7 Easter May 8, 2016
Acts 16:16-34 Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21 John 17:20-26
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.... and the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us."
In the Creation story God spoke words to create all things in this world and in John's Gospel we are told that the spoken and creating Word of God also was God. The Gospel of John is about how the life of Jesus was what God as Word would look like in a human life.
The Gospel of John is the last canonical Gospel written. The writer of John's Gospel assumed that Christ has risen and gone in his ascension and he has returned to the status that he had before the foundation and creation of the world; he has returned to be the eternal Word of God. I think that this means that God as eternal Word is always creating and sustaining the human world as we have come to know it precisely because we have words. We are most like God because we use words, and using words is how we ourselves become co-creators with God in how we articulate our thinking, speaking, writing and acting.
The Gospel of John could be seen as a study in the many forms of word or language permeating our lives. The Gospel is an affirmation that word and language are central to what it is to be human but it is not enough simply to possess language. We need to know how to use language real well. We need to know how to articulate body language with our moral and ethical behaviors. We need to appreciate all of the diverse forms of how we use language. Word use has so many nuances; if we use words wrongly we can harm our lives and the lives of others. Violent acts and careless deeds are wrong uses of body language. Wrongful use of language can also lead to foolish thinking. If we take poetic language to mean something literal then we can misrepresent our faith and bring it into public scorn.
Today is Ascension Sunday and the reading from the appointed portion of John's Gospel is part of the longest prayer attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. What are we to learn from this prayer of Jesus? The prayer of Jesus shows us that prayer is a valid discourse of language use. Prayer as communication with the unseen and the invisible is a discourse found in people of all times. And one might think that it is crazy to speak or try to communicate with those whom one cannot see, but it is perhaps a crucial development in abstract and imaginative thinking to be able to express a sense of empathy beyond one's own limitation.
Smoke signals and writing are forms of communication which take place between persons who are not physically present to each other. Telegraphy, telephones, email and now texting are developments in communicating without being physically present to another person.
Prayer is the discourse that is based upon having empathy with someone greater than us whom we sense is with us and enough like us to be able be in relationship with. One of the chief presentation of Jesus in the Gospel of John is his relationship with his Father. And the disciples were thinking, "Jesus, who are you talking to and about? We can't see the Father, show us your Father and we will be satisfied." The goal of the Gospel of John was to show us an ideal relationship between Jesus and God his Father and from this modeling, each disciple of Christ was to learn how to activate and enter into this kind of personal relationship with God which can attain the level of intimacy of the very best possible relationship that a parent and child could have.
Who are you praying to Jesus? Show us your Father and we will be satisfied. My Christian friends, who are you praying to? Show me your invisible God and my preference for using the scientific method will be satisfied.
People who are angry about God and about prayer as a valid discourse are people who have not developed this specialized discursive practice expressing another kind of abstract thinking. And yet people who pray too much and engage in excessive abstract thinking can often lose balance in their lives and such fanatics can then become the one who misrepresent people of faith to the world.
Jesus told his disciples, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." This is an expression of how human life bears the image of one who is greater than human life. We could say, "If you have seen humanity, you have seen God because we bear within us the invisible which is greater than us because of our connection with great Invisible."
The resurrection of Christ and the ascension of Christ have come to the language which the church came to use about how they could account for how it happened that Jesus was no longer present in the world. And even though Jesus was not present in the world, the church survived, grew and even flourished. How could the church be so successful if Jesus was unseen and invisible?
Jesus had both a Risen appearance and an ascension presence. The ascension presence of Christ was the transforming of the body of Jesus into the Spirit of Christ who could dwell within the inner space of each person. And how can this Christ be accessed? Through the abstract discourse of prayer. You Christians are crazy! To which Christians responded, "but it works!" We are able to access through this practice of prayer the sense of the exalted divine personal presence within us which we call the presence of Christ. And as we practice access to the presence of Christ, we have the power to transform our lives, our words, our behaviors and how we live together with each other through love and justice.
Jesus taught the church that prayer is a valid way for us to experience his life when he was no longer visible to us. Prayer is a different discourse than face to face discourse but because it is different we don't have to apologize for our practice of prayer. We can assert that it helps to access a different kind of abstract thinking and an empathy with hope which is attached to a future which is not yet seen. The abstract function of prayer which activates imagination to know a surpassing perfect person and ourselves as surpassing ourselves in the future gives us the ability to practice a valid judgment upon the current imperfections in our lives and our world. With this abstraction and empathy toward who and what we are not yet, we can be given inspiration for creative advance, and we need this inspiration for personal transformation.
Let us embrace the truth of the poetics of the ascension. In our modern age of space travel we know that up and down is based upon a very limited visual perception. We know that the sky is not a hard dome on which rise and set the sun, moon and stars. There is not a trap door at the top of a dome through which one gains access to a physical heaven with thrones. The language of the ascension was the poetics of prayerful relationship with God expressed in the Pauline poetics as being seated with God in heavenly places.
The ascension is a celebration that we have access to Christ in the heaven of our inner space. Why? Because God still resides in each of us because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.
Let us know that the visible and seeming physical ascension of Jesus was the Gospel writer using physicality as a metaphor for emphasizing the profound and real effects of spiritual transformation of the lives of many people.
The Ascension of Christ, invites us to the life of prayer and in this prayer we are called to the inner space of a heavenly perspective. We are invited continually to enter into a perspective on our lives which includes more than what we can actually see. And we access this perspective with the faculty of faith.
Today you and I can honor the ascension of Christ through the practice of prayer. Prayer is a valid discourse in the use of our words. It can teach us another level of abstract thinking which can provide us with new answers and new insights to assist us with the everyday issues of our lives. It can help us edit our faulty versions of each other and this world toward better seeing. And when we attain better versions of each other and life; we live better.
Let us not use prayer to make us religious fanatics who create wrong abstractions of our actual world. There are plenty of fanatics doing that today. Let us use prayer to participate in the abstractions of hope, a hope of a surpassing future which gives us the insights to act with faith in the present toward the practice of the love and justice of Jesus Christ. Amen.
In the Creation story God spoke words to create all things in this world and in John's Gospel we are told that the spoken and creating Word of God also was God. The Gospel of John is about how the life of Jesus was what God as Word would look like in a human life.
The Gospel of John is the last canonical Gospel written. The writer of John's Gospel assumed that Christ has risen and gone in his ascension and he has returned to the status that he had before the foundation and creation of the world; he has returned to be the eternal Word of God. I think that this means that God as eternal Word is always creating and sustaining the human world as we have come to know it precisely because we have words. We are most like God because we use words, and using words is how we ourselves become co-creators with God in how we articulate our thinking, speaking, writing and acting.
The Gospel of John could be seen as a study in the many forms of word or language permeating our lives. The Gospel is an affirmation that word and language are central to what it is to be human but it is not enough simply to possess language. We need to know how to use language real well. We need to know how to articulate body language with our moral and ethical behaviors. We need to appreciate all of the diverse forms of how we use language. Word use has so many nuances; if we use words wrongly we can harm our lives and the lives of others. Violent acts and careless deeds are wrong uses of body language. Wrongful use of language can also lead to foolish thinking. If we take poetic language to mean something literal then we can misrepresent our faith and bring it into public scorn.
Today is Ascension Sunday and the reading from the appointed portion of John's Gospel is part of the longest prayer attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. What are we to learn from this prayer of Jesus? The prayer of Jesus shows us that prayer is a valid discourse of language use. Prayer as communication with the unseen and the invisible is a discourse found in people of all times. And one might think that it is crazy to speak or try to communicate with those whom one cannot see, but it is perhaps a crucial development in abstract and imaginative thinking to be able to express a sense of empathy beyond one's own limitation.
Smoke signals and writing are forms of communication which take place between persons who are not physically present to each other. Telegraphy, telephones, email and now texting are developments in communicating without being physically present to another person.
Prayer is the discourse that is based upon having empathy with someone greater than us whom we sense is with us and enough like us to be able be in relationship with. One of the chief presentation of Jesus in the Gospel of John is his relationship with his Father. And the disciples were thinking, "Jesus, who are you talking to and about? We can't see the Father, show us your Father and we will be satisfied." The goal of the Gospel of John was to show us an ideal relationship between Jesus and God his Father and from this modeling, each disciple of Christ was to learn how to activate and enter into this kind of personal relationship with God which can attain the level of intimacy of the very best possible relationship that a parent and child could have.
Who are you praying to Jesus? Show us your Father and we will be satisfied. My Christian friends, who are you praying to? Show me your invisible God and my preference for using the scientific method will be satisfied.
People who are angry about God and about prayer as a valid discourse are people who have not developed this specialized discursive practice expressing another kind of abstract thinking. And yet people who pray too much and engage in excessive abstract thinking can often lose balance in their lives and such fanatics can then become the one who misrepresent people of faith to the world.
Jesus told his disciples, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." This is an expression of how human life bears the image of one who is greater than human life. We could say, "If you have seen humanity, you have seen God because we bear within us the invisible which is greater than us because of our connection with great Invisible."
The resurrection of Christ and the ascension of Christ have come to the language which the church came to use about how they could account for how it happened that Jesus was no longer present in the world. And even though Jesus was not present in the world, the church survived, grew and even flourished. How could the church be so successful if Jesus was unseen and invisible?
Jesus had both a Risen appearance and an ascension presence. The ascension presence of Christ was the transforming of the body of Jesus into the Spirit of Christ who could dwell within the inner space of each person. And how can this Christ be accessed? Through the abstract discourse of prayer. You Christians are crazy! To which Christians responded, "but it works!" We are able to access through this practice of prayer the sense of the exalted divine personal presence within us which we call the presence of Christ. And as we practice access to the presence of Christ, we have the power to transform our lives, our words, our behaviors and how we live together with each other through love and justice.
Jesus taught the church that prayer is a valid way for us to experience his life when he was no longer visible to us. Prayer is a different discourse than face to face discourse but because it is different we don't have to apologize for our practice of prayer. We can assert that it helps to access a different kind of abstract thinking and an empathy with hope which is attached to a future which is not yet seen. The abstract function of prayer which activates imagination to know a surpassing perfect person and ourselves as surpassing ourselves in the future gives us the ability to practice a valid judgment upon the current imperfections in our lives and our world. With this abstraction and empathy toward who and what we are not yet, we can be given inspiration for creative advance, and we need this inspiration for personal transformation.
Let us embrace the truth of the poetics of the ascension. In our modern age of space travel we know that up and down is based upon a very limited visual perception. We know that the sky is not a hard dome on which rise and set the sun, moon and stars. There is not a trap door at the top of a dome through which one gains access to a physical heaven with thrones. The language of the ascension was the poetics of prayerful relationship with God expressed in the Pauline poetics as being seated with God in heavenly places.
The ascension is a celebration that we have access to Christ in the heaven of our inner space. Why? Because God still resides in each of us because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.
Let us know that the visible and seeming physical ascension of Jesus was the Gospel writer using physicality as a metaphor for emphasizing the profound and real effects of spiritual transformation of the lives of many people.
The Ascension of Christ, invites us to the life of prayer and in this prayer we are called to the inner space of a heavenly perspective. We are invited continually to enter into a perspective on our lives which includes more than what we can actually see. And we access this perspective with the faculty of faith.
Today you and I can honor the ascension of Christ through the practice of prayer. Prayer is a valid discourse in the use of our words. It can teach us another level of abstract thinking which can provide us with new answers and new insights to assist us with the everyday issues of our lives. It can help us edit our faulty versions of each other and this world toward better seeing. And when we attain better versions of each other and life; we live better.
Let us not use prayer to make us religious fanatics who create wrong abstractions of our actual world. There are plenty of fanatics doing that today. Let us use prayer to participate in the abstractions of hope, a hope of a surpassing future which gives us the insights to act with faith in the present toward the practice of the love and justice of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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