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