Merely Anthropomorphizing in the Best Possible Way

5 Easter   C       April 28, 2013

Acts 11:1-18     Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35

 Lectionary Link

  Do you ever talk to your plants?  Do you talk to your pets?  Why do you do it?  Do you understand your pet’s language?  Do you understand your plants?  Do you believe in animal whispering?  Plant whispering?  Can you do this without your sanity being called into question?

  We do lots of things in this life that are meaningful to us and yet we do not have the full scientific justification for doing them.

  We are but prisoners of human experience?  I am but a prisoner of Phil’s human experience?  How can I know non-human experience as a non-human? A dog’s life as a dog?   How can I know non-Phil human experience as non-Phil persons?  Your life and as you know it?  Even if I have “whispering” gifts, I end up translating the assumed experience of others into my own language of understanding.

  What is the nature of inter-species relationship?  What is the nature of inter-personal relationship?  What is the relationship between differences?

  From our prison of human experience and from my particular prison of Phil’s personal human prison, we confront the world with some questions.  Should the world feel what I feel or should I feel what the world feels?  Are both impossible?   The impossible assumption is that I can know what you experience and how you experience or that I can know how a dog feels or how my plants feel.  Yet the experience of faith is to live by the impossible; by believing and acting as though we can know how another being actually lives and feels.

   I love the expression of this assumption in the 148^th Psalm.  This Psalm is an expression anthropomorphism gone wild.  The Psalm is conducting the orchestra of all Nature and imploring everything in heaven and earth to “Praise the Lord.”  Sun, moon, stars, wild beasts, wind, rain, fruit-trees, hills, mountains, young, old, men and women, kings and people of all kinds, Praise the Lord.  Can there ever be any more presumptuous anthropomorphism than this?

  But we live by this meaningful presumption all of the time.  And when we really do the impossible we live the very best.   Compassion and love represent the extreme faith event of empathy, presuming to walk a mile in the shoes of another person in such a way as to be able to honor their life with the high sense of adoration, veneration and care.  And all of this is based upon this impossible presumption, of being able to live beyond the limitation of Phil’s human experience.  Projecting myself as being in the skin of another.

  In the Gospel lesson, there is a reference to glory.  Glory is the kind of intensified fame, adoration, regard, or veneration that is given and received between different beings.  We give glory when we confront excellence and greatness.  When we can say, “Wow, this is so wonderful that I must confess its greatness.”  In the experience of praise or adoration, checking the ego at the door is not difficult.  These experiences happen to us when we have a brush with what we call the sublime; it happens in artistic performance, it happens in the experience of love, it happens at the oceans, in the mountains, in the forms of beauty in this world, in extraordinary performance, in heroism and in myriads of moments of the ego being caught off guard.  When we encounter the sublime, our egos are checked, we can offer voluntary praise and worship and adoration.

  Sometimes we are forced to check our egos through oppression, through suppression or through humiliation; but the best way for our egos to get checked is through an encounter where we can naturally confess excellence as it casts a spell over us wins us and whispers our ego to forget itself.  And in that moment we make room truly for another person and other beings in our life.

  Jesus gave an eleventh commandment, a new commandment, the commandment to love one another as a new standard of living.  The standard of love is the invitation to the impossible.  It is the invitation to live as though we can actually walk in the shoes of someone else and feels as they feel, even though we know the sheer impossibility of complete coincidence with the consciousness of another being.  What is the mystical event of passing over into the experience of another such that we can treat them with a different sense of care than we would if we did not experience this sense of empathy?

  I believe that what makes the biblical wisdom tradition an impossible scientific tradition is this impossibility of empathy; this sense of going out of ourselves into others and being with them in such a way that lets them know the experience of care.

  We certainly agree with science about the validity of empirical experience but in our mystical tradition we marvel that there is any ability at all for beings to have mutual experiences conducted between us.  And not only conducted between us but done so in a way that has generated words from experience such as sharing, caring, empathy and love.

  There is something about the ego and sense of self that often would like to make the epidermis an impenetrable barrier of separation, but there is something about the experience of greatness that can massage the ego to admit connection among all orders of being.  In this great order of being from the sub-atomic and molecule to all the unseen orders of the imagination we are able to experience the belonging of togetherness.  We assume that we are enough like each order of being enough to speak on behalf of all orders of being, and so as human, and in being human we speak on behalf of other orders of being.  We speak on behalf of animals and plants and angels and demons and God, and we do so as human beings, because we believe that connection is basic to our lives.  And we extend this relatedness to all orders of being; why indeed do we go to Mars and to the moon and send our eyes into outer space as far as we can reach..  We are curious about the full reach of how we might relate to all things.

  That is how we are made; we are made for the impossible to believe that we can speak for all things because in some way we are like all things and all beings. We believe that all things and beings are like us in some way.

  And that is where God comes in; we need a confession of a great Totality to exorcise the individual egos of all things and to convince us that we are not separate but all together and that we live best in living together well.

  So the Psalmist anthropomorphizes all Nature as we all do because we believe that we share enough in common with all of creation.  And we as people of faith believe that for all of nature to recognize God through worship and praise is the very best way for all of us to check our tendency towards separation before God’s greatness and believe that we are called to be together in the mutually beneficial ways of love and creativity.

  I believe that we can anthropomorphize, that we can treat everyone in a humanly way, because we share enough in common with all orders of life.  We as Christians, believe that God, theomorphized in the Jesus Christ, that is, God treated humanity as though it could be seen through the divine point of view.  In Jesus, we believed that God walked in human shoes so as to allow us to be merely human, but call us to be merely human in the very best way that we can.

  And we are human in the very best way when we do the impossible, when we have the creative imagination to go out of ourselves and into each other and into our world with empathy, compassion and that great eleventh commandment, Love one another.

  Let us continue to keep at doing the impossible; for me, it means escaping Phil’s world to be in your world, with you and for you.  Escaping our individual worlds to reach the impossible but mystical state of empathy and compassion.

  It begins when we can all encounter the greatness of the sublime and when humility comes easy when our adoration is won by the experience of One who is greater.  The greatness of God gives us reason to do the impossible; to go out of ourselves and into the realm of empathy and love.

  Let us go forth and anthropomorphize…I’ve got news for you.  That all we can do, be merely human, but let us do it the best way, let us do the impossible.  Love one another.  Amen.