Easter 7A: Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11 “Becoming One”
Our scripture lessons for today are but a few pages apart in our Christian Bible and are but a few days or weeks apart in physical time. Our Gospel lesson places Jesus with the disciples, still at the Last Supper, praying with and for them. The lesson from Acts takes place in the ensuing weeks, after Jesus has paid post-resurrection visits to some. Remember our downtrodden friends from Emmaus who were trudging along the road after the crucifixion? Remember the man who came alongside them and unfolded for them the whole meaning of the scripture? That man was Jesus, and that was what is called “a post-resurrection visit.” The passage that Norm read today is called “the ascension” and is perhaps a form of final farewell. But we who know Jesus in our hearts know that he never dies, he never really leaves.
The phrase that I’d like to magnify for our consideration today is found on the front of your bulletin. It is the identifying phrase for the United Church of Christ. It is Jesus’ prayer that we may all be one. What does this mean exactly? Look at the person next to you. It seems he or she has a bag of skin and bones, a head of hair (maybe lots, maybe little), certain ways of looking at things, a style and manner of speaking. How could you possibly “be one” with this person? I am sure you have guessed the answer. Jesus was not asking that we be one in our physical manifestation, he is asking that we be one in spirit.
Last week we discussed how Jesus was sending a “paraklete,” a comforter and defender to be with us forever. We came to understand that this was a new word he was using to describe the Holy Spirit. We laughed as we watched two adults try to pass a grapefruit from one set of feet to another, as emperor penguins pass off their one and only egg in a sharing of parental responsibility. I mentioned to you that last week’s lesson was the “passing off” of humanity from the physical presence of Jesus to the care of the Holy Spirit. Right now the disciples are somewhere between those two sets of feet. After the ascension in particular, they are bereft and longing for their leader, Jesus. Soon they will receive the Holy Spirit but they have not experienced this.
Does the term “Holy Spirit” sit easily with you? I know that in my faith journey, I somewhere developed an aversion to the word “God” because it was so often meant to imply “God the Father” which was too patriarchal for my taste. And even the word “Jesus” seemed somehow co-opted by the religious right. But “Holy Spirit” was a term that rolled off my tongue and penetrated my heart. Because it is invisible, it can’t really be claimed by either gender, and I loved that.
In my reading last week, I came across a writer whose Eastern religion background caused him to stumble with the term “Holy Spirit.” Here is what he said, “…I had a little trouble at first using terms like ‘Holy Spirit,’ (but) I knew that I could substitute the word ‘Tao’ without changing the meaning. Holy Spirit was still the impersonal God energy that manifests equally through each one of us, just as the Tao does.” (Ferrini, Return to the Garden, p. 19) The author, Paul Ferrini, was somewhat new to a deep understanding of Christianity. But he has become a strong voice now for the understanding that each one of us can have an ongoing relationship with God in our hearts and minds. That we can ask for help and receive it. That we can bring our problems to God and be guided as to how to proceed in a way that honors everyone in our experience (p. 20)
Ferrini began holding workshops to explore his understandings of Christianity. He came to understand at a deep level the importance of apprehending Christianity not just with the mind, but with the heart. He saw among his students that “When people are willing to put their judgments aside and live from a place of trust, they would go into ecstasy.” I believe he was witnessing the type of unity of spirit of which Jesus spoke in today’s lesson. Ferrini said, “They would look into the eyes of total strangers and fall in love. They could feel this kind of love, not just for a few people, but for everyone.” He would go on to say that when we stay in our hearts, we cannot stop giving love.
Last weekend, I had the very good fortune to hear the life story of a man who fell in love with humanity. Not only that, he was a gifted poet and could write it down for all of us to read. The man’s name is Walt Whitman. The thing I found compelling about him was not only his writing, but his willingness to be a public voice regarding his own evolution and transformation. Today, anyone who did this would be proclaimed a “flip-flopper” and would be written off as a bad candidate. But Whitman tasted all he could of life and let these experiences change him. Born in a rural setting, he found his first adult work in New York City. And so he became a stylish gentleman who cut quite a dashing figure. He was fascinated with the teeming crowds. He went to theaters, opera houses and a basement restaurant under Broadway called Pfaff’s where the Bohemians of his day gathered.
Whitman would ride the Broadway omnibuses for hours, just talking with the drivers, whom he knew by name. His first poems are seen as trite and sentimental, and had he stayed in that mode, we would not know of him now. But something happened in his 20’s and 30’s that caused a deep change in him and in his writing. In his own words, he said, “I found myself possessed at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three with a special desire and conviction…a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, most indefinitely hitherto, had steadily advance to the front, defined itself and finally dominated everything else.” Scholars note that Whitman was a great student of the Bible. Historians note that like Shakespeare, he was gifted in oratory. Critics note that he had the courage to disregard popular forms of poetry writing in favor of what would be called “free verse.” The creators of a PBS documentary of Whitman pointed to the deep and grievous impact that the practice of slavery had on Whitman when he moved to the South. I would suggest to you that because of his willingness to be one with everything and everyone, from bus drivers to slaves to prisoners to priests, he had learned and could write of the transcendent state to which Jesus directs the disciples in today’s readings. “That they may all be one.”
He wrote, in “Song of Myself,” “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, regardless of others, ever regardful of others, maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man…” His transcendent identity did not stop there. He also related to every nation, as evidenced in his poem “Passage to India.”
Whitman was profoundly disturbed by the events that threatened to bring our nation into civil war. Whitman’s mother was a Quaker and he did not enlist when war broke out. His brother George was wounded in battle and Whitman went to Virginia to care for him. Perhaps in response to the tremendous suffering he witnessed in the military hospitals, Whitman volunteered to become a male nurse. He visited the wards and wrote letters for the soldiers, or brought them treats or tobacco. He would write to his mother, “Mother, I have a real pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of saving quite a number of lives by saving the soldiers from giving up…” Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln almost every day on the streets of Washington. He became the voice for the nation’s grief after Lincoln’s assassination. Historians noted that as he aged there was a spiritual quality in his appearance. He is said to have faced his death with serene confidence, which certainly reminds me of Jesus during his farewell discourse, a bit of which we heard today. I will go further than the historians dare to go, and tell you now that the unity of the Christ presence lived in Whitman, by whatever name we wish to call it. And may it
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