Prayer as Meaningful Discourse

7 Easter    C     May 12, 2013

Acts 16:16-34 Psalm 97

Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21    John 17:20-26            

Lectionary Link 

   If one says that something is true if and only if something can be empirically verified then this is a denial of lots of things that occur which are meaningful for us.  One can understand why people would want to put such a limitation upon truth.  It is an effort to control and certify meaning so that communication can be precise.  It is an attempt to bring the replication ability of the scientific method into all human use of language.  But really why would we want to do this even if we could?  If this were all that we aspired to in language then we might as well be happy that robots could take over, but human language gets colored in many more diverse ways in the fullness of human experience.  Moods, emotions, dreams, love, fantasies, music, intuitions and much, much more enter into our use of words and we are in fact complex language users with subtle upon subtle use of various discourses that arise from the endless variety of human experiences.  For us to limit meaningful truth to only what can be verified by scientific method would be a serious denial of what words do to communicate the fullness of human experience.

  Today’s Gospel is another reading from John’s Gospel on the Sunday after the Ascension.  And really all of the Gospels are post-Ascension word art that pertain the experience of knowing Christ in his resurrection.

  The events of the past are never empirical because as we relate the words about them, they are no longer here.  And everything before our eyes is rapidly becoming the immediate past tense much as looking at a river and assuming one is looking at the same water; oops, the water I was staring at has already gone downstream, the current flowing water only looks like what has already flowed past.

  And so we have recounted a prayer of Jesus, a prayer that Jesus would have said as it was shared by some people who believed that they knew Jesus rather well.

  John’s Gospel as I say endlessly is a confession about Word.  I find it very conducive to our postmodern period when we have begun to recognize the most obvious insight of all, namely, that words mediate every human experience.  Word accounts for the nano-second time delay between experience of something and the word that constitute our experience of something.

  The old insight was that things exist independently and before words rather than co-extensively and at the same time with people word-users.  Now we understand that things exist for us as humans because we use words.

  Let us try to force the prayer of Jesus into empirical only word use.  Jesus is praying?  Empirically it looks as though he would just be speaking to himself.  Or is he praying out loud so that his disciples taking dictation can record the words and then spend 2000 years trying to interpret a theology from the words of prayer by Jesus?

  Okay, by the content of the prayer of Jesus, Jesus is not just speaking to himself; he is speaking to a Being whom is addressed as Father.  And like Philip is quoted in the same Gospel as a preeminent doubter, we might ask Jesus, “Show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied.”  This is another way of saying, “Jesus, use language in only empirical ways and we will be happy.  Keep it simple.  Don’t go all poetic on us and refer to people and things that we cannot see.  Jesus, where is your Daddy to whom you are speaking?” 

 And of course Jesus had already answered, “If you have seen me, then you have seen the Father.”

  And this answer raises all kinds of questions for empiricists and monotheists.  An empiricist wants to say, “So Jesus you are Jesus and you are also Father and if you are Father, we assume that within your skin is the God the Father.”  So is not this an incredible limitation on where God could be? 

And if one is a radical monotheist, one believing that God could not be identified with anything in human experience since that would make God something empirical and thus limited and thus an idol.

  And of course we know the solution offered by the writer of the Gospel of John.  God is Word who is flesh in Jesus and Jesus gave us the model of how we are functioning, living and having our being in the reflexive play of words because the entirety of human life is constituted by a continuous performance of words about former words.  John’s Gospel is about how we find ourselves in the variations of how we know ourselves and our world in and through the word.

  Do you see how reflexive word is?  By word I say that I have human experience and then I turn around and say that it is human experience to use words.  We are caught in total circular word reflexivity and I think the acknowledgement of this is the great secret of the Gospel of John.

  Word is monumental; by word we attain the type of poetic oneness that Jesus was speaking about in his Prayer.  By word Jesus can say that he is in the Father and the Father is in him.  By word Jesus can ask that his disciples and all of the future disciples might be in the Father and in him.  But do you see how if one is a literalist about words and deny the explosive poetic meanings of word, how limiting this would be on Jesus as a user of language and upon us who desire to have the manifold expansive types of human experience that draw from us all many kinds of word use?

  So Jesus prayed that his disciples would be one and all in the future would be one.  And one wonder if it isn’t like a desperate request of mother about her children, “Can’t you all just get along?”

   The writer of John’s was well aware that there was a world outside of the writer’s community who did not understand his community and their language and their confession of a relationship with a risen Christ.  I believe that he was accounting for different language identity communities, something of what we call today a paradigm.  Why do bird of feather flock together?  Because they share a “paradigm” of word use that have them to believe that they are unified.  This happens in science, in politics, nationalism, in sports or any time there is a group identity.  What is it that gives group oneness or cohesion to a community?  It is an interior practice of a sense of agreement about how words unify around what is regarded to be a common experience.  The writer of John is very much aware about the unity that can come because of words.  Through words we get the closest to one another as is humanly possible.  The closest literal physical union between two people is in their child, but they lose their person identity because a new person comes into an independent existence.  So the way that people become closest is in the exchange of words; words go deeply into that mingling processing center within us and then goes throughout our entire being in becoming flesh in the action and presentation of our lives.  John truly understands the significance of Word and its vital comprehension of our lives.

  And if word is so vast as to encompass many discursive practices, can we admit that the discourse that we call prayer is a discourse that has a long history of practice in the history of humanity?  Prayer one of the best ways we can be involved with other people.  Sometimes it is better for us to express our thoughts about someone else to God rather than directly to the person.  Prayer is to practice a relationship with a person as preparation to actual interaction.

  Today is a day when we celebrate probably the most significant prayer force in the world, the prayer force of mothers.  Don’t mess with mother’s prayers, amongst other things.  The prayers of mothers are like long reaching tentacles that surround their children wherever they go.  The prayers are so pervasive probably most children ask first in all that they do, “What would Mom do or what if Mom is watching?”

   Let us remember today to accept the expansive use of word; let us not limit meaningful language to only what we can verify with our eyes.  Let us accept the discourse of prayer and accept that Jesus prayed and we should too as a way of acknowledging our visible and invisible connection with all things and everyone.  And because we have specific location within the group of people to whom we've been called let us pray for one another as we mobilize our desire for the mutual well-being of each other.

  And let us not get too theological and scientific about God and try to figure out God as Father and Son as theological doctrine.  Let us accept the example that Jesus called his inner guide, his Father and he invites us to this identity with our inner Guide and Parent whom we know as God.  And let us confess that we never want to be separated from God at all and so we can say like Jesus, if you have seen us you can see God as the originator of all life.  Amen.