Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2017
Halloween has come to be have a rather mixed identity in America. Among the "babies thrown out with the bath water" in the Reformation by many post-Reformation Christian churches was the logical corollary of the resurrection expressed as the Communion of Saints. The Communion of Saints is the cloud of witnesses of the faithful departed through the mercies of Christ. Believers in the resurrection treat those witnesses as though they still live on. The growth of the Cult of Saints in the tradition of the church seemed to put devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints in competition with devotion to Christ. Why pray to Ever Blessed Mary and the saints when you can go to the Main Man, Jesus, Himself? In the extreme reaction to the Cult of Saints, the triduum of All Hallows' Eve, All Hallows' Day and All Souls Day lost its liturgical role in many post-Reformation Churches. So what did we get in America? A day to party with spooks and witches and giving the kids a day to wear costumes and collect candies. And many of the churches long detached from the traditions of All Saints' and All Souls' decided that all of the spooky stuff was Satanic and "non-Christian" and so they forbid participation in the Halloween fun, seemingly finding demons and demonic in such stuff. Even though for the kids, it is mainly about the costumes and the candy and about the community ritual of secular fun. Churches with the All Saints' continuous tradition need not be apologetic about the anthropologically sound tradition of venerating faithful departed persons, even heroic persons for their contribution to our lives. For Christians who engage in resurrection logic, they believe those who have departed in the mercies of Christ live on, and if they live on, one can still talk to them without implying a competition in one's devotion to the Risen Christ. People, All Hallows' Eve is an expression of Easter. Please have fun but don't lose the connection.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2017
On our way to All Hallows' Eve when for the kids, it's mostly about the costumes and candy, we might reflect about what is lost in how it has become a commercialized cultural tradition. Common to all cultures is the reverence and respect for those who have died. Christianity as a conquering religion came to many pre-Christian places and stated: Our veneration of ancestors is greater than yours, in fact your veneration is "ancestor worship" and is "sinful." The "valid" veneration of one's ancestors was presented as the Communion of Saints and Souls and an articulation of a hierarchy of the "value" of the departed to the lives of the still alive. The church got involved by grading saints through canonization and part of the grade was determined by intercessory events of the posthumous becoming "known" to the living. There came to be designated "heroic" saints with recognition through official promulgation by the church. In the liturgy of the church the lesser saints who are those local to you and me became the "souls" of All Souls Day. So we do designate as "heroic" the saints and souls who contribute to our lives and many saints and souls attain legendary status because our dream-space is a liminal state of connecting with the invisible realm, and the normal natural laws of science do not pertain in dream-space. Today's secular Halloween is filled with costumes of fantastic heroes and all of the kings, queens, princes and princesses of material from the imagination of human dream space. We should not forget to unearth from the secular Halloween the human tradition of venerating people who visibly made a difference to this world and are absolute in their past existence even as they are invisible in their present existence. We confess that we are all too human in wanting a continuing connection with the "telling" persons of universal and local and personal history who are gone to the realm of the invisible.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2017
One could say that law in its most universal form is an expression of the very function of language, i.e., the assigning of value and behaviors of using word in the now vis a vis every other use of words to which one has access. The essence of law is to establish value with defined purpose and in sacred scripture the law is to teach us to live toward our "better angels." We achieve this by honoring the most inclusive Ego of all, God, the Great I AM. Acknowledging our partial ego existence within the Community of the Great I AM provides us the connection with Higher Power to exert the kind of controls which allow us the gift of empathy, or the ability to co-exist in mutually beneficial ways with other egos living within the Great Ego I AM. We live the life of law on a continuum of the most general to the most specific and when we get stuck on a particular cultural detailed expression of a law, one can absolutize or make an idol out of a temporally provincial application of the great law. The solution is to draw back to the source of legal thinking which is expressed in the Summary: Love God, Love one's neighbor. Love oneself. From this general Summary one goes forth each day to make new applications in new situations, even as it often means the messiness of "the devil in details" compromise. Living legally, from General Law to detail application can be done while honoring all of the rules of one's societies which are promulgated and practiced for the actuarial objectivity needed for successful community living.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2017
We live in a "Christian world" where many Christians are divided by "having a common Savior and God" (apologies for altering the Shavian quote regarding the English and the Americans being divided by having a common language). Historically, the divide has been expressed with some very "unChristlike" behaviors toward each other (and worse towards non-Christians), e.g. burning and torture of heretics, sacking each others cities, etc. It could be that we have elevated truths to administrative idols whose venerations are enforced for community solidarity and so we-they communities exist. Protestant-Catholic, Orthodox-Catholic, Baptist-Episcopalian. Each communion or denomination for their own separate integrity have unwittingly idolized doctrinal markers that with many years of hermeneutic contortions have been legitimized in "Christ's name." It could be that the actual wisdom teacher Jesus was in fact one who problematized all thinking regarding God and his own identity precisely to avoid the idolization of any doctrinal position. He problematized the thinking in his day regarding the Messiah and the early church maintains a range of ideas to provide insights into the meaning of Jesus: Son of Man, Son of God, Suffering Servant, Anointed King or God's chosen one for a holy purpose, Vine, Door, Light, Lamb, Shepherd et al. Any of these in a range of insights can be latched onto as a final doctrine or they can be seen as the method of problematizing idolatry regarding a "know it all mentality" regarding a very big and mysterious God. The Jesus of the Gospel should be a warning to anyone that we don't know it all about him, God, or ourselves and the invitation to humility about all is the cure from any temptation to idolize a doctrine and make it a "security blanket" in the face of awesome mystery.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2017
Sometimes we can live with preconceived interpretations of Jesus and his own thinking about Messiahship, as when he quotes a Psalm attributed to David, "The Lord says to my Lord." "If David calls him Lord, how can he be his son?" This rejoinder could be simply the wise response to problematize those who want simple and easy answers about something which has no simple and easy answers. Jesus shows them the inconsistency of their own logic and it is a warning to us about having absolute precise understanding about anything including "revelation." The denying naïve believe that "revelation" happens without personal interpretation within context, relative to whom ever is interpreting. Interpretations can always be problematized because the very habit of coming to Language means it can and will be deconstructed through processes of language. Revelation should be regarded as serendipitous moments of insights which motivate personal transformation and when people try to capture and codify revelation for standardized presentation, one finds something akin to trying to trap air in the bottle. One only sees the bottle but not the air.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2017
How does one interpret the past to explain the present? People interpret the past differently and thus their identity is constituted differently and they have a different mission based upon their interpretations. This is precisely the case with the notion from Hebrew Scripture of Messiah. When Christian expositors began with the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and his appearance as "Spirit event" in the lives of people, they interpreted these manifestations of Kingly power in the inner and spiritual realm. In the visible realm, Jesus was not a king like David with an army to deliver the people of Israel from Roman tyranny. For those who wanted a battling king and not a king of hearts, Jesus could not be a Messiah and such interpreters remained in the synagogue. For those who followed a "Spirit-Risen Christ" winning hearts and invisibly converting Gentiles, Jesus was a candidate for fulfilling the Messiah of Hebrew Scriptures. However they had to delay his more Davidic appearance to a "Second Coming" and they had to view his first coming more in the mode of the Suffering Servant as exemplified in his death on the Cross.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2017
The New Testament tradition is a "creative" interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and sometimes the authors of the New Testament rely on some sweeping generalizations, like David wrote all of the Psalms, (including the ones that were written in the Babylonian captivity many years after he lived?). The oracle of Jesus in the Gospels also voices the same interpretive assumptions as other New Testament writers to show the portions of the Hebrew Scripture which would be templates for Jesus as the Messiah. Oracle Jesus in Matthew quotes a Psalm: ‘The Lord said to my Lord,“Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? It is assumed that this Psalm could not be David referring to himself, as in "God said to me, David," so "my Lord" had to be someone besides David. However if the author of this Psalm was penning a honorific to his royal highness, David, it would have different referential meaning. Most scholars today do not think David wrote all of the Psalms.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2017
Law in its most general sense is the very use of language because language results in a string of signifiers, signifying other signifiers, hence assigning values. When value is assigned law is evident since values create the hierarchies of living evident in human behaviors and speech. Revelation represents an understanding that superlative values are given "from above" as a way of legitimizing them for community prescription.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2017
We live in the midst of law as a global notion and law as context specific rules. The Torah supposedly has 613 laws even as we reduce it to the Big Ten, or even further to the Summary. Jesus, in Gospel sayings, recounted the summary of the law as a corrective for those who made legal minutiae as social markers of acceptance by God, or religious society. Legal minutiae highlights the importance of religious "legal" experts to micro-manage one's life to be designated as socially acceptable and also accepted by God. The importance of rules should be that they teach us how to live in moral and ethical ways; not to enhance our membership in exclusive clubs. The abbreviation of all of the laws into the summary of the law means that Jesus was highlighting the legal motive rather than the particular cultural rules of what was regarded to be of "good taste." Love God, Love one's Neighbor. Love oneself. This is the heart of legal thinking. It requires a sensitivity that inspires being in "good taste" or being appropriate to the situation too. Each of us is breaking someone's rules all of the time but the motive of the laws, as expressed in the Summary, moves us from the petty to the principle of the law from which we interpret and apply in ways appropriate to the situation. Ethics is both principled and situational. Ethics is absolute in the sense of the summary of the law but it is relative (related to the situation) in appropriate application from a heart of love of God, neighbor and self.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2017
One of the sub-plots of the Gospel writings involve Jewish religious authorities trying to trap Jesus to say controversial and rebellious things about the Roman overlord, the Caesar, so that the Roman authorities would respond and "get rid" of Jesus as a too controversial rabbi for the religious authorities. When the message got out that Jesus was a king, a messiah, it is seen as the last straw bringing his arrest. The Roman authorities were responsible for the death of Jesus even if they had help from persons in religious parties of the Jews. By the time the Gospels were written they indicate a rapprochement of the church with the Roman political situation since the churches were becoming increasing Gentile in membership and the synagogues were excommunicating followers of Jesus. Hence the Gospels are rather more harsh on the Jews than the Romans. This "harshness" on the Jews in the Gospel has been used for anti-Semitic actions in Christian history. We should not generalize the antipathy of the Gospel contexts as being the rule for interfaith relationships today.
Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2017
It is recorded that Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai. He did not see God's face (no one can look God in the eyes), but he was allow to see the "back" side of God as God passed by. Everyone who used Roman currency were allowed to see the face of the Caesar stamped on the coins. His image on the coins meant that he was the authority for collecting and spending tax monies. We may not see God's face, but we are to find the image of God on and within each other as we honor the baptismal vow of respecting the dignity of all persons and seeking and serving Christ in all persons. Honoring the image of God within ourselves as it has come to be manifested as the Risen Christ means truly honor our belonging to God. We cannot see God but we can allow God and Christ to see through us. We hope the collective seeing of God through us will help to heal our world.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2017
The interlocutors of Jesus: "You show partiality to no one." So what about taxes to the Caesar; isn't that showing partiality to the Caesar? Come on, say something bad about the Caesar so we can get you on the record. The dialogue is diagnostic regarding whether the message of the Gospel could co-exist with the Roman situation. The reality is that it did. Urbanization made the home churches important social clubs for newcomers to the cities. The Roman situation of law and roads meant that there was a certain social stability and travel ability for the message of the Gospel to thrive and spread. Rendering unto Caesar taxes could co-exist with everyone finding the image of God upon one's life as the Spirit of Christ was rising in many hearts.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2017
In the biblical tradition, no one can see God and live. It is a question of capacity. The Contained can never comprehend the Container. The partial can never be in equivalency with Whole to be able to say, "I see all." When Moses was in God's presence to receive the law, he was allowed to see God's "back side." How do we know God then? We are told that God's "image" is upon human beings. So anthropomorphism is established in the biblical tradition. We cannot help but see God in humanity and have humanly seeing of the divine. When Jesus spoke about the icon or image of Caesar on a coin, he was referring to fact that God's image was upon the Caesar even as Caesar paraded as the King of the World. Caesar and everyone, always already bears the image of God upon them and even as humanity often poorly represents the image of God, humanity cannot escape the image of God being upon us. So what do we do? We nurture that image of God upon us by becoming made in the likeness of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2017
The Caesars during the time of St. Paul employed the "cult" of Emperor tradition as the legitimization of their power. They were designated as gods and sons of gods. How did the Pauline promotion of the centrality and divinity of Jesus co-exist in such a context? It was probably an advantage that the resurrected Jesus was not visible as a "threat" that could be seen and that the Christian movement was a "Spirit" unseen movement and was small enough to "fly under the radar." One could say that Paul had strategies and tactics for the Christian Movement to survive and grow within the Roman context. In the Epistle to the Romans, he obviously is writing against the debauched practices of the emperors, even while he does not tactically oppose the Roman emperors and their legal agents. St. Paul encouraged the church to pray for the authorities because he saw the stealthy success of the Christian Spirit Movement in the lives of all kinds of Roman citizenry. One might even imagine that the dispensing with ritual markers of the Christian religion in contrast with the ritual and public markers for Jews allowed the movement to grow because of "stealth." Letters which had not yet become an "official" Bible was a tactic of communication and letters could be "secreted" from house church to house church under the radar of detection. If the Roman genius was law, Paul understood that the conditions of living under law provided stable conditions for the growth of the movement. Paul's tactic is instantiated in the oracle of Jesus in the Matthean situation of saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." An "oracle" saying of Jesus gave "origin" authority to what had become a Pauline tactic.
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2017
What about Jesus and taxes? He said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's; give to God what is God." Interlocutors were trying to trick Jesus to be "against" Caesar by opposing the Caesar's taxes. If Jesus could be shown to be "against" Caesar, it would hasten his demise. Caesar's image was on the coins; God's image is mysteriously within everyone. Jesus said to tend to that mysterious image which is upon our lives. People have found and nurtured the mysterious divine image on their lives within every possible political setting meaning that the kingdom of heaven is "within people" no matter what kind of politics is found in one's external setting.
Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2017
Icon. A sacred painting or "image." The Septuagint translation of Genesis states that humans were created by God in the "image" or "icon" of God. Jesus was given a coin with the "image" or "icon" of the Caesar on it. Jesus said, "Give to the Caesar the things that have his "icon" stamped on them (let the Caesar have his taxes), but give to God the things that have God's "icon" stamped on them, i.e., all human beings including the Caesar. Jesus understood a good biblical pun.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2017
Many are called, but few are chosen. This is the harsh elitism of the Gospel. Jesus told a rather harsh parable about an angry unrequited king dealing with subjects who won't come to the wedding party of his son. This same king removes with strong eternal punishment someone who is not dressed in proper wedding attire. The Gospel writers were wondering textually why God is not universally winsome in the hearts of all people and the conclusion is God calls all but few come into the experience of being chosen. This may seem to smack of too exclusive elitism and it could be that such elitism is not a public thing, it can only be known in the hidden recesses of one's inner life and that it is such a unique gift experienced in such a unique way resulting in such wonderful life transformation that one wishes that everyone could be chosen even as one knows that one cannot make it happen for anyone. It is a gift that can arise in anyone's experience but the many who don't find it are distracted by the clutter of alternate things to revere instead of the divine life within.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2017
The parable of the king who invites guests to feast presents God as an unrequited party giver. But the parables are buried in human behaviors and human logic in that they trace how humanity has defined what it means to relate to God in the "prescribed" ways of the various faith settings. People come to accept or reject God's invitations in various ways and they themselves within their community pre-define what it is to have faith to accept or reject God's invitation. The Gospel parables are vignettes of the chaos of competing human judgments and one should accept the insight about the chaos of competing human judgments about the divine, even while one should not presume to know precisely as to whether there is a preferred or winning judgment. Parables invite word participation within a language field to give one insights about the ambiguities of life to inform our imperfect actions even while resisting some algorithmic interpretation of what God really means or what Jesus really meant. Fundamentalists have problems with the uncertainty in the precision of biblical interpretation so they try to set the certain and final and precise meanings. While such certainty may provide what becomes the "objectivity" for community constitution, it involves a proud certainty which results in the "excommunication" of those who differ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2017
Casting a "wedding crasher" dressed in the wrong garb into outer darkness seems a bit extreme, as told in a parable of Jesus. In a modern context imagine a football player showing up to play the game in a baseball uniform. He would not be allowed to play and the owner, coach and team might be upset by the refusal to conform to the rules. The hospitality of God must be embraced on God's term, namely, God provides the "uniform" of grace and forgiveness. One should not offend God's hospitality with a "pride" of thinking one's own accomplishments demand God's grace. Just take God's grace on God's own terms; it is adaptable enough to one's condition and one need not arrogate oneself to be more deserving of God's grace because of one's "pre-existing" conditions.
Aphorism of Day, October 12, 2017
Parable logic of Jesus: A wedding guest wears the wrong vestments to the wedding and is cast into darkness. The logic seems to use extreme human over-reaction to something trivial as an inciting exaggeration. The parable forces listener to consider some of the extreme behaviors of human earthly power and invites listeners to understand how the kingdom of heaven is about a loving God who provides garments and the outer appearance of righteousness as a gift of one's entry to the always already divine party of the kingdom of heaven. All are equal in the kingdom of heaven and given the garments of righteousness by the chief of the feast.
Aphorism of Day, October 11, 2017
The Parable logic of Jesus Christ. A king set a wedding feast for his son. He invites an A-list. They refuse to come. He punishes them. King invites and compels others to come. They come. One does not have proper wedding attire. King punishes the mis-dressed severely. Therefore, few are chosen. Are parables to be interpreted as one-to-one correspondence of an "angry vindictive God" or do the represent the harsh reality of coming to the event of being the few who come to enlightenment? Why is it just a few? Spiritual enlightenment does not come with group identification; it comes with context specificity in an individual's life. When the few happens in myriad occasions it becomes the many. Few is a metaphor for awareness of the kingdom happening only in the context specific individual life experience event. The parable run counter to the status quo of group rate automatic salvation. A person does not achieve health until he or she achieves it, one at a time.
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2017
A parable of Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a king to sends out a wedding invitation to his preferred A-list of guests for his son's wedding. The invited guests have better things to do and the king as unrequited party giver is angry that they do not respond so he punishes them and invites those who weren't on the original A-list. The early church analyzed the "market" appeal of the Gospel; why did some respond and others have a rather ho-hum view? The answer was, "Many are called and few are chosen." Certainly one could interpret this in light the antipathy between church and synagogue or it could be the few who are chosen represents the particular timing in the life of a person when spiritual awakening occurs. People can go for a long time and not be aware but suddenly life circumstances present the opening for one to become a part of the "few." One of the reason we continue to do "church" is so that people who have not yet become a part of the "few" will still find a community that has been faithful to nurture the experience of transforming enlightenment. People resist enlightenment when it is always offered because their inner and outer lives have not come to the harmonic experience of the few. It is easy to be "bored" with enlightenment when it has no appealing relevance within all of the other things that commands the time and devotion of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2017
Sometimes the parables of Jesus include harsh language of punishment exacted by kings and landlords on "offenders." The parables use the logic of human "eye for an eye" punishment. We have the choice to believe that God thinks like human in God's judgment or whether we believe God in Christ reconciles all to God in loving one's enemies to the very end and the ends beyond the end of death. It could be that "apocalyptic" Christians have more anthropomorphic views of God like those presented in Hebrew Scripture of an "oft" angry and interdicting and punishing God. One sees this in the preachers who interpret specific hurricanes and natural disasters to be an angry God doing "smart" bombing of those whom the preacher is "opposing." Such views present a very cruel God who does not "smart" bomb with natural disasters since the collateral damage of one's presumed "good guys" is also a reality of any disasters. Unfortunately, this kind of "primary naiveté" in presuming to know divine motive and causal connection behind everything is the kind of false security that many who call themselves Christian hang on to.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2017
How less is more. There are 613 commandments in Hebrew Scripture. Historically, we've come to favor the 10 commandments or the further reduction to the "summary" of the law: Love God and love one's neighbor as oneself. The 613 commandments included many items of ritual purity that St. Paul did not regard to be necessary to be practiced by Gentiles in order to be "written" into the contract of God's covenant with people. So the reduction of the required rules meant that more people were let into the church that separated from the synagogues which required embracing more of the 613 commandments for "official" membership.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2017
The phrase "Let go and let God," is found among 12-steppers in sobriety quest. One of the secrets of accessing the sense of being aided by a Higher Power involves relinquishing the "ownership" of one's life, body, soul and spirit and allowing the Higher Power to "own" and thus become the source of regulatory control. Finding the "Clean Heart of the Holy Spirit" below our desire is the secret to regulatory control of how desire is projected upon the objects which can easily become objects of adoration unto the idolatry which characterizes addiction. St. Paul describes giving up the ownership of one's being as declaring the body to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit. He states, "you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price." Freedom from addictive behaviors starts with the profound stewardship insight that we and the entire world belongs to God. Our prayers are efforts to be good stewards of our own desire and how we use desire to energize enjoyment of the good things in our world without being addicted to them.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2017
"Possession is nine tenths of the Law" is a folk legal aphorism as is "God helps those who help themselves." God as a seemingly "absent landlord" who does not seem to punish human tenants for "not paying" with one to one correspondence of punishment with each event of "failure to pay," is a "weak" God in the sense that God defers to the greater conditions of real freedom and those conditions allow the strong to "help themselves." If only the strong help themselves as the prelude to a strength devoted to helping others who are not so strong to help themselves then "helping oneself" can honor the aphorism of Jesus, "to whom much is given, much is required." We can ignore God's right to all because we don't fear a God who will intervene with context specific punishment. Some have theories of specific karma in how our acts always "pay forward" in specific ways. We should all fear the greatness of God as the greatness of real freedom into which we dip with our limited freedom to prove that God's love and justice are the greatest lures in the field of this great freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2017
The Gospel parable about the tenant who lives the notion of “possession is nine tenths of the law,” sums up the human dilemma. It does seem like we can “own” things as our own and yet the purpose of the Gospel is to persuade us that we own thing in a better way for ourselves and for the benefit of the world if we acknowledge God’s ownership on whose behalf we serve as stewards. By killing or denying God’s gentle reminding collectors we perpetuate the myth of our actual ownership of anything. We are a small part of a Big System which owns us all. So we should take good care of everyone and everything in the neighborhood of our influential sphere.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2017
A dominant motive of the New Testament writings is the disappointment by writers about the members of the synagogue refusing to accept the religious innovation of Jesus being the Messiah. The New Testament writers used the Hebrew Scriptures to support the innovation and interpreted the life of Jesus as a seamless continuity with Hebrew Scriptures. When it came to actual division it could be said that the strategy of evangelism was the main disagreement: Christians believed that Gentiles were exempt from ritual purity practices which gave Jews their unique identity. Christian did not believe that requiring the Gentile citizens of the Roman Empire to follow all of the ritual purity customs was possible. They did not believe that Judaism limited in part to the practices of ritual purity could be a "universal" faith offering a welcoming inclusion to all in accessible ways. While Christians proclaimed a spirituality which did not involve being conformed to the "image" of the world, the people of the synagogue believed that Christians did conform to the image of the Roman world by discontinuing the commitment to ritual purity customs. St. Paul "spiritualized" the physical signs of ritual purity. He said it was more important to have one's heart "circumcised" rather than undergoing actual circumcision as a "sign" that one's life was different in matters of faith practice than the practices of devotions to the gods and goddesses common to the people of the Roman Empire. The parables of Jesus cite those who thought they held "exclusive" stewardship of God's blessing as "gatekeepers" who kept people out of God's kingdom. The parables of Jesus indicate that those who were "last" to attain "favored" status in God's eyes were "first" in sharing an equality of inheritance as God's children. How do we move on from being locked into the "temporal provincialism" of the New Testament so dominated by Christians who felt rejected by the synagogue community because of their messianic "innovation" regarding Jesus and the disagreement over customs of ritual purity?
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2017
One of the 10 Commandments is "Thou shalt not kill." But it does not specifically say, "Thou shalt not prevent the killing of fellow Americans with guns." So whatever is not specified is not strictly forbidden. If one does kill with a gun, one can be prosecuted and punished. America prides itself on pragmatism and actuarial wisdom in making preventive legislation and the insurance industry relies on actuarial statistical data to set rates and pay outs. We accept safety legislation on seat belts, baby toys, baby cribs, cigarettes, furnaces and a myriad of other things. But we (law-makers) don't write much safety legislation regarding what kinds of guns should be available to the general public. We have been taught to accept our "Wild West" ethos of everyone's freedom to be a gun slinger carrying his gun into the proverbial saloon of American life. Actuarial wisdom is obvious; if guns are ubiquitously accessible and have rapid firing capability, then the statistical probability of more death and injury is certain. Is the gun issue a reflection of our having the largest military budget in the world? Does being the most weaponized military in world express itself in the micro-situation of every citizen free to be a "one person militia" to claim second amendment privileges? We are not really Constitutional literalists when it comes to the Second Amendment. As long as we act on actuarial foolishness, we will not convert the American ethos regarding guns.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2017
The actual separation of the Jesus Movement from Judaism is given theological justification in Paul's letter to the Roman Church. Essentially, Paul wanted Judaism to confer blessing on the disregard for keeping the ritual purity requirements of Judaism to Gentile followers of Christ. This was of course, unacceptable to the members of the synagogue who believe their very identity would be threaten by such allowances. The Gospel literature present Jesus as the origin for this eventual separation from Judaism. Jesus could have been interpreted as merely a reformer of Judaism but he came to be interpreted as a founder of a new "religion." He became the "chief cornerstone" that the builders rejected. Surely, this is not so cryptic observance of the destroyed Temple which had lost its cornerstone and Jesus became the figurative starting point for a new "building of people."
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2017
Kenosis is the "self emptying" of God to be known in human form. This expresses the theology of the obvious, namely, that we legitimize adequacy in human experience the ways that we think the holy, extra-human reality of God is known to us. It instantiates the obvious, namely, whatever is and can be known by human beings ultimately comes to language. Even though language or word may be subsequent to God/ALL THAT IS, in actual practice having language is co-extensive with the knowledge of God or of anything. We have to use language to confess that God and life exists before language.
Halloween has come to be have a rather mixed identity in America. Among the "babies thrown out with the bath water" in the Reformation by many post-Reformation Christian churches was the logical corollary of the resurrection expressed as the Communion of Saints. The Communion of Saints is the cloud of witnesses of the faithful departed through the mercies of Christ. Believers in the resurrection treat those witnesses as though they still live on. The growth of the Cult of Saints in the tradition of the church seemed to put devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints in competition with devotion to Christ. Why pray to Ever Blessed Mary and the saints when you can go to the Main Man, Jesus, Himself? In the extreme reaction to the Cult of Saints, the triduum of All Hallows' Eve, All Hallows' Day and All Souls Day lost its liturgical role in many post-Reformation Churches. So what did we get in America? A day to party with spooks and witches and giving the kids a day to wear costumes and collect candies. And many of the churches long detached from the traditions of All Saints' and All Souls' decided that all of the spooky stuff was Satanic and "non-Christian" and so they forbid participation in the Halloween fun, seemingly finding demons and demonic in such stuff. Even though for the kids, it is mainly about the costumes and the candy and about the community ritual of secular fun. Churches with the All Saints' continuous tradition need not be apologetic about the anthropologically sound tradition of venerating faithful departed persons, even heroic persons for their contribution to our lives. For Christians who engage in resurrection logic, they believe those who have departed in the mercies of Christ live on, and if they live on, one can still talk to them without implying a competition in one's devotion to the Risen Christ. People, All Hallows' Eve is an expression of Easter. Please have fun but don't lose the connection.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2017
On our way to All Hallows' Eve when for the kids, it's mostly about the costumes and candy, we might reflect about what is lost in how it has become a commercialized cultural tradition. Common to all cultures is the reverence and respect for those who have died. Christianity as a conquering religion came to many pre-Christian places and stated: Our veneration of ancestors is greater than yours, in fact your veneration is "ancestor worship" and is "sinful." The "valid" veneration of one's ancestors was presented as the Communion of Saints and Souls and an articulation of a hierarchy of the "value" of the departed to the lives of the still alive. The church got involved by grading saints through canonization and part of the grade was determined by intercessory events of the posthumous becoming "known" to the living. There came to be designated "heroic" saints with recognition through official promulgation by the church. In the liturgy of the church the lesser saints who are those local to you and me became the "souls" of All Souls Day. So we do designate as "heroic" the saints and souls who contribute to our lives and many saints and souls attain legendary status because our dream-space is a liminal state of connecting with the invisible realm, and the normal natural laws of science do not pertain in dream-space. Today's secular Halloween is filled with costumes of fantastic heroes and all of the kings, queens, princes and princesses of material from the imagination of human dream space. We should not forget to unearth from the secular Halloween the human tradition of venerating people who visibly made a difference to this world and are absolute in their past existence even as they are invisible in their present existence. We confess that we are all too human in wanting a continuing connection with the "telling" persons of universal and local and personal history who are gone to the realm of the invisible.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2017
One could say that law in its most universal form is an expression of the very function of language, i.e., the assigning of value and behaviors of using word in the now vis a vis every other use of words to which one has access. The essence of law is to establish value with defined purpose and in sacred scripture the law is to teach us to live toward our "better angels." We achieve this by honoring the most inclusive Ego of all, God, the Great I AM. Acknowledging our partial ego existence within the Community of the Great I AM provides us the connection with Higher Power to exert the kind of controls which allow us the gift of empathy, or the ability to co-exist in mutually beneficial ways with other egos living within the Great Ego I AM. We live the life of law on a continuum of the most general to the most specific and when we get stuck on a particular cultural detailed expression of a law, one can absolutize or make an idol out of a temporally provincial application of the great law. The solution is to draw back to the source of legal thinking which is expressed in the Summary: Love God, Love one's neighbor. Love oneself. From this general Summary one goes forth each day to make new applications in new situations, even as it often means the messiness of "the devil in details" compromise. Living legally, from General Law to detail application can be done while honoring all of the rules of one's societies which are promulgated and practiced for the actuarial objectivity needed for successful community living.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2017
We live in a "Christian world" where many Christians are divided by "having a common Savior and God" (apologies for altering the Shavian quote regarding the English and the Americans being divided by having a common language). Historically, the divide has been expressed with some very "unChristlike" behaviors toward each other (and worse towards non-Christians), e.g. burning and torture of heretics, sacking each others cities, etc. It could be that we have elevated truths to administrative idols whose venerations are enforced for community solidarity and so we-they communities exist. Protestant-Catholic, Orthodox-Catholic, Baptist-Episcopalian. Each communion or denomination for their own separate integrity have unwittingly idolized doctrinal markers that with many years of hermeneutic contortions have been legitimized in "Christ's name." It could be that the actual wisdom teacher Jesus was in fact one who problematized all thinking regarding God and his own identity precisely to avoid the idolization of any doctrinal position. He problematized the thinking in his day regarding the Messiah and the early church maintains a range of ideas to provide insights into the meaning of Jesus: Son of Man, Son of God, Suffering Servant, Anointed King or God's chosen one for a holy purpose, Vine, Door, Light, Lamb, Shepherd et al. Any of these in a range of insights can be latched onto as a final doctrine or they can be seen as the method of problematizing idolatry regarding a "know it all mentality" regarding a very big and mysterious God. The Jesus of the Gospel should be a warning to anyone that we don't know it all about him, God, or ourselves and the invitation to humility about all is the cure from any temptation to idolize a doctrine and make it a "security blanket" in the face of awesome mystery.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2017
Sometimes we can live with preconceived interpretations of Jesus and his own thinking about Messiahship, as when he quotes a Psalm attributed to David, "The Lord says to my Lord." "If David calls him Lord, how can he be his son?" This rejoinder could be simply the wise response to problematize those who want simple and easy answers about something which has no simple and easy answers. Jesus shows them the inconsistency of their own logic and it is a warning to us about having absolute precise understanding about anything including "revelation." The denying naïve believe that "revelation" happens without personal interpretation within context, relative to whom ever is interpreting. Interpretations can always be problematized because the very habit of coming to Language means it can and will be deconstructed through processes of language. Revelation should be regarded as serendipitous moments of insights which motivate personal transformation and when people try to capture and codify revelation for standardized presentation, one finds something akin to trying to trap air in the bottle. One only sees the bottle but not the air.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2017
How does one interpret the past to explain the present? People interpret the past differently and thus their identity is constituted differently and they have a different mission based upon their interpretations. This is precisely the case with the notion from Hebrew Scripture of Messiah. When Christian expositors began with the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and his appearance as "Spirit event" in the lives of people, they interpreted these manifestations of Kingly power in the inner and spiritual realm. In the visible realm, Jesus was not a king like David with an army to deliver the people of Israel from Roman tyranny. For those who wanted a battling king and not a king of hearts, Jesus could not be a Messiah and such interpreters remained in the synagogue. For those who followed a "Spirit-Risen Christ" winning hearts and invisibly converting Gentiles, Jesus was a candidate for fulfilling the Messiah of Hebrew Scriptures. However they had to delay his more Davidic appearance to a "Second Coming" and they had to view his first coming more in the mode of the Suffering Servant as exemplified in his death on the Cross.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2017
The New Testament tradition is a "creative" interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and sometimes the authors of the New Testament rely on some sweeping generalizations, like David wrote all of the Psalms, (including the ones that were written in the Babylonian captivity many years after he lived?). The oracle of Jesus in the Gospels also voices the same interpretive assumptions as other New Testament writers to show the portions of the Hebrew Scripture which would be templates for Jesus as the Messiah. Oracle Jesus in Matthew quotes a Psalm: ‘The Lord said to my Lord,“Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? It is assumed that this Psalm could not be David referring to himself, as in "God said to me, David," so "my Lord" had to be someone besides David. However if the author of this Psalm was penning a honorific to his royal highness, David, it would have different referential meaning. Most scholars today do not think David wrote all of the Psalms.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2017
Law in its most general sense is the very use of language because language results in a string of signifiers, signifying other signifiers, hence assigning values. When value is assigned law is evident since values create the hierarchies of living evident in human behaviors and speech. Revelation represents an understanding that superlative values are given "from above" as a way of legitimizing them for community prescription.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2017
We live in the midst of law as a global notion and law as context specific rules. The Torah supposedly has 613 laws even as we reduce it to the Big Ten, or even further to the Summary. Jesus, in Gospel sayings, recounted the summary of the law as a corrective for those who made legal minutiae as social markers of acceptance by God, or religious society. Legal minutiae highlights the importance of religious "legal" experts to micro-manage one's life to be designated as socially acceptable and also accepted by God. The importance of rules should be that they teach us how to live in moral and ethical ways; not to enhance our membership in exclusive clubs. The abbreviation of all of the laws into the summary of the law means that Jesus was highlighting the legal motive rather than the particular cultural rules of what was regarded to be of "good taste." Love God, Love one's Neighbor. Love oneself. This is the heart of legal thinking. It requires a sensitivity that inspires being in "good taste" or being appropriate to the situation too. Each of us is breaking someone's rules all of the time but the motive of the laws, as expressed in the Summary, moves us from the petty to the principle of the law from which we interpret and apply in ways appropriate to the situation. Ethics is both principled and situational. Ethics is absolute in the sense of the summary of the law but it is relative (related to the situation) in appropriate application from a heart of love of God, neighbor and self.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2017
One of the sub-plots of the Gospel writings involve Jewish religious authorities trying to trap Jesus to say controversial and rebellious things about the Roman overlord, the Caesar, so that the Roman authorities would respond and "get rid" of Jesus as a too controversial rabbi for the religious authorities. When the message got out that Jesus was a king, a messiah, it is seen as the last straw bringing his arrest. The Roman authorities were responsible for the death of Jesus even if they had help from persons in religious parties of the Jews. By the time the Gospels were written they indicate a rapprochement of the church with the Roman political situation since the churches were becoming increasing Gentile in membership and the synagogues were excommunicating followers of Jesus. Hence the Gospels are rather more harsh on the Jews than the Romans. This "harshness" on the Jews in the Gospel has been used for anti-Semitic actions in Christian history. We should not generalize the antipathy of the Gospel contexts as being the rule for interfaith relationships today.
Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2017
It is recorded that Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai. He did not see God's face (no one can look God in the eyes), but he was allow to see the "back" side of God as God passed by. Everyone who used Roman currency were allowed to see the face of the Caesar stamped on the coins. His image on the coins meant that he was the authority for collecting and spending tax monies. We may not see God's face, but we are to find the image of God on and within each other as we honor the baptismal vow of respecting the dignity of all persons and seeking and serving Christ in all persons. Honoring the image of God within ourselves as it has come to be manifested as the Risen Christ means truly honor our belonging to God. We cannot see God but we can allow God and Christ to see through us. We hope the collective seeing of God through us will help to heal our world.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2017
The interlocutors of Jesus: "You show partiality to no one." So what about taxes to the Caesar; isn't that showing partiality to the Caesar? Come on, say something bad about the Caesar so we can get you on the record. The dialogue is diagnostic regarding whether the message of the Gospel could co-exist with the Roman situation. The reality is that it did. Urbanization made the home churches important social clubs for newcomers to the cities. The Roman situation of law and roads meant that there was a certain social stability and travel ability for the message of the Gospel to thrive and spread. Rendering unto Caesar taxes could co-exist with everyone finding the image of God upon one's life as the Spirit of Christ was rising in many hearts.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2017
In the biblical tradition, no one can see God and live. It is a question of capacity. The Contained can never comprehend the Container. The partial can never be in equivalency with Whole to be able to say, "I see all." When Moses was in God's presence to receive the law, he was allowed to see God's "back side." How do we know God then? We are told that God's "image" is upon human beings. So anthropomorphism is established in the biblical tradition. We cannot help but see God in humanity and have humanly seeing of the divine. When Jesus spoke about the icon or image of Caesar on a coin, he was referring to fact that God's image was upon the Caesar even as Caesar paraded as the King of the World. Caesar and everyone, always already bears the image of God upon them and even as humanity often poorly represents the image of God, humanity cannot escape the image of God being upon us. So what do we do? We nurture that image of God upon us by becoming made in the likeness of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2017
The Caesars during the time of St. Paul employed the "cult" of Emperor tradition as the legitimization of their power. They were designated as gods and sons of gods. How did the Pauline promotion of the centrality and divinity of Jesus co-exist in such a context? It was probably an advantage that the resurrected Jesus was not visible as a "threat" that could be seen and that the Christian movement was a "Spirit" unseen movement and was small enough to "fly under the radar." One could say that Paul had strategies and tactics for the Christian Movement to survive and grow within the Roman context. In the Epistle to the Romans, he obviously is writing against the debauched practices of the emperors, even while he does not tactically oppose the Roman emperors and their legal agents. St. Paul encouraged the church to pray for the authorities because he saw the stealthy success of the Christian Spirit Movement in the lives of all kinds of Roman citizenry. One might even imagine that the dispensing with ritual markers of the Christian religion in contrast with the ritual and public markers for Jews allowed the movement to grow because of "stealth." Letters which had not yet become an "official" Bible was a tactic of communication and letters could be "secreted" from house church to house church under the radar of detection. If the Roman genius was law, Paul understood that the conditions of living under law provided stable conditions for the growth of the movement. Paul's tactic is instantiated in the oracle of Jesus in the Matthean situation of saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." An "oracle" saying of Jesus gave "origin" authority to what had become a Pauline tactic.
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2017
What about Jesus and taxes? He said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's; give to God what is God." Interlocutors were trying to trick Jesus to be "against" Caesar by opposing the Caesar's taxes. If Jesus could be shown to be "against" Caesar, it would hasten his demise. Caesar's image was on the coins; God's image is mysteriously within everyone. Jesus said to tend to that mysterious image which is upon our lives. People have found and nurtured the mysterious divine image on their lives within every possible political setting meaning that the kingdom of heaven is "within people" no matter what kind of politics is found in one's external setting.
Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2017
Icon. A sacred painting or "image." The Septuagint translation of Genesis states that humans were created by God in the "image" or "icon" of God. Jesus was given a coin with the "image" or "icon" of the Caesar on it. Jesus said, "Give to the Caesar the things that have his "icon" stamped on them (let the Caesar have his taxes), but give to God the things that have God's "icon" stamped on them, i.e., all human beings including the Caesar. Jesus understood a good biblical pun.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2017
Many are called, but few are chosen. This is the harsh elitism of the Gospel. Jesus told a rather harsh parable about an angry unrequited king dealing with subjects who won't come to the wedding party of his son. This same king removes with strong eternal punishment someone who is not dressed in proper wedding attire. The Gospel writers were wondering textually why God is not universally winsome in the hearts of all people and the conclusion is God calls all but few come into the experience of being chosen. This may seem to smack of too exclusive elitism and it could be that such elitism is not a public thing, it can only be known in the hidden recesses of one's inner life and that it is such a unique gift experienced in such a unique way resulting in such wonderful life transformation that one wishes that everyone could be chosen even as one knows that one cannot make it happen for anyone. It is a gift that can arise in anyone's experience but the many who don't find it are distracted by the clutter of alternate things to revere instead of the divine life within.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2017
The parable of the king who invites guests to feast presents God as an unrequited party giver. But the parables are buried in human behaviors and human logic in that they trace how humanity has defined what it means to relate to God in the "prescribed" ways of the various faith settings. People come to accept or reject God's invitations in various ways and they themselves within their community pre-define what it is to have faith to accept or reject God's invitation. The Gospel parables are vignettes of the chaos of competing human judgments and one should accept the insight about the chaos of competing human judgments about the divine, even while one should not presume to know precisely as to whether there is a preferred or winning judgment. Parables invite word participation within a language field to give one insights about the ambiguities of life to inform our imperfect actions even while resisting some algorithmic interpretation of what God really means or what Jesus really meant. Fundamentalists have problems with the uncertainty in the precision of biblical interpretation so they try to set the certain and final and precise meanings. While such certainty may provide what becomes the "objectivity" for community constitution, it involves a proud certainty which results in the "excommunication" of those who differ.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2017
Casting a "wedding crasher" dressed in the wrong garb into outer darkness seems a bit extreme, as told in a parable of Jesus. In a modern context imagine a football player showing up to play the game in a baseball uniform. He would not be allowed to play and the owner, coach and team might be upset by the refusal to conform to the rules. The hospitality of God must be embraced on God's term, namely, God provides the "uniform" of grace and forgiveness. One should not offend God's hospitality with a "pride" of thinking one's own accomplishments demand God's grace. Just take God's grace on God's own terms; it is adaptable enough to one's condition and one need not arrogate oneself to be more deserving of God's grace because of one's "pre-existing" conditions.
Aphorism of Day, October 12, 2017
Parable logic of Jesus: A wedding guest wears the wrong vestments to the wedding and is cast into darkness. The logic seems to use extreme human over-reaction to something trivial as an inciting exaggeration. The parable forces listener to consider some of the extreme behaviors of human earthly power and invites listeners to understand how the kingdom of heaven is about a loving God who provides garments and the outer appearance of righteousness as a gift of one's entry to the always already divine party of the kingdom of heaven. All are equal in the kingdom of heaven and given the garments of righteousness by the chief of the feast.
Aphorism of Day, October 11, 2017
The Parable logic of Jesus Christ. A king set a wedding feast for his son. He invites an A-list. They refuse to come. He punishes them. King invites and compels others to come. They come. One does not have proper wedding attire. King punishes the mis-dressed severely. Therefore, few are chosen. Are parables to be interpreted as one-to-one correspondence of an "angry vindictive God" or do the represent the harsh reality of coming to the event of being the few who come to enlightenment? Why is it just a few? Spiritual enlightenment does not come with group identification; it comes with context specificity in an individual's life. When the few happens in myriad occasions it becomes the many. Few is a metaphor for awareness of the kingdom happening only in the context specific individual life experience event. The parable run counter to the status quo of group rate automatic salvation. A person does not achieve health until he or she achieves it, one at a time.
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2017
A parable of Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a king to sends out a wedding invitation to his preferred A-list of guests for his son's wedding. The invited guests have better things to do and the king as unrequited party giver is angry that they do not respond so he punishes them and invites those who weren't on the original A-list. The early church analyzed the "market" appeal of the Gospel; why did some respond and others have a rather ho-hum view? The answer was, "Many are called and few are chosen." Certainly one could interpret this in light the antipathy between church and synagogue or it could be the few who are chosen represents the particular timing in the life of a person when spiritual awakening occurs. People can go for a long time and not be aware but suddenly life circumstances present the opening for one to become a part of the "few." One of the reason we continue to do "church" is so that people who have not yet become a part of the "few" will still find a community that has been faithful to nurture the experience of transforming enlightenment. People resist enlightenment when it is always offered because their inner and outer lives have not come to the harmonic experience of the few. It is easy to be "bored" with enlightenment when it has no appealing relevance within all of the other things that commands the time and devotion of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2017
Sometimes the parables of Jesus include harsh language of punishment exacted by kings and landlords on "offenders." The parables use the logic of human "eye for an eye" punishment. We have the choice to believe that God thinks like human in God's judgment or whether we believe God in Christ reconciles all to God in loving one's enemies to the very end and the ends beyond the end of death. It could be that "apocalyptic" Christians have more anthropomorphic views of God like those presented in Hebrew Scripture of an "oft" angry and interdicting and punishing God. One sees this in the preachers who interpret specific hurricanes and natural disasters to be an angry God doing "smart" bombing of those whom the preacher is "opposing." Such views present a very cruel God who does not "smart" bomb with natural disasters since the collateral damage of one's presumed "good guys" is also a reality of any disasters. Unfortunately, this kind of "primary naiveté" in presuming to know divine motive and causal connection behind everything is the kind of false security that many who call themselves Christian hang on to.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2017
How less is more. There are 613 commandments in Hebrew Scripture. Historically, we've come to favor the 10 commandments or the further reduction to the "summary" of the law: Love God and love one's neighbor as oneself. The 613 commandments included many items of ritual purity that St. Paul did not regard to be necessary to be practiced by Gentiles in order to be "written" into the contract of God's covenant with people. So the reduction of the required rules meant that more people were let into the church that separated from the synagogues which required embracing more of the 613 commandments for "official" membership.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2017
The phrase "Let go and let God," is found among 12-steppers in sobriety quest. One of the secrets of accessing the sense of being aided by a Higher Power involves relinquishing the "ownership" of one's life, body, soul and spirit and allowing the Higher Power to "own" and thus become the source of regulatory control. Finding the "Clean Heart of the Holy Spirit" below our desire is the secret to regulatory control of how desire is projected upon the objects which can easily become objects of adoration unto the idolatry which characterizes addiction. St. Paul describes giving up the ownership of one's being as declaring the body to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit. He states, "you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price." Freedom from addictive behaviors starts with the profound stewardship insight that we and the entire world belongs to God. Our prayers are efforts to be good stewards of our own desire and how we use desire to energize enjoyment of the good things in our world without being addicted to them.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2017
"Possession is nine tenths of the Law" is a folk legal aphorism as is "God helps those who help themselves." God as a seemingly "absent landlord" who does not seem to punish human tenants for "not paying" with one to one correspondence of punishment with each event of "failure to pay," is a "weak" God in the sense that God defers to the greater conditions of real freedom and those conditions allow the strong to "help themselves." If only the strong help themselves as the prelude to a strength devoted to helping others who are not so strong to help themselves then "helping oneself" can honor the aphorism of Jesus, "to whom much is given, much is required." We can ignore God's right to all because we don't fear a God who will intervene with context specific punishment. Some have theories of specific karma in how our acts always "pay forward" in specific ways. We should all fear the greatness of God as the greatness of real freedom into which we dip with our limited freedom to prove that God's love and justice are the greatest lures in the field of this great freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2017
The Gospel parable about the tenant who lives the notion of “possession is nine tenths of the law,” sums up the human dilemma. It does seem like we can “own” things as our own and yet the purpose of the Gospel is to persuade us that we own thing in a better way for ourselves and for the benefit of the world if we acknowledge God’s ownership on whose behalf we serve as stewards. By killing or denying God’s gentle reminding collectors we perpetuate the myth of our actual ownership of anything. We are a small part of a Big System which owns us all. So we should take good care of everyone and everything in the neighborhood of our influential sphere.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2017
A dominant motive of the New Testament writings is the disappointment by writers about the members of the synagogue refusing to accept the religious innovation of Jesus being the Messiah. The New Testament writers used the Hebrew Scriptures to support the innovation and interpreted the life of Jesus as a seamless continuity with Hebrew Scriptures. When it came to actual division it could be said that the strategy of evangelism was the main disagreement: Christians believed that Gentiles were exempt from ritual purity practices which gave Jews their unique identity. Christian did not believe that requiring the Gentile citizens of the Roman Empire to follow all of the ritual purity customs was possible. They did not believe that Judaism limited in part to the practices of ritual purity could be a "universal" faith offering a welcoming inclusion to all in accessible ways. While Christians proclaimed a spirituality which did not involve being conformed to the "image" of the world, the people of the synagogue believed that Christians did conform to the image of the Roman world by discontinuing the commitment to ritual purity customs. St. Paul "spiritualized" the physical signs of ritual purity. He said it was more important to have one's heart "circumcised" rather than undergoing actual circumcision as a "sign" that one's life was different in matters of faith practice than the practices of devotions to the gods and goddesses common to the people of the Roman Empire. The parables of Jesus cite those who thought they held "exclusive" stewardship of God's blessing as "gatekeepers" who kept people out of God's kingdom. The parables of Jesus indicate that those who were "last" to attain "favored" status in God's eyes were "first" in sharing an equality of inheritance as God's children. How do we move on from being locked into the "temporal provincialism" of the New Testament so dominated by Christians who felt rejected by the synagogue community because of their messianic "innovation" regarding Jesus and the disagreement over customs of ritual purity?
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2017
One of the 10 Commandments is "Thou shalt not kill." But it does not specifically say, "Thou shalt not prevent the killing of fellow Americans with guns." So whatever is not specified is not strictly forbidden. If one does kill with a gun, one can be prosecuted and punished. America prides itself on pragmatism and actuarial wisdom in making preventive legislation and the insurance industry relies on actuarial statistical data to set rates and pay outs. We accept safety legislation on seat belts, baby toys, baby cribs, cigarettes, furnaces and a myriad of other things. But we (law-makers) don't write much safety legislation regarding what kinds of guns should be available to the general public. We have been taught to accept our "Wild West" ethos of everyone's freedom to be a gun slinger carrying his gun into the proverbial saloon of American life. Actuarial wisdom is obvious; if guns are ubiquitously accessible and have rapid firing capability, then the statistical probability of more death and injury is certain. Is the gun issue a reflection of our having the largest military budget in the world? Does being the most weaponized military in world express itself in the micro-situation of every citizen free to be a "one person militia" to claim second amendment privileges? We are not really Constitutional literalists when it comes to the Second Amendment. As long as we act on actuarial foolishness, we will not convert the American ethos regarding guns.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2017
The actual separation of the Jesus Movement from Judaism is given theological justification in Paul's letter to the Roman Church. Essentially, Paul wanted Judaism to confer blessing on the disregard for keeping the ritual purity requirements of Judaism to Gentile followers of Christ. This was of course, unacceptable to the members of the synagogue who believe their very identity would be threaten by such allowances. The Gospel literature present Jesus as the origin for this eventual separation from Judaism. Jesus could have been interpreted as merely a reformer of Judaism but he came to be interpreted as a founder of a new "religion." He became the "chief cornerstone" that the builders rejected. Surely, this is not so cryptic observance of the destroyed Temple which had lost its cornerstone and Jesus became the figurative starting point for a new "building of people."
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2017
Kenosis is the "self emptying" of God to be known in human form. This expresses the theology of the obvious, namely, that we legitimize adequacy in human experience the ways that we think the holy, extra-human reality of God is known to us. It instantiates the obvious, namely, whatever is and can be known by human beings ultimately comes to language. Even though language or word may be subsequent to God/ALL THAT IS, in actual practice having language is co-extensive with the knowledge of God or of anything. We have to use language to confess that God and life exists before language.
