Babushka Dolls and Layers of Gospel Tradition

5 Lent  A       April 2, 2017
Ez. 37:1-14     Ps. 130 
Rom. 6:16-23    John 11:1-44     
Lectionary Link

Just so you don't think that this sermon is pointless, here are four points.  Babushka dolls, death and resuscitation, and resurrection.

Why Bubushka?  Not because Russia is in the news but because they provide concentric layers to illustrate the layers of history.  History is a story and the last story develops from all of the stories told before the latest story and includes traces of the past while being the next outer layer.  The Bubushka doll or matryoshka doll like the layers of an onion provides a model for looking at the development of traditions and today we are looking at some specific Gospel traditions.

First,let's look at the Gospel tradition of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  These three do not appear in the Gospels Matthew and Mark.  They do in the Gospels of Luke and John.  Some scholar think that may mean that the writers of John's Gospel read Luke since John was the latest Gospel to come to writing.  The story of the restoration of Lazarus back to life appears to be a story to prove the assertion found in the parable about Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke.  In the Gospel of Luke we do not know about Lazarus having two sisters because the Lazarus in Luke is a figure in one of the parables of Jesus: Lazarus and the rich man.  Lazarus was the leprous beggar who begged at the gate of the rich man who ignored him and didn't know that he was there.  Both Lazarus and the rich man die; in the afterlife Lazarus dwells in paradise with Abraham and the rich man dwells in agony across an impassible canyon.  His agony is intensified because he can see Lazarus and Abraham but cannot be with them.  He implores father Abraham to send someone back from the dead to warn his brothers and family to amend their lives so that they don't have to arrive in Hades too.  Abraham denies his request and said that if they did not follow Moses and the prophet, then neither would they believe even someone who came back from the dead.

Fast forward to the Gospel of John.  Jesus arrives late to Bethany and Mary and Martha are in distress because their brother Lazarus has died and has been put in the tomb.  Jesus has arrived late to show that he has power over death and he calls Lazarus from the tomb back to life.  But what is the outcome of this marvelous event?  This Lazarus returns from the dead and yet many of Jewish religious leaders still do not believe and they prophesy the necessity of the death of Jesus to save Israel.  For the members of the community of John's Gospel, Lazarus had returned from dead and still many did not believe and many who knew about the Risen Christ still did not believe.  So the Lazarus story was a commentary on the disbelief of many regarding the resurrection.

Let's look back at the Babushka doll.  The earliest figure represents the events of Christ themselves, and we don't actually have full and actual video or audio recordings of these event.  There was a range of stories that were passed in oral traditions about Jesus.    We may think that the Gospels represent the next layers, but in fact in Christian writings, the writings of St. Paul were the first writings about Jesus that we have.  The Gospel present the chronological logic of being the first writings about Jesus, but the writings of St. Paul pre-date the Gospel writings.  The mysticism of Paul and the early disciples then determined how the narrative of the life of Jesus was to be presented in the Gospels.

Paul did not see Jesus.  He did not witness his teachings.  He wasn't a disciple who followed him from Galilee.  He was not at the crucifixion and he was not privileged with the early post-resurrection appearances.  He was a persecutor of those who said that Christ had risen.  Paul was converted in a mystical experience in an encounter with the Risen Christ.  Paul developed the theology of the death and resurrection of Christ which then became presented in the Gospel narratives.

Paul spiritualized everything.  He believed that every thing needed to be interpreted from having an inner conversion.  For Paul, death had two meanings; there was the death of the body and there was spiritual death.  Sin was the condition of being in a deathly state.   By taking a personal mystical identity with the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul believed that one could pass from a state of death into a state of receiving new life, the life of knowing God's Holy Spirit.  When this spiritual program of Paul was presented in the Gospel, the death of Lazarus represented the natural deathly state of living in alienation from God.  Jesus came to weep over our alienation from God and call us forth to live lives unbound from the bands of the fear of death.  We, like Lazarus, live until we die our natural physical death.  We live as it were, spiritual resuscitated lives, until our bodies die.  But when we die, then our resurrection bodies will take off like the butterfly from the lifeless cocoon.  So, here we can see the distinction in the mysticism of the early church between resuscitation and  resurrection.  Like Lazarus, we can sense the freedom of living again, even though we know that our bodies will die.  But in identity with Jesus as the resurrection and the life, we can live with the hope of a life that will be preserved in the greatness of God's memory.

So here are the layers of the tradition.  The event of Jesus.  The memorial traces based upon the experience of St. Paul and his mysticism of the death and resurrection of Christ as an invitation for each of us to embark upon personal transformation.  Then the mysticism of Paul written into the narratives of Jesus in the form of the Gospel writings.  In the Lazarus tradition, we are taught that we can have our spirits resuscitated by God's Holy Spirit, not to deny the eventual deaths of our body, but to partake of the eternal aspect of our nature that will live on because of belief in God as the ultimate preserving agent of greatness.

We can live in fear, ignorance and greedy, grabbing feverishly all in life right now in fear that we cannot have all that we desire because we don't have enough time to collect and take all that we desire.  This is represented by the rich man who neglected the poor beggar Lazarus.  It was represented by those who denied the future of the afterlife.  The Gospel of Christ is coming to a faithful wisdom guided by hope in a continuous future.  Hope is the baptism and cleansing of our desire.  In hope we know that if we don't finish all that we wished and dreamed about, we believe that the fullness of God still awaits us after we die.

Jesus came to deal with the alienation of the spiritual death represented by the sense of alienation from God in this life and the afterlife.  St. Paul took the experience of the Risen Christ as a mystical identity with the death and resurrection of Jesus.  He taught this identity as a method of spiritual transformation.  The Gospel writers then reweaved the spiritual theology of Paul and the early disciples back into the stories of Jesus in the Gospel to preserve the teaching in accessible forms to as many people as possible.  Today many people stay at the story level of the Gospels; they don't perceive the mystical theology hidden therein.

And you and I today are another babushka doll layer of the tradition of Jesus Christ.  We have received and borrowed and studied and prayed and been converted by all of the remnants of this wonderful traditions that have come to us.  We have attempted in our own personal ways to enter into this mystical experience of the Risen Christ being within us as our hope for a future beyond the bookend of our deaths.

Let us do all that we can to be a transitional layer of the traditions of the Risen Christ to those who are with us now and who will live after us.  If we seek to identify with the Risen Christ and teach this mystical spiritual tradition well, we may be faithful conduits of God's grace to the next generation, the next layer of the Jesus tradition.

Remember we always live in the later days, because now is always the latest day.  Let us take care to present the mystical tradition of the Risen Christ to everyone in the very best possible way.  Amen.

Sunday School, April 2, 2017 5 Lent A

Sunday School, April 2, 2017  5 Lent A

Theme:

Stories and Babushka dolls

Babushka dolls are like an onion.  They have layers.  They are a way of showing how things grow.  The way that you and I appear today includes all of the layers of stories about us before we became who we are.

The Gospel stories can be seen like babushka dolls; they are layers of story and sometimes bigger story includes a smaller story that came before the bigger story.

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus told a story about a beggar who was very sick who lived at the gate of a wealthy man and the wealthy man ignored beggar and did nothing to help him.  The beggar’s name of Lazarus and we don’t know the name of the wealthy man.  Both Lazarus and the wealthy man died.  The wealthy man after death went to a place of discomfort; but Lazarus went to a place of pleasure to live with the great Abraham.  In death, Lazarus and the wealthy man lived on the opposite sides and there was a big canyon between them that could not be cross.  The wealthy man was sad about being in a bad place.  He yelled across the canyon and asked that Abraham would send Lazarus back to life again to warn his family who had not yet died to live better lives so that when they died they would not have to suffer.  Abraham said that even if Lazarus came back to life and spoke to the wealthy man’s family, his family would not believe.  Why?  If they don’t listen to what Moses and the prophets taught them, then they would not even believe a man who returned from the dead.

The writer of John wrote about a man name Lazarus who died.  The sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha were very sad and when Jesus saw their sadness, he cried.  Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus and he called Lazarus back to life again.  But did everyone believe in Jesus after this happened?  No.  People still did not believe that Jesus was the Resurrection and the life.

So do you see how the later story about Lazarus who died was like another layer of the story that Jesus told about Lazarus and the wealthy man.

Remember you and I are in the outer layer of another babushka doll about Jesus and the Resurrection.  How are you and I making the resurrection of Christ appear in our lives today?  Are we doing it with love, kindness, hope and justice?  What will people in the next layer of life and history say about how we believed in the resurrection of Christ?

Sermon:

Do a Lazarus “mummy” sermon with strips of cloth.  Get a child to be “mummy” Lazarus and other children to help bind the mummy and then unbind him as you retell the Lazarus story.

When the pyramids of Egypt were opened, they were found to be burial chambers for the kings of Egypt.

  And when they took the dead bodies out of the wooden caskets what did they call them. Mummies.

  So when people died they wrapped their bodies in cloth.

  I need a volunteer mummy today.  Would someone like to volunteer?

And so we are going to wrap up our volunteer to look like a mummy.

  We read the story about the death of Lazarus.

  Jesus came to see Mary and Martha after their brother had been wrapped and buried.

  And Jesus cried when he saw the sadness of everyone.

  So Jesus went to the tomb and he said, Lazarus, come out!

And Lazarus came out.

  And Jesus said, “Unbind the man.”

  So let us unbind our mummy and let him free.

  Jesus wanted to teach people that God is stronger than death.  But death is very strong.  It can make us have worry and fear.  And these worries and fear can be like that clothes that wrap up the mummy.

  Jesus says, unbind the man.

  Jesus tell us that we don’t have to be tied down because of death, because, there is a new life for us after death.

  After death, our life is preserve by God.

  So we don’t have to live in fear of death during this life, because we believe that God will preserve us forever.

  Let us remember that Jesus is the resurrection and the life.  Amen.

St. John the Divine Episcopal Church

17740 Peak Avenue, Morgan Hill, CA 95037

Family Service with Holy Eucharist

April 2, 2017: The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Gathering Songs: Dry Bones, Christ Beside Me, There is a Redeemer, I Am the Bread of Life,  

Liturgist: Bless the Lord who forgives all of our sins.

People: God’s mercy endures forever.  Amen.

Liturgist:  Oh God, Our hearts are open to you.

And you know us and we can hide nothing from you.

Prepare our hearts and our minds to love you and worship you.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Opening Song: Dry Bones

Ezekiel connected dem dry bones, Ezekiel connected dem dry bones. Ezekiel connected dem dry bones. Now hear the word of the Lord. 

The toe bone connected to the foot bone. The foot bone connected to the ankle bone. The ankle bone connected to the leg bone.  The leg bone connected to knee bone. The knee bone connected to the thigh bone. The thigh bone connected to the hip bone. The hip bone connected to the back bone. The back bone connected to the shoulder bone. The shoulder bone connected to the neck bone. The neck bone connected to the head bone. Now hear the word of the Lord.

Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around.  Now hear the word of the Lord.

Liturgist:         The Lord be with you.

People:            And also with you.

Liturgist:  Let us pray

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Litany of Praise: Praise be to God! (chanted)

O God, you are Great!  Praise be to God!

O God, you have made us! Praise be to God!

O God, you have made yourself known to us!  Praise be to God!

O God, you have provided us with us a Savior!  Praise be to God!

O God, you have given us a Christian family!  Praise be to God!

O God, you have forgiven our sins!  Praise be to God!

O God, you brought your Son Jesus back from the dead!  Praise be to God!

Liturgist: A reading from the Prophet Ezekiel

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord."

Liturgist: The Word of the Lord

People: Thanks be to God

Liturgist: Let us read together from Psalm 130

If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss, * O Lord, who could stand?

For there is forgiveness with you; * therefore you shall be feared.

I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for him; * in his word is my hope.

Litany Phrase: Thanks be to God! (chanted)

Litanist:

For the good earth, for our food and clothing. Thanks be to God!

For our families and friends. Thanks be to God!

For the talents and gifts that you have given to us. Thanks be to God!

For this day of worship. Thanks be to God!

For health and for a good night’s sleep. Thanks be to God!

For work and for play. Thanks be to God!

For teaching and for learning. Thanks be to God!

For the happy events of our lives. Thanks be to God!

For the celebration of the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and parish family.

   Thanks be to God!

Liturgist:         The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John

People:            Glory to you, Lord Christ.

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."  When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Liturgist:         The Gospel of the Lord.

People:            Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Sermon – Father Phil

Children’s Creed

We did not make ourselves, so we believe that God the Father is the maker of the world.

Since God is so great and we are so small,

We believe God came into our world and was born as Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary.

We need God’s help and we believe that God saved us by the life, death and

     resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We believe that God is present with us now as the Holy Spirit.

We believe that we are baptized into God’s family the Church where everyone is

     welcome.

We believe that Christ is kind and fair.

We believe that we have a future in knowing Jesus Christ.

And since we all must die, we believe that God will preserve us forever.  Amen.

Litany Phrase: Christ, have mercy.

For fighting and war to cease in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For peace on earth and good will towards all. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety of all who travel. Christ, have mercy.

For jobs for all who need them. Christ, have mercy.

For care of those who are growing old. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety, health and nutrition of all the children in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For the well-being of our families and friends. Christ, have mercy.

For the good health of those we know to be ill. Christ, have mercy.

For the remembrance of those who have died. Christ, have mercy.

For the forgiveness of all of our sins. Christ, have mercy.

Youth Liturgist:          The Peace of the Lord be always with you.

People:                        And also with you.

Song during the preparation of the Altar and the receiving of an offering

Offertory: Christ Beside Me   (Renew! # 164)

1          Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me—King of my heart;  Christ within me, Christ below me, Christ above me—never to part.

2          Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand, Christ all around me—shield in the strife:  Christ in my sleeping, Christ in my sitting, Christ in my rising—light of my life

3          Christ be in all hearts, thinking about me, Christ be on all tongues, telling of me; Christ be the vision, in eyes that see me, in ears that hear me, Christ ever be.

4          Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me—King of my heart; Christ within me, Christ below me, Christ above me—never to part.

Doxology

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below.

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Prologue to the Eucharist

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, for to them belong the kingdom of heaven.”

All become members of a family by birth or adoption.

Baptism is a celebration of birth into the family of God.

A family meal gathers and sustains each human family.

The Holy Eucharist is the special meal that Jesus gave to his friends to keep us together as the family of Christ.

The Lord be with you

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

It is very good and right to give thanks, because God made us, Jesus redeemed us and the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts.  Therefore with Angels and Archangels and all of the world that we see and don’t see, we forever sing this hymn of praise:

Holy, Holy, Holy (Intoned)

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might.  Heav’n and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 

Hosanna in the highest. Hosanna in the Highest.

All may gather around the altar

Our grateful praise we offer to you God, our Creator;

You have made us in your image

And you gave us many men and women of faith to help us to live by faith:

Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachael.

And then you gave us your Son, Jesus, born of Mary, nurtured by Joseph

And he called us to be sons and daughters of God.

Your Son called us to live better lives and he gave us this Holy Meal so that when we eat

  the bread and drink the wine, we can  know that the Presence of Christ is as near to us as  

  this food and drink  that becomes a part of us.

And so, Father, we bring you these gifts of bread and wine. Bless and sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. Bless and sanctify us by your Holy Spirit so that we may love God and our neighbor.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed he took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his friends, and said, "Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me."

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine, gave thanks, and said, "Drink this, all of you. This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me."

Father, we now celebrate the memorial of your Son. When we eat this holy Meal of Bread and Wine, we are telling the entire world about the life, death and resurrection of Christ and that his presence will be with us in our future.

Let this holy meal keep us together as friends who share a special relationship because of your Son Jesus Christ.  May we forever live with praise to God to whom we belong as sons and daughters.

By Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever. AMEN.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we now sing,

Our Father: (Renew # 180, West Indian Lord’s Prayer)

Our Father who art in heaven:  Hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done: Hallowed be thy name.

Done on earth as it is in heaven: Hallowed be thy name.

Give us this day our daily bread: Hallowed be thy name.

And forgive us all our debts: Hallowed be thy name.

As we forgive our debtors: Hallowed be thy name.

Lead us not into temptation: Hallowed be thy name.

But deliver us from evil: Hallowed be thy name.

Thine is the kingdom, power, and glory: Hallowed be thy name.

Forever and ever: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Breaking of the Bread

Celebrant:       Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

People:            Therefore let us keep the feast. 

Words of Administration

Communion Song: There is a Redeemer (Renew! # 232)

There is a redeemer, Jesus, God own Son, precious Lamb of God, Messiah, Holy One.

Refrain: Thank you, O my Father, for giving us your Son; and leaving your Spirit ‘til the work on earth is done.

Jesus, my Redeemer, name above all name, precious Lamb of God, Messiah, hope for sinners slain.  Refrain

When I stand in glory I will see His face, and there I’ll serve my King forever, in that holy place.  Refrain

Post-Communion Prayer. 

Everlasting God, we have gathered for the meal that Jesus asked us to keep;

We have remembered his words of blessing on the bread and the wine.

And His Presence has been known to us.

We have remembered that we are sons and daughters of God and brothers

    and sisters in Christ.

Send us forth now into our everyday lives remembering that the blessing in the

     bread and wine spreads into each time, place and person in our lives,

As we are ever blessed by you, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Closing Song:  I Am the Bread of Life, Lord (Blue Hymnal, # 335)

1-I am the bread of life; they who come to me shall not hunger; they who believe in me shall not thirst.  No one can come to me unless the Father draw them. 

Refrain: And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day.

4-I am the resurrection, I am the life.  They who believe in me, even if they die, they shall live for ever.  Refrain

Dismissal:   

Liturgist: Let us go forth in the Name of Christ.

People: Thanks be to God! 

Aphorism of the Day, March 2017

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2017

One should not miss the textual fact that women in the Gospel of John receive privileged revelation in direct conversation with Jesus.  To the Samaritan women at the well he said, "I am he, the Messiah."  To Martha/Mary of Bethany: "I am Resurrection and Life."  And to Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection: "Go tell my brothers.."  It might make one ponder why women in the intervening years were erased from leadership roles within the church.  Authority derives from encounters with Christ; this is the charismatic event which should guide the "office" of ministry.  The signs of the "office" without the charismatic encounter can mean official ministry without effective or engaging ministry.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2017

The coming back to life of Lazarus who has to then die again begs a contrast of this kind of resuscitation with the kind of "coming back to life" that is proclaimed about Jesus.  The issue is complicated since the same Greek word is used both for what happened to Lazarus and what is confessed about Jesus.  The resurrection body of Jesus was different from the resuscitated body of Lazarus.  We moderns may be motivated by our scientific proclivities which did not trouble the early writers imbued by mystical experiences regarded to be so genuine and impactful in their lives that they had a equality of true meaning with the perceptual empirically verifiable experience.  (See doubting Thomas periscope) Gospel mystic writers believed mystical experience was as "really real" as the eye-witness empirical verification.  We on this side of modern science tend to privilege the "truth meaning" of empirical verification because it would assume an openness to all and not be foreclosed to the unique incidence of an individual mystical experience.  Lots of Christians had individual mystical experiences of the "Risen Christ" and the experiences were not corporate experience but they were corporate in the interpretative language which was available to them which enabled them to describe their individual experience.  The experiences were individually unique while the interpretations of the experience were provided by the community.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2107

John's Gospel is identified by the "ego eimai" εγω ειμαι  declarations of Jesus.  "ego eimai" is Greek for "I am."  There are eight "I am" statements in the Gospel of John.  "I am" is an affirmation of existence and it is followed by an equivalence tautology.  I am resurrection and life.  John's Gospel begins by declaring the beginning of human life as we know it as Word, which was with God, which was God and became flesh in Jesus Christ.  Jesus said that his words were spirit and life.  In John's Gospel Jesus speaks his personal existence into being in the life of the church.  In the poetry of the church, Jesus is way, truth, life, resurrection, good shepherd, gate of the sheep, light of the world, living bread from heaven and even the "I am" who was before Abraham.  The printed words of Jesus only have sense when one assumes the entire Worded universe.  In John's Gospel there are individual words which only have significance because the entire human universe is essentially a "worded one" since that is the only one we know and having words is the only way we can know that we know.

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2017

Blaming the absence of Christ.  "Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died."  It is sometimes a hard adjustment to reconcile one's belief in Christ and the hard reality of the outcomes of freedom in time, like illness and death.  If we think belief in Christ exempts us from probable occurrences in time, we may be asking for an exemption that Jesus did not have for himself.


Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2017

In the Gospel of John, physicality or naïve realism or commonsense reality is used as a metaphor for substantial experience.  Nicodemus was supposed to be "born" again.  People were to partake of living water and living bread and actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus.  The writer of John's Gospel repeated mocks the characters in the story who take things so literally, i.e., just the physical sense of something happening as being real while denying or being unaware of the substantiality of an inner spiritual event which really changes one's life.  The death of Lazarus and his being called back to life fits in consistently with "physicality" being used as a profoundly expressive metaphor to highlight what it really feels like to be called to spiritual life from the state of spiritual death.

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2107

"Again" is the adverb denoting repetition.  Repetition means that present action shares something of what has been done in the past and yet since it represents an action later in time it is totally new.  Something done for the first time and not repeated will never need the word "again" until the action is done for the second time.  Routine actions are done again and again and while they may seem to the same each time, there is a slow accrual of difference based upon the context of the subsequent event.  The Gospel of John uses "again" as a metaphor for the spiritual seeing which parallel the physical counterpart.  Born and born again.  Seeing again refers to spiritual sight.  Life can be fresh "again" as the interior lives are reconstituted by word and spirit.

Aphorism of the March 25, 2017

According to the Samuel the Judge when selecting a successor to King Saul, he was told that humanity looks at outer appearance but the Lord looks at the heart.  How does one have these "X-ray eyes" to see within?  The Gospel of John is all about having these "X-ray eyes" to see things about God that others don't see.  How does one receive this kind of "X-ray sight?"  By being born from above and receiving the Spirit of God.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2017

People who use the phrase "born again" often limit the phrase.  "Again" is an important adverb since it cites what is central to human life, namely, the repetition of actions over and over again.  Born again sometimes refers to a one time event of a spiritual rebirth but that places a limit upon the metaphor.  Conversion should be continuous and one should never stop being born into new knowledge and insights about God and life.  We are going to do things "again" today and while they may seem to be but the repetitive trace of what has been done before, we should appreciate the newness in time of what we do again and so bring an intentional new quality to what we do "again."

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2017

As much as we strive for agreement in science for having a common way of agreeing about what is seen outside of us and agreeing upon how nature behaves, the way we see is determined by how our internal lives are constituted by the language of this interior and parallel life.  Our language constituted insides is our spirit and our life and determines the way in which we see.  Our interior lives can become re-constituted through interaction with new word influences in such a way that we become converted to see things anew.  Former states of seeing become regarded to be blindness in contrast to the new ways in which we come to see things.  This is the sight and blindness model found in the Gospel of John to account for why some people found Jesus to be the telling insight of their lives and why some found him to be one to oppose because he was "over-throwing" a familiar way of seeing the world.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2017

The Gospel of John treats the outward and visible life as a metaphor for an inward and spiritual life.  One can be born from above, walk again in Jesus as the Way, see again, live again after death, believe again after doubt, eat living bread, be quenched by living water, and restored to pastoral ministry after denying Christ.  The physical world and ordinary passages of life are but the vehicle for the spiritual in the Gospel of John.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2017

What is most literal about the Gospels is that they are literal about being non-literal in their interpretation and appropriation of the theological symbolic order of Judaism.  St. Irenaeus said one was suppose to prefer a "plain reading" of Scripture.  But the most "plain" reading of "I am the gate of the sheep," is in fact an appreciation of metaphors that are quite distant from "empirical verification."  Even the seeming plain narrative of the life of Jesus in the Gospel is a metaphorical reading encoding the practices of the early Christian churches who trace the origins of their practices to the root event of Christianity, the life of Jesus.  All of the Gospel writing is but variations in metaphorical discourses.  So the Gospel should be read in a literary and artistic way and not in a journalistic literal way.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2017

The writers of the Gospel of John looked for answer as to why people could resist the otherwise irresistible truth of the Gospel.  Why do people disagree with us by benignly ignoring the relevance of our good news for them or by actively, even violently opposing us as a mortal threat to their way of existence?  One can see the Kuhnian notion of people living in different paradigms as a way for accounting to the fact that people "see" things quite differently even to the point of characterizing another person as being "blind" to one's truth.  The Gospel of John uses "sight" and "blindness,"  "light" and "darkness" to account for irreconcilable differences and incommensurable world views.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2017

Jesus promised the Samaritan woman "living water."  Baptism and the immersion in mikvah were supposed to be done in "living water" such as a river or spring, signifying their direct connection with divine creation.  The "living water" which Jesus promised was an inward baptism so that one could worship in "Spirit" and in truth.  Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born of water and the Spirit.  He told the Samaritan woman that he could provide living water within her life to help her worship in Spirit and truth.  This is that answer to the perpetual prayer request: "Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me."

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2017

The non-literal New Testament writers co-opted the symbolism of Judaism and "spiritualized" them.  The church was the new "Israel" (how could anyone who remained in the synagogue accept this?).  The meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is an origin discourse for the Jesus Movement in Samaria and since Samaritans were the offspring of the divided Northern Kingdom, the New Testament writers were announcing the reunification of the two divided kingdoms in the New Israel, the church.  One needs to appreciate the "creative" interpretation going on here.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2017

In analysis of how the meanings of words attach in approximation to empirical verification, one can note that John's Gospel move such approximations to quite a "poetic" distance.  The Gospels presents the Christ acts and words as "Signs."  The semiotic switch in the Gospel of John makes elements like wine, light, water, bread, flesh, blood, sight, blindness, death, life, being lame, gate, vine, birth, shepherd and storm on the sea into poetic metaphors quite a distance in verisimilitude from the actual empirical signification of the words themselves.  One can note that the author of John's Gospel is quite comfortable with the notion that Word creates the reality of human experience and all of the nuances therein.  Word creates the very notion of "physicality" in the Gospel of John whereas in the other Gospels one can still sense that their authors believe that outer physical world determines the world of words.  This has been overturned in the "advanced" Word metaphysics of John's Gospel.  Birth from above means one lives in a realm of "word reality" in different way than commonsensical "naïve" reality.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2017

The recorded insults of the opponents of Jesus in the Gospels include being in league with the devil, being mad and being a Samaritan.  Could be that Jesus and the Jesus Movement was a "Samaritan sympathizing" movement in that followers of Jesus befriended members of the Torah-based Samaritan faith whose members also had expectations of a messiah.  The living water discourse of Jesus with Samaritan woman at the well represents evidence of a Samaritan/Jesus Movement rapprochement.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2017

John's Gospel begins with the creating Word.  The creating Word in John is able to show how the signs of God are able to convert one to awareness of an alternate linguistic universe that one is born into and in this alternate universe one drinks living water and eats living bread and Jesus as this new word universe is Way, Truth, Life and Messiah and I Am, and Gate, Vine, Good Shepherd, Light, Truth, Resurrection, Life, Healer, Calmer of the sea, Alchemist of water to wine, Gospel text and much more.  The creating Word of John reveals that anything human can only be so because it comes to word.  Word in John is revealed to be the only valid human metaphysics and because of Word, humans name God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  That we have Word is the precursor to the confession of what is extra-linguistic and so Word is co-extensive with everything including the consciousness of humanity being word users.

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2017

One can understand the scientific frustration with "biblical poetic discourse" when metaphors of equivalency can seem to be on "steroids" and seem to lose all connection with empirical verification.  In John, Christ is Word and the words of Jesus are spirit and truth and God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth.  One can see the trouble that the empiricist might have in wanting "exact" language that can gain community objectivity wider than a group of people using poetic words of faith.  On the other hand, the answer is rather obvious; don't limit language and fail to appreciate contextual use.  Let your science be science and let your poetry be poetry and don't confuse the two and don't limit the valid truth values of either.  The two can have overlapping interaction, as when actual aesthetic, "spiritual," poetic truths move and guide that actual body language(empirically observable) of a person in morals and ethics.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2017

An underlying dynamic of the learning process presented in the Gospel of John is a transformation in understanding discursive practices.  Disciples and interlocutors of Jesus are presented as being crassly literal about everything and do not have the discursive insight which comes from being "born from above" to embrace the transformative meanings derived from the appreciation of an entire range of metaphors for the meaning of the life of Jesus presented within the Gospel discipleship manual of the community that has come to have the name of John assigned to its Gospel.


Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2017

Evangelical means something different today than it meant in the early Jesus Movement.  Evangelical means sharing the Good News of Christ.  Nascent Christianity was essentially evangelical because it was good news for a wider audience than the audience of the synagogue members who observed ritual purity.  It was an alternate theology to Roman citizens who had a smorgasbord of divinity choices and who knew the effects of the chief practical god of their everyday lives, namely, the Caesar and his political presence everywhere.  Evangelism in this context meant that Christians and their message was adaptive and winsome in the interstitial personal spaces of private lives and political context.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2017

In a Monty Python satire, a vicar in the pulpit declares, "My text for today is: "My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man.""  Part of the satire points out that we read the Bible selectively privileging certain portions and certain verses because they represent key features of our own group identity.  There are too many biblical words to give each word the same complete "inspirational" status.  For fundamental Evangelical Christians, they privilege John 3:16 as a verse of their identity and it is found in the same discourse which trumpets another marker of their identity: Ye must be born again.  Does the editorial selection of what is read from the Bible expose the fact that not everything in the Bible is regarded equally?  When is the last time you heard a sermon preached on the verse in Song of Solomon, "We have a little sister and she has no breasts?"  Such satires work because of the uneven way in which people regard various portions of the Bible.  One should not be too proud of how one regards biblical inspiration, especially if one has both purported it is all inspired and each word has equal inspiration in one's daily application.  Inspiration may have to do with the always already potential sublime effects of the biblical texts.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2017

The biblical record involves a posthumous theological deliberation on people in the past.  Abraham was a pre-historic, patriarch who fulfills an important role in establishing the coming to "self identity" of the covenantal people of Israel.  But much, much later Abraham becomes for Paul, the pre-Mosaic person who had a valid relationship with God before the Mosaic law existed.  Therefore if people could have valid faith before the Mosaic law and before covenantal relationship had become limited to keeping the Mosaic law within a community, then the Gentiles could be seen like Abraham; they could have valid faith without the benefit of living under the conditions of the Mosaic law within a segregated Mosaic community.  Abraham was "used" by Paul as a way to tie the Gentiles in with how Paul needed to understand Gentile Christianity in continuity with his "Mosaic" of "pre-Mosaic" roots.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2017

The writer of John's Gospel presents Jesus as challenging the unenlightened who see things with a literal mind.  Nicodemus asks how he can get back into his mother's womb.  The disciples say that if Lazarus is sleeping, it is good.  The Samaritan woman at the well has a mind set on actual water.  The seeing religious folk ask they are blind.  Jesus is not literally a shepherd, a gate, way, life, vine and light.  Disciples appear to be offended at the horrendous thought of eating flesh and drinking blood.  John's Gospel is about the "mysticality" of Word.  Word is Spirit and Word is Life.  Having word and language is the essence of human life.  That language is able to use physicality as its metaphor is also one of the magic effects of language.  As much as we trust an objectivity of the observations of our senses, such observations are both pre-constituted and post-constituted in word and language.  The Gospel of John mocks people who are trapped in the discursive habit of "physicality" being the only valid and true presentation of language.  Word and language are metaphorical in being and so being essentially metaphorical, word and language cannot help but spin endless metaphor.  John's Gospel asks us not to favor the metaphorical discourse of empirical physicality over the variety of discourses in language including the poetic.  The language of faith and love forces us to wax poetic beyond being limited to the metaphor of physicality.  Since seeing with our eyes is a most commonsensical discourse (based on our ability to manipulate things in our outer world),  in a comparative sense, such physicality is used to reinforce the reality/realness/actuality of other discursive truths, namely the aesthetic "moving" truths.


Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2017

The last shall be first.  This ironic statement found in the Gospel is hermeneutically true since the last or latest one who interprets anything actually creates the meaning of what happened in the past for the present.  St. Paul exalted the more obscure Abrahamic tradition to rewrite Gentiles into a spiritual lineage which pre-dated those who had inherited the Mosaic law.  When it comes to the Bible or to the U.S. Constitution, the latest interpreters are always reconstructionists since they make it serve their own current political needs.  We build our own view of the past and use the designation of antiquity to say, "See my tradition is longer and therefore more venerable than yours; ergo you must agree with my views."  We should be very humble about being the last or latest interpreter since very shortly we will be used to justify other people in the position of the latest.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2017

Sometimes the religious discussion about faith and works seem to be like a dog chasing its own tail.  We are told that by our works we cannot make ourselves "acceptable" to God and yet we have the words of Jesus which say belief or having faith in Jesus Christ is the work of life.  And so some religious people purport to be better in their work of believing in Jesus than others.  It is like congratulating oneself for being wise to take a gift and forgetting about the generosity of the Giver.  It might be that the work of belief has to do with the continual effort in time not to accept the habits of the inner sense of alienation from living and having our being in God.  We can easily become so locked into egocentric and ethnocentric limitation we act as though the divine Ground is so negligible as to be absent in its relevance to our lives.  Accepting the Risen Christ nature within us means that we work to acknowledge our connectedness with the Plenitude of the Divine Environment.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2017

One might re-appropriate the Gospel of John as a "deconstructive post-modern" Gospel in that the physical creation story of Genesis is re-visited as a linguistic creation of the world since awareness only happens because of Word and the derivative languages.  In John words are "spirit and life" and making word equivalent to spirit reveals the fact that words are invisible mystifications of interior states of human being.  Within worded beings, who are created by the Word, the Gospel of John also shows that one is re-born by Spirit-word to continuously be converted to the wider contexts humans can have as they explore the endless discursive realms of words.  Remember we have to use words even to talk about what we think generates words, such as "mind" or "consciousness" or even the science of the places in the brain responsible for "language."  We use words even to create the origin of words.  Words about words perhaps is the only valid circular argument because it is unavoidable.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2017

Opponents of Jesus said that his great works were achieved because he was in league with the devil.  The temptation of Jesus presented his resistance to Satan and the asserted his perfect agency as God on behalf of God within the human situation.  Jesus is God's bilingual expression in humanity uniting the mystery of God with what can knowably come to human word in personal manifestation.  Jesus as eternal word used his words to defeat the shadowy Satan at the horizon of consciousness.  The shadow of evil still lies at the edge of consciousness waiting as a possibility to tempt human agents to make it actual.  Following Jesus, we must resist and keep evil in its shadow form and not let it become actual in the agency of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2017

It could be that temptation and the valuing behaviors designating sin arise in the training liminal phase of moving from infant/child sense of time to the sense of time as chronological sequence of occasions or events which adults are attempting to give children orientation into.  When time as sequence of events results in comparative judgments as something bad or good or better and worse, people are vulnerable to the main issue of temptation, namely, the timing and frequency of human behaviors.  Learning proper timing is expressed in the famous verses of Ecclesiastes: there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven.  Wisdom faith is about finding "Kairos" timing or purposeful timing for doing everything in life.  Temptation involves possible choices set before us to mistime what we do in both when we do something and frequency (how many times we do something).  It may be fine to drink an alcoholic beverage at the right time.  We may be tempted to drink at the wrong time and the wrong frequency or repetitions.  Temptation is about mistiming in the choices before us that instigate the actions we end up performing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2017

Satan asked Jesus to cast himself down from a high place to prove his faith that God's angels would catch him.  And he quoted a Psalm as a text to support his suggestion.  There are several elements to this temptation.  Mistiming: Die before your appointed time.  Literalism: Take the Scriptures literally and not metaphorically.  Anti-natural laws: Belief in God allows one to defy gravity and its effects.  All of these temptations still occur for people today and to fall for these tricks makes religious folks often look very silly.


Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2017

Temptation involves being thrown off in our timing of what, when and where we should do certain things in our life.  Fasting as a religious discipline is a corrective measure for interdicting mistimed behaviors in our lives and reasserting a true freedom of self-control.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2017

If we are supposed to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, then we are assigned the perpetual state of being "less than God" as the state of sin.  And if sin means perpetually shooting the arrows of our mind, soul and strength toward an unreachable perfection, what is important is that we are shooting the arrows of our intentional words, deeds and thoughts in the right direction toward the right target.