Acts 16:16-34 Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21 John 17:20-26
Today is the Sunday after the Ascension, and the Ascension appears in the Gospel story to explain the disappearance of Jesus of Nazareth into his future state to be known as the Risen Christ in his invisible state but still effective presence within the interior lives of people.
The Bible could be called the story of people trying to explain the experiences of both Revealed and Deprived Divine Apparency.
Modern Science takes the Divine out of Divine Apparency, by studying only that which is apparent to the senses and the many apparatuses that are used to register, measure and test what we as humans are experiencing. Modern science is the method of statistical approximation so as to enhance our actuarial wisdom on how to best interact with our environments. Since the many experiences of the divine and what might be called the para-normal, or even the aesthetic do not conform to the scientific requirement controls of consistent replication, the divine or the transcendent is regarded to be unreliable scientific knowledge, even if such human behaviors are significant for sociology, anthropology, psychology, which do not have the reductive limitations of the natural sciences. So, the Divine cannot be erased from human experience if we include in the realm of the observable human behaviors the many interpretations which humans have given to describe and explain human behaviors, which include interior events deriving from the interior states and coming into language, in descriptions which do not conform to the laws of nature as known in science.
The practice of pitting science against human phenomenon which does not comport to eye-witness accounting or replication is a denial that human beings are multi-faceted and multi-discursive beings who know how to shift between scientific codes to aesthetic, mythical, dream, and "spiritual" codes within their unified being. But when religious persons try to insist that mythical accounts have the same empirical reality as a scientific or eye-witness historical account, then incredible confusion and misrepresentation of religion takes place. The experience of wonder and the uncanny of what we might call the aesthetic Sublime need not be incompatible with being full-fledged feet on the ground scientists.
Scientists themselves in their methods have the humility to not imply the reduction of all human experience to the scientific method and the discourses of scientific laws, because they know that scientific laws are not causatively absolute, but statistically approximate. This means that they are tentative, opened to be falsified in the future by a better explanatory law. Early science and Enlightenment thinkers adopted a "machine" or "clock" view of the universe, that is, God designed the universe running like a clock and did not intervene in the running of the clock or the machine. And the consistency of the machine discovered by reason and science was proof of the non-meddling great Maker. When a transcendent cosmology was denied by scientists, they held to the "uniformity of natural causes in a closed system," meaning there was was no outside interference from a transcendent and non-existent divine being.
As our cosmologies have become more horizontal, and denying of the vertical given that there is no up and down in our vast universe, there has arisen the humility of not knowing the edges of the horizon or lots that escapes our observation and ability to examine. What we cannot know is called the Negligible. We know it is there but we don't know how it specifically effects what we observed. This view was stated in a scientific theory called "Chaos Theory." The Wholly Negligible, that is what we don't know except as the Great More than we know, is the realm of myth and sacred traditions.
Human beings break up the pure continuity of uninterpreted Wholly Negligible with stories. It is unavoidable for humans with language to make up stories to give meaning within the morass of everything that is. And indeed, one might say that science is one such "story" form for explaining the meaning of our lives.
The biblical story is what we call sacred tradition with many stories to impart meaningful insights in the various context specific situations of the many writers who have been added to the community text book.
The biblical accounts are insights about the revealed and deprived divine apparency. Human experience include "pinch me" delicious occasions of all sorts from the perceived synchrony of good things happening in timely ways to the many occasions of the the sublime which brings the confession of the divine being apparent. Biblical writers wrote about how the divine was apparent to them and how to foster relationship patterns to practice a state of ready awareness for the divine to be apparent, sort of like the expression, when I pray, coincidences seem to happen.
But biblical accounts are also full of trying to understand what I would call the deprived divine apparency, as in what happens in the experiences of woe, pain, loss, misfortune, and the experiences of terrible mistiming causing human suffering. There are times when the weakness of God, or even the absence of God seem poignant as when the Greater Order of All seems to bend to the harsh results of things that happen in a system where true freedom is abroad.
Sacred tradition deals with Revealed Evident Divine Apparency and Deprived Divine Apparency and everything in between. Why? Sacred tradition is presented as an art of living with the potential continuum of what might happen to human beings.
The Hebrew Scriptures provides the story of divine apparency with the metaphor of a covenant between the divine and humanity, reinforcing that fact that human behaviors and choice truly effect the outcomes toward excellence or the mediocre. Moses and the Law is one of the highlight stories of how the divine was made apparent to people, and the Hebrew Scriptures are accounts of how people have lived with fidelity or failure in this covenant with the Highest.
The New Testament is a story about how the Divine became intensely apparent in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a story about the temporary deprived apparency of Jesus in his death on the cross. It is about the return of his revealed apparency in his post-resurrection appearances. Further it is about the deprived apparency of Jesus in the story of his disappearance that we highlight on this Ascension Sunday.
The Ascension of Jesus is a story about the seeming absence of Jesus and this could be interpreted as a deprived divine apparency. But the Ascension as the explanation of the apparent absence of Jesus became the occasion for the revelation of divine apparency in the experience of the Risen Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Another phase of divine apparency was articulated.
In the oracle of Christ found in John's Gospel, the members of the Christ community articulated their new identity in knowing themselves following the witness of Jesus as a unique child of God; members could express their identity as children of God and being one with Father, in a universal divine family. This oracle is presented using the genre of prayer, reinforcing the New Testament notion of a heavenly Christ interceding for humanity.
The New Testament is a collection of stories of sacred traditions of people who came to believe that following Jesus, they too were children of God and were commissioned to live with each other with the Risen Christ, the Eternal Word being the patron of their fellowship association. The New Testament writers told their origins stories of Jesus and the apostles who were commissioned to proclaim how the divine was apparent in the lives of all, following the professed example of Jesus. The stories in the New Testament are varied because the actual life situations of the followers of Jesus were quite diverse. The writer of the Revelation of John the Divine indicates conditions generating a hope for an imminent apocalyptic intervention as a visionary method of coping with the oppressive situation for the writer and the writer's community.
Followers of Jesus too had to live with experiences of when life circumstances presented both seeming divine apparency and deprived divine apparency. The writer of Revelations expresses it differently than do the writers of the other books, but they wrote about their experiences upon the continuum of when it seem the divine was apparently poignantly favorable, as well as when suffering seem to represent a deprived divine apparency.
The issue of divine apparency or deprived divine apparency is still an issue for us and our world. We are called to live the Gospel of Christ who represents God who comprehends the human experiences of enhanced or deprived divine apparency.
Let us embrace the witness of Jesus Christ who gave us an example to live with all, and to do it together, assisting each other come what may. Let us also commit ourselves to promote and spread the art of living as initiated by Jesus Christ. Amen.
