Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Prayers for Epiphany, 2025

Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, March 4, 2025

God, let this eve of Lent not be one of silly excess in taking in too much of what should always be shared with those who have no chance of excess; but let it be a time of reflecting on strategies of how we might be better in the Christ command to love God and our neighbors.  Amen.

Monday after the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 3, 2025

Prepare us O God for the Lenten fast, when we begin to organize our lives to attain better timing in doing the things which are healthier for us and for more people in our world because we intentionally forsake selfish ways.  Amen.

Sunday, Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2025

God, you are great enough to accrue and accumulate all becoming; you have the memory to retain all phases of our becoming and to transfigure us with the hope of recognizable continuity with our selves in future states even beyond the life which we see.  Give us hope to believe in the light of metamorphosis which can shine us into our future.  Amen.

Saturday in 7 Epiphany, March 1, 2025

God of transfiguring energy or inner Light in time, in wisdom you have given insights about our processual metamorphosis, and in that wisdom we can be given the gift of language, not as but collections of cultural tropes and traditions of word use, but the gift of knowing Word as what is eternal and abiding.  Let such a gift of language be ours today.  Amen.

Friday in 7 Epiphany, February 28, 2025

Christ, who told us to let our lights shine, let us surface the inner light of the high insights which pertain to the love and justice for the well being and common good of all people.  As you were transfigured by love, let us also be transfigured.  Amen.

Thursday in 7 Epiphany, February 27, 2025

God, we are subjected to various phases in the procession of time and to the phase which we designate as after life;  we can only imagine an afterlife equivalent of the butterfly breaking out of a cocoon.  Grant us the hope of the reconfiguration of our life energy as beaming with light.  Amen.

Wednesday in 7 Epiphany, February 26, 2025

God whose omnipresence can be named as transfiguring processual sustaining life manifest as passing through the temporal phases of becoming; give us wisdom to orient ourselves to this train of time with faithful adjustments to what we are always becoming toward surpassing ourselves in excellence even if the scars of time seem to contradict that surpassing excellence.  Amen.

Tuesday in 7 Epiphany, February 25, 2025

God of the transfigured Christ, you remind us that phases are only temporary and we live in contrast of past phases with what is now even as it slips through our hands into what will be.  Even as with our use of language, we try to stop time, give us wisdom to reapply what we understand love and justice to have been in new ways now.  Amen.

Monday in 7 Epiphany, February 24, 2025

God, your have given us faith to deem the energy of entropy toward our seeming demise as the processual energy of metamorphosis toward the equivalent of our butterfly beings driven by an inner light; give us faith in the basic purposeful energy of life even while it is manifest in so many various phases of appearances.  Amen.

Sunday, 7 Epiphany, February 23, 2025

God, we crave the life of normal comfort when the heroic is not needed; steel our hearts for the time when the heroic is needed in the face of oppression and when we have the power give us the courage to prevent the oppression of others.  Amen.

Saturday in 6 Epiphany, February 22, 2025

Befriending God, give us perpetual the Spirit of friendship so that all differences which are used to regard one another as enemies might cease; grant us grace to be befriending people as we seek common good.  Amen.

Friday in 6 Epiphany, February 21, 2025

God, the experience of people who have called upon you has often been in the time of oppression such that the beatitudes were generated to help people live winsomely during oppression; forgive us for guilty silence when we witness representative leaders openly commit us to cruelty or abandonment of marginalized persons and nations threatened by invaders wreaking devastation upon them.  Amen.

Thursday in 6 Epiphany, February 20, 2025

God, in Christ we understand your humility to be emptied into the particular, even the particulars of our life circumstances, but that emptiness is fullness because it is connected with everything, everywhere, all at once such that what is emptied into the particular can never be separated from the All.  Give us faith to hold onto the deep connectedness even when the particular experience seems to threaten us with lonely isolation, and more horrendously, the moral bankruptcy of a nation of people.  Amen.

Wednesday in 6 Epiphany, February 19, 2025

God, we pray for a world where the heroic lifestyle of the beatitudes were not required, a world where forgiveness was not needed, a world where persecution, oppression, and hatred did not exist.  Help us not to generate the meaning of You as the requirement of our anxious dread that if things can go wrong, they will.  Give us hope to to believe that we were made good and that goodness is the normalcy to which we are are called.  Amen.

Tuesday in 6 Epiphany, February 18, 2025

Jesus, your words ask of us the impossible to not judge and to always forgive while we possess language which is the very continuous classification and appraising phenomenon of living; give us grace to be open to bless those who once have known our condemnations, and forgive those who have hurt us badly so that reconciliation might be achieved as the healing of our world.  Amen.

Monday in 6 Epiphany, February 17, 2025

God, whose kindness can seem to be a weakness when woeful people are sustained while they wreak havoc on myriads of vulnerable people even if death eventually ends them; give us faith to believe in the arc of just correction at work in the goodness of the perpetual sustaining of all things.  Amen.

Sunday, 6 Epiphany, February 16, 2025

Eternal Word, Divine Persuader and Rhetorician, expose to us how we are living lesser values by the revelation of your higher values which pertain to loving you beyond our own desires which create mere idols, and loving our neighbors who are oft messy as we are in needing perpetual patient love.  Amen.

Saturday in 5 Epiphany, February 15, 2025

Eternal Word who is God, you have imparted within us word ability wonderful and diverse to express the sublime and the mundane; give us grace and humility to recognize in our use of language we are instantiating our linguistic identity with you the Eternal Word, who inhabits anything that can be known.  Amen.

Friday in 5 Epiphany, February 14, 2024

God, who is Love, your Valentine to us is more than chocolate or flowers and it is not fickleness of affinity or desire; it is the continuous sustaining of us and all in all of the genuine freedom which comprises the probabilities of life; help us to funnel your generous sustaining love into acts of justice love for all.  Amen.

Thursday in 5 Epiphany, February 13, 2025

God of liberation, let us call our lives blessed when we are active to overcome poverty, hunger, prejudice, and sadness in our world; and let us know that it is better for us to experience such deprivations than to be those who actually cause the same for others.  Amen.

Wednesday in 5 Epiphany, February 12, 2025

God, free the wealthy from the woes of possession being what controls and possesses them; give them the joy of selling what they have and giving to the poor to follow their Christ-like better angels.  Amen.

Tuesday in 5 Epiphany, February 11, 2025

Blessed Jesus, you left us words of the beatitudes to remind us that we forever have room to grow towards what is perfect; give us strength to work to keep people from needing to know an adjusting blessedness to the conditions of poverty, sorrow, war and conflict, persecution, hunger, thirst,  and marginalization.  Amen.

Monday in 5 Epiphany, February 10, 2025

God of all conditions, help us to know how we are blessed when we are poor or bereft of the conditions which seem to define a normal standard of living; give us grace to be strongly poor with all who are poor because of the patterns of blind greed of people who do not tend to the common good.  Amen.

Sunday, 5 Epiphany, February 9, 2025

God of Hope, hope is our calling and the accompanying analgesic for our faith which does not yet see hope's utopia; and if hope is our pain killer, let the prayers and work of love and justice be what tires us out each day.  Amen.

Saturday in 4 Epiphany, February 8, 2025

God who has made us to be people persons because we are born and constituted by and with people; help us in our peopling behaviors so as to draw out of each one the best gifts for the common good. Let this continual mutual gift exchange be our perpetual calling.  Amen.

Friday in 4 Epiphany, February 7, 2025

Give ears to hear your Call O God, eyes to see your message and a willingness to heed, especially if it asks of us something outside our heretofore comfort zone.  Amen.

Thursday in 4 Epiphany, February 6, 2025

God who beckons and calls in the Mystery of what we do not yet know; let your Mystery be made known in the manifestations of love and justice to us and through us.  Amen.

Wednesday in 4 Epiphany, February 5, 2025

God, who is Wild beyond our attempts at domesticating you in presentations done mainly for the administration of people for the convenience of an imposed social order; give us insightful orientation toward everything that is happening with the appropriate filters of doing love and justice in actual ways with each other.  Amen.

Tuesday in 4 Epiphany, February 4, 2025

God, the infinite diversity of your omnipresence is the seeming negligible hum of the universe which resides beyond our range and does not give us in our smallness the ability to comprehend such greatness; give us we pray enlightened apparent intercourse with tangible and close encounters which unveil in specific events of our lives your incognito presence.  Amen.

Monday in 4 Epiphany, February 3, 2025

When O God, when will the rich be sent away empty, and the lowly lifted up?  Give us grace O God to be the underground care-givers of those who are lowly because of the neglect of the wealthy and powerful who do not subscribe to the Christ words to whom much is given, much is required.  Amen.

Sunday, The Presentation of our Lord, February 2, 2025

God our birthing parent of the Absolute Plenitudinous Past; you emptied the witness of your presence into Jesus and he was presented to his specific community in his time and place; let us be presented too to you in our specific times and places so that our humanity might be redeemed in knowing our always already connection with the inner Divinity of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Saturday in 3 Epiphany, February 1, 2025

God who empties into weakness in the actual situations of freedom when the greedy and powerful oppress the weak because they have the freedom to do so; we fear the awesome freedom which makes morality valid and enhances the experience of justice when it is realized.  Amen.

Friday in 3 Epiphany, January 31, 2025

God who has given us language to encode our existence and knowing of it; we find ourselves often encoded with the limitations of our time and place influences when we seem to be but the unthinking pawns of known and unknown habits of bias which prevent us from successful acts of charity; give us grace to expand our cultural codes to love's standard of loving our neighbor as our themselves.  Amen.

Thursday in 3 Epiphany, January 30, 2025

God, whom we are prone to forget because we are so locked into our provincial ghettos; let our rituals of remembrance be for us an invocation of your presence and blessing upon the specific rites of passage through which we transverse on our way to becoming holy humans.  Amen.

Wednesday in 3 Epiphany, January 29, 2025

God, the great expanding Container of All; all belong to you even though all do recognize such; help us to realize that we all belong together and we are challenged with living together in the best possible way for the common good of all.  Amen.

Tuesday in 3 Epiphany, January 28, 2025

God of Time and of our aging, we adopt rituals of remembering You in the times of our lives, so that among all that is lost in the process of time, we can retain community identity bearing our highest values of the love of You and our neighbors.  Amen.

Monday in 3 Epiphany, January 27, 2025

God who is the Great Expanding Container of All in Time; grant that what we add in freedom to the over-all becoming of all that is be works of love, mercy, justice, and kindness and so help to determine a better future.  Amen.

Sunday, 3 Epiphany, January 26, 2025

Good God, whom we confess that you have made us good; we confess that we have not lived up to our original goodness even to descend into acts of incredible inhumanity; we thank you for allowing Jesus to arise in our history as an example and as a grace to restore toward our original goodness and toward a hard won future holy goodness.  Amen.

Saturday in 2 Epiphany, January 25, 2025 (Conversion of St. Paul)

Holy Spirit, you are the dynamic presence of God in the process of history; through you we came to have the paradigm shift arising in the ministry of Paul, who wrote the Gentile people into the line of salvation history; give us grace to invite continuously those who have been deprived of the knowledge of their full inclusion in the family of God.  Amen.

Friday in 2 Epiphany, January 24, 2025

At some point we as language users came to call you God, or the one who used language to create by making word the flesh of existence; and from our experience of delight we have posited an original goodness even in the midst of the freedom for some things to be awful; give us grace to embrace the goodness of the good news which Jesus came to reinforce as what is the most appropriate representation of the original delight.  Amen.

Thursday in 2 Epiphany, January 23, 2025

God, whom we have come to deem as a Language Originator; with language and faith we have come to deem our existence as good, even when we have behaved badly and when the clashes in the conflicts in nature often put us in harms way; give us grace to believe in original goodness and empower us to preach the good news which was so exemplified in the life of Jesus.  Amen.

Wednesday in 2 Epiphany, January 22, 2025

God, who often seems incognito in the non-apparent; when greed and evil intent seem to have become the apparent public norm such that they have overturn values of truth, keep us faithful in the oft unseen works of kindness, love, justice, and mercy.  Amen.

Tuesday in 2 Epiphany, January 21, 2025

God of all probabilities, the presence of so many circumstances of bad news in our world cries out for the good news of healing, sight, peace, love, and the overcoming of greed with a great Spirit of generosity; grant us good news especially to those who are devastated by the bad news of their froward circumstances.  Amen.

Monday in 2 Epiphany, January 20, 2025 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)

While violence was practiced against his people, O God, you raised up Martin Luther King, Jr., to practice non-violence in trusting that the innate naturalness of love and justice could win the hearts of those who claimed religion but practiced oppression; help us to continue in the work of Dr. King, following Jesus to bend the arc of history toward a more perfect justice for all.  Amen.

Sunday, 2 Epiphany, January 19, 2025

God, you have blessed the human community with innumerable gifts and where they are exercised with wisdom and love, they promote the common good; confuse the gifts of the powerful and the greedy O God, and let the collateral gleanings of their selfish foolishness redound to the benefit of those who are in need.  Amen.

Saturday in 1 Epiphany, January 18, 2025 (Confession of Peter, beginning week of Prayer for Christian Unity)

God, we acknowledge that Christians seem often to be persons divided by confessing a common Messiah; give us wisdom to seek the more significant unity in pursuing outcomes of love and justice for all people in our world.  Amen.

Friday in 1 Epiphany, January 17, 2025

Omni-present God, we often wish that omni-present sustenance of all were more discriminating in what is being sustained as we observe that everything that has happened has the proof of having been sustained, even by the divine omni-presence;  we ask for fearful respect for the genuine freedom which we have in shaping how our world is sustained and help us shape the world toward love and justice.  Amen.

Thursday in 1 Epiphany, January 16, 2025

God of all and in all, individualize the signs of your presence to as many a possible so that our world can survive and be sustained in peace and care for one another.  Amen.

Wednesday in 1 Epiphany, January 15, 2025

God, how can we know your signs unless we first know the codes and translations of what a sign of you would be?  You gave us Jesus as the chief sign revealer of how to be humanly best in knowing the sign of what is divinely human and what is humanly divine.  Amen.

Tuesday in 1 Epiphany, January 14, 2025

God you have given us Christly presence as the power of imagination to supplement the seeming ordinary water of life and make it seem like an extraordinary feast such that others think we drink the elixir of wine, but we must confess that we are Holy Spirited people.  Amen.

Monday in 1 Epiphany, January 13, 2025

God, we like Mary, seek for the Christ to be in the mundane of our lives akin to dealing with shortage of wine at a wedding party; and even though in rebuke of our trivial priorities, we may hear a sigh of "what does that have to do with the higher priorities of the Risen Christ," we thank you for being involved in the child-like ordinary stuff of our lives.  Amen.

Sunday, 1 Epiphany, January 12, 2025 The Baptism of Our Lord

Eternal Word of God, you are coming to full solidarity with all humans in all human experience, and we commemorate your baptism as a event of the solidarity of the divine life with us, thus affirming ways of being human as valid ways to come to know what is more than human, even God as the Great Expanding Container of Life.  Amen.

Saturday after the Epiphany, January 11, 2025

God of Water, Wind, and Fire; who cleanses, quenches, breathes life, and warms and gives light; save us from floods and hurricanes, tornadoes, and devastating fires, and bring us renewing and rebuilding resilience when we know the worst effects of being caught in harms way of nature.  Amen.

 Friday after the Epiphany, January 10, 2025

God, the Container of All, into whom we have all been initiated by being born; we thank you for specific baptism and being received into particular communities of faith so as to continuously remind ourselves that you in Jesus represent the divine with us in such complete solidarity as to allow us to regard our paths as being valid ways of affirming our relationship in and through You.  Amen.

Thursday after the Epiphany, January 9, 2025

Forgive us God of all, for wanting the name of being a Christian country, or Christian community without manifesting the basics of being Christ-like in loving you and our neighbor as ourselves.  Amen.

Wednesday after the Epiphany, January 8, 2025

Eternal Word of God, giver of language which gives us ritual process within community; you became baptized by John to express solidarity with humanity in a particular moment of time and in becoming one with us you now invite us to become one with you in your Risen State in our baptismal states of becoming more Christ-like.  Amen.

Tuesday after the Epiphany, January 7, 2025

God of Omni-Manifestations, your omnipresence often obscures specificity to be known in personal ways; we thank you for the personality of Christ who is human enough to allow us to reduce you to anthropomorphic ways to perceiving your relevance to us in our specific situations.  Amen.

The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2025 

God, who existed before our calendars to observe your manifestations to us; we recognize that the Christ nature came from the beginning and came in Jesus, and will continue to come as the Light which enlightens toward the surpassing goals of enlightenment to which we are called; give us grace to adjust our seeing behaviors to the light of Christ today.  Amen.

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Transfiguration, a Pre-Resurrection Sign

Last Epiphany C March 2, 2025
Exodus 34:29-35 Ps. 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36
 


Lectionary Link

The New Testament word for transfiguration is the Greek word from which our English word metamorphosis derives.

We learned this word in elementary school when we studied the life cycles of butterflies and moths.  By appearance, an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly seem significantly different, but in fact they are only phases of the same being.  They undergo such dramatic changes that if one did not witness the changes while they happened one might say that there is a complete discontinuity between the phases.

We in our human life cycle observe the phases of human life and they too are different.  Photographs taken at different times in the span of one's life could not be proof knowing that such pictures were of the same person.  How many babies could even be identified from their sonograms?  There is apparently significant discontinuities between how people appear at different times in our life.

One of the great mysteries of human life concerns imagination and speculation about the phase of human life that we designate as the afterlife.  We presume to be superior to butterflies.  We can note that butterflies leave their objective immortality behind in the eggs which they lay for the next generation of butterflies, but their beautiful butterfly phase does not have an afterlife, except as their wings and bodies decay and transform to something else.  Humanly speaking with human presumptions about our anthropocentric importance, we love and cherish our butterfly phase so much that we would hope that this phase of how we have been constituted would have continuity beyond the grave.

The belief in the life of human metamorphosis including post-life continuity phase or phases became articulated in the New Testament writings as the way to cope with the greatest apparent discontinuity that we know in human existence, namely, death itself.

Can death be the cessation of all continuity of a being with itself?  Will I have continuity in my afterlife with the person whom I know myself to be now?

I would submit that the account of the Transfiguration, in being identified as the Light shining within Jesus, was given as a pre-Resurrection sign in the life of Jesus as he was making his metamorphosis toward death and his re-appearances in significantly different presentations in his afterlives.  Why his afterlives?  His reappearances were different for different people, because they were tailored to the experiences of the people who experienced him in his afterlife phases.

St. Paul might be one who most poignantly wrote about the transfiguration feature of the life of Christ, or the afterlives of the Risen Christ within the lives of those who experienced one of those appearances.

St. Paul said that the Risen Christ was revealed, not to him, but in him.  This indwelling Christ was the light and the energy and the down payment proof of the future resurrection of his spiritual body.  This Indwelling Risen Christ was the energy of the metamorphosis, the transforming, and transfiguring which was happening within Paul and all who invited this indwelling Risen Christ to be known within them.

St. Paul promoted this notion of transfiguration in life in his mystagogy.  He wrote that Christ was within us as the hope of glory, that is being transfigured by the holy presence of the Spirit and Lord of life.

The mystagogy of transfiguration came to be presented in the phases of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus was a presentation of Jesus meeting two other persons who had transfiguring events on mountains, Moses and Elijah.  Moses received the law on Mount Sinai and his face shone with a glow from having been within the cloudy and blazing presence of God.  Elijah experienced the fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.  These mountain events were mid-career events for Moses and Elijah and punctuated their prophetic importance, as well as their re-appearance in the apocalyptic fervor which so dominated the religious context of the Jews during the time of Jesus.  Moses and Elijah appeared on the mount of the Transfiguration to fulfill their apocalyptic roles and affirm Jesus as the logical successor in the train of the law and the prophets.  Jesus was an ending and a beginning; ending of a phase of the law and the prophets, and the beginning of a significant new way for God to be manifestly known to more people in the world.

The Gospels present the transfiguration phases of the life of Jesus as mystical teaching for us anticipate transfiguration energy in our lives which counters the devolving process of the apparent entropy which ends in death.  Just as the transfiguration was a sign of the ultimate triumph of the inward life Jesus in his resurrection reappearances, so too, the Holy Spirit is the sign of the counter life to the entropy of death which will result in our afterlives as our future selves, beyond our selves that we know in this life.

Let us accept the hope narrative of the transfiguration as we defy the seeming demise of our earthly appearances, with vision of what the hope implant within us might ultimately be.

Jesus was transfigured, so that we too might embrace the transfigured life as proof that energy never dies, it only undergoes constant change.  Today, let us embrace with the faith of the transfiguration life and ponder what we might yet be in our future.  Amen.

Friday, February 28, 2025

Aphorism of the Day, February 2025

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2025

It is our habit to confess "spirit" or "soul" as the mysterious essences of a person which the surgeons can never really locate when they cut us open.  The most truly knowable mystery about our inner selves is language or word ability.  Language mysteriously happens within us with obvious communicative results and even when surgeons cite language centers in the brain, the mystery of it is still not solved.  How we are constituted by our language is perhaps a better designation of our "essence" than the word spirit, which is derived from wind or breath.

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2025

It is hard to conceive of a world without time, even a world which does not rely upon a sensorial experience of time.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2025

The mantic or divination of images of the end need to be looked at not as future prediction but as how the dreamers' interior lives give them images of execution of justice for coping with their difficult times.  Too many literal apocalyptic people use the mantic visions to presume that God is on our side and is going to knock the heads of our opponents, as we see and understand our opponents.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2025

The camel driver warned not to believe the label on the package, "Pitted Dates." Bite very carefully he warned.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2025

For Paul, the resurrection is being "hooked on a feeling" that an inner self will not dissolve as energy to be dispensed like a big bang from the location of his death; but rather be an inner self with such continuity that it can only be named as a "spiritual body."  Body is a physical term and from the sensorial view point physicality is used as a metaphor of substantiality, meaning it is "really real."

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2025

The information about the lives of persons in the Hebrew Scriptures do not have the designation of being of the genre of biography.  In Romans times, "bios" was such a genre which the ancient Greeks also had.  The writers of the Gospels in their contexts were using "bios" genre as a presentation mode for the life of Jesus, but such presentations were tinged with "Risen Christ" mystagogy which meant that discerning readers had to perceive the difference between the literal and the spiritual.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2025

The predominance of modern science resulted in the classification of biblical writings as in the realm of the imaginary, and more like art or entertainment, and therefore lacking meaningful truths.  Religionists in a defensive inferiority complex posturing defended biblical stuff as scientific and so they themselves diminished the truth as beauty of mystical experiences and the discourses which such experiences produced. As people with language we have the ability to drive in different discursive lanes with meaningful truths representative of the kinds of experiences which produce the texts.

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2025

The multi-vocality of the writings in the collections of Scriptures which were voted to be canonical by human appraisers and assessors of their right to be the official text book for their various communities,  means that their variety changes their applicability to be in various ways and at various times depending upon the relevance of such applied meanings.  They also represent the inability of humans to attain the meaning of the love God, as in how was slavery once compatible with people who thought they were obeying God and now it isn't?

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2025

Some use the notion of "harmony" to say that God speaks with one voice through the Bible.  However, harmony actual implies multi-vocality.  Many voices together, different voices together.  One should honor the multi-vocality of the biblical texts of mere human being struggling to give voice to deal with the great questions of existence in their time in oft radically different ways.  The Bible is a collection of multi-vocality because it involves writers integrating the practices and cosmologies and the local knowledge of their times into their explication of their insights on how to live with the big questions of existence.  We are doing the same now in trying to integrate and synthesize insights from the "local" knowledge available to us to struggle in the art of living well.  We presume a discourse of totality not because we can speak with the authority of comprehending totality but because we assume that we are not alone because we are amidst everything else, past, present, and future.  Totality for us simply put is the EVER-MORE than us.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2025

Ancient history and ancient writings leave us guessing about the specifics of the contexts when they were written.  We are often left to use common sense intuition to try to translate ancient writings to our current lives.  Are the ancients so foreign to us that translations can only hint at a significant range of meanings?  There is so many writing about writing about writing such that the texts are layered with interpretations themselves.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2025

The care recommended by Jesus might be the ethical equivalent of the practice of triage in medicine; assess the urgency of the care needed and treat the most urgent cases first.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2025

Phrase from the Beatitudes in Luke: "God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked."  Is such kindness God's weakness as the hidden sustainer of all who lets the sun shine upon the good and the bad?  God's kindness is the weakness of allowing genuine freedom.  Human strength is determined by what side of good and evil we choose to be with our freedom.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2025

One's life can be analyzed by what one is passively and actively persuaded about.  Passively one receives the values of family and culture as the tacit persuasions of one's life.  Many of these go "unexamined" for one's entire life because one cannot "see" them.  Actively we take on new values as we are persuaded when confronted with the kinds of contrasts which require us to make value judgments which change our persuasions.  The New Testament word for faith, pistos, has the meaning in classical Greek, persuasion, which was the goal of the practice of rhetoric.  One's persuasions are perhaps forms the chief identities of one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2025

To appropriate the New Testament writings sensibly is to read them as explanation and teaching about the inward experiences of the writers using the genres available to them in the Roman context mixed with their appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures as templates for expounding on the meaning of the Risen Christ.  It is silly to import scientific discourse and modern eye-witness reporting genre onto the New Testament writings.  Today we have opposing parties fighting over the wrong thing; one says it's true because the natural laws were "miraculously" violated and they have modern eye witness accuracy, and the other side is saying they are not true because they violate the rule of empirical verification and the tenets of modern historicism.  The mystagogy of the New Testament can be meaningfully true even as a discourse of the Sublime.  There is no need to pit the scientific against the aesthetic.

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2025

Among the different kinds of love, agape, storge, philia, and eros, one is fortunate to combine them all on Valentine's day, to have unconditional love, friendship love, familial love, and the magnet of attraction.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2025

The logic of the Beatitudes is counter to what people normally would call a blessed and successful life experience.  Poverty, Sadness to the point of weeping, persecution and unpopularity,  being hated, and hunger:  Are these the states of blessedness?  And how is it that we sort of romantically assume this is the normal lifestyles of people who call themselves Christian today in situations of wealth, glee, popularity, and satiation?  The conditions of the beatitudes are what people try to avoid and this is regarded as being psychologically normal.  Interpreters have to do some intellectual gymnastics to appropriate them as being relevant to what most regard to be a healthy psychological and social life.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2025

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation."  This phrase from the Lucan beatitude seems exactly counter to Marx's phrase, "religion is the opium of the people."  Wealth is the opium of the wealthy, i.e., the controlling substance which make wealth a curse.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2025

How do we make sense of the beatitudes from our vantage points of comfort and privilege?  Nietzsche called the beatitudes slave morality or a transvaluation of values.  Isn't poverty bad?  No, it's blessed.  American Christianity has idealized the beatitudes while requiring the blessed state of the beatitudes of the peoples whom we have oppressed while confessing ourselves as "Christians."  The slaves who were brought to America received in a trickle down way the message of Jesus, whom they came to love even when their masters did not practice the love Jesus toward them, but required of them to live the beatitude lifestyle as their "job" performance.  We should be very careful about proclaiming ourselves as "beatitude" Christians to avoid hypocrisy.  I think most American Christians understand themselves as being "reign with Christ" people who are claiming pre-heaven on earth privileges.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2025

The Bible is a book with accounts of people of faith adjusting to many different conditions and provides insights for helping us adjust with wisdom in having the courage to changes the things we can while accepting the things we can't change.

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2025

Hope may be the positive name that we give for perpetual future and it is positive since it implies a comparative better than what has come before.  Hope is no guarantee that the future will be better but hope is what accompanies time and everything which happens to human within it.  It is the ultimate analgesic.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2025

Hope might be called nature's opium since the dangling carrot of a better tomorrow is a present analgesic.  Some people are just embarrassed because hope inspires invented narratives that are utopian, meaning, "no such actual places."

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2025

Even as Marx called the religion the opiate of the people, his own writings could be characterized as hopeful utopian literature wishfully hoping that good angelic people would prevail over bad people.  His kind of hope was its own form of mental opium.  Whatever our "ism," we rely on the analgesic of hope.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2025

Freud's book on religion is entitled, The Future of An Illusion, and we could also write books about The Future of Art and Cinema.  Freud means illusion in a pejorative way in that in his view religion cannot be mentally healthy behavior.  We should live our religion in meaningfully true ways just as we can live artistic lives meaningfully true in how we relate to significant mystery in our lives.  Bad religion can manifest signs of pathology; good religion can be embracing ourselves as multi-discursive beings who know how to keep the practice of each kind of discourse within their proper lane.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2025

Religion as faith perspective is a filtered way of processing the experiential data that one experiences.  Freud called such perspective an illusion.  Marx called it an opiate.  They were only partially right, since faith perspective involves coping with what is actually happening and to do so one often needs entertaining imagination as well as mind analgesics.  Just because religion can be imaginative and a pain soother does not mean that is all it is.  Many people get their mind analgesics and entertaining imagination experiences in places other than religion.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2025

Living is always already responding to stimuli.  The stimuli is the call and our responses are answers to that call.  God is the overload of all stimuli all at once which can be perceived as but a droning hum of the negligible because there is so much that confronts us.  We can only respond with our reductive funneling interpretation of what becomes apparent in its closeness to us.  The purpose of enlightened community is to provide filters of love and justice so that the call of God in its close apparency might reflect the values of love and justice.  The call of God is general in its oceanic flooding of us; the call of God is apparent in how it arrives specifically close to us in our particular circumstances.

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2025

Putting accumulating billionaires in charge of government is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2025

Interpret legal discourse as legal discourse, scientific discourse as scientific discourse, biblical discourse as biblical discourse with a community poetic of its own and be honest about its mystagogy.  Each discourse has telling meanings, or truths, according to its own internal interpretative rules.  Embrace the greater truth of humanity as multi-discursive practitioners.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2025

Ritual is real life theater.

Quiz of the Day, February 2025

Quiz of the Day, February 28, 2025

Which of the following non-Israelite is not in the genealogical line of Christ?

a. Tamar
b. Rahab
c. Ruth
d. Bathsheba
e. Asenath

Quiz of the Day, February 27, 2025

Who was not on the Mount of the Transfiguration?

a. Moses
b. Elijah
c. Andrew
d. Peter
e. Jesus
f. James
g. John

Quiz of the Day, February 26, 2025

What name did the unknown Samaritan woman at the well come to be known as in the church?

a. Doras
b. Photini
c. Lois
d. Eunice

Quiz of the Day, February 25, 2025

When Ruth, the Moabite, came to Israel, where did she live?

a. Hebron
b. Shiloh
c. Bethlehem
d. Jericho

Quiz of the Day, February 24, 2025

Which Gospel proclaims Jesus as the Light of the World but does not include an account of the Transfiguration?

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Quiz of the Day, February 23, 2025

"The widow's mite" is

a. a reference to the widow who shared her food with Elijah
b. the amount Jesus observed a widow to place in the temple treasury
c. the power of a widow as noted by Elisha
d. a parable Jesus told to convict the rich

Quiz of the Day, February 22, 2025

"The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," is found where in the Bible?

a. Proverbs
b. Ecclesiastes
c. Matthew
d. 1 Timothy

Quiz of the Day, February 21, 2025

"The wolf and the lamb feeding together," is found where?

a. Psalms
b. Genesis
c. Isaiah
d. Revelations

Quiz of the Day, February 20, 2025

Which of the following represents Paul view of the resurrection?

a. the physical body is resurrected
b. the body is resurrected as a spiritual body
c. the resurrection of the dead happens when the Lord returns
d. b and c
e. a and c 

Quiz of the Day, February 19, 2025

The term bishop is used in the New Testament writings where?

a. In the writings of Paul that scholars regard to be his
b. In the deutero-Pauline writings
c. In the Acts of the Apostles
d. In each of the Gospels
e. a and d
f. b and c

Quiz of the Day, February 18, 2025

"As a reward the Lord gave me the gift of language..." Where is this phrase found?

a. Ecclesiastes
b. Proverbs
c. Ecclesiasticus
d. The Wisdom of Solomon

Quiz of the Day, February 17, 2025

"He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored," is a line that Julia Ward Howe "borrowed" from

a. Revelations
b. Ezekiel
c. Isaiah
d. Daniel
e. a and d
f. a and c

Quiz of the Day, February 16, 2025

Blessed are you who are poor and not blessed are the poor in spirit, is found in what Gospel?

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Quiz of the Day, February 15, 2025

Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, might be called

a. a homophone
b. an oxymoron
c. a synonym
d. a translated phrase
e. a metaphor


Quiz of the Day, February 14, 2025

What might be true about St. Valentine?

a. he was a martyr
b. he was beheaded
c. he was shot with arrows, thus Cupid's arrows for the popular day
d. there are three recorded St. Valentines
e. a, b, and d
f. a, b, and c

Quiz of the Day, February 13, 2025

When the canon of Scripture become mostly settled?

a. first century
b. second century
c. third century
d. fourth century

Quiz of the Day, February 12, 2025

What do biblical scholars designate as "Q?"

a. the Signs book of John's Gospel
b. A source available to the writers of Luke and Matthew
c. a competing view of Jesus to Mark's Gospel
d. the source of all the parables

Quiz of the Day, February 11, 2025

Paul's ministerial companion Timothy was related to whom?

a. John Mark
b. Barnabas
c. Lois
d. Silas
e. Eunice
f. a and e
g. c and e

Quiz of the Day, February 10, 2025

In which Gospel are the beatitudes the "sermon on the plain" and not the "sermon on the mount?"

a. Matthew
b. Mark
c. Luke
d. John

Quiz of the Day, February 9, 2025

From whom did Paul receive "his" Gospel?

a. from Ananias in Damascus
b. from Cephas
c. from James in Jerusalem
d. from Stephen at his stoning
e. directly from the Lord

Quiz of the Day, February 8, 2025

According to various traditions, which person of the Hebrew Scriptures was not assumed into heaven?

a. Moses
b. Elijah
c. Enoch
d. Melchizedek
e. Elisha

Quiz of the Day, February 7, 2025

Which prophet wrote that Elijah would return before the day of the Lord?

a. Isaiah
b. Jeremiah
c. Ezekiel
d. Malachi

Quiz of the Day, February 6, 2025

The hymn sanctus used in the Eucharist derives from which book of the Bible?

a. Psalms
b. Ezekiel
c. Isaiah
d. Revelations

Quiz of the Day, February 5, 2025

Isaiah was called by God during the reign of what king?

a. Solomon
b. Asa
c. Ahab
d. Uzziah

Quiz of the Day, February 4, 2025

Who used the metaphor of having "child birth pangs" on behalf of converts to the faith?

a. Peter
b. Paul
c. Jesus
d. John

Quiz of the Day, February 3, 2025

Which two letters of Paul are most alike?

a. 1 & 2 Corinthians
b. Galatians and Romans
c. Galatians and Ephesians
d. Romans and 1 Corinthians

Quiz of the Day, February 2, 2025

The Presentation of our Lord derived from what event in the life of people of Israel?

a. the Abrahamic covenant
b. the Passover
c. the giving of the Law
d. the entry into the Promised Land

Quiz of the Day, February 1, 2025

Who is the most famous saint of Kildare?


a. Patrick
b. Brigid
c. Blath
d. Aidan
e. Columba 

Prayers for Advent, 2025

Thursday in 1 Advent, December 4, 2025 Gracious God who is as vulnerable and weak to the free conditions of the world as we are because the ...