5 Easter C May 15, 2022
Acts 11:1-18 Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35
As a species, we are distinct in being very language centered beings. Everything gets mediated through language; even when we were infants and were undeveloped in having language, as more advanced language users, we have to project upon infants their humans experience as though they were advanced enough to talk about it. When we see a baby's response, we make assumptions about how they are experiencing their world and we use language to do so on their behalf.
We are prisoners of having language but that does stop us from speculating about beings who are outside our language prison. We just assume, like the proverbial Dr. Doolittle, we can talk to the animals, and they can talk to us. And we assume that our plants react to our speech as well.
The Psalmist imagines that all the creatures and creation can praise the Lord. If praising the Lord with human language is our highest profession, then surely the creatures and creation must be able to do that too in their own way. Can we understand that as human beings with language communication ability, we cannot help but project that on everything which we experience?
The spiritual reason we do it is because in understanding Jesus Christ to be God with us, as the eternal Christ who was also declared to be the Eternal Word, the Eternal Language from the beginning. And we are made in the image of Eternal Word.
St. John the Divine writes it in a bit different way, by saying Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, in effect Christ is everything which can come to any alphabet.
As language users, we use language to first declare that we have experiences, and those experiences are classified by language. The Psalmist wrote poetry of projected experience, assuming that animals and creation were enough like us to have the vocation to praise the Lord. In fact, the Psalmist declares that the highest vocation of all creation is to praise the Lord. And this is completely consistent with the first commandment, "The Lord our God, is One. Worship only the One God."
What are other human experiences which we have classified in our language experience? We have dreams and visions, and dreams and visions are alike in the sense that they are different than our ordinary "feet on the ground" commonsense experience. Space and time rules don't apply in dreams and visions. Gravity doesn't apply in visions. In dreams and visions, the doors or gates of perception get opened and every sort of reality can get juxtaposed in this dream and visionary seeing. Peter had a vision, which he believed was God giving him command to eat "non-kosher" animals, the ones eaten by the Gentiles who were coming to accept Christ and having experiences of the Holy Spirit. This dream for Peter was preparation for him to be receptive to people who had different cultural eating traditions than his own. He was commanded not to make kosher habits as the basis for the determination of the love and favor of God. And in an expansive way, we need to see this as a teaching for us not to attach cultural and national restrictions on what the love of God can do for people who may be foreign to us.
St. John the Divine, wrote that he was "in the Spirit." He had his perceptual doors opened to the kaleidoscopic and merged presentations of heavenly realities. He saw and wrote about unbelievable and impossible things; things which cannot be possible within our commonsense reality. He heard a declaration that death, tears, crying, and mourning would be no more. He heard a declaration about their being a new heaven and a new earth. What could that mean? Why would God make a new heaven? Isn't the heavenly abode of God already perfect or was it polluted by the rebellious angels who promoted themselves as lesser gods?
St. John the Divine perhaps was one who had been a prisoner and forced to work in the mines of the Isle of Patmos. Suffering and extreme deprivations can create visionary states and these visionary states can be an analgesic from the severity of pain. Christians have been reading the Book of Revelation for years with some trying to force visionary states upon the commonsense state of human existence. It can't be done; what can be accomplished is the comfort of knowing that the fullness of parallel reality can provide insight, comfort, creativity, invention, hope, and inspiration for us as we have to live in commonsense reality most of the time. Many biblical fundamentalists would like to promote dream reality as the same thing as commonsense reality, and we need to be aware of where that kind of thinking is influencing our current political life today.
The last kind of human language experience which I would like to cite from our Bible reading today is what I call the declaration of providence. Providence is the reflection upon a higher and guiding purpose that one cites about a past event.
John's Gospel was written more than a half century after Jesus. It is a book of the providence of God as observed from the perspective of what had happened within the Jesus Movement. Practically speaking there is no past until the present. The past is invented when it is contrasted with the present. The leaders of the Jesus Movement could not pretend that everything which had happened in the fifty years after Jesus, didn't happen. The Jesus Movement had been successful. Why was it successful? To explain the success of the Jesus Movement, the life of Jesus is retold which include the seeds of why the Jesus Movement became lasting and successful. Telling the past means that logic has to be challenged. If a close friend of Jesus, Judas betrays him and turns him over to be killed by the Roman authority, Pontius Pilate, what is the commonsense logic? Jesus would be removed, and his movement will end and die. But how is the story told? When Judas is revealed at the Last Supper, Jesus said a strange thing: "Now the Son of Man is glorified." Jesus also told Pontius Pilate, that Pilate did not have any power to release him.
From the advanced position of fifty years of a growing and successful Jesus Movement, the individual events in the life of Jesus are declared to be the providence of God. And it is wonderful that some things turn out very surprising from some very dire circumstances.
As much as we believe in providence, and because we have experienced some eventual good things occurring after some very bad things, we still need to be very careful about presuming to know specific providence in the present, because we can really minimize present time suffering. And providence does not mean that everything bad has equally good consequences. How many people want to say that it is God's will for the Ukrainian people to be going through what they are because there is something better for them in the future? Can we see how shallow and minimizing it is for us to declare God's will for other people who are suffering while they are suffering.
Let us appreciate the language of having really big hope in such visionary presentations of a new heaven and new earth, without any dying, mourning and suffering. It is a vision of the reconciliation of all things; and in hope we can experience this as a parallel reality, even while we know that in our commonsense reality of the world, there is lots of real, real, suffering which we cannot minimize by declaring our hope in eventual reconciliation.
Christ as the eternal Word, invites us to learn how to understand our experience with language which presents God's love, as found in the most profound gritty proclamation which the writer of John's Gospel understood to be the words of Jesus:
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Amen.
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