Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2020
The last day of the year invites us to the sociology of how we measure time. The way we measure time actually comes to code our social existence by the artificial scheduling of human events and activities. Some scheduling derived from agricultural patterns in nature but such are variable based upon where one lives. One might think that utopia is to escape how one has become socially coded by all of the calendars of one's life which indicate the priority how and when the time of our life is expended in doing certain activities. We always need to assess our relationships with all of the calendars of our lives; are they useful time strategies to organize the priorities for our time or are they tyrants insisting that inessential things are essential to our existence?
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2020
From magi comes the word magician. Magic is based upon diverted attention to make what is totally this-worldly to seem to be "other-worldly" intervention. The original other-worldly intervention is called creation and it is indeed Sublime that within language we come to be aware of our existence as language users who inherit a world full of named "objects" and who continue in time to be perpetual neologists because in time all speaking is new speaking, all naming is new-naming, refreshed naming. If creation is "other-worldly" intervention and it is on-going, then the magic is to present our language experience as magical occasions for the context specific Sublime to break in. There is no reason to pit the other-worldly against the "this-worldly." Go forth and be magi and live magically.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2020
It's one thing to say that one's religion is universal, it is another to see that it is practiced in a way that is made accessible to everyone. Everyone can be an Episcopalian but how accessible are "things Episcopal" to the lifestyles of a significant larger population? Everyone can be a member of the Amish community if they are willing to follow the Amish way of life. A Christ-center Judaism made for a more accessible faith community even while ending up compromising too many faith practices which were regarded as being "non-negotiable" for being an adherent member of the synagogue. The magi symbolize that Christ-centered Judaism was going to be accessible to people who did not have a background in the practices of Judaism. The cogent point might be to not think too exclusively about the particulars of how one practices one's faith; allow that there are many missions in the promotion of relationships with God. Because one appreciates one's own tradition does not mean one must become the prideful one who says one's way is the best and only path of knowing "salvation."
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2020
What is the rhetorical importance of the Magi? It is the narrative form of declaring that God is for everyone and is found by the seeker. The natural theist who understands that the heavens declare the glory of God can find that such natural faith like Abraham had is validated in a visit to Christ. Finding the Christ Child validated the faith that they already had.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2020
Try to think about knowing anything or being conscious of anything at all without having Language. But you've used Language to think about not having Language. But babies and animals don't have Language and I can think about them? Yes, but from having Language one projects what it is like to have a non-language state of existence like animals and babies. In the beginning was/is the Word.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2020
John 1:1 paraphrase: The beginning of human life as it can ever be known is Language in its fullest sense; Language is co-extensive with the Superlative because with Language we name the Superlative. Through Language, life is known to be and nothing can be said to have being without the mediation of Language.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2020
Christmas Haiku
A babe is crying
With all loss and pain on earth
Smile again dear child
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2020
The kingdom of Christ always seems to be mainly "underground." When it has become above ground it has subtly compromised with the greedy powerful for more than right to worship but the power to force people to be "religious" in a prescribed way. It's ironic how the kingdom of kindness cannot really be a visible kingdom since when it is promoted as such, it is an item on the ego resume of the proud to instantiate their "humility." "I'm a trillionaire, and look, I've given a billion to good causes."
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2020
There is seeming contradiction between "not being conformed" to the image of the world and interacting with the images of the people of the world in order to engage them for evangelism. Christmas as a feast was essentially evangelism. It was offered as a replacement for an existing solstice feast and so the question might be posed, Is that conforming or converting? Does there have to be some conforming engagement in order to convert. In the sixties, Rock and Roll was the devil's music and now every big box megachurch has a "Christian" Rock band on stage.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2020
If Jesus can die with us on the cross, then the baby Jesus can cry unconsolably with us during our days of losing so many lives in the pandemic. The Christ Child is crying unconsolably now and we have to stay with him when there is no immediate relief. Christmas this year: stay with the Christ Child who cries unconsolably.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2020
The Christmas story had to be told in a certain way in Luke. In the spiral of sacred history there had to be shown an alignment with things past and present, as evidence of the continuous return in history of great events and great people who would mark the world in such special ways that a significant body of people confessed the superlatives of a person because everyone else paled in comparison. There are many genres in the New Testament to present the uniqueness of Jesus, and one might say there can be as many genres of Jesus as there are people since the story of the Jesus-effect gets filtered through the individual and unique experience of each person. Go forth and write your Gospel today.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2020
There is an irony about religious communities within their cultural settings. If one is not supposed to be conformed to the world, does one go toward the Amish and monastic "cloister" life to resist any assimilation. But if one's community has good news which is supposed to be accessible to the entire world, how is non-engagement a good strategy? Yes, one can say one's message is for all, and anyone is free to come away from the "world" and join the cloistered people with their "true, universal, message," "wink, wink," but only for us. Christo-centric Judaism was to bring the covenant of God to as many people as possible believing that the messenger has the advantage with "insider information" about the image of God residing within everyone. The effort involves getting people to accept what they already have in the inherent dignity of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2020
How can one say that God is our maker or creator? Each particular only exists within everything that has been existing, is existing and will exist in future. We cannot be separated from Plenitude, so Plenitude caused us and made even though most of Plenitude is negligible to us in knowing the fullness of total causal connections. To say one is created or made by Plenitude is the poetic shorthand way of stating infinite connections involved in any "causation."
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2020
When using the Bible, there are naive habits of interpretation which assume that words translated from an ancient text into our language have exact correspondence. What exactly corresponds between people in a transhistorical way is that we all have language and language embeds within its use the cultural contexts regarding what words meant within their own cultural reference frame. Since cultural reference frames are so vastly different, and ancient frames often inaccessible, the interpretive process involves human intuition about what are the universal habits of thinking that prevail within a cultural reference frame. How then do we translate ancient reference frames into modern corresponding reference frames? For example, among ancient language users, one assumes motion and getting from A to B. How? Walking, riding a donkey? We today also move around and get from points A to B. How do we do it? Bicycles, cars, planes? Transportation and mobility are universal; the modes within a culture are different. Concepts like Love and Justice are the universal and the narratives of Scriptures have distinct ways to promote the value of love and justice in their times and places. What often happens is that ancient cultural habits of mind are absolutized in ways that make the presentation of love and justice in our time, unlovely and unjust. Love and Justice cultures of the past used to tolerate and uphold slavery and the subjugation of women. Love and Justice in our time have to create new cultures of compassion and empathy.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2020
What biblical "predictions" mostly indicate is "not yet." They've not happened yet and so many things and many of them cannot happen given the specific cultural details of when the "predictions" were utter. The angel Gabriel told Mary that Jesus would rule over the house of Jacob because he is given the throne of David forever. So how can this be true in an era when the very notion of "king" is totally outdated and it does not seem to be a preferred metaphor for a truly loving and just God. Heaven and earth pass away, continually in time, including the relevance of "time worn" metaphors. What remains in time is language and language users who have the continual work of translating ancient metaphors to relevant signatory usage in the present.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2020
Many biblical communities have trapped God into an anthropomorphic super Being who is angry and jealous; both are attributes that we think are inappropriate for mature human beings, even if we say God's anger and jealousy is the perfect way to be angry and jealous, for the right reasons. God's wrath demands perfection that we can't attain and so we deserve the "death penalty" and for a long season God allowed the death of animals in our place, until the time that God offered the divine Son as the only and final and perfect death. Such a God is filtered through the lenses of the ancient cultures represented in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Could it be that evolution in interpretation better represents the understanding of God as one who desires being a living sacrifice and understanding death as what one does to check one's ego to live for and with others and for a worshipful God? Some people like to live with all of the literal blood of the Bible, while others have moved to the life of "living sacrifice."
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2020
The Bible might be called a story of God's family planning. God births Adam and Eve signifying the original motive of God to have children. But the children rebelled and rebel and they continuously need exemplars to remind them that they really are God's children, first and foremost. But the children continue to believe that God is an absent and unseen parent and so God allows to arise within the human family the supreme exemplar of being a Child of God. That Child gets the special Christmas narrative as a template to let the mystery of having been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and knowing that the Christ-nature has been born into each by virtue of having the image of God implant forever.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2020
Sometimes in family planning parents "plan" to have a child and sometimes there are surprises. The Gospel of Luke provides more details in the pre-birth of Jesus for Mary, Joseph and the family of John the Baptist. The Annunciation is the Gospel way to state that God is a family planner for the birth of Jesus. Each person has pre-birth events for the eventual realization of the birth of the Risen Christ in one's life. The realization of such is uniquely tailored to each person's life to affirm the uniqueness of the individual experience of the realization of the birth of Christ in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2020
The Gospel as a genre of New Testament writing cannot be dislodged from the origins of the gospel in Isaiah. The good news that Jesus identified with was for the captive, the blind and those in need of comfort. Today, many treat the Gospel as the "good news" about "my church" and why you should join and financially support us. This is far from the Gospel which Jesus identified with when he read the Isaiah portion about "good news" in the synagogue.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2020
Ancient hermeneutic circles versus modern hermeneutic circles. Imagine taking a lab rat out of a terrarium and putting it into an aquarium and bemoaning the fact that the rat does not do well in the water. Taking biblical writers out of their hermeneutic circles and thrusting them into our current hermeneutic circles bring comments about their failure to fair well. What do participants in all hermeneutic circles share? Language. Embedded in language are universals which pertain to human life; such universals are manifest differently within all cultures of human experience. The goal of charitable hearing of messages from the past is to look for the big principles, not the cultural details.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2020
The capacity to rejoice should not be extinguished by the current affliction which one faces, since the power of affliction involves the tyranny to make us miss all of the other goodness with co-exists with our affliction. Gaudete! any way any time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2020
Jesus took particular identity with the writing in Isaiah, "the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me," especially to bring "good news" to those who most needed it in conditions of sickness and oppression. The good news word in Isaiah is "basar" and this means that the very notion of Gospel is a distinct borrowing from Hebrew Scriptures as it was reprised in the identity which Jesus took with the ministry of bringing good news. Good news is as old as the creation story when God called all creation "good." We have found many ways to soil the "goodness" of creation and when we can recover "original" goodness in love and justice for all, indeed it is "good news." In churchiness we have reduced Gospel to Books in the Bible and official teachings about Jesus. But good news in the Isaiah and Jesus traditions is actively bringing restorative news to the people who need it the most.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2020
Sometimes we have to intentionally respond to the injunction, Rejoice! To stir up one's ability to "joyificate" is to stir the always already latent capacity that we retain from having been a smiling babe, when we smiled for no apparent reason at all. To start, we begin with the gifts that are always free: air, water, the sky, the birds, the trees, friends, light, darkness, sleep, and on and on there are things of joys which can have a magnetic effect in drawing from us the ability to rejoice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2020
The command to rejoice even when it doesn't seem logical is a charge for us to be empowered managers of our emotional and spiritual lives, in being able to spiritually and emotionally multi-task with the uneven conditions which face the world and ourselves at any given time. And we need to do it with honesty and no self accusation of hypocrisy. Things may be bad, really bad, but is it hypocritical to smile and bring joy to a baby or child who doesn't need to be burdened with adult concerns in even bad times? No, this is not emotional and spiritual hypocrisy, it is the versatility that we can spiritually and emotionally walk and chew gum at the same time and we can be ambi-empathetic based upon who we need to respond to at any given time. This isn't a "give it the old stiff upper lip" show for the children. It is the emotional and spiritual diversity that we can manifest with true honesty because not everything is going completely right or wrong at any given time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2020
The Third Sunday of Advent is gaudete Sunday which is the command to "rejoice!" In the middle of the devastations of Covid-19? The human nature is complex enough to be deeply mournful and at the same time be in possession of lots of other modes of being, like joy, gratitude, love, faith and the other fruits of the Spirit. The command to rejoice, particularly in hard times is a reminder about what the Spirit can inspire within us at all times. The Good News that is promised in the prophet Isaiah is about healing and comfort and about rebuilding after devastation, some of which happened because of human willful ignorance. So, we light a pink candle on 3 Advent to remind us that the light of hope co-exists within all of the conditions of life, and so we offer the smile of our newborn baby aspect of our personality. We smile for what we do not fully know, because rejoicing hearts echo what God said after creating, "It/you are good!" Rejoice!
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2020
The community of John the Baptist must have been some sort of "counter-community" to the existing gatherings in Judaism. It was a significant reform movement and apocalyptic and less concerned about settling in since the end was near. The Jesus Movement took up the apocalyptic tones of John's Movement but had to adapt itself continually to the reality that the end did not occur. The kingdom is coming, the kingdom is already here is the changing messages promoted to be adapted to the threats faced by a particular community when a particular preaching or writing came to expression.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2020
John the Baptist's community might be regarded as the proto-church since John seemed to be a para-Judaic religious movement in challenging the authenticity of "Jewish membership" by requiring Jews to get "baptized" into what he understood as God's community of repentant people. Baptism was required for proselytes to the synagogue, as well as circumcision for males. Why would John require Jews to be "baptized" into their own community, unless he regarded his movement as a distinct community of repentant people?
For ultimate legitimization of the right to reign, monarchs resorted to the "divine right" propaganda. "If God appoints, what can one do but accept the ruler?" So the monarch refers to God to establish hierarchy. To confer the designation as holy and revealed upon a writing, is to legitimize the writing as sacred and authoritative in the community of reception. That communities "voted" on what writings were "revealed" and worthy of being used for authority of actions within a community, is an indication one also has to regard the "voting communities" on the canon of Scriptures as inspired. One can say that writings are "inherently inspired," thus validated by the voting members to declared them as authoritative for the community of the faithful. But even in what we call "revelation," the human role is not removed.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2020
The baptisms of John in the Jordan River might be called a "liturgical" innovation. Indeed there were baptismal rites for proselytes in Judaism and other water purification rites. It seems as though John was offering baptism to everyone who would take a vow of repentance, including Jews who were adherents to regular ritual practice. John did not seem to be one who was like the great learned rabbis of the time. He did seem to comprise a community and one gets the impression that it was egalitarian and open to anyone who could take the vow of repentance. That his "star" protege was perhaps Jesus, whom he baptized, makes John crucial in the development of the Christ-communities which also practiced baptism but couple water with the interior baptizing with the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2020
John the Baptist was an apocalyptic prophet exhorting people to flee from the "wrath to come." Every parent uses a visualization of the future to influence current behaviors in the life of a child. Practical futurism is simply called "planning." Why do we plan? We want successful future outcomes. The apocalyptic is a kind of futurism but it does not every escape the "present." A vision of the future is used to motivate current behaviors. This happens in all areas of life and in the religious life of first century Palestine.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2020
John the Baptist and Jesus make up the ideal 12 step team. John says, "stop doing it." But then he says Jesus will baptize with the Higher Power to help you gain control; the Higher Power aka the Holy Spirit.
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