Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13, Apocalypse Explained 865:2 (see below)
See also on Youtube
Photo by Thuan Vo
​
We begin today by hearing from Deuteronomy, a section containing instructions for the ancient Israelites regarding the sacrifices of their first fruits. Now, first fruits are pretty much exactly as they sound…they are the first things to be grown agriculturally from the land in a given growing season. The first fruit sacrifice was different from tithing, which is also detailed in this chapter. Tithing was a specified amount to be given every third year, while first fruits were to be celebrated and given each year out of the abundance, tenderness, and delight of a new growing season. Both tithes and first fruits were laid upon the altar, then communally enjoyed together with the landless and the foreigner, those who had no means to grow their own crops. What seems like something that purely honors God actually gets turned around into an act of community and care for each other. 

So what might these instructions mean for us today, those of us who are not farmers, or an agrarian people? Perhaps we might make a practice of tithing financially. We can certainly also think of fruits as just about anything we produce in the world through the work of our bodies and minds, though it is definitely more nuanced to imagine how we might make an offering of our intangible “non-edible” work.

In our reading, Swedenborg invites us to explore that, just as there is the fruitfulness of our work on a natural level, there is also the fruitfulness of our work on a spiritual level. When we turn our minds away from purely natural things, and start thinking about spiritual things, we become fruitful in a different way; we yield spiritual fruits. We do this by opening our minds to larger questions: What kind of God do I believe in? What do I need to learn, or how might I need to change in order to love other people more effectively? How might I stop living selfishly, or conversely, how might I engage appropriate boundaries to allow for self-care? How might I learn the courage to stand up for others?  There are obviously many more examples of questions, as many as there are people willing to engage with them.

In the very opening of our minds to such questions, there is a goodness that is produced, that is made alive in ways that were not alive before. As these questions and their potential answers grow within us, they start to take form. We recognize what is true for us about them…we may decide we need to start listening more, we may decide we need to learn about our privilege and another’s oppression, we may choose a spiritual practice or habit…and as we live into the implications of these decisions, first fruits are born within us. Tender, green, alive, nourishing, delightful, and beautiful spiritual fruits. As we live out our life, we harvest the results of these fruits and they, thanks be to God, make for wonderful feasting.

This is the ideal template for Lent, the liturgical season that we are currently in. It is a time to focus on really becoming open to spiritual questions, of recognizing our limitations and flaws, so that we can become more open to the ways God is growing those spiritual fruits inside of us. But of course, as we attempt this, we will also bump up against the forces that prevent us from asking the necessary questions, prevent us from engaging those questions with openness.  What are these obstacles about? Why do they come up? Why are we not always naturally open? Why are we so distractible or averse to the process of self-examination? Part of it has to do with the kinds of stories that we are telling ourselves. Our ability to open up our minds and our hearts is held within the stories that we tell ourselves about God and the world and the purpose of all things.

In our gospel text for today, we hear about Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. The devil (or as we might understand that character— the forces of evil and hell) has a specific kind of story that it tells. A story that tries to close down the growing of spiritual fruits, that tries to keep our mind on things that are earthly and craven.

The first temptation is issued thus: “If you are the son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” This is not so much a taunt as it is an invitation. The “if” here is better translated as “since.”(1) “Since you are the son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Since you have this special power, gift, vocation, position, just use it for yourself, and for your own purposes, that’s what it is for. The Devil is telling their story about reality, and inviting Jesus to take part in it. That story is: We are all just in it for ourselves.

Then the devil says: “If you worship me, all this will be yours.” This time the “if” is as it sounds: an offer. But it stands upon another false story. Who said the devil had ownership over all that stuff anyway? The devil is asking to us believe that the powers of evil and falsity have the power to give, to own, to be generative, creative and generous. Asking us to believe that the world was created by such powers, and is driven by such powers, and belongs to such powers. If you want to get anything out of this world or this life, says the devil, you’d better wise up to how things really work; that’s how you’ll get yours.

Finally, the devil says: “Since you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.” Now the devil is telling a story about our relationship with God. Truly, the devil would prefer there was no God at all, but if there must be one, the devil will cheapen our relationship with God, and cast that relationship as purely transactional. If you have any standing with God, says the devil, make sure you get some more; test God, wring as much out of God as you can, make God do things for you, again surely that’s what God is good for.

And so we are told the devil’s story: keep your eye on what you can get..out of privilege, out of the world, out of God. There is no need to trust, no need to explore, no need to engage with anything beyond that which accumulates power and status. Our fruits are our own, and must be used to make more and more external fruits. There can never be enough. This is the devil’s purpose of life.

But what was the story that the Israelites told themselves and each other in our reading today? It is a very different story. They told the story that their beginning was with someone who was lost, desperate, itinerant. Someone who found a home in a place that wasn’t their own but thrived in that place, where they were valued. That over time, challenges and oppressions arose, and they felt lost again, so they cried out and God heard them. And God brought them out of their challenges, and gave them a land and an identity that was truly their own, gave them sustenance and thriving.

And then, they weave that story into their yearly cycle, practicing remembrance of the story in each first fruit of the land. They remember how far they have come, how their challenges brought them into a place they called home, that they have a God who listens and responds.  And when they remember, they not only so to shore up their own sense of security and gratitude, they turn around are care for those within their circle who need support. They remember their own challenges, and that prompts them to be present for others. 

Two different stories. The devil’s story wants to take power and fruitfulness and increase it for personal gain. According to the devil this is what these things are for, getting more of what you want. This is the only kind of generativity the devil believes in: accumulation. Like a black hole that sucks everything toward it, even light, the devil’s story is zero sum; more for me has to equal less for everyone else. And if one is ever lowly, then the point is to become not lowly as quickly as possible, for all things must lead back to the aggrandizement of the self. Challenges and obstacles are not for deepening relationship; they are just in the way.

The story from Deuteronomy however, is much more nuanced and redemptive. It recognizes that we all experience our lowly and broken states, externally and internally, but that such states are the fertile starting point for an amazing story. We might see humble and discouraging beginnings, we might see obstacles and a winding road, but God sees a beloved people in the making. 

In this story, God is generous and we are recipients of gift-giving. God’s generativity is not about getting more but about becoming more, coming into our own identity, finding our place, our land, our ground, our space to grow. And as we grow, we alternatively expand and struggle and cry out, because this being human, this being ourselves, is difficult work. But God is listening. When we feel stuck, when we are oppressed, when we find it difficult to breathe, God works a wonder for us. God brings us out and through our challenges over and over again, into a land, into a selfhood, that is truly our own. But that land is not the end game; we are instead expected to close the circle by reaching out to others. We remember back to our beginnings, and we use that experience to reach out to those in our present who need us. The devil’s story is a black hole. God’s story is a circle.

Which brings us back around to Lent. Why Lent? What is its purpose? What story are we telling about what we are doing and why? Yes, for a time, we might put ashes on our foreheads. We might take the time to notice that which we might not otherwise notice about ourselves. We might zero in on where we can improve, what we can give up. But why? Are we working towards an ideal self that is perfect, that is high above and disconnected from an icky and difficult world? No, we are entering into God’s circular story, in which our challenges are that which guide us both forward and back-around, toward heaven but a heaven-on-earth. A heaven that exists when we remember to take those first fruits and hold a feast in gratitude for all those who need a place at the table. 

Lent is a time when we remember to unhook from the devil’s story; it is pervasive and persuasive and we all believe it at times. Instead, in Lent, let us dive deep into God’s story; a story in which there is challenge and desperation but also redemption, gratitude, and care.

Amen.

(1) David Schnasa Jacobsen, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3984


Readings:

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

1 When you have entered the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, 2 take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land the LORD your God is giving you and put them in a basket. Then go to the place the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name 3 and say to the priest in office at the time, “I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come to the land the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us.” 4 The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the LORD your God. 5 Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. 6 But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor. 7 Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our ancestors, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. 8 So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, LORD, have given me.” Place the basket before the LORD your God and bow down before him. 11 Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the LORD your God has given to you and your household.

Luke 4:1-13

1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. 3 The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” 4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’” 5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.” 8 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’” 9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; 11 they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ ” 12 Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

Apocalpse Explained 865:2

It shall now be stated in a few words what first-fruits in the Word signify. They signify the same as the first-begotten; but the latter term is used of animals, and first-fruits of vegetables. Thus the first-begotten are what are born first, and first-fruits are from the first things produced; and both signify the spiritual good first formed, which is essentially truth from good from the Lord. The origin of this is as follows. There are two minds in humankind, natural and spiritual. From the natural mind alone nothing but evil is produced, and the falsity therefrom; but as soon as the spiritual mind is opened, then good is produced, and the truth therefrom; this which is first produced is meant by the first-begotten and by the first-fruits. Now because nothing born and produced from the spiritual mind is from people but from the Lord, therefore those things were sanctified to Jehovah, that is, to the Lord, because they were God’s, and consequently holy.

Readings: Micah 6:6-8, Mark 12:28-34, The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #124 (see below)
See also on Youtube

Hopefully many of you were able to enjoy the Be Love event from the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative this past week, an event celebrating what Helen called her spiritual birthday, the day she met her beloved teacher Anne Sullivan.

Helen Keller’s story has inspired generations, and while many of us might be most familiar with the earlier aspects of her story, her entire life’s work, one of advocating for the vulnerable all over the world, is equally inspiring.

Helen was born in 1880 and at the age of 18 months suffered an illness that robbed her of her sight and her hearing. For years, she existed in a state of isolation, without a sense of language that would allow her to communicate with others around her. 

When she was 6 years old, she was introduced to a person who would change everything for her: Anne Sullivan. In a famous moment, one day as Helen was feeling water from a pump run over her hand, while Annie signed the letters for “water”, Helen suddenly understood what language was and the world opened up for her.

Helen would go on to attend college, write multiple books, and become a social reformer and a world famous speaker, who advocated for disability rights, women’s rights, civil rights, economic equality, and world peace. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, or the ACLU.

And, a lesser known fact about Helen is that she was a follower of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, who she credits as giving her a foundational theology for her life. She was introduced to his works by her dear friend, John Hitz, and immediately found them to align with her innate sense of spirituality.

Helen has described Anne Sullivan coming into her life as a mental awakening, and the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg as her spiritual awakening. She wrote of this experience in a book, now titled Light in My Darkness, and characterized her feelings to a friend thus:

Swedenborg's message has meant so much to me! It has given color and reality and unity to my thought of the life to come; it has exalted my ideas of love, truth, and usefulness; it has been my strongest incitement to overcome limitations.(1)

Now, I had already planned to preach a sermon on Helen Keller today before I had remembered that it would be the first Sunday in Lent. And at first, it seemed like it might an poor fit. Lent is a time when we intentionally make a sacrifice, give up something in our life, or take on a new spiritual discipline or practice, in order to reveal new insights about ourselves. We intentionally deepen our reflections and welcome knowledge about how our lives and habits might need to change in order to more fully connect with God and with others. This is a necessary inward journey, and conversely it seems like Helen’s journey was often one of reaching outward, of helping others. So, we might wonder how exactly her life’s journey should speak to our Lenten journey today?

Helen was so good at both articulating and modeling what a faithful life calls us to, and so I believe that Helen can give us the why of Lent. She writes:

Sick or well, blind or seeing, bound or free, we are here for a purpose, and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it. It is not the stone walls that make it small or large, but the brave souls' light shining around and in it. The altar is holy only when it represents the altar of our heart upon which we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded—the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcomes doubt.
Lent is the time when we, with courage and faith, look upon the altar of our heart and see it both for what it is, and what it could be. If there is to be prayer and piety during Lent, it is only for this purpose: to reveal to us more fully how we can be useful, to reveal to us how to become those brave souls shining with light. To reveal to us how we must act.

Our moment feels like a dark time, my friends. It is a dark time for our nation. Principles of democracy, transparency, accountability, honesty that we thought we could rely upon are no longer a given at the highest levels of our government. It is deeply distressing to see something we love fall apart, especially without knowing what exactly we can do to fix it. It is almost enough to consider dispensing with Lent altogether this year, as it is so difficult to genuinely reflect from a place of instability. 

And then, I think of Helen and I wonder what she would say. What would she tell us in this Lenten season? She, who from a place of darkness and silence still managed to conjure a love so deep and wide that we still speak of it today. What would she say to us? As I pondered this question, I came to her writings which I will now quote at length. I hope they will minister to you as they have to me.

“We should never surrender to misfortune or circumstances or even to our faults hopelessly or passively—as if we were but carved images with our hands hanging down, waiting for God’s grace to put us into motion. We should not succumb to spiritual slavery. We should take the initiative, look into ourselves fearlessly, and search out new ideas of what to do and ways to develop our will power. Then God will give us enough light and love for all our needs(2) 

Now, limitations of all kinds are forms of chastening to encourage self-development and true freedom. They are tools put into our hands to hew away the stone and flint that keep hidden our higher gifts. They tear away the blindfold of indfference from our eyes, and we behold the burdens others are carrying, learning to help them by yielding to the compassionate dictates of our hearts.(3) 

We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off our disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent external world. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.(4) 

The constant service of Swedenborg lies in thoughts such as these. He shows us that, in every event and every limitation, we have a choice, and that to choose is to create. We can decide to let our trials crush us, or we can convert them to new forces of good. We can drift along with general opinion and tradition, or we can throw ourselves upon the guidance of the soul within and steer courageously toward truth.(5) 

Truly I have looked into the very heart of darkness and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have travelled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to God as surely as the green, refreshing fields and fruitful orchards.

I, too, have been profoundly humiliated and brought to realize my smallness amid the immensity of creation. The  more I learn, the less I think I know; and the more I understand of my sense-experience, the more I perceive its short comings and its inadequacy as a basis of life. Sometimes the points of view of the optimist and the pessimist seem so well-balanced to me that it is only by sheer force of spirit that I can keep my hold upon a practical, livable philosophy of life. But I use my will, choose life, and reject its opposite, nothingness.(6) 

This Lenten season, let us remember Helen’s words, that to choose is to create. What do we wish to create in this moment we are in? I hope we will work to create sanctuary, connection, inclusion. I hope we will create care and concern for the suffering. I hope we will create a love for truth, and a desire to learn. I hope we will create a mighty resolve to see each other fully with love, and to create a world where there is dignity and thriving for all.

Each moment we choose each of these things, we create them. No one can ever take that away from us. As we create them, they will exist as an embodiment of and a testament to the divine love that created the universe, and created us. This ability to partner with God in the exerise of our free will, to co-create the reality of heaven on earth, is a gift. And there are times when that gift may feel too heavy, or that we don’t know what to do with it, or that anything that we do with it will always be too small to matter. 

But the truth is, every spark of creation that brings love to life in service of others is a true act of worship. Every spark exists and every spark matters. Let us consider this Lenten season as a time when we are guarding the flame, when we are holding safe and growing holy sparks that may light in someone else’s darkness. In honor of Helen, may we choose to create a world where we take care of each other. Amen.

1. Helen Keller. Letter to Rev. Paul Sperry. 10 October 1926
   
2. Helen Keller, Light in My Darkness, p135
3. Ibid
4. Ibid 137
5. Ibid 138
6. Ibid 139

Readings:

Micah 6:6-8
6 With what shall I come before the LORDand bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Mark 12:28-34
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him.
33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Teachings #124

A life of caring, though, consists of having goodwill toward our neighbors and doing good things for them; basing all of our actions on justice and equity, and on what is good and true; and applying the same principles in all our responsibilities. In a word, a life of caring consists of being useful. This kind of life is the primary way to worship God; a life of piety is only secondary. This means that if we separate the one from the other, if we lead a pious life but not a caring life at the same time, we are not in fact worshiping God. We may be thinking about God, but this comes from ourselves and not from God, because we are constantly thinking about ourselves and not at all about our neighbor. If we do think about our neighbors, we regard them as worthless if they are not like us. Further, we are thinking of heaven as our reward, so our mind is preoccupied with self-love and taking credit. Being actively useful is something we either neglect or regard with contempt; and that is also how we treat our neighbors. Yet at the same time we believe there is nothing wrong with us. This shows that a pious life apart from a caring life is not the spiritual life that is needed within our worship of God.

Readings: 2 Kings 6:8, 18-23, Luke 6:27-38, Secrets of Heaven 3796 (see below)
See also on Youtube
Photo credit: Ismael Sanchez

The readings today are part of what is sometimes called Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. Jesus has just delievered Luke’s version of The Beatitudes, proclaiming the blessedness of the poor, the hungry, the grieving, and the excluded, and issuing a warning to those who are rich, satiated and praised. Now, Jesus continues his sermon, telling his hearers to love their enemies, to be generous, and to refrain from judging.

These statements are among some of the most famous of Jesus’ teachings. After all, this passage contains what is known as The Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you.” There is so much deeply grounded common sense to be found in that one phrase. Likewise, “love your enemies” is well known to encapsulate much of Jesus’ worldview. 

How are we to hold this teaching? How are we to hold it today, in our context, as we note the powers-that-be scapegoating trans people, axing and outlawing diversity, equity and inclusion programs, gutting aid to the most vulnerable, and doing so without attention to the rule of law, or basic norms of diligence and accountability?

For Luke, he was writing to an early Christian community that was in conflict with both the greater Roman empire, and with the communities of faith from which they arose, and occasionally, because they were human, with each other. All the more astonishing then, that Jesus was not only saying that we should love those with whom we simply disagree, however painfully or vehemently, Jesus was saying we should love those who oppress us, those who actively work to diminish our humanity, our thriving, our happiness. Well, that sucks. This request hardly seems fair, or doable. How can God really ask this of us?

Well, simply, because this is how the kingdom comes. This is how the New Jerusalem descends. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we say “on earth as it is in heaven.” How else do we imagine that is going to happen? When we hear “love your enemies” and understand it superficially, we forget the stakes. The stakes are heaven on earth, the stakes are the universe coming to reflect and embody the divine love that created it. 

Yet, even as we raise the stakes, we also have to recognize that the Bible is not a rule book. We can’t take this list of examples from this text and think that if we check them off exactly as it says then everything will be okay. There is more to it than that. Jesus was talking about a certain quality of relationship, the redemptive quality that belongs to the connection between human beings when they actually see each other, when they allow the kingdom to break through, when they break the cycle of violence and judgment. Jesus used the particular examples from the text because they spoke to the community that was hearing them. He spoke of being generous without thought of repayment, because that ancient society was built upon the patron/client social system, where all relationship was governed by a complex hierarchy. Yet, Jesus asked that the generosity of the early Christians be decoupled from that kind of social calculation, that it be viewed as a good in and of itself. Further, these early Christians knew what it was to be oppressed. Both in their context as Jews and their new faith as Christians, it would have been easy to get caught up in conflict every single day. The chances of Roman soldiers abusing them in some way was relatively high. Yet, Jesus counsels them that they should unhook from the eye-for-an-eye mindset, from dreams of vengeance or comeuppance, because a heart consumed with revenge has no room for the kingdom. He calls them toward a kingdom view that is overflowing…“Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you.”  This is not an easy path; this kind of discipleship really asks something of us. There is a cost to it.

But let’s continue to be careful here, because if we are still treating the Bible like a rule book, we can become easily confused about what this all means. Jesus’ whole deal here is not about submission but instead about contextualization, about grounding our experiences in shared humanity. God is asking us to see each other. To turn the other cheek to someone who has struck you means to stand your ground without retaliation, to turn your face so that the perpetrator must look into your eyes. Turning the other cheek is not only about breaking a cycle of violence but it is also about defying objectification. Likewise, the commands about generosity and refraining from judgment are about breaking a cycle of stereotyping and therefore defying categorization. Defying these two ways of thinking are key. We human beings justify our bad behavior towards each other by dehumanizing and stereotyping each other. The less similar we are to each other, the less our empathy is activated, the more distance we can put between us. And isn’t it so much easier that way? Don’t we feel so much more powerful when we are convinced of our rightness by way of objectifying and categorizing others?

But this is what Jesus is asking us to relinquish, and it is how the kingdom of God becomes real. We open up our minds to seeing each other, to people who are different, we connect with them in some way and the circle is widened. This is painfully slow, painstaking work…who has time for this, we might protest? And can it really be enough? In times of urgency, can it really be enough? Certainly there must be limits? Well, of course there are. Context always matters.

We must always remember to never become legalistic about what Jesus was saying here. There are very reasonable objections to the idea of loving our enemies, encapsulated by the famous quote from the author James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

Because it matters who is saying it to who. When the church is the oppressor and tells its adherents to love their enemies, this is an abuse of power. When society is the oppressor and tells the oppressed to “love their country” and “be good citizens,” this is an abuse of power. James Baldwin has also said: “Ignorance allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” When those who would dehumanize others gain power, it is not a good thing, in Jesus’ time or now. The exhortation to “love your enemy” is not an excuse to allow those who would oppress to continue oppressing; “love your enemy” was not Jesus’ way of telling early Christians to get on board with the empire of Rome. Instead, “love your enemy” is about intentionally opting out of the cycle of dehumanization. “Ignorance allied with power” cannot function without dehumanization and categorization, likewise empire, hatred, oppression, cannot function without dehumanization and categorization.  Our text continues with Jesus saying: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into a pit?” So we need to opt out, someone needs to opt out, and Jesus wants it to be us.

Jesus is asking someone (anyone!) to see and uphold the concept of shared and connective humanity. Doing so is not about martyrdom, but about refusing to participate in the dehumanization of ourselves and others. When we turn the other cheek, we demand to be seen as a person, and also we must see the oppressor as one as well. We prevent them from perpetrating harm, as needed, and often. But in love, we see them clearly, wholly, hopefully, and in context. And this is such hard work.

Which has prompted Rev. Nadia Boltz Weber to proclaim, echoing all of us: “I hate that this is God’s economy. That the salvation of my enemy is tied up in my own. Which is why I sometimes say that the Gospel is like, the worst good news I’ve ever heard in my life.”(1) 

Preached as it is on a level place, a plain, we find that “love your enemy” is not a platitude. It has real stakes, in real life. The practice of it involves seeing the humanity in each other, recognizing that we were born to be face to face with each other. The practice of it involves deep empathy for context, recognizing that we all carry burdens. The practice of it involves expecting more than excuses from each other, recognizing a shared hope that the kingdom will come, but that its path runs though our hearts, and they must be cleared of ego and fear. “Love your enemy” is not about maintaining a false equivalency but a recognition of the limits of equivalency at all. Each person is a universe unto themselves, and beloved of God. We are asked not to submit to power, but to surrender to the reach of God’s love. “For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

We must always continue to measure by the rule of love, so that the rule of love becomes the shape of our souls. Even as we act to protect, uphold, resist, and exist, may we believe in that overflowing, good measure. It’s the only way.

Amen.

1. Nadia Boltz Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Revolution, p188-89

Readings:

2 Kings 6:8, 18-23

8 Now the king of Aram was at war with Israel.

18 As the enemy came down toward him, Elisha prayed to the LORD, “Strike this army with blindness.” So he struck them with blindness, as Elisha had asked. 19 Elisha told them, “This is not the road and this is not the city. Follow me, and I will lead you to the man you are looking for.” And he led them to Samaria. 20 After they entered the city, Elisha said, “LORD, open the eyes of these men so they can see.” Then the LORD opened their eyes and they looked, and there they were, inside Samaria. 21 When the king of Israel saw them, he asked Elisha, “Shall I kill them, my father? Shall I kill them?” 22 “Do not kill them,” he answered. “Would you kill those you have captured with your own sword or bow? Set food and water before them so that they may eat and drink and then go back to their master.” 23 So he prepared a great feast for them, and after they had finished eating and drinking, he sent them away, and they returned to their master. So the bands from Aram stopped raiding Israel’s territory.

Luke 6:27-38

27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Secrets of Heaven #3796

…We ought to pay attention to the various states we pass through, because the states themselves usually affect our perception. This is something we can examine in ourselves but not in others, because the Lord alone knows the aim of every desire. That is why the Lord said, “Don’t judge anyone, or you will be judged; don’t condemn anyone, or you will be condemned” (Luke 6:37). A thousand people can seem to have the same desire for truth and goodness when in reality each has a desire with a different origin, or a different aim.
The reason the aim determines whether a desire is real, feigned, or deceitful is that our purpose is our very life. What we live for—in other words, what we love—is what we hold as our goal. When the welfare of our neighbor, the larger community, the church, and the Lord’s kingdom forms our goal, our soul dwells in the Lord’s kingdom and therefore in the Lord. The Lord’s kingdom is nothing other than a kingdom of purposes and usefulness seeking the good of the whole human race.

Readings: Malachi 3:1-4, Matthew 6:9-13, Secrets of Heaven 1692 (see below)
See also on Youtube

As we focus on the phrase: Lead us not into temptation, The Lord’s Prayer once again brings us to another really big topic: temptation and God’s deliverance. There’s so much here we can only scratch the surface.

First, if the phrasing “Lead us not into temptation” gives you pause, know that you are not alone. The idea that God might actually *lead* us into conflict and has to be petitioned not to do so, has bothered Christians from the very beginning of the movement. There is evidence that early Christian liturgies even modified the wording of the prayer to deal with this. Some scholars believe that the phrasing speaks to a kind of apocalyptic mindset that was prevalent in Jesus’ day, one that understood history to be heading toward a great battle between the faithful and cosmic forces of evil. The prayer spoke to a hope that, in following God, the faithful might not be led into a conflict that would ultimately overwhelm them (1). I think that we can resonate with those kind of existential anxieties even today, whenever we hope that we will be up to whatever challenges life throws at us.

But of course, all of this exposes some natural and fundamental questioning that we might well have around how Divine Providence works, about how God actually affects and shapes our lives. How does God lead us? Why does temptation exist? What is its purpose? And where is God during times of temptation? 

Swedenborg speaks to all of these questions many times in his works. First, in regard to the phrasing “lead us not into temptation” he points out that these words are what he calls an appearance. In the Swedenborgian worldview, there is an internal spiritual metaphorical meaning contained within the literal outward meaning of the words on the bible page. God’s Divine Truth emanates out toward us and goes through successive accomodations to human understanding, finally coming to rest in the outward “clothing” of the words spoken to and by the people of the time the Bible was written. Sometimes that outward clothing feels pretty similar to the spiritual meaning, (for example “love our neighbor”) and sometimes it almost totally obscures it (for example, God is angry and vengeful). To illustrate the difference in meaning, Swedenborg uses the example of the sun appearing to rise and set around a still earth, according to our vantage point, when the actual reality is that the earth moves around the sun. What appears to our eyes in that circumstance doesn’t represent the ultimate truth. Likewise for God’s nature; there were times when circumstances were interpreted by people to conclude that God was angry and vengeful and the Bible reflects that conclusion. However, the reality is that God is entirely loving.(2)

It is a similar case with the phrasing of the prayer. God never takes the tough love approach, leading us into trials or temptations, “for our own good.” When we want someone to blame it can sometimes feel like that. But God’s leading doesn’t actually happen that way. God has the utmost respect for our freedom, and so God’s leading is subtle and internal and individually crafted according to our needs and mindset. God does not create circumstances out in the world for us to experience, but rather, as we do experience them, guides our response and reflection and our meaning-making.

But this does prompt the question of what temptations are and why they happen. Culturally, the word temptation has taken on a kind of salacious tenor, which is why some of the most recent translations of Swedenborg’s works simply use the word “crisis” instead. We all know what it feels like to be in crisis, both large and small. Crisis means a time of upheaval, often in which various elements are in opposition to each other, and/or turning point decisions will be made. After a crisis, we usually see things differently, and act differently with intention, because the crisis has changed us. Perhaps we have a health crisis that prompts us to make changes to our habits. Perhaps we have a relationship crisis through some selfish action on our part and we rescue it via repentance and reformed behaviors. We might experience crisis in response to many of the things that are going wrong in the world, and wrestling with questions about our responsibilty, our fear, our overwhelm, our values, and our willingness to act.

So, Swedenborg uses temptation in this way, not so much as something that has the potential to make us stray from the right path, but rather, as an experience that has the potential to change us: that clarifies our thinking, strengthens what we value and opens the path toward transformation. Why is this kind of experience necessary? We heard in our Swedenborg reading that temptations or crises are the means by which evils and falsities are broken up and dispersed within us. We all have unhealthy tendencies and false ideas to which we cling. This doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us people. People born into a natural earthly world, faced with a natural earthly life. Many times, we are happy to just chug along, not paying attention to our unhealthy tendencies or false ideas until we are forced to, until we are thrust into a crisis. The crisis *makes* us pay attention. And just like forgiveness, it is another holy threshold, where we get to decide what we value. We get to decide if we will keep trying to put our head back in the sand, or if we will face the crisis process with courage, and be open to what it will reveal to us.

In personal terms, a crisis can be precipitated by any number of different outward events, but the nature, quality and outcome of the crisis will be dictated by *our* internal processes and constitution: what and who we love and value, what we understand to be true, how willing we are to reflect and repent if necessary, and how willing we are to change.

But, even though our own personal makeup determines the nature and shape of our crises, and it sure does feel like a lot of work to make it through them, and this brings into relief another appearance at play. Swedenborg emphasizes that the Lord is fighting fiercely for our benefit during our crises, and it is by the Lord’s power alone that our crises are resolved, even as we are “allowed” to feel the full blooming of our own efforts. We have to feel like we are doing our own work in order for it to have any real meaning for us. The experience of overcoming or working through our crises changes us fundamentally, and we get to hold on to that, it becomes part of us. But it is key for us, as we look back upon our temptation times, to recognize it was the Lord’s power that brought us through, not our own. Making it through a crisis should indeed make us feel confident, and it is worth celebrating, but it is a confidence that should be grounded in faith and gratitude rather than self-satisfaction.

And this circles us back around to what is appearing as an unintentional sub-theme of our Lord’s Prayer series. Many times we are asking for things in the prayer that are already happening. In the sentence we are focusing on today, we ask that we might be delivered from evil, but that is not something that God needs to be prompted to do. Just as in the giving of the daily bread, just as with forgiving our sins, so it is the same with our constant deliverance. God is already giving us internal sustenance, already forgiving us, and already fighting on our behalf all the time. We don’t have to prove that we are good enough to receive God’s care. It happens no matter what.

So why do we pray for these things if they are already happening? Well, just because they are already happening, doesn’t mean that they have nothing to do with us, or that their meaning, efficacy or potential to change us is not affected by our conscious awareness and partnership. We ask for things that we know are already given or already happening so that we might remember them, so that we might give our consent to partner with them, and so that we might remain open to them. I know that when I pray The Lord’s Prayer, my silent addition is often “Please don’t let me forget.” Don’t let me forget in the middle of the day, when I’m hungry and grumpy and overwhelmed and trying to power through my to do list? Don’t let me forget when I’m trying to go so sleep but my mind is swirling.  Don’t let me be so distracted by my own selfhood, that I forget that God is with me.

Swedenborg writes:

We construct a life for ourselves through endless sensual pleasures, through love for the material world and for ourselves…This demonstrates how large a gap separates mortal life from heavenly life, which is the reason the Lord uses adversity to regenerate us and bend us into harmony. (3)

I love this imagery, that we might be “bent into harmony” through our crises. There is nothing more human than the struggle we all share in trying to live this life, and this acknowledgment is the foundation of empathy. We are reminded of Martin Luther King’s quote, that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. In the midst of crisis, spiritual or otherwise, we are likely to forget or dismiss this slow work of bending ourselves and the world towards justice and harmony. But it is the work that is most important to God; it is the work that God will never abandon, and so neither should we.
Amen.

(1) The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol VII, p133.
(2) Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #3425
(3) Ibid #760

Malachi 3:1-4

1 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

Matthew 6:9-13

9 “This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Secrets of Heaven #1692

Hardly anyone can see what the battles of spiritual crisis accomplish. They are the means for dissolving and shaking off evil and falsity. They are also the means by which we develop a horror for evil and falsity, and gain not only conscience but strength of conscience; and this is the way we are reborn. For that reason, people who are regenerating are thrust into combat and undergo terrible trials — if not during their physical lives, then in the other life…

[2] It is the Lord alone who does the fighting in people facing their own spiritual battles, and who conquers. By our own power, we cannot accomplish anything at all against evil, hellish spirits, because they band together with the hells in such a way that if one hell were overcome the next would rush in to fill the void. This would continue forever. They are like the ocean beating on the individual stones in a jetty. If it managed to open a chink or a tiny crack in the jetty, it would never stop until it had broken down and overflowed the entire structure, leaving not a trace. That is how it would be if the Lord did not bear our battles by himself.

Readings: Psalm 130, Matthew 6:9-15, Divine Providence 280 (see below)
See also on Youtube

Forgiveness is one of those topics that seems like it simple on the outside, but actually contains multitudes within it. I believe this is partly because forgiveness is such an emotional topic. To countenance forgiveness, we have to come face to face with the fact that human beings mess up so much and hurt each other all the time. Thinking deeply about forgiveness means we have to acknowledge that these hurts have ongoing consequences, that they are sometimes held deep within us for a long time. We have to embrace accountability and admit how difficult that is for the human ego, and that many times we will avoid it. And we have to acknowledge the fragility of human relationship, how dependent it is upon our ability to forgive each other.

So, it makes sense that forgiveness would be part of the Lord’s prayer; it is an important spiritual and transformational practice. And clearly, in the biblical context, in was important to Jesus as well, for in our Matthew text, he expounds upon the notion of forgiveness even after he finished telling them how to pray, as part of his famous Sermon on the Mount. 

The first important thing to acknowledge about forgiveness as a notion, is that forgiveness is a function of relationship; it always occurs *within* relationship, and it doesn’t have any meaning except *as* a function of relationship, however intimate or peripheral this relationship might be. This certainly can include our relationship with ourselves, or even our higher and lower selves, but ultimately forgiveness only comes into play because there is a disconnection between two things in relationship. It a holy threshold, an essential recognition of our infallibility but also a declaration of hope that relationship can exist and thrive in the face of imperfection. Imagine if forgiveness didn’t exist; how alone and isolated, how rigid yet fractured we would be.

But even though forgiveness represents a moving forward of relationship through the process of dealing with disagreement and tension, that doesn’t always mean the moving forward is the same thing as the continuance of the relationship, as it was. The outcome of forgiveness is many times the repairing of relationship, but sometimes it also is the letting go of relationship. Let’s consider these in turn.

As human beings, as the Lord’s Prayer shows us, we incur debts to one another. Debts of empathy, understanding, care, concern, and dignity. There are so many ways that we hurt and disappoint one another, and we often feel the pain of this deeply. Many times, this debt or disconnect is created because of an imbalance between how we expected to be treated and how we were actually treated. And this disconnect threatens or prevents relationship.

Enter, forgiveness. Disconnection of relationship is not necessarily a terminal condition, thanks be to God. Forgiveness is the process by which relationship is restored. But because it is a function of relationship, it requires engagement on the part of all who are in the relationship. Forgiveness requires accountability, what Swedenborg calls repentance, on the part of the one who was hurtful, and grace on the part of the one who was hurt. Both sacrifice ego; one sacrifices rightness, the other invulnerability.

Relationship depends upon empathy, upon caring about the wellbeing of another. Part of that caring, must include accountability when it is warranted. Without accountability, without repentance, forgiveness as a function of relationship repair is not possible, because refusing accountability is a fundamental abdication of empathy, (of putting oneself in another’s shoes and imagining their point of view) and how can relationship survive without empathy? I recall this challenge as a parent: that we teach our children to say “I’m sorry” from a very young age, but at some point we also need to teach them how to “be sorry,” we need to teach them the value of empathy and accountability. We need to teach them that empty words cannot carry relationship, and that to be sorry means to act differently in future. 

We see from our reading today that Swedenborg was very critical of religious traditions that tried to circumvent true repentance, that offered what he called instantaneous salvation, a wiping away of our transgressions through so-called faith, by saying the right words, without a necessary accountability. Other theologians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer have called that “cheap grace.” The work of repentance must cost us something, must cause a re-evaluation of our ego and identity, so that an actual new and different future for the relationship in question can be brought into being.
But just because something is costly doesn’t make it a punishment. We often think about relationship in terms of give and take, but I’m not sure that works here very well, as it invites a sense that repentance is something we “take” or “exact” from each other. Forgiveness is really more about give and give. One gives repentance, another gives grace, and a new future gets to be written in relationship. This is what Jesus was referring to in the Matthew text. A lot of the time, Jesus speaks of forgiveness in terms of pride and hypocrisy. He cautions his disciples against holding grudges, or about withholding forgiveness in exchange for power. And it is in this context we hear the end of our Matthew text, which on the face of it sounds rather transactional, but really is about cultivating a compassionate state of mind. The refusal of either accountability or grace for selfish reasons just compounds sin upon sin, and will close our hearts way down every time. God always forgives, and always will, but that can’t have any functional reality for us until we open our minds to what we need to be forgiven for, and then extend that humble mindset to our interactions with others.
 
So, what about the other side of things: forgiveness as relinquishment. What about when there is no accountability or repentance on offer? Forgiveness still has a role to play here but it is less about repair and more about freedom and integrity. When an emotional debt has caused a disconnect in relationship and the one who has hurt us refuses accountability, it is very difficult to continue forward. And even if the relationship is severed, that doesn’t mean we might not still be tethered to it in an emotional way. There is no world in which it is God’s intention for us to remain in that hurt forever. Forgiveness can release us.

But it can be very hard. The way in which we culturally, unconsciously, understand forgiveness can make us feel like forgiving a hurt means somehow we are condoning it. Think about the common words: “It’s okay, I forgive you.” These words are usually offered in the context of relationship repair, but take on a whole different tone when repentance is not offered. The words “It’s okay” will often times hover over any contemplation of forgiveness, whether we realize it or not.

So it is important to remember that forgiveness is not a statement of right or wrong. Forgiveness is an action that intentionally heals a wound. Whatever hurts we have endured, our pain is a declaration of the wrongness of what has happened to us, and that declaration will always stand. But still the potential of that holy threshold remains unresolved, and forgiveness practiced on our own part, can release us from that lack of resolution. This kind of forgiveness will necessarily contain some measure of grief and a recognition that it is God’s work to reform other people, not ours. Like I said, hard spiritual work that takes the time it takes. But of course a God of love would wish this kind of release for us, and help us to make it so.

Now I know, I’ve simplified things a little here in this sermon, perhaps even a lot. It certainly is possible to feel hurt based on our sense of ego or entitlement, or false assumptions. There is such a thing as selfish pain, and not all hurt means that someone else did something wrong. It is also true that it is possible to hurt someone unintentionally, and the associated repentance in that case will feel different to when hurt is actually intended. I’ve said nothing at all on the topic of consequences, which are often an important part of accountability, or healthy boundaries, which are an important part of healing. And we must not forget the toxic ways that religous systems can twist biblical teachings on forgiveness, forcing those with little or no power to forgive ongoing abuse by stating that forgiveness is a biblical virtue. Every good notion, even forgiveness, can be weaponized by those who wish to continue perpetuating harm. Forgiveness tugs on a multitude of strings because the restoration of relationship is complicated and contextual and individual.

But the ultimate goal is wholeness, however it can be found. The psalm from our readings said “But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.” (Psalm 130:4) Our God models an unrelenting forgiveness not because of some hazy idealism, but because it is the only way to stay in relationship with us, God’s fallible creation. And God wants that more than anything else, and so of course, God forgives.

Amen.

Readings:


Psalm 130

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD; 2 Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. 3 If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you. 5 I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. 6 I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. 7 Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. 8 He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins.

Matthew 6:9-15

9 “This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ 

14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.


Divine Providence 280

Another popular misconception is that when sins have been forgiven they are also set aside. This misconception is characteristic of people who believe that their sins are forgiven through the sacrament of the Holy Supper even though they have not set them aside by repenting from them. It is characteristic also of people who believe they are saved by faith alone or by papal dispensations. They all believe in direct mercy and instant salvation. 

When the sequence is reversed, though, it is true: when sins have been set aside, they are forgiven. Repentance must precede forgiveness, and apart from repentance there is no forgiveness. That is why the Lord told his disciples to preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:27) and why John preached the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 3:3). 

The Lord forgives everyone's sins. He does not accuse us or keep score. However, he cannot take our sins away except by the laws of his divine providence; for when Peter asked him how many times he should forgive someone who had sinned against him, whether seven was enough, he said that Peter should forgive not seven times but seventy times seven times (Matthew 18:21-22). What does this tell us about the Lord, who is mercy itself?

Readings: I Chronicles 29:10-20, Matthew 6:9-13, Divine Providence 58 (see below)
See also on Youtube

Welcome to this sermon series in which we examine a prayer that we have likely said many hundreds of times: The Lord’s Prayer. It is called thus because it is based upon two passages in the gospels when Jesus’ disciples ask him how they should pray and he gives them a model. The Lord’s prayer as we know it contains themes of holiness, God’s will, God’s kingdom, God’s provision for us, forgiveness and indebtedness, and temptation. Additionally, a doxology was added to the end in the early days of the Christian church, most likely based on our reading from I Chronicles, a reminder of whence comes all power and glory. To this day, we find that some Christian practices include this doxology and some do not. 

Today, we will focus on the beginning phrases: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The prayer starts out by using a metaphor that speaks of intimate relationship; we do not just say “Father” but “Our Father.” It is interesting to note that in the gospel of Mark (14:36), when Jesus is praying in the garden of Gethsemane in his most challenging moments, he qualifies his use of the word “Father” with the Aramaic term “Abba,” which is best understood by us as “Papa,” a word used not to indicate fatherhood in a general detached sense, but a word used everyday in familial contexts. So whatever word we use for our own fathers, that is the word that would express the closeness with which we are addressing God in this prayer.

Next, we speak of hallowing. This is a kind of archaic word to us now, but it means to make holy, or to honor with holiness. And specifically, we hallow, or make holy, the name of God. On the surface, this might seem a simple matter of external praise. But Swedenborg indicates that in the bible, the word “name” represents the essential nature of something, its entire character, or essential being. (1)

To illustrate this, I want to tell you about the very first thing that I ever bought as a child with my own money. It was a homemade stuffed seal at a flea market. I loved that stuffy so much. Can you guess what I called it? Seal. Not very original, I know. But when I think back to that time, and about why I didn’t choose a different name, I think it is because I loved that seal for exactly what it was. This would have been in the early 80’s, so the variety of available toys pales in comparison to today, and basically in a landscape of mostly teddy bears and dolls, I had never seen a stuffy quite like it. So I didn’t see a reason to name it anything other than it was, because I loved seals, and I loved this stuffy because it was a seal. I called it the name that best reflected its essential character, which was its most valuable trait to me. 

And thus in a similar way, when we invoke and hallow God’s name, we do not simply hallow the word that we call God, but rather, the whole of God’s being that we are using that word to signify. Sometimes that word might be Father, Lord, God, Creator, or something else but regardless of the actual word, when we hallow God’s name, we are lifting up and honoring the whole of what God stands for, the whole of God’s intent and mission and providence. And as we heard in our Swedenborg reading, God’s intent is to save the whole human race, no exceptions.

Next, we begin to speak of how we would like God’s presence to be known by us and by the world. This prayer, like much of the bible, uses a royal metaphor to express this. We ask that God’s kingdom might come, essentially that God’s “reign” might be extended from heaven onto the earth. The assumption embedded here is that heaven is a realm, or a vision even, where God’s intent comes to pass more completely than on earth.

How are we to understand what it means for God’s kingdom to come on earth? It might help us to understand how that metaphor is employed in the gospel at large. Most of the time, it is done in a kind of subversive way, in that it co-opts that familiar royal language, but then reframes what such a reign would be, reframes what such a kingdom would look like, and contrasts it with what we know of earthly kings and kingdoms. If we might otherwise describe kingdoms in terms of power, strength, authority and dominance, the bible describes God’s kingdom as a place where the least will be first, belonging to people who are poor in spirit, or who are like little children. Jesus compares it to a party to which everyone is invited, a seed sown in a field, yeast leavening bread, a tiny mustard seed, a treasure hidden in a field for which we would give everything we own. Because of the way that God’s kingdom is actually described in the bible, many preachers now slightly change the word to “kin-dom” to better reflect its true nature, one in which relationship, equity, respect and worthiness are paramount. 

Finally, as as extension of the notion of bringing God’s kingdom to earth, we ask in the prayer that God’s will be done. Inherent in this request is the idea that our will must be surrendered to God’s will. In so far as prayers are calling forth what might not yet be, we pray that even as our own will remains primary before our eyes (we are human after all and it cannot be otherwise) that we might remember that God’s will ultimately has a broader view; in essence, we surrender our view to God’s view and practice the discipline of putting our will into eternal perspective. Jesus himself models this prayer, once again in Gethsemane, as he countenanced the ultimate sacrifice of his own will and his own life, saying: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36)

While we will generally, thankfully, not be facing Jesus’ particular gauntlet in our own lives, we recognize that the dynamic itself plays out in smaller ways over and over. I’m sure we all find our own will, our own desires, thwarted time and time again in this life. And the purpose of our submission to God’s will in the prayer, is not to make us inherently suspicious of our own will in every circumstance. It is not that are to become emotional martyrs but rather to submit to the discipline of curiosity, the discipline of holding our own will lightly enough, that when it does need re-evaluating, we are open to doing it. This is how regeneration happens. This is what salvation actually is.

There is such a powerful progression within these initial lines of the prayer. We first proclaim as holy not only God’s being but God’s intent and providence; and in the hallowing of God’s name we declare our allegiance to God’s intent, and our belief in God’s trustworthiness. This then leads us to ask that God’s vision, what we call God’s kin-dom, might become manifest in our world. We see the value of the kin-dom and wish for it to be the way of things. But even as these opening lines speak mostly of God, they begin to mark out our responsibility as well. Many upcoming parts of the prayer, which we will explore in the coming weeks, explicitly lay out important ways that we can help the kin-dom come, though faithfulness, forgiveness, and courage. But these start, in these early sentences, with the surrender of our own will. Many times, our desires will be contrary to the coming of God’s kin-dom, and in our prayer we make this essential recognition and commitment: when our will is contrary to the kin-dom, may God’s will be primary.

The purpose of prayer in general is to center us in our relationship with God. As we navigate our own lives, as we navigate our personal and communal contexts, how might this prayer be of help to us?  Everyone will have their own individual responses but here’s what I see:

That God remains present with us, and as God ever was. God’s being, intent and vision are steadfast and available; when we lift them up as holy we place them at the center of our lives, and they become our compass and our guide. When we have questions about the meaning of things, we have something fundamental to turn to. Then, when we declare that God’s kin-dom might come, we issue an invitation to our own selves to step into the birthing of that vision, to partner with what God is already doing. We have an answer to the question, what should we do? We have the hope of God’s kin-dom to look forward to and to guide our work. And then we start to get an answer about how; we declare that God’s will be done, setting in motion a foundational discipline of reflection that is an opening for personal spiritual growth. And thus, a powerful invocation is given, and a powerful prayer is begun:

Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity #300.


Readings:

I Chronicles 29:10-20

10 David praised the LORD in the presence of the whole assembly, saying, “Praise be to you, LORD, the God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. 11 Yours, LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. 12 Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. 13 Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name. 14 “But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. 15 We are foreigners and strangers in your sight, as were all our ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. 16 LORD our God, all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. 17 I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity. All these things I have given willingly and with honest intent. And now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. 18 LORD, the God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep these desires and thoughts in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.

Matthew 6:9-13

9 “This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Divine Providence #58

The reason divine providence focuses on what is infinite and eternal particularly in its intent to save the human race is that the goal of divine providence is a heaven from the human race…Since this is the goal, it follows that the main focus of divine providence is reforming and regenerating us, that is, saving us, since heaven is made up of people who have been reformed and regenerated. 
Since regenerating us is a matter of uniting what is good and what is true, or love and wisdom, within us the way they are united in divinity that emanates from the Lord, divine providence focuses primarily on this in its intent to save the human race. The image of the Infinite and Eternal One can be found in us only in the marriage of what is good and what is true.

Readings: Isaiah 62:1-5, John 2:1-11, True Christianity 249 (see below)
See also on Youtube
Photo by Vinícius Estevão

Today we find ourselves exploring Jesus’ very first miracle in the gospel of John. Jesus, his mother Mary, and the disciples, were at a wedding which had run out of wine to serve. Perhaps it is hard for us, today, to muster any real alarm at the idea of there being no wine left. Weddings in those days were often multi-day affairs and the implication is that there was some wine to begin with at least. Surely, by now, everyone had already had their fill, we might say? Context is certainly helpful to us in understanding why it is that Mary thought this was worth bringing to Jesus’ attention. He was, after all, just a regular guest, not a member of the family or the wedding party. 

Well, we in the Western world, for the most part, experience an abundance of fresh and clean water. This is not something we can assume of Jesus’ day, particularly in a desert climate. Wine was an important drink because fermentation killed various pathogens that might otherwise be present in fresh water. Today we think of wine as an indulgence, but it is possible in that context there was no alternative to the wine; the wedding party was in danger of not having any liquid at all to serve at an event in a dry climate. 

In addition, in Jesus’ context, much more so than today, there existed a stringent hospitality culture. For the wedding to run out of wine to serve the guests: that would have been extremely shameful. Cana would not have been that big a place; the bridegroom would from that point onward have been known as “the one who ran out of wine at his wedding,”(1) and his whole family would have shared in the humiliation. Certainly, this would not have been a good start to married life for the bride and bridegroom.

Is there anything to which we could compare this situation to today? Perhaps we might imagine that a wedding reception or party only served half of the people dinner, or had no working bathrooms for a hundred people? Even so, it is hard to replicate for us now the urgency that would have been felt by the original hearers of the story.

Jesus saved the wedding party from acute and lasting embarrassment, and the guests from potentially dangerous dehydration. It is a story of abundance and grace urgently needed but where it was least expected. However, and I thank a couple of my former seminary classmates for bringing this to my attention, water being changed into wine is not good news for all people. Those who are challenged by alcohol addiction will hear this story very differently than those who are not. Likewise for all the many references to wine in the gospels, including how it is a foundation of communion theology. We’ve already mentioned why wine was so prevalent a drink in ancient times; Jesus simply used the forms of his day, and our relationship to those forms has changed somewhat according to our new modern context. This is one reason why it is important to recognize the metaphorical nature of what Jesus is doing here. This is not a miracle about wine in and of itself, but about what the wine represents: the potential for transformation. In this story, it is the wine that holds the space for this idea, but such divine gifts are written into the fabric of reality and can be seen in so many things. We might think of raw ingredients being made into a cooked meal, we might think of the journey of caterpillar to butterfly, a diamond being converted from a lump of carbon, or the transformation of blossom to fruit. 

When we interpret this story through a Swedenborgian lens, which takes elements of the story and asks what they represent within ourselves, we can see in a larger sense that we are exploring how it is that people can grow and change. The waterpots represent our normal way of doing things, filled with water that represents our normal way of thinking. We might have inherited these forms or perspectives, or we might have accepted them due to their prevalence in the world around us. They might even seem to serve us, and society, in certain ways. But they are not expressing the fullness of God’s intention for us, not expressing the reality of God’s love as fully as possible. For in a Swedenborgian worldview, wine always represents truth that comes from goodness (AR 316), truth that has gained its soul, its reality, from love.

Our life, and all its manifestations, both boring and sublime, need to be filled with a rationale that serves love, so that our presence in the world likewise serves love, and this is what is represented by Jesus turning water into wine.

I’m sure we can think of many examples in our own lives when our old ways of being became transformed into something more loving, when old habits gave way to a new awareness. Perhaps we relinquished control and gifted someone space, or conversely perhaps we relinquished self-centeredness and gifted someone true attention. Perhaps we stopped going through the motions and came to understand the gift of the present moment, or the power of showing up. Perhaps we have come to recognize our privilege, or our responsibility, or our belovedness, and now act differently. These are the gifts and goals of the spiritual life, what we call in our tradition, the process of regeneration.

However, when these transformations occur, when water is transformed into wine on personal and societal levels, there is often push back. There are always parts of ourselves and parts of our society who are invested in the status quo and don’t want it to change because it serves them as it is.

I’m not saying it is wrong to be skeptical of change. Clearly, not all change is good in every circumstance, not all progress is positive. Technology, for example, while it has done so much good in the world, has also initiated climate change, increased income inequality and consumerism, and made war incomprehensibly more deadly, among other things.

Which is why it is so important to keep in mind the context of the gospel story for today: a wedding, a community event. This miracle of transformation occurred within a community, in order to serve that community. It was a miracle that worked to draw people deeper into community with each other, that allowed a host to continue to attend to his guests and provide for their needs. Swedenborg writes that a marriage represents the love that God has for us and that we have for God, a desire for union between God and people(2). When we evaluate some change that we see around us, when we observe a transformation in ourselves, or in our world, and we wonder if we are seeing the wedding at Cana writ large, seeing water become wine, we should also wonder, what is this change looking toward? Greater community or greater separation? 

This is where we can learn much from the preaching of Martin Luther King Jr, whose life we will commemorate as a country tomorrow. One of the bedrocks of his philosophy, was The Beloved Community, which was not a utopian vision of something far away but a practical earthly vision where (in his words) “love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred” because a “critical mass of people [are] committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.” (3)

He writes in a sermon:

“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” (4)

Rev. Dr. King understood that God pushes us forward into change, but only for the purpose of greater connection, with ourselves, with God, with others. When speaking of the Montgomery bus boycotts, he said

“the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.” (5)

The story of the wedding at Cana, and the words Martin Luther King, call us to believe in miracles in the hearts of people. Miracles of abundance that, in the words of Karoline Lewis, “lead to or restore relationship.”(6) And in that community with each other, we find, as the steward in the story said, the best is saved for last. As we allow the transformation of water into wine, as we must do in this life in order to spiritually progress, we will find an abundance and a quality and a grace that we could not have foretold. God’s love and providence are always working towards union, always working towards the beloved community. In these years before us, I hope we will continue to have the courage to believe in that.
Amen.

1. Sermon Brainwave #644, https://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=1096
2. Conjugial Love #62
3. http://thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy/
4. Martin Luther King Jr, The Strength to Love, page 69.
5. http://thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy/
6. https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=5276

Readings:

Isaiah 62:1-5

1 For Zion’s sake, I will not be silent; for the sake of Jerusalem, I will not rest—not until her integrity shines like the dawn, her deliverance like a flaming torch. 2 The nations will see your vindication, and the rulers your splendor; you will have a new name that YHWH’s mouth will bestow. 3 You will be a garland of beauty in YHWH’s hands, a solemn crown worn by your God. 4 Never again will you be called Forsaken. Never again will your land be called Desolate. But you will be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land will be called Married. For YHWH will take delight in you and your land will be joined with God in wedlock. 5 For just as a young couple marry, you will be forever married to this land; as a newly married couple rejoice over each other, so will YHWH rejoice over you.
John 2:1-11

1 On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.” 4 “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim. 8 Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.” 11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

True Christianity 249

…in the individual details in the Word there is a marriage between the Lord and the church and therefore a marriage between goodness and truth, because wherever there is a marriage between the Lord and the church a marriage between goodness and truth is also present, since the latter marriage comes from the former one. 

When a whole church, or just an individual within a church, has truths, the Lord flows into these truths with goodness and brings them to life. To put it another way, when people who are part of a church understand something true, the Lord flows into their intellect and enlivens it by bringing goodwill into it. 

We all have two faculties of life called the intellect and the will. Our intellect is a vessel for truth and therefore for wisdom; our will is a vessel for goodness and therefore for goodwill. For us to become part of the [universal] church, these two parts of us have to become one. The two parts do in fact become one when we build our intellect with genuine truths and our will is filled with goodness and love. Then the life of truth and the life of goodness are in us - the life of truth in our intellect and the life of goodness in our will. When these two lives are united, they become one life, not two. This is the marriage between the Lord and the church; it is also the marriage between goodness and truth in us.

Readings: Isaiah 51:1-2, 4-5, 9-11, Luke 5:1-11, True Christianity 58 (see below)
See also on Youtube

This is the first call story in the gospel of Luke. The Jesus that we have just celebrated being born will grow up to perform a ministry of teaching and healing. At the start of today’s text, we see that he is beginning to gain a reputation and is drawing large crowds, so large that he resorts to preaching from a boat. 
Now, Jesus and Simon Peter, who will become one of the most prominent disciples, have already met by this point. In fact, one of the healings Jesus had just performed in the gospel of Luke was for Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. Jesus knew whose boat he was using, and the gospel makes it sound a little more casual and random than it probably was. Yet, there was purpose in what Jesus was doing, because when he was done teaching, he was not yet done with Simon. “Put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch,” he told him. Simon does not seem sure about Jesus entirely. He has seen him heal his mother-in-law but still thinks he knows better, at least regarding fishing. After all, fishing is his trade. So, he is doubtful but respectful, still calling Jesus “Master,” and he does what Jesus says, though we imagine probably half-heartedly and without expectation.

The catch, however, is super-abundant; it is a miracle of plenty where there previously had been none. Simon is astonished and falls on his knees before Jesus, this time calling him “Lord.” And along with James and John, Simon subsequently leaves everything and follows Jesus.

There is some interesting language used in this gospel, compared the the other versions. Jesus tells Simon “don’t be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” Perhaps some of us are more familiar with the wording from Matthew or Mark: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” This is not just a disagreement in translation; the actual words in greek are different between the gospels. Perhaps Luke was trying to be clever, playing on the sense that Simon Peter, the fisherman, was he himself the first to be “caught.”

However, in modernity, we cannot help but squirm at this wording. From this side of history, catching people sounds very problematic. Through the lens of colonialism and slavery, the word catch sounds a discordant note. Whatever Luke intended at the time, “to catch” a person, to us now, infers an abrogation of freedom on the part of the one who is caught. Is this what Jesus meant?

We know that it cannot be so. There is not a single instance of Jesus forcing someone to follow him. Indeed, he even allowed one of his own the freedom to betray him. What is meant here then? What shall we gather from this story, as we enter into it as people who both support the growth of spiritual community and experience our personal faith? As people who hope to “catch” and also who are caught? As both fisherman and fish?

From the fisherman point of view, we are being asked to believe in an abundance of spirit and connection in the midst of the everyday. Fish was a staple food and there was a thriving fishing industry on the sea of Galilee. Simon was equivalent to a middle class small business owner today (1). He was wonderfully ordinary, not particularly distinguished or qualified. After Jesus had done his thing for while, he issued a specific challenge to Simon. Go out onto the deep water, put down your nets.

Much like the English word “deep,” the greek word “bathos” has both a literal meaning (“deep sea”) and also a metaphorical meaning (“the deep things of God.”) It speaks of depth as a physical measurement, but also as the depth of things, as mystery. As we heard in our Isaiah reading, the primordial sea was an ancient Jewish symbol of chaos (2). And that is often how we perceive things that are beyond our understanding in any given moment; as chaos, as a deep and foreboding darkness. Yet, Jesus invites us to go out into this depth, this mystery, to go out beyond what we think we know, to go out beyond into the place where our limited understanding is no longer dominant. How many of us want to do that? How many of us really want to go deep, when we could just exist on the surface? But Jesus directly commanded Simon to go there, to put down his net, to reach into the mystery and see what he might find.

When God invites us to go deep, it is not chaos that God means for us find but God’s presence. From our Swedenborg reading we heard:  

[God’s] omnipotence fills, and works within, the sphere of the extension of goodness, a sphere that is infinite. At a deep level, this sphere pervades the universe and everything in it.

God’s love pervades everything. Even at the deepest darkest depths, God’s love and God’s presence can be found. The purpose of Jesus’ request to Simon Peter was to uncover that reality. In our everyday lives, we remain safe on the boat, living our surface life, seeing how we want to see, thinking we know what fish are out there. God is inviting us to go deeper into the water. What did Simon find there? He found an abundance of fish that he could not have predicted. And Simon also found that he was the fish. He was the one who was caught. The heart of the miracle is not so much the abundant haul of fish, though knowledge of God’s abundance is always a miracle. This was also a call story. The real miracle is that Simon became the fish. The real miracle was that for a moment, separation and distance were abolished, and Simon found himself viewing God’s love from the inside, breathing water when we has was used to breathing air.

The real miracle is the knowledge that everything is connected. We imagine a separation between the spiritual life and our everyday concerns, between Sunday and Monday. We imagine a separation between God and the world, or between groups of people.  Perhaps it is easier to get on with being a fisherman that way. Our default mode is separation, our default mode is to stay on the surface. Yet God invites us into the deep. And when we accept this invitation, connection, empathy, and love are our reward.

But even so, what is our reaction to this new sense of connectedness? When we look to the text, do we see wonder and astonishment? Yes. But we also see shame. Simon was convinced of God’s transformative power but believed that he was not pure enough to engage with it. That his sinfulness must somehow disqualify him from relationship with God.  Even as he proclaimed Jesus “Lord,” he also told him to go away. Connection feels painful, feels impossible, if we truly believe that we don’t deserve it, or that we don’t belong in the circle. Even as Simon recognized the abundant power that he saw before him, even as Simon recognized the gift of being scooped up in God’s net, it felt like too much.

Simon received an invitation to explore depth, connection, and transformation. Sometimes the possibility of these things feel like chaos and so we demur. We burrow back into our own smallness, we toss out our shame behind us as reasons why God should not want us. But God does want us. There is nothing we can do that will ever persuade God to no longer want us.
So what does this mean for the mission of the church, for the so-called “catching” of people? How are we to understand that? For the disciples were to become leaders in the Jesus movement, spreading Jesus’ teachings far and wide. What does it mean for us, as we step away from the boat as Simon did, leaving behind what we think we know, to follow Jesus? I believe that it means we issue the invitation as Jesus did, for people to explore depth in safety. I believe it means that we let the spirit do the work of transformation in others and stand together in love and community as we each struggle with what that brings up for us, including shame. And I believe it means we go forth with a vision in which people are no longer marked and defined by separation, but in which the fisherman sees with the eyes of the fish and vice versa.

As we are liberated from our own sense of separation, our presence automatically brings others into community. And perhaps this is what it means “to catch” others: to help facilitate a transformative moment… to catch our breath, to catch a glimpse of something beautiful….a moment when we realize that something is deeper and fuller than we thought, a moment when we realize our potential, a moment when we realize God’s love, a moment when we shift from Master to Lord, a moment when we transform from fisherman to fish. These are deeply precious moments of personal call, and so we praise a God who, in the words of Isaiah, makes a road in the depths of the sea for us.

Amen

(1) Ronald J. Allen, https://www.workingpreacher.org/?lect_date=02/10/2019&lectionary=rcl
(2) Ibid


Readings:


Isaiah 51:1-2, 4-5, 9-11
1 “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn; 2 look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, who gave you birth. When I called him he was only one man, and I blessed him and made him many. 4 “Listen to me, my people; hear me, my nation: Instruction will go out from me; my justice will become a light to the nations. 5 My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations.

9 Awake, awake, arm of the LORD, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that sea monster through? 10 Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed might cross over? 11 Those the LORD has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

Luke 5:1-11

1 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." 5 Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" 9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." 11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

True Christianity #56

In the universe and everything in it, God's omnipotence follows and works through the laws of its design. God is omnipotent, because he has all power from himself. All others have power from him. God's power and his will are one. Because he wills nothing but what is good, he cannot do anything but what is good… God is in fact goodness itself. When he does something good, he is in himself. He cannot walk away from himself. 

Clearly then, his omnipotence fills, and works within, the sphere of the extension of goodness, a sphere that is infinite. At a deep level, this sphere pervades the universe and everything in it. At a deep level, this sphere also governs things outside of itself to the extent that they become part of it through their own design. If things do not become part of that sphere, it still sustains them. It tries in every way to bring them back to a design in harmony with the universal design that God inhabits with his omnipotence and follows in his actions. If things against the design are not brought back into the design, they are cast out of God; but there he still sustains them from deep within. 

Readings: Psalm 28, Luke 1:39-35, Secrets of Heaven #545 (see below)
See also on Youtube

This week we will take some time to center the character of Elizabeth. Elizabeth is introduced within the first five verses of the book of Luke and is the mother of John the Baptist, who we focused on last week. 

We learn that she is the wife of a priest named Zechariah; they are childless and quite old. But Elizabeth will soon enter into the biblical tradition of miraculous pregnancies. An angel appears to Zechariah to tell him that Elizabeth will conceive and bear a son, and they are to call him John.  “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to make ready people for the Lord.” (v17)

And soon, just as the angel said, Elizabeth falls pregnant. After a few months, Elizabeth’s relative, Mary, comes to her with her own miraculous story. Mary is pregnant too, the miracle being not her age, but that her womb will grow the earthly body of the living God. The beauty of this story is in its mystery. All Mary needed to do was say an initial greeting: “Hello, Elizabeth….!?” as we all might do at the door of a trusted friend. And the baby John, growing, developing, in his quiet and dark space, was shocked awake by the sound. Something about the call of Mary’s voice activated the Holy Spirit within John, and we are told the baby “leaped for joy.” It is hyperbole, of course. But it serves to illustrate the mystical connection between Jesus and John, one that will be so beautifully illustrated when John baptizes Jesus at the Jordan river some thirty years later.

In this moment though, despite the baby’s leaping, it is Elizabeth who gives voice to the movement of the spirit with what are sometimes called her “four oracles.”

First, she declares the blessedness of Mary. This blessedness, which seems so clear to us now, was patently ridiculous then. Mary was unmarried, and we can imagine what kind of tumult her pregnancy was going to cause her family, and her betrothed, Joseph. Mary was insignificant in the scheme of things; a teenager of no particular family or reputation, an oppressed minority under the thumb of a brutal empire. From an earthly perspective, her life was about to fall apart. But Elizabeth declares her blessed.

Second, she affirms the identity of Mary’s child. Mary is about to sing her Magificat, her hymn about what God is going to do with her, how Jesus will affect a mighty change in the power structures of the world. But even before that, Elizabeth affirms that Mary is, that someone like Mary could be, the vessel for that kind of change. And, she affirms the identity of Jesus but  though Mary, using the term Mother of my Lord, lifting up the fact that God chose to work through women in a patriarchal society.

Third, she interprets the leap of her baby within her. With all that we have already said, that in earthly terms Mary’s pregnancy wa snot a good thing, that it is ridiculous to think that someone like Mary could be so pivotal, into circumstances under which we would all be aghast and overwhelmed and unbelieving, Elizabeth speaks of joy. And in a much more elemental way than “this good news for you makes me happy.” She speaks of what God is doing in electric terms, of life’s deep knowledge that God always reaches out to us and that this is good. She gives words to the fact that in the quantum space between sound and cell there was a communication, there was a missive of love that we call spirit. And it caused a reaction that Elizabeth called joy. The animation of still-developing life recognizing life.

And fourth, she declares another beatitude upon Mary for her faith. We don’t actually know the wholeness of Mary’s mental state at this time. She utters her sacred yes in the previous verses: “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” And soon she will sing of the possibilities in the future, but in the in-between, we can imagine she might have felt some worry. But Elizabeth lifts up Mary’s faith in God’s promises. We can read this as the promises that the angel fortold, of Jesus birth, but also Mary will soon sing of greater promises, of a just society, of full bellies, of the ascent of the humble rather than the arrogant. Mary has a faith around God’s intention for the world, and is willing to play her part in bringing this into being. This opportunity brings her joy and so she sings: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…” (Luke 1:46)

Elizabeth becomes the conduit through which the joy in Mary and the joy in John are connected. It is amazing to think that this is the same rough and ready John the Baptist from our text last week, the one hurling epithets about vipers and warning about the winnowing fork and the fire. Today we find that the urgency of his call was born out of joy, was born out of an electric leaping in utero at the sound of Mary’s voice, and the promise that she represented. And Mary, born into a dangerous world of empire that many of us can hardly fathom now (but that many in this world still can), accepting a mission that might well ostracize her, or impoverish her, and that would later require her family to flee as political refugees, into this reality she speaks of joy as well. If joy is possible for Mary, it is possible anywhere, and this is a radical hope.

It communicates to us that we are made for joy. That the very existence of joy is a simple declaration of God’s original intention for us, for a good God would not make beloved children for any other purpose.

But of course, if we are not feeling joy, that is not an indictment of us, that we are somehow defective, or defensive, or unfeeling. There are many reasonable and understandable reasons to not feel joyful. The challenge of the spiritual journey is to acknowledge the fact that we are made for joy, without also making the experience of joy an imperative in every moment. We must hold very gently the potential unhelpfulness of the question: If joy is a natural preordained state, then what am I doing or not doing that is getting in the way of it? There are times that this question is a useful one. Sometimes our ambition, or our distraction, or our selfishness gets in the way of the simple joy that is available to us when we quiet ourselves down, or when we open our eyes to what is already present, or when we serve someone other than ourselves. Sometimes we are looking for joy in the wrong places, and once we recognize that, we are freer to seek joy where it will actually find us.

But other times, joy does not feel accessible at all, and this is not our fault. There is trauma and brokenness and loss in this world, and the appropriate and unavoidable reaction is often sadness, grief and lament. We need to recall that Elizabeth said: blessed is she, not joyful is she. Just as the beatitudes declare “blessed are those who are poor, who weep or hunger” as a way of expressing love, care and concern for those who are normally forgotten and marginalized, so too does Elizabeth’s beatitudes upon Mary pronounce a blessedness that is counter to her circumstances. The beatitudes of the gospels declare a state of inherent worthiness of each of our beings that does not depend upon our emotional state or our productiveness, and so too we hear a beatitude upon Mary that is anchored in a larger trust in God’s promises, a larger trust in God’s ultimate intentions, and not in her feeling in any given moment.

It can be difficult to hold lament in one hand and trust in the other. Even now we might be feeling a mounting tension and uncertainty around the state of the world, or other events in our lives. But what we do know from our Swedenborg reading today, is that heavenly joy resides in our inmost recesses, in the deepest and most secret parts of our being. This capacity for joy is always with us. It is a part of God’s order of heaven and of life, part of the web of experience to which we are always connected. We won’t always feel it, and that is okay. Lament is the price of love, the price of moral concern for those around us. But we may also know that, even when it is quiescent, the capacity for joy is our baseline, an integral part of our operating instructions. At times, perhaps this capacity will come alive with a leap that we weren’t expecting. At times, this capacity will rest within us, softly waiting for a time it can be born. And so, we learn in Advent that we can trust in God’s promises, not even so much what God will do but what God has done already.

Amen.

Readings:

Psalm 28

1 To you, LORD, I call; you are my Rock, do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who go down to the pit. 2 Hear my cry for mercy as I call to you for help, as I lift up my hands toward your Most Holy Place. 3 Do not drag me away with the wicked, with those who do evil, who speak cordially with their neighbors but harbor malice in their hearts. 4 Repay them for their deeds and for their evil work; repay them for what their hands have done and bring back on them what they deserve. 5 Because they have no regard for the deeds of the LORD and what his hands have done, he will tear them down and never build them up again. 6 Praise be to the LORD, for he has heard my cry for mercy. 7 The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him. 8 The LORD is the strength of his people, a fortress of salvation for his anointed one. 9 Save your people and bless your inheritance; be their shepherd and carry them forever.

Luke 1:39-45

39 At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, 40 where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 42 In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! 43 But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? 44 As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. 45 Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”

Secrets of Heaven #545

In order to teach me about the existence and nature of heaven and heavenly joy, the Lord has given me the opportunity to perceive the pleasures of heavenly joy frequently and for extended periods. Because I have learned these things by actually experiencing them, I possess the knowledge but cannot possibly put it into words.

To offer just an idea of it: The countless pleasures and joys there, which come together to create a single experience shared by all, carry with them a certain emotion. Within that common experience, or that common emotion, are points of harmony among a boundless number of feelings. These individual points of harmony do not come clearly but only vaguely to our awareness, because our perception is extremely generalized. Even so, I was allowed to perceive that there were countless parts, organized in a way that can never be described. Those countless parts flow from the order that exists in heaven, which determines their nature.

[2] The smallest individual elements of an emotion are organized in such a way that they are presented and sensed only as a collective whole, according to the capacities of the person who feels the emotion. In a word, every whole has an unlimited number of parts, organized in the most perfect way; every one of the parts is alive; and every one of them affects us, all the way to our inmost recesses. For the inmost recesses are where heavenly joy comes from.