5 Easter C April 28, 2013
Acts 11:1-18 Psalm
148
Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35
Do you ever talk
to your plants? Do you talk to your
pets? Why do you do it? Do you understand your pet’s language? Do you understand your plants? Do you believe in animal whispering? Plant whispering? Can you do this without your sanity being called
into question?
We do lots of
things in this life that are meaningful to us and yet we do not have the full
scientific justification for doing them.
We are but
prisoners of human experience? I am but
a prisoner of Phil’s human experience?
How can I know non-human experience as a non-human? A dog’s life as a
dog? How can I know non-Phil human experience as non-Phil
persons? Your life and as you know
it? Even if I have “whispering” gifts, I
end up translating the assumed experience of others into my own language of
understanding.
What is the nature
of inter-species relationship? What is
the nature of inter-personal relationship?
What is the relationship between differences?
From our prison of
human experience and from my particular prison of Phil’s personal human prison,
we confront the world with some questions.
Should the world feel what I feel or should I feel what the world
feels? Are both impossible? The
impossible assumption is that I can know what you experience and how you
experience or that I can know how a dog feels or how my plants feel. Yet the experience of faith is to live by the
impossible; by believing and acting as though we can know how another being
actually lives and feels.
I love the
expression of this assumption in the 148th Psalm. This Psalm is an expression anthropomorphism
gone wild. The Psalm is conducting the
orchestra of all Nature and imploring everything in heaven and earth to “Praise
the Lord.” Sun, moon, stars, wild
beasts, wind, rain, fruit-trees, hills, mountains, young, old, men and women,
kings and people of all kinds, Praise the Lord.
Can there ever be any more presumptuous anthropomorphism than this?
But we live by
this meaningful presumption all of the time.
And when we really do the impossible we live the very best. Compassion and love represent the extreme
faith event of empathy, presuming to walk a mile in the shoes of another person
in such a way as to be able to honor their life with the high sense of
adoration, veneration and care. And all
of this is based upon this impossible presumption, of being able to live beyond
the limitation of Phil’s human experience.
Projecting myself as being in the skin of another.
In the Gospel
lesson, there is a reference to glory.
Glory is the kind of intensified fame, adoration, regard, or veneration
that is given and received between different beings. We give glory when we confront excellence and
greatness. When we can say, “Wow, this
is so wonderful that I must confess its greatness.” In the experience of praise or adoration, checking
the ego at the door is not difficult.
These experiences happen to us when we have a brush with what we call
the sublime; it happens in artistic performance, it happens in the experience
of love, it happens at the oceans, in the mountains, in the forms of beauty in
this world, in extraordinary performance, in heroism and in myriads of moments
of the ego being caught off guard. When
we encounter the sublime, our egos are checked, we can offer voluntary praise
and worship and adoration.
Sometimes we are
forced to check our egos through oppression, through suppression or through
humiliation; but the best way for our egos to get checked is through an
encounter where we can naturally confess excellence as it casts a spell over us
wins us and whispers our ego to forget itself.
And in that moment we make room truly for another person and other
beings in our life.
Jesus gave an
eleventh commandment, a new commandment, the commandment to love one another as
a new standard of living. The standard
of love is the invitation to the impossible.
It is the invitation to live as though we can actually walk in the shoes
of someone else and feels as they feel, even though we know the sheer impossibility
of complete coincidence with the consciousness of another being. What is the mystical event of passing over
into the experience of another such that we can treat them with a different
sense of care than we would if we did not experience this sense of empathy?
I believe that
what makes the biblical wisdom tradition an impossible scientific tradition is
this impossibility of empathy; this sense of going out of ourselves into others
and being with them in such a way that lets them know the experience of care.
We certainly agree
with science about the validity of empirical experience but in our mystical
tradition we marvel that there is any ability at all for beings to have mutual
experiences conducted between us. And
not only conducted between us but done so in a way that has generated words
from experience such as sharing, caring, empathy and love.
There is something
about the ego and sense of self that often would like to make the epidermis an impenetrable
barrier of separation, but there is something about the experience of greatness
that can massage the ego to admit connection among all orders of being. In this great order of being from the sub-atomic
and molecule to all the unseen orders of the imagination we are able to
experience the belonging of togetherness.
We assume that we are enough like each order of being enough to speak on
behalf of all orders of being, and so as human, and in being human we speak on
behalf of other orders of being. We
speak on behalf of animals and plants and angels and demons and God, and we do
so as human beings, because we believe that connection is basic to our
lives. And we extend this relatedness to
all orders of being; why indeed do we go to Mars and to the moon and send our eyes
into outer space as far as we can reach..
We are curious about the full reach of how we might relate to all
things.
That is how we are
made; we are made for the impossible to believe that we can speak for all
things because in some way we are like all things and all beings. We believe
that all things and beings are like us in some way.
And that is where
God comes in; we need a confession of a great Totality to exorcise the
individual egos of all things and to convince us that we are not separate but
all together and that we live best in living together well.
So the Psalmist
anthropomorphizes all Nature as we all do because we believe that we share
enough in common with all of creation.
And we as people of faith believe that for all of nature to recognize
God through worship and praise is the very best way for all of us to check our
tendency towards separation before God’s greatness and believe that we are
called to be together in the mutually beneficial ways of love and creativity.
I believe that we
can anthropomorphize, that we can treat everyone in a humanly way, because we
share enough in common with all orders of life.
We as Christians, believe that God, theomorphized in the Jesus Christ,
that is, God treated humanity as though it could be seen through the divine
point of view. In Jesus, we believed
that God walked in human shoes so as to allow us to be merely human, but call
us to be merely human in the very best way that we can.
And we are human
in the very best way when we do the impossible, when we have the creative
imagination to go out of ourselves and into each other and into our world with
empathy, compassion and that great eleventh commandment, Love one another.
Let us continue to
keep at doing the impossible; for me, it means escaping Phil’s world to be in
your world, with you and for you.
Escaping our individual worlds to reach the impossible but mystical
state of empathy and compassion.
It begins when we
can all encounter the greatness of the sublime and when humility comes easy
when our adoration is won by the experience of One who is greater. The greatness of God gives us reason to do
the impossible; to go out of ourselves and into the realm of empathy and love.
Let us go forth
and anthropomorphize…I’ve got news for you.
That all we can do, be merely human, but let us do it the best way, let
us do the impossible. Love one another. Amen.
