Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-22, Mark 1:21-28, Divine Providence 230:2, Secrets of Heaven 668 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Eduardo Goody on Unsplash We join Jesus today at the begining of his minstry in the gospel of Mark, right after he has called his first disciples to follow him. They reach the town of Capernaum, and Jesus goes into the synagogue and begins to teach. It is not so unusual that Jesus would have engaged in a public reading and exposition of the Torah - this was the purpose of the synagogue - but rather that his teachings began to put him in conflict with the experts in the law, the scribes. He was starting to preach something different, something that made the people sit up and take notice, something that made the religious leaders uncomfortable. What is interesting is that Mark characterizes less what Jesus says, but how he said it. He tells us Jesus taught with “authority” and that was part of what the people, and indeed, the impure spirit, were responding to. We’ll leave modern interpretations of exorcisms to another day. For now, I’d like to focus on the question of authority: why did Jesus have it, and why was that important to the people listening? To understand why the Jewish people would sit up and take notice of someone teaching with authority, we need to take a detour through Deuteronomy. It is the fifth book of the bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses, and takes the form of various Mosaic speeches and acts, providing a supplement and an expansion of the of the original law, including the ten commandments, which we hear about in Exodus. The book experienced “several stages of growth and editing,” coming together during the Babylonian exile and after it, as Israel worked to reclaim its identity, both internally and politically. So in our reading, in the midst of this reclamation of identity and nationhood, we see the careful balancing of the powers in religious life. In making a covenant with the people, God had established Godself as the ultimate authority, but understandably, the people had always required some kind of accommodation of that authority in their context. So, God gave them the law, and the priesthood, and finally a king. But, the problem with authority passed down by inheritance, like the priesthood and kingship, is the rise of orthodoxy. Therefore, God also gave authority to prophets. When the authority of the king or the priests calcified into something that no longer served the people but served the elite, God sent prophets to preach a word that challenged the status quo. A word new enough shatter complacency but old enough to remind the people what had been true all along. These prophets are an incredibly important part of Jewish tradition, they are an embodiment of God’s continual care and love, a compassionate God who cares enough to send correction when God’s people have gone astray. This is one of the reasons that the question of “authority” was important to the Jews in Jesus’ context and why they were so attuned to it. They had a tradition of prophets rising up to challenge the status quo, and so the people were always on the look out. But, the particular people who wrote and collated Deuteronomy were not prophets but priests. They recognized the importance of prophets to the balance of righteous power but they also feared them. They feared for their own position, of course. Those ensconced in orthodoxy rarely believe it is right for it to be dismantled or reformed. But also, there is a potential dark side to prophetism. Such a back door into God’s authority can leave a space open for bad actors and profiteers. Vulnerable people will often believe anything that gives them hope. But not everyone who claims to speak for God, does. Not everyone who claims to speak the truth, does. So, the Deuteronomists were attempting to set up some boundaries. They wanted to limit the influence of outsiders, so they said prophet must rise up from “among your own people” and they wanted leave a high bar, so it needed to be someone “like Moses,” their most revered prophet. And then they also provided some guidelines for answering the question: how do we know when someone is speaking for God? How do we know if what they say is the truth? The first guideline is that the prophet should not speak in the name of other gods. On the face of it, that seems pretty simple. If they say it doesn’t come from the one true God, then it doesn’t come from God. But speaking in the name of other gods isn’t always so straight forward. In Swedenborgian sense, a name symbolizes the character, the essential nature of a thing. If you are familiar with the play by Arthur Miller, the Crucible, the main character is asked to sign his name to a document professing his guilt in order to gain his freedom. Many others had already done so. But he is not guilty of the crime and he cannot bring himself to do it because his name, to him, is not only what he is called by others, but what he stands for as a person. Speaking in the name of other gods is also about speaking with allegiance to the character of not only other gods, but other powers, other priorities. In the words of one of my commentaries it is preaching “doctrines which teach the soul to worship other things as supreme.” Other things like money, power, influence, celebrity, pleasure, security, the list goes on. So a true prophet does not lift up priorities that are antithetical to God’s kingdom, does not invite us to worship things other than God, does not call us to value things which God has cautioned us against valuing. The other guideline this chapter provides is that the word of prophecy must come true. Already, this is a tricky one. The Israelites, post-exile, were chastened that they did not listen to their many prophets who preached destruction, for that did indeed come to pass. And yet, we heard several weeks back the story of Jonah, about a prophet who did preach destruction but found that prophecy averted by the Ninevites’ repentance. As we know having come through a modern pandemic, it is often very hard to prove the realness of a disaster averted. But the prophetic word is not always about predictions of calamity; remember it is a new word about what has always been true. The prophets were bringing the people back to the covenant, back to what they knew was right. This is a type of word that can be proven true in the course of our own lives. Is it better to love than to hate? Is it better to tell the truth than to lie? What happens when we respect our parents, our neighbors, our spouses according to the commandments? What happens when we look after the most vulnerable among us? The truth of this type of prophecy is borne out everyday, right in front of us. The realness of God’s divine truth is not an abstract thing; its realness comes to pass in the small moments between people just as readily as in the “arc of the moral universe.” So, the first guideline is prompting us to pay attention to what a prophet is calling upon us to love and serve. The second guideline is prompting us to take a look at the form of the prophecy and the fruit that it bears. Do the words encourage us to love or hate, do the words encourage us to act with courage and integrity? Because, for something to be true, it must be giving form to love. If it is not giving form to love then it is not true. From our Swedenborg reading: no truth can be brought forth unless love exists within it. If it is giving form to love of the Lord and love of the neighbor, then it is true. If it is giving form to self-love, giving form to love of dominion, giving form to fear….then what is being preached is falsity, no matter how appealing, how pragmatic, how right it may sound. We will know a prophet by what they tell us to love and by what they tell us to do. So, the Jewish people of Jesus’ day were urgently waiting for a prophet to rise up and speak truth to power. As an occupied people under the boot of Rome, with a political and religious elite complicit in their efforts to retain control, they hoped and prayed for a word from God that would change their dire circumstances. By their tradition, they were finely attuned to the authority of the prophet, and they saw it in Jesus that day. We too look for prophets, in our day and age, even if we don’t necessarily understand people to speak for God as directly as in ancient Israel. Perhaps we don’t always look for religious prophets, but political and cultural prophets certainly. It is a natural human tendency to resist the calcification of our institutions, to try to introduce some fresh air into fossilized ways of doing things. God knows this, and the Deuteronomists knew this. But prophets are not always recognized in their day. Many did not recognize Jesus for what he was, many did not recognize the word of God being spoken in their midst. Likewise, often it is only the passage of time that proves the truth of the prophet. As many have reminded us this past Martin Luther King day, Dr King was not popular in his day. He is oft quoted now, and is much admired, but Gallup polls in the 1960s show a very different picture. In a a survey in 1963, the year before Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, just under half of the respondents had a negative view of him, with a fourth having an extremely negative view of him. Much of white america did not approve of Dr. King’s actions during the civil rights movement. And we can see why; he was employing the prophet’s refrain…Repent! Open your eyes to the suffering of the marginalized! The *purpose* of the prophet is to make us feel uncomfortable, to help us see where God’s kingdom is yearning to be born more fully. And we don’t always welcome that reminder. But, let us apply the rubric: what was Dr. King calling on us to love? Our fellow human beings. What was he calling on us to do? Give form to that love through the granting of equal rights. Dr. King’s good friend and colleague, Rabbi Heschel has written, that “the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness….prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: few are guilty, but all are responsible.”(1) As we will learn as we journey though Mark this year, Jesus will not be satisfied with an understanding of power and authority that is apart from sacrifice. Many will marvel at his miracles, at his teaching, but Jesus meant for these to be a call to action, to responsibility, to an embrace of a kingdom in which servanthood and mutual love reign. Having our eyes opened to the moral state of our lives, individually, socially, nationally, can be very painful. But it can also be transformational, because the recognition of the authority of divine truth is just as much a call as any of Jesus’ disciples received. The question is: are we listening? Amen. (1) Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction, p16-17 Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-22 15 The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him. 16 For this is what you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, “Let us not hear the voice of the LORD our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die.” 17 The LORD said to me: “What they say is good. 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him. 19 I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name. 20 But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.” 21 You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?” 22 If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed. Mark 1:21-28 21 They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. 22 The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. 23 Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, 24 “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” 25 “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” 26 The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek. 27 The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” 28 News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee. Divine Providence 230:2 We can see from this that in the Word, "the name of God" means both God and everything divine that is in God and that emanates from God. Since the Word is a divine emanation, it is a name of God; and since all the divine gifts that we refer to as the spiritual gifts of the church come from the Word, they too are a name of God. Secrets of Heaven 668 …Indeed no truth can ever be brought forth unless some good or delight exists for it to spring from. Within good and delight there is life, but not within truth apart from that which it derives from good and delight. It is from these that truth is given form and develops, even as faith, which is connected with truth, is given form by and develops out of love, which is connected with good. Truth is like light; there is no light apart from that which flows from the sun or flame. It is from these that light is given form. Truth is merely the form which good takes, and faith merely the form which love takes. The form that truth takes depends therefore on the character of its good, as does that of faith on that of its love or charity.
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Readings: Genesis 28:10-19, John 1:43-51, Secrets of Heaven #3539:2, #3701 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Johannes Plenio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/spiral-staircase-1102913/ Today we hear the story of Nathaniel’s conversion. As a character, he does not appear in any gospel apart from John, and is absent from the other gospel lists of the twelve disciples. This is not surprising though; the gospel of John does not seem to define discipleship as narrowly, or formally, as the other gospels. In this gospel, Nathanael appears twice; in our text for today, and also later when Jesus appears by the Sea of Galilee after the resurrection. He seems something of a relatable figure, doesn’t he? Perhaps it is easy to recognize his skepticism in ourselves and others. Nathanael hails from Cana, and people from Cana generally despised folks from Nazareth. So, when he scoffs that nothing good can come from Nazareth, he is revealing his pre-existent bias. We all often fall into bias or prejudice, forming opinions from preconceptions, and we deserve to be challenged on it, drawn away from it, especially if we are public figures who set the tone for national discourse. Yet thankfully, Nathanael does not appear to be hardened in his ideas; he accepts Philips invitation to “come and see.” Upon seeing Nathanael, Jesus affirms his good character. His reference to Nathanael as an “Israelite” is meant to place him positively within the history of their tradition. Nathanael asks suspiciously, how do you know me? And Jesus reveals what Nathanael had been doing before Philip had come and found him. This hardly seems like much of a revelation; there could have been a number of ways Jesus could have found this out. But Nathanael is convinced. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that a fig tree traditionally denotes a place where rabbis study the Torah, and to Nathanael it was revealing something of his own private nature and aspiration. We don’t really know. Even so, even Jesus seems a little bemused by the speed of Nathanael’s reversal, and shares rather conspiratorially, “you will see greater things than that.” As we imagine Jesus whispering the same thing to us, it feels like an exciting promise, that we are being let into an amazing secret. As we travel through the episode though, I believe that the true revealing of Jesus character is found not so much in the titles that Nathanael subsequently calls Jesus, but in verse 51, where Jesus says you will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. This is a reference to the story of Jacob’s ladder in the book of Genesis. In our reading today we learned that, while Jacob was on a journey, he stopped to sleep for the night and he had a dream. And he saw what Jesus was referring to here: “a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” The Lord is at the top, reiterating his promises to Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather, and making new promises to Jacob, including: I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.” A Swedenborgian interpretation of this story of Jacob, involves the joining together of what is spiritual and what is earthly, essentially the process of our spiritual journey as earthly beings becoming spiritual beings. In order to be regenerated, we need to be able to raise up our understanding beyond the less than spiritual things that we love in this world. We need to be able to recognize the truth of God’s reality even if it is different from the habits and the loves we have formed in ourselves. For example, we might love winning arguments, but the truth of reality is that conversation and relationship is about connection not domination, and so should be opportunities for listening and empathy. Our relationships will likely suffer until we can arrive at a recognition of this fundamental truth. But this recognition *itself* doesn’t mean anything for our spiritual trajectory if we don’t bring that understanding back down to earth and enact change in our actual life. To do this, we would need to put aside the satisfaction that we get from besting our conversation partners, and thinking ourselves absolutely right, in order to really hear other people, and actually practice listening. The process of regeneration of our spirit, is that we ascend to realization and then we descend to actualization, the spiritual brought down and conjoined with the earthly. There are many ways to understand or to picture how this process works; the stairway suggests a connective loop but a spiral is also an image that is often and usefully employed. What I find especially interesting in the juxtaposition of these two stories are the two different promises that God makes to Jacob and to Nathanael, promises made to us as well, when we are in these different headspaces. To Nathanael, Jesus says “you will see greater things than these.” This is an exciting promise filled with potential. It is about what we are going to be able to learn, how we are going to be able to expand our minds and our worldview. We are going to be amazed by what God is and what God can show us. There is more to know and experience and understand and we are being invited into that knowledge. This is the promise that is spoken to us at the beginning of the ascent of the stairway. We begin here in all of our earthly details but sometimes we look up and we know there is more to life. We might be reasonably skeptical in our hope, we might take each rung carefully and that is okay. But the *promise* is that the stairway exists and it goes upward. The promise is that we can improve our state, ever increasing our capacity to love and make the world a better place. This kind of outward looking aspiration is what drives much of human learning, both secular and religious. The other promise is to Jacob. God says: “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.” This is the promise of the descent. If the ascent is exciting and exhiliarating, the descent is not always so. Changing our habits, our desires, our selfish impulses, our social structures, is actually very hard work. Psychology has informed us that it takes nine positive thoughts to counteract one negative one, or that forming new habits takes three skills: attention, focus and purposeful repetition. Do any of those three things sound like they are supported and lifted up in this modern day and age? Not so much. Spiritual work can be discouraging, exhausting, and embarrassing. We will fail many times before we succeed. Think of trying not to lose our temper, for example. It is so very hard to dismantle our emotional habits around our various triggers. What about facing the reality of white privilege? Many of us will encounter layers and layers of shame and regret and defensiveness and uncertainty around this topic before we are able to contribute usefully to the dismantling of systemic racism. The promise of the descent though, indeed the promise contained within the incarnation itself, is that God does not stay at the top of the ladder while we go down into the scary hard work. God comes down with us, is present with us, through all of it. God’s whole purpose is to make a heaven from the human race, to connect the earthly and the spiritual within us, and this is a game way too important to coach from the sidelines. So God goes where we go, into the details, into the slog. And Jacob wakes up, recognizing that the lowly crossroads where he laid his head is the house of God; God was present and he didn’t realize it. And this is one of the ways in which we can become derailed in our process, whereby we think that God only presides at the top of the stairway and that freedom and peace and satisfaction only exist at the top. It is possible to become so obsessed with self-actualization, with aspirationally being our best selves, that we forget about the descent when it matters, forget to be present to our life. The mistake is when we see the stairway as an escape from our life, not the way to transform our life. The exact opposite case is demonstrated in the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He writes: “When I was in Vietnam, so many of our villages were being bombed. Along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries, or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help the people who were suffering under the bombs? After careful reflection, we decided to do both—to go out and help people and to do so in mindfulness. We called it Engaged Buddhism. Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing?”(1) And the gospels of Jesus underscore this point, as we progressively see how Jesus follows up on his comment to Nathanael. When he said “You will see greater things” he could have simply meant all his superhuman miracles, the transfiguration, the resurrection. These were awesome, awe-filled things. But he also meant touching and healing the unclean, he also meant the garden of Gethsemane, he also meant the cross, he also meant his fellow people of Nazareth. Jesus entered into the most broken and despised aspects of human life, as well as the good parts, as well into the potential. With him, the angels were ascending *and* descending all the time: You will see greater things AND I will not leave you. Jesus’ glorification was, and needed to be, a reflection of our own process, a reflection of the ascent and the descent, a reflection of a whole and connected loop, because God means to offer salvation to everyone and redemption to everything. A manufactured superhero Jesus bids us escape our lives and our contexts, and sometimes we really do wish that is what redemption is about: escape. But it is not, it is about transformation. A very wise lady once said to me: There is no way out but through. And in the end, how else can we imagine that God and humankind could have any real partnership but with this balancing, this fundamental connection, between transcendence and immanence, between the great beyond and the right here. God powers the movement of the human spirit with a twin engine of divine promises: The divine carrot moving us forward, the divine companion holding us up. Praise be to God. Amen. (1) Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, p91 Readings: Genesis 28:10-19 10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. 11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” 17 He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” 18 Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. John 1:43-51 43 The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.” 44 Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. 45 Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” 46 “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked. “Come and see,” said Philip. 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” 48 “How do you know me?” Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 49 Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.” 50 Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” 51 He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Secrets of Heaven 3539:2 The goal of rebirth is for us to develop a new inner self and therefore a new soul, or spirit, but our inner self cannot be remade or reborn unless our outer self is too. Although we are spirits after death, we take with us into the other life aspects of our outer self: earthly emotions, doctrines, facts—in short, all the contents of our outer, earthly memory. These form the foundation on which our inner depths rest. Whatever priorities determine their arrangement, then, those are the priorities that inner things take on when they flow in, because inner things are modified on the outer plane. This shows that not only our inner, rational self needs to be reborn or remade but our outer, earthly self as well. Secrets of Heaven 3701 And look: God’s angels going up and going down on it symbolizes infinite and eternal communication, and resulting union; it also symbolizes an apparent climb from the lowest level and then, when the pattern reverses, a descent. Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5, 60:1-6, Matthew 2:1-12, Heaven and Hell #141, Secrets of Heaven #9031 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Jill Wellington: https://www.pexels.com/photo/lady-in-beach-silhouette-during-daytime-photography-40192/ Today we are extending Epiphany a little bit longer. So if you haven’t taken your Christmas tree down yet, don’t worry, I’ve got you. Two weeks ago, we heard about Simeon and Anna, and contemplated what it means for Jesus to have a particularly Jewish identity but also an identity with a larger purpose for the whole world. So too now, does Matthew hint at this broader scope with the visitation of the three wise men, referring back to Israel’s mythology of the last days, and how that involves all people. The gospel of Matthew is primarily written with the early Jewish-Christian communities in mind, and so it is very concerned with demonstrating that Jesus is a fulfillment of the Torah, the holy Jewish scriptures. This could very easily have translated into a completely insular gospel, an insider account, an inward looking endeavor. And yet, right here at the beginning, in the middle of very Jewish story, we encounter these foreign figures, these three Magi. We assume there at least three because there are three gifts detailed, but we are not actually told how many there were. The word describing them, magos, indicated a priestly class (though probably not a royal class) of Persian or Babylonian experts in the occult…meaning things like astrology and dream interpretation, soothsaying. It’s where we get the modern word “magic.” They were clearly pagan, and just very different from the Jews. Yet, here they are, paying homage to Jesus. Why would that be important? If Jesus was to be understood as a fulfillment of Jewish scripture, why should that matter to anyone other than the Jews? Because the Jewish way of understanding God’s end plan for the world always involved the whole world and not just them. Yes, the story of the Old Testament is the story of one group of people and their particular relationship with God, and their promises to God. But that doesn’t mean that they believed God was going forsake the rest of the world. We heard in our reading today, in Isaiah chapter 2, the prophet detailing a vision of “the last days,” where “all the nations” will stream towards the high mountain on which the Lord’s temple will be established, where people will beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. God’s divine plan for humankind involves peace and acceptance amongst all people, that all should walk in the light of the Lord. This vision is reiterated in our other reading, Isaiah 60, a post-exile text, where during a time of searching for and reforming their identity, the Jewish people are reminded that their future is intertwined with the future of all peoples, and that further, their identity is now to, though God, become a blessing and a light to the whole world. We read: See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the people. But the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. What an amazing call to action to receive after years of oppression in exile. One would reasonably imagine that a people newly out of exile would be thirsty for revenge, desperate to reclaim their power in the world, bitter and prejudiced against anyone but their own people. But instead, God calls them to be the complete opposite. God calls them to be a light for the nations, God calls them to be bright and welcoming like the dawn. God calls on them to shine and let the glory of the Lord rise up in them. And it is to these texts, among others, that Matthew is alluding in his story of the Magi. The Magi represented the nations following the light mentioned in Isaiah, following the brightness that would lead them to a new dawn, and a new future for the world. Their presence was not only an indication that Jesus was special, that Jesus was to be worshipped, they represented an important part of the fulfillment of Israel’s destiny, a destiny that would not be complete without them, for it had always included them. Now granted, the nations in Isaiah’s vision that are to stream into Zion are doing so to pay honor to the one true God - the vision is inclusive but it is not relativistic. Yet, it is also not nationalistic either, but rather, God-centric - the nations are to come because of the greatness of the Lord, not because of the greatness of Israel. God had always been acting for and speaking to the whole world, and so like Simeon and Anna, the Magi had their eyes open, their minds watchful. When they saw something important rise up, they acted, they stood up, they moved. Verse 2:2 is variously translated “we saw a star in the east,” and “we saw a star when it rose” because the greek word anatole can mean both the east and “a rising,” like the rising of the stars or sun. These wise men, from the East, from the place of “the rising,” rose up themselves to follow the star to wherever it would lead them. In Swedenborgian terms as well, the east is a powerful image because “the east” represents the Lord. And this is because Swedenborg tells us that the Lord appears in heaven as the sun, a manifestation of divine love and divine truth, in the form of warmth and light. The Lord’s love shines like a sun, and everything that comes into being in heaven and on earth is ultimately from this source. To the extent that this warmth and light are accepted by us, to the extent that we allow this warmth and light to manifest itself as love and wisdom in our actions and our lives, then we learn from our reading that the angels say of such people “the Lord has risen among them.” Indeed, the “Lord is said to rise in the heart when a person is being regenerated, when he or she is governed by the good of love and faith.” The Magi embodied this state of being. They were driven by their holy curiosity, their desire to see what God was doing in the world and so they were open to noticing the star rising, open to the new possibilities of a journey, open to seeing beyond themselves. Herod, however, gives us the opposite case. Herod could not see the star. He too was a foreigner, an Idumean, from a region south of Judea, but there would be no searching for the light for him, no birthing of new possibility, because to the self-absorbed, all that is not the self is dangerous. With his eyes glued constantly to his own ascendency, to the consolidation and perpetuation of this own power…of course it was impossible for him to see the star, impossible to be open to a recognizing something good or true apart from his own self-interest. But that didn’t mean it was impossible for him to recognize the importance of the Magi showing up. Even in purely worldly terms, it was unusual. They ask where is the king? And of course, to Herod’s mind there is only room of one king: himself. There is no rising within his heart, no dawning of something new, because all newness to him is a threat to his power, to the status quo. To him, the promise of the star is nothing but annihilation and so he acts accordingly. And this is representative of the conflict within our own hearts, for we all have parts of us that are Herod, and parts of us that are the Magi. God is always wanting to rise within our hearts, always gently urging us to turn toward the east, to notice the star…but if our hearts only have room for ourselves we will not react with an expansion of spirit, we will not react with curiosity, we will not react by rising up ourselves, we will only contract, and act to shut the light down. And sometimes, honestly, this feels easier. The Magi did not know where they were going. Pilgrimage is scary, movement is scary, especially when we have no guarantees about where we will end up or what we will find. But Herod’s path is darkness and death, as safe and astute and pragmatic as it may seem. Herod’s path represents the setting of the sun, not its rising. So what does this mean for us? What lessons can we draw from the Magi? First, We can desire not to be insular. Whatever promises that we think God has made to us, God will always be speaking to all. The light was made for shining, and so salvation is open to all who will have it. God’s vision for our future involves curiosity and open doors. Second, We can learn that God constantly endeavors to rise within the human heart. Whether it is a huge bright rising sun, or small shiny star, or a tender gentle burnished dawn… there is always a possibility of a new state of being for us. People, including us, might not always react well towards newness, but God tells us to not to fear. May we believe in God’s perpetual dawning. Third, We can learn that when we sense something rising, then it is time to act. The Magi trusted the rising, they looked for it, they acted on it. Pilgrimage can be scary, movement can be exhausting, but can we also remember that the rising is a gift, that the end of the journey is always new life, a baby in the manger. Can we inhabit that space, and live into this paradigm? Fourth, we learn that God has called us to be a blessing and a light to the world. There will be times when we would rather shut down, times when we would rather lash out, for there is so much suffering in our own lives and in the world at large. In the midst of that though, God has said, Let there by light, and let it be you. God called forth the light from chaos in the beginning, and God calls it forth even now. The Magi were looking for the star, the Jewish people eagerly anticipated the coming of the nations…and that looks to me like we are all a people searching for each other, searching for our common dawning. So Arise, my friends, and shine, for your light has come. Amen. Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5 1 This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: 2 In the last days the mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. 3 Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4 He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. 5 Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the LORD. Isaiah 60:1-6 1 “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you. 3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. 4 “Lift up your eyes and look about you: All assemble and come to you; your sons come from afar, and your daughters are carried on the hip. 5 Then you will look and be radiant, your heart will throb and swell with joy; the wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come. 6 Herds of camels will cover your land, young camels of Midian and Ephah. And all from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense and proclaiming the praise of the LORD. Matthew 2:1-12 1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” 3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written: 6 “ ‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ” 7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” 9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. Heaven and Hell 141 The reason they give the name "east" to the direction in which the Lord is seen as the sun is that the whole source of life is from him as the sun. Further, to the extent that warmth and light, or intelligence and wisdom from him, are accepted among angels, they say that the Lord has risen among them. This is also why the Lord is called the east in the Word.1 Secrets of Heaven 9031 …It is similar with the Sun of heaven, which is the Lord; this too is said to rise. But it is said to rise in the heart when a person is being regenerated, and also when he or she is governed by the good of love and faith; and it is said to set when a person is immersed in evil and in falsity arising from it. Photo by Jessica Lewis 🦋 thepaintedsquare: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photography-of-bauble-1646331/
Readings: Luke 2:21-40, Secrets of Heaven #10574:11 (see below) See also on Youtube We talk a lot during Advent and Christmas about the coming of the light, and about the light shining in the darkness, and how beautiful and hopeful that light can be. This is often a lifeline to us; we need beauty and we need hope. But of course, the light did not come only to be beautiful, to be the object of our admiring gaze. The light came to inspire and effect the transformation of this world……in fact, the beauty and hope that is inspired in us by the light, the glory of it, is I believe, because we recognize its larger purpose. Today in our text we read the final section of Luke’s birth narrative. It tells us about what Mary and Joseph do before returning to Galilee. It does not often get as much attention as the manger scene but it is important nonetheless, because it makes a declaration about who Jesus is and what he is going to do. Among the various rituals that we hear described in the text, one of them is that Jesus is circumcised, as the law specified, on the eighth day after his birth. This event would mark his acceptance into the covenant community of Israel. Yet, this act is held in tension with Jesus’ naming, which Luke makes clear comes, not from Joseph or Joseph’s linage, but from God. We find that Jesus’ identity is both within and without established boundaries, he is both particularly Jewish, and but also something beyond that. So, as we will see throughout this passage, Jesus identity is of two realms. He is clearly Jewish, and his parents do all that they are supposed to do in order to fulfill the law. They are devout, they are diligent, and so will Jesus be. But, that is not all Jesus is to be. Jesus has also been given an identity by God that speaks to something larger than the destiny of Israel, it speaks to the coming of the kingdom of God. And so this tension that exists in the presentation of Jesus identity, can mirror the tension of how God is to be present in our own lives. God will always be “something else” to us, something beyond our expectations, for God shows up in ways that we cannot imagine. The Christmas story is an example: God showing up in all the places we do not expect…a vulnerable baby, born out of wedlock into poverty to a marginalized young woman of no particular birth in an occupied land. The Christmas story is so familiar that we sometimes forget just how unusual it really is, the gently sanitized versions of the stable belying the muck and the mess, and joy of the shepherds muting the terror and surprise of the heavenly host appearing to the lowest of the low. Praise be to God that the divine does not play by our rules, our bureaucracies, our systems of merit. Praise be to God that our concepts of where God is *allowed* to be are confounded again and again and again. God shows up where we do not necessarily expect. And also, as we hear in our text today, God showed up for the patient and devout Simeon and Anna, showed up for them in the very place that God had always said God would be: the temple. So, it’s not that God specifically enjoys being random or confounding us, it is just that God cannot be bounded by our ideas of God; it is impossible that the infinite should conform to the finite. But that doesn’t mean that the point of surprise is to humiliate and confuse us, or to have us believe that we cannot possibly rely on God in any way because God’s ways are so very mysterious. The point is that God must have as many means as possible to reach us. For Simeon and Anna, their God showed up for them through what they had always done: their diligent rituals, their devotion. They had patiently and devoutly transformed themselves into people who could see God in the everyday, and when Jesus showed up, they understood exactly who he was and what he was going to do. They were not put off by the poverty of his circumstances or the vulnerability of his infant state. They had long cultivated the kind of eyes that could see God, and so they *did* see God. It will not be long in the gospel story before we learn that not everyone was willing or able to recognize God so easily. And so now, as we stand on the threshold of a new year, we might find ourselves sitting in a similar tension. We have just witnessed the incredible gift of the birth of Jesus, and the incredible wonder of how God shows up, and now we must return to our lives as they are. And as we return we find it is also the time of year for resolutions, the time of year when we are called to think about how we want to live into the new year. To ask: how I can be a partner to God? To wonder: Is there a way that I can uncover God’s presence in the everyday, through my everyday, just like Simeon and Anna. For, we will always all be Shepherds, wherein the divine sometimes bursts in upon us, our eyes forced open by the sheer majesty. We will all always be Mary wherein the divine is found in unexpected opportunity, seeing God in circumstances that we never would have chosen on our own. But the question before us today is: can we also be Simeon and Anna, ready and waiting to see the divine because of the kind of life we have constructed for ourselves. Because clearly, we cannot control God’s coming, but we can little by little transform ourselves into the kind of person who recognizes God’s constant presence in this world, who sees the baby and declares the glory. For, the seeing of the light and declaring the glory of it cannot really be separated. We heard this in our Swedenborg reading: the light represents God’s divine truth, and the glory represents whatever is produced by the light. Here we come to understand that the function of the light is active. It is not just content to shine beautifully; it’s aim is to *enlighten*, to produce an outcome that increases the presence of God in the human heart, to be a way in which we can perceive something of the divine, a way in which we can be connected to the love of God. This is the way God is truly glorified, not by praise, but by outcome, by what happens when we perceive what the light reveals. And this is not always pretty. In Simeon’s words…”This child is destined for the falling the rising of many in Israel…so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed and a sword will pierce your own heart too.” The light of Divine Truth reveals, but we are not always happy about *what* it reveals. Change is scary, and growth is work. Yet, it gives us the opportunity to step into that which glorifies God, instead of that which obscures God. Swedenborg phrases it that “the glory” is everything that *springs* from Divine Truth. I do love how active that phrasing is. The enlightening, the revealing nature of Divine Truth wants to give birth to something alive and glorious, something that connects us more strongly to God and to each other, and given the smallest opportunity, our smallest cooperation, it will. And the question posed by Simeon and Anna today is how to keep our eyes open to the light on the non-Christmas days of the year when we are not assisted by a culture saying “Look here!” Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.”(1) Of Anna, our text says: “She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.” In reality, we never *do* leave the temple, we never can, for God’s presence is not mediated by space but by attention. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are. God has made the world, and our lives, the temple. May we remember to pause and look around, for a tiny, precious, vulnerable revelation may be about to enter. Amen. (1) Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, xvi Readings: Luke 2:21-40 21 On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived. 22 When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord” ), 24 and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.” 25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. 27 Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying: 29 “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. 30 For my eyes have seen your salvation, 31 which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: 32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.” 33 The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him. 34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, 35 so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” 36 There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, 37 and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. 38 Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. 39 When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. 40 And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him. Secrets of Heaven 10574:11 These places have been quoted from the Word because 'glory' and 'light' are mentioned together in them; and they have been quoted to make people aware that 'light' means Divine Truth that comes from the Lord, thus the Lord Himself in respect of Divine Truth, and that 'glory' means everything that is a product of the light, consequently everything that springs from the Divine Truth composing the intelligence and wisdom which angels possess, and which people in the world who receive the Lord in faith and love possess. Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Luke 1:26-38, Divine Providence #96:5 (see below)
See also on Youtube Today we visit with King David, just after he has defeated the Philistines, brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and settled into his new reign as king. David finally receives a break from war, and turns his mind to how he can glorify the Lord. He decides that it is time to build a temple for God, for the ark still remains in the tabernacle as it always has, essentially in a tent. David clearly has good intentions. He has been faithful, he has battled hard for the Lord, and surely now the time would be right to erect a monument to God, to place his people’s most cherished possession within a building that reflects its value in earthly terms. But the Lord sends a message to David via the prophet Nathan, and asks: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? There is much contained within this one sentence of gentle chiding. God draws David away from any grandiose plans he might have had, and reminds him that God has never asked for a grand temple. God has been present through every step of the People of Israel’s journey and will continue with them. That has never been in question. God instead turns the question to David’s purpose and inclination. Though David has a rest from battle now, throughout the rest of the book of 2 Samuel, he will be plagued with challenges, many of his own making. Part of what makes David such a relatable and beloved character is that he is both flawed and faithful; he is powerfully human. And perhaps this explains the Lord’s response. David will have plenty to contend with in the coming years. Very soon he will greatly displease the Lord by committing adultery with Bathsheba, and deliberately putting her husband in harms way. The Lord knew that David had some very different building he needed to do. David had faith already; what he needed to do was build his own ability to live according to that faith. Swedenborg writes that a building houses in the word can metaphorically relate to the building of our own willingness and intentionality.(1) David had brought much glory to the Lord already in battle, had brought together the tribes of Israel and made them into a powerful nation. He knew what God had done for him and his people, he knew the truth of God’s power and steadfastness, and he believed in it deeply. But he had not integrated that belief with his actions in a personal way. Swedenborg writes: In the Word the good that exists with a person is compared to 'a house', and for that reason one who is governed by good is called 'the House of God’.(2) David wanted to build a literal house for God, which was a fine idea, but he had forgotten about building a house for God out of his life. Even as he ruled, he would often govern by what was best for him, rather than being governed by what was best for others. And this why it would be David’s son, King Solomon, who would build the temple. David had established himself as a king through war, whereas the name Solomon is derived from the Hebrew word for “peace.” An adversarial mindset cannot build a house in which God can be worshiped. David even delivered Solomon detailed plans for the temple. But goodness and peace and love must build the temple. For love followed-through-on is what builds the house, the structure, the habits, the perspectives, in which God is truly worshipped, not just our ideas about what is good. We build the temple, the temple of our lives, day by day, when we are able to focus on embodying love to those around us, leaving the world just a little better than we found it; this is how our selfhood becomes a house in which God is glorified. It is tempting to default to a sense that David was not “good enough.” But that is not what it is about. It is not about earning our salvation, brick by brick. It is about recognizing that we are progressively transformed by the steps we take on each of our journeys. When God asked: “Are you the one who would build me a house to live in?” it is not meant to be framed as a rhetorical measurement, but rather as a reflection; did David understand what building God a house would mean? Fr. Richard Rohr writes: We all tend to aim for the goal instead of the journey itself, but spiritually speaking, how we get there is where we arrive. The journey determines the final destination. If we manipulate our way, we end up with a manipulated, self-made god. If we allow ourselves to be drawn and chosen by love, we might just end up with the real God.(3) And this why the temple was not important to God, why God never asked for it to be built. To God, the covenant was the thing that was important, and the covenant was just as active and relevant in a tent as in a temple. God was interested in how faithfulness to the covenant might lead each person might bring glory to God in their own hearts, minds and lives. This will be brought into an even fuller representation by Mary, betrothed to a descendent of David himself, many hundreds of years later, when her body would actually build a space for God to dwell inside. By this time the temple David had proposed had long been built, and was the center of Jewish life in Jerusalem. Surely the Lord must have been content with that grandest of buildings? But no, this is the point, of course. It is God's intent to dwell with us, personally, in the fullest of possible ways. The Lord does automatically dwell with us, inherently, within our will and our intellect, and the freedom that exists there.(4) This is how we are all images and likeness of the Lord. But God is not content to dwell like a boarder in the guest room, but wishes to dwell as someone who shares the life of the household. The fullness of God’s dwelling with us, the efficacy of it, the realness of it, depends on our response. When God reaches out, what do we do? This time, Mary’s answer to the question Are you the one to build me a house to live in? was a resounding yes! Her song that follows our reading for today, known as The Magnificat, makes clear that she understood what the coming of the Lord would mean, in her own life, and in the life of the whole world. She said: I am the Lord’s servant, may your word to me be fulfilled. None of us will be called to build an actual temple, or to gestate the incarnation of God, but we are called a mystical embodiment of God’s love nonetheless. We all place a plank in our own house of God every time we try to bring some goodness into the world. This is the kind of worship that God cherishes. God’s question to David really is the most perfect of Advent questions: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? May we receive the question as David, hearing any gentle chiding that we might need to hear, any adjustments to our perspective that need to me made, any follow-through to which we need to commit, any hypocrisy we need to abandon, any stubbornness we need to let go of, any indifference we need to relinquish. And may we hear also the question as Mary, as one who would say yes, yes to opening our minds wide for the coming of the Lord, yes to how that will stretch and grow our hearts, yes to building a dwelling place for God deep within us, a home where our very life is worship, a house where every moment is praise. Amen.
Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 1 Now when the king was settled in his house, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, 2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent." 3 Nathan said to the king, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you." 4 But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan: 5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? 6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. 7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?" 8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel; 9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. 10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. 16 Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me ; your throne will be established forever.’ ” Luke 1:26-38 26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” 29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” 34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.” 38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. Divine Providence 96:5 The reason the Lord dwells in these abilities [our will and our intellect] in each of us is found in the inflow of the Lord's intent, an intent that wants to be accepted by us, to make its dwelling within us, and to give us the happiness of eternal life. This is the Lord's intent because it comes from his divine love. It is this intent of the Lord that makes whatever we think and say and intend and do seem to be our own. Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10, Mark 1:14-20, Heaven & Hell #59 (see below)
See also on Youtube With today’s text, we are near the beginning of Mark’s gospel. Jesus has recently been baptized by John the Baptist, and then spends some time in temptation in the wilderness. Now, as John’s time in prison is foreshadowing the price that is to be paid for challenging the powers-that-be, Jesus steps into the public domain and begins his ministry. He starts by calling two sets of brothers to follow him. They are fishermen, and they *immediately* lay down their nets and follow Jesus. The greek word euthus, translated variously as “at once” or “immediately” is a favorite of Mark’s, and he uses it often. It lends an urgent tone to his narrative overall, where things seem to happen at a rapid pace. Let us think for moment about the disruptive nature of what these brothers did. Fishing was their livelihood; the livelihood of their families. In another 10 verses or so, Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, so clearly at least Simon was married and likely had children. There would have been a clear expectation about how these brothers would fulfill their responsibility to the family business. Yet, James and John literally leave their father, Zebedee, in the boat. Certainly we can imagine his puzzled expression, trying to wrap his head around why they would leave him to follow this nobody from Nazareth, without so much as a goodbye, or an explanation. Let us now contrast this story with that of Jonah. Our text from today is pretty much the only part of the Jonah story that goes well. Jonah is famous, not so much for proclaiming God’s word, but for running away from God’s call. It is a well-known story. God asks Jonah to go to Ninevah, a large Assyrian city, to tell them to repent or they will be destroyed. Assyria at this time, was Israel’s number one enemy. So, Jonah says “no way” and hops on a ship going in the opposite direction. But the story says that God sends a storm to threaten the ship, and so Jonah eventually comes clean and allows himself to be tossed overboard so that the storm will stop. He is then swallowed by a big fish and remains in its belly for three days and nights. When it finally spits him up on dry land, Jonah agrees to go to Nineveh. To Jonah’s dismay, the Ninevites repent immediately and are spared, as we hear in the text. And Jonah is enraged. He feels like a fool, for he suspected this would happen. He says at one point: “I am so angry I wish I were dead.” Such a drama queen. But the Lord asks him (and the story itself ends brilliantly on this question) why should God not have a concern for a city comprised of 120,000 people? Why not indeed. So, in one story we see the brothers drop their net and stride with purpose away from the ocean. In another, Jonah ends up jumping into the ocean. One to become “fishers of men” and the other “fish food.” What else is different about these two stories? Certainly, the brothers followed God’s call right away, and Jonah did not. But neither will have an entirely straightforward path. The disciples will make many mistakes, including —a biggie—abandoning Jesus at the cross. This seems just as big a betrayal as Jonah’s reluctance, and Jonah did eventually do what God asked of him. Discipleship is clearly a winding path, with some successes and some failures. So I’m not sure it helps us to think that the brothers were perfect in their response and Jonah delinquent. Rather, I find it more interesting to explore the conditions surrounding their call. Even as much as the brothers were leaving the expectations of their context, they did not leave their context entirely. They dropped their nets and went away from social expectations but went into community. The brothers were with each other, they journeyed with Jesus in a group of disciples, and the bible tells us in the same chapter, returned to Simon’s house to heal his mother-in-law of a fever. In fact, they encamped there at Simon’s house to heal many many more people. As itinerant as this rag-tag band was, the gospels are filled with accounts of meals together in houses, of crowds gathering together to hear the good news, to be healed, to be fed. Even at the end, at the resurrection, it is Mary Magdalene and Salome, and Mary the mother of James, wife of poor puzzled Zebedee, who go together to anoint Jesus’ body. Jesus and the disciples are surrounded by layers of community, each stepping up when the other could not. Yes, they went out, they responded to the call, but not in a way that severed their connections to each other. But Jonah, throughout his story, seems entirely alone. Entirely alone in his truancy, in his distress, in his proclamation, and in his anger. There was no brother to assist him in his preaching, no family to help him countenance his reluctance, or process his anger. The belly of a fish held him fast as he repented of his desertion, but it is a poor substitute for the arms of a community. And it is true that a prophet and a disciple are called to different things. There is an aloneness to the prophetic voice that is perhaps unavoidable. But, we can also sense that Jonah’s pouting and his anger made him more alone than he needed to be. And sometimes, isn’t that how our challenging emotions make us feel? Our shame, our regret, our anger, our resistance gives us a kind of tunnel vision. We are reduced to nothing but that feeling and it is hard to see anything more. I’m sure we can all think of times when this has been he case for us, when our overwhelming feelings have led to a sense of social isolation. But what if it doesn’t need to be that way for Jonah or for us? What if Jonah had had community surrounding him? What might that have looked like? How do *we* make community for the Jonah parts of ourselves, for the times when Jonah rises up within us? When we want to run, when we want to hide, when we doubt, when we rage, when we cry. How do we enfold the disruption of God’s call, of God’s challenge to our status quo, within the structure of community? I read a quote this week from Professor Karoline Lewis, a quote that I know I really needed to hear: “Sometimes, I think we forget that being saved by Jesus, to follow Jesus, means that you have others around to save you on a daily basis. To remind you of who you are and who you are called to be. To see you and appreciate you and celebrate you. To tell you how far you have come and where God still needs you to go. To come alongside you so that you realize you are not alone. She continues: When Jesus calls the disciples in Mark, notice what’s absent -- no individualism, no being left on your own, no pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. No, “you can handle this, so, buck up, buttercup.” No, “follow me and good luck with that.” Rather, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” That is, follow me and more followers are to come. Follow me and you will never be by yourself. Notice -- Jesus calls them together, not separately. Andrew and Simon. Then James and John. Discipleship is not an autonomous profession.”(1) In discipleship, God calls us into community. And this is really important because to do what Jesus asks, as in verse 14, Repent and believe the good news, we need other people. As I preach over and over, spiritual work can be hard, scary, exhilarating, exhausting….and changing the way we think, trusting in the goodness of the world, all of these thing are harder done alone than with companions. God calls us into community, so that when we are asked to do the things that are difficult, and the Jonah parts of us rise up, we can stay with it. We might feel like we deserve to be in the belly of a fish, but we have a community to tell us differently. Being in a community doesn’t protect us from failing; from pouting like Jonah or constantly not understanding what the kingdom is about like the disciples. But the resurrection, God’s ultimate statement about the existence of a universe that stands for life, and growth and transformation, this brought the disciples back into community, and they went on to form christian community around the world, and through the ages. Now, Swedenborg doesn’t really tell us a lot about the phenomenon and practice of Christian fellowship. He writes a little bit about how a church should function ecclesiastically and about the responsibilities of its leaders, but not so much about walking together in Christian community, about “doing life together” in modern Christian parlance. What he does write about, a lot, is of course, heavenly communities. In Swedenborg’s worldview, heaven consists of countless communities of the heart, people joined together in fellowship because of the similar loves that they share. All these communities have different roles and functions, and they fit together in a cooperative and inter-related manner like a human body. Swedenborg calls this the Grand Human. The greater Christian world has a similar idea applied to the church: the body of Christ. Community and inter-relatedness are part of the divine design. The theologian Brian McLaren writes: Although you can learn beliefs in isolation, you can't learn love apart from a community.(1) Whether it is through communities of family, work, church or other, we need other people in order to learn how to love, to challenge us, to hold space for us, to trust us, to believe in us. The God of Divine Love would have it no other way. And as we stand on the precipice of a holiday devoted to gathering for the purpose of thanksgiving, let’s us praise a God who made us for each other. Amen. (1) https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/you-are-never-alone (2) Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration, p56 Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” 3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. 10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. Mark 1: 14-20 14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” 16 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 18 At once they left their nets and followed him. 19 When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20 Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. Heaven and Hell #59 The Whole Heaven, Grasped as a Single Entity, Reflects a Single Individual It is a secret not yet known in this world that heaven, taken in a single all-inclusive grasp, reflects a single individual. In heaven, though, nothing is better known. Knowing this, knowing particulars and details about it, is the hallmark of angelic intelligence there. In fact, many other things follow from it and do not come clearly and distinctly to mind without this as their general principle. Since angels do know that all the heavens, like their communities, reflect a single individual, they refer to heaven as the universal and divine human -"divine" because the Lord's divine nature constitutes heaven. Readings: Ezekiel 34:11-46, Matthew 25:31-46, The Doctrine of Faith #68, Divine Providence #101:3 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Magda Ehlers In the gospel of Matthew, this story of the sheep and the goats will be the very last teaching that Jesus delivers before the plot against his life is put into motion and the march toward the cross begins. One imagines then that it is a pretty important teaching. We start out with a depiction of the coming of God’s kingdom, where there will be separation between kinds of people, pictured as the work of a shepherd. The sheep are those who ministered to others, not as a way to receive reward, but because it was the right thing to do. The goats are those to whom such ministry did not even occur. Both are surprised that their action, or lack of action, would mean something to God…but God reveals that God is present with those in need, with the “least of these,” and that how we act has relationship to who we become. Technically, this story is less of a parable, than it is an apocalyptic drama. In a parable, we begin with a familiar setting which is then tweaked a little in order to bring a new understanding, to demonstrate something about the nature of God’s kingdom. In this case, we first start with a description of what is going to happen in God’s kingdom, and then it is revealed by what means this will come to pass, through the grounded and familiar acts of caring for one another. This is actually what the word apocalypto in greek means: to reveal. In modern use the term has become associated with an idea of endings, but really, an apocalypse is simply a revealing, a lifting of the veil. What makes this lifting of the veil so powerful is that what we see behind the curtain is not otherworldly but decidedly earthly, the intersection of need and brokenness with compassion. Now, understandably, the Matthew passage will lead us to focus on our actions, our process, as we imagine ourselves as either sheep or goat. But first, I’d like a step back and recognize how this parable is a larger picture of God’s work in the world. I would like to dwell for a moment on the king in the story, the one who recalls the image of shepherd in Ezekiel, the one who reveals his own solidarity with those who are in need. From our reading today, indeed from the whole of scripture, we learn that loving God is inseparable from loving others. This is because we cannot love God without loving the character, the nature of God; and the nature of God is pure love. In Ezekiel, we see this nature pictured in God as a shepherd, a God who cares about his flock. In this picture, we learn that God notices and identifies with those who suffer. God is with us, among us, traveling with us. God is affected by our suffering, doesn’t want it to continue. God wants healing, wholeness, blessedness, plenty…and not for God but for US. We must remember again, that this was a very new concept in antiquity, that such a God could exist. Yet this is every human’s story: We find ourselves in exile or in need, we are lost sheep, yet God seeks for us, looks for us, bring us out of what is enslaving us, feeds us and cares for us. The exile might be due to our own sin, or it might not, but God’s presence does not depend upon the genesis of the suffering. God’s action may well change in response to different conditions, for a sheep wandering into a ravine on it’s own will require a different response to a sheep falling prey to a wolf, but the response of God’s heart is the same regardless; to reach out and to save. And so as we begin to approach the Advent season, we can see that the incarnation we will soon be celebrating is grounded in this kind of God, this shepherd God who tends and guides and protects. We are about to learn just how far this God would go. How far God would go for the hungry, the thirsty, the estranged, the entrapped, the vulnerable, for us. God would go as far as it took. God embodied, quite literally, this parable and calls us to do the same. And how easy it sounds, how poetic, these well known verses. How peaceful and pastoral this shepherd image might seem. But anyone with a knowledge of farming will understand how messy shepherding really is. How down and dirty one must become. How acquainted with mud, and food and weather and birthing and physical exertion. And this is when everything goes right! How difficult shepherding becomes, how difficult caring becomes, when we are afraid of each others brokenness. What struck me today, though, was the fact that both the goats and the sheep were surprised. This surprise is important, narratively. It’s purpose is to communicate that the sheep were not calculating - they did not care for others in order to get into heaven, they cared because they were moved by suffering. And for the goats, it is to communicate that thoughtlessness and self-absorption is not protective. Just because the goats did not cause the suffering of the least, does not mean their inaction was morally neutral. To quote the author Charles M. Blow: One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. And yet, of course, no one is purely sheep or purely goat. We all have sheep-y and goat-y tendencies, habits and impulses mixed up together. And now that the gospel has been proclaimed, now that we see this reality of what could be, we are called to exercise a ongoing separation of the sheep and the goats within ourselves. We are called to recognize the times we do not want to see the least, the times we shut our eyes, the times we justify our blindness, the times we argue that some people and things are just too hopeless to be resurrected. And, we are likewise called to recognize the times we *do* see with God’s eyes, the times we are moved to feed, house, bind, connect, the times we recognize God in the least, God connected to the world. And hopefully, in recognition of the king who acts like a shepherd, of a God who would get down in the mud, we call on our goat-y-ness to be transformed, and we do the work that would make it so. Where then is the surprise? Is there still room for surprise in the ongoing work of regeneration? In spiritual work, driven as it is by reflection and self-knowledge, surprise seems impossible. If we are trying to become like the sheep, it will not surprise us if we do become so. The thing about having a progressive theology of salvation, about recognizing that the sheep and goats are parts of all of us, is that the simple and instant judgment of the text today is revealed as a snapshot…the whole point is for the goats to become sheep-in-training, just as we strive to become angels-in-training. And so the surprise becomes less a pre-requisite for a sheep-nature, but rather the reward. To quote Helen Keller “there is joy in self-forgetfulness.” If heaven is a state of mind, a state of being, then perhaps the surprise is the peace and freedom that comes from not calculating anymore, from being able to finally forget our selfishness and fear. If heaven is a state of mind, then we must accept that, to get there, our goat-like minds will change over time, and we are an ongoing construction project. We heard in our Swedenborg reading today “life constructs a belief system for itself and constructs a faith for itself.” To me this sounds a lot like neuroplasticity, a term meaning the ability of the adult brain to change over time, that our experiences and actions can contribute to the alteration of the synaptic structure of the brain. Our life over time constructs the way we understand things. The sheep were surprised because their actions had re-made them. They had acted their way into a new way of thinking. When the veil is lifted on the kingdom, we will see that we cannot escape the imperative toward action through right or pure belief, for the answer does not begin thought at all. The answer is compassion, literally “feeling together,” the answer is connection, first and foremost. Transformation of the self is possible. What an amazing, simple, breath-taking hope…a hope and a faith that leads us straight into Advent, where a God believed in us so strongly that God would reach so far, straight into the heart of our vulnerability, our need, our blindness. Because the fact is, as we are now, sometimes we are the sheep, sometimes we are goats, many times we ourselves are the least, in body or spirit. We find ourselves on all sides of the equation, mired in suffering and need. And so was God. God was, and is, both shepherd and lamb, redeemer and sufferer, teacher and baby, both the king and the least. And for this we are grateful. Amen. Readings: Ezekiel 34:11-23 11 “ ‘For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. 12 As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. 13 I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. 14 I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15 I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign LORD. 16 I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice. 17 “ ‘As for you, my flock, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will judge between one sheep and another, and between rams and goats. 18 Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? 19 Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet? 20 “ ‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says to them: See, I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21 Because you shove with flank and shoulder, butting all the weak sheep with your horns until you have driven them away, 22 I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. 23 I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. Matthew 25:31-46 31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. 34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ 37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ 41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ 44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ 45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ 46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Faith #68 The failure of caring in the people described in Matthew shows that goats mean people who are devoted to a faith divorced from caring…A neglect of deeds is characteristic of people who are devoted to a faith divorced from caring because of their refusal to believe that deeds have anything to do with salvation or the church. When people so set aside caring—which consists of deeds—then faith fails as well, because faith comes out of caring… Divine Providence #101:3 In the spiritual world where we all arrive after death, no one asks what our faith has been or what our beliefs have been, only what our life has been, whether we are one kind of person or another. They know that the quality of our faith and the quality of our beliefs depend on the quality of our life, because life constructs a belief system for itself and constructs a faith for itself. Sermon by Ministry Student Tirah Keal
Readings: Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18, Matthew 22: 34-46, Secrets of Heaven #2023, Divine Providence #94 (see below) See also on Youtube Photo by Jamez Picard on Unsplash These passages told us about the Two Great Commandments: Love the Lord and Love the neighbor, which means basically, Be nice to people. While you can dig really deep into these passages that we read, you can spend hours studying them, all the same, they are as simple as they sound. If You’re Loving the Lord, you will be loving the neighbor. If you're loving your neighbor, that is loving the Lord. Best two for one deal ever. I don't know about you but I often get in my head way too much about it, thinking that it can't be that simple, it can't be that easy. Especially if I am trying to be a good citizen of the world and I'm reading the news, It's kinda bleak. In fact the news is usually the bad news. That’s what we see in the Headlines - what's wrong with the world today? So then I go okay how about I just look at national news that'll be less right? Nope, still bad, still hard, still frustrating and scary. How about local news? Even local news is overwhelmingly sad. I feel this sense that if I'm loving my neighbor I should be helping fix these problems. And Suddenly I’m exhausted and overwhelmed and very quickly pretty depressed. And now not only am I not fixing the world, I'm not even doing the dishes or taking a shower or showing up for my kids when they're upset. Sometimes loving the neighbor looks an awful lot like self-care. That's weird for me, it's a relatively new thing to encounter the concept that the following list of things - in no particular order - can fall under the heading Loving the Neighbor: Getting a good night's sleep Doing the laundry Taking a Shower Putting on deodorant Washing the dishes Brushing my Teeth - How is that love for the neighbor? Because now I don’t have bad breath! If I get a good night’s sleep, then I get up on time, then I leave for work on time, then as I’m driving I'm not stressed out and hanging on to the wheel for dear life and cutting people off in traffic. No. Instead, I'm relaxed and I can peacefully enjoy my commute. Then when I get to work I'm calm and centered so that if other people are distressed I can be like "it's okay, welcome how can I help?" So it's love for the neighbor to get a good night’s sleep because that can lead to a lovely interaction in my workplace. We fall into a trap very easily of thinking that little actions aren't big enough. For a little while I worked as a cashier at a grocery store. When people came to the checkout with their piles of groceries, I would say “How are you?” and very often the response was just “I’m fine.” But more often than you might think someone would say “actually I'm feeling sad, I just lost my sister” or “my family is coming to town I'm so excited!” They would share genuinely from their heart how they were doing in that moment. It was such a gift to be able to celebrate with them, or grieve with them. It was such a gift for me to be able to turn to someone who just told me a tragedy and say “I'm so sorry, I lost my mom when I was young I know how that feels” and it made both of us lighter. Love to the neighbor doesn't have to be big and showy, in fact for most of us it's never going to be big and showy. It's going to be the little things, but don’t underestimate those little things because we never know the ripple effect that they're having. Let’s say a person in a really sad mood came to the grocery store and I checked them out, and as I checked them out, hopefully I rang up their groceries correctly, but in the meantime, we talked and as they left maybe they felt a little lighter. Maybe that meant that when they went home that night they could prepare dinner for their family with love and lightness in their heart. Maybe that made it a little easier to make dinner. Maybe that meant that as their family sat around the dinner table they could have a heart-to-heart conversation rather than sit sullenly in silence or argue with each other. These are little tiny gifts we give each other, and they do exactly what these readings were telling us - that the Lord's love is flowing into all of us all the time. To follow these two great Commandments all we have to do is share. But we're not always the ones giving, sometimes we're the ones receiving. Sometimes we're the ones that are low. Sometimes I'm the one that's depressed and I need to go to somebody and say I”'m not okay and I need help.” I'm not failing to follow the two great Commandments if I need help. Failing to follow the two great Commandments would be refusing help if it's offered, or not asking for help when I know I need it. I've been guilty of that, there are times that I get mad and then I get kind of stubborn. Somebody who knows me well will be aware that I’m upset, and they'll come and to me and ask “are you OK”? and I respond “I'm fine” but I'm not fine at all! By refusing to engage, by refusing to say “yeah I'm not I'm not okay” I’ve shut them off and I don't accept their help. That is breaking the two Great Commandments, that's shutting off the flow of Love from the Lord. Sometimes following the two great Commandments can even look pretty confrontational. If I'm overloaded and I'm not going to be able to accomplish important things that need to get done, following the two great Commandments can be standing my ground and saying “No I can't.” Sometimes people don't like that answer. I'm a mom, I spend a lot of time taking care of my kids - doing the things that other people in the house didn't notice needed to get done. If I'm sick or depressed, or just really busy, and can’t do things things I normally do, then my family suddenly notices the things that didn't get done - the dishes are piled high,the laundry is all dirty etc. I could think I'm a failure, that I’m not loving my neighbor, but actually in that moment loving the neighbor can be me saying “how about you guys wash some dishes.” That's still loving the neighbor. Hopefully we take these lessons into our lives and live these teachings, so here's the challenge for us this week: Don't underestimate the little kindnesses, they're a bigger deal than you think, and be willing to ask for help when you need it. Amen Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 1The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. 15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. 17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Matthew 22:34-46 34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Secrets of Heaven #2023 The divine presence among people who believe in the Lord is love and charity. Love means love for the Lord. Charity means love for our neighbor. Love for the Lord cannot possibly be separated from love for our neighbor, because the Lord's own love goes out to the entire human race. He wants to save all of us forever and to attach us tightly to himself so that not one of us will perish. So anyone who loves the Lord has the Lord's own love and consequently cannot help loving others. Divine Providence #94 The Lord's union with us and our mutual union with the Lord are accomplished through our loving our neighbor as ourselves and loving the Lord above all. Loving our neighbor as ourselves is simply not dealing dishonestly or unfairly with people, not harboring hatred or burning with revenge against them, not speaking ill of them or slandering them …. people who do not do such things because they are both bad for their neighbor and sins against God treat their neighbor honestly, fairly, cordially, and faithfully. Since the Lord acts in the same way, a mutual union results. When there is a mutual union, then whatever we do for our neighbor we do from the Lord, and whatever we do from the Lord is good. Readings: Isaiah 45:1-7, Matthew 22:15-22, Divine Love & Wisdom #326 (see below)
See also on Youtube For the last several weeks, we are have been following the lectionary in Matthew, and Jesus’ occupation of the temple in Jerusalem, where he has been using parables to criticize the powers that be: the high priests and the Pharisees for forgetting about the everyday people, and using their high religious and political positions for their own gain. The priests and Pharisees have been spending their time conspiring and trying to discredit Jesus, trying to get him to say something that will get him in trouble and end the stand-off. And this is what the text is about today, a question from them about taxes that is supposed to be a trap. First, what is this tax that they are referencing? It was called the census tax, and it was instituted when Judea became a Roman province. So, it was a tax levied just on Jewish citizens, not Roman ones. Not surprisingly, the Jewish people hated it. and it’s institution triggered the development of a nationalist movement called the Zealots, who later fomented rebellion against Rome themselves. Now, this tax was really not at all like the taxes that we pay in a democratic society, where, at least in theory, taxes are used for the betterment of all citizens, and where we have the option to vote out our representatives if we don’t like the way they are using our tax money. To the Jews, the payment of this tax was a constant reminder of their occupied and defeated state as a people, and it went directly towards the perpetuation of their oppression. So, of course, they were incredibly resentful about it. They would have been very happy to hear Jesus say that the tax should not be paid. Jesus would then be fulfilling many of their collective dreams about the coming Messiah who would return them to independence and finally throw off Roman rule. And the pharisees knew that, that it would disappoint Jesus followers to hear him say the tax was lawful. But the Pharisees also knew that saying what the people wanted to hear would raise the ire of Rome. The empire was relentless about putting down rebellion, and in fact, this is what the practice of crucifixion was all about - the public display of an extremely shameful, slow and painful death as a deterrent to anyone who would even think about challenging the empire. The Zealot movement would learn this painful lesson about 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, when they rebelled against Rome and Rome completely ravaged Jerusalem, destroying the temple, which would never be rebuilt, even to this day. So the Pharisees were trying to put Jesus in between a rock and a hard place. What is fascinating is the hypocrisy involved, which Jesus calls out. As experts and scholars in the law, their question to Jesus, “is it lawful” was a question about the Torah, not about the lawfulness of taxes in general. And as scholars of the Torah themselves, of course they had an opinion about it, which was, that in principle the tax was not lawful. They just did not publicly say that and resist it. So, they were trying to get Jesus into trouble for an opinion that they actually agreed with, but did not choose to act upon. So obviously, the question is a trap. If Jesus answers that the tax should be paid, then the people would be disappointed (and disappointed people often get angry). If Jesus answered that it should not be paid, then he would anger the Roman authorities for fomenting rebellion. Jesus’ answer though, is one of his typical non-answers, vague enough that he could not be trapped either way. Though it might look like just a clever evasion, it contains much more than meets the eye. The most common interpretation of this episode is that it represents an argument for the modern conception of the separation of church and state. There is a secular realm (Caesar’s realm) and a religious realm (God’s realm), and they should be compartmentalized separately. While certainly, there are lots of good arguments for the separation of church and state, it is not likely that this was intended to be one of them in Jesus time because the modern notion of the separation of church and state is just that: modern. Ancient readers would not likely have understood this verse in that way. The way that religion and politics interacted then was very different then to the way it does now, in the democracies and constitutional monarchies of the modern world. How else then, did Jesus mean it? Well, at first, it sounds like we are getting an indirect yes on the face of it. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Ok sure, pay the tax that is due to Caesar. Simple right? Except, then he goes on: “give to God what is God’s.” What *is* God’s then? Oh, everything. And so what seems like a simple answer actually becomes a subversion of the phenomenon of empire as a whole, empire that would try to claim territory, treasure and people as its own. Nothing can actually be the empire’s own. We heard in the Isaiah reading about a God whose presence is in everything, who was even in the actions of a foreign monarch, Cyrus without his acknowledgement, who formed light and darkness and who created all things. “I am the Lord and there is no other.” Or from our responsive reading, Psalm 24 “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.” In Jesus’ answer, we see an affirmation of the fact that a separation of the secular and religious is ultimately impossible. Now, by this, I don’t mean that the modern separation of church and state in political systems is useless or ill-advised; on the contrary, within a human system such as politics, the separation of realms is an important safeguard. But as a philosophical and theological matter, we see that the presence and the imprint of God in the world and in our lives is much larger than a human system can contain or express. God is the source of all life, all creativity, all love, all wisdom…so all our decisions, all our striving has relationship to God. This becomes even more intriguing when we consider what the inscription is on the coin Jesus asked them to bring: “Tiberius Caesar, August son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” The emperors of Rome routinely made the claim to be divine, to be the Son of God and the High Priest of the Roman empire. To the Jewish people, to those who believed in the “I am the Lord and there is no other,” this was an entirely blasphemous claim. So, it was not just the image of the emperor on the coin that prevented the use of Roman money in the temple, which is why Jesus famously expelled the money changers, but also the explicit claim that the image served to express: that there was some other divine being apart from the Lord to which people should give allegiance. And in drawing attention to the image of the emperor, Jesus also draws attention to all that empire stood for and all the ways the Pharisees were complicit. In asking the Pharisees to give him the coin from their own hand, he was also showing how they played a part in the essential usurping of God’s divinity for the purposes of empire, for the purposes of the consolidation of power, and the perpetuation of injustice that power demands. Because imagine if the emperor really did have divine power - what would it be dedicated to? It’s own preservation on the backs of marginalized and occupied people. Whereas the power of God is dedicated to the renewal and restoration of *all people*, enacted and embodied through God’s steadfastness and loyalty to the Jewish people of that time. The image of God is dedicated to a heaven from the human race, dedicated to the regeneration and growth of all people, dedicated to the reconciliation of the whole world. So, the image of Caesar exists only to serve itself, whereas the image of God exists to love, to serve, to create. It is not surprising then that the image of Caesar was imprinted on money, a proxy for power and accumulation. Conversely, God’s image is imprinted in the whole world, in the way that the universe is made to be useful, and in the capacity for every human being to receive love and wisdom. So, the driving question left behind by Jesus enigmatic answer is: where do we see the image of God? Caesar and empire sees the image of God in the self, and the things that serve the self. Whereas where does Jesus want us we see the image of God? Everywhere. Everyone. It is one of Jesus’ clearest teachings. Yet somehow, we still fail. Somehow we still forget. We try to take the image of God and like Caesar, claim it’s definition, so that we might feel like we are okay, safe, certain, superior. The most extreme form is Caesar claiming to BE God, but the much more common, less extreme form, is saying that we are LIKE God, or God is LIKE me, …like my gender, like my racial group, like my religious group, and this is how we end up with all kinds of war and oppression. The only thing preventing any one person from embodying the image of God is idolatry, the inversion of God’s gift of love and wisdom towards the self, or a selfish ideal, not any of the outward characteristics by which we usually try to judge people. How ironic then, that Caesar’s very act of claiming God’s image for himself was the very act that proved that he wasn’t in that image at all. So, let us then give back to Caesar all the things that cause us to turn our own backs on the image of God, that cause us to despise, dismiss or disparage others. Let us subvert the reach of empire by refusing to act by the rule of power and gain. Let us instead give glory and gratitude to God for a universe that bears God’s image, for an divine order that supports life, growth and resurrection. Amen. Readings: Isaiah 45:1-7 1 “This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut: 2 I will go before you and will level the mountains ; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. 3 I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. 4 For the sake of Jacob my servant, of Israel my chosen, I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of honor, though you do not acknowledge me. 5 I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me, 6 so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting people may know there is none besides me. I am the LORD, and there is no other. 7 I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things. 8 “You heavens above, rain down my righteousness; let the clouds shower it down. Let the earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness flourish with it; I, the LORD, have created it. Matthew 22:15-22 15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. 16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. 17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?” 18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? 19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” 21 “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” 22 When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away. Divine Love &Wisdom #326 We can tell from all this, then, that if we focus on functions, there is a human image to everything in the universe. We can also tell that this testifies to the fact that God is human, because the things just listed do not come into being around angelic people from themselves, but from the Lord through them. They actually arise from the flow of divine love and wisdom into the angels, who are recipients, and are brought forth to their sight the way the universe is created. So people there know that God is human and that the created universe, functionally viewed, is an image of God. Readings: Isaiah 25:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14, True Christianity #371
See also on Youtube Photo by Rachel Claire: https://www.pexels.com/photo/banquet-table-with-candles-and-plates-4992827/ We heard two weeks ago about a God who is constantly reaching out to us. Divine Love cannot do anything else. So, it is not a surprise to hear this week that God is constantly inviting us to a banquet, as we heard in Isaiah, constantly calling for our presence, for the presence of all people. This invitation comes to us in many different ways and surely we are incredibly blessed that God loves us all so deeply. And if last week was about God’s invitation, then this week centers our response. For the story of God’s great love is only half the story. Is this love of God’s requited? What does it mean to reciprocate God’s love? What does God require of us? We enter into the text today in the same place we have been for several weeks. Jesus is occupying the temple, and the chief priests and Pharisees are trying to discredit him. Jesus does not back down however, and levels increasingly pointed criticism of the priest’s conduct with a series of parables, of which this one is the culmination. We see from the language used, the phrase “Jesus spoke to them again,” that the narrative tension is continuing to mount, and thus everything in the parable is heightened as well. There are some familiar aspects, certainly, like the form of a wedding banquet but as is usual for a parable, there are out-of-the-ordinary and disproportionate aspects. This time armies are marching and cities are burned, while supposedly dinner is still on the table, and a man is thrown into the outer darkness for not having the right clothes. We are again uncomfortable, which is good, because now we are listening. It was the custom in that time for invitations to an event to be issued in a two-fold way. The first invitation was issued in advance, and a general day given, to which people would indicate their acceptance. Then, on the day itself, when the food and the household had been prepared, then people would be notified that it was time to attend. It is actually this second invitation that we are witnessing in the text. So, it is not just a situation of people not being free to attend. Rather, these are people who had already agreed to attend, and who were now refusing to come. We don’t need to understand much of ancient custom to relate…this is socially unacceptable in any time. It is an upsetting upheaval of the guest/host relationship. In Matthew’s particular context, writing as he is to a primarily Jewish audience, the first half of the invitation would have been understood as Israel’s original covenant with the Lord, and the second invitation, the reminder, would have been understood as Jesus and his subsequent Christian missionaries. Swedenborg talks to us about what this invitation means in a more personal way, how the invitation plays out in our spiritual psychology. The two-fold invitation can also be a picture of how the Lord invites us to engage with the spiritual life; how divine truth presents itself to us, and how we are invited by the Lord to interact with it. The first invitation is to our intellect, our thinking mind. We are presented with true ideas to which we might feel positively disposed. Yes, we say to ourselves, these things are true, and I assent to them, in a general way. Such as, God is love, or God loves all people and wants them to thrive, or God intends all people to heaven, or it matters to our spiritual state how we live our life. These things are universally and generally true; we believe them. This is like agreeing to come to the banquet when the invitation is still aways off. The second invitation, however, is to our will. Now the invitation is not somewhere off in the far off future, the invitation is now, today, asking us to attend when we said that we would. This invitation is asking us to take the generally true ideas that we have assented to, and to actually live them, to actually act as if they are true. And what the people in the text did, well, isn’t that often the same thing that what we do? We make excuses. The text says “they paid no attention and went off — one to his field and another to his business.” There is a story similar to this one in the book of Luke, in which the invited make even more detailed excuses. In that version, The first says, I have bought a field and I must go see it, the second says I have bought some oxen that I must go see, and the third says I have married a wife, so I cannot come. At least they sound somewhat apologetic. Honestly, these excuses sound fairly reasonable, as I am sure all our our own justifications sound to ourselves. But the excuses prevent them from attending the banquet; prevent them from seeing their promises through. We RSVP’d to God’s invitation. Now we should come. But, as I said, this second invitation is to our will. What if we don’t *want* to come? What if we are afraid to? The demands of divine truth, the demands of attending the banquet that we said we would attend - this can be scary. Actually living according the truths that we have assented to in our intellect means that we might have to sacrifice something, something of our own making, our own wants and desires. And it means we might have to spend something, something of our own time, focus, energy. The people in the text don’t want to leave their own pursuits, didn’t want to leave their own priorities and goals…their field, their business, their oxen, their wife. And it is okay to have things of our own that we care about. Our sense of self, our sense that we can build and create and sustain things on our own is an important gift from the Lord. Without it, reciprocation of the Lord’s love would not be possible. But sometimes we can become too enamored with our own sense of accomplishment. Like the screens we are surrounded with these days, it can be hard to tear ourselves away from our incessant drive to accumulate, either goods or social currency. This is understandable - in this culture our sense of self-worth is closely tied to our performance and our accomplishments. Yet, in the midst of this reality, God calls us to a banquet, calls us to a magnificent meal that, as we hear in Isaiah text, is set in the midst of chaos, set in the midst of our troubles, our shame, our challenges, our distractions. How audacious. How inconvenient. How divinely patient and loving. This tension of whether or not to attend this banquet, whether or not to follow-through, whether or not to show up and how to show up, is continued in the depiction of the guest without the wedding garment. On the face of it, this man is treated terribly unfairly. How could someone invited on the spur of the moment, someone without means, be expected to have the proper clothing? Why does the host not understand this? It seems really harsh. There are several ways to try to understand what the gospel writer is getting at here. In early Christian thought, the new identity of conversion was often pictured as putting on a new set of clothes. It is a powerful image. In addition, some scholars believe there is evidence that a wealthy host in antiquity might have had a store of clothing that that he would provide to guests, that the guest is therefore deliberately choosing not to take advantage of the host’s hospitality and is therefore communicating disrespect. While there isn’t full agreement on this point, what is clear is that in that ancient setting, the proper *exchange* of hospitality was extremely important. There is still a sense that those showing up would have a certain obligation to the host, even if they didn’t expect that they would be attending. We can argue about whether the expectations of the host were reasonable, but at least in the allegorical sense that Jesus has been presenting so far, we begin to understand that while God extends the invitation far and wide, to all people, our response to the invitation is also important. We shouldn’t excuse ourselves from attending the party, and neither should we should we show up without the intent to be a good guest, as far as we possibly can. Because, the Lord is interested in a *reciprocal* relationship with us. Imagine that, we are so important to God that our response not only matters, but is integral to the quality of our relationship with God. As we heard in the reading for today, the Lord is seeking a partnership with us, a conjunction that involves engagement, that involves giving and receiving, that involves awareness of where we stand, and a willingness to listen and learn. What an amazing honor this is, it really seems incredible, even more incredible that this invitation should be offered to every single living being. Really accepting the invitation though, means more than being a body in the room. This is a wedding banquet. In the Swedenborgian sense, a marriage represents union many different levels, and ultimately it represents the heavenly marriage, which is the marriage of love and wisdom within God. To show up to a wedding banquet means to show up and be ready to celebrate this union of love and wisdom and to work to effect their conjunction in our lives and in the world. For what is love, but the soul of what is wise, and what is wisdom but the understanding of how to effectively, consistently and bravely love? When we show up to the banquet ready commit ourselves to the beauty and the usefulness of the heavenly marriage, we must show up clothed in the readiness to explore the elusive balance of this principle. We must show up clothed in awareness, humility, courage, and in a willingness to ground our truths in real life. Because it is surely not *easy* to love wisely, as we are finding in these turbulent times. We lean too far into the pursuit of wisdom and it becomes an excuse for judgment, coldness and self-satisfaction. We lean too far into the pursuit of love and it becomes an mechanism by which we indulge our own neediness and prop up our own lack of self-worth. Wisdom gives form to love, and love gives life to wisdom, and they cannot exist one without the other. So showing up to the banquet of the heavenly marriage requires something of us. It means working to be conjoined with the Lord. It means taking the things we may believe in our intellect, and putting them into practice, it means showing up clothed in an awareness of how much work that is going to be, and also how important it is! But it also means a celebration of a God that is constantly inviting, constantly laying out a banquet for all people, a God dedicated to enacting the marriage of love and wisdom for the purpose of creating blessedness, happiness, fullness, peace and joy, through providence and through us. So let us clothe ourselves in our wedding garments everyday. Let us be dressed and ready in heart and mind, to attend the banquet of the Lord. Amen. Readings: Isaiah 25:1-9 1 LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago. 2 You have made the city a heap of rubble, the fortified town a ruin, the strangers’ stronghold a city no more; it will never be rebuilt. 3 Therefore strong peoples will honor you; cities of ruthless nations will revere you. 4 You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in their distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall 5 and like the heat of the desert. You silence the uproar of strangers; as heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is stilled. 6 On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine— the best of meats and the finest of wines. 7 On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; 8 he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The LORD has spoken. 9 In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” Matthew 22:1-14 1 Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. 4 “Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. 6 The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. 8 “Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. 9 So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ 10 So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests. 11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 12 He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. 13 “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 “For many are invited, but few are chosen.” True Christianity #371 Our partnership with the Lord is reciprocal: the Lord is in us and we are in the Lord… [2]…Because the partnership is reciprocal, it obviously follows that we have to unite ourselves to the Lord so that the Lord will unite himself to us. Otherwise there will be a parting and a separation rather than a partnership - not on the Lord's initiative but on our own. [6]…It is a mutual partnership that is brought about by cooperation rather than action and reaction. The Lord acts. We receive the Lord's action. We then function as if we were on our own. In fact, we function on our own from the Lord…since the Lord continually keeps us in free choice…The Lord gives us this freedom so that we can forge a reciprocal partnership and be granted life and eternal blessedness as a result - something that would be impossible without a reciprocal partnership. |
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