Readings: Ruth 3:1-11, 4:13-17, True Christianity 599 (see below)
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Here we are in the third installment of our series on the book of Ruth. Let’s recap where we have been. Naomi is an Israelite women who goes to live in Moab due to famine. Her sons marry local Moabite women, one of whom was named Ruth. After a time, Naomi’s husband and sons die, and she has no choice but to return to Israel. She is bitter and feels forsaken by God. But, even though it means leaving her homeland, Ruth will not abandon Naomi, and so she travels to Israel with her. 

Once they arrive, they must contend with how they will survive. Ruth attempts to glean the leftovers from the harvest in the fields of a local wealthy landowner named Boaz. Boaz had heard of Ruth’s act of loyalty to Naomi and orders extra grain to be left behind for Ruth to collect. Naomi is glad to hear of this development, and points out that Boaz is related to her husband’s family and thus has a responsibly for their welfare. She calls him their guardian-redeemer, a specific term with both social and legal meanings.

Today we hear the climax and the resolution of the story in chapters 3 and 4. Naomi has a plan for securing their future, and so she gives Ruth some very specific instructions. These instructions probably sound pretty strange to us now - uncovering feet? - and we might not really feel clear about what is happening.

But what might confuse us a little in English is very plain in the Hebrew. The original text contains a lot of suggestive wordplay and euphemistic terms. Given Ruth’s model behavior in the previous chapters, our first instinct might be to resist what is suggested in the Hebrew text, to make her completely chaste, non-transgressive, uncalculating, and demure. But the fact is, Ruth takes a risk here, and acts outside of what might have been considered acceptable behavior in Israelite society. We might wonder: was it right for her to do so? Was it “right” for Naomi to ask Ruth to act in such a way? And what does “right” in this context even mean?

Boaz must have been aware of his relationship to their family, and of his responsibility as their guardian-redeemer. Yet, as of Chapter 3, he had not done anything more than allow Ruth to glean a little extra grain. We might also ask: was he intending to act? Why was he taking so long? What would have happened if Ruth had done nothing? Was it not “right” for Ruth to call him to account, to remind him of his responsibility?

Like many stories in the Bible, these characters are all very human, feeling real human emotions, acting with mixed human motives, trying their best within the context they are given, sometimes falling short, and sometimes bringing about miracles.

As one of my commentaries notes: 
“We have to acknowledge that what Ruth did was scandalous in the eyes of the world, *and* that it was an act of loving kindness.”(1) It was an act that sought to take care of her mother-in-law, to alleviate her emptiness; it was an act that gently called a “pillar of Israelite society to responsibility”(2) as well as relationship, it was an act that would heal a family and begin a line that would culminate in one of Israel’s greatest leaders.

And so the text prompts us to ask ourselves, in what ways might *we* be called to risk, might we be called to push against social norms in order to practice connective and covenantal love, what in the Hebrew is called hesed, love that enfolds people into community. Is there a place in our lives that is calling out for accountability, for relationship, for encouragement, for change, but we are constrained by what feels to us like social respectability, social expectations, and the embarrassment and fear associated with with pushing against those norms? 

Because, the next most important question to ask is: What occurs as a result of Ruth’s risk-taking? One thing, among many, is that Naomi experiences a reversal of her emptiness. Her overall and understandable bitterness drives the narrative of the first chapter. But by the end of the story, we find her heart is filled again. The narrative is signaling that her personal trajectory mirrors the trajectory of her people as a whole, that her grandchild, so precious to her in a personal way, will also play his part in leading a whole people towards redemption, as a link in King David’s familial line. An act of risk, courage and hope, grounded in hesed, that first *uncovers* and lays bare human vulnerability and need, and then culminates in the *recovery* of hope and meaning.

The text aims to drive this home in its use of language. The Hebrew scriptures often like to juxtapose similar sounding words in order to contrast their meaning. In chapter 3, we notice the juxtaposition of the word gala, meaning uncover, reveal or remove, and gaal, meaning recover, redeem, or restore. In the words of my commentary again: the “narrator encourages the audience to consider the ways in which uncovering can lead to recovering - the redemption of what was lost.” (3)

Ruth acts to uncover the feet of Boaz - and in the Hebrew this has a suggestive association. And yet, this uncovering leads to a recovering. Her vulnerability and his responsibility are uncovered, and into that place of need a relationship is formed, and dignity is recovered. 

As we go even deeper, Swedenborg writes about how the act of “uncovering” in the bible represents a removing of external things so that internal ones may be apparent(4). Often, external things (learned perspectives, attachments, anxieties, habits) get in the way of spiritual progress. But, as suggested in our Swedenborg reading, this is just part of the process, a process of redemption that has been built into the divine design. We are called to uncover the truth about ourselves, to quiet the ego long enough for truth to be revealed to us, and then to remove that which cannot serve love, cannot serve hesed. This act of faithful gala — uncovering— makes space for, makes a path for, gaal — restoration.

And so as we consider divine design, and God’s intention for us, we might ask, where is God in the book of Ruth? Even though the narrative is dealing with very human problems and very human interactions, God’s presence is very much woven into the story as well. There are no prophets speaking God’s word directly, the settings are fields and roads and threshing floors rather than tabernacles or a burning bush, and yet God feels very close to this story, we see God within this story. The way God is known in the book of Ruth is through people. There is loss, and there is death and God responds with loyalty and hesed from a daughter-in-law. There is poverty and uncertainty and God responds with mutual relationship and kindness from one who can help. There is bitterness and perceived abandonment, and God responds with new birth and new life.

In chapter 3, verse 9, Ruth asks Boaz to spread his garment, or his cloak over her. The word for cloak, kanap,  is also the word for wing, and Boaz had previously used that word in chapter 2, when he praised Ruth for her loyalty “May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” We might wonder though, how much at the time he said this, was this some vague blessing, or did he consider the reality that many times the love of God becomes real and palpable through human decision. Ruth makes that connection clear to him, that if God’s wings are to give her refuge, that refuge in a physical sense must come through him. One of the ways that God’s love finds its way to us, is by the care and concern we show each other.

And so we find ourselves back to asking the question: what is our part? We are all sometimes Naomi, sometimes Ruth, sometimes Boaz. Naomi’s bitterness was not where she began, or where she was destined to end up. She was taking a detour, a necessary and understandable one, one that we all take from time to time. But God’s wings were over her the entire time. May we all find the courage to step into our place in the divine process, the uncovering and the recovering, one that brings all people into redemption. Amen.

1. The New Interpreter’s Bible, p295
2. Ibid, p303
3. Ibid, p290
4. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #9917 and #9960

Readings:

Ruth 3:1-11, 4:13-17

1 One day Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi said to her, “My daughter, I must find a home for you, where you will be well provided for. 2 Now Boaz, with whose women you have worked, is a relative of ours. Tonight he will be winnowing barley on the threshing floor. 3 Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes. Then go down to the threshing floor, but don’t let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. 4 When he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do.” 5 “I will do whatever you say,” Ruth answered. 6 So she went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law told her to do. 7 When Boaz had finished eating and drinking and was in good spirits, he went over to lie down at the far end of the grain pile. Ruth approached quietly, uncovered his feet and lay down. 8 In the middle of the night something startled the man; he turned—and there was a woman lying at his feet! 9 “Who are you?” he asked. “I am your servant Ruth,” she said. “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family.” 10 “The LORD bless you, my daughter,” he replied. “This kindness is greater than that which you showed earlier: You have not run after the younger men, whether rich or poor. 11 And now, my daughter, don’t be afraid. I will do for you all you ask. All the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character. 

4:13 So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. The LORD enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. 14 The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! 15 He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.” 16 Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. 17 The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.

True Christianity 599

During the battles or conflicts within us, the Lord carries out an individual act of redemption, much like the all-encompassing redemption he brought about while he was in the world. 

While he was in the world, the Lord glorified his human manifestation, that is, made it divine, through battles and inner conflict. In a similar way within us individually, the Lord fights for us while we are undergoing inner conflict and conquers the hellish spirits who are assaulting us. Afterward he "glorifies" us, that is, makes us spiritual. 

After his universal redemption, the Lord restructured all things in heaven and in hell in accordance with the divine design. He does much the same thing in us after crises of the spirit - that is, he restructures all the things in us that relate to heaven and the world in accordance with the divine design. 

Readings: Ruth 2:10-12, 15-20, True Christianity 126 (see below)
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Welcome to our second week journeying with the book of Ruth. Today we hear about what happened to Naomi and Ruth as they settled into life in Bethlehem. Without husbands, and more specifically, without ancestral land, they had no way to support themselves other than gleaning from the fields of others, essentially collecting leftovers from the harvest. This is how Ruth meets Boaz, a wealthy landowner. Now, as we had heard two weeks ago, the book of Leviticus stated that provision should be made in this way for widows and foreigners, people exactly like Naomi and Ruth. And it seems that this is what Boaz had been doing and we can imagine that Ruth probably wasn’t the only one gleaning leftovers from the harvest. However, we hear in the text a particular kindness from Boaz: he instructs his workers to leave extra gleanings behind for Ruth to gather.

When Naomi hears about the connection that Ruth made with Boaz, she is happy for more than one reason. Boaz is not some random benevolent landowner. He has a connection to their family, a connection that puts him in a position of responsibility for their welfare. She calls him their “guardian-redeemer.” 

This introduces another important theme in the book of Ruth: redemption. It is a theme that is explored at many levels. On one level, the term “guardian-redeemer” has specific meaning in Israelite law, one that has more to do with property and linage than with spirit or emotion. But we can also see that the book is exploring redemption in a deeper sense: how was Naomi going to be rescued from her bitterness? How might Ruth be rescued from a life of uncertainty and poverty and otherness? How might God be working for the benefit, the redemption, of the Israelite people? Scholars believe that the book of Ruth, while placed narratively in the time between the judges and the kings, was probably written much later in the days following the Israelites exile in Babylon, as commentary on how, and with what values, the Israelites might rebuild their nation. It was a book that spoke into the embodied redemption of beginning a society again.

So I thought today might be a good time to explore the idea of redemption in a theological sense. In several weeks, before we know it really, we will be entering the liturgical season of Advent, where we will hear plenty of “redeemer” language, as we tell the story of how God reached out into the world to be incarnated as a person like you and me. In the gospel of Luke, after meeting the baby Jesus, Zechariah sings “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them.” (Luke 1:68) A question we might have is: What does it mean to be redeemed? And how does a little baby born millennia ago redeem me now?

To redeem something, in basic everyday terms, means to buy, recover or exchange something, like redeeming a coupon. We give the coupon, and get a discount in return. When that idea is transferred to the world of theology, as in redemption, then we start to explore more existential shades of meaning, as we consider atonement, deliverance or rescue for ourselves personally, and how God might be involved in that.

And so we find that needing to be redeemed, reflects a situation of being or having one thing, and wanting or needing to have another. The process of redemption describes the journey from the first state to the second. The term redeemer describes someone to enables that journey to occur.

In the book of Ruth, we have our two main characters mired in a state of bitterness and poverty, and the story is tracing their journey from this first state into another different state, as we will see, an objectively better one. It tells the story of how they are redeemed physically and emotionally. Boaz helps them on that journey, and so is called their guardian-redeemer.

Likewise, in Advent, we tell a similar story in terms of the whole of humanity. The gospel of John begins with themes of light and darkness. The world was a dark place, and it seemed that people’s hearts were dark as well, and something needed to be done. Jesus, the light of the world, comes to help people on a journey of redemption, a light shining in the darkness, illuminating the possiblity of being different.
But often times, the theology of redemption is presented in very transactional terms.  A lot of traditional Christian theology pictures a God who is angry because the people of the world are so sinful, with hearts so dark that they were not listening to all the ways that God had offered redemption before. According to all kinds of ancient religion, when people transgress there must be a consequence, a price paid to God. So, some Christian theologies say, Jesus stepped in to pay that price for us, for humanity, to pay the price due to God for our sins, then and forever more. The ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate exchange, and the ultimate act of redeeming that will last forever.

So in personal terms, this is like if we do a dine and dash, and eat a meal at a restaurant but leave without paying. Jesus steps in to pay the bill, stopping the police from coming after us. Which certainly seems nice. But as Swedenborg has pointed out, this idea is undergirded by some untenable assumptions, and has some serious loopholes.

Because what Swedenborg was seeing in his own religious circles, was people praising Jesus paying the bill, but continuing to dine and dash, because, you know, Jesus was paying the bill. And Swedenborg wondered how this could ever be what the divine wanted or intended. Where was the room, where was the imperative, for human emotional and spiritual development?

And in addition, for Swedenborg, it was impossible that God should be angry and vengeful. God can only be divinely loving and wise, mourning our evil choices of course but never despising us, and never demanding restitution for God’s own sake, only desiring a holistic accountability anchored in our transformation. And if God is not angry and vengeful, demanding a price for our transgressions, then the whole redemption-as-an-exhange thing falls apart. And if it does, then what was Jesus’ sacrifice all about? How was Jesus redeeming us if not paying our bill?

So Swedenborg offered a different understanding of redemption. God, instead of solving things from outside of the process, entered into the process and life that has been ordained for us, became human, became a form that could actually be tempted by hell and used our common humanity as both a model for living and a way to concretely overcome evil and the love of power. This redeems us not by exchange, but by relationship. By entering into the process with us, God created a connection and a closeness that continues to serve us.

Because, when we consider the complexity of human experience, we see that redemption cannot ever be just about transaction, just about our bill being paid, just about receiving forgiveness, however good that might make us feel, or how grateful we might be for it. We human beings can suffer in a multitude of ways, both of our own creation, and completely not our own fault. And how we make the journey out of that suffering can be complicated. Our need is not always just forgiveness, sometimes our need is one of letting go, reframing, patience, evolution, and so many other things. Obviously then, redemption must be a personal journey, and if God is to effect our redemption, to be our redeemer, God has to be on the journey with us, has to be responsive to what we need in the moment. Paying our bill, or in traditional Christian language the forgiveness of our sins, is indeed be a good and kind thing in many a case, but is not sufficient for the totality of human spiritual development. We need more from our God, and thankfully, God gave it. God gave us a redemption that leads to partnership, that results in the kind of freedom and learning that each one of us really needs. This is a kind of redemption we must live into. Not earn, but live into. It is indeed a gift, and one given fresh every single day, not just Easter Sunday. 

And so, as we return to the book of Ruth, what kind of redemption, do we see, and shall we see, there? Today we see Boaz taking a sustained interest, seeing Ruth for who she really is, imagining what she might need in terms of protection, community, and sustenance, and providing for it. She was rescued from hunger and aloneness by a stranger enfolding her into community, and Naomi begins to be rescued from her cynicism and grief by the prospect of being seen. Next week the story of their redemption continues in both complicated and beautiful ways. The book of Ruth understands that redemption is indeed a journey, with many moving parts, actors and beneficiaries. It speaks to us clearly of redemption that is built on relationship: a more complicated way perhaps, but one that bears so much fruit. Thanks be to God. Amen.


Readings:

Ruth 2:1-12, 15-20

1 Now Naomi had a relative on her husband’s side, a man of standing from the clan of Elimelek, whose name was Boaz. 2 And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.” Naomi said to her, “Go ahead, my daughter.” 3 So she went out, entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she was working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelek. 4 Just then Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters, “The LORD be with you!” “The LORD bless you!” they answered. 5 Boaz asked the overseer of his harvesters, “Who does that young woman belong to?” 6 The overseer replied, “She is the Moabite who came back from Moab with Naomi. 7 She said, ‘Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves behind the harvesters.’ She came into the field and has remained here from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.” 8 So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. 9 Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” 10 At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She asked him, “Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me—a foreigner?” 11 Boaz replied, “I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband—how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. 12 May the LORD repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” 

15 As she got up to glean, Boaz gave orders to his men, “Let her gather among the sheaves and don’t reprimand her. 16 Even pull out some stalks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up, and don’t rebuke her.” 17 So Ruth gleaned in the field until evening. Then she threshed the barley she had gathered, and it amounted to about an ephah. 18 She carried it back to town, and her mother-in-law saw how much she had gathered. Ruth also brought out and gave her what she had left over after she had eaten enough. 19 Her mother-in-law asked her, “Where did you glean today? Where did you work? Blessed be the man who took notice of you!” Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working. “The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,” she said. 20 “The LORD bless him!” Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. “He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.” She added, “That man is our close relative; he is one of our guardian-redeemers. ”


True Christianity 126

Suffering on the cross was the final trial the Lord underwent as the greatest prophet. It was a means of glorifying his human nature, that is, of uniting that nature to his Father's divine nature. It was not redemption. There are two things for which the Lord came into the world and through which he saved people and angels: redemption, and the glorification of his human aspect. These two things are distinct from each other, but they become one in contributing to salvation. 

In the preceding points we have shown what redemption was: battling the hells, gaining control over them, and then restructuring the heavens. Glorification, however, was the uniting of the Lord's human nature with the divine nature of his Father. This process occurred in successive stages and was completed by the suffering on the cross. 

All of us have to do our part and move closer to God. The closer we come to God, the more God enters us, which is his part…

The union itself [between the Lord's divine and human natures] was completed by the suffering on the cross, because this suffering was the final spiritual test that the Lord went through in the world. Spiritual tests lead to a partnership [with God]. During our spiritual tests, we are apparently left completely alone, although in fact we are not alone - at those times God is most intimately present at our deepest level giving us support. Because of that inner presence, when any of us have success in a spiritual test we form a partnership with God at the deepest level. In the Lord's case, he was then united to God, his Father, at the deepest level. 

Readings: Ruth 1:1-22, Secrets of Heaven #1038 (see below)
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The book of Ruth is a powerful and emotional story. Even though it is told with relative economy, the text is filled with wordplay and callbacks that are often lost in English translations. It explores themes of lovingkindness, community, immigration, loyalty, responsibility and redemption. And it is by no means straightforward; interpreters continue to argue about what the book is trying to say, even today. It is a story grounded in an ancient context, many details of which are lost to us now, but it also functions as an extended parable, one in which we can see even our modern selves reflected.

We will be spending three weeks looking at the book of Ruth together, and today we start at the beginning of the story. We are introduced to the main characters: Naomi, and her daughter in law for whom the book is named - Ruth.  We are told that the story takes place during the times of the judges, the period that followed the leadership of Moses and Joshua, but before Saul is established as the first King of Israel.

The narrative for Naomi starts out with difficulty: she and her family need to travel to Moab due to a famine in the land of Israel, but, even in this time of famine, Naomi’s personal life is full. She has a husband and two fine sons. And while her husband dies, in short order, her sons find wives in Moab and it seems that all is good. But then suddenly, Naomi is beset by further tragedy. Both her sons die, without heirs. This is a very challenging situation for a women in ancient times, particularly for a widow. Naomi would have depended on her husband and sons for survival. So, she plays the only card she has left, to return home to Israel, her homeland, where thankfully, the famine was now over.

These are the first few instances of a running theme of the book: reversals and returns. Naomi’s life went from full in a time of emptiness to empty in a time of fullness; an enormous upheaval. And in times of such upheaval, we search for solid ground, we think about what we can and should return to, in order to make sense of our lives. And so this first chapter is full of the notion of returning. Naomi makes plans to return to her homeland, and she urges her daughters in law to return to their mother’s houses. 

The implication is, of course, that they are still young enough to marry again. If Naomi had more sons, Israelite law would have required them to marry their brother’s widows, but as Naomi colorfully explains, she has no more sons and certainly will not bare any more. Orpah and Ruth should go home and begin their lives again. 

Neither want to. It is a testament to the life they all must have had as a family together that they resist. Eventually though, Orpah is persuaded. But not Ruth. Ruth makes a stand for her relationship with Naomi and refuses to leave her. 

This speaks to another theme in the story: hesed. Hesed is an extremely important spiritual principle in the Hebrew scriptures. It is often translated as lovingkindness, but that word really only gets to about half of the meaning. Yes, it is about lovingkingness, but specifically the kind of lovingkindness that draws people into relationship with each other, that binds them together as kin and community, that speaks to their responsibility to each other. It is sometimes described as covenantal love, in that it is not pure sentiment, but rather a love that understands that it is enacted again and again over time in relationship. For this reason, it is sometimes translated as steadfast love, and is often used in describing God’s steadfast love toward us. The idea being that as we experience God’s steadfast love, we are called to model and embody that love in our relationships with others.

Naomi had already spoken of hesed in verse 8, that the Lord might treat Orpah and Ruth as kindly as they had treated her and her sons. She was invoking this notion of lovingkindness and connectedness within relationship as something that should happen to them over there, back in their mother’s houses, where in her mind they would clearly be back in the proper care of God. Naomi, it seems, had exempted herself from hesed. And of course, why wouldn’t she? She had lost so very much, and she was bitter and empty. She felt like the Lord had forsaken her. She states: “the Lord’s hand has turned against me!” And so she drew herself outside of the reach of hesed, outside of the reach of God’s lovingkindness, outside of the reach of anyone’s lovingkindness.

But Ruth disagreed. She was under no obligation stay, not by her society’s expectations, but still she re-drew the circle of hesed around Naomi. We hear Ruth not only say “Where you go I will go….” but also “Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” She is speaking not only of physical presence but also of identity. She weaves the two of them into relationship at a deep level, and in that moment, creates a community of two. She speaks into being an ongoing covenant between them. She speaks the language of our Swedenborg reading, whereby we are told that union with God comes from our willing reciprocation of love, the return of love to the Lord and the expansion of love towards others.

Naomi won’t really be able to hear or feel the fullness of that gift of hesed for a while. At first, Naomi is so fully within her own bitterness that she basically ignores Ruth when they arrive back in Israel. But we cannot be too harsh with her, for that is just the way grief works sometimes. “The Almighty has made my life very bitter,” she laments. Our reversals of fortune, our losses in this life, are sometimes so very hard to take. They hollow us out, and it is hard to believe that we might ever experience fullness and meaning again. But as you might have already guessed, the story of Ruth will have something to say about that, and we will hear more as we go along.

But for now, there is one more theme that is being introduced in this first chapter. As beautiful as Ruth’s sentiments are, this is not just simple story of kindness between two people. The context of the story speaks powerfully about insiders and outsiders and the purposes of God. This is a thread that runs throughout the entire Hebrew scriptures, as we saw last week. Again and again, outsiders to the people of Israel are woven into the fabric of Israel’s story in important ways.

Ruth was a Moabite, a people despised by Israel for generations. Perhaps this is a part of the kindness that Naomi offered in advocating for their separation. Surely, they both knew the difficulty that Ruth would have being a Moabite in Israel. We can now even more fully appreciate the act of courage that Ruth offers; in drawing the circle of hesed around Naomi, she placed herself in an uncertain position. As I preached last week ago, Israel’s God and Israel’s laws consistently advocated for the ethical treatment of foreigners, but as we all know even now, the distance between the ideal and the practice; well, that is where the hard work is. As the story progresses, this sense of Ruth being an outsider to Israel hovers over everything.

Now, at the end of this first chapter, with the characters and the stakes setup as they are, it might be fruitful to to ask: where do we see ourselves reflected? This need not be prescription, only observation. Which parts of ourselves are Naomi right now, emptied out? Which parts of ourselves believe we have somehow been placed outside the circle of hesed, or that we don’t deserve to be included? Which parts of ourselves feel like an outsider, or conversely wish to despise an outsider? Which parts of ourselves are willing to fight for relationship and community? This is the power of ancient story; that we might see ourselves looking back at us through the millennia, and we might know that God journeys with us both then and now. 

I hope this doesn’t spoil things too much, but by the end of the book we will come to understand that this is not just a story about two random women. This is the story of King David’s ancestors, about how “King David’s family tree [is] rooted in the loyal behavior of a foreigner…”(1) and about how the purity of bloodline is much less important than loving, ethical and courageous behavior. And so the whole story begins with a reversal of the readers expectations: that someone designated an “outsider” would model hesed so touchingly. May we all dare to reverse the expectations of our world, to re-draw the circle of hesed, the circle of love and belonging, to include all of God’s beloved children. 

Amen.

(1) The New Interpreter’s Bible, p263


Readings:

Ruth 1:1-22

1 In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. 3 Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

6 When Naomi heard in Moab that the LORD had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. 7 With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah. 8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the LORD show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. 9 May the LORD grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud 10 and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.” 11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? 12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the LORD’s hand has turned against me!” 14 At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her. 15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.” 16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” 18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. 19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” 20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” 22 So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

Secrets of Heaven 1038

The fact that a pact [or a covenant] is the presence of the Lord in love and charity is evident from the nature of a pact. Every covenant exists to tie people together; that is, the goal is for people to live in mutual friendship, or in a state of love. This is why marriage too is called a compact or covenant.

The Lord cannot unite with us except in love and charity, because the Lord is love itself and mercy; he wants to save us all and draw us to heaven — that is, to himself — with a powerful force. So we can all see and conclude that no one could ever be united to the Lord except through that which is the Lord, or in other words, without doing as he does, or making common cause with him. To do this is to love the Lord in return and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the only means of union. This is the most essential element of a compact. When union does grow out of it, then the Lord, of course, is present.

Readings: Leviticus 19:1-6, 9-20, 32-37, Apocalypse Revealed 586:3 (see below)
See also on Youtube
Photo credit:  Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Something that may have been on our minds lately is the topic of immigration. We have all observed how some politicians use the specter of immigration, illegal or otherwise, to rile up their base, to center their followers in fear and anxiety and the notion of white centrality and white supremacy, creating real consequences for already marginalized and vulnerable people. This election season is no exception.

The question of immigration is complicated one, for many countries the world over. The reality is that climate change and active conflicts, among many other events, have created large numbers of refugees world wide, and many countries are grappling with the logistics of accepting and integrating these refugees effectively and humanely. It takes a lot of resources and positive intention to do so, as well as foresight. The U.S. in particular is using asylum laws were written decades ago, and I think we are finding that these laws are really not up to the task. And of course, it is particularly frustrating then, when the issue of immigration is used as a political football, rather than as an issue that we all need to come together to solve as humanely as possible. As the world and our country grapples with the question of how to manage the flow of immigration thoughtfully and charitably, I think it is worth taking a moment to see what our system of faith offers the conversation, to ask how it grounds our guiding ethos and intention.

When one is wondering how the bible talks about immigration, one often turns to a famous passage in Leviticus:

‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Lev 19:33-34)

We don’t often refer to Leviticus in church. It represents part of our history as a tradition, but the tradition has evolved over the millennia and parts of this book might feel irrelevant to our modern context. This is understandable. Leviticus represents the faith and practice of a specific group of people in a specific time period; we no longer share their context and so we no longer share many of those practices. But, it remains one of our sacred texts. Why? Because we recognize and worship the God from which it came, we recognize that as specificity may fall away, principle and ethos remains.

A good part of the book of Leviticus, which specifically includes Chapter 19, is often called The Holiness Code. We can see this reflected in how Chapter 19 begins: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy. Throughout the book of Leviticus, this statement or one similar occurs 152 times(1). But what is holiness exactly and how does it relate to all the very specific laws the book contains?

Holiness is one of those words that seems easily definable on its face, because we use it all the time, but more slippery when we interrogate it. Essentially, something that is holy is set apart, or different, or other, than what we experience in our everyday life. Think about how we understand our holy spaces, like this church. We treat them differently, reverently, because we want them to be something else, other than our everyday spaces. Or, when we want part of our everyday spaces to be holy, what do we do? We might arrange them differently, act in them differently, or speak a blessing (like grace at the dinner table) over them so that, even momentarily, the space is differentiated for us. Or perhaps you have had a holy experience? Maybe on a mountain top, or in meditation, or relationship with another. What was it about that experience that caused you to call it holy? I think it is likely because it felt different, it felt like the veil had been lifted back for a moment, you felt and saw and knew things differently, even though you were right here in the world as you always are.

This is why God is called holy. Not necessarily because God is good (although God is) or because God is powerful (although God is) but because holy is the word that we use to explain that God is “other” than us, or “beyond” us in some way. God is the source of whatever it is that is “different” to us in our experience of holiness.

But, God doesn’t want that essential otherness to equal remoteness or distance or inaccessibility. And so God is always inviting us into ways of thinking, appreciating, loving, seeing, and acting that bring us closer to God, that bring us closer to what we call holiness. And this is what the book of Leviticus is really about. It is a long list of rituals and laws the purpose of which would be to help the people of Israel live the kind of life that would let them feel and be close to God, a holy life.

But it is so important to recognize that the point of God inviting us into holiness is not for the purpose of rescue or escape, that we might become better than others, or so holy and pure that we can be drawn away from our world to get closer to God. As you might have noticed from our reading, so many of the laws were ones that would bring us into healthy relationship with the people around us. While the Hebrew word for holy means set apart, the english root for the word holy means whole, and both are getting at something important. 

Recall how many times, just in our reading let alone in the whole book, we heard the phrase “I am the Lord.” 

I will paraphrase: Leave the gleanings of your harvest for the poor, I am the Lord. Do not defraud, do pervert justice, do not anything that endangers your neighbors life, I am the Lord. Do not hate a fellow, do not seek revenge, I am the Lord. Over and over and over.

The character of God, the holiness of the Lord, was to be embodied, grounded, was to be found in the care that the Israelites showed one another. This is an ethos that we can draw from Leviticus that transcends time and context. It is as important to us now as it was to the Israelites then. And, then as now, loving our neighbor as ourselves is not just a rule to followed so that we can be called good, it is a reality to be evoked and created, it is completing a sacred circle. We are told: Love thy neighbor, align with the character of the Lord, and this holy connection with the people around us brings the holiness of the Lord into our midst.

Which finally brings us back around to immigration. The Lord entreats the Israelites to be kind to the foreigner among them, directly confronting tribalism by telling them to treat a foreigner as if they native-born, with no distinction. And how were they to be in touch with their own best motivations in this practice? Through empathy: Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. 

God understands who we are. God understands how hard it is to love others sometimes, how easily we get possessive and protective, how easily we retreat or get distracted. God understands how seductive group-based dominance and hierarchy can be, how it can provide us with a surge of powerful but shallow personal significance. God understands who we are.

So God tells us to be guided by empathy, to remember our commonalities as human beings. For the Israelites, they had a literal experience of being mistreated foreigners. These stories filled their narrative imagination, their escape to freedom defined their identity. So God called upon that memory as a guide, paraphrased by Jesus’ contemporary Rabbi Hillel as: what is hateful to yourself, do not do to another. The Israelites had a visceral experience of trauma at the hands of a despotic ruler, and God said: remember that and do not perpetuate that trauma upon others.

And the same spiritual principle works for us now. We thankfully, may not have personal stories of political persecution or trauma or displacement to guide our empathy, but we might not have to go very far in either our family histories or relationship networks to find someone who has.  My grandmother was a Latvian refugee in the second world war. I’m quite sure it changed her, as it did her whole family. And at minimum, at a basic level, we all know what it feels like to be afraid, to be despairing, to not know who we can count on, to not know where we belong, and to be afraid that we don’t in fact belong anywhere.

But we do, we all do, belong that is. This is the ethos of the holiness code. God stands apart, but only because *we* choose to be petty and small and blind. Of course God stands apart from that. But God, and God’s holiness, is deeply deeply present in the love that we show to one another, not as sanction or reward, but because when we love one other, enfold one another into community, especially when it is hard, we are living into the true reality that is the character of God, we are living into whatever it is that is behind the veil, that we can sometimes glimpse when we are quiet and open and ready.

With the eyes of our spiritual tradition, we can look upon the earthy challenge of immigration and see that it is an opportunity to practice holiness, that it is an opportunity to embody the character and ethos of God in our everyday. Of course, that is going to take a lot of work, political will, give and take, and probably some mistakes. And it also doesn’t mean that God doesn’t support healthy boundaries (and that is a topic for another day.). But what *is* clear, is that if we are looking to the bible to justify in-group and out-group thinking, it doesn’t. Our text today takes that completely off the table. That kind of thinking does not express the character of God; it is the opposite of holy. 

Our Swedenborg reading makes the distinction, that a spiritual life is not about being holy per se, but about being a vessel, a dwelling place, for truths and goods, for ways of thinking and acting, that are holy. The Lord alone is holy; may we reflect as many precious points of holy light as we can. 

Amen.

(1) The New Interpreters Bible, pg 520

Readings:

Leviticus 19:1-6, 9-20, 32-37

1 The LORD said to Moses, 2 “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy. 3 “ ‘Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths. I am the LORD your God. 4 “ ‘Do not turn to idols or make metal gods for yourselves. I am the LORD your God. 5 “ ‘When you sacrifice a fellowship offering to the LORD, sacrifice it in such a way that it will be accepted on your behalf. 6 It shall be eaten on the day you sacrifice it or on the next day; anything left over until the third day must be burned up.

 9 “ ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God. 11 “ ‘Do not steal. “ ‘Do not lie. “ ‘Do not deceive one another. 12 “ ‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the LORD. 13 “ ‘Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. “ ‘Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight. 14 “ ‘Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD. 15 “ ‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. 16 “ ‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people. “ ‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the LORD. 17 “ ‘Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt. 18 “ ‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. 19 “ ‘Keep my decrees. “ ‘Do not mate different kinds of animals. “ ‘Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. “ ‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. 

32 “ ‘Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God. I am the LORD. 33 “ ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. 35 “ ‘Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36 Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt. 37 “ ‘Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the LORD.’ ”

Apocalypse Revealed 586:3 
Those people who live according to the Word's truths are called saints, not because they are holy, but because the truths in them are holy; and truths are holy when they come from the Lord in them, and they have the Lord in them when they have His truths in them.

Readings: Isaiah 35:1-6, Mark 7:24-20, Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2 (see below)
​See also on Youtubeyoutu.be/0pVdNdopHRU
Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Welcome friends, to a new church year. Hopefully we have all been able to enjoy some restful times over our summer, taken some space to renew ourselves.

This is exactly what Jesus was trying to do in our text today. He had been engaged fully in ministry for a while, healing and teaching, which included some intensive debates with the religious leaders of this day. He was clearly exhausted. There are many ways that this gospel reading humanizes Jesus. The first is that we see he was not limitless; his mind and body were capable of exhaustion and overwhelm just as ours are. The second is more implied, but clearly, for Jesus to have been experiencing such tension and exhaustion over the course of his ministry meant that Jesus very much cared about his mission. He felt the stakes of it all. He wanted to succeed. Sometimes when we focus on the divine and other-worldly Jesus of the Easter story, we forget about the humanity of Jesus - he wept, he loved, he slept, he ate, he laughed. 

And he also made mistakes. Many times we don’t want to think about Jesus as someone who made mistakes. It makes us uncomfortable, for we base our entire tradition on things that he said and did. Can we base a whole tradition on someone who is fallible, even if just a little bit? But when we look at this entire story, we find that there is a deeper teaching, one that the gospel writers made sure to include. And I think we know from our own lives, we can learn just a much from our mistakes as we can from our triumphs, probably more even.

And so we have this exhausted Jesus, just trying to find a moment to himself to recharge. We know this person; he is us. We are told: He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. How frustrated, how grumpy he must have been to have yet another person come for a piece of him. He had nothing left in the tank to give. And so, as this Syro-Phoenician woman delivers her request, he lashes out at her with an insult. 

It is important not to try to explain this away. Many do, saying that it wasn’t really an insult in his day, or saying that Jesus was trying to test this woman’s faith. Neither of these things are true. It was an insult and it was intended as such. Dogs as beloved pets is a relatively modern concept, which we cannot overlay here. The woman was a gentile, of Greek and Syrian extraction. In Matthew’s version of this episode, she is explicitly termed a Canaanite, the Israelite’s antagonists of old. And even as Jesus encountered and healed different people from different places, he also had a specific mission for his beloved Jewish people. At a moment when it felt like he had nothing left to give, he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone outside of his tribe. In his exhaustion, he gave way to his own bias about this woman’s value. 

Which brings us to a discussion of a more modern concept: confirmation bias. In our increasingly divided and siloed cultural landscape, you may have heard of this idea already. Basically, it is the tendency to prefer information or interpret information in a way that validates our pre-existing views and conversely to reject information that contradicts our pre-existing views. It is the phenomenon behind what feels like the increasing intractability of all our positions, our inability to agree on even the most basic terms of fact, science, or reality. The truth is, once we have decided that something is true, our brains work very hard to justify that decision, latching on to anything that confirms it, and rejecting, ignoring, or re-interpreting anything that doesn’t. 

Studies have shown that when we receive information that confirms what we already think, our emotional centers in the brain light up. It feels really good to be right. Conversely, when we are given facts that refute what we already think, the reasoning regions of our brain “go dark.”(1) It feels less good to be uncertain or unsure, and so we instinctively avoid it. Evolutionarily, it may have benefited us to create mental patterns and structures upon which to make decisions, and to feel good when those constructs are borne out well. Could we imagine if every decision was made from zero? We’d never get anything done! But like any tendency, when it goes into hyperdrive, when we become overly reliant on the way certainty feels good, then we are tempted to constantly oversimply, to avoid flexibility of thought, and to habitually ignore reason itself. These habits, more than anything, invite us into us vs them thinking. There is no quicker way to boster our own self-esteem, our own sense of value and belonging, than to place ourselves conceptually into some sort of in-group, over and against “those people.” Confirmation bias is the way of thinking (or not-thinking) that more and more convinces us that we are right to do so.

Jesus, in his circumstances that we are considering today, was in a moment where confirmation bias could have been at play. All his life he was likely subject to a cultural confirmation bias about the gentiles, about anyone who wasn’t Jewish. The gentiles surely did the same for the Jews as well. It built up Jesus’ internal idea of who this woman was. In a moment of weakness and frustration, he relied on this bias instead of seeing the person who was in front of him. 

Yet, in a powerful moment of self-determination, the woman turns the insult around, refusing to own the intended injury but instead claiming it so that it might be wielded as a rhetorical reply in Jesus’ own style. She stood unshakable in her own dignity, and in her desire to save her daughter. 

Can we imagine then the multitudes that exist between v 28 and v 29 of our text today? The silence after her statement: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” What did those seconds hold for Jesus? There were two ways that it could have gone. Jesus could have leaned in to his confirmation bias, let his rational mind ignore what he just saw, let his emotional mind get a glow up of superiority and rightness, and interpret what she said in a way that supported the insult he had delivered. “Those Syro-Phoenicians, so rude, so conceited, who does she think she is? How dare she say such a thing to me. These people are always taking advantage.” And we can imagine his next words might have been “Get away from me.”

But they weren’t. Instead, Jesus rejected the human tendency towards confirmation bias. He let his rational mind receive new information, and reflect upon it. He saw this woman stand firm with confidence and wit, yet without rancor. He saw the lengths a mother would go to save her child, a given among all cultures and creeds. He saw the courage it took to speak up in a culture where women were socialized to be deferential. And with this new information, Jesus saw that he had acted wrongly, and chose to act differently, the second time with more compassion.

This in itself is a small miracle. It’s not actually the norm. Studies show that when human beings are presented with facts and information that refute what we might think, that we tend to dig in to our strongly held notions, rather than entertaining new ones.(2) We want to avoid  uncertainty, and especially, avoid any repentance and repair that might be a consequence of our strongly-held ideas. We are not told how Jesus felt about this episode, but we can imagine him sinking to a chair once the woman had left, feeling regret for lashing out. Having to re-evalute our ideas about the world, and especially our ideas about ourselves, is not usually pleasant. Yet, the fundamental work of the spiritual life is change and growth.

We heard in our Swedenborg reading, how even in his time, it was clear that people will defend and justify whatever they want by any intellectual means that they can. Swedenborg writes that human beings were created with a will, to act as a vessel for love, and an intellect, to act as a vessel for wisdom, and it is through these two vessels that God can dwell within us. They mirror the relationship of God’s own Divine Love and Wisdom within Godself, and they are designed to act in concert, with love being the fuel for wisdom, and wisdom being the structure for love. For the sake of our freedom of choice, and the development of our spiritual life, we human beings have the ability to both choose what kind of love we ultimately want to serve, and to see the intellectual truth of something when our hearts haven’t quite gotten the memo yet. But when self-love becomes the fuel for everything we think, causing us to abdicate the ability to see anything else, then tendencies like confirmation bias are given free reign.

Today, in this one short episode, Jesus shows us that it doesn’t have to be so. A key discipline of the spiritual life is the ability to sacrfice short term good feelings like complacency or superiority or self-satisfaction, for the chance to grow in our ideas and perspectives, for the chance to grow in wisdom. For as we grow in wisdom, we make more space for empathy and compassion within us, which in turn helps us grow even further in wisdom, a holy virtuous circle. But this circle can’t get going unless we commit to regularly challenging our own ideas, and to keeping an open mind. Studies have shown that this can be as simple as training ourselves to notice our own thought processes. (3)

I feel for the exhausted and fallible Jesus in this story, and seeing him grapple successfully with a very human tendency, increases rather than decreases my faith in what he was trying to do. This small moment is a nitty-gritty miracle, theology embodied in relationship between two human creatures. What would Jesus do? Jesus didn’t hestitate to change course when he was reminded of the humanity of another. May it be so for all of us. Amen.

1. Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, p174
2. Ibid, p181
3. Ibid, p182
   
   
   

Readings:

Isaiah 35:1-6
1 The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God. 3 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; 4 say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” 5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. 6 Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.

Mark 7:24-30​
24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. 25 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. 27 “First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 28 “Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2
From the intellectual faculty called rationality, and from the volitional faculty called freedom, a person acquires the ability to affirm whatever they wish. For the natural person can elevate their intellect to as high a light as they desire. However, a person who is caught up in evils and their resulting falsities does not elevate it further than the higher region of their natural mind, and rarely up to the region of their spiritual mind. The reason is that they are governed by the delights of their natural mind, and if they elevate their intellect above that, their love's delight perishes. If they do elevate it further and see truths opposed to their life's delights or to the assumptions of their own intelligence, they then either falsify those truths, or pass them by and scornfully leaves them behind, or they retain them in memory as means to serve their life's love and conceit in their own intelligence.

Readings: 2 Samuel 6:1-2, 12-19, Secrets of Heaven 10416 (see below)
See also on Youtube: youtu.be/PK5TJzklh7U
Not long after I decided to go with the reading for today, I began to regret it. As I read over 2 Samuel, going back and forth over the text to see what happened before and after, I started to panic a little, thinking: “I can’t draw anything good from this!” And why? Because it is too messy. There are no simple heroes or villains. It is a story of war, and no one comes out well. We may remember David, a mere boy who vanquished the giant Goliath. After that, he spent years as a loyal servant in King Saul’s court. Even as Saul’s paranoia eventually forces David to become a fugitive, he maintains his integrity in the face of Saul’s cruelty. And yet, as David gathers support and strategizes, even as Saul eventually dies at the hands of the Philistines and David mourns him with sincerity, the narrative is filled with wartime actions that seem almost casual in the biblical account but that feel deeply wrong in the larger scheme. And, as much as David is lifted up as a seminal leader, alongside his good qualities we also know that he was deeply flawed.

And in a flash I feel a distinct resonance with our own times: full of messiness and sadness and loss and injustice, full of a necessary reframing of things we thought we knew, full of a necessary reckoning with things covered over, full of dealing with things we never thought we’d have to deal with. From pandemics and insurrections to climate change and racial injustice, there is a lot to feel uncomfortable and uncertain about. Processing it all feels hard and messy and sad, as we all just try to figure out how to show up in way that is accountable and useful. I’m sure we’d prefer easier stories, easier history, an easier sacred text, but that is not what we have in front of us.

What I take from this story, though, is the recognition that God remains in all of it, not as sanction but as grace, and a reminder to pair reflection and challenge with celebration and joy. Because, in the face of all that is happening in the world,  I know that I sometimes it can feel like celebration is not allowed, that somehow joy itself in the face of injustice and pain is a betrayal. How can we be happy when so many are suffering, so much is going wrong in our world?

And certainly, there are ways that the pursuit of happiness, of momentary and external joy, can be a distraction, an avoidance, a resistance, an indulgence, that prevents us from dealing with what needs to be dealt with. We certainly need to be aware when we are doing this. But, celebration and joy around the presence of God with us is an indispensable way to connect *to* God, to feel within our bones that our God is a good God, to recognize that our God is with us, in every challenge. It is a kind of celebration that cannot be relinquished, for the sake of our own well-being.

We can see this in the picture of David dancing as the ark is taken to Jerusalem, bookended by war and upheaval on one side and David’s upcoming transgressions on the other.  It is not so much that David as a character has a consciousness of this tension; rather, the narrative itself provides us with the juxtaposition. Within so much loss and violence and turmoil, still God reaches out in order to be among humankind, to be at the very center of our lives, as the ark with God’s instructions for living would be in the center of Jerusalem. And so David dances, as do the people, and we are invited to join in.

This dancing, this expression of joy, does not erase the urgency and the gravity of the wrongs we will need to right, the catastrophes we will need to manage, the apologies we will need to make, the healing we will need to do. The dancing, the expression of joy, puts us in the space where we might be renewed, where our selfhood is forgotten, even if just for a moment, where God’s love might freely flow into our soul, our mind, our heart, so that we have the fortitude and the resilience to step into the challenges of our life and our world.

For there certainly are other ways to approach our challenges. We look at Michal, Saul’s daughter, we see her despising David as he danced, and we see a resonance with that part of us that despises freedom and joy in ourselves and in others. She admonishes David sarcastically as he returns home:

“How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!” (2 Samuel 6:20)

Her story is complicated too. As daughter of the king, she was used to privilege. And yet as a women in ancient times, she did not have access to any measure of self-determination either. She was initially promised in marriage to David by her father, Saul, when David was favored in court. Years later, after Saul had died, David called that promise due and dragged Michal away from her current husband. The biblical account tells us her husband followed behind her for miles, weeping, as David’s soldiers led her away. Of course she was salty and resentful, at minimum. Her life had been determined by powerful men who cared nothing for her own wishes. And even her own feelings ultimately do not get to be hers, as this personal episode is co-opted by the narrative to demonstrate the true end of the reign of Saul and his line.

There are ways that we have all been wronged and challenged, by particular people, by systems, by what seems like fate. Anger, resentment, and sadness are reasonable and expected reactions to this reality, especially in situations where we have no power to make things better, to right the wrongs, to change our circumstances. 

But the ways we process that anger, resentment and sadness are key. We can see in Michel what happens when life make us hard and cynical. When we see the eruption of joy in others and all we can think of is what we have lost, what has gone wrong. The biblical narrative implies that for this stance, Michal would remain childless all her life. In the natural sense, this seems an overly harsh sentence for an understandable reaction to being treated like chattel. But in the spiritual sense, we can see that nothing can be born from that type of hardness, there can be no offspring of growth and transformation from a mindset that centers our pain, instead of processing our pain, that twists the existence of hardship into an ongoing support for a ego-centered worldview. And that is a very different thing from recognizing an accountability for our own actions even as we do not excuse what has happened to us, even as we work for justice and change.

And all of this is so nuanced and difficult to sort out in our real lives. This text doesn’t tell us “don’t worry be happy.” This text doesn’t tell us to just forget about our challenges and dance. This text isn’t saying we shouldn’t feel the fullness of the injustice of the transgressions we encounter, learn about, or experience. Perhaps it is just too much to see *David* dancing, knowing that he was the one who took Michel away from her life. But is it possible to see the dancing itself as holy and good apart from him?

What instead, would it have been like if Michal could have danced? She was alone in that window looking down; what if there had been a community to dance with her, to help her remember her connection to her God and her worthiness and potential. We can have compassion for the way her perspective turned, and why, while also hoping and wishing that she might have had access to a community and a practice that renewed her, that kept her whole in spirit. Purely happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales, but the dance, connected to the ground and our heartbeat; it bridges what is and what could be in a real and primal way.

The establishment of the ark in Jerusalem is so very important to the Jewish tradition and by extension, to ours. It signals the centrality of God in our lives, about how God pitched a tent right in the middle of all our messiness, and how we might respond by building the temple of our reverential selfhood around it. What steadfastness, what an unreasonable faith God has in us! And for this gift, for this grace, we dance. Amen.


Readings:

2 Samuel 6:1-2. 12-19

1 David again brought together all the able young men of Israel—thirty thousand. 2 He and all his men went to Baalah in Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim on the ark.

12 Now King David was told, “The LORD has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. 13 When those who were carrying the ark of the LORD had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. 14 Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the LORD with all his might, 15 while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD with shouts and the sound of trumpets. 16 As the ark of the LORD was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, she despised him in her heart. 17 They brought the ark of the LORD and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the LORD. 18 After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD Almighty. 19 Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes. 

Secrets of Heaven #10416

This is clear from the meaning of 'playing' as the desire of a person's interiors to celebrate, for play is the outcome of that desire, being a bodily activity brought about by gladness of mind; and all desire for celebration and all gladness of mind come from the delights belonging to the loves that govern a person. The reason why agreement as well is meant is that every desire to celebrate has agreement residing inwardly within it; for if any disagreement or disapproval enters in, that desire perishes. The desire to celebrate resides inwardly in a person's feeling of freedom, and all feeling of freedom comes as a result of love, when nothing exists to frustrate it.

Readings: Mark 6:1-13, Secrets of Heaven #4677:8-9 (see below)
See also on Youtube: youtu.be/ucNEkdH5y0M
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

So, I feel a little crotchety standing up here and saying this but its true: I don’t like to travel.  Now, I totally like being in new and different places, that’s great.  What I don’t like is the traveling to and from new places, especially air travel.  I’m not afraid to fly, but rather, I do get anxious about all the moving pieces…packing for myself and my family, leaving to get to the airport on time, finding parking, wondering will there be a huge line at security? will I make it onto an overbooked flight?  how will I navigate an unfamiliar airport?  There are just so many variables.

I recall one time several years ago trying to make it back from Convention in California. As I touched down in Chicago, ready to make a connection, my phone dinged.  The connecting flight was delayed two hours.  Fine, that meant I had more time for lunch.  But over the next several hours, I came to dread the buzz of my phone.  Ding. One more hour delay.  Ding. Another hour.  Ding.  Another two hours.  Ding.  Flight cancelled. I checked into a hotel with nothing but my handbag and my clothes on my back, thinking of this text. No second tunic, or deodorant for that matter, for me.

This is what makes the bible a timeless document.  Instructions given to specific people in a specific time, for specific reasons, can also have something important to say to us now.  Jesus had good reason to instruct his disciples as he did.  The dangers of traveling in the ancient world (as chronicled for example in the story of the good samaritan) made pairing up a good idea. A staff, in particular, was necessary to protect against wild animals. They were not to carry money to make it clear that they were not charlatans or magicians looking to make a quick buck, as there were many of those kind around in those days. They were to stay in the first house they were welcomed to, in order to discourage an appearance of currying favor to procure fancier accommodations. They were not to carry a second tunic, something that would protect them against the cold of night, but rather, trust in the Lord that lodgings would be found. And finally, shaking the dust off one’s clothing has a precedent in the book of Nehemiah as a sign of renunciation. The disciple’s mission was urgent, and they were not to waste time in the towns that were not receptive to their preaching.

Jesus was combining common sense with a desire for accountability, integrity and resilience. His disciples would be able to adapt to their circumstances, bringing the good news to people with a sense of servanthood, not triumphalism or superiority.  And they would respect people’s freedom, moving on when it was clear that they were not welcome.  We would do well to remember the simple beauty of these instructions and what they teach us.  Like: Community is a good thing; so make a friend for the journey.  Or: Be fierce and brave in protecting those we love from harm; and we might be called upon to protect the vulnerable too.  Avoid making money an idol; recognize that it is incidental to the movement of God in the hearts and minds of individual people; we can always show love no matter how much money we have in our pocket.  Be a humble servant; what we are given and who we are is enough; we need not strive towards an ever-increasing level of comfort and convenience because, really, it is not about us.  Avoid trying to engineer all possible outcomes; for then there is no room for the movement of God and for grace to flow between people and into situations. And, always respect the freedom of others; we may not agree with them but we are doing no one any favors by being pushy.  Gentle persistence born of love is about trusting the emergence of image of God in all people, and that is very different from the kind of relentlessness is often about our own agenda more than God’s.

As we learned in our Swedenborg reading, there are two additional spiritual dimensions to this teaching.  In the Word, tunics (as do most clothing) correspond to truth, the true ideas that we clothe ourselves with, the ideas we slip into that guide our living in the world. We are not to have two tunics because, as the reading said, Divine Truth is singular, it only ever derives its being from divine love.  There are no other origins for Divine Truth, and the instruction to only have one tunic represents this fact. A second tunic would represent truths that we derive from our selfhood and our ego, truths and ideas that serve us, not Divine Love.  And it is really easy to pack that second tunic, just in case. It’s really easy to clothe ourselves in divine truth until it starts to cost us something.  For example, we might believe in the equality of all people until it means that we need to give up our privilege.  We might believe that God loves everyone until we ourselves are called to love everyone, including those we “other.”  We might believe in the glory of creation, until it inconveniences us to care for our earth.  Then, we reach for that second tunic to protect ourselves against the loss of whatever we think is indispensable to us.  We start to think we deserve our unearned privilege, or that others are inferior or different, or that we can’t possibility make a difference. But these ideas involving superiority, power, apathy (and many others) do not serve divine love, they serve our self.  They keep us feeling safe and comfortable and toasty warm.

The second idea from the Swedenborg reading is this: that all the things listed in the gospel text, in Mark and the other gospels, are all good things from the Lord.  Gold, silver, bronze, and bread represent different shades and kinds of goodness in our lives. So it is not that the disciples were never to have any contact at all with these things, but rather that they were not supposed to pack them for themselves.  They were not supposed to carry them along as if they owned them.  And this is because the goodness and truth we receive from the Lord is from the Lord alone.  We get into trouble when we start thinking that they are ours, that they originate in us, and we can and should control their coming and going.

I remember when my daughter was a much younger than she is now, and I thought that I would start giving her some responsibility when we were preparing to travel.  I gave her a backpack and told her to pack the things she thought she would need.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was a little surprised by what made it into the bag, and I had to sit down with her and pull things out one by one.  I found myself saying things like: “You never use that headband, do you really think you will need it? or “You can’t possibly need three different stuffed animals, how about just one.” (Let me say, with practice and age, she is a very competent bag packer now.)

But you can see how this is like us and God.  When we pack our own bags, we will put lots of stuff in there that doesn’t belong.  And so God will sit down with us and gently challenge us about what we think is necessary for the journey.  This is actually the process of regeneration: The Great Unpacking.  We all probably begin with one enormous unwieldy backpack, full of things that we have deemed necessary for survival, or things we picked up on the way. Sometimes we maybe let other people pack our bag and we never thought to look inside, or we were too afraid to. But, One by one, God will help us unpack the things we don’t need, the things that are too heavy and weighing us down, the things that prevent us from being the nimble and focused disciples that God knows we can be.  Do we need this armor?  No we do not.  Do we need this self-defensiveness?  Nope. Do we need this fear? No. Do we need this self-focus, do we need this worry, do I need this self-hatred, do I need this distrust?  No, no and no.

Just in case we think we can get around the idea of an empty backpack by choosing to only packing good things, like empathy, service, civility, well, its not that simple. Packing good things is better than unhelpful things, certainly, but this can only be transitional at best. Money and bread are good and helpful things, but the disciples were not supposed to pack them because the problem is our packing them into our backpack ourselves. The problem is us trying to control the goodness of God, to hoard it and use it for our own ends. And this is where it gets so hard; striving for achievement, keeping ourselves busy, pleasing other people, having enough, being healthy or accomplished—these all seem like good things. And they are. Unless we are using them to bolster our own sense of self-image, keeping them in our backpack because they make us feel good or important.  And lets face it, we all do this.

This is why it is important to sometimes take off our figurative backpack and take a look inside.  Buddhist teacher Tara Brach quotes the sage Sri Nisargadatta saying “illusion exists…because it is not investigated.” She continues: “If we are attached to untrue beliefs, it is because we have not examined our thoughts. We have not met them with mindful investigation; we have not asked whether they truly represent our current, living experience of reality.  Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.” (1)

Perhaps we are carrying around some things that we didn’t realize, things that prevent us from being present to our lives in its vulnerable and beautiful reality, that prevent us from opening our hearts in compassion to those around us, that prevent us aligning from ourselves with the influx of heaven.

Swedenborg’s book Divine Providence tells us: “The Lord is at work in the center of our being, and works from that center into everything that depends on it all the way to our boundaries, and we are living at these boundaries while this is happening.  As long as we are keeping these boundaries closed, then, no cleansing can take place.” (2) The Lord is with us, in the center of our being, and is working for our benefit.  But God will not take away our sins without our cooperation, just as it would have been unkind for me to empty my daughters carefully packed backpack without her permission.  We need to purposefully and in freedom, lay our backpack down and look inside, and be willing to learn about the value and usefulness of what we have packed. 

And one day, to our surprise, we might find that our psycho-spiritual backpack is empty, that our second tunic is neatly left in the closet, and we do not care, because we are so connected to our God that we know we will be given what we need in every moment to become an angel.  Amen.

1. Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, p116
2. Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Providence #119

Readings:

Mark 6:1-13

1 Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. 2 When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? 3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. 4 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” 5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.

6 He was amazed at their lack of faith. Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. 7 Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over impure spirits. 8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9 Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. 10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 They went out and preached that people should repent. 13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.


Secrets of Heaven 4677:8-9

[8] Because Divine Truth is singular - that is to say, it is derived solely from Divine Good - the twelve disciples were commanded, when they were being sent out to preach the gospel of the kingdom, not to have two tunics.
[9] All the individual instructions given in these places are representative of the celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom which the disciples were sent to preach. The reason they were not to take gold, silver, bronze, bag, or bread with them was that those things meant different kinds of good and truth received from the Lord alone.…Now because these things had to be not twofold but singular, they were forbidden to have two staves, two pairs of sandals, or two tunics.

Readings: Revelation 12:1-9, 13-17, Apocalypse Revealed 533:1,3 (see below)
​See also on Youtube ​youtu.be/7a9UIkBh-nY
Photo by Mier Chen on Unsplash

Today we are celebrating, a little late, a traditional Swedenborgian holy day, June 19th. On this day, we celebrate the amazing ways that God is always breathing life into our spiritual journeys, individually and collectively, and we celebrate the vision that this reality suggests: that God has a dream for humanity, and that God is working to help us achieve it. This vision is what Swedenborg has called a New Church, and is pictured in the book of Revelation by a beautiful city descending from the sky called the New Jerusalem. This is of course, where our church gets its name: The Church of the Holy City. It is named thus, so that as we gather together in the here and now, we also look forward and work to cooperate with what God is doing in the world and for the world. 

Now, there is another metaphor used for the New Church in the book of Revelation though, and that is “the women clothed with the sun” from Chapter 12, which is our reading for today. 

But first, a note on The New Church, as a phrase:

The Swedenborgian movement has historically called itself The New Church, on our best days we know that it is only aspirational, that the New Church will never actually be bounded by bylaws, boards, membership, and committees. We make that structure because humans beings can accomplish more when we work together, and it makes us happy to gather with each other. But the phenomenon of “church” (defined in Swedenborg’s mystical way) exists wherever people work to take care of each other, raise their hearts and minds beyond their own self, and look to a higher power to help them do that. 

Certainly, human beings have always been able to do that, so “church” (mystically defined) has always existed. But there are also times when human capacities for spirituality need revitalization, especially if the earthly structures and the forms of church that we have devised are actually starting to get in the way of people caring, loving, and growing spiritually. 

Much of Swedenborg’s works are him arguing against human theologies that *are* getting in the way, particularly the kinds where we try to buy or talk our way into salvation. There is no short cut into salvation - is always whole-person transformation and nothing less, an eternal journey towards healing and wholeness, powered by the ways we connect our faith (what we believe) with the ways that we reach out to serve and love others.

So, sometimes in human systems there needs to be a newness brought to bear — God is indeed always doing a new thing! When we talk about there being a New Church, what we mean is a movement away from trying to find short-cuts to spiritual healing and wholeness, and a movement into accepting that salvation can only occur when the love in our hearts and the faithfulness in our minds work together towards the project of mutual love. There are many in the world that already understand this! And of course, it is an ongoing lesson for us all.

But let us now return to the figure of the woman clothed with the sun. She represents this revitalization of human spirituality, this New Church, in particular, the ways that it now exists in heaven, for everything on earth is connected to everything in heaven. She is clothed with the sun because any such revitalization must have the love of God at its core, and we learned in our meditation several weeks ago that the Lord appears in heaven as the sun.

The moon beneath her feet represents the New Church on earth, reflecting those rays of the Divine sun as best we can, but not being the origin of them. Swedenborg notes that since all things in heaven and earth are connected; there could be no New Church in heaven if there is not one on earth, and vice versa. Yet, we note the *separation* of the sun and the moon in this picture; what of that? The mystical church on earth and the mystical church in heaven *are* connected, yet always working towards full conjunction. We are a work in progress, in the process of becoming ever more connected. Or, to use a Lutheran phrase to describe the character of it: “already but not yet.” We are already connected but our union is not yet full and complete. There will always be more work to do. So, what is it that actually conjoins us with God and the heavenly church? The work of love, of course.(1) We unite ourselves with God and heaven when we love what God loves and when we act in accordance with that. But let us return to that in a moment.

Because the next question is a little less heart-warming. We have already asked what conjoins, so the next question is: what fractures, what separates? What devours?

Here we come to the great red dragon from the story. The woman is in labor and gives birth to a child, representing all the humane perspectives that a revitalized human spirituality will center: God is Divine Love & Wisdom, God is always forgiving, God made heaven for all, salvation is available to all who live the kindest life they can, sacred scripture speaks on many levels, all religions can be a path to God, and more.

Yet the dragon wishes to devour such humane, useful, effective ideas, to center other ideas instead. Ideas that make God and spirituality punishing, exclusive, materialistic. Ideas that center power, rigidity, cruelty. Ideas that tell us we should be out for ourselves, that mutual love is weakness, that faith need only be the right words to the right person, that some deserve salvation more than others.

We see the dragon everywhere, everywhere around us and everywhere within. A desire to connect more authentially with others in our life might be devoured by a fear of vulnerability. A desire to connect with God more intentionally is devoured by our lack of follow-through. A desire to apologise is devoured by our sense of pride. 

A desire to be a more welcoming church, town, country is devoured by a fear of change. A desire to take care of the vulnerable is devoured by a lack of generosity. A desire for integrity and process is devoured by the hunger for power.

There is much that stands in the way. But ultimately, though the dragon and what it represents stands there waiting, what I see connecting the New Church in heaven and the New Church on earth is the phenomenon of labor: the work of it, the pain of it, beauty of it, the courage of it, and the sheer creativity of it. The phrase “a labor of love” is a phrase for a reason; we know the truth of it. We might think of the New Church, this revitalization of the human spirituality and what it can achieve, as the opposite of a black hole: something that is continually birthing new, thoughtful, caring, brilliant, helpful, comforting things that can assist in our spiritual journeys. These things might be birthed in churches, or in spiritual movements, but they can certainly be birthed in many other places too. Anywhere or anyplace that looks to learn and grow in service and love, in movements of all kinds that stand for justice, hope and peace.

And so then, our work is two-fold, to facilitate and assist in birthing the newness, the comfort, the preciousness of every tiny piece of spiritual growth we and the world might make, and then to be vigilant against the dragon that would devour them. And I hesitate to use such language, because such language is so often used to pit human beings against each other. You’re the dragon, no you’re the dragon. Battle metaphors are powerful *and* flawed tools.

But we know the world, and we know our own hearts, do we not, my friends? There *are* forces, habits, tendencies within us that will swallow our good intentions whole. And what is the world made of, but us? We need to be able to see the dragon with clarity, to know the way it is appearing within us, and work to let go of the claws that it has in us, while at the same time resisting the dragon’s sneaky disguises as “othering” or as shame, or as judgmental pride.  Instead, we look to the story and see that the child is protected by being sent up to God. We protect the preciousness birthed by the New Church by first and foremost relinquishing ownership, surrendering pride and power and merit, and centering God instead of ourselves.

There are many ways to picture the powerful story of God’s presence with us, of God’s vision for humanity. The woman clothed with the sun is a beautiful one that speaks to us on many levels. It communicates to us a timeless sense of connection, generativity, beauty and protection, as well as the reality of what stands against those things. As we celebrate New Church day, today and in the future, I hope we all might be in equal parts hopeful, clear-eyed, and willing to labor. Amen.

(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #1068


Readings:

Revelation 12:1-9, 13-17
1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.
4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.
9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child.
14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach.
15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.
16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.
17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.


Apocalypse Revealed 533:1,3
A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet. This symbolizes the Lord's New Church in heaven, which is the New Heaven, and the New Church to come on earth, which is the New Jerusalem.
…The woman here appeared clothed with the sun because the church is governed by love toward the Lord; for it acknowledges Him and keeps His commandments, and that is loving Him (John 14:21-24). 
The moon appeared under the woman's feet because it means the church on earth, which was not yet conjoined with the church in heaven. The moon symbolizes the intelligence in a natural person, and faith (no. 413). And its being seen under the woman's feet means, symbolically, that it was a church to come on earth…
[3] The church in heaven does not continue in existence unless it is conjoined with a church on earth, because heaven where angels are, and the church where people are, function together, like the internal and external components in a person…

Readings: Mark 3:20-35, Apocalypse Revealed 723 (see below)
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

The gospel of Mark, as a narrative, really gets down to business quickly.  Literally, we have turned ONE page from the start, at least in my bible, and Jesus is getting into all kinds of trouble. He has already been baptized by John, called his disciples, preached all over the place and healed many people of various diseases and maladies, including leprosy and paralysis, eaten with a (gasp) tax collector and other sundry sinners and challenged the religious authorities on the subject of the Sabbath. Jesus has been very busy, and people are taking notice. Large crowds follow him around, and we start our text for today with the acknowledgment they were preventing him from even doing normal things like sitting down at a table to eat.  Understandably, Jesus’ family is concerned.  They do not yet understand what he is trying to do.  Their time will come, as Jesus’ brother James will one day be the leader of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem, after Jesus’ death.  But for now, they think he is out of his mind.

However, his late-to-the-game family is the least of Jesus’ troubles. The religious authorities and the political elites are already plotting to kill him.  By page three of the gospel. They are actively looking for reasons to denounce him and trap him, and we are treated to one of those arguments here. They recognize that Jesus is performing miracles that are beyond human means. They see the transformative nature of his works. But they attribute the power of these accomplishments to the devil. They see him heal people and free them from possession, and they call such work satanic. Jesus exposes the ridiculousness of their assertion.  Hell does not stand for human freedom and human thriving; why on earth would the devil participate in such work?  Hell seeks dominion and enslavement, not healing and not liberation. It doesn’t make any sense. Then Jesus says “Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven…”
Now, this is quite the pronouncement, seemingly in conflict with Jesus’ words and actions so far, based as they have been on the necessity for repentance and the availability of forgiveness. So, blasphemy must be pretty bad then, to elicit such a response. What is blasphemy though exactly? It is sort of an umbrella theological term, which at best can mean irreverent behavior towards that which is sacred and at worst cursing and reviling God and what God stands for.  And clearly, it is this second more troubling and serious end of the spectrum that Jesus is talking about. 

Because we are not talking about the ubiquitous OMGs that seem to clutter our cultural landscape.  Certainly, taking the Lord’s name in vain is not to be encouraged but habitual and relatively unconscious blasphemy is very different from what Jesus is talking about here in this text.  Swedenborg makes a distinction between blasphemy that originates in the understanding and blasphemy that originates in the will.  And I quote (1):

“The second kind are the ones which are so horrible, not the first. Those that come out of the will by way of the understanding spring from evil of life, whereas those that come solely out of the understanding and not at the same time out of the will spring from falsity of doctrine or from the illusions of the outward senses that deceive a person set fast in a state of ignorance.”(1)

Ignorance and thoughtlessness do not condemns us. True blasphemy is never just a misunderstanding, one cannot trip and accidentally blaspheme. Neither is it blasphemous to be skeptical about God, or even wrong about God. Paul, author of many biblical epistles, is an excellent example of this. He started out as a devoted Pharisee persecuting Christians because he thought it was the right thing to do. But as soon as he had a spiritual experience, heard from Jesus that he was in the wrong, he immediately changed his behavior completely. His will was to be zealous for God, even as his understanding led him to work against God. But since his will was not for himself and his own power and rightness, then as soon as he understood his wrongness he transformed his behavior.

However, it is entirely another thing to see and recognize the work of the Holy Spirit for what it is and call it satanic as we understand the religious leaders in our story to have done, to see resurrection and re-creation, God’s main work in this world, and to say that it is worthless and treat it with contempt. To say essentially that the vulnerability and struggle of re-creation is fundamentally the wrong way to go. We might take the German Christian church during the rise of Nazism, as an example. The German Christian church actively allowed Nazi ideology to permeate and twist the gospel. Nazi flags were hung in churches, strewn upon altars. They took the Word, full of God’s bestowal of worthiness on all creatures, and deemed it inadequate, claiming that the Nazi interpretation of the gospel, based on purity of race, was the true fulfillment of the Word.  They took God’s depth and breadth of love and made it narrow, made it an excuse for domination and superiority.  It is an understatement to call this an over-reach, even though it was. It was also blasphemy of the worst kind.  The only way to justify such a disparate interpretation is from a will for power, for nothing else can cause God’s name to be taken up in the spirit of exclusion and death. This was not a mistake in interpretation, this was not an honest disagreement, this was the will for power twisting the gospel into its exact opposite. This is blasphemy. Taking the vulnerable, transformative, resurrection message of the Jesus and making it about the dominance of one people over others.

And this is what there is no coming back from, no forgiveness. What we are capable of understanding about God stems from what we love and value. When we try our best to love God, and not our self-as-center, we might make mistakes of understanding but we are inherently open to correction because in our love for God we submit our understanding to God, we submit our own interpretations and preferences to God’s mission for the universe.  Therefore our understanding of God’s truth can and likely will change over time. This is part of our spiritual journey, our trajectory of transformation and growth. But this will not happen if our will loves ourself and our own ego above all else. Growth and change is then threatening to our sense of ego-power. We will prefer that which is static and certain for that can be more easily controlled. Being created anew is inherently uncontrollable because it involves a surrender of self, and to the self that is focused on power, such surrender is impossible. And so the blasphemy that calls God’s creative and transformative character hellish cannot be forgiven because this kind of blasphemy rejects the whole premise of forgiveness, rejects the whole notion of transformation, rejects the goodness of re-creation at all. It is a self-inflicted wound, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The lack of forgiveness comes not from God. God cannot turn away from us. As we heard in our reading, it is against God’s nature.(2) The lack of forgiveness for blasphemy against the Holy Spirit comes from rejecting the idea of vulnerability as useful, repentance as necessary, and forgiveness itself as a way forward into new ways to love.

Notice also, that Jesus, as testy as he sometimes gets, does not take these affronts personally.  He sees himself as part of God’s larger movement for all of creation, and therefore exposes the heart of the worldview that these religious leaders espoused.  It seemed that they were objecting to one troublesome man, but Jesus points out that to be against the healing and liberation that he, Jesus, brings is also to be against the whole trajectory of the Holy Spirit, to be against the character of God. The whole of the cosmos expresses God’s creative power, and every part of the universe participates in its own on-going creation, and Christ is just one part of that larger picture.

The Holy Spirit is calling us all to take part in the adventure of on-going creation. Like all adventures, it won’t all be sweetness and light along the way, but the horizon is ever expanding if we are willing to let God lead us.  And perhaps it will serve us today to think about where we are throwing up roadblocks to our own re-creation.  Where we have convinced ourselves that rightness is better than vulnerability, where we have convinced ourselves that we are so chosen and blessed that we need not stoop to care for the forgotten, where we have convinced ourselves that true Christian love is fanciful and ill-advised.
Because, blasphemy is not an act that comes from nowhere, it comes from what we have chosen to love and value. When the self is loved above all, then the movement of the Holy Spirit towards others is incomprehensible. Though it is hard sometimes, when we choose to love God, we choose to love the principles of expansion, inclusion, surrender and redemption, we choose to love the existence of a creative and blossoming universe.  And so praise be to God, the creator of wonders.

Amen.

1. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 9222:4
2. Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity 56

Readings:

Mark 3:20-35

20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” 22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” 23 So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house. 28 Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” 30 He said this because they were saying, “He has an impure spirit.” 31 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” 33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. 34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

Apocalypse Revealed 723

For blasphemy symbolizes a denial of the Lord's Divinity in His humanity, and an adulteration of the Word, thus its profanation. For someone who fails to acknowledge the Lord's Divinity in His humanity and falsifies the Word, but not intentionally, does indeed commit profanation, but lightly. But people who claim for themselves all the power of the Lord's Divine humanity, and for that reason deny His Divinity, and who apply everything in the Word to acquiring dominion for themselves over the sanctities of the church and heaven, and for that reason adulterate the Word - those people commit serious profanation.

True Christianity 56

…From these few points you can see how insane people are who think that God can condemn anyone, curse anyone, throw anyone into hell, predestine anyone's soul to eternal death, avenge wrongs, or rage against or punish anyone…In reality, God cannot turn away from us or even look at us with a frown. To do any such thing would be against his essence, and what is against his essence is against himself.