By Rev. Russell Daye
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

No More Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge

Acts 1:1-11

Anyone who has been on an organised tour of the 'Holy Land' - here I mean the distant one, Israel, not our own holy land of Cape Breton - will have come home with some odd memories. Mine include the following. Being at a site that is purported to be the place where David slew Goliath, joining dozens of fellow visitors in picking up a rock for a keepsake, and then seeing a dump truck transporting fresh rocks to the site as our bus drove away. Visiting at least two different churches that contained the manger in which the baby Jesus was laid. Being offered, for a good price, a small cross made from the wood of the cross on which Jesus was hung - and later hearing from my tour guide that if one took all the wood that has been used to make these keepsakes, one could construct a sizeable town with it. But this week all my stories were trumped by one told by an Anglican colleague. On her trip to Israel, she was taken to the hilltop from which Jesus ascended into heaven and shown the footprint he left there. One presumes that it was especially deep because of a jumping motion.

There is a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge going on here. There is the wink, wink of the people who make and flog those little crosses. And one expects that there is a fair bit of wink, wink with those who buy them. There is the wink, wink of the guides who take us to see the launching place for the ascension…. But then there are the people who buy those little crosses, hold them tightly in times of trouble and gain real strength and comfort from them. There are the people who have a transforming spiritual experience when they see the last footprint that Jesus left on Earth. There is no wink, wink for them.

How is it possible that people could have such divergent views of what is real, of what is true? Looking across the fault line of these differing views, we are smacked up the side o' the head by metaphysics - both ontology and epistemology. People live in different worlds, both in terms of what they know to be real and in terms of how they do that knowing. Today's reading from Acts is a good place from which to look at that fault line, a good place to receive that smack up the side o' the head.

The event described in the opening chapter of Acts has come to be called the Ascension. The writer of Acts is the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke a half century or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Acts is the sequel, and picks up the story with the resurrected Jesus being taken up into heaven. Here is how it reads:

he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

Now, any child of a certain age will know that this is impossible. I've had children in Bible studies say to me things like, 'well, where did he go, the moon?!' What then do we do with this story? Some Christians have decided to ignore it. But that's not a good choice; it's a key story about where Jesus the Christ dwells now that he's not walking around Palestine with a fleshly body. Others have decided to ignore what science has taught us about what is really up there in the heavens and accept the story literally. Many in the United Church have decided to use the old wink, wink, nudge, nudge when dealing with this story. We read the story and say that, of course, it didn't really happen like this but that there is spiritual meaning in it. Let's pretend Jesus rose up to heaven and see what we learn. We might call this 'Bible study while holding our noses.'

Frankly, I think we've done enough of this. It's time to ask more directly, 'how do people who know that there is no heaven physically up there learn from this story?'

For a response to this question let me offer up two not-so-little words that are of immeasurable help: explicate and implicate (note: these are not the verbs you recognise by this spelling but newly coined adjectives). To illustrate their meaning, allow me to give you a little illustration. When you meet a person clothed from the neck down, the contours of his face are explicate, the contours of his body are implicate. You see the face fully; you know its features directly. The shapes and features of the body are only hinted at. They cannot be directly known. That which is explicate is visible, directly known. That which is implicate is hidden, unknowable or at least unknowable through our normal ways of knowing.

For those living in the ancient near east, heaven was implicate. It was a place of great power, populated by gods and angels and archangels and demons. What happened in heaven influenced what happened on Earth, and humans could infer events in heaven by witnessing their repercussions on Earth - if the gods were angry mountains shook or armies raged - but humans could not see or know directly this heavenly realm.

So, when Jesus was taken up into heaven, he was returned to this place of power, where he could still influence the lives of those on Earth, but he could no longer be seen in bodily form. It's not clear how many early Christians took this cosmology literally, believing that heaven was literally 'up there', and how many took it metaphorically. Perhaps there was a mix, as there is today. What is clear, is that the early Christians believed that there was an implicate order - a hidden realm of power. Their cosmology, their story of the nature of the universe made space for it. They called it 'heaven', or the 'Reign of Heaven', or the 'Reign of God'.

A great problem for Christians today, is that the dominant cosmology of our society does not leave space for an implicate order. Our story of the nature of the universe, which comes from science, tells us that that which exists is that which can be seen, known, measured, studied. There is no room for a hidden realm of power, for the Reign of Heaven. And so, when dealing with stories like the ascension we are left to employ unsatisfactory interpretive techniques like the old wink, wink, nudge, nudge. In 21st century cosmology there is no room for a hidden realm of power. … Or is there? Or is there?!

Fascinatingly, a number of scientific disciplines - physical, biological, and social - are playing with notions of the implicate. For a taste, lets look at the work of the man who coined the phrase 'implicate order.' David Bohm was a theoretical physicist who studied with Robert Oppenheimer and worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein, and after decades at the University of London was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

A central assertion of Bohm's work in physics was that behind the explicate order of the universe - this visible, tangible order that is marked by independent objects and fragmentation - there lies a hidden order of undivided wholeness. The existence of everything is deeply entwined in the existence of everything else. He employed the analogy of a stream: in a photo or a frozen moment a wave or splash of water may seem independent, but it is really an expression of the whole. He called this the implicate order. To a student of religion, this sounds very much like the unity of God and creation, the profound wholeness and holiness experienced by mystics and pointed to in Jesus' teachings about the Reign of Heaven.

As a kind of very serious hobby, especially later in life, Bohm also explored hidden realms of meaning in social science. He examined human processes of dialogue and published a very influential book in this area. He came to believe that, especially those dialogue processes that involved deep respect and deep listening, when participants examined their preconceptions and patterns of thought, a new kind of flow and coherence could arise that gave insight into the harmony of all things, into the implicate order.

If Bohm had lived long enough, I'm sure he would be very interested in new developments in brain science related to experience. There is a whole new body of work on the brain and spiritual experience, sometimes called 'neurotheology'. One of the things being discovered is that, when certain parts of our brain become more active and others less active, humans tend to have an experience of this fundamental wholeness. Jill Bolte Taylor describes just such an experience in her book My Stroke of Insight. Taylor, a Harvard brain researcher, had a profound experience of this kind that lasted for several hours after damage to her left brain freed her right brain free to fully shape her experience. Also, researchers have discovered that humans tend to have these experiences when our temporal lobes become more active and our parietal lobes go quiet. This tends to happen to people in deep meditation or prayer.

This research as produced a debate between those that argue that spiritual experiences are simply the products of brains and not perceptions into an otherworldly realm, and those who argue that the human brain is constructed to perceive the fundamental wholeness that lies underneath our ordinary experience of life.

You could probably guess which side of that debate I find more convincing, but let's leave that aside. I want to finish this sermon by returning to the issue of how the church deals with biblical passages like the one that describes Jesus' ascension. I want to close with this assertion: 'no more wink, wink, nudge, nudge!' It is time for us to stop being ashamed of these stories. It is time for us to stop being ashamed of having a cosmology that leaves room for the implicate, for unseen spirit and power in this world. It is time for us to stop behaving as though we have nothing important to say to our society as it writes and rewrites its story of the universe. It is time for us to do our interpretive homework and retrieve the power of stories like the ascension. It is time for us to stop assuming that the ancients who gave us these stories were naïve or childish. It is time for us to understand them better so that they can continue to teach and inspire us.

Why go to all this trouble? Because the Bible is the Word of God for us. If that Word is going to continue to live in us, and we in it, then we need to meet it not with shame and resignation but with the best of our thinking and imagination. When we meet the story of Jesus' ascension in this way, what do we discover? We discover that Jesus the Christ dwells in a place of power and spirit from which he continues to pull our world toward the heart of love.