 Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22, True Christianity 684 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash Let’s talk about baptism. How many of us remember our baptisms? Any of us baptized as babies very likely do not. Any of us baptized as adults probably do. Perhaps some of us participated in rituals that “confirmed” our infant baptisms. For those have not been baptized at all, from a Swedenborgian point of view there is no need to panic! Baptism is simply a sign, a representation, that the ongoing work of regeneration is being attempted in partnership with the Lord. Such spiritual work absolutely can and does occur without baptism happening. However, for many people, there is a lot of power in the experience of baptism, and in any spiritual experience that demarcates a new space in time, a new day, a new way of thinking or living. We ourselves right now, by simply by living in January, are baptizing for ourselves a new year. Our calendar is somewhat arbitrary, after all. Time flows pretty uniformly, at least at the Newtonian level at which we exist in our day to day. But on January 1st, we declare the year is new. We declare that the previous year is over. We draw a line in the sand and step out into possibility. We may have many feelings about such threshold times. We might be glad to let go of a difficult year. We might be sad to leave a year that once held something or someone we have lost. We might be excited and curious to see what a new year holds for us. Or we might feel overwhelmed at all the open space and uncertainty ahead. To me, that jumble of feelings is captured in part by this poem by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet and philosopher. He wrote: Faith is the bird that feels the light And sings when the dawn is still dark. All of our futures are uncertain, we are all in the dark on that point. Yet, faith, that beautiful bird, “feels” the light, anticipates that the light is coming, and sings anyway. Our text today pictures Jesus in one of those threshold moments. The people, responding to John the Baptist’s preaching, were filled with that bird-faith singing, filled with expectation for a bright and liberated future. And they wondered what that future looked like? Did it have within it a Messiah? Was John that Messiah? No, I’m not, says John, as he points them even further forward towards Jesus. John’s particular gift was shaking people awake, revealing the truth to them, opening them up. This is represented by his baptism of water, the water providing a metphor for the process of spiritual washing, of purifying ourselves from evil and falsity. While the language of religious purification, and words like “evil” and “falsity” can sound kind of austere or fantastical, all that really means is identifying and removing self-serving desires and ways of thinking that prevent us from loving others. Hence John’s baptism is also called the baptism of repentance. Repentance as a process involves a revealing of truth which causes us to change our minds, to turn around in our perspective. And this ability, this willingness to really entertain personal accountability, is a cornerstone of our spiritual growth. But even so, there is one step more. There was one coming, said John, who would give them baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. After the turning around, we actually need to embark on a new way of living. As we heard in our reading, Swedenborg writes of this baptism of holy spirit and fire: The Holy Spirit here means divine truth that is related to faith; the fire means divine goodness that is related to love and goodwill. Both emanate from the Lord. It is through these two things that the Lord carries out the entire process of regeneration. The Holy Spirit unfolds its wings of truth within our minds, and the divine fire of love burns within our hearts, and these two things *together* propel us forward again and again into our new life, singing for the dawn even when it is dark. And this baptism of spirit and fire requires engagement, it requires work, and thus is pictured by the winnowing fork. Our old ideas, our old identities and habits of being are winnowed; the lies and the half-truths and the justifications fall away down to the threshing floor, and hopefullly only that which is nourishing to our spiritual lives remains. Thus, through the work of the winnowing fork, we are left with the grain, ready to grow a new plant, or ready to be transformed into bread that will nourish our body, and our souls. So in church, at whatever time of life it comes to us, we might share a baptism of water with our family and friends, and they witness the newness and the holy possibility. It is a ritual that signifies the beginning of a process. The baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire that is still to come is the rest of our life. Our baptism of water is like a spiritual January 1st, full of bright opportunity and invention. The baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire is like the rest of the year, full of ups and downs and winnowing and learning and working. Jesus also receives a baptism. We heard from our reading: The Lord himself was baptized by John, not only so as to institute baptism for the future and set the example, but also because he glorified his human nature and made it divine in the same way that he regenerates us and makes us spiritual. Jesus’ experience was to be analogous to ours; a partnership with God, which in his case was a partnership with his own divine soul. This partnership initiated a spiritual blossoming and necessitated spiritual trial, but also culminated in a union of humanity and the divine. At Christmastime, we just celebrated the fact of God being born into the world. What is just as miraculous is that throughout his life, Jesus was reborn again and again into truth and love, just as we are. Thus, we read in Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven(2) that a “dove” represents the truth and goodness of faith in one who is being reborn. Jesus didn’t know exactly what his future would be but that dove was a representation of feeling that faith-light and singing in the dark before the dawn, a representation of the divinely ordained work to come. There was much that was dark in Jesus’ time, as in ours. But he believed in the dawn that was coming because he knew who God was, and what God was doing. So here we are in the bright open space of the beginning of the year. We don’t know what will happen with this year. It certainly doesn’t feel like it is starting off well, and I know I am holding, as you may be, a foreboding sense that things might get worse, in our country and in our world. But to enter into uncertainty is also to enter into possibility, and to enter into new possiblity with faith is one of the holiest acts of worship. For me, I can only conjure up that faith because of how God speaks to Jesus in that baptism moment: This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased. When uncertainty and overwhelm and fear makes us feel small and powerless, we can remember that God’s possibility for us is held within an unceasing love. From Isaiah we read: …you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, says the Lord. The future might be uncertain, but we are always enfolded and cherished within God’s arms. All our all striving and trying will always be held within the context of God’s love, purposes, and promises. The baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire asks much of us, it asks that we give up our precious ego and our precious pride, it asks us to transform ourselves, and to have faith in newness and love when it is so much easier to have faith in self-regard, material things, and being right. We might be afraid to step out into what God calls us toward, but we can try and fail and begin again, we can stretch and reach and leap, because we *always* have those divine arms to come back to. So today, I have filled the baptismal font with water. If you like, during the reflection time, or after the service during the postlude, you are welcome to come forward to anoint yourself with the water in remembrance of all the moments we are called to newness, in remembrance of your baptism or some other occasion. We feel the water and we remember; we remember our Lord, praying under the wings of the Holy Spirit, we remember the faith-bird that sings, sings when the dawn is still dark. Amen.
Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7 1 But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. 3 For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. 4 Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. 5 Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; 6 I will say to the north, "Give them up," and to the south, "Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth— 7 everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 15 The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. 16 John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” 21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” True Christianity 684 The Third Function of Baptism, and Its Ultimate Purpose, Is to Lead Us to Be Regenerated… This is the same as the point made about the Lord that "He baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” The Holy Spirit here means divine truth that is related to faith; the fire means divine goodness that is related to love and goodwill. Both emanate from the Lord. It is through these two things that the Lord carries out the entire process of regenerating us. The Lord himself was baptized by John, not only so as to institute baptism for the future and set the example, but also because he glorified his human nature and made it divine in the same way that he regenerates us and makes us spiritual.
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 Readings: Luke 2:41-52, True Christianity 89 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash As a mother, I have to tell you, this text is really hard to read! First, there is the anxiety of losing your child. All parents, or anyone looking after a young child, have experienced their hearts in their throat at some point, when they realize that the child is not where they expected them to be. Then, can you imagine having to search for three days! I’d be an utter wreck. And then, additionally, there is the sass that Jesus delivers when he is found! The kind of sass only a pre-teen can accomplish. “Why were you searching for me?” WHY? YOU KNOW WHY? IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS! Breathe, just breathe, Mother Mary. As much as I would rather not explore it though, this text is an extremely rich one. It is the only account in the gospels of an event in between the infancy and the adult ministry of Jesus. In biographies of famous figures of that day, stories of a precocious childhood were common. In particular, the Emperor Augustus was known to have eulogized his grandmother to great effect at the age of twelve (1). So already, the gospel writer is telegraphing Jesus’ superiority to the emperor. We also begin the story with Jesus’ whole family going to Jerusalem for Passover. All male Israelites were required to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover, and some other religious festivals, once a year. The journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem would probably have taken four or five days by foot. Clearly, Mary and Joseph are observant and diligent Jews, and Jesus’ facility with the Torah in the temple anchors him firmly in the Jewish tradition. Such pilgrimages from country to city would have taken place in groups for the sake of safety, and we can probably surmise, in the form of extended families. We also might surmise a more communal parenting style than we are familiar with today, arising from a pastoral village setting, so it is not entirely unbelievable that Mary and Joseph might have thought Jesus was just hanging out with his cousins. Children can be extremely reluctant to come home when they are having a good time with their friends! But we can also imagine the panic felt by Mary and Joseph when they realized Jesus was missing, how quickly they must have tried to travel back, how confused and frantic they must have felt while retracing their steps. We don’t know if they spent three whole days searching in Jerusalem, or if the three days included the travel back to the city, but clearly they didn’t go straight to the temple. The text tells us they were astonished to find Jesus there. Probably they went first to the family they had been staying with, then perhaps to friends, then probably the marketplace, or some other place where children might hang out. So let me ask: Why did they not think to check the temple sooner? To Jesus, it seemed obvious that they were searching the wrong places for him. But it wasn’t obvious to Mary and Joseph. Why not? Even with all they had seen and heard, even as they knew their son was special, they didn’t assume that he would be in God’s house, attentive to God’s business. In similar ways, we too might look for fulfillment, and meaning in places that do not necessarily serve us. What are the lyrics to that famous song? “Looking for love in all the wrong places”? In our day to day lives, we are driven by the human desire to feel safe, content, fulfilled, and engaged. We look toward many different things to satiate those desires. We look to various kinds of entertainment to engage our minds, sports teams or politics to satisfy our tribal instincts, social media to feed our desire for connection, food to satisfy our desire for safety and sufficiency. We look to money for material comfort and upward mobility, to power for worthiness, to-do lists and technology for control, and many many other individual variations of these things. These are just some examples of ways that we try to inject meaning into our lives, ways to make us feel okay, ways to make us feel settled, safe, included and worthy. And what do these efforts lead to? *Do* they lead us to feel we have meaningful lives? *Do* we feel safe, settled, included and worthy on their account? Sometimes we do, in the short term. But just as often we feel restless, empty, stressed, like something is still missing. Studies have shown that human beings are not actually very good at predicting what will make us happy and fulfilled over time(2). Martin Luther King Jr, in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott entitled, “The Birth of a New Age(3)” spoke of the kind of leaders we need to propel our society forward, to midwife our society into a form that he called “the beloved community.” He said: “We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity.” One thing I find interesting in this quote is that it implies a recognition that human beings must love something, must find meaning somewhere. So, the question becomes *what* are we in love with? What is driving us? What is the soul of our work? Where are we finding meaning? In money or justice? In publicity or the common good? Because, the problem is not so much looking in the wrong places, as if God can be found only in one place, in the temple or in church, as if some parts of this world are inherently good and others are not. The problem is loving our various distractions and delusions for themselves instead of how they can be infilled with God. Things like money and publicity are in actuality neutral in and of themselves; how we use them and why determines how present God will be in them. For example: I recently gave money to a GoFundMe campaign for a friend of a friend who was experiencing some challenges (I’m sure many of you have done similarly for other causes). This involved both money and publicity as referenced in the King quote. However, money that contributes to the the well-being of others when they need it the most is, of course, filled with God’s love and usefulness. Likewise the publicity, the social media platform that allowed me to know about this person at all. For all of the flaws inherent in social media, (and there are many!) in that moment and for that purpose, it was Godly and heavenly. What an honor, a miracle really, to be able to help someone I don’t even know so materially and easily, with just a keystroke. There are many other examples: we know that various entertainments can have a usefulness that is as simple as rest, rejuvenation or community, and as complex as introducing us to new perspectives and ideas we can reflect upon. Even power, something that the gospel teaches us to be incredibly suspicious of, when used to help others can be a good thing, when used properly it can birth us all into a better world. We know from the Christmas story that God can and does enter into this world in ways that we might not expect. That God can and does enter into this world through forms that we might dismiss or disparage. We recall from our Swedenborg reading, that this is in fact, part of the divine design. All in the universe, including us, have been created so that they can welcome the divine, can be prepared to be infilled with the Lord. When space is made, when all that is self-serving is cleared out, then God enters as if coming in to God’s own dwelling. This is what we prayed for in our Christmas Eve prayer from Sister Joyce Rupp, that *we* might all be God’s Bethlehem in the here and now. And this is our choice: We can love all those things that distract us from God as things in and of themselves, and they *will* fulfill their purpose, they *will* distract us. But when we see that God has created all things to be a vessel for partnership, then these things can be transformed. It is not about looking in the wrong places per se, because God can be, and is, in all those places that Mary and Joseph looked in first. God is in the marketplace, the playground, the library, the shopping mall, the office. Instead, it is about recognizing divine interconnectedness as the blueprint of the world. Jesus was in the temple bringing our attention to this divine interconnectedness. “Didn’t you know that I had to be in *my Father’s* house?” he said. In the Greek, there isn’t actually a noun at the end of this sentence, and translators will fill in the gaps with “my Father’s house”, or “about my Father’s business.” But really, the most literal translation is “didn’t you know I had to be in that which is my Father’s?” It is more that Jesus was saying: Didn’t you know that I had to inhabit my divine inheritance? Didn’t you know that I had to be present to my relationship to Spirit? Didn’t you know that I had to be present to the divine order that calls us to partnership, that calls us to depth and connection? Jesus is calling us to see that loving God first, and loving the things God loves, infills and enlivens everything else, due to God’s living relationship with us and the world. It is when our allegiance is given *to* whatever distracting thing, then we will be lost and continually searching. When, for example, we love money for sake of having more and not for the good it can do, or when we love power and publicity for the sake of self-gratification and not for purpose of connection and enlightenment, that is when we will have trouble finding God, because we have closed down our capacity for partnership with the Divine. I know we feel this in our bones these days, as we see the current administration make a pretense of serving God, while clearly only serving themselves. So, we return to the question: What are we in love with? For what we *love* will affect what we are able to discover, what is able to unfold within us. Mary and Joseph were clearly loving Jesus as their son, their boy, and so they looked for him in places where a twelve-year-old boy might be. Could we not imagine that Mary and Joseph hurried past the temple without looking inside, in a rush to retrace their steps. Jesus, however, with a burgeoning knowledge of his connection to the divine, was growing beyond their expectation, just as our Lord calls us to grow beyond our own expectation of where God should be, to see opportunities for partnership, for God’s indwelling, everywhere. Amen.
Readings: Luke 2:41-52 41 Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. 42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. 43 After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44 Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. 47 Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. 48 When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” 49 “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” 50 But they did not understand what he was saying to them. 51 Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. True Christianity 89 In the process of taking on a human manifestation, God followed his own divine design. …in the act of creating, God introduced his design into the universe as a whole and into each and every thing in it. Therefore in the universe and in all its parts God's omnipotence follows and works according to the laws of his own design…. Now, because God came down, and because he is the design, there was no other way for him to become an actual human being than to be conceived, to be carried in the womb, to be born, to be brought up, and to acquire more and more knowledge so as to become intelligent and wise. Therefore in his human manifestation he was an infant like any infant, a child like any child, and so on with just one difference: he completed the process more quickly, more fully, and more perfectly than the rest of us do. …The Lord's life followed this path because the divine design is for people to prepare themselves to accept God; and as they prepare themselves, God enters them as if he were coming into his own dwelling and his own home… It is a law of the divine design that the closer and closer we come to God, which is something we have to do as if we were completely on our own, the closer and closer God comes to us. When we meet, God forms a partnership with us.  As I considered what to talk about today, my mind kept returning to the notion of resilience, which as I understand it, is the ability to encounter adversity while responding in a way that encourages recovery and repair. While this may resonate particularly in these days, when the news is filled with chaos, loss, incompetence and cruelty, we recognize, of course, that adversity is not a modern occurance. It is part of the human condition. We encounter it in personal terms, we encounter it in social and political terms, we encounter it in spiritual terms, and we always have.
This was as true in Jesus’ day as it is in ours. And what we celebrate here today is a God named Immanuel - meaning God with us. Into an experience of adversity long ago - a personal yet universal experience - God decided to be with us. And of course, we can argue that God has always been with us, and that is certainly true. What brings us to celebrate today though, the thing that is so remarkable and poignant about the Christmas story, is that God decided to be human with us in our adversity. Human spiritual story-telling is filled with wonderful visions of the Divine being with us in lots of different ways. But, the Christmas story tells us of a God becoming vulnerable, a God growing cell by cell in the womb of a marginalized young woman, a God who grew up in the context of a brutal empire, a God who learned and changed and loved and sacrificed. The point of the incarnation of God as Jesus was to be in our experience with us, not to erase it, and not to overcome it from the outside looking in. The point was to experience the adversity of the human condition and help us understand that—even so—God is always leading us towards life and resurrection. The point was to help teach us about resilience, the essential truth that adversity does to get to have the last word, God does, and if we believe that, then the work of resilience, restoration and repair, can continue to have meaning, and can continue to give us hope. God did this for us by walking through our experience, every bit of it, honoring the specificity of it, the surprise of it, the exhaustion of it, the ache of it, the beauty of it. This is the gift of Christmas. In the words of author Stephanie Duncan Smith: The incarnation always brings good news, but it never minimizes the realness of our pain. Advent declares the hope that a light is coming, but it first declares the truth that the world right now is so very dark.(1) Resilience isn’t actually found in pretending that adversity doesn’t exist. That’s just denial, that’s toxic boot-strapping, and that keeps us stuck, exhausted, and alone. The key to the incarnation is that it fully declares the truth of the darkness, the brokenness, the disconnection, the disappointment but then goes on to also declare the coming of the light. This is the true boldness of faith. Not assent to various religious formations but bone-deep understanding and trust that God made a universe that will consistently unfold and bring forth light, love, growth, compassion, connection and thriving for all God’s creatures. God entered into the experience of human life to show us this. And so resilience is a practice that rests on the belief that we are not alone in adversity and that our efforts toward restoration and repair really mean something, that they join together with God’s purposes to create an increasingly beautiful and compassionate world. It is a practice that involves saying yes, as Mary did, to a greater purpose, yes to bringing light into the world. If we are to be inspired by the Christmas story, let it be that in our experience of darkness, of hurt, of fear, we choose to respond with grace, recover in compassion, restore with hope, and repair with intention. Jesus is the light of the world, and this light came to us through birth, and a human life. God with us, all the way through. Amen. (1) Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway (Convergent Books, 2024), 50-51. |
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