3 Advent A December 11, 2016
Is.35:1-10 Ps. 146: 4-9
James 5:7-10 Matt. 11:2-11
How many of you who wear eyeglasses have multifocal lenses? Bi-focals, tri-focal or Quadra focal? How many of you have photochromatic lenses? These are lenses which adjust according to the amount of light.
Why do we put so many transitional views into one set of lenses? Well, we don't want to be switching eye glasses continuously and our eyes can be trained to focus through the various transitional areas to provide clear seeing. I did have difficulty when I had very small lenses and it meant that transitional areas were smaller and so my eyes had to be trained to look through smaller areas or my vision clarity was affected.
And if we think transitional lenses are amazing because they allow multi-seeing through the same pair of glasses, words and language are much more amazing than multi-focal eye-glasses. Our word ability allows us many different ways to see the world. And we are pretty good at switching back and forth in the different ways in which we use language. A child can look and see Peter Pan and Tinkerbell flying around in a movie; but why is it that a child knows when he or she jumps off the bed that they will not fly but become earthbound really quickly? They have switched their word glasses from magical realism and fantasy to commonsense, naïve realism that takes their previous experience with gravity into account. But what happens when a child does not make the transition from magical realism to commonsense seeing? A child might leap from a high place think he or she might fly like Peter Pan or Tinker Bell and coming crashing down to the floor. My dear child, it is okay to see through the eyes of magical realism in one situation but to try to transfer that to a situation of actual encounter with gravity is to have one's confusion get one into serious trouble.
We as people of language and word are blessed to have this language ability be so multi-focal and so diverse that it allows us to express the wide diversity of the human capacity from poetic imagination to detailed scientific brute facts. We sometimes are seeing things through poetic imagination and sometimes just the nitty gritty details of the gravity of brute facts. Lying, silliness and schizoidal behaviors occur when we begin to think that poetic imagination is brute fact or conversely when brute fact is poetic imagination. When such mistakes in application of discursive seeing take place, it can be either comical, tragic or just plain nonsensical.
The Bible is a book of words and language and it was written from various ways of seeing the world. When we read the Bible, we need to enter with intuition into the kind of seeing that the writer is writing from. When a writer is using poetic imagination, we cannot assume scientific discourse.
The writings in the prophet Isaiah include lots of writings from the vision of the poetic imaginary. The prophet creates another world which does not exist in any actual place; the prophet creates utopias. The prophet personifies or anthromorphizes physical environments. A wilderness can be glad and a desert can rejoice. This anthropomorphizing of the environment reveals something about the writer. The writer is living under environmental stress. His environment was not giving him and his people the kind of sustaining pleasure that he desired for himself or for his fellow citizens. He desired a more perfect environment where everyone could live and thrive in a poetically perfect place. He wanted to travel on a highway and be safe; he did not want to be attacked by lions or robbers when he traveled.
Isaiah spun a world of fantasy and magical realism and the vision provided comfort for him and his community to survive some very difficult days. One of the mistakes fundamentalists have made is due to the success of modern science. Modern science has been so successful, that religious people became intimidated and so they have made the poetic imaginations into the truth of some actual future event. They have tried to read poetry like a science book in order to say that the Bible is true. The Bible is true because it has poetry and many other ways of seeing the world. We are people of science today, but we still seek relief in the artistic presentation of poetic imagination when we watch television and movies and sports. We harm the Bible if we try to make it into the truths of a modern science textbook. We miss the poetic truth of the Bible if we don't read it and seek the similar kinds of truth for our souls that we look for today in novels, poetry, cinema, music, dance and sports.
The Bible includes an umbrella of language use some of which was meant to entertain and sooth people during some very hard times. Some religious people have been wrongly tempted to believe that things are only true if they are empirically verified or could be or will be empirically verified. They have come to read the Bible with only the lenses of empirical verification to try to defend the Bible as being true scientific truth or modern eye-witness journalistic reporting. This is the wrong way to defend the Bible and it is an offense to the beautiful, inspired truths of the Bible.
It is a wonderful truth to want an environment of plants, animals be friendly co-residents. It is a wonderful truth to want geographical features of rivers, hills, deserts, mountains and oceans to be friendly and supportive places for us. We want to believe that we live and move and have our being in the grandest environment of all, namely, living and moving and having our being in the Lord God. And what do we want to believe about the Lord God as our total environment? Like the Psalmist we want the Lord God to keep good promises to us. We want the Lord God to give justice to the oppressed, to feed the hungry, open the eyes of the blind, make the lame to walk, take care of the needy orphans and widows. We want the Lord God to frustrate the forces of the wicked so they do not have success.
The poetic imagination of what we want our environment to be and how we want the Lord God to be known, functions for us in ministering to our most basic nature of hope. As babes we were made to be hopeful and this expression of the hopeful means that language must allow us to wax poetic about the imaginary ideal. We need the imaginary ideal to inform the direction of our lives within the down to earth real scientific brute facts of the world of freedom. In the brute world of freedom we know that things can be anything but ideal. The ideal is challenged by the wound of freedom which is the probability that things can and will go wrong and bad things will happen.
The ideal utopian world and God co-exist with the probability of things going bad within the conditions of real freedom. We are people who have the privilege of language to receive hopeful comfort from the poetic imagination of the ideal while at the same continuously making pragmatic adjustments to hard conditions of freedom on the ground. This very struggle defines our identity as people who are constructed of both dust and divinity.
Another lens of our language is what the Greeks called "Kairos." Kairos is the experience of eventful time, times of transitions, times of crisis, times of endings and new beginning. All of the anticipation for the end of the world partakes of this discursive feature of "kairotic" or eventful time. The sacraments themselves are the rites of celebration of eventful time in our lives. The reason we often miss eventful or "kairotic" time in the church today, is because we've moved most of our eventful time into the secular sacraments of the world and even into the scientific world. Today, the scientific world tells us that life as we know it could end at any time through disaster or lack of conditions that can sustain humans being on this planet forever.
We should not discount the kairotic or second coming time discourse of biblical people. It was their poetry for embracing the future for which they did not like us, have more realistic modes of perceiving what the end would look like.
Another way that we need to appreciate the truth of the Gospel writers is how they wrote in parables about Jesus and John the Baptist to represent the seachange that had occurred because of the success of the Christian message. The Gospel writers wrote about Jesus as representing the entire Christian Movement. They wrote about John the Baptist as one who represented the entire movement of John the Baptist. Of all of the parties within Judaism, it seems as the most converts to the Gospel came from the substantial community of John the Baptist. The community of John the Baptist lingered until after the end of the first century. The Gospel writers, some of whom had once followed John the Baptist, believed that the purpose of John the Baptist was completely supportive of what happened in the Jesus Movement. The Gospels are proof that the writers were trying to convince members of the community of John the Baptist that it was okay to follow Jesus without being disloyal or disrespectful of John the Baptist. In the Jesus Movement so many wonderful things had happened; people saw, heard and spoke in a new way which overcame previous blindness, lack of hearing and speaking. People found a way to walk on the Highway of God. They found a community where the sick and the previously quarantined were healed by being welcomed into community. They found a community called a fellowship in which people took care of each other. They believed that having been dead in the condition of their sin, they had been brought to life by God's Holy Spirit. John the Baptist died before seeing the completeness of the Gospel success and so each Christian had a distinct advantage over John the Baptist. They lived longer and saw much more than he did. The appeal of the Gospel writers to John's followers was this: "If you truly followed John the Baptist, you can freely and whole-heartedly follow Jesus without diminishing your respect for John the Baptist."
The Gospel writers saw through lenses of peace and reconciliation. They hoped to bring the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus together as one community under the Risen Christ.
We are blessed and distinct as human beings because we have language. But language and words can be used wrongly. Let us learn to appreciate the language of poetic imagination as inspired truth. Let us learn to the appreciate the language of "Kairos" or eventful time. We have moved the language of Kairos into our politics but we need to know whether in the Bible or in politics, kairotic language represents a vital truth of our hopeful human nature. Finally, we use language the best when we reconcile and make friends. The Gospel church used the language of reconciliation to draw them together with the community of John the Baptist. The Gospel writers used Jesus and John the Baptist as figureheads supporting the union and friendship of these two communities of people. This was perhaps one of the earliest phases of the "ecumenical" movement. The language of reconciliation of the Gospel was a language of appreciation for John the Baptist and his important role in setting up an enhanced appreciation of Jesus Christ.
Today, let us be thankful for the many ways in which the biblical language teach us to see our lives. Let us seek to have wisdom to read the Bible through the correct lenses of language so that we don't confuse poetic imagination with empirical commonsense reality.
The Gospel message allows us to activate the truths of all of the ways in which we use language. Let us during the season of Advent learn to use our language in the ways which can develop our natures to their maximum multifocal potential. We are not poets only; we are not scientists only, we are both and much much more. I believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ is wisdom that calls us to our full development as persons, as persons who need to know how to use our words in the right ways.
Advent is and always has been about the comings of Jesus Christ. And he has come to us now, he will come to us in this Eucharistic event, and he will come to each of us in ways tailored to each person's experience. So, let us be ready for the comings of the Christ. Amen.
Why do we put so many transitional views into one set of lenses? Well, we don't want to be switching eye glasses continuously and our eyes can be trained to focus through the various transitional areas to provide clear seeing. I did have difficulty when I had very small lenses and it meant that transitional areas were smaller and so my eyes had to be trained to look through smaller areas or my vision clarity was affected.
And if we think transitional lenses are amazing because they allow multi-seeing through the same pair of glasses, words and language are much more amazing than multi-focal eye-glasses. Our word ability allows us many different ways to see the world. And we are pretty good at switching back and forth in the different ways in which we use language. A child can look and see Peter Pan and Tinkerbell flying around in a movie; but why is it that a child knows when he or she jumps off the bed that they will not fly but become earthbound really quickly? They have switched their word glasses from magical realism and fantasy to commonsense, naïve realism that takes their previous experience with gravity into account. But what happens when a child does not make the transition from magical realism to commonsense seeing? A child might leap from a high place think he or she might fly like Peter Pan or Tinker Bell and coming crashing down to the floor. My dear child, it is okay to see through the eyes of magical realism in one situation but to try to transfer that to a situation of actual encounter with gravity is to have one's confusion get one into serious trouble.
We as people of language and word are blessed to have this language ability be so multi-focal and so diverse that it allows us to express the wide diversity of the human capacity from poetic imagination to detailed scientific brute facts. We sometimes are seeing things through poetic imagination and sometimes just the nitty gritty details of the gravity of brute facts. Lying, silliness and schizoidal behaviors occur when we begin to think that poetic imagination is brute fact or conversely when brute fact is poetic imagination. When such mistakes in application of discursive seeing take place, it can be either comical, tragic or just plain nonsensical.
The Bible is a book of words and language and it was written from various ways of seeing the world. When we read the Bible, we need to enter with intuition into the kind of seeing that the writer is writing from. When a writer is using poetic imagination, we cannot assume scientific discourse.
The writings in the prophet Isaiah include lots of writings from the vision of the poetic imaginary. The prophet creates another world which does not exist in any actual place; the prophet creates utopias. The prophet personifies or anthromorphizes physical environments. A wilderness can be glad and a desert can rejoice. This anthropomorphizing of the environment reveals something about the writer. The writer is living under environmental stress. His environment was not giving him and his people the kind of sustaining pleasure that he desired for himself or for his fellow citizens. He desired a more perfect environment where everyone could live and thrive in a poetically perfect place. He wanted to travel on a highway and be safe; he did not want to be attacked by lions or robbers when he traveled.
Isaiah spun a world of fantasy and magical realism and the vision provided comfort for him and his community to survive some very difficult days. One of the mistakes fundamentalists have made is due to the success of modern science. Modern science has been so successful, that religious people became intimidated and so they have made the poetic imaginations into the truth of some actual future event. They have tried to read poetry like a science book in order to say that the Bible is true. The Bible is true because it has poetry and many other ways of seeing the world. We are people of science today, but we still seek relief in the artistic presentation of poetic imagination when we watch television and movies and sports. We harm the Bible if we try to make it into the truths of a modern science textbook. We miss the poetic truth of the Bible if we don't read it and seek the similar kinds of truth for our souls that we look for today in novels, poetry, cinema, music, dance and sports.
The Bible includes an umbrella of language use some of which was meant to entertain and sooth people during some very hard times. Some religious people have been wrongly tempted to believe that things are only true if they are empirically verified or could be or will be empirically verified. They have come to read the Bible with only the lenses of empirical verification to try to defend the Bible as being true scientific truth or modern eye-witness journalistic reporting. This is the wrong way to defend the Bible and it is an offense to the beautiful, inspired truths of the Bible.
It is a wonderful truth to want an environment of plants, animals be friendly co-residents. It is a wonderful truth to want geographical features of rivers, hills, deserts, mountains and oceans to be friendly and supportive places for us. We want to believe that we live and move and have our being in the grandest environment of all, namely, living and moving and having our being in the Lord God. And what do we want to believe about the Lord God as our total environment? Like the Psalmist we want the Lord God to keep good promises to us. We want the Lord God to give justice to the oppressed, to feed the hungry, open the eyes of the blind, make the lame to walk, take care of the needy orphans and widows. We want the Lord God to frustrate the forces of the wicked so they do not have success.
The poetic imagination of what we want our environment to be and how we want the Lord God to be known, functions for us in ministering to our most basic nature of hope. As babes we were made to be hopeful and this expression of the hopeful means that language must allow us to wax poetic about the imaginary ideal. We need the imaginary ideal to inform the direction of our lives within the down to earth real scientific brute facts of the world of freedom. In the brute world of freedom we know that things can be anything but ideal. The ideal is challenged by the wound of freedom which is the probability that things can and will go wrong and bad things will happen.
The ideal utopian world and God co-exist with the probability of things going bad within the conditions of real freedom. We are people who have the privilege of language to receive hopeful comfort from the poetic imagination of the ideal while at the same continuously making pragmatic adjustments to hard conditions of freedom on the ground. This very struggle defines our identity as people who are constructed of both dust and divinity.
Another lens of our language is what the Greeks called "Kairos." Kairos is the experience of eventful time, times of transitions, times of crisis, times of endings and new beginning. All of the anticipation for the end of the world partakes of this discursive feature of "kairotic" or eventful time. The sacraments themselves are the rites of celebration of eventful time in our lives. The reason we often miss eventful or "kairotic" time in the church today, is because we've moved most of our eventful time into the secular sacraments of the world and even into the scientific world. Today, the scientific world tells us that life as we know it could end at any time through disaster or lack of conditions that can sustain humans being on this planet forever.
We should not discount the kairotic or second coming time discourse of biblical people. It was their poetry for embracing the future for which they did not like us, have more realistic modes of perceiving what the end would look like.
Another way that we need to appreciate the truth of the Gospel writers is how they wrote in parables about Jesus and John the Baptist to represent the seachange that had occurred because of the success of the Christian message. The Gospel writers wrote about Jesus as representing the entire Christian Movement. They wrote about John the Baptist as one who represented the entire movement of John the Baptist. Of all of the parties within Judaism, it seems as the most converts to the Gospel came from the substantial community of John the Baptist. The community of John the Baptist lingered until after the end of the first century. The Gospel writers, some of whom had once followed John the Baptist, believed that the purpose of John the Baptist was completely supportive of what happened in the Jesus Movement. The Gospels are proof that the writers were trying to convince members of the community of John the Baptist that it was okay to follow Jesus without being disloyal or disrespectful of John the Baptist. In the Jesus Movement so many wonderful things had happened; people saw, heard and spoke in a new way which overcame previous blindness, lack of hearing and speaking. People found a way to walk on the Highway of God. They found a community where the sick and the previously quarantined were healed by being welcomed into community. They found a community called a fellowship in which people took care of each other. They believed that having been dead in the condition of their sin, they had been brought to life by God's Holy Spirit. John the Baptist died before seeing the completeness of the Gospel success and so each Christian had a distinct advantage over John the Baptist. They lived longer and saw much more than he did. The appeal of the Gospel writers to John's followers was this: "If you truly followed John the Baptist, you can freely and whole-heartedly follow Jesus without diminishing your respect for John the Baptist."
The Gospel writers saw through lenses of peace and reconciliation. They hoped to bring the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus together as one community under the Risen Christ.
We are blessed and distinct as human beings because we have language. But language and words can be used wrongly. Let us learn to appreciate the language of poetic imagination as inspired truth. Let us learn to the appreciate the language of "Kairos" or eventful time. We have moved the language of Kairos into our politics but we need to know whether in the Bible or in politics, kairotic language represents a vital truth of our hopeful human nature. Finally, we use language the best when we reconcile and make friends. The Gospel church used the language of reconciliation to draw them together with the community of John the Baptist. The Gospel writers used Jesus and John the Baptist as figureheads supporting the union and friendship of these two communities of people. This was perhaps one of the earliest phases of the "ecumenical" movement. The language of reconciliation of the Gospel was a language of appreciation for John the Baptist and his important role in setting up an enhanced appreciation of Jesus Christ.
Today, let us be thankful for the many ways in which the biblical language teach us to see our lives. Let us seek to have wisdom to read the Bible through the correct lenses of language so that we don't confuse poetic imagination with empirical commonsense reality.
The Gospel message allows us to activate the truths of all of the ways in which we use language. Let us during the season of Advent learn to use our language in the ways which can develop our natures to their maximum multifocal potential. We are not poets only; we are not scientists only, we are both and much much more. I believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ is wisdom that calls us to our full development as persons, as persons who need to know how to use our words in the right ways.
Advent is and always has been about the comings of Jesus Christ. And he has come to us now, he will come to us in this Eucharistic event, and he will come to each of us in ways tailored to each person's experience. So, let us be ready for the comings of the Christ. Amen.
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