Readings: Amos 5:18-27, Revelation 21:1-2, 22:1-5, Secrets of Heaven 63 (see below)
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Our two readings today differ greatly in tone. One is full of lament, the other is bright with hope. During the last few years, we have seen much to fill us with both lament and hope. We are seeing corruption and incompetence at the highest levels of our government. We are seeing those in power deliberately prey on the vulnerable among us, no longer even bothering to try to hide their cruelty. We have seen initiatives supporting diversity deliberately dismantled. We have seen crucial international aid withheld. Yet, we have also seen resistance to cruelty and avarice. We have seen communities showing up for each other. We see people courageously speaking truth to power. We still see unjustifiable war, unexpected disaster, personal loss, division, greed and callousness all around us, but when we have eyes to see it, we can also see unity, competence, sacrifice, and accountability too. Now, as it probably is with any time in history, it is reasonable to find both lament and hope in our hearts. 

Let’s first spend some time with the Amos text. Most of us are probably only familiar with verse 24, made particularly famous by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But I highly recommend reading the whole of chapter five at some point because it communicates so viscerally, as did our shorter reading, the depth of God’s lament. The whole chapter is a litany of complaints against the people of Israel, that they have turned away from God, that they have levied unfair taxes upon the poor, that they have oppressed the innocent, taken bribes, and denied the poor justice in the courts, that they enriched themselves without any thought of others.

And in Amos God says, I can’t save you from this. If you insist on making these kinds of choices again and again and again, I can’t make it better. If you insist on replacing me with idols of your own making, if you insist on ignoring my words and replacing our covenant with your own selfishness….there will be no religious festival, no sacrifice, no special words that will be able to magically transform the world you have made.

And let’s be clear: God is heartbroken over the way things are going in the book of Amos. God is pleading with the Israelites to open their eyes and see what their selfishness and blindness has wrought. Those who have fashioned God in their own image, those who have twisted God’s word to serve their own purposes, those who have turned away from the suffering of God’s beloved, will not find likeness, will not find light or peace or safety, when they come to understand what God is really about. It will be a terrifying surprise, like running from a lion only to meet a bear, like pitch darkness without a flashlight. And this, not as a punishment, just as the soul-disorienting realization that God doesn’t exist to serve our self-aggrandizement, our worldview, our privilege. 

And so God is pleading with them to wake up. To recognize that they cannot participate in festivals, or enact sacrifices in a purely external way. They can’t act selfishly and then act performatively, and expect God to be okay with it.  “I will not accept [that]” says the Lord, “But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-ending stream.”

Swedenborg writes of this verse:

'Justice' means truth, and 'righteousness' good. Both stem from charity (kindness) and are the burnt offerings and sacrifices of the internal self (1).

A river evokes something old and deep and unstoppable. If the hypocritical sacrifices that God is rejecting in Amos are paper-thin and surface-deep, a river is something timeless, reflecting the heart of God…a never-ending stream of justice and righteousness coming up from the deep well of God’s divine love.

God is asking us to connect with that depth, to offer up sacrifices that come from deep inside us, that reflect the depth and the power of that river. That reflect the divine love that gives it being. To give metaphorical burnt offerings that represent ways in which we have recognized our wrongness, and our willingness to use that burnt ash to fertilize new growth. There are so many ways that this applies to each of our own contexts, our own spiritual work, our own particular sacrifices of things we are holding on to. Whether it is the sacrifice of our complicity towards white supremacy, sexism, or materialism for example, of personal reputation and ego, of ideology, of ambition, of avarice, of complacency. Today, just two days after Juneteenth, a celebration of freedom from oppression, is a particularly good day to consider what God is calling for us to sacrifice, so that the river of justice can truly flow.

Now let us take a look at the Revelation text. This begins with the descent of the Holy City New Jerusalem, from which our church is named. And we are told that the river of the water of life flows down the middle of this city, and the tree of life bearing different fruits every month grows on either side, and that the leaves of this tree will be for the healing of the nations.

If in Amos, God spoke that justice and righteousness should flow like a river, here in the holy city we see that river, flowing right through the center. Swedenborg writes that a river indicates divine truths in abundance, and in addition, so do the leaves of the tree. And I quote:

The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. This symbolizes the resulting rational truths by which people caught up in evils and… falsities are brought to think sanely and to live decently(2).

We are invited into a vision in which justice, righteousness, and healing are paramount. A vision in which Divine truth flows in abundance and it leads to people thinking with clarity and living with kindness.

The holy city is thus built by truth being heard and then people changing the way that they live. The holy city is built by the kind of sacrifice that God desires, internal sacrifice, whereby people relinquish ways of thinking that serve themselves and take on ways of thinking that promote healing and service and equality.

And as peaceful as the image of the New Jerusalem appears, we know that doing this is hard work, and will often involve internal conflict. This might feel uncomfortable to us because we have been taught to avoid conflict, to feel like conflict means that we are doing something wrong. But as we heard in our reading:

The hour of conflict is the hour when the Lord is at work…Nor does [the Lord] rest until love is playing the leading part, at which point conflict ceases.

The Lord is at work in our hearts and in our world! I cannot think of anything more worthy of celebration and praise on this Holy City Sunday. When we look around and see conflict and denial and disagreement and anxiety in ourselves and in the world around us, it might not feel like the New Jerusalem is coming. When we see our world looking more like the book of Amos than the holy city, a vision where the leaves of the tree heal us all feels pretty far away, and maybe even a little naive. 

But if the Lord is at work, so must we be. We know that the New Jerusalem is not something that we must passively wait for, something in our future that we will have no connection to. It is brought into being through each human heart. It is brought into being with each act of living courageously and decently. It is brought into being via our true and willing sacrifice, made in community together.

God will not rest until love is playing the leading part, And if the Lord does not rest, neither shall we rest until the holy city is embodied as fully as it can be in our world. Now of course, I don’t literally mean we shouldn’t rest. We are of course limited human creatures, we have a biological and emotional need to rest. But what I mean is that we cannot become complacent, content to rest in our privilege, however that privilege has become manifest. This complacency leads to an Amos world, full of blindness and selfishness, full of idols of our own making and myths of our own creating.

These days the invitation has never been more clear….The Lord is at work. Will we join Him? Amen.

(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #922:3
(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, Apocalypse Revealed #936


Readings:

Amos 5:18-27
18 Woe to you who long for the day of the LORD! Why do you long for the day of the LORD? That day will be darkness, not light. 19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him. 20 Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light— pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness? 21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. 22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. 23 Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! 25 “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel? 26 You have lifted up the shrine of your king, the pedestal of your idols, the star of your god — which you made for yourselves. 27 Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,” says the LORD, whose name is God Almighty.

Revelation 21:1-2, 22:1-5

1 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Secrets of Heaven #63

…the Lord is constantly fighting on our behalf against evils and falsities and by these conflicts is confirming us in truth and good. The hour of conflict is the hour when the Lord is at work, which is why in the Prophets a regenerate person is called 'the work of God's fingers'. Nor does the Lord rest until love is playing the leading part, at which point conflict ceases. When that work has reached the point where faith has been joined to love, it is then called 'very good', for the Lord then moves us to be a likeness of [God]self…

Readings: Matthew 9:35-10:8, Secrets of Heaven 3941 (see below)
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Jesus employs another interesting metaphor in our text today, to give shape and meaning to the practice of spiritual life: the harvest. Agricultural metaphors abound in the bible. Jesus, and the people who wrote the bible, used images that the people reading or listening to it knew and could instinctively relate to.
So, what does the metaphor of “harvest” communicate to us then? Harvest is the culmination of a season of growing. It it the end result of ongoing labor. It is usually one event in time, recurring yes, but something that is only done at a specific time, when the crop is ready. Therefore, a lot of work is necessary in a short amount of time in order to take advantage of the readiness of the crop, to cash in on all the work that has gone into the season. For people who rely on the work of their own hands for their sustenance and livelihood, harvest is a time of urgency.
We can hear the urgency in Jesus’ use of the image. He has just experienced a deep sense of compassion for the people surrounding him. Looking more deeply at the Greek here provides nuance. First, the word used for compassion indicates a something felt deep in the gut. It is visceral, it is collapses distance, it is empathy felt deep in our insides. We might recognize this same word from the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. Second, the two Greek words used to describe the people that Jesus saw are often translated as harassed and helpless, which is a little passive. The actual meaning of the words imply both violent harassment and a state of being actively thrown aside. Jesus was noticing not only their emotional state but their political and social one. These people were not helpless and harassed because of their own personal issues, they were oppressed systemically by an oppressive regime. The further description of them being sheep without a shepherd is not just pretty pastoral language. It is directly referencing the Jewish prophetic tradition, specifically Exekiel, which calls the bad leaders who take advantage of the poor “bad shepherds.”
It is into this reality, this reality of people being harmed by systems, by ignorance, by malice, that Jesus speaks with the urgency of the harvest metaphor.
So, how are we to hold this urgency? For we must be careful; like all things urgency can be used for good and for harm. The are many harmful uses of urgency, many that have to do with manipulation and control. Traditional Christianity is not exempt; it has often stoked an urgent fear in people that they are destined for hell. How convenient then, that they also can offer the remedy: belief in Jesus. We see the harmful use of urgency in politics, where misinformation is used to stoke fear, outrage and division. I know I can personally relate to the fact that under the influence of anxiety it is harder to think rationally. It is a sad reality that power-hungry people know this and will actively use it to control others. 
But there are also positive aspects to urgency. Sometimes urgency can help us clarify what is important to us. In situations such as an illness, all the dross can fall away and we appreciate the beauty of small ordinary things. Urgency can help us get things done; sometimes just the right amount of urgency can focus us differently than at other times. Urgency can inspire us to be brave, giving us the gumption to do things we might otherwise not be inclined to do. Urgency can inspire people to work together; we see this any time there is a natural disaster of some kind, and people pull together to do what needs to be done. 
It is in this positive sense that Jesus is employing the urgency of the harvest metaphor. He was responding to the state of his people under political and economic hardship and the true emotional overwhelm and exhaustion that occurs when having to live that way long-term. He was responding to the reality that they had been abandoned and dismissed by the powers-that-be and the deep existential disorientation that occurs when this happens. His response: to send his disciples to minister to them with an urgent seriousness and focus. This is how we should read his command to, for that moment, ignore the Gentiles and the Samaritans. We know from many other stories that Jesus had compassion for them too. In this moment though, Jesus had a specific and urgent mission for the people right in front of him.
He sends his disciples to preach hope and to let the people know that God cared about them. But their work was not just about words. It was about making a concrete difference in people’s lives. In the words of Jesus’ time, he said to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” In some sense, this was hyperbole, but it also wasn’t; he was directing them to bring people back into health, back into relationship, back into community - basic things that were being destroyed by the constant oppression they were experiencing. Jesus wanted his disciples to do some good, some real good for real people.
This is another way to read the harvest metaphor, for it communicates urgency but also culmination. Swedenborg interpreted the harvest in the context of spiritual journey. As we heard in our reading, “the field” represents the church, or more generally, our whole spiritual life. The seeds that are planted in the field represent good intentions and true ideas that we have chosen to cultivate. These grow within us, with new seeds being planted whenever we learn something new or expand our experience of compassion. The culmination, the end goal, of these good intentions and true ideas is each of us being able to do some good for our neighbor, in large ways and in small. To quote Swedenborg:
In that sense the seeds which are sown in the field are truths of faith which are planted in good. Harvest means their growing ripe when forms of good develop from them (1)
The harvest is what we are trying to get to: forms of good that make a difference in others’ lives. Our good intentions and true ideas are important, but they are not growing fully ripe by simply staying in our hearts and minds and never being acted upon. The seeds that we have planted within ourselves are ultimately to serve the harvest, they are to serve taking care of each other, to serve the hapless and harassed around us, however that might be showing up in our context. All things lead to loving our neighbor, and if Jesus never said anything else other than this, it would be enough.
The reality is though, we cannot exist in a state of urgency all the time. It is too exhausting for our nervous system. We are not machines, we cannot work at urgent high levels indefinitely. God knows this, and this is why we have the Sabbath written into our earliest myths about how we were created. God invites us into the urgency of the call to minister to our neighbors, into the urgency of keeping our eyes open to the reality of suffering, into the urgency of knowing that we are God’s hands in the world. This urgency is a gift, for we know the harvest is the culmination of the seeds that are being planted in us all the time. And, we are invited to balance that urgency with the Sabbath, for all good soil needs to rest and be fed with the nutrients it needs for the next growing season. 
Jesus said: therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Our Lord of the harvest feels the urgency of the suffering of all God’s children. Our Lord of the harvest equally knows that the harvest is where we have always been heading, if we wish to conform ourselves to the mutual love of heaven. So, in asking for the Lord to send out laborers, we can only humbly say, Lord, send me. Amen.

1. Emmanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 9295

​
Readings:

Matthew 9:35-10:8

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.
36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.
38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”


1 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.
2 These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus;
4 Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans.
6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.
7 As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’
8 Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.


Secrets of Heaven 3941
The reason why 'wheat harvest' means a developing state of love and charity is that 'the field' means the Church and so the things that constitute the Church, while the seeds sown in it mean the germs of good and truth. And what springs up from those seeds, such as wheat, barley, and many other crops, are the fruits of love and charity, and also of faith.

Readings: Exodus 15:22-27, Matthew 9:9-13, Secrets of Heaven #8356 (see below)
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Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash


Today’s texts introduce a powerful metaphor for the way God works in our lives, and how we can grow and evolve emotionally and spiritually. Now one of the frameworks that we often use to talk about spiritual progress is sin and repentance. Sins are actions or attitudes that harm others or ourselves. A loving and caring God guides us to see those sins for what they are, guides us to experience appropriate regret and accountability for them, guides us in repairing harm and choosing to avoid those harms in the future. As we engage with this process, we become more heavenly from the inside out, because we are learning how to practice mutual love, and heaven is a realm of mutual love. This is an excellent and useful framework, one that particularly appealed to Swedenborg. (I’m imagining this is because it is very process-oriented and that this appealed to his scientific nature).
But, there are also other helpful ways to imagine our spiritual journeys, other metaphors that might guide us towards growth. Today we see one of them in God as our Healer.

In our first text, Moses is leading the newly liberated Children of Israel away from the Red Sea, where the Egyptians had perished in pursuit of them. They had traveled three days without water but when they finally found some, it was bitter. I’m sad to say that I certainly would have grumbled as they did in that situation. Yet, Moses appeals to the Lord and is told to throw some wood into the water so it can become safe to drink. After this miracle, God characterizes himself as the “God who heals you.”

In the Matthew text, Jesus is being very provocative as he often does. He begins by calling Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him. We can’t quite appreciate today how transgressive that would have been. Tax collectors in those days were collaborating with the oppressive machinery of Rome. Matthew would have been extracting payments from his neighbors in ways that would have harmed them and certainly have made them resentful. Yet, he responds to Jesus, and allows himself to be called out and away from that oppressive system. Given Matthew’s record of behavior, the Pharisees understandably question what Jesus is doing. He responds by trying to widen their lens. They have existed in a highly-regulated religious structure based on ritual and respectability, which ends up offering fairly narrow accessability for those who found themselves on the margins, for whatever reason. So Jesus uses the metaphor of sickness and healing to try explain what he is doing, to explain that God doesn’t demand perfection and respectability first, before God will engage with us. God is not a gate-keeper. God will try to heal anyone who needs it, because God’s ultimate goal is a healthy, honest, thriving person, not necessarily one who is “respectable” by whatever human standards we might be judging at the time.

The thing that is so interesting about the physician and healing metaphor is that it pre-supposes the existance of our wounds. Every person has been emotionally wounded in their life, in some way, large or small. Many times, depending on the depth or the severity of the wound, we might build our personalities around protecting that wound. Perhaps we have learned a robust self-sufficiency, perhaps we have learned to be extremely and co-dependently aware of the feelings of those around us, perhaps we just never ever look in the direction of the wound or anything that would remind us of it. We need not feel ashamed for having done any of this. Our former child selves, or our inner child now, is just doing the best they can to survive and not be hurt again. Many of these protections look and feel a lot like strength or success. But just as often they hide an inability or an unwillingness to be vulnerable in ways that connect us to others. At worst, they might cause us to lash out at others, or engage in other kinds of harmful behavior. We all find ways to protect, soothe, or cover over our wounds. But that is not the same as healing them. That is not the same as learning who we could be without them.

The framework of sin and repentance doesn’t really acknowledge where our sinning might come from. And often, our attempts to change our behaviors can only go so far without understanding the wounds that drive us. The trick is that most wounds are caused within relationship, and so they can only be healed in relationship. This can certainly be a relationship between us and God. But just as often, it is our relationship with people; friends, partners, therapists, colleagues, church, affinity groups and more, that help heal us. This is what Jesus was getting at with his practice of eating with people who others called “sinners.” When healing is the goal, rather than ritual or respectability, then community is essential to that healing process. And in fact, this is the motivation of the incarnation as a whole. God decided to come closer, decided the embody human community with us, so that we all might have more pathways towards healing.

The point of of the incarnation is often discussed in terms of “salvation” for us, but when we think about it in terms of healing and community, it allows us to redefine or even reclaim the word, allows it to sing a different song.

Because, unfortunately, salvation as a concept is vulnerable to the exercise of illegitimate power. In the words of Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, an indigenous Episcopal priest:

“the word itself speaks of the illegitimate power claimed by the church, which, whether through force or influence, has held the world hostage to its demands concerning its ability to grant salvation or, if you will, paradise. If you hold the “keys to the kingdom,” you get to decide not only who gets in but what they have to do to get there. I don’t think Jesus ever intended the concept of salvation to be associated with that kind of illegitimate power.”  (1)

In Rev. Dr. Woodley’s opinion, healing conveys a more accurate meaning as to what Jesus was trying to do than salvation. Healing requires our cooperation, and cooperation is a word that belongs to community, and in fact only has meaning in community, even if it is just a community of two. Healing is a process, one that takes time and intention, and we must bring to it our honesty and accountability, our patience and determination. And like all relationship, healing requires vulnerability, a recognition of what we have been powerless over, a willingness to receive the gift of care.

Now, when Swedenborg interprets our Exodus text, he does so using the sin and repentance framework. Yet, there are pieces of the interpretation that can speak to a healing framework as well. Water represents truth, and there are times when certain realities feel bitter to us, so we shy away from them. In the sin and repentance framework, Swedenborg posits that this is because we are not yet ready for the accountability acknowledgment would require. I’m sure we can recognize how this has played out in our lives. But in the healing framework, the bitterness can also represent our woundedness, places that feel too confusing, painful or overwhelming to explore. And into this truth is thrown a piece of wood to make the water sweet, representing the way that goodness received can not only transform us, but also transform how we understand the truth of our wounds. Swedenborg writes here that the goodness represented by the wood revives our “affection for truth,” our basic sense that it is good to know the truth about ourselves. We need to know the truth about ourselves and our experience if we are to grow as people. Yet, knowing the truth about ourselves and our experience can be very scary, especially as we consider the trauma of our woundedness. So, we can understand how the goodness, the presence, compassion, patience, or trust, received from another can be such an important part of the process, can be an incredible gift that human beings can give to each other.

Now the caveat of course, is that for extreme trauma and woundedness, trained professionals are an integral part of the picture. I’m not asking us to dig deeper than any of us have the expertise to explore. But for our everyday woundedness, the regular difficulities of being human, our various communities are essential. Even though, to make a point, Jesus separates the sick and the healthy, the righteous and sinners, in his conversation with the Pharisees, in reality, we are all both, and we can’t really avoid that. What we can do is choose to engage in the process of healing, whatever that looks like for us. For we have a God who heals us, and thank goodness for that. Amen.

(1) Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59pm Conversation, Randy S. Woodley and Bo C. Sanders, p18

Readings:

Exodus 15:22-27

22 Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.
23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah. )
24 So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
25 Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink. There the LORD issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test.
26 He said, “If you listen carefully to the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.

Matthew 9:9-13

9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples.
11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Secrets of Heaven #8356
'And the waters became sweet' means that as a result the truths were made pleasant. This is clear from the meaning of 'sweet' as pleasant, for 'sweet' in the spiritual sense means sweetness of life, which is the same thing as pleasantness; and from the meaning of 'the waters' as truths… The situation here is that a person's feeling of affection for truth comes from good. For goodness and truth have been joined together as if in marriage…