Readings: Zechariah 9:9-12, Mark 11:1-11, Secrets of Heaven 2781:8-9 (see below)
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Welcome to Palm Sunday, the narrative beginning to Holy Week. As we just read, Jesus has entered Jerusalem for the final time. He rides on a donkey, telling the disciples exactly where to find it. His reputation has been growing, and the people welcome him with joy and anticipation for the way that they think he will save them from their current circumstances. In the gospel of Mark, after this entry, Jesus will immediately clear the temple of merchants. He will argue a little with the religious authorities and will do some public teaching. He will be anointed by a women at a friend’s house, and he will share a final supper with the disciples. And then he will be arrested, for a ministry that centered upon those who had been excluded, and that called out those who profited from that exclusion.

What has struck me this week is the emphasis on Jesus’ “kingship.” I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have a hard time resonating with what that meant to the people in Jesus context. Like most of you, I have grown up in a democracy, not a monarchy, and even though my childhood was spent in a country that is part of the British Commonwealth, my primary experience of government was one that was elected.

So the idea of a “king” (or any monarch) and what that means, feels a bit remote to me, and in case it feels that way to you too, I thought I would explore it today.

Kingship throughout time, in most contexts including the Jewish one, has been rather inseparable from the divine right to rule. We recall from the Old Testament that Israel’s ability to have a king was granted by God, the first two kings, Saul and David, anointed by God’s prophet Samuel. Even today, monarchs are often ritually anointed at their coronations, and in Britain for example, the monarch is also the head of the national church.

Likewise, the word Christ itself, which is simply the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah, means “anointed one” and we hear the people in our text today shouting “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” The Jewish people of Jesus’ day had long looked forward to the restoration of their nation, and the coming of a great and powerful ruler who would return Israel to autonomy and prominence. And of course they did. They had suffered the indignity of being an occupied people for way too long, under a brutal and unforgiving empire. We would all feel the same way, and many in our world currently experience such conditions.

So when they started to hear about Jesus and the amazing things he was doing, of course they got their hopes up. Of course their yearning and anticipatory joy caused them to gather in the streets. And of course, they wanted to welcome and praise this new king, one that would uphold their history and restore their people, and so they did what had always been done for kings: they spread garments and tree branches to make a pathway.

Jesus had never asked for this though. He *had* told his disciples that he was the Messiah but coupled it with a warning of his suffering to come, attempting to reframe for them what being the Messiah really meant, to him. He was anointed, chosen, to usher in a new kingdom but it would nothing like what the people expected. He was focused on a spiritual fulfillment, not an earthly one.

So, he let the crowds signal his royal identity. But here is what he didn’t do: he didn’t lean into their admiration, he didn’t manipulate their feelings, he didn’t work them up. Instead, he intentionally subverted that worshipful energy. Instead of coming in on a warhorse, as royals in the past would do, with much fanfare, he comes in on the lowliest of animals, in an allusion to our Zechariah text. To quote one of my commentaries: “…Mark wants us to view Jesus as a king, but only by helping us re-imagine the very concept of king in accordance with Jesus’ mission.”(1)

This is really important for us to remember. As we re-enact this day the world over, we have an opportunity to be actively conscious of what we are celebrating. When we signal our praise of the Lord’s kingship, what are we signaling? Certainly, some good and wonderful things: Godly power, omnipotence, providence and love, and our offering of loyalty, trust and joy.

But as we do this, it is also important for us to remain cognizant of the irony that Jesus was enacting. Recent history in this country and in ithe world, and indeed the length and breadth of human history, has shown us that human beings are very susceptible to the worship of power and dominion. We need to be careful not to swallow imperialism, and the worship of dominion itself, whole without moving on to the deconstruction of earthly imperialism that Jesus was doing. Because, we could very easily just substitute Jesus for Caesar and leave everything else the same. We could pray for the coming of a kingdom that elevates us and those like us and forget the tenor of Jesus’ entire ministry. But Jesus would never step into hierarchical earthly power structures as they are. He has been trying to tell us all along that we can’t happily wave the palms, craving power and influence, all the while ignoring the donkey. 

The truth is, Jesus was heading toward a painful and humiliating execution, which would serve to continue the subversion of what we are to consider strong, how we are to understand power. Yet, we can persist in making the Easter story about mastery over death instead of sacrifice, about the salvation of a few by grace instead of all by love, about the creation rather than the critique of religious power.

But Jesus had literally just schooled the disciples on this topic before entering Jerusalem:

Mark 10:42 … “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

And this is why it is such a beautiful tradition in the many churches that the palms featured on Palm Sunday become the ashes used in the following Ash Wednesday. Our adoration must be anchored in reflection and relinquishment. We heard in our Swedenborg reading that the spiritual meaning of the Lord riding the donkey is to demonstrate the correct order of subordination of our human nature. Our earthly desires need to serve our spiritual desires and not the other way around.

Even though we do live in a democracy, where the people elect their leaders rather than being ruled by a king, it is also true that there has always been a strong strain of people and movements trying to co-opt legitimacy and power through claiming or implying a divine right, that God is on their side, that they are doing God’s will. I can only imagine what an addictive feeling it is, to be so sure that we are serving a higher power that we can disregard kindness, empathy, ethics or the rule of law.

The people shouted, as we do today, “Hosanna,” a word that is complicated to translate but contains a sense of giving honor to one who will save us. But that saving cannot mean that only *we* are saved, and that we are saved because someone will allow us to climb to the top of the heap, only to turn around the crucify those behind us. Jesus' entire ministry was founded on the ethos that salvation (not to mention loving concern) must include everyone.

So while the structures and the trappings of kingship are not something with which I can personally resonate, all the ways that human beings interact with the power of leadership certainly *is* recognizable in myself, my fellow human beings, and in our current context. As we shout Hosanna today, let us recognize then that one of the most fundamental salvation opportunities that Jesus offers to us, is that we might be lovingly saved from ourselves.

Amen.

(1) Ira Brent Driggers, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sunday-of-the-passion-palm-sunday-2/49620



Zechariah 9:9-12

9 Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 10 I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the warhorses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth. 11 As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit. 12 Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.


Mark 11:1-11

1 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’ ” 4 They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, 5 some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” 6 They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. 7 When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. 9 Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted, “Hosanna! ” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” 10 “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” “Hosanna in the highest heaven!” 11 Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.


Secrets of Heaven #2781:8-9

[8] Riding on a donkey was a sign that the earthly dimension would be made subordinate, while riding on a young animal, the foal of a female donkey, was a sign that the rational dimension would be…From this - the spiritual meaning of these animals - … that He might fulfill the representatives of the Church, the Lord was pleased to ride in this way.
[9] From this evidence it can now be seen that everything in the church of that day represented the Lord and accordingly the heavenly and spiritual qualities of his kingdom. That includes even a female donkey and her foal, which represented the goodness and truth in a person's earthly self. The reason for this representation was that the earthly self ought to serve the rational self, which ought to serve the spiritual self, which ought to serve the heavenly self, which ought to serve the Lord. That is the proper hierarchy.

Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34,  John 12:20-33, Secrets of Heaven 2657 (see below)
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Photo by Fayette Reynolds M.S.

Here we are in the final week of Lent, and our text balances us delicately on the precipice before everything is put into motion for the crucifixion. In the previous chapter in the gospel of John, Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. It was his greatest, most momentous sign so far and the religious authorities were getting nervous.  They imagined that Jesus would create such a movement of hope that the Roman authorities might move in and destroy the Jewish people entirely. They were afraid; can you really blame anyone under occupation feeling this way? So, they start planning to take care of the problem in-house, by arresting Jesus.

So, Jesus’ days are numbered. He travels from Bethany, where Lazarus and his sisters live, to Jerusalem just before the Passover festival.  We will hear about his entry into Jerusalem next week, on Palm Sunday. All I will say now is that the raucous reception that Jesus receives on arrival does nothing to calm the Pharisees nerves.

Jesus’ fame is spreading far and wide, and as we hear in the beginning of our text for today, some Greeks were among the crowds. They may have been Greek-speaking Jews, or they may have been Greek proselytes, we don’t really know.  What we do know, is that they wished to see Jesus. The language used, and the inclusion of Andrew and Peter recalls the original calling of the disciples in John 1. We are prompted to recognize that Jesus’ reach is expanding.  A verse before, the Pharisees have just complained in desperation: “see this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”  We begin to understand that Jesus’ call will be replicated again and again and again.

But then, Jesus words turn to a perennial, persistent human question. “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”  Using the metaphor of a grain of wheat, Jesus starts to describe something important about God’s kingdom, that experiencing God’s kingdom has something to do with going from alone-ness and individuality - like a single seed -  to much-ness, or plurality - like the many seeds.

Human beings have indeed struggled with this balance of individuality and community, to different degrees, for as long as there has been human consciousness.  On one hand, we are individuals, and ultimately our choices are our own. Our freedom, and our accountability to that freedom, is part of what makes us human.  And yet, we are also social animals, communal beings.  We yearn for and thrive in community, and being in community means sacrificing some measure of individuality and individual rights for the good of the whole. Different societies have come down on the scale in different places on this question, throughout time.

The United States, in particular, forged its nascent identity through disagreement on this question.  The war of independence was fought because the English monarch was asking for taxation without representation, was asking for submission to the overall health of the nation without allowing for individual engagement in the life of the nation. To the Founding Fathers this was unfair, not just in a political way but in a way that struck at the core of what it meant to be human. They recognized the fundamental importance of liberty and individuality to the human psyche. We wish, of course, that they had been willing to recognize that importance as it extended to all human beings, not just the white, male, land-owning ones.  But even so, they were on to something, and so enshrined liberty in the structures and institutions of this country, with careful checks and balances so that as little liberty as possible was given up in order to orchestrate a safe and effective union.

But even with their careful planning, what that balance between individual freedom and the common good looks like in practice remains an active question for us now and much of politics involves arguing about where to draw this line. And it is not just on scale of politics, nations, or civil society, that these questions arise. We strike bargains between individual needs and communal ones with each other on a smaller scale as well. When we enter into relationships with others: marriages, partnerships, friendships, parenting, we negotiate a balance of healthy submission and differentiation. This balance will be different in different contexts, but overall I think we can say, going too far in either direction can be problematic.  

And this is because we are balancing two inherently valuable things. On it’s own, a kernel of wheat - and indeed a person -  has value in and of itself. Our freedom, our singular nature is important. No one else but each of us, can decide for us to accept the love of God and let it transform us. We will always be completely alone with God in this spiritual moment.  But accepting the love of God and letting it transform us also means moving beyond our singular nature.  We are alone only so that we can be deeply loved for our uniqueness and be given the gift of choosing our life.  It is not God’s intention for us to remain in that space, for then we will be tempted into self-centeredness. Love must be shared, and so Jesus talks to us about moving from the single grain to the many….from single-pointed-ness to spaciousness, from individuality to radical kinship with others.

And it is in this idea of radical kinship that I want to introduce you to Father Gregory Boyle. Father Boyle is a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention, rehab and re-entry program in Los Angeles. In two of his books, Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir, he details the miraculous transformations that hundreds of formerly incarcerated, formerly active gang members have made in the program, which seeks to provide spaces of love, compassion and accountability in which new healthy relationships can be learned and formed.  Father Boyle seeks to re-introduce these lost and traumatized souls to their own goodness.  Yet, he insists that he has not “saved their lives” but rather they have saved him.  He finds that outside volunteers to the program often ask him what to “do” at Homeboy, and he always answers “Wrong question. The right one is: What will happen to you here?” The answer to every question about the kingdom is found in our awakened connection with each other.

He continues: “It is true enough that the could make the world more just, equal and peaceful, but something holds us back, in all our complicated fear and human hesitation.  It’s sometimes just plain hard to locate the will to be in kinship even though, at the same time, its our deepest longing.  So no matter how singularly focused we may be on our worthy goals of peace, justice and equality, they actually can’t happen without an undergirding sense that we belong to each other.  Seek first the kinship of God, then watch what happens.” (Tattoos on the Heart, p202)

To Boyle, the kingdom cannot come into being fully without us giving ourselves over to radical kinship. While that feels like a risk, radical kinship is actually God’s delight, God’s vision for us. Swedenborg expands upon the seed metaphor that Jesus uses, by imagining the same idea with fruit. In our reading, he talks about two levels of our development. The first is a state of mind that is about learning and growing in the context of our natural world, of preparing our minds through curiosity and engagement with true ideas. This level engages our precious individuality, and Swedenborg likens it to the fruit ripening, and seeds being formed within it. This ripening has a good purpose, because ripe fruit is nourishing! But stopping at this point does not take advantage of the potential that exists *within* the fruit. Thus a second state of mind develops from the process of regeneration, one that shifts from thinking to loving, from individuality to mutuality. This is pictured by a fully ripe fruit will dropping to the ground and interacting with its environment. Yes, it is decomposing, yes part of it is seeming to die…but actually it is coming to life in a new way. Most of us think we are coming to life when we are ripening, in the previous stage. And yes, that is a certain kind of coming to life. We are becoming sweeter and richer and fuller and wiser in ourselves. But, while that is important, it is not our ultimate potential, it is not the only kind of life to which God calls us. We can be a beautiful fruit upon God’s tree, and God will delight in us there, but within us there are seeds that are meant to grow new life. We are were meant to connect with the earth and be transformed, sending up new green shoots that will become a thousand times more fruitful than one seed alone. In this metaphor for our spiritual development, we see the spaciousness, the expansiveness that God has in mind for us.

This is why I chose Psalm 118 for our responsive reading today because it speaks of that spacious place.  “when hard pressed, I cried to the Lord; he brought me into a spacious place.” In Lent, we necessarily turn inward, we work on ripening ourselves with insight. This is good and necessary work.  But it is not the goal of the work, in and of itself, for Swedenborg tells us that heaven consists in mutual love, and in fact, that all the individual angels in heaven are made one by mutual love. We do the work of ripening ourselves so that we can love each other more effectively and freely.  Spiritual reflection might well *feel* solitary, but the outcome should not be solitary.  The outcome of spiritual work is that we might no longer feel disconnected from other people, we do not make them “other.”  We enlarge our tribe, we make everyone real to us, the veil of separation between us and other people falls away. As Father Boyle says, we make a decision to live in each other’s hearts.

The Greeks in our text wanted to see Jesus. Hopefully, they kept their eyes open to what was to come.  For when we want to see Jesus, this is what we will see…as he says “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  God is constantly drawing us closer to Godself and each other, reminding us of our kinship, reminding us that we belong to each other. And if at any time, we feel the weight of our alone-ness, feel the burden of our individual freedom, we can be brought into the spaciousness of God to recognize our birthright, our connectedness with each other.“First seek the kinship of God and then see what happens.”

Amen.


Readings:

Jeremiah 31:31-34

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
John 12:20-33

20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." 22 Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor. 27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—"Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." 29 The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." 30 Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." 33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

Secrets of Heaven 2657

[2] Everyone who is being reborn has two kinds of rationality: one before rebirth and the other after.
Our first rationality, before rebirth, we acquire from sensory experience, reflection on the issues of public and private life, secular studies, reasoning sparked and facilitated by our secular studies, and the spiritual knowledge we gain from religious doctrine–that is, from the Word. At the time, none of this reaches much higher than the images present in our bodily memory, which are quite closely tied to the material world, relatively speaking…
[3] After regeneration, our rational mind is formed by the Lord through the desire for spiritual goodness and truth. The Lord has a miraculous way of grafting this desire onto the truth present in our first rationality. In this way, he takes anything present there that is harmonious and supportive and brings it to life…
[4] The way it works can be illustrated by comparison with fruit on a tree. In the beginning, our first rationality resembles immature fruit, which gradually ripens, until it finally develops seeds inside itself. When it reaches the stage where it starts to separate from the tree, its state is complete…Our second rationality, though, which the Lord gives us as a gift when we have been reborn, resembles the same fruit in good soil, where the flesh surrounding the seed decays. The seed sends forth roots from inside itself, and above ground a sprout, which grows into a new tree. The new tree gradually develops until at last it produces new fruit, then gardens and whole parks, all in keeping with the urge for goodness and truth that it receives.

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:14-21, The Last Judgment 36 (see below)
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Photo by Elsa Gonzalez on Unsplash


John 3:16 is probably the world’s most famous Bible passage. It is beautiful and it is comforting to consider the great love of God, and what that means that God will do for us.  But like all passages removed from their context, they perhaps take on a greater or fuller meaning when understood in their entire surroundings.  In this case, we can’t really understand verse 3:16 fully without understanding what Jesus is up to with verse 3:14, how he is using the idea of being “lifted up” and how that relates to the concept of “believing.”

So, that means we must dive in to this very strange to us story of the serpents and the Children of Israel.  This short anecdote occurs in a cluster to anecdotes around the time of the death of Moses.  If we recall, after escaping slavery in Egypt the Children of Israel soon began to complain, and wish for a return to Egypt. So, God instructed them to wander the wilderness for 40 years, so that the complaining and petulant generation would die out and the new generation might proceed with the conquest of Canaan. Even Moses himself would not live to see the promised land. This story of the serpents occurs during the transition time between generations, between the old and the new.

What we translate as poisonous serpents were really more a mythical flying serpent-like creatures called “seraphim” that had a long history in Jewish Temple iconography.  Their name comes from the Hebrew word “to burn” and they were “filled with the fire of divine holiness,” the purpose of which was to purify more often than it was to kill. Thus, these creatures had a two-fold character: to both punish and to heal. And so here in this story, we see them providing both the poison and the antidote.

Now of course, from a Swedenborgian perspective, we don’t subscribe the idea that God would ever purposefully send something harmful to us, even if it were to teach us an important lesson. That’s not how we understand God’s divine love to work. In ancient times, humanity’s understanding of God (or a patheon of gods) put God behind all events in the world; from macro events like politics and victory in battle to micro events like sickness and famine. But even as we acknowledge the ways this worldview was evolving, a deeper sense is clearly apparent in the text. Jesus drew out the idea that the seraphim embodied; that looking upon something that brings us death, both actually and metaphorically, can also bring life. This idea is at the heart of the cross, and at the heart of Jesus’ courageous life.  And Jesus had to explain this many times to many people because it is deeply deeply counter-intuitive.

One of the people that Jesus tried to explain this to was Nicodemus the Pharisee.  Our John reading for today comes down right in the middle of the conversation that they were having together.  Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, has been keeping an eye on Jesus.  He knows something important is happening with Jesus but he doesn’t understand the whole picture.  So, under the cover of night he seeks Jesus out, wanting to know more. Jesus tries to explain to him the importance of being “born again,” that we must relinquish our own selfish ways of thinking and allow ourselves to be remade in God’s image, but Nicodemus has trouble understanding. 

Probably because he is talking to a Pharisee, an educated scholar of the Torah, Jesus uses the story of the serpents as a way to try to explain being born again, as a metaphor for what he is trying to explain: that which causes our selfhood pain can also heal.  Jesus’ explanation hinges on the double meaning of the greek word hypsoo meaning both “lifted up” and “exalted.”  Yes, the Son of Man must be lifted up high on the cross, literally nailed to it, and this will cause his physical death, a criminal’s death, in an extremely humiliating and public way, but in doing so he will also be exalted, meaning he will increase in stature and meaning and importance. That which would kill him would also lead to resurrection. Can we stop for a moment to consider how ridiculous this must have sounded? Just imagine the very worst humiliation that could ever happen to you?  Do you have it in mind?  Perhaps, like me, you found your heart involuntarily beating a little bit faster just contemplating it.  But now imagine someone telling you that this humiliation will be the very best moment of your life? Um, no. Pass. That is definitely not going to be the case, we say, it will likely be my very worst moment.  Right?  We absolutely resist this idea.

And yet, some of the most powerful personal experiences can be understood in this way.  We’ve heard many times from addicts in recovery, for example, that the moment that they hit rock bottom was the best and most important moment of their life. It seems hard to imagine it felt that way to them at the time, but in retrospect they see how it changed them, how it allowed them to ultimately re-make their life.  And isn’t this the exact purpose of the seraphim to which Jesus is referring?  The divine fire might be painful whilst it is purifying us, but submitting to it ultimately brings us to healing.

And thus, Jesus work in the world rests heavily on this kind of irony…that which appears to us one way is not necessarily so, and in fact, might be the opposite of what we think. The cross, which appears to kill, actually gives life, just as the seraphim which appeared to harm, also provided the healing. Jesus is preaching an upside-down world, one that has hope in it where we would never expect it, and thank goodness, for this world is often very bleak as it is.

So this upside-down-ness, this counter-intuitiveness, is intimately connected to what it means to “believe.” In this context, believing does not mean so much an intellectual assent to a set of principles, or even believing strongly that what we are told in the gospels actually happened.  Believing here means believing in the meaning of Jesus’ life and the cross, that the meaning put forth by these events is the meaning that is the most true, useful and productive way to understand the reality of the whole universe. And naturally, we live our lives, consciously or unconsciously according that how we understand the reality of things.  So in this context, belief is really more about trust and loyalty than intellectual belief, about the meaning to which we will consistently conform our lives.  So let’s try hearing the bible quotes this way…“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever trusts in that kind of giving God shall not perish but have eternal life,” or “whoever lives a life loyal to that principle of love and sacrifice may have eternal life in him.”  This is a type of belief that we must give ourselves over to completely, that structures our entire life.  It is not enough to just say “I assent” because that requires nothing of us. This type of belief contains within it a desire to re-make every aspect of our lives according to it because we trust and have confidence in the fact that it represents God’s truest reality.  Belief in Jesus is basically a choice to live in a world in which evil, sin, death, brokenness and hate do not have the last word because we have faith that they can be vanquished and/or transformed, and then living as if that were already true. 

So, what does this mean for us then, in the season of Lent?  Well, it actually underpins our whole purpose for the season.  Lent is time for putting aside our normal ways of doing and thinking in order to see Jesus upside-down world more clearly.  Any Lenten practices that we might undertake of denying ourselves or disrupting our habits is not about punishment but about giving ourselves over to the irony.  One of my classmates at seminary shaved her head during Lent, to disrupt her normal sense of vanity so that she might learn something new about her essential worthiness.  Another person I know once challenged herself to contact her representatives in congress everyday, disrupting her sense that she has no power, learning that her voice can matter. Others might give up sugar or fast in another way, disrupting a crutch that seems indispensible, but learning that they are stronger and more whole than they thought.

These are simple ways remind ourselves of Jesus upside-down world, to say that we trust that God will show us something new in an uncomfortable experience that we would normally avoid. Because, let’s face it, when we are trusting only ourselves we would take one look the cross and say no thanks, of course we would. God certainly does not expect us to relish suffering. But perhaps instead we can take a breath and stop for a moment and realize that we are not the arbiter of righteousness, we are not the arbiter of the right-ness of experience, we are not the arbiter of what can be transformative, God is.

Now Swedenborg would probably not describe this all in same terms that I have (I was trained at a Lutheran seminary after all!)  He was too much of a scientist to naturally want to describe the world as needing to be upside-down, or to have much appreciation for irony in a literary sense. But especially in spiritual and psychological terms he would agree…we need to invert the order of the things that we love so that we might conform ourselves to an image of heaven.  We are born, and we are taught, to love ourselves and our power, and the world and its power.  And those loves, in proportion, can be good.  But only as long as they are subordinated to loving God and loving other people.  And the way that we get to loving God and other people, especially when we have habitually loved only our selves and the world, is to truly believe and enact the fact that all life and love is from the Lord.  When we believe that, when we live that, then we will learn to question our selfishness, our priorities, and our thinking, because we will truly value God’s judgement and love above our own.  And that process, regeneration, will turn our loves and our lives upside down.

The cross, and the whole of Jesus life, reminds us that the world’s understanding of things, our natural understanding of things, might not be right.  In the cross, in the incarnation, God begs for us to look at the world upside-down, sideways and inside out so that we don’t miss what we are supposed to be learning, so we don’t miss chances to see and experience beauty and transformation where we didn’t expect it.  In Lent especially, we are invited to walk through the world a little askance so that we might see resurrection, so that we might see the image of heaven.  For God loved the world, and us, so very much, that God embodied an incredible physical and spiritual reversal, so we might always be reminded to look at things sideways, to trust and believe in God’s revealing above all else.

Amen.


Readings:

Numbers 21:4-9

4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!” 6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

John 3:14-21

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

The Last Judgment 36

[1]…It is assumed that faith exists so long as the church's teachings are believed, so that it is with those who believe. But believing by itself is not faith, only willing and doing what is believed is faith. When the church's teachings are merely believed, they do not enter into the way a person lives, but only into their memory and so into what the external person thinks. They only enter into their way of life when they enter into their will and thus their actions; that is when their spirit is first engaged. For a person's spirit, the life of which is what a person's life really is, is formed by their will, and only by their thinking to the extent that this arises from their will. A person's memory and the thinking which arises from this is merely the entrance through which the introduction is effected. 

[3] …Faith is an affection for truth arising from willing what is true because it is true, for this is the real spiritual element in a person. It is far removed from the natural, which is willing what is true not for its own sake, but to get for oneself glory, fame and gain...So willing what is true because it is true is also acknowledging and loving the Divine; these two things are so closely linked that in heaven they are looked on as one…faith is not just believing, but also willing and doing, so there can be no faith if there is no charity. Charity or love is willing and doing.