7 Easter C May 12, 2013
Acts 16:16-34 Psalm 97
Revelation
22:12-14,16-17,20-21 John 17:20-26
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.
