Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2023
The apocalyptic genre is writing about conceiving endings for the sake of imagining justice, especially to survive current conditions of injustice.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2023
What is the relation of a handful of water taken out of the river to the entire river? What is the relation of a story taken out of the entire universe of possible continuous discourse? It is but arbitrary book ends to try to give the location of identity within the morass of all. Apocalyptic endings are but tropes used to provide definitions within the realm of infinite differences. Apocalyptic is a way of confessing that our duration and endings have meaning.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2023
Modern day cinematic apocalyptic imagination is much more prolific than the biblical apocalyptic could achieve in writing.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2023
The apocalyptic is a discursive response by powerless people who are threatened with collateral damage when powerful people fight with each other for control of world resources. The discourse is an exercise in imagining that impending threats of the tyrants can be stopped by the greater cosmic God. It is a shame when people with significant social power misappropriate the apocalyptic discourse either for sheer entertainment, e.g. super hero cinema, or worse yet when comfortable Christians wish for the end of the world for their God to show everyone that they were "right" and people who disagreed with them were wrong and deserved punishment.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2023
Having a Shepherd King means that kingly power is used to tend to the vulnerable. Power in service is the meaning of Christ the King.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2023
Apparently the Son of Man is hidden within poor and needy people of the world to incentivize people to tend to them. Apparently, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and a very small percentage of Christian people got the message.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2023
What most Christians do not practice? Finding the real presence of Christ in the needy. It is easier to have faith to find Christ in bread and wine than in the homeless and the poor.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2023
How does life often feel? Like the Big Ref in life is not dealing out realtime penalties to big time offending cruel tyrants and greed vacuums for most of the goods in life, while penalizing the more moderately bad and selfish people who don't sin boldly enough to get away with it. The timid sinners survive by having faith in a pan-optic seer who will punish the realtime unpunished at some later time with catastrophic reversal of fortune. The wise might simply opine that it will have been better to have been assigned more roles of goodness in life than roles of wicked cruelty and greed.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2023
The notion of King and monarchies in liberal democracies is relegated to nostalgic national identity function as in the case the English monarchy or fairy tale status in the various cinematic Disney kingdoms. The notion of a singular benevolent omni-competent person ruling over the entirety of humanity past, present, and future is inconceivable unless such a figure is Word as the All and in All that can be humanly known. Word is what is King of kings, in an unavoidable way.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2023
How can Christ as King have significance as a symbol within the post Enlightenment Era when many nations have come to see democracies as a needed correction to monarchies and totalitarian regimes? Perhaps the Risen Christ is best understood as the surpassing Self of every person beckoning each to future excellence in love and justice. So much thinking about Christ as King is an external forceful powerful future authority rather than the possibility of the interior lives of all people being swamped with irresistible love.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2023
Being Christ the Kingly does not mean be a benevolent dictator; it means using one's ability, knowledge, and power to tend those who need care the most.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2023
The most telling realm of God is to be the realm within the epidermal borders of the human body.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2023
Stewardship does not always mean that one is successful in terms of certain public metrics of success; it means that one is always already at the work of developing and using one's gifts.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2023
Would that the world was full of just moderately bad and selfish people, and not the monsters of greed and power who ruin the lives of so many people. Just because we can't be angels doesn't mean that few should be demonic in their greed and exploitive and destructive power. Why can't everyone just be moderately selfish people?
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2023
Fear is a powerful motivator causing paralysis. Transformed fear might be called faith or being persuaded about positive outcomes inspired by hope.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2023
The motivation for failure to invest might be fear. Fear of failure might keep us from developing our gifts, and the result is that we lose because some things can only be done at the available time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2023
The parable of the talents indicates that the divine has given everyone assets to invest/develop and the stewardship task is to continually develop what we've been given to avoid atrophy of our assets. Atrophy is the cruel built in punishment of inactivity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2023
The parable of the talents is about avoiding this epitaph on one's tombstone: "He had lots of potential."
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2023
Why do we extol being prepared for the future so much so that we don't regard how we are responding now as being completely adequate? Time is always moving with another after what was before, and so we make attending to the future the main task of living. We, of course, differentiate the immediate future of the moments before in the now from the more long term future for which we believe that we have more time for strategic planning. And strategic planning involves connecting the location and direction of current footsteps with the desired destination many miles of time away., even without the current assurances of ever attaining the destination.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2023
What do we need to be prepared and ready for? The next. The next is always a not yet actual field of probabilities. We synthesize from what has already happened a logic for what might yet happen. From that logic, if we are wise we prepare for what is next, without certain guarantee of success but it is still wise to act from statistical approximations.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2023
The notion of precedence is used as a method of comparison. A past incidence is used or cited in the present to impart authority to something in the present. Difference uses of language for history, jurisprudence, academic writing use precedence differently with different standards of application. The New Testament writers use "identity precedence" to establish the belief about the surpassing greatness of Jesus. Heroes from the Hebrew Scriptures and phrases regarding divine designation are used to present Jesus in a surpassing comparative way the significance of Jesus for those who follow him. This use of precedence is not the kind of precedence used in science with a dependence upon statistical approximation and the replicable requirement for scientific facts. Spiritual experience accounts and anecdotal experiential precedence is a different order of precedence and the two should not be confused. Spiritual discourse is aesthetic discourse and its truth/beauty criteria is different from the requirements of science.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2023
Being asleep and awake are metaphors in the parable of Jesus about the bridesmaids. The common phrase of "being asleep on the job" evokes something similar. Obviously, we are not made to be awake 24 hours a day but the metaphor refers to being awake about the presence of the realm of God. If one can be awake about the realm of God, then one can enjoy the rest of sleep as needed.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2023
Modern readers of the Bible can treat the writers of the Bible as those who did not know the difference between discursive uses of language. Bible writers, like us knew how to be poetic, ironic, hyperbolic, and common sense reporters as well. To treat poetic and hyperbolic discourse as naive realism is a misreading of the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2023
The injunction of the word of Christ about being ready is really about probability theory, actuarial wisdom, scientific thinking, meaning we take into account all past and current experience in being best prepared for what might happen. There is no wisdom in making the word of Jesus impractical and then calling it "spirituality."
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2023
"The kingdom of heaven will be like this." Perhaps this should be understood as the continuous future tense, since the now is always on the cusp of what will be and time itself is a feature of the kingdom of heaven since the kingdom of heaven is the realization of everlastingness itself. The words of Jesus can also be the future anterior tense in the sense that the realm of God is an always already awaiting the in-breaking into one's awareness, in which case the kingdom of heaven will have been realized experientially.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2023
The New Testament word for hypocrite means "actor." In many ways we become those acting out the scripts of our situation, including our pieties and religious behaviors. We have roles to play, the persona as a mask which we wear to appear to the public. Learning agreement between our inside feelings, our speech, facial expressions, body language is very difficult. We can live mostly divided lives because we may be performing for people in contexts in ways that betray our inward feelings. And is it a bad thing to act pleasant and be seemingly kind to people even when we don't feel like it? When are we acting bereft of having feeling for the role? We might redeem the role of being hypocrites by aspiring to be recovering hypocrites, which means the script says we must be "perfect" as the Father in heaven is perfect, yet we don't feel, act, or speak perfectly as actors. We don't give up the perfect script as our goal even as we continue to attempt to align with Spirit as inward goodness with acts and words of goodness, and so we labor to be recovering hypocrites.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2023
Finding one's calling in a vocation can lead one to become over-identified with the profession which gives one esteem within society. The words of Jesus remind us that our child of God identity is primary and this should keep us humble no matter what kind of success or failure we have in our professions.
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2023
The Bible does not exhaust God's word, because in the beginning was the Word, which was with God and was God. Word is the embracing All in all that can be known and is coextensive with everything that can be known.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2023
Religious communities tend to reduce and limit "God's word" to "holy texts," which of course have gone through years of having been interpreted when written, read and used and "voted" into official canons designating them as the "official God's word textbook." The fuller notion of God's word is Word itself being one with God, thus meaning that any word in time and in timeliness can be a God-word to the one who experiences its piercing relevancy.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2023
The words of Jesus about having no rabbis, fathers, or instructors is a warning about relying upon one's written resume and title of office and not manifesting the inner charism of ministry. Through winsome service one verifies the presence of the messiah in one's life.
