Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2018
The Gospel accounts place in a narrative of Jesus, the theology of the early church subscribing to the rhetorical truth that a story is a better way of teaching than didactic discourse. Jesus told demons to be quiet about his identity. Demons knew who Jesus was before most of the other characters presented in the Gospel. The Gospels present Jesus as the one who was controlling his own script of life and one of the chief items on the script was that Jesus was also the Christ who was above all principalities and powers of darkness in heavenly places. Those powers wanted to let his identity out before its proper stage entry. Jesus in the Gospel is presented as the playwright of his own script and within this script the theology of the early church is being taught.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2018
St. Paul's evangelistic methodology was, "I have become all things to all persons so that I might save some." How much do we morph and refuse to wear our identities on our sleeves in order to persuade others about what we think is the good news of Christ? Institutional Christianity is calcified Christian identities that seems to say, "We the institution will do nothing to persuade you; it is your option to enter the institution and follow our rules. You have to become all things to us according to our rules in order to be one of us." It is amazing how informal and personal Pauline evangelism gets lost in calcified institutional Christianity. The pride of success means you conform to us; we don't need you that much to change ourselves to reach out to attempt to open ourselves to the details of your life. So goes mainline churches that complain about losing members and not growing even while doing nothing to "become all things to all people."
Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2018
There is poignant irony in the greatness of God, humanly conceived as the sum total all of discursive practice (WORD). The irony of God's greatness is that God's greatness is freedom and freedom is the inherent weakness of God. If God wanted and could interdict all innocent suffering why doesn't it happen always? The inherent weakness of God is permissive freedom since morality only has its telling value in the conditions of overall freedom. One could say the biblical record is one of people trying to deal with reality of freedom being the inherent weakness of God, a weakness which permits human agony and ecstasy to occur, as well as all of the seemingly benign drudgery. The New Testament Gospel writers understood unseen demons to be the mysterious cause of evil which beset many people. A lucky few got to interact with the shamanic Jesus who from his invisible insides was able to instigate the reorganizations of the interior lives of those who were possessed. Gospel writers placed in story form the Pauline belief that Christ was seated above the principalities in the invisible realm. God as True Freedom, subjected Jesus to that Freedom in his death on the cross because what is true about Freedom is that there is always Some More occasions of freedom which have the power to open up the rewriting and reinterpretation of the meanings of previous events of freedom. The New Testament is written on the subsequent side of the resurrection appearances of Jesus and in the freedom of that subsequent resurrection the meanings of the cross of Jesus are re-written. Freedom means that nothing is ever finally resolved; things are only constantly open to being resolved by surpassing occasions of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2018
How does one classify a person who is very disruptive to the social order, even a threat and still maintain the humanity that is the essence of every person? A disruptive person can be a person with an "unclean person" whose identity is made equal to his malady or he can be a person capable of great inner peace when Jesus met him without fear and did not see him as a "sick" person but as one who bore God's image.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2018
In the time of Jesus the Palestine Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had a limited scope of diagnostic categories. One categories seemed to fit all disordered mental and physical disease: The devil did it through the agencies of fallen angels, demons and "unclean" spirits. The Jesus cure seem to come in one dramatic event of exorcism and we don't know if the person then lived happily ever after, we mostly know about the event of Jesus casting out the unclean spirit. Though there was expressed some doubt about the finality of the "cure" because the little imps could return to the person with sevenfold fury. In our current day of mental health crises of addictions to opioids and the casting out of the "unclean depressed spirit" through psychotropics and the dispensing with the long process of the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis we probably should note that what is lacking is genuine befriending between people as the curing fellowship of being together in ways that includes everyone with their idiosyncratic gifts and infirmities. The church as such a fellowship is increasingly avoided because people can no longer tolerate each other in healthful ways.
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2018
St. Paul believed that an interior cosmic battle was going on with principalities and powers and spiritual forces in heavenly places. Winning the battle in the "interior" heaven came before the will of God was done on earth (in the exterior world). The Gospels present Jesus as the most direct expression of God's will being done on earth and as one who whispered the man with the unclean spirit. The early church presented Jesus as an heroic "ghostbuster." The "ghostbusting" of Jesus signified that he was a Cosmic Victor.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2018
There can be something unreal about the Gospel stories of Jesus in that they can be read as focusing upon the event of the intervention of Jesus to "save" the day. Readers are not left with much of the aftermath and one can seem to think that naively "everyone lives happily ever after." An addict might find the event with a Higher Power to begin to attain sobriety but for most addicts, life does not become "happily ever after" because sobriety becomes the daily work. Jesus "heals" the person with an "unclean" spirit and we celebrate the magical realism of this account of our hero and we can be fooled to believe it represents the normal continuous experience of the "power" of God. The man with unclean spirit could have wished for the prior healing power of Jesus never to be in such a psychological state in the first place. Why didn't the miracle of God work so that such a miracle was not needed in the first place? Hero stories, past and present, seem to freeze the heroic event and disregard the duration of the times of life filled with diversity of human experience that cannot be lived continuously in peak events of the miracle. The writings of Paul are filled more with the everyday drudgery of Christian living; the Gospels came to their form later than the writings of Paul and are "root event" oriented as explanation as to why the Jesus Movement was on the way to becoming a rather monster snowball careening down the slope of human history.
Aphorism of Day, January 24, 2018
Societies that survive do so in part because of might be called today, Public Health systems. The history of humanity includes lots of different promulgations and practices of "public health." In the Hebrew tradition an entire system of classification for things "clean"=healthy and permitted and things, and "unclean"=unhealthy and not permitted, evolved and developed. Something unclean had to be avoided or if not the one who was in contact with the "unclean" had to be quarantined or shunned until such a person could be ritually purify and restored to the state of "cleanness" as defined by community authorities. A person with an unclean spirit showing up at the synagogue would of course set off every religious and social fire alarm. Jesus, the people whisperer, and Fireman put the fire out and people were in awe of his authority and lack of fear for this person who was "unclean" at the center of his being. People are supposed to run away from a fire but a Fire fighter is one who runs to the fire to exert authority over it. As such, a Fire fighter is a liminal figure between the threat of a fire and safe distance from the harmful effects of a fire. Jesus was a liminal figure between the community of the "clean" and the "unclean" in that he had the authority to deal with the harm without destroying the persons affected by the harmful state. Jesus could see the "clean" image of God on each person and people saw in Jesus the icon of their restoration.
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2018
The Psalmist's prayer request: Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me. The early church was about receiving the "Holy (most clean) Spirit at the heart of one's life and as fulfillment of this ancient but always contemporary prayer request. Some hearts and spirits in people were characterized as being "unclean" and designated as "demonic," meaning that the controlling impulse of one's life had become a personal force of alienation compelling harm to self and others. The Gospels present Jesus as a People and spirit whisperer and as the one who could baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2018
Societies form classification systems to describe who and what is healthy and beneficial to society. In the ancient societies represented in the Hebrew Scriptures things and states of persons were classified as clean or unclean. The unclean had to be restricted from harming or co-mingling with the clean to "protect" the clean. There were segregatory rules to uphold social quarantines. Hence a person who was regarded to be really "messed" up inside because that person acted out of control in a way perceived as dangerous to others, was regarded to a have an "unclean" spirit. Jesus was shone to be a healer offering the Higher Power to interdict and bring "cleanness" to the inner lives of people. And the ultimate bill of good health was seen as the presence of the Holy (Most Clean) Spirit in one's life to impart divine sanity.
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2018
A call from God can be general or specific. A specific call pertains to the sense of attraction and engagement in a specific mission and such a mission has a duration in time and may end. One might say that the general call of God always has particular call even if it may be a call to wait in a time of "limbo" between specific missions of ministry. The call to "wait" and see what to do next is also a valid call. In the call of God "waiting" can be an action verb and a mission and a time when self reflection might be the preparation for the next "deployment."
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2018
From the highly informal and charismatic call of Jesus to his disciples derived the entire institutionalization of religious "calls" within the church. The call of Jesus goes from being a personal event of teacher-student engagement into a highly regulated administrative canonical process of ordination. The early church list many "charismatic" gifts and ministries in the church that eventually become crowded out by the "official" three-fold ministries of bishop, priest and deacon. A Movement grew to be a large Institution because of success and the need to consolidate and organize large numbers of converts. Seeing a bishop or pope on a "throne" ordaining clergy seems a long way from the charismatic Jesus calling fishermen to follow him. What is needed is the recovery of the personal interaction of a call and the leveling of the institutional hierarchy of the call into the one and equal call that is publicly validated in the church in baptism. Baptism expresses the main Christian call; ministries are lesser calls into the different ways in which a person articulates within church and society one's baptismal calling.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2018
One way of understanding the general call of God to everyone is through the ancient metaphor of the image of the divine being upon each person. In the metaphor of "original sin" one finds an explanation as to why people cannot honor the divine image upon one's life. One replaces the divine image with the social constructed "ego" who seems to sit upon the perceptual throne of one's own universe. This socially constructed ego bears the imperfections of those who are equally imperfect egos and who have modeled or nurtured the construction of one's ego. The Christ arises as one on whom can be projected the hidden real self, the self of the divine image. Projecting upon Christ and the Christ-like in our environment activates the self of the divine image within us and calls us to engage in as much Christ-like mission to fully recover and express the self of the divine image from which we have been alienated.
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2018
The official ordained ministries of the church in practice has often led to a clericalism seen in the diminishment of lay ministry and lay people having a valid "call and vocation" in their Christian life. In practice the lay persons call was manifested in obeying the "official call" of Christ found in the ministries of the clergy. One of the recoveries articulated in the various liturgical reformations which took place after Vatican II was the recovery of baptism as the equal call of Christ to everyone. Everyone is equal in baptism; a baby articulates his or her equal baptismal calling differently than a bishop.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2018
The call of Christ is an Epiphany because it instantiates the Cosmic Call of God found in all of creation with context specific call have personal events and duration in the times and places of individual people. Jesus Christ is the divination of Anthropomorphic Word whereby we become honest about human words being valid way to assign and confess God as the highest value that can come to Word as Word expresses equality with the Divine.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2018
Epiphany is the season of the call of Christ. The Jesus Movement had to start somewhere and with some people. The main Person was Jesus who had a magnetic charisma but persons responded to it in varying ways. When the response resulted in a mutual relationship a call reached the tipping point of one being ordained for a mission. The Gospel includes accounts of more than twelve people being called and sent by Jesus. The twelve were significant because in space-time relationships of three years only a few people could have a really close proximal relationship with Jesus. The twelve as a number was symbolically important in the early church leaders interpreting the church as the "new Israel" with new family patriarchs. In actual relationships, it would seem Mary Magdalene, Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany and the mysterious "beloved disciple" of John's Gospel were the closest to Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2018
Peter, Andrew, James and John were all fishermen who left the family businesses to follow Jesus. The call of Christ has always given another option for people to develop some other kinds of personal gifts than they would have had opportunity for if they had stayed in the expected roles determined by local and family contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2018
One of the frightening effects of regional and provincial bias is the fearful ignorance that does not permit us to find future excellence outside of our familiar "forty acres" of our personal experience. Nathaniel had a bias against meeting Jesus when he said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Fortunately Philip coaxed him to come and see Jesus or he would have miss the greatest event of personal enlargement in his life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2018
Did Jesus use the metaphor of Jacob's ladder to describe himself? He told Nathaniel that he would see the angels descend and ascend upon the Son of Man. In John 1, Word is God and Word is perhaps the ladder of passage between the seen world and the unseen world and "angels" or messengers, are perhaps the personified "messages" which ascend and descend upon the very existence of Word as God as that which arises from the great within to interact with the great without.
Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2018
A task for Christians today is to drop some of the baggage which has accrued about Christians, Christianity and Evangelism. Too much evangelism is mainly about how "my church is better than others" so you should join us. Evangelical comes from the Greek word meaning "good news" and its root is in the prophet Isaiah who wrote about good news coming to the poor, the blind, the oppressed and the prisoners. When Jesus read this passage, in his homily he said, "My life represents these "good news" values written about by Isaiah. If our Gospel is about ourselves and our churches and not about the love and justice of Christ coming to those who need it, we are missing the point.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2018
Copper wire is a fine conductor of electricity but if there is no electricity it loses it purpose. In evangelism, we are to be conductors for the Electric Christ to reach others. John's Gospels presents John the Baptist, Andrew and Philip as those who conducted or introduced others to Christ. In our day of televangelist fame and megachurch stars, it seems as evangelists are "putting the copper wire in place of the electricity," and that is not a good substitution. Evangelists and their membership and bankrolls are swelling and one wonders if the Electric Christ has been conducted somewhere out of sight in the silent anonymity of hearts of people who are unimpressed with the "public show" of religion.
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2018
One of the most personal and intimate meanings of the Epiphany is experienced in the call of Christ known as becoming a disciple, a student of Jesus in a process of having one's life be mentored by the influences of Jesus Christ. The call of Christ might be called an event of mutual Epiphany: The one called is manifested to the Caller even as the Caller is manifested to the life of the one called. Nathaniel, had a regional bias. When told about the hometown of Jesus he replied: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" This skeptic was seen by Jesus while under a fig tree and Jesus noticed him from afar. Nathaniel became manifest to Jesus in the gaze of Jesus and the skeptic Nathaniel became a friend of Jesus because Jesus noticed him. Evangelism is a special gift of how we notice each other because we've experienced the gift of being "noticed" by Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2018
The assumption of people of faith is that there is a great Being, God and that great being, is actually interested in the well-being of lesser being and that interest is known in God seeking out lesser beings as God being a participant through representation within the conditions of freedom governing all lesser beings. The assumption is that God as the greatest knows all lesser beings in an appreciative way because God see the "telos" of the surpassing end of what lesser beings can become. God's "epiphany" about human beings is knowing us and loving us and calling us to what God's knows we can become. God's calling is a coaxing love to us to exercise our freedom in the best possible way in the direction of constantly surpassing ourselves in excellence. While the Epiphany might be about how God in Christ is manifest to all people; such resides in the great-Counter Epiphany of how human beings are manifest, known, loved and appreciated by God. God has an Epiphany of each of us, in that we presume that God loves us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2018
Epiphany refers the entire process of how people came to be persuaded about Christ. Persuasion or "pistos" in Greek was the goal of Aristotelian rhetoric. In New Testament Greek, "pistos" is the word for faith and one can note the relationship between the old and new meanings, i.e., faith means that which one has become persuaded about such that one's life practice is transformed around the events of meaning that evoked the persuasion. Faith is the kind of persuasion that is attractive enough to get to one's motivational center. Faith motivates desire and desire that projects upon worthy subject matter leads one from idolatry to enjoyment without slavish attachments.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2018
The New Testament language for Jesus is diverse. It varies from particular events in the life of Jesus when he is presented as doing ordinary human things like accepting solidarity in receiving a baptism by John the Baptist. But there is also the poetic Cosmic Christ who is the metaphor for everything that is. Such expansion from particular person to expansive "Word from the Beginning" and "All and in All," is the poetic hyperbole in the confession ecstasy of people who cry "Christ in me, the hope of glory." I don't see Christ "out there" as an idol, but Christ is hidden even as the Christ nature lives and sees through me. From the mysticism of Paul about the "Christ nature" came the return to the Jesus nature found in narratives of the Gospels. The irony is that some do not return from the Jesus narrative to the "Christ nature mysticism;" they remain with an external Jesus of history and miss the point of the Gospels to lead us to find the "Christ nature" within us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2018
The subtitle of the Epiphany is The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. This subtitle probably sums up the paradigm change which brought about the separation of the Jesus Movement from the synagogue. In Judaism, the way living the Torah could become the way of living for a person not born into a Jewish family. A non-Jew could undergo a water rite and conform to the ritual customs of Judaism and become a "Jew." The early Christian leaders who saw the "charismatic" effects that happened in Gentile persons who heard the message of Christ did not require that such "charismatic" effect be publicly "ratified" by conforming to the ritual purity requirements of Judaism, save the water rite of baptism. The dispensing of the requirements of the purity requirements of Judaism for the Gentiles followers of Jesus Christ meant that the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles resulted in the separation of "Christians" from the synagogues. As such, the Epiphany represents the first great paradigm shift and this shift defines the birth of a new faith community.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2018
Understanding discursive practice on the continuum of the particular to the most general one can survey the presentations of Jesus the Christ. Jesus is a particular person and yet the Risen Christ in metaphorical generality becomes the omni-presence Christ nature who is all and in all. ( Col. 3: 11 ἀλλὰ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν Χριστός-"but Christ is all, in all) The presentation of Jesus is one who spoke particular words but he is also presented in the most general sense as the pre-existent eternal Word from the beginning. If one tries to isolate the particular from the general on the continuum one commits the falsehood of idolatry. If one tries to isolate the general from the particular on the continuum then one commits the falsehood of denying that the general resides in being an abstraction from the quantity of the cases of particulars. Slip and slide on the continuum but do not deny the great inclusive continuum of being within Word and knowing that one exists generally and particularly because of Word. If one denies that language mysticism undergirds the biblical witness, one is trying to assert particular and general while denying the Continuum.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2018
How do occasions of living become valued vis a vis other events of human experience? Human experience, known by living the field of language, gets differentiated when we use language to classify experiential events/occasions and place value on them and even place "hierarchical" value on them because we compare and say, "From this perspective, this is better than that." In the valuing processes in being merely human and using and being used by language, we by language set up a value system for events that stand out as sublime, and so we use the words epiphany and theophany to designate such experiences. And such words attain particular and specific definition within the particular fields of traditions of using language to categorize religious experience. The Epiphany as a day and season in the church calendar sums up both general and particular religious experience of Jesus Christ. The church as a community happened because there was replicated in human experience events of the sublime characterized by language such as receiving the Holy Spirit or having Christ born within one's life. The observation of this phenomenon helped and naming of the general phenomenon of the Epiphany and the promulgation of the same has provided the language of classification for individuals to continue to have particular events to be labeled as Christo-centric epiphanies.
Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2018
The arrival of the magi symbolizes the church teaching that Jesus is the wisdom of God and those who are wise and seek wisdom, even being foreign and from afar will find the wisdom of God in Christ. Christ as Wisdom is the occasion for continuous Epiphany.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2018
We head toward the day of Epiphany, which is "Christmas" on the Julian calendar. The arrival of the magi in Bethlehem is the lesson of the day, and this is a will have become story of the early church. What will have become as a result of Jesus Christ? The church will have become primarily a Gentile church because the Gentiles have arrived at the birth of the Risen Christ in their lives and they will have honored him with gifts signifying how they have come to value the birth of Christ in them. The Gospels are the cryptic stories of Jesus written to hide what the church "will have become" in the 8-10 decades after Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2018
In the first week of January, the church commemorates two days of initiation and identity in the life of Jesus. His naming/circumcision and his baptism. Circumcision was a secret mark of identity for Jewish males, public to their community, but private in how it marked the identity that Jewish males carried about themselves when they reached the age of knowing how they were "different." The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist was an event of publicly identifying his solidarity with John and his community. Even as John the Baptist recognized the "uniqueness" of Jesus, Jesus was humble in taking membership in John's community, perhaps the "proto-church."
The Gospel accounts place in a narrative of Jesus, the theology of the early church subscribing to the rhetorical truth that a story is a better way of teaching than didactic discourse. Jesus told demons to be quiet about his identity. Demons knew who Jesus was before most of the other characters presented in the Gospel. The Gospels present Jesus as the one who was controlling his own script of life and one of the chief items on the script was that Jesus was also the Christ who was above all principalities and powers of darkness in heavenly places. Those powers wanted to let his identity out before its proper stage entry. Jesus in the Gospel is presented as the playwright of his own script and within this script the theology of the early church is being taught.
Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2018
St. Paul's evangelistic methodology was, "I have become all things to all persons so that I might save some." How much do we morph and refuse to wear our identities on our sleeves in order to persuade others about what we think is the good news of Christ? Institutional Christianity is calcified Christian identities that seems to say, "We the institution will do nothing to persuade you; it is your option to enter the institution and follow our rules. You have to become all things to us according to our rules in order to be one of us." It is amazing how informal and personal Pauline evangelism gets lost in calcified institutional Christianity. The pride of success means you conform to us; we don't need you that much to change ourselves to reach out to attempt to open ourselves to the details of your life. So goes mainline churches that complain about losing members and not growing even while doing nothing to "become all things to all people."
Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2018
There is poignant irony in the greatness of God, humanly conceived as the sum total all of discursive practice (WORD). The irony of God's greatness is that God's greatness is freedom and freedom is the inherent weakness of God. If God wanted and could interdict all innocent suffering why doesn't it happen always? The inherent weakness of God is permissive freedom since morality only has its telling value in the conditions of overall freedom. One could say the biblical record is one of people trying to deal with reality of freedom being the inherent weakness of God, a weakness which permits human agony and ecstasy to occur, as well as all of the seemingly benign drudgery. The New Testament Gospel writers understood unseen demons to be the mysterious cause of evil which beset many people. A lucky few got to interact with the shamanic Jesus who from his invisible insides was able to instigate the reorganizations of the interior lives of those who were possessed. Gospel writers placed in story form the Pauline belief that Christ was seated above the principalities in the invisible realm. God as True Freedom, subjected Jesus to that Freedom in his death on the cross because what is true about Freedom is that there is always Some More occasions of freedom which have the power to open up the rewriting and reinterpretation of the meanings of previous events of freedom. The New Testament is written on the subsequent side of the resurrection appearances of Jesus and in the freedom of that subsequent resurrection the meanings of the cross of Jesus are re-written. Freedom means that nothing is ever finally resolved; things are only constantly open to being resolved by surpassing occasions of freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2018
How does one classify a person who is very disruptive to the social order, even a threat and still maintain the humanity that is the essence of every person? A disruptive person can be a person with an "unclean person" whose identity is made equal to his malady or he can be a person capable of great inner peace when Jesus met him without fear and did not see him as a "sick" person but as one who bore God's image.
Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2018
In the time of Jesus the Palestine Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had a limited scope of diagnostic categories. One categories seemed to fit all disordered mental and physical disease: The devil did it through the agencies of fallen angels, demons and "unclean" spirits. The Jesus cure seem to come in one dramatic event of exorcism and we don't know if the person then lived happily ever after, we mostly know about the event of Jesus casting out the unclean spirit. Though there was expressed some doubt about the finality of the "cure" because the little imps could return to the person with sevenfold fury. In our current day of mental health crises of addictions to opioids and the casting out of the "unclean depressed spirit" through psychotropics and the dispensing with the long process of the "talking cure" of psychoanalysis we probably should note that what is lacking is genuine befriending between people as the curing fellowship of being together in ways that includes everyone with their idiosyncratic gifts and infirmities. The church as such a fellowship is increasingly avoided because people can no longer tolerate each other in healthful ways.
Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2018
St. Paul believed that an interior cosmic battle was going on with principalities and powers and spiritual forces in heavenly places. Winning the battle in the "interior" heaven came before the will of God was done on earth (in the exterior world). The Gospels present Jesus as the most direct expression of God's will being done on earth and as one who whispered the man with the unclean spirit. The early church presented Jesus as an heroic "ghostbuster." The "ghostbusting" of Jesus signified that he was a Cosmic Victor.
Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2018
There can be something unreal about the Gospel stories of Jesus in that they can be read as focusing upon the event of the intervention of Jesus to "save" the day. Readers are not left with much of the aftermath and one can seem to think that naively "everyone lives happily ever after." An addict might find the event with a Higher Power to begin to attain sobriety but for most addicts, life does not become "happily ever after" because sobriety becomes the daily work. Jesus "heals" the person with an "unclean" spirit and we celebrate the magical realism of this account of our hero and we can be fooled to believe it represents the normal continuous experience of the "power" of God. The man with unclean spirit could have wished for the prior healing power of Jesus never to be in such a psychological state in the first place. Why didn't the miracle of God work so that such a miracle was not needed in the first place? Hero stories, past and present, seem to freeze the heroic event and disregard the duration of the times of life filled with diversity of human experience that cannot be lived continuously in peak events of the miracle. The writings of Paul are filled more with the everyday drudgery of Christian living; the Gospels came to their form later than the writings of Paul and are "root event" oriented as explanation as to why the Jesus Movement was on the way to becoming a rather monster snowball careening down the slope of human history.
Aphorism of Day, January 24, 2018
Societies that survive do so in part because of might be called today, Public Health systems. The history of humanity includes lots of different promulgations and practices of "public health." In the Hebrew tradition an entire system of classification for things "clean"=healthy and permitted and things, and "unclean"=unhealthy and not permitted, evolved and developed. Something unclean had to be avoided or if not the one who was in contact with the "unclean" had to be quarantined or shunned until such a person could be ritually purify and restored to the state of "cleanness" as defined by community authorities. A person with an unclean spirit showing up at the synagogue would of course set off every religious and social fire alarm. Jesus, the people whisperer, and Fireman put the fire out and people were in awe of his authority and lack of fear for this person who was "unclean" at the center of his being. People are supposed to run away from a fire but a Fire fighter is one who runs to the fire to exert authority over it. As such, a Fire fighter is a liminal figure between the threat of a fire and safe distance from the harmful effects of a fire. Jesus was a liminal figure between the community of the "clean" and the "unclean" in that he had the authority to deal with the harm without destroying the persons affected by the harmful state. Jesus could see the "clean" image of God on each person and people saw in Jesus the icon of their restoration.
Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2018
The Psalmist's prayer request: Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me. The early church was about receiving the "Holy (most clean) Spirit at the heart of one's life and as fulfillment of this ancient but always contemporary prayer request. Some hearts and spirits in people were characterized as being "unclean" and designated as "demonic," meaning that the controlling impulse of one's life had become a personal force of alienation compelling harm to self and others. The Gospels present Jesus as a People and spirit whisperer and as the one who could baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2018
Societies form classification systems to describe who and what is healthy and beneficial to society. In the ancient societies represented in the Hebrew Scriptures things and states of persons were classified as clean or unclean. The unclean had to be restricted from harming or co-mingling with the clean to "protect" the clean. There were segregatory rules to uphold social quarantines. Hence a person who was regarded to be really "messed" up inside because that person acted out of control in a way perceived as dangerous to others, was regarded to a have an "unclean" spirit. Jesus was shone to be a healer offering the Higher Power to interdict and bring "cleanness" to the inner lives of people. And the ultimate bill of good health was seen as the presence of the Holy (Most Clean) Spirit in one's life to impart divine sanity.
Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2018
A call from God can be general or specific. A specific call pertains to the sense of attraction and engagement in a specific mission and such a mission has a duration in time and may end. One might say that the general call of God always has particular call even if it may be a call to wait in a time of "limbo" between specific missions of ministry. The call to "wait" and see what to do next is also a valid call. In the call of God "waiting" can be an action verb and a mission and a time when self reflection might be the preparation for the next "deployment."
Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2018
From the highly informal and charismatic call of Jesus to his disciples derived the entire institutionalization of religious "calls" within the church. The call of Jesus goes from being a personal event of teacher-student engagement into a highly regulated administrative canonical process of ordination. The early church list many "charismatic" gifts and ministries in the church that eventually become crowded out by the "official" three-fold ministries of bishop, priest and deacon. A Movement grew to be a large Institution because of success and the need to consolidate and organize large numbers of converts. Seeing a bishop or pope on a "throne" ordaining clergy seems a long way from the charismatic Jesus calling fishermen to follow him. What is needed is the recovery of the personal interaction of a call and the leveling of the institutional hierarchy of the call into the one and equal call that is publicly validated in the church in baptism. Baptism expresses the main Christian call; ministries are lesser calls into the different ways in which a person articulates within church and society one's baptismal calling.
Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2018
One way of understanding the general call of God to everyone is through the ancient metaphor of the image of the divine being upon each person. In the metaphor of "original sin" one finds an explanation as to why people cannot honor the divine image upon one's life. One replaces the divine image with the social constructed "ego" who seems to sit upon the perceptual throne of one's own universe. This socially constructed ego bears the imperfections of those who are equally imperfect egos and who have modeled or nurtured the construction of one's ego. The Christ arises as one on whom can be projected the hidden real self, the self of the divine image. Projecting upon Christ and the Christ-like in our environment activates the self of the divine image within us and calls us to engage in as much Christ-like mission to fully recover and express the self of the divine image from which we have been alienated.
Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2018
The official ordained ministries of the church in practice has often led to a clericalism seen in the diminishment of lay ministry and lay people having a valid "call and vocation" in their Christian life. In practice the lay persons call was manifested in obeying the "official call" of Christ found in the ministries of the clergy. One of the recoveries articulated in the various liturgical reformations which took place after Vatican II was the recovery of baptism as the equal call of Christ to everyone. Everyone is equal in baptism; a baby articulates his or her equal baptismal calling differently than a bishop.
Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2018
The call of Christ is an Epiphany because it instantiates the Cosmic Call of God found in all of creation with context specific call have personal events and duration in the times and places of individual people. Jesus Christ is the divination of Anthropomorphic Word whereby we become honest about human words being valid way to assign and confess God as the highest value that can come to Word as Word expresses equality with the Divine.
Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2018
Epiphany is the season of the call of Christ. The Jesus Movement had to start somewhere and with some people. The main Person was Jesus who had a magnetic charisma but persons responded to it in varying ways. When the response resulted in a mutual relationship a call reached the tipping point of one being ordained for a mission. The Gospel includes accounts of more than twelve people being called and sent by Jesus. The twelve were significant because in space-time relationships of three years only a few people could have a really close proximal relationship with Jesus. The twelve as a number was symbolically important in the early church leaders interpreting the church as the "new Israel" with new family patriarchs. In actual relationships, it would seem Mary Magdalene, Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany and the mysterious "beloved disciple" of John's Gospel were the closest to Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2018
Peter, Andrew, James and John were all fishermen who left the family businesses to follow Jesus. The call of Christ has always given another option for people to develop some other kinds of personal gifts than they would have had opportunity for if they had stayed in the expected roles determined by local and family contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2018
One of the frightening effects of regional and provincial bias is the fearful ignorance that does not permit us to find future excellence outside of our familiar "forty acres" of our personal experience. Nathaniel had a bias against meeting Jesus when he said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Fortunately Philip coaxed him to come and see Jesus or he would have miss the greatest event of personal enlargement in his life.
Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2018
Did Jesus use the metaphor of Jacob's ladder to describe himself? He told Nathaniel that he would see the angels descend and ascend upon the Son of Man. In John 1, Word is God and Word is perhaps the ladder of passage between the seen world and the unseen world and "angels" or messengers, are perhaps the personified "messages" which ascend and descend upon the very existence of Word as God as that which arises from the great within to interact with the great without.
Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2018
A task for Christians today is to drop some of the baggage which has accrued about Christians, Christianity and Evangelism. Too much evangelism is mainly about how "my church is better than others" so you should join us. Evangelical comes from the Greek word meaning "good news" and its root is in the prophet Isaiah who wrote about good news coming to the poor, the blind, the oppressed and the prisoners. When Jesus read this passage, in his homily he said, "My life represents these "good news" values written about by Isaiah. If our Gospel is about ourselves and our churches and not about the love and justice of Christ coming to those who need it, we are missing the point.
Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2018
Copper wire is a fine conductor of electricity but if there is no electricity it loses it purpose. In evangelism, we are to be conductors for the Electric Christ to reach others. John's Gospels presents John the Baptist, Andrew and Philip as those who conducted or introduced others to Christ. In our day of televangelist fame and megachurch stars, it seems as evangelists are "putting the copper wire in place of the electricity," and that is not a good substitution. Evangelists and their membership and bankrolls are swelling and one wonders if the Electric Christ has been conducted somewhere out of sight in the silent anonymity of hearts of people who are unimpressed with the "public show" of religion.
Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2018
One of the most personal and intimate meanings of the Epiphany is experienced in the call of Christ known as becoming a disciple, a student of Jesus in a process of having one's life be mentored by the influences of Jesus Christ. The call of Christ might be called an event of mutual Epiphany: The one called is manifested to the Caller even as the Caller is manifested to the life of the one called. Nathaniel, had a regional bias. When told about the hometown of Jesus he replied: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" This skeptic was seen by Jesus while under a fig tree and Jesus noticed him from afar. Nathaniel became manifest to Jesus in the gaze of Jesus and the skeptic Nathaniel became a friend of Jesus because Jesus noticed him. Evangelism is a special gift of how we notice each other because we've experienced the gift of being "noticed" by Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2018
The assumption of people of faith is that there is a great Being, God and that great being, is actually interested in the well-being of lesser being and that interest is known in God seeking out lesser beings as God being a participant through representation within the conditions of freedom governing all lesser beings. The assumption is that God as the greatest knows all lesser beings in an appreciative way because God see the "telos" of the surpassing end of what lesser beings can become. God's "epiphany" about human beings is knowing us and loving us and calling us to what God's knows we can become. God's calling is a coaxing love to us to exercise our freedom in the best possible way in the direction of constantly surpassing ourselves in excellence. While the Epiphany might be about how God in Christ is manifest to all people; such resides in the great-Counter Epiphany of how human beings are manifest, known, loved and appreciated by God. God has an Epiphany of each of us, in that we presume that God loves us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2018
Epiphany refers the entire process of how people came to be persuaded about Christ. Persuasion or "pistos" in Greek was the goal of Aristotelian rhetoric. In New Testament Greek, "pistos" is the word for faith and one can note the relationship between the old and new meanings, i.e., faith means that which one has become persuaded about such that one's life practice is transformed around the events of meaning that evoked the persuasion. Faith is the kind of persuasion that is attractive enough to get to one's motivational center. Faith motivates desire and desire that projects upon worthy subject matter leads one from idolatry to enjoyment without slavish attachments.
Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2018
The New Testament language for Jesus is diverse. It varies from particular events in the life of Jesus when he is presented as doing ordinary human things like accepting solidarity in receiving a baptism by John the Baptist. But there is also the poetic Cosmic Christ who is the metaphor for everything that is. Such expansion from particular person to expansive "Word from the Beginning" and "All and in All," is the poetic hyperbole in the confession ecstasy of people who cry "Christ in me, the hope of glory." I don't see Christ "out there" as an idol, but Christ is hidden even as the Christ nature lives and sees through me. From the mysticism of Paul about the "Christ nature" came the return to the Jesus nature found in narratives of the Gospels. The irony is that some do not return from the Jesus narrative to the "Christ nature mysticism;" they remain with an external Jesus of history and miss the point of the Gospels to lead us to find the "Christ nature" within us.
Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2018
The subtitle of the Epiphany is The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. This subtitle probably sums up the paradigm change which brought about the separation of the Jesus Movement from the synagogue. In Judaism, the way living the Torah could become the way of living for a person not born into a Jewish family. A non-Jew could undergo a water rite and conform to the ritual customs of Judaism and become a "Jew." The early Christian leaders who saw the "charismatic" effects that happened in Gentile persons who heard the message of Christ did not require that such "charismatic" effect be publicly "ratified" by conforming to the ritual purity requirements of Judaism, save the water rite of baptism. The dispensing of the requirements of the purity requirements of Judaism for the Gentiles followers of Jesus Christ meant that the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles resulted in the separation of "Christians" from the synagogues. As such, the Epiphany represents the first great paradigm shift and this shift defines the birth of a new faith community.
Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2018
Understanding discursive practice on the continuum of the particular to the most general one can survey the presentations of Jesus the Christ. Jesus is a particular person and yet the Risen Christ in metaphorical generality becomes the omni-presence Christ nature who is all and in all. ( Col. 3: 11 ἀλλὰ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν Χριστός-"but Christ is all, in all) The presentation of Jesus is one who spoke particular words but he is also presented in the most general sense as the pre-existent eternal Word from the beginning. If one tries to isolate the particular from the general on the continuum one commits the falsehood of idolatry. If one tries to isolate the general from the particular on the continuum then one commits the falsehood of denying that the general resides in being an abstraction from the quantity of the cases of particulars. Slip and slide on the continuum but do not deny the great inclusive continuum of being within Word and knowing that one exists generally and particularly because of Word. If one denies that language mysticism undergirds the biblical witness, one is trying to assert particular and general while denying the Continuum.
Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2018
How do occasions of living become valued vis a vis other events of human experience? Human experience, known by living the field of language, gets differentiated when we use language to classify experiential events/occasions and place value on them and even place "hierarchical" value on them because we compare and say, "From this perspective, this is better than that." In the valuing processes in being merely human and using and being used by language, we by language set up a value system for events that stand out as sublime, and so we use the words epiphany and theophany to designate such experiences. And such words attain particular and specific definition within the particular fields of traditions of using language to categorize religious experience. The Epiphany as a day and season in the church calendar sums up both general and particular religious experience of Jesus Christ. The church as a community happened because there was replicated in human experience events of the sublime characterized by language such as receiving the Holy Spirit or having Christ born within one's life. The observation of this phenomenon helped and naming of the general phenomenon of the Epiphany and the promulgation of the same has provided the language of classification for individuals to continue to have particular events to be labeled as Christo-centric epiphanies.
Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2018
The arrival of the magi symbolizes the church teaching that Jesus is the wisdom of God and those who are wise and seek wisdom, even being foreign and from afar will find the wisdom of God in Christ. Christ as Wisdom is the occasion for continuous Epiphany.
Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2018
We head toward the day of Epiphany, which is "Christmas" on the Julian calendar. The arrival of the magi in Bethlehem is the lesson of the day, and this is a will have become story of the early church. What will have become as a result of Jesus Christ? The church will have become primarily a Gentile church because the Gentiles have arrived at the birth of the Risen Christ in their lives and they will have honored him with gifts signifying how they have come to value the birth of Christ in them. The Gospels are the cryptic stories of Jesus written to hide what the church "will have become" in the 8-10 decades after Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2018
In the first week of January, the church commemorates two days of initiation and identity in the life of Jesus. His naming/circumcision and his baptism. Circumcision was a secret mark of identity for Jewish males, public to their community, but private in how it marked the identity that Jewish males carried about themselves when they reached the age of knowing how they were "different." The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist was an event of publicly identifying his solidarity with John and his community. Even as John the Baptist recognized the "uniqueness" of Jesus, Jesus was humble in taking membership in John's community, perhaps the "proto-church."
