Aphorism of the Day, September 39, 2019
Mustard seed faith involves doing the obvious little things that grow into great character on which the architecture of goodness depends. As children, we may rely on reward or fear of punishment to “do the right thing,” but when one shifts gear from law to Spirit, one realizes that being able to do the good and right thing is its own reward.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2019
The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man is finished in John’s Gospel. Lazarus returns from the dead and still people do not believe. Thus the punchline of the Lazarus/Rich Man parable is instantiated.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2019
There are many gulfs or canyons between people; human biases which separate people. If canyons of separations exists as social conditions into which we are born, the human faith mission is to spend one’s life building bridges.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2019
The love of money is the root of all evil. You cannot serve God and wealth. This is biblical capitalism. Biblical capitalism and the biblical free market philosophy derives first from being in relationship to God as primary and then using one’s wealth to serve what being rightly related to God means, i.e., loving God and one’s neighbor.
If empathy is a preferred and recommended quality of human excellence, then attaining is better through one’s own free choices. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man presents the trope of a forced post-death trading places. Eternal judgment is presented as the Rich Man being forced into having an eternal empathy with the poor man through condemnation to perpetual torment.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2019
The parable about the Rich Man and Lazarus indicates that we can take patterns of separation between us and other people to the grade. If the division of poor and rich is fast-forward to the afterlife, imagine the division to be ad infinitum? The parable suggests that at death one will be with Abraham the father of faith or one will be in perpetual torment.
Aphorism of Day, September 24, 2019
Biblical banalities that have needed to be exposed as retroactively demeaning to people who weren’t allowed to even know they were being demeaned: Slavery and the subjugation of women.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to explain how the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis slowly creeped to become the tacit practice of people who thought they were
“Christian.” The Lazarus/Rich Man parable is a teaching about the banality of neglect which happens in so-called enlightened cultures of Christian or “liberal” values. Banality become the chasm of separation denoting the character of people who live in close proximity to each other but practice cruel neglect without knowing it because they have become so used to the poor. The poor have receded into an unnoticed background of the existence of their society. The banality of the homeless in our cities only get interrupted when politicians want them to disappear because of their inconvenience to our urbane “style.” Even Jesus is quoted as saying, “the poor are always with us.” That doesn’t imply that the poor should always be neglected just because they are always with us. How can poor people have functional worth in society for their own sense of self worth and for worthwhileness in the societies where they reside.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2019
Jesus wondered that the abundant human energy was so good at doing wrong, he imagined what it would be like to transform the human capacity and have it aimed toward goodness. The reason profound human Desire needs to be God directed so that the many idolatries of addictions might be avoided. The collateral effect of directing our Desire at God in a singular way means that addicting idolatry can be converted to freeing enjoyment of all that God has freely given us.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2019
Is a market free if it results in the greedy owning the majority of the worlds resources? If freedom means that the poor can be trampled, does that do justice to any notion of freedom? An elephant has the freedom to squash mice; but the freedom for bullies to be successful does no justice to enlightened freedom. Enlightened freedom would include the creativity to take sufficient care of everyone. Just saying “let’s have a free market,” does not make it “free” in the enlightened sense of the word free as taught by Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2019
The very rich man said to the pastor, “I will pay you lots of money to use the King James Version of the Bible. The pastor asked why. He said, “The KJV has Jesus saying you can’t serve God and Mammon and most people don’t know what Mammon means and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2019
Jesus told a parable about a greedy person being really good at what he was. And he wondered why aren’t more people really good at the generous wisdom of God? Jesus came to show us that our “capacity” could be transformed to be able to express full out excess in the right direction.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2019
Being faithful with having a little or a lot is the stewardship issue of life. Sometimes we are less wasteful when we have a little and stewardship efficiency is lax when we have a lot. The waste that we have when we have a lot might be better given to those who have little and not enough. That is the dilemma of the uneven distribution and stewardship equity in our world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2019
In the parable of the “shrewd steward” one finds musings of Jesus about the power of natural self interest. He wonders why the God-wise don’t transform power of natural self interest into power of a higher interest on what can be done once we get beyond the “self.”
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2019
Leaven and shrewdness are negatives in the Bible but Jesus uses the parables to point out that secular energy can become sacred energy if it is transformed in one’s life of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2019
Rather than bemoan sin as a negative, one should regard it as the complement of repentance. Acknowledging sin simply means that in a world of becoming, we always find ourselves as “not having fully become.” I have not yet fully become, so perfect ability always awaits me. Sin as being incomplete and not having yet “hit the target” means we are on a humble path of betterment tolerated by the one who has most Become.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2019
In the “Genealogy of Morals,” Nietzsche seems to be saying that morals are generated by the people who have the power to say what is “good” or “evil.” This is, of course, a rejection of any transcendental referential authority for the genealogy of what is good or bad. How do we take aim at what is good for us? Torah means to “take aim at” and perhaps the 10th commandment is very significant in what causes us to “aim” at all, namely, the energy of “coveting” or desire. Taking aim with all of our desire at the unnameable G-d who is “no-thing” means we are always aiming in worshipful desire for what is more than us as a way of surpassing the better more than us in our future. For desire to create a better us we need human exemplars to help us aim in the right direction toward the elusive future perfection of surpassability.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2019
"Crimes" take place within social, political and religious contexts. Monarchs and religious leaders used to be able to kill those who were deemed heretics. St. Paul would be charged with accessory to murder in our juridical system in his pursuit of followers of Jesus to their deaths. Saul of Tarsus "snapped" when the commandment against killing found in his Torah became obviously violate in his pursuit of St. Stephen to his death. As a result, Paul called himself, foremost of sinners. He did the crime but didn't have to "pay the time" except the knowledge forever that he had indeed "missed the mark" in being a part of the effort to kill Christians. Even though great sinners can come to believe in great grace, the significance of their profound misdeeds can provide the gravity of momentous motivation for perpetual reparation. It would seem as though great sinners who know grace become those motivated by the guilt becoming reparative living.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2019
The belief in inherent sinfulness might also mean that we as people are part of the "gang that couldn't shoot straight." We are born without good aim at what is right which is why the Hebrew Scripture is a story of the revelation of the Torah being God's gift to help us "aim" right. What happens when the big aim at the good living of love and justice get replaced by taking aim at what is to remain a very exclusive group of people? Suddenly people are condemned for missing such a petty and limited target and called woefully sinful. Reformers like Jesus come to help us aim in the right direction so that we are not "mis-firing" in the efforts of our life energy. If the Hebrew and Greek words for sinning means "missing" the mark, our faith life involves learning how to aim straight toward the supreme value.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2019
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2019
How did archery and sin get related? "chet" or sin in Hebrew means to "miss the mark." And this is related to the meaning of "Torah," to "take aim at." Some people became perpetually those who missed the mark because they did not have the "cross hairs" of the Torah to know what they were supposed to aiming at. Jesus and the early church believed that the religious leaders had made the targets so arcane and exclusive that they did not have the general promulgation to make them "valid" laws. They had become "insider" rules to keep people out. (totally understandable because their lives were being dominated and overrun by outsiders). For Christians, Jesus became the "new" cross hair for aiming at the perfection of learning to live better each day toward a perfect yet unattainable "target" of God. Sin was the perpetual missing of the mark but being Christ-aided, one could at least be aiming one's life in the right direction at the perfect target.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2019
The word "sinner" in biblical use is often used to refer to those who live outside the purity rules of the religious party who define what purity and impurity is. Everyone is the sinner or the "outsider" of someone's group. Jesus was said to have hung out with and ate with "sinners," which means that he made himself "ritually impure" because of his contact with the ritually impure. It is hard to be winsome with outsider if one is not permitted to even enter their space. Sometimes the rules of "holiness" for religious people means that one does not have evangelistic permission to engage people where they are.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2019
Translations can be misleading. We translate the words of Jesus as saying we have to hate our life. The English word life is too broad to be able to designate the Greek word, "psuche" or "soul" life or "ego-state" life. Why translate the word so broadly that people need the follow up distinction about it not referring to our physical lives. Literal translations can present the wrong message to many readers.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2019
St. Paul in his letter to Philemon had to deal with the dilemma of slave and free being "one in Christ" and yet having to still honor the socio-economic structure of society that could not envision freedom in Christ with actual social and economic freedom. The Christian churches had to wait hundreds of years for freedom in Christ and freedom in human society to become the equal practice of justice inside and outside the church. Churches still lag behind the full sacramental justice practice for all members. Ordination and matrimony is still not an calling open to lots of people in many churches.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2019
It is the fated lot of the liturgical preaching to one Sunday explicate the radical words of hospitality of Jesus and then the next Sunday have to explicate the words of hostility that Jesus utters to characterize the needed relationship of family members divided over following Jesus. Apparently there are conditions in the early where hospitality in family relationship was not possible and people who had a common God were divided.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2019
Hating one's family members in order to qualify for Christian discipleship seems to be literally counter to other words of Jesus. The hyperbole of such words require an ironic reading of them to stress the silliness of following Jesus being bad for self and one's family.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2019
The hating of one's life proposed in the words of Jesus necessary for being a disciple should be regarded as a hyperbolic way of emphasizing the poignant necessity to integrate change as descriptive of life itself. If one holds onto a static "psuche" or how one's "soul life" was constituted in the past, then one may not be properly prepared to take on the new which confronts in the present. So one does have to "hate one's psuche" in order to practice the "renewing of the mind" implied in what is meant by repentance.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2019
One could say that hate is a deprivation of love and in the matter of being a disciple of Jesus, it was a binary issue. One either was a disciple or was not; there was no gradations in the matter. What one is persuaded about means that everything else takes a secondary deprived position. The "hate" of one's family signals the "adult" separation of the chief values of one's family to embrace the individuation which is required for authentic faith. I no longer live vicariously on dad and mom's faith; I have come to my own persuasion which govern the rationale which I now set forth in my life. The cost of discipleship means a mutual letting go of one another to allow even radical individual obedience while remaining within a community of individual believers. The discipleship experience is arriving at authenticity in validating one's individual commitment such that one eschews the commitment of others as standing in for one's own. The reciprocity between being in the "herd" while leaving it to be authentically oneself in one's faith commitment is so poignantly pronounced that the metaphor of a love-hate binary relates the intensity that such poignancy can entail.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2019
In argumentation comprehensiveness, coherence and consistency is strived for. What about Jesus saying "love your enemies," but "unless you hate your father," and other families members you cannot be my disciple? When does a family member seem lower than the enemy who is supposed to be loved?
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2019
Hospitality begins with the discernment of the needs of one's fellows and a corresponding empathy of knowing that the one in need could be me. When one offers hospitality it is also healthy self interest in paying forward toward the future "me" who might need exigent hospitality.
Mustard seed faith involves doing the obvious little things that grow into great character on which the architecture of goodness depends. As children, we may rely on reward or fear of punishment to “do the right thing,” but when one shifts gear from law to Spirit, one realizes that being able to do the good and right thing is its own reward.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2019
The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man is finished in John’s Gospel. Lazarus returns from the dead and still people do not believe. Thus the punchline of the Lazarus/Rich Man parable is instantiated.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2019
There are many gulfs or canyons between people; human biases which separate people. If canyons of separations exists as social conditions into which we are born, the human faith mission is to spend one’s life building bridges.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2019
The love of money is the root of all evil. You cannot serve God and wealth. This is biblical capitalism. Biblical capitalism and the biblical free market philosophy derives first from being in relationship to God as primary and then using one’s wealth to serve what being rightly related to God means, i.e., loving God and one’s neighbor.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2019
If empathy is a preferred and recommended quality of human excellence, then attaining is better through one’s own free choices. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man presents the trope of a forced post-death trading places. Eternal judgment is presented as the Rich Man being forced into having an eternal empathy with the poor man through condemnation to perpetual torment.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2019
The parable about the Rich Man and Lazarus indicates that we can take patterns of separation between us and other people to the grade. If the division of poor and rich is fast-forward to the afterlife, imagine the division to be ad infinitum? The parable suggests that at death one will be with Abraham the father of faith or one will be in perpetual torment.
Aphorism of Day, September 24, 2019
Biblical banalities that have needed to be exposed as retroactively demeaning to people who weren’t allowed to even know they were being demeaned: Slavery and the subjugation of women.
Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2019
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to explain how the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis slowly creeped to become the tacit practice of people who thought they were
“Christian.” The Lazarus/Rich Man parable is a teaching about the banality of neglect which happens in so-called enlightened cultures of Christian or “liberal” values. Banality become the chasm of separation denoting the character of people who live in close proximity to each other but practice cruel neglect without knowing it because they have become so used to the poor. The poor have receded into an unnoticed background of the existence of their society. The banality of the homeless in our cities only get interrupted when politicians want them to disappear because of their inconvenience to our urbane “style.” Even Jesus is quoted as saying, “the poor are always with us.” That doesn’t imply that the poor should always be neglected just because they are always with us. How can poor people have functional worth in society for their own sense of self worth and for worthwhileness in the societies where they reside.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2019
Jesus wondered that the abundant human energy was so good at doing wrong, he imagined what it would be like to transform the human capacity and have it aimed toward goodness. The reason profound human Desire needs to be God directed so that the many idolatries of addictions might be avoided. The collateral effect of directing our Desire at God in a singular way means that addicting idolatry can be converted to freeing enjoyment of all that God has freely given us.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2019
Is a market free if it results in the greedy owning the majority of the worlds resources? If freedom means that the poor can be trampled, does that do justice to any notion of freedom? An elephant has the freedom to squash mice; but the freedom for bullies to be successful does no justice to enlightened freedom. Enlightened freedom would include the creativity to take sufficient care of everyone. Just saying “let’s have a free market,” does not make it “free” in the enlightened sense of the word free as taught by Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2019
The very rich man said to the pastor, “I will pay you lots of money to use the King James Version of the Bible. The pastor asked why. He said, “The KJV has Jesus saying you can’t serve God and Mammon and most people don’t know what Mammon means and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2019
Jesus told a parable about a greedy person being really good at what he was. And he wondered why aren’t more people really good at the generous wisdom of God? Jesus came to show us that our “capacity” could be transformed to be able to express full out excess in the right direction.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2019
Being faithful with having a little or a lot is the stewardship issue of life. Sometimes we are less wasteful when we have a little and stewardship efficiency is lax when we have a lot. The waste that we have when we have a lot might be better given to those who have little and not enough. That is the dilemma of the uneven distribution and stewardship equity in our world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2019
In the parable of the “shrewd steward” one finds musings of Jesus about the power of natural self interest. He wonders why the God-wise don’t transform power of natural self interest into power of a higher interest on what can be done once we get beyond the “self.”
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2019
Leaven and shrewdness are negatives in the Bible but Jesus uses the parables to point out that secular energy can become sacred energy if it is transformed in one’s life of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2019
Rather than bemoan sin as a negative, one should regard it as the complement of repentance. Acknowledging sin simply means that in a world of becoming, we always find ourselves as “not having fully become.” I have not yet fully become, so perfect ability always awaits me. Sin as being incomplete and not having yet “hit the target” means we are on a humble path of betterment tolerated by the one who has most Become.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2019
In the “Genealogy of Morals,” Nietzsche seems to be saying that morals are generated by the people who have the power to say what is “good” or “evil.” This is, of course, a rejection of any transcendental referential authority for the genealogy of what is good or bad. How do we take aim at what is good for us? Torah means to “take aim at” and perhaps the 10th commandment is very significant in what causes us to “aim” at all, namely, the energy of “coveting” or desire. Taking aim with all of our desire at the unnameable G-d who is “no-thing” means we are always aiming in worshipful desire for what is more than us as a way of surpassing the better more than us in our future. For desire to create a better us we need human exemplars to help us aim in the right direction toward the elusive future perfection of surpassability.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2019
"Crimes" take place within social, political and religious contexts. Monarchs and religious leaders used to be able to kill those who were deemed heretics. St. Paul would be charged with accessory to murder in our juridical system in his pursuit of followers of Jesus to their deaths. Saul of Tarsus "snapped" when the commandment against killing found in his Torah became obviously violate in his pursuit of St. Stephen to his death. As a result, Paul called himself, foremost of sinners. He did the crime but didn't have to "pay the time" except the knowledge forever that he had indeed "missed the mark" in being a part of the effort to kill Christians. Even though great sinners can come to believe in great grace, the significance of their profound misdeeds can provide the gravity of momentous motivation for perpetual reparation. It would seem as though great sinners who know grace become those motivated by the guilt becoming reparative living.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2019
The belief in inherent sinfulness might also mean that we as people are part of the "gang that couldn't shoot straight." We are born without good aim at what is right which is why the Hebrew Scripture is a story of the revelation of the Torah being God's gift to help us "aim" right. What happens when the big aim at the good living of love and justice get replaced by taking aim at what is to remain a very exclusive group of people? Suddenly people are condemned for missing such a petty and limited target and called woefully sinful. Reformers like Jesus come to help us aim in the right direction so that we are not "mis-firing" in the efforts of our life energy. If the Hebrew and Greek words for sinning means "missing" the mark, our faith life involves learning how to aim straight toward the supreme value.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2019
Prayer on a Day of Infamy, September 11th
God, on this day of infamy, we remember those who died.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the heroes who lay down their lives in the rescue of others.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the lost "might have been" experiences of lost loved ones in the lives of those who deeply miss them.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember our lost freedom to feel safe.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the temptation to judge the many by the action of an evil few.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember how this event instigated eighteen years of war.
God, on this day of infamy, cleanse the memories of the peoples of this world and enable us all to believe in the power of redemptive overcoming love, rather than avenging retaliation.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the infamy of the Cross of Jesus, which became our redemptive salvation. Amen.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the heroes who lay down their lives in the rescue of others.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the lost "might have been" experiences of lost loved ones in the lives of those who deeply miss them.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember our lost freedom to feel safe.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the temptation to judge the many by the action of an evil few.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember how this event instigated eighteen years of war.
God, on this day of infamy, cleanse the memories of the peoples of this world and enable us all to believe in the power of redemptive overcoming love, rather than avenging retaliation.
God, on this day of infamy, we remember the infamy of the Cross of Jesus, which became our redemptive salvation. Amen.
How did archery and sin get related? "chet" or sin in Hebrew means to "miss the mark." And this is related to the meaning of "Torah," to "take aim at." Some people became perpetually those who missed the mark because they did not have the "cross hairs" of the Torah to know what they were supposed to aiming at. Jesus and the early church believed that the religious leaders had made the targets so arcane and exclusive that they did not have the general promulgation to make them "valid" laws. They had become "insider" rules to keep people out. (totally understandable because their lives were being dominated and overrun by outsiders). For Christians, Jesus became the "new" cross hair for aiming at the perfection of learning to live better each day toward a perfect yet unattainable "target" of God. Sin was the perpetual missing of the mark but being Christ-aided, one could at least be aiming one's life in the right direction at the perfect target.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2019
The word "sinner" in biblical use is often used to refer to those who live outside the purity rules of the religious party who define what purity and impurity is. Everyone is the sinner or the "outsider" of someone's group. Jesus was said to have hung out with and ate with "sinners," which means that he made himself "ritually impure" because of his contact with the ritually impure. It is hard to be winsome with outsider if one is not permitted to even enter their space. Sometimes the rules of "holiness" for religious people means that one does not have evangelistic permission to engage people where they are.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2019
Translations can be misleading. We translate the words of Jesus as saying we have to hate our life. The English word life is too broad to be able to designate the Greek word, "psuche" or "soul" life or "ego-state" life. Why translate the word so broadly that people need the follow up distinction about it not referring to our physical lives. Literal translations can present the wrong message to many readers.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2019
St. Paul in his letter to Philemon had to deal with the dilemma of slave and free being "one in Christ" and yet having to still honor the socio-economic structure of society that could not envision freedom in Christ with actual social and economic freedom. The Christian churches had to wait hundreds of years for freedom in Christ and freedom in human society to become the equal practice of justice inside and outside the church. Churches still lag behind the full sacramental justice practice for all members. Ordination and matrimony is still not an calling open to lots of people in many churches.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2019
It is the fated lot of the liturgical preaching to one Sunday explicate the radical words of hospitality of Jesus and then the next Sunday have to explicate the words of hostility that Jesus utters to characterize the needed relationship of family members divided over following Jesus. Apparently there are conditions in the early where hospitality in family relationship was not possible and people who had a common God were divided.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2019
Hating one's family members in order to qualify for Christian discipleship seems to be literally counter to other words of Jesus. The hyperbole of such words require an ironic reading of them to stress the silliness of following Jesus being bad for self and one's family.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2019
The hating of one's life proposed in the words of Jesus necessary for being a disciple should be regarded as a hyperbolic way of emphasizing the poignant necessity to integrate change as descriptive of life itself. If one holds onto a static "psuche" or how one's "soul life" was constituted in the past, then one may not be properly prepared to take on the new which confronts in the present. So one does have to "hate one's psuche" in order to practice the "renewing of the mind" implied in what is meant by repentance.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2019
One could say that hate is a deprivation of love and in the matter of being a disciple of Jesus, it was a binary issue. One either was a disciple or was not; there was no gradations in the matter. What one is persuaded about means that everything else takes a secondary deprived position. The "hate" of one's family signals the "adult" separation of the chief values of one's family to embrace the individuation which is required for authentic faith. I no longer live vicariously on dad and mom's faith; I have come to my own persuasion which govern the rationale which I now set forth in my life. The cost of discipleship means a mutual letting go of one another to allow even radical individual obedience while remaining within a community of individual believers. The discipleship experience is arriving at authenticity in validating one's individual commitment such that one eschews the commitment of others as standing in for one's own. The reciprocity between being in the "herd" while leaving it to be authentically oneself in one's faith commitment is so poignantly pronounced that the metaphor of a love-hate binary relates the intensity that such poignancy can entail.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2019
In argumentation comprehensiveness, coherence and consistency is strived for. What about Jesus saying "love your enemies," but "unless you hate your father," and other families members you cannot be my disciple? When does a family member seem lower than the enemy who is supposed to be loved?
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2019
Hospitality begins with the discernment of the needs of one's fellows and a corresponding empathy of knowing that the one in need could be me. When one offers hospitality it is also healthy self interest in paying forward toward the future "me" who might need exigent hospitality.
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