May 17, 2009
Edwards (Knox) United Church
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 10:44-48
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
John 15:9-17
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
We see things out of what are called worldviews. They are like a pair of glasses, lens through which we see. Those of us who we wear glasses forget that until we take them off and the world is fuzzy. Worldviews are like that, for we don't notice our assumed perspective, that we see reality through social constructed ideas.
We have been watching Elvis Costello's Spectacle. He interviews musicians. Two common questions are: How has music influenced you; and one in the area of spirituality. Last week he interviewed Bill Clinton. Clinton said that music helps us notice things we would otherwise over look. In essence, artistic views are essential to how we are as humans.
What Clinton was getting at was that some form of art is like taking off our glasses and forces us to see in new ways. And good art or music is not only a way of taking off your glasses, it is a way of putting on new ways of feeling and seeing. Through aesthetics our understanding is changed.
My theological understanding is that the aesthetics is really a sub set of religious experience. Faith values up the human imagination, makes one look at the world in new ways, ask questions you haven't asked.
Religious vision is how we see beauty in the world. It is a way we access the imagination of God who calls us to beauty. Religious experience makes clear that beauty is at the heart of all experience, and beauty arises out of the love of God for the world.
Augustine of Hippo describes this new way of "seeing" things as the "healing of the eye of the heart" by divine grace:
Our whole business in this life is to heal the eye of the heart (sanare oculum cordis), so that God might be seen.
This "light of grace" is the aim of God coming to the aid of humanity's incapacity to see and feel fully. This is done by "bestowing vision," thus enabling us to discern God's presence and activity within the natural realm.
Our sense of God opens us to new realities, new ways of engaging the issues of our world. To do that our faith understanding must expand to give us more a vivid way of experiencing God.
Creative, generating new ideas and insights in response to "surprising facts" gives us a way to navigate through the issues of our time. "New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth."
The religious journey is motivated by the observation of a "surprising fact," "genuine doubt," and "genuine surprise." It is not merely a logical operation, but is rather to be understood as a spontaneous activity of the mind which makes the strange familiar, making sense of what has surprised us.
When we are open to the idea that God is continually doing a new thing we will embrace a sense of "puzzlement," something intuitive about how we are to be in the world.
When our texts speak of the Holy Spirit, I think they are speaking of this process of seeing the world in new ways through new glasses. The insight comes to us "like a flash," as an "act of insight."
The Holy Spirit works most fully through our participation in events that focus on religious meaning. Music may move us, however when it is done in religious contexts and is explicitly religious, it opens us to a deeper reality, to see the sacred in all things.
The way we image the world helps us see the world. Faith is a way to create an image that helps us see the world as beloved by God and that we have a role to play in the dream of God, to help God achieve it.
Our sight is, nevertheless, elicited by observation, and the process of reflection. The experience of God is made more vivid by worship and thinking, by study and by action. And our living out the dream of God makes more vivid our sense of God. It is things that surprise us that often trigger lines of thought that lead to new discoveries or perspectives.
Our texts are about this shift in religious understanding, that the Holy Spirit is calling us into new understandings.
There is Peter with a group from the original community. We see this in the comment of the circumcised and we know that meant there had been an idea of what the tradition demanded – circumcision. Yet they are surprised, it is not demanded any more, membership had been redefined. The tradition had expanded and the tradition is now understood no longer as some given, unchanging mode of thinking or practice. The tradition is now one of being open to new insights, new ways of being as a community. Christianity moves beyond some form of dogma or this is an unchanging idea, to reflection and new ways of being the community that speaks to new realities.
In the gospel of John, we see the basic idea that forms and sustains the community of faith, allows change. It is the idea of love of God.
John tells us the community had been changed by their encounter with Jesus. We get the radical understanding of how we are internal and externally related - it is as friends.
The phrase "no longer servants" changes the dynamic of personal relationships. It is a concept of equalitarian. In John's time, one was connect through kinship networks or institutional relationships like master/slave. Friendship as we know it, which is we can be friends across gender, class and ethnicity, did not exist. But the aim of God to love, the call to us to love one another, moves us into new ways of relating. It is a call to organize our world where we care for all, even those who are outside our familiar networks. It is to be friends in Christ.
We are still working on this insight. For it is hard for the church to move beyond what it has known. A friend says his congregation has not come to terms with the fact it is based on a family systems model. This is where, as someone once said to me in Renfrew, "I have been here for twenty years but really I am an outsider because I was not born here."
The family system church identity is determined by who belongs to whom. This can be a strength. It can sometimes stops change. The way to overcome this is to acknowledge the nature of the community, and to understand how it works in creating an identity. From there the community can begin to move to a friendship network. Even there, there is work to be done. Because we can define friends as neighbours, and since we don't want to cause dissension in the neighborhood, the one different can be excluded.
What the radical sense of friendship means is that we can risk truth telling. A friend can make us think in new ways by a small challenge to how have seen things. It is a small word, have you thought of this? Here is another way of seeing the issue.
I know I count on friends to speak truth in love. They can encourage me to think again when I am being blind. In the Citizen, Sue Johnson said:
Saying, "This is so hard. I know you are worried and hurt, but I am here and we can do this together," isn't just kindness; it is literally the ability to deactivate the alarm centers in your partner's brain.
Being a friend can move us into unknown territories. And when we are a friend in Christ we can dream dreams of love that can change the contours of our world.
George Hermanson,
www.georgehermanson.com
