Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2021
The experience of time means that revelation is never "final as being complete," it is only partial. Persons in moments or occasion of time only see "in part" because they no can't "be" in the past or in the future. Revelation means to uncover that which has not yet been known to persons heretofore. By closing the canon of Scriptures, one falsely assumes that revelation has ended but Scripture and people exists in time, in becoming, and this means continuous uncovering of what has not yet been known is always, already happening. One should not elevate an understanding of a "version" of reality to the place of some finally and completely understood truth. God is humble enough to continue to constantly become; and we should be humble to acknowledge the same. God has no rival in great becoming in whom everything else exists as mere ciphers within such becoming, even living off the creative sustenance of such great becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2021
Adam was given the task of "naming" things in creation. All of this assumes some pre-existing language ability in Adam. Having language is the way we live and interact as people who have come to name the world inside us and the world outside us. When we name, we project upon what we name and poetically we project language user ability upon creatures and objects which don't have the same language ability as us. So, our pets and plants can "communicate" with us and heavens can "declare" the glory of God. It is not surprising that the hyper-Language became known to be equivalent/co-extensive with the divine: "And the Word was God."
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2021
In the presentation of the act of creation, God speaks things into existence and called them good. This is insightful symbolically since it suggest that "speaking or word" is how we understand existence and "word" is the creative structuration of all things, as least as things can be known by a knower who is a language user. The Bible is is the textual form of word and represents the record of people coming to insight about how to present how human existence can best be structured but also provide the examples of worst case scenarios when humanity refuses to submit to the highest insights of structuration express as love and justice in living together as stewards taking take of this earth home.
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2021
In the early Christ-communities the experience of the Risen Christ was the panacea of life which accompanied every human experience in the full range of health to all manner and degrees of illness, with death being the final illness. And yet even in death, one would known the Risen Christ. The Gospel stories of Jesus are presentation of the reality of the Risen Christ being known from cradle to grave and beyond.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2021
The writing of history or the retelling of the past cannot be an exact copy of what happened; it can only be a current version of what happened as it relates to what is happening now. The "now" of Gospel writing was from the perspective of the people who were constituted by the experience of the Risen Christ through the Holy Spirit. The decades of experiences of the Risen Christ are threaded throughout the narratives of the Gospels which present stories of the physical presence of the Jesus of history as a teaching method for the substantial experience of the "now" experience of the Risen Christ in the lives of the Gospel writers/preachers/listeners.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2021
What is writing? The technology for the re-cycling of words with the intention of retaining something of the past into the present and the future. The words have a referential function even though what words refer to is not as stable as the written characters. What words refer to are vulnerable to the contexts of the users of such referential words and what is "signified" has the shelf life of the cultural contexts in which a word is used. What does sit at table mean if Middle Easterners eat while sitting on the floor? Does sitting at table mean the same as Da Vinci's portrayal of the Last Supper? Or does it mean that he Euro-centrized a presentation of "what would the Last Supper look like" in Da Vinci's time?
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2021
The writing of history is like being in Saint Louis and trying to write about water analysis of water of the Mississippi River which has long ago dissipated into the Ocean. How does one write about such "old" water long passed by and impossible to retrieve? Imagine the Gospel writers trying to "retrieve" fragments of the life of Jesus in the memorial records thirty to eighty years after he's gone and doing it in places and communities which did not look like the Galilee and Jerusalem of the time of Jesus. The "old" memories of Jesus were in fact new applications of the communities of the Risen Christ interwoven with the memories of the Jesus of History, and the Risen Christ oracles through the preachers directs the presentation of the Jesus of History.
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2021
The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon wrote that God did not create death. But did God create the conditions of freedom where death was a possibility that could become actual within the lives of human language users who came to label death as a cessation of life as it was known among those who continued to live? The notion of freedom and perpetual becoming means that death or ending of any state of being is but transitional moments. What makes human death experience so poignant are the many many experiences of projected desire on a person suddenly coming to an end and one loses the ability to project desire upon a favorite. The loss of the "future" of a person in one's life in the custom modes of relationship is what defines human death. God's creation assumes relationships and relationship can never end; only be re-comprised in time in different modes of states of being. The resurrection is the belief of a re-comprised person in the post-death state, absent in the body but present with the Lord, as Paul wrote.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2021
Jesus is presented as one who does not "promote" his own acts of wonders. He often does something fantastic and tells the recipients, "Don't tell anyone about this?" And people mostly disobeyed. How could you keep good news silent? Scholars think that this "secrecy" is an addition by Gospel writers to explain why Jesus was not more popular in his own time having done such spectacular things, but also as a way of indicating a notion of God's timing in the unfolding of the events in the life of Jesus. If his fame was too soon, he would have attracted attention of his foes and hastened the timing of the events of his life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2021
The past events in the traces of community memory cannot be exact reproductions in the present; they become teaching tropes and they become something else when imbued with current events relevance and with elation of hopeful outcome. The Gospels are literatures of post-resurrection outcomes high on the hope of walking in heaven and being seated with Christ in heavenly places before one is actually there. The presentation of the healing ministry of Jesus is a presentation of the as if resurrected Christ with us making everything right and it functions as a coping method in face of the obvious, namely people get sick and die.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2021
If God is beyond all gender designation, God can also be within all designations as a metaphor of preference for presentation of superlative value. It does happen that human fathers can exemplify the better angels of human behavior to become eligible as a personal metaphor for God. One could hope that Joseph was such a model father for Jesus that Jesus found the "father metaphor" the highest form of expression for his relationship with his heavenly parent. We can be grateful for knowing God as the greatest Father, about whom no one greater can be conceived.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2021
The declaration of emancipation from slavery is a great event to observe. The event of the Exodus is about God's direct intervention to bring persons out of slavery. Unfortunately, God only seems to work directly in the ancient pre-historic past but the point of such presentation is to model that God desires emancipation. We are now working on the aftermath of emancipation in becoming our better angels to remove and repair all of the lingering effects of slavery without denial because of how absolutely loathsome slavery was. We cannot deny the lingering social effects of slavery on Black persons by retreating to extreme individualism of saying it is every man and woman for himself/herself, now that slavery is over. Equal justice under the law as actual practice of a society is what emancipation needs to mean.
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2021
When narratives of the past are recounted in the present, they have already become figurative, symbolic, instructive tropes and rob of significant connection to any original contexts. The apostles and disciples in the early communities responsible for generating the Gospels were oracles in translating the memory of Jesus into appropriate instruction for later and new contexts. Contexts cannot be "frozen" as they were, even in language because language is a living force.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2021
"Jesus, how can you sleep through the storm and the waters which threaten to swamp our boat?" Threatening water is the possibility of death by drowning and in the symbolism of "immersion" in the waters of baptism, one dies with Christ and then rises with him which one comes out of the water. Does God seemingly "sleep" through the freedom of death to happen to us all or does invite us through Jesus to the possibility of rising after death? Is death calmed? Is its sting removed? The faith program of the early church was to live with faith now because one has hope that the "death" issue has been dealt with.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2021
A categorical imperative is wanting that something so winsomely right be a universal maxim. Jesus calmed the stormy seas. Wouldn't it be a wonderful maxim if Jesus calmed everyone's stormy sea all of the time. When that doesn't happen, one is forced into the poetics of admitting that that the big Sea of Life is Death. The resurrected Christ "calmed" death for everyone, all of the time and one can begin to understand the poetic teaching insights of Gospel stories. They are not "literal" events requiring categorical imperative status to be true, rather they point us to the outcome of having faith in face of what will happen to all, i.e, death.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2021
It may not be our first impulse to read a Gospel story as encoding a teaching or a theology of the early church. As individual persons trained in "me and my Bible" ways, and steeped in notions of "individual" salvation, we perhaps are not inclined to appreciate how the Scriptures are built through community for the community. Yes, it is wonderful to connect our individual stories with biblical figures but the actual information about the people is so sparse that we often may project too much on them as "totemic" figures of identity. This is acceptable projective devotional reading but such individual insights should not override the grander theological messages encoded within the narratives.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2021
When we read about specific disciples in the Gospels, we often read the Gospel in a personal mode. Jesus calmed the sea in the boat of the disciple fishermen. So the logic goes, if Jesus calmed the storm for Peter, then Jesus could calm every storm for everyone. But hurricanes and tsunamis have been harrassing and killing people quite often. Why does not Jesus calm the storms for others and only for the selective few? However if one reads the Gospels as the theological statement of the church decades after Jesus is no longer seen, one understands the programmatic teaching in the Jesus story, namely, the big storm of life is death and in the resurrection Jesus calms death, not by eliminating it but surpassing it. And he does not just do it selectively for a few disciples; he does it for anyone/everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2021
St. Paul believed that he did the impossible when he wrote, "from now on we regard no one from a human point of view." How did St. Paul escape a human point of view? He regarded himself as inwardly and spiritually altered so that as he said, he had the mind of Christ and the Spirit of God. He believed that he had access to the way in which Christ and the Holy Spirit saw things. Seeing a new creation is what Paul called his altered state of seeing.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2021
"We walk by faith, not by sight...." wrote St. Paul. Such would seem to be a discounting of the empirical method of commonsense and science. But Paul did not write, "I walk only by faith, and not by sight at all." Paul was stating the obvious regarding the use of different discourses for matters of the heart as opposed to matters of natural laws and commonsense. It is silly to pit faith discourse against scientific discourse as if one cannot be a poet or aesthete and a scientist at the same time. We are linguistically complex people and with words we are highly nuanced and yet the ignorant speak as if we reside in simplistic either/or tropes.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2021
When "monarchies" came to the Bible, King became a metaphor for God, who was presented as the central and all-powerful being of the universe on whom all attention was to be focused. But God as an invisible king had to be known within the divine realm by the effects in the created order of divine reality and greatness. Jesus was not an earthly king; he was a completely ironic king in his contrast with earthly kings like David and the Caesar. His self-effacing kingship was like the invisible kingship of God. Many of the teachings of Jesus in parables were about this "realm or kingdom" of God, which was easy to miss because it seemed so obvious that the Caesar was the king who was in charge.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2021
Biblical writers appropriated metaphors. We are told by Samuel that God was against having kings but God allowed Israel to have kings. What happened? King became a metaphor for God who was referred to as King of gods and King of Israel. And then king as messiah became appropriated for the dream-king for apocalyptic intervention. The notion of Jesus as a visible king had to be delayed into the future, even while the core of the message of the Jesus sayings pertained to perception of God's kingdom or realm as an always/already reality of living.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2021
In the op art pictures like the duck/rabbit picture, what is it within a person which allows one to see either the duck, the rabbit or the assumption that one is seeing both but only with sequential focus? We see from the inside through the language grids which have come to constitute our lenses and so seeing is always an interior thing. Writ large in our politics, some religious people may view a political leader as God's messiah while others regard the same person as a lying anti-Christly person. The insides of the people with such antithetical interpretive seeing is an indication of how persons have been forming their interior selves through their input and influences. Ironically, both kinds of seeing use the Bible to justify their seeing? What would be the "outside" arbitrar for such diverse biblical see? Truth, justice, evidence of kind words would be a start.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2021
The New Testament is about seeing, that we can see and how we see things. The most important factors in seeing is sight and light. Sight is one of the five senses, so those who are not blind have sight. But how do we see? Impressionist painters painted in a way that indicated they were seeing things different than the painters who presented "mirror images" of their subjects. The biblical writings include sayings about seeing as God see, seeing the heart or interior or sub-surface phenomenon. Paul spoke of spiritual seeing and contrasted this with mere "human seeing." The word of Jesus to Nicodemus indicated that he could not pierce the "kingdom of God" paradigm without being born from above or being born of water and the Spirit. How one sees is based upon the taxonomical grid of word lenses which constitute how one characterizes one's life experience. One's lenses are informed by how one comes into the definitions of what happens to oneself. How we appropriate our experience and integrate it in preparation for future seeing is the life process of learning how we see things. Perceiving or seeing the realm of God is the seeing through faith which tinges mere physical sight with moral and value imperatives.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2021
The kingdom or realm of God is a way of seeing in a distinctive recognizing way of the sublimity of God seemingly hidden in what we think is so ordinary. One parable of Jesus indicates that the kingdom of God is so obvious like the growth of a plant that it can be missed because it is too obvious. We are so used to artificial "entertainment" that we miss the wonder buried in the banality of the sublime. Artificial "entertainment" is based upon the notion that the stuff of life itself does not have within it the capacity to evoke wonder for what it is and the Plenitude within which it dwells.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2021
The forgiveness of sin can be confusing since this is does not indicate the "direct" object of the forgiving one. The direct object of forgiveness is a person who is forgiven his or her commission of a sin. So, the sin is not forgiven; rather the person who does the sinning is forgiven. One might wish that God's forgiveness could mitigate the results of misdeeds and wrongs in this world, but the plain of freedom has an absolute memory because the past is absolute in that it happened and thus each occasion became a brick in the wall of all subsequent occasions of occurrence. For a person to remain unforgiven, it would mean that a person would fail to qualify in the conditions of realizing guilt, confessing it and asking for mercy. The unforgiven person is the one who does not believe that he or she needs mercy. It is a state of egotism which says, "I am made to do what I want, unapologetically."
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2021
"Who are members of my family?" asked Jesus rhetorically and followed by his answer, "the ones who do the will of my Father." The "will" of God can seem to be so vague as to defy precise interpretation even when one qualifies it by saying to occupy oneself with mercy, love, and justice. And these great virtues also are vague and so one never escapes the task of making them concretely applied within the sometimes "messy" experience of one's life. We can be "wowed" by the "Will of God" and what it requires but we have to then do the work of application in our lives. Our failures at application provide plenty of reasons for natural humility necessitating our need for grace as we "try again and again" at the never ending work of God's will of love and justice. The experience of grace means that we integrate our failures into the process of becoming more just and loving.
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2021
To say that something is unforgivable is a teaching point regarding a behavior which should be interdicted and not perpetuated. The unforgivable sins should elicit this teaching lesson: Don't ever be like this! Don't be like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or slave owners. The unforgivable is a force of devolution and not evolution with the creative advance of God's Spirit toward love and justice and higher harmonies. For freedom to be freedom, the unforgivable is permissible but not beneficial to composite creative advance. It's only lesson is the negative injunction: Don't be like that.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2021
The family of Jesus had a new genetic code. What made one a member of the family of Jesus? Flesh and blood, genetic relationship? No, it was doing the will of God. Doing God's will assumes that among the vast freedom which face the human community there are some free choices which are the higher choices. Such choices are the will of God, and if that is too vague, one might further qualify such choices as those which promote love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2021
Jesus spoke about an unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. Some unforgivable sins are still happening of the spiritual kind, like calling evil, good and good, evil. Every people are heirs of some unforgivable social sins in particularly the Holocaust and the horrendous massacres and genocides which were inflicted upon people by people with power to do such mass killings. The practice of slavery as the diminishment of the people bearing God's image for the purpose of economic gain was also an unforgivable sin. That evil oppression was valorized for "economic" good, surely was a sin again the "Spirit." There are things done which are unforgivable as long as one is in the realm of the living. Unforgivable is one of the most severe pronouncement we that we can make on the violation of the image of a loving God within the creatures of this world.
Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2021
The reputation of Jesus was so controversial that some of his family felt that an intervention, as if they thought to "shut him up" or stop his ministry. He was called both mad and in "league with Satan" to do his "people whispering." This prompted a reply from Jesus about who was his family: "those who do the will of God."
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