, reactivating the memory of the joys of gestation and birth. This is to know the experience of being content, joyful and happy for no reason at all and certainly not because of what one has in terms of material possession. Christian mystagogy is about the return of the "repressed" joy of birth itself with a distilling contentment which is able to regulate all of the other circumstances of life, some of which may be counter-contentment.
Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2016
"You can't take it with you" is found in 1 Timothy: "we brought nothing into the world so we can take nothing out of the world." This reflection is probably without telling meaning for people more concerned about what lies between the bookends of birth and death. Pre-life and afterlife wealth does not seem a big concern for people who want to collect quantity of stuff during their lifetime. Threats about retribution and judgment in the afterlife does not seem to affect those who elevate greed to a human virtue of quantitative superiority. What we did bring into the world is the gift of "spirit" denoting our being in the image of God. Nurturing the renewal of this "spirit" through the Holy Spirit is the task of seeking the quality of life, to accompany whatever quantities in life which might befall our material well-being. What we take from this life is the permanent groove of our character. Do we want to leave this world as the "meek" who inherited the earth because we knew that our Daddy/Mommy God had given it all to us, or do we want to leave this earth with the character of greed, the pride of having way too much bullies of richness who could mock or simply ignore the poverty of others?
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2016
"Neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." A major functional purpose of the Gospel writings is a polemic against the members of the synagogue who do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, viz., those who do not accept the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. The polemic is ambiguous since the intent is to convince and even threaten at the same time. It is anachronistic since it is a more heated rhetoric of Pauline Christo-Judaism which is interwoven into the presentation of the life of Jesus in his own time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2016
In reading the Gospels, one can fall into "double-literalism." By this one can view the story situation of Jesus as actual modern historical writing and then further try to figure out a parable of Jesus by assigning literal people exposed by the "secret" meaning of the parable. To counter this double-literalism, one needs to understand that the Gospel narratives of Jesus use "oral traditions" about Jesus to present the concerns of the post-resurrection Christ communities. One can credit the attempts of the writers to avoid blatant "anachronisms" in their presentation but it still is obvious that concerns of the subsequent apostolic period are planted within the narrative, e.g. Jesus speaks about building a church when "church" was not even in the vocabulary of his time. Parables are tools which allow interpreting parties to project meanings and so one can assign "good guy/bad guy" roles in literal ways. But in a more Wisdom appropriation of the parables, one can find that the parables themselves illustrate general scenarios which provokes some wise insights about why things are the way they are without making the content of the parable a "causatively absolute" reason for why something does happen. Behind literalism is a pride which boasts about being "particularly" more knowing about the specifics than other people not within one's hermeneutic circle.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2016
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. You cannot serve God and wealth. It is hard for a rich person to inherit the kingdom of God. One could say that these writings about wealth in the New Testament were generated within communities which struggled with the age old problem of wealth inequality. These would not have been written if there were not members of the Christian communities who were not wealthy so the writings themselves are evidence that there was a socio-economic diversity in the early churches such that the preachers were using rather strong words to "guilt" the wealthy to perhaps share. The Gospel of Christ is not supposed to be the Robin Hood mentality of stealing from the rich to give to the poor; it is supposed to be the inner work of the Spirit persuading people to sharing and generosity so that all can have enough. That there are so many stark warnings about wealth in the New Testament writings, particularly in the oracles of Jesus shared within the early churches, attests to the fact of wealth being an issue of the early churches. In Christ, there was to be no rich, no poor but if that were true the rich would help to remove the class distinction, at least within the egalitarian community of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2106
In a parable of Jesus, the afterlife of two people is illustrated as a wealthy man being on the opposite side of a great chasm from a poor leper named Lazarus. The wealthy man wanted to be with Lazarus but he had arrived at the opposite side because he had neglected the poor Lazarus every day of his life. Moral of the story: socio-economic class segregation can be the everlasting character of one's life such that it becomes the defining character of one's afterlife.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2016
You cannot serve God and wealth. Serving wealth means that we are "greedy collectors" of things because in frightful insecurity we think quantity of stuff can give us the false sense of ownership in the proverbial "possession is 9/10 of the law." Serving God means that we are inheriting children of God of the delights of creation and the way in which we can serve God with what we have on temporary loan while we live is through enjoyment, gratitude and generosity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2016
You cannot serve God and wealth. This is an update upon the Ten Commandments. Primary veneration of God means that one does not have other gods, or graven images of the same, that one does not steal or covet and that one gives one's time to God (Sabbath). Interesting to note that during New Testament times, the concern was less about idols representing gods and goddesses; the graven image had morphed into money and wealth which is the more formidable competitor with the service and worship of God. We are less likely to venerate idols of gods and goddesses today; we still are tempted to spend the majority of our time with managerial devotion of all of the stuff that we own, which begs the question, do we own it or does it "own" us?
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2016
From the Pauline church as we know it from the writings, it was written, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." In the early churches which read the Gospel of Luke, the oracle words of Christ were heard, "You can't serve God and wealth." Genuine conversion to the Risen Christ is known through the relationship that one has with one's money and wealth. The prescribed relationship is that all that we have belongs to God and we are God's stewards of the blessing of our wealth. Wealth is a curse if we are not rightly related to it.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2016
Jesus told a parable about a shrewd embezzler who cut deals for his financial future after his imminent dismissal from his managerial position. And then the punchline of Jesus: He wished that the children of light were as diligent about their "eternal" well being. A life dilemma has to do with how much easier it seems to be motivated by our physical well-being than our spiritual well-being. And yet it is the chaos of our inner spiritual lives which often wrecks our physical and emotional lives. To wit: Take care of your insides.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2016
We tend not to be shocked that the words of Jesus often include the metaphors of slave and master, as in being a slave to God or to wealth. We probably don't think that the image of God as the "benign" slave owner is the most favorable image of God. "God treats all of the divine slaves well" does not have very politically up to date sound to it. It still sounds offensive. Being a slave refers to a perpetual state and class identity. Where are we not in control of our lives? Where do we not have freedom? If we project our desires upon ownership of things such that our own compulsion leaves us without freedom, then the condition of addiction would be the loss of personal freedom. In the order of Plenitude, we did not have some of the greatest freedoms, like where we were born or whom we were born to. We don't have freedoms in the face of accidents; accidents means that free choice was not determinative. So in the face of the greater freedoms of Fate, we serve with our lesser freedoms. As limited as our freedoms are given our actual power to control everything in the universe, we do have the freedom to acknowledge a Higher Power, not as random configuration of events happening to us, but as a divine Personality with a caring beneficence toward us. Master/slave dialectic might have been the metaphor of choice in societies which accepted slavery as a matter of cultural economic practice; we need to translate today this metaphor into other kinds of studies in the relative freedom which we humans have to "co-determine" events of our lives. The point is that we need to experience the freedom of an "interior" Higher Power to help us from being controlled by the addictive behaviors of letting desire's projections linger on things and people to the point of idolatry.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2016
You can't serve God and wealth UNLESS God is your WEALTH.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2016
In language oxymorons are used to nuance meaning by using contradiction to actually provide the mood of intense meaning. So one might say that someone is "awfully nice" to mean "very, very nice" even though "awfully" is a negatively tinged word. The parables of Jesus often use the negative to reinforce a positive. "leaven" or yeast which refers to corruption or defilement is used to illustrate how the kingdom of grows; starts from a small culture and stealthily influence the entire piece of dough. In another parable, Jesus highlights the cheating and embezzling habits of a manager and states that the children of light should be correspondingly good with their lives. One cannot serve God and wealth, but one should have at least as much greedy motivation to serve God as does the one who is greedy to be wealthy.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2016
One can see the subtle change in the meaning of sinner in the New Testament. Sinner seemed to at times be used to designate the person who did not properly observe the ritual purity of religion. Sinner was a group designation. Sinners as group designation can and has happened in every religious group to refer to the people who are "not with us." It refers to the class of people called "infidels" or the people who don't have "our faith." Jesus and John the Baptist are presented in the Gospels as making a sinner an individual before God who can change one's status before God through an individual act of repentance. The former group designation of sinners, known as Gentiles, were granted individual status as individual sinners who could change their status before God by receiving the Holy Spirit. And in this transaction the sinner was made to participate in God's purity and holiness and thereby lose their former "outsider" status.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2016
In the tradition of St. Paul, he is presented as a self-confessed violent man, blasphemer, persecutor, such that he was the foremost of sinners. (1 Timothy) His plea? He had acted in ignorance so God had mercy upon him. And so the chief work of Jesus as confessed by the Pauline churches was to "save sinners." One sees the ignorance attached to forgiveness in the words of Jesus from the cross: "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." Our world today is full of the ignorance of violence, blaspheming and persecution; can the mercy and forgiveness of God still be effective in converting the ignorant to cease their violence and persecution? And what are we to do when the conversion of the ignorant has not yet happened? Who stood up for St. Stephen when he was stoned with Saul of Tarsus standing by? There is no glory in seeking to become a martyr to the ignorant violence of others; martyrdom is a posthumous designation of last resort. Part of the human dilemma is the waiting period for God's mercy to convert the violent and the unjust who live in the ignorance of their activity. What is not ignorance is the protection of the innocent and the practice of love and justice. Waiting for God's mercy to convert the ignorant cannot absolve human diligence in strategies of protection for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2016
Jesus told the parable about the "lost" to indicate the value of people to God. Jesus was looking for people whom others had forgotten. As we near the 15th anniversary of 9/11 we might ponder the condition of "lostness" in our world today. In some ways, the entire populace is lost by the conditions created by the rise of "death cult" terrorist groups which were born in reaction to regional conflicts and responses of super powers. The proliferation of "death cults" now engage the entire world in the state of lostness, living in fear itself. Fear is the general deprivation of its opposite, Faith. The lostness of today's world is that we have been deprived of the normalcy of Faith and we pray that God would become manifest in finding us and bring us all back into the normalcy of Faith.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2016
The experience of losing something and then finding it was a parable of Jesus describing God's experience with humanity. The image of God on humanity is like the gps device within humanity. Like a lost child at a mall looking for a parent and the parent looking for a child, there is the drama of the experience of the lost one and the caring parent. Jesus was angry at religious people who represented God as primarily angry at sinners. Jesus countered by presenting God as one who was primarily the happy one when a sinner was relieved from the state of alienation and the compass of God's image brings the sinner to his or her true humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2016
A criticism of Jesus in the Gospel by his religious opponents was, "He eats with sinners." In the Judaic context a sinner would have be someone who did not follow the ritual purity codes of Judaism and therefore was a "defiled" person. In the early Church, this parable of Jesus presented in an "as if it really happened" fashion is a revelation about the practice of Holy Eucharist in the burgeoning Gentile church. The Gentile Christians were the ritually impure people who were invited to "eat/partake" of the Presence of Jesus every time they had communion.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2016
Actuarial wisdom would suggest to the shepherd if out of 100 sheep, one was lost and strayed away, then the statistically motivated shepherd should just accept the loss and tend the safe 99 in the fold. Unless the shepherd has a unique attachment to each of the sheep and a love that will not allow the shepherd to accept the loss of even one. Jesus said the heart of God is to know and value each and so if one has become lost and alienated from the safety and protection enjoyed by the many, when it comes to the value of each person, God does not make anyone a statistical category. The loss of one is not acceptable. A great issue in life is to feel lost and alienated from the acceptance of a significant community; some people live within the community and still feel lost, or undervalued. To become a part of a caring community it may be important first to sense the loss and experience in one's interior life, being valued by God and re-established by God into the esteem of the entire universe. This is an esteem which enables one to become one who truly values the worth of others because of God's seeking heart.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2016
Among the insights of the book of Job that purports to be about "bad things happening to good people," the writer also is asking for the readers to have humility about presuming to know too much about why things happen. We create meanings about why things happen from our human traditions as a way of preserving identity in the face of the barrage of experiential data which confronts us all of the time. The writer of Job is perhaps arguing that in a Plenitude of all, the fact that an infinite number of particulars in various relative and causal relationship with an infinite number of mutual and co-existing particulars means that we cannot presume to have exact and precise knowledge of cause and effect relationships. Our theology can be simplistic probabilistic theory of "if you do good, God will bless you with success." There is lots of wisdom in that probablism because it is obvious that if one does not murder someone, then they will be blessed with the condition of not being charged with murder. Probability theory and good theology of practice compliment each other but when it happens that a person who did not murder gets charged with murder, the exception to the theory challenges the blessing formula. Job because of his suffering was charged as being guilty of some unconfessed or secret sin that he himself did not know about. When it comes to the freedom involved in the human condition the "chaos" theory is applicable more than in "science" since human blips which occur as exceptions to actuarial theories are more rampant and seemingly random than the occasional blips in scientific data that cause scientists to pull their theoretical hair. In short, the behavioral patterns of weather which sometimes evade exact prediction because of the influence of unknown "negligibles" are more exact than what can and does happen to human beings. Theological formula really are only probability theories of statistical approximation of what "might" happen in any situation. Job, is one who exemplified the exception to the theological formula and the writer of Job was perhaps saying, "People, theology and meaning are not yet a closed book, because God and theology still have a future." The appropriate future of theology is to respond to need and if theology becomes the habit of responding to human need then theology will have a future because it will have escaped its previous strait jackets. The writer of Job was proclaiming that the "whirlwind" of God deconstructs easy probability theories as to why things happen.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2016
One wonders if there was not a radical re-socialization that characterized the early churches expressed in Pauline terms as "in Christ, there is no Jew, no Greek, no Gentile, no male, no female, no slave, no free." The message of the Gospel indiscriminately was embraced by people across the normal "structures" of society and encouraged an equality of "fellowship" even between people who weren't supposed to be equal. This radical egalitarian expression of baptism among diverse people was perhaps a nascent birth of the "individual" or the individual attaining merit because of an inner spiritual change. The church would go on to become institutionalized and "feudalized" and the individual become lost within the corporate anonymity presided over by the only legitimate Christian agents, i.e., the clergy. The Enlightenment and the Reformation brought about again the "rebirth" of the individual in that the individual was not just to be passively assimilated into a the church as the baptismal machine of everyone in the realm. The participation of the individual in embracing spiritual change presaged the participation of the individual in democracies which require individual freedom to participate in the collective governance. Church polity today is still expressed on a continuum of the feudal church expression and the church of the isolated autonomous congregation. Ironically, it is secular governments which give the individual permission as to where and how to participate in the continuum of polity of the churches.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2016
Words of Jesus: "None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions." These hard words for Christians who lived on after the early age when many in the early church believed that the world would end soon either through martyrdom or a cataclysmic "second coming," had to be dealt with when the world lingered and when Christians grew to become the majority religion. How can successful and settled Christians who are going to be around in an enduring world, literally follow the words of Jesus? The way to deal with this dilemma gave rise to two classes of Christians, the monastic-religious-clergy who came to take the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and the ordinary class of Christians who were to follow the 10 commandments. Many of the oracles of Jesus pertained in the era of an "apocalyptic world soon to end atmosphere." If the world is soon to end then why raise children or have a family or build a home or collect possessions? The "disciple" of Jesus had to be ready for this world to end and become the Spartan who would forgo earthly comforts to spread the message. These strong strains of "apocalyptic" discipleship behaviors are found in the Gospel and other New Testament writings, such as in the letters of Paul. The first New Testament writing, 1 Thessalonians is about the issue of the end of life as we know it, so the "family value" sayings pertain to this state of urgency about the imminent end of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2016
Some of the most poignant human conflicts occur in family division over religious commitment. One could make the case that the entire New Testament is an explication of the family division between Judaism and the nascent communities that confessed Jesus as the Messiah and admitted ritually impure Gentiles to their membership. Stark language of separation characterize the oracles of the words of Jesus in the early churches and recorded in the Gospels. Examples: a disciple of Jesus had to hate one's family and when Jesus was presented with his mother and siblings, he said "those who do the will of the Father were his family." The message of the oracle of Jesus was about a "new birth" into another family. "Not born by the will of the flesh or the will of humanity but born of God." The heroes of the words of Jesus are children and babies because they symbolize the condition of spirituality needed for this new birth that surpassed one's flesh and blood birth. The stark "anti-natural family" words of Jesus are the ironic hyperbole which exposed the conditions of divided families over religion of the early Christian Movement and the words are strikingly harsh and strong because they express the reality of what was actually happening in families divided over religion. Christians and Jews became people who were divided over having a "Common Yahweh." (note, out of respect for the holy name, Jews do not presume to pronounce "Yahweh;" they often read Adonai, instead.)
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2016
The letter of Paul to Philemon is asking Philemon to receive back his runaway slave as a "brother" in Christ. This attest to the strong belief that the early Christians had in believing that the Holy Spirit created within them the true DNA of family relationship. It also could account for the oracle of Christ issuing a "koan" about "hating one's family" to be His disciple. There was a new "family value" program in the early church; flesh and blood had become replaced with Holy Spirit as the essence of true familial relationship. Seems radical in its time and still radical today.
As much as we wished that Jesus had not told parables about slaves since he should have been more enlightened before his time in our post-resurrection view of him as some superhero, Jesus and his words were constituted and mediated by the cultural codes and practices of his time. Jesus as incarnation of God is the anthropomorphic principle of people exercising the right to know the more than human, suprahuman Being of God limited and emptied into human contexts. It begs the question as to if human practices at any given time "soil/diminish" the transcendent principle of the divine perfect being. In Pauline language, the "kenosis" or emptying of divinity into the less than the divine mode as a way for the less than divine to know the divine, is the assumption behind all encounter between God and the human experience of God. It is true that what is perfect always get humanized through human approbation, for indeed, we are always, already, "all too human."
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2016
As if size matters, the disciples asked Jesus, "Increase our faith." Jesus replied if you had the faith of a mustard seed, implying that the disciples could increase their faith by adding the quantity of individual deeds of faith. Through the continual practice of faith, faith becomes the character of one's life and then the uncanny becomes normal.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2016
Uncanny faith outcomes? With "mustard seed" faith one can command a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea. What would be comparable in "real" life? An obscure prophet named Jesus crucified to become out of sight, out of mind, has his teachings take over the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2016
The quotable Jesus? Uprooting mulberry trees and planting them in the sea? Seems like a rather fantastical goal for one's faith. Come see what I've done by faith: I've planted a mulberry orchard in the lake. How about something more useful like solving world hunger and world peace? Perhaps the hyperbolic point of Jesus is that through deeds of faith the seeming uncanny can occur.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2016
When what is normal and good and healthy becomes valorized as being heroic it is an indication of how far general practice has slipped. Charity today is regarded as doing extra heroic giving. A generous person gives us a million dollars and we want to be congratulated for having the grace and the intelligence to take it. The sign of a pampered generation is when people want to be perpetually congratulated for doing things which are good and healthy for their own well-being. That might be okay for children in training but as adults we are supposed to be child-like in meekness, not childish in behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2016
Jesus told a rich man to sell all he had and give it to the poor. Francis of Assisi was from a wealthy family and he left his wealth to become poor and help the poor. Jesus said "Blessed are you if you who are poor for the kingdom of God is yours." It is rather ironic for wealthy Christians to sell religion to people who are already poor and bless them for being poor. If wealthy Christians take to heart the words of Jesus they would realize that they are not in the state of blessedness because of their wealth. Being poor is the attitude switch that we all need in that we should acknowledge our "poverty" of ownership over anything in this life. We brought nothing, we take nothing from the world. While we are here we borrow or administer what is given. How do we administer what we are given? Does our administration of what we are given include the creativity to make sure everyone has enough? The inequality in the distribution of wealth in the world is the greatest human failure in creativity. How is it that feeding the people of the world is never regarded to be the most creative work of humanity?
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2016
"There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it." Godliness and contentment involves a return to the traces our "birth" state. A baby comes into the world with "nothing" in not knowing or caring what he or she is to possess. The metaphors of being "born again" or receiving the kingdom of God as an infant or child perhaps refers to the ultimate regression therapy of Christian mystagogy, namely, reactivating the memory of the joys of gestation and birth. This is to know the experience of being content, joyful and happy for no reason at all and certainly not because of what one has in terms of material possession. Christian mystagogy is about the return of the "repressed" joy of birth itself with a distilling contentment which is able to regulate all of the other circumstances of life, some of which may be counter-contentment.
Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2016
"You can't take it with you" is found in 1 Timothy: "we brought nothing into the world so we can take nothing out of the world." This reflection is probably without telling meaning for people more concerned about what lies between the bookends of birth and death. Pre-life and afterlife wealth does not seem a big concern for people who want to collect quantity of stuff during their lifetime. Threats about retribution and judgment in the afterlife does not seem to affect those who elevate greed to a human virtue of quantitative superiority. What we did bring into the world is the gift of "spirit" denoting our being in the image of God. Nurturing the renewal of this "spirit" through the Holy Spirit is the task of seeking the quality of life, to accompany whatever quantities in life which might befall our material well-being. What we take from this life is the permanent groove of our character. Do we want to leave this world as the "meek" who inherited the earth because we knew that our Daddy/Mommy God had given it all to us, or do we want to leave this earth with the character of greed, the pride of having way too much bullies of richness who could mock or simply ignore the poverty of others?
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2016
"Neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." A major functional purpose of the Gospel writings is a polemic against the members of the synagogue who do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, viz., those who do not accept the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. The polemic is ambiguous since the intent is to convince and even threaten at the same time. It is anachronistic since it is a more heated rhetoric of Pauline Christo-Judaism which is interwoven into the presentation of the life of Jesus in his own time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2016
In reading the Gospels, one can fall into "double-literalism." By this one can view the story situation of Jesus as actual modern historical writing and then further try to figure out a parable of Jesus by assigning literal people exposed by the "secret" meaning of the parable. To counter this double-literalism, one needs to understand that the Gospel narratives of Jesus use "oral traditions" about Jesus to present the concerns of the post-resurrection Christ communities. One can credit the attempts of the writers to avoid blatant "anachronisms" in their presentation but it still is obvious that concerns of the subsequent apostolic period are planted within the narrative, e.g. Jesus speaks about building a church when "church" was not even in the vocabulary of his time. Parables are tools which allow interpreting parties to project meanings and so one can assign "good guy/bad guy" roles in literal ways. But in a more Wisdom appropriation of the parables, one can find that the parables themselves illustrate general scenarios which provokes some wise insights about why things are the way they are without making the content of the parable a "causatively absolute" reason for why something does happen. Behind literalism is a pride which boasts about being "particularly" more knowing about the specifics than other people not within one's hermeneutic circle.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2016
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. You cannot serve God and wealth. It is hard for a rich person to inherit the kingdom of God. One could say that these writings about wealth in the New Testament were generated within communities which struggled with the age old problem of wealth inequality. These would not have been written if there were not members of the Christian communities who were not wealthy so the writings themselves are evidence that there was a socio-economic diversity in the early churches such that the preachers were using rather strong words to "guilt" the wealthy to perhaps share. The Gospel of Christ is not supposed to be the Robin Hood mentality of stealing from the rich to give to the poor; it is supposed to be the inner work of the Spirit persuading people to sharing and generosity so that all can have enough. That there are so many stark warnings about wealth in the New Testament writings, particularly in the oracles of Jesus shared within the early churches, attests to the fact of wealth being an issue of the early churches. In Christ, there was to be no rich, no poor but if that were true the rich would help to remove the class distinction, at least within the egalitarian community of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2106
In a parable of Jesus, the afterlife of two people is illustrated as a wealthy man being on the opposite side of a great chasm from a poor leper named Lazarus. The wealthy man wanted to be with Lazarus but he had arrived at the opposite side because he had neglected the poor Lazarus every day of his life. Moral of the story: socio-economic class segregation can be the everlasting character of one's life such that it becomes the defining character of one's afterlife.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2016
You cannot serve God and wealth. Serving wealth means that we are "greedy collectors" of things because in frightful insecurity we think quantity of stuff can give us the false sense of ownership in the proverbial "possession is 9/10 of the law." Serving God means that we are inheriting children of God of the delights of creation and the way in which we can serve God with what we have on temporary loan while we live is through enjoyment, gratitude and generosity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2016
You cannot serve God and wealth. This is an update upon the Ten Commandments. Primary veneration of God means that one does not have other gods, or graven images of the same, that one does not steal or covet and that one gives one's time to God (Sabbath). Interesting to note that during New Testament times, the concern was less about idols representing gods and goddesses; the graven image had morphed into money and wealth which is the more formidable competitor with the service and worship of God. We are less likely to venerate idols of gods and goddesses today; we still are tempted to spend the majority of our time with managerial devotion of all of the stuff that we own, which begs the question, do we own it or does it "own" us?
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2016
From the Pauline church as we know it from the writings, it was written, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." In the early churches which read the Gospel of Luke, the oracle words of Christ were heard, "You can't serve God and wealth." Genuine conversion to the Risen Christ is known through the relationship that one has with one's money and wealth. The prescribed relationship is that all that we have belongs to God and we are God's stewards of the blessing of our wealth. Wealth is a curse if we are not rightly related to it.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2016
Jesus told a parable about a shrewd embezzler who cut deals for his financial future after his imminent dismissal from his managerial position. And then the punchline of Jesus: He wished that the children of light were as diligent about their "eternal" well being. A life dilemma has to do with how much easier it seems to be motivated by our physical well-being than our spiritual well-being. And yet it is the chaos of our inner spiritual lives which often wrecks our physical and emotional lives. To wit: Take care of your insides.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2016
We tend not to be shocked that the words of Jesus often include the metaphors of slave and master, as in being a slave to God or to wealth. We probably don't think that the image of God as the "benign" slave owner is the most favorable image of God. "God treats all of the divine slaves well" does not have very politically up to date sound to it. It still sounds offensive. Being a slave refers to a perpetual state and class identity. Where are we not in control of our lives? Where do we not have freedom? If we project our desires upon ownership of things such that our own compulsion leaves us without freedom, then the condition of addiction would be the loss of personal freedom. In the order of Plenitude, we did not have some of the greatest freedoms, like where we were born or whom we were born to. We don't have freedoms in the face of accidents; accidents means that free choice was not determinative. So in the face of the greater freedoms of Fate, we serve with our lesser freedoms. As limited as our freedoms are given our actual power to control everything in the universe, we do have the freedom to acknowledge a Higher Power, not as random configuration of events happening to us, but as a divine Personality with a caring beneficence toward us. Master/slave dialectic might have been the metaphor of choice in societies which accepted slavery as a matter of cultural economic practice; we need to translate today this metaphor into other kinds of studies in the relative freedom which we humans have to "co-determine" events of our lives. The point is that we need to experience the freedom of an "interior" Higher Power to help us from being controlled by the addictive behaviors of letting desire's projections linger on things and people to the point of idolatry.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2016
You can't serve God and wealth UNLESS God is your WEALTH.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2016
In language oxymorons are used to nuance meaning by using contradiction to actually provide the mood of intense meaning. So one might say that someone is "awfully nice" to mean "very, very nice" even though "awfully" is a negatively tinged word. The parables of Jesus often use the negative to reinforce a positive. "leaven" or yeast which refers to corruption or defilement is used to illustrate how the kingdom of grows; starts from a small culture and stealthily influence the entire piece of dough. In another parable, Jesus highlights the cheating and embezzling habits of a manager and states that the children of light should be correspondingly good with their lives. One cannot serve God and wealth, but one should have at least as much greedy motivation to serve God as does the one who is greedy to be wealthy.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2016
One can see the subtle change in the meaning of sinner in the New Testament. Sinner seemed to at times be used to designate the person who did not properly observe the ritual purity of religion. Sinner was a group designation. Sinners as group designation can and has happened in every religious group to refer to the people who are "not with us." It refers to the class of people called "infidels" or the people who don't have "our faith." Jesus and John the Baptist are presented in the Gospels as making a sinner an individual before God who can change one's status before God through an individual act of repentance. The former group designation of sinners, known as Gentiles, were granted individual status as individual sinners who could change their status before God by receiving the Holy Spirit. And in this transaction the sinner was made to participate in God's purity and holiness and thereby lose their former "outsider" status.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2016
In the tradition of St. Paul, he is presented as a self-confessed violent man, blasphemer, persecutor, such that he was the foremost of sinners. (1 Timothy) His plea? He had acted in ignorance so God had mercy upon him. And so the chief work of Jesus as confessed by the Pauline churches was to "save sinners." One sees the ignorance attached to forgiveness in the words of Jesus from the cross: "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." Our world today is full of the ignorance of violence, blaspheming and persecution; can the mercy and forgiveness of God still be effective in converting the ignorant to cease their violence and persecution? And what are we to do when the conversion of the ignorant has not yet happened? Who stood up for St. Stephen when he was stoned with Saul of Tarsus standing by? There is no glory in seeking to become a martyr to the ignorant violence of others; martyrdom is a posthumous designation of last resort. Part of the human dilemma is the waiting period for God's mercy to convert the violent and the unjust who live in the ignorance of their activity. What is not ignorance is the protection of the innocent and the practice of love and justice. Waiting for God's mercy to convert the ignorant cannot absolve human diligence in strategies of protection for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2016
Jesus told the parable about the "lost" to indicate the value of people to God. Jesus was looking for people whom others had forgotten. As we near the 15th anniversary of 9/11 we might ponder the condition of "lostness" in our world today. In some ways, the entire populace is lost by the conditions created by the rise of "death cult" terrorist groups which were born in reaction to regional conflicts and responses of super powers. The proliferation of "death cults" now engage the entire world in the state of lostness, living in fear itself. Fear is the general deprivation of its opposite, Faith. The lostness of today's world is that we have been deprived of the normalcy of Faith and we pray that God would become manifest in finding us and bring us all back into the normalcy of Faith.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2016
The experience of losing something and then finding it was a parable of Jesus describing God's experience with humanity. The image of God on humanity is like the gps device within humanity. Like a lost child at a mall looking for a parent and the parent looking for a child, there is the drama of the experience of the lost one and the caring parent. Jesus was angry at religious people who represented God as primarily angry at sinners. Jesus countered by presenting God as one who was primarily the happy one when a sinner was relieved from the state of alienation and the compass of God's image brings the sinner to his or her true humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2016
A criticism of Jesus in the Gospel by his religious opponents was, "He eats with sinners." In the Judaic context a sinner would have be someone who did not follow the ritual purity codes of Judaism and therefore was a "defiled" person. In the early Church, this parable of Jesus presented in an "as if it really happened" fashion is a revelation about the practice of Holy Eucharist in the burgeoning Gentile church. The Gentile Christians were the ritually impure people who were invited to "eat/partake" of the Presence of Jesus every time they had communion.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2016
Actuarial wisdom would suggest to the shepherd if out of 100 sheep, one was lost and strayed away, then the statistically motivated shepherd should just accept the loss and tend the safe 99 in the fold. Unless the shepherd has a unique attachment to each of the sheep and a love that will not allow the shepherd to accept the loss of even one. Jesus said the heart of God is to know and value each and so if one has become lost and alienated from the safety and protection enjoyed by the many, when it comes to the value of each person, God does not make anyone a statistical category. The loss of one is not acceptable. A great issue in life is to feel lost and alienated from the acceptance of a significant community; some people live within the community and still feel lost, or undervalued. To become a part of a caring community it may be important first to sense the loss and experience in one's interior life, being valued by God and re-established by God into the esteem of the entire universe. This is an esteem which enables one to become one who truly values the worth of others because of God's seeking heart.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2016
Among the insights of the book of Job that purports to be about "bad things happening to good people," the writer also is asking for the readers to have humility about presuming to know too much about why things happen. We create meanings about why things happen from our human traditions as a way of preserving identity in the face of the barrage of experiential data which confronts us all of the time. The writer of Job is perhaps arguing that in a Plenitude of all, the fact that an infinite number of particulars in various relative and causal relationship with an infinite number of mutual and co-existing particulars means that we cannot presume to have exact and precise knowledge of cause and effect relationships. Our theology can be simplistic probabilistic theory of "if you do good, God will bless you with success." There is lots of wisdom in that probablism because it is obvious that if one does not murder someone, then they will be blessed with the condition of not being charged with murder. Probability theory and good theology of practice compliment each other but when it happens that a person who did not murder gets charged with murder, the exception to the theory challenges the blessing formula. Job because of his suffering was charged as being guilty of some unconfessed or secret sin that he himself did not know about. When it comes to the freedom involved in the human condition the "chaos" theory is applicable more than in "science" since human blips which occur as exceptions to actuarial theories are more rampant and seemingly random than the occasional blips in scientific data that cause scientists to pull their theoretical hair. In short, the behavioral patterns of weather which sometimes evade exact prediction because of the influence of unknown "negligibles" are more exact than what can and does happen to human beings. Theological formula really are only probability theories of statistical approximation of what "might" happen in any situation. Job, is one who exemplified the exception to the theological formula and the writer of Job was perhaps saying, "People, theology and meaning are not yet a closed book, because God and theology still have a future." The appropriate future of theology is to respond to need and if theology becomes the habit of responding to human need then theology will have a future because it will have escaped its previous strait jackets. The writer of Job was proclaiming that the "whirlwind" of God deconstructs easy probability theories as to why things happen.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2016
One wonders if there was not a radical re-socialization that characterized the early churches expressed in Pauline terms as "in Christ, there is no Jew, no Greek, no Gentile, no male, no female, no slave, no free." The message of the Gospel indiscriminately was embraced by people across the normal "structures" of society and encouraged an equality of "fellowship" even between people who weren't supposed to be equal. This radical egalitarian expression of baptism among diverse people was perhaps a nascent birth of the "individual" or the individual attaining merit because of an inner spiritual change. The church would go on to become institutionalized and "feudalized" and the individual become lost within the corporate anonymity presided over by the only legitimate Christian agents, i.e., the clergy. The Enlightenment and the Reformation brought about again the "rebirth" of the individual in that the individual was not just to be passively assimilated into a the church as the baptismal machine of everyone in the realm. The participation of the individual in embracing spiritual change presaged the participation of the individual in democracies which require individual freedom to participate in the collective governance. Church polity today is still expressed on a continuum of the feudal church expression and the church of the isolated autonomous congregation. Ironically, it is secular governments which give the individual permission as to where and how to participate in the continuum of polity of the churches.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2016
Words of Jesus: "None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions." These hard words for Christians who lived on after the early age when many in the early church believed that the world would end soon either through martyrdom or a cataclysmic "second coming," had to be dealt with when the world lingered and when Christians grew to become the majority religion. How can successful and settled Christians who are going to be around in an enduring world, literally follow the words of Jesus? The way to deal with this dilemma gave rise to two classes of Christians, the monastic-religious-clergy who came to take the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and the ordinary class of Christians who were to follow the 10 commandments. Many of the oracles of Jesus pertained in the era of an "apocalyptic world soon to end atmosphere." If the world is soon to end then why raise children or have a family or build a home or collect possessions? The "disciple" of Jesus had to be ready for this world to end and become the Spartan who would forgo earthly comforts to spread the message. These strong strains of "apocalyptic" discipleship behaviors are found in the Gospel and other New Testament writings, such as in the letters of Paul. The first New Testament writing, 1 Thessalonians is about the issue of the end of life as we know it, so the "family value" sayings pertain to this state of urgency about the imminent end of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2016
Some of the most poignant human conflicts occur in family division over religious commitment. One could make the case that the entire New Testament is an explication of the family division between Judaism and the nascent communities that confessed Jesus as the Messiah and admitted ritually impure Gentiles to their membership. Stark language of separation characterize the oracles of the words of Jesus in the early churches and recorded in the Gospels. Examples: a disciple of Jesus had to hate one's family and when Jesus was presented with his mother and siblings, he said "those who do the will of the Father were his family." The message of the oracle of Jesus was about a "new birth" into another family. "Not born by the will of the flesh or the will of humanity but born of God." The heroes of the words of Jesus are children and babies because they symbolize the condition of spirituality needed for this new birth that surpassed one's flesh and blood birth. The stark "anti-natural family" words of Jesus are the ironic hyperbole which exposed the conditions of divided families over religion of the early Christian Movement and the words are strikingly harsh and strong because they express the reality of what was actually happening in families divided over religion. Christians and Jews became people who were divided over having a "Common Yahweh." (note, out of respect for the holy name, Jews do not presume to pronounce "Yahweh;" they often read Adonai, instead.)
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2016
The letter of Paul to Philemon is asking Philemon to receive back his runaway slave as a "brother" in Christ. This attest to the strong belief that the early Christians had in believing that the Holy Spirit created within them the true DNA of family relationship. It also could account for the oracle of Christ issuing a "koan" about "hating one's family" to be His disciple. There was a new "family value" program in the early church; flesh and blood had become replaced with Holy Spirit as the essence of true familial relationship. Seems radical in its time and still radical today.
