Readings: I Kings 3:5-12, Secrets of Heaven #1555 (see below)
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Today we have listened to a foundational story from the narrative of King Solomon in ancient Israel. Solomon was the son and the successor of King David. He was known particularly for his wisdom, and because he is the one who finally built the temple in Jerusalem. We hear him in this story ask for the wisdom that will make him famous as a ruler.

This story is one example of the way that differences in translation can really effect the direction of our discourse and comprehension. The translation I read today is the New International Version, the one I usually default to because of its straightforwardness. It says that Solomon asked God for a “discerning” heart. But the King James Version says that Solomon asked God for an “understanding” heart. 

Those words are actually quite different in English. When we think of being “discerning” we think of deciding between things with a certain level of judgment. It can be good judgment, certainly, but there is definitely a sense of figuring something out intellectually, of judging between things.

And it just so happens that in our bible study last Sunday, quite apart from this reading, we had a discussion of what it means to be “judgmental” (in a bad way), as opposed to “discerning” in a good way.

We came to recognize that being “judgmental” involved several qualities. First, there is an element of harmful speed in judgmental decision-making. We might call these “snap judgments”, and in such cases, it is often our various biases that are guiding our judgment. Now, we all have biases, it is an unavoidable element of being human, but the problem is when we pretend that we don’t have them. The problem is when we lean into snap judgments and refuse to do the work of learning about the fullness of someone’s humanity or the fullness of a certain situation. 

Second, there is often a certain level of hypocrisy involved with being judgmental. We are all human and we all have flaws. Maybe not exactly the same flaws at exactly the same time, but knowledge of our own flaws should certainly encourage humility and empathy when we encounter flaws in others and guide our judgement accordingly. If it doesn’t, it is difficult to trust a discernment that is so obviously blind to one half of the picture.

Third, we decided that the most central element of being judgmental was that it comes from ego rather than love and concern. Let’s be honest; being judgmental can be an incredible high. There is nothing quite like feeling superior to another person to make us feel better about ourselves. Feeling superior is incredibly addictive. It can make us feel safe and certain, it can pre-empt uncomfortable reflection, it can guard against shame. But it doesn’t actually make us any better at being truly discerning, or at being truly wise. 

To comprehend the real gift of what Solomon was asking for, and what God gave him, the translation of an “understanding heart” can give us a deeper insight into wisdom.

When we consider the meaning of understanding, it introduces some different elements. Understanding is used to mean comprehending knowledge, yes. In a math class we might be asked: Do you understand this concept? and we can answer Yes I do. But understanding as a word also can contain something deeper than simple comprehension. It can contain a sense of empathy, a larger sense of trying to see the whole picture, of recognizing dignity and shared humanity. We might say in relationship: I felt like this person understood me and what I was going though.

This communicates an essential sense of understanding as involving the heart in a different way than intellectual discernment. That, crucially, in order to really understand rather than just discern, we must be coming from love and respect rather than ego.

And this is exactly how Swedenborg describes the process of becoming wise. He distinguishes between knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom, recognizing that they are different capacities that have different purposes on our journey of spiritual growth. Knowledge is simply about assimilating facts. What has happened in my life? What does the bible or my tradition suggest? What do I feel about it? Knowlege is an important stage or capacity because it gathers foundational information that is helpful to be aware of. But it is still only awareness, nothing more.

Intelligence is more about making connections between concepts and figuring out how they should be applied. How does spirituality relate to life? Is charity more important than faith, or are they both important, and how? What does this or that bible story or teaching suggest about my current situation? Intelligence is an important stage or capacity because it allows us to start taking abstract concepts and apply them to our particular lives and situations. It starts making connections between ideas about God and spiritual things and our own development. But, intelligence can still be practiced fairly intellectually or abstractedly.

Wisdom, though, is when knowlege and intelligence engage the heart, and become integrated with it and our experience. We start to ask: what kind of love and insight is needed in a particular situation? What action will serve connection and thriving? How is God’s Providence moving in this situation, and what is it hoping I will learn? These are questions that are not so much about getting answers as they are about performing service, and they are questions that our ego shies away from asking. They are questions that come from love, and they look to the goodness that love wants to achieve. In wisdom, knowledge and intelligence learn to serve love.

Now, you might have noticed that we haven’t yet said anything about the second half of Solomon’s request to God.

So give your servant a discerning (or understanding) heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.

In a state of wisdom, it is still important to distinguish between right and wrong. Wisdom isn’t some magical woowoo oneness that transcends any need to make distinctions. Wisdom doesn’t take us away from the question of right and wrong, but rather, takes us deeper into it. 

Because then right and wrong become, not judgmental terms to be co-opted by ego for its own purposes but a way into love. Wisdom asks of the distinction between right and wrong: how and for what purpose? Not just because God said it, not because being right can make us feel safe or good or superior, not even because it makes the most sense. Right because it furthers human dignity and freedom, right because it connects people one with another, right because it gives us a chance to become who God wants us to be, right because it is good, respectful and loving. And wrong because it takes us further away from any of those things. We must love goodness (and not ourselves) in order to know what is right and wrong; we must love goodness to be wise, and have in Swedenborgian language “a heart so established in what is good that it has a perception of truth."(1)

And the thing that is so tricky about this story is that, like most characters in the bible, Solomon had his flaws. He was wise in many ways, but also imprudent in others. We are once again challenged to recognize that God doesn’t require perfection to engage with us. God doesn’t require wisdom in every part of us in order to work towards wisdom in others. Our journeys are sometimes lurching and incomplete. Wisdom does not ask us to be perfect. It simply asks us to keep listening, and to keep striving for the heart that understands. Amen.

(1) Anita Dole, The Dole Study Notes: The Wisdom of Solomon

Readings:

I Kings 3:5-12

5 At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, and God said, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”
6 Solomon answered, “You have shown great kindness to your servant, my father David, because he was faithful to you and righteous and upright in heart. You have continued this great kindness to him and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day.
7 “Now, LORD my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties.
8 Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number.
9 So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?”
10 The Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this.
11 So God said to him, “Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice,
12 I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be.


Secrets of Heaven #1555

The light we gain through knowledge of faith's true concepts and good actions is called the light of [intelligence], whereas the light of wisdom is part and parcel of life and is gained from life. The light of [intelligence] relates to our intellectual side, or our intellect, while wisdom's light relates to our volitional side, or our life.

[2] Few if any know how we are led to true wisdom. [Intelligence] is not wisdom but leads to wisdom, since to understand what is true and good is not to be true or good. To be wise is to be so. Wisdom is exclusively a question of the way we live, of actually being wise. Wisdom, or in other words, life, is what secular and religious knowledge introduces us into.

Readings: Matthew 10:24-31, Secrets of Heaven #4796 (see below)
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We humans are fascinating creatures. We have an interior life, with a certain quality, certain thoughts and feelings, and we can choose whether or not that interior life is manifest in our exterior life. Animals cannot do this in the same way. Young children do not do it instinctively; it is an ability that we grow into. Our thoughts can be our own, our feelings can be our own, and ultimately it is up to us how much of those things we share, and in what ways we act upon them.

This is a complex gift. We are each individuals, beloved of God in our own way, and our journey belongs to us, no one else. And also, we exist within, and were born for, community and connection, and the quality of this community and connection will often turn on how much, and in what way, we choose to share our interior life.

The balance of this itself is also complex. We withhold too much our our interior experience and it is hard to connect with others. We share too much of our interior experience and this can destabilize valuable boundaries or center ourselves in harmful ways. Enter also, the possibility of hypocrisy: the pretense of speaking or acting in some way when we secretly believe another; the interior and the exterior becoming misaligned for self-serving purposes. We have an instictive distaste for hypocrisy, I think, because of the way it introduces doubt and mistrust into our relationships. Which leads us further to the notion of “authenticity.” A person is perceived to be authentic, or genuine, when we sense that their interior experience is aligning with their external actions and way of life. And I think perhaps we all yearn for a certain level of authenticity in our lives and relationships. It can feel like a burden, it can feel like work, to maintain an essential level of disconnection between our interior selves and our exterior life. The complexity of this is heightened for marginalized groups as well, who often need to conform to the white centrality, the heteronormativity, or the maleness of cultural and public spaces.

Swedenborg, however, speaks of heaven being a place where any dissonance between our interior and exterior selves is completely reduced. He writes:

…in the other life no one is allowed to pretend to affections they do not really have, so we cannot put on a face that is contrary to the love we are engaged in. We are all refined down to a state in which we say what we think and manifest in expression and act what we intend.(1)

While in many ways this idea might feel terrifying, like being exposed in a way that we might not desire, we can also appreciate the freedom inherent in this state of being. It is the epitome of authentic living. We are not maintaining masks, we are not doing the work of mediating the acceptability of our interior life to others, we are in the flow of life that God made us for. 

Now, of course though, this kind of flow only works in the context of heavenly mutual love. And we cannot get to a state of ongoing mutual love without the practice of courageous confession. The reason that angels can get to that level of authenticity is that they have courageously and faithfully confronted all the things within them that might desire to hide. The shame, the selfishness, the fear, the anger, the resentment, the history of harm toward the self and others that we all harbor in some way. This kind of reflection is the path of regeneration, as we call it in our tradition, and it begins with courageous confession. This confession can be primarily to ourselves and our God. There is value in a private reflective process; we can go deep, we can feel the safety of God’s personal presence with us, we can take the time and the pace we need. 

And, there is value in a public reflective process as well. The success and effectiveness of 12-Step programs speak to how public and crucially, communal, confession and reflection can be integral to living an authentic life. Sometimes we may not feel like we have the ability to do it on our own, and so the acceptance, compassion, and accountabilty of a group can be key. One-on-one therapy is another semi-public way into couragous confession. Speaking our truth to another can be powerful, as can be receiving an outside perpsective that we hadn’t considered.

There is no one right way to do courageous confession. But if we are serious about discipleship - which is the earthly context for the Matthew text - and more broadly, if we are serious about an evolving spiritual life, then we have to learn how to get comfortable with courageous confession. It is the starting point for all growth.

This principle is true for groups as much as it is for individuals, for it is not so much a Christian principle as it is a human one. As we consider the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is a principle that we would do well to consider for the overall health of our nation. The United States has never been very good at courageously confessing its flaws. The very declaration we celebrate only granted true independence and rights to white men, and many of the founding fathers that we venerate now owned slaves in their day. When we let the full truth of that sink in, we can only see it as a heartbreaking and demoralizing level of hypocrisy.

Yet, within that messiness, there was a kernel of vision, a baby bud of equality, that started to give birth to something important. It wasn’t born perfectly. And yet, we all have a responsibility to help it become better, more inclusive, more expansive, more effective. This can only happen through courageous confession, through being thoroughly honest about who has been left out and why,  about who has been primarily served and why, and about what harmful forces still exist that threaten the vision of true equality and enfranchisement for all.

We might think of the effort to take down the National Park signs in our sister city, Philadelphia, that uplifted the story of George Washington’s slaves. For some, it feels more comfortable, more patriotic, to remain in an uncomplicated and simple veneration of the founding fathers. But I don’t believe that patriotism is supposed to be comfortable, just as our spiritual journeys are not supposed to be comfortable. If either are primarily or only comfortable, then we are not growing, we are not learning, we are not evolving. When we refuse to practice courageous confession in either realm, we stay stuck in a facsimile of patriotism or of faith that actually doesn’t ask anything real of us.

So, why talk politics? Not for any partisan purpose, but because we recognize that it is all connected. When we develop a robust personal practice of courageous confession, through a spiritual or other framework, then we are more likely to be able to continue to practice it in our communities, our organizations, our countries, and our world. And our world —the survival and thriving of our world— needs people who are actively building this ability within themselves.

When we look at it this way, when we look at how our own journeys intersect and undergird the trajectory of the whole world, the stakes rise and it can feel overwhelming. My own knees get a little wobbly just thinking about it. So, thank goodness Jesus ends our text today with some encouragement.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

We are reminded that God’s care extends to all - the whole world and everything in it. We are reminded of God’s intimate knowledge and love for us - enough to number the very smallest things within us. We are reminded not to be afraid - that our unique reflective abilities were given to us for a purpose, and we should step into them knowing that God is with us, and is guiding us. We can be honest here; the path of growth is so very uncomfortable at times. Our impulse is to conceal, even to ourselves, that which causes us to question and to doubt, that which causes us to feel guilt, that which needs us to re-imagine or reframe. …for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. From God, this is a blessed promise, so let us not be afraid. Amen.

(1) Emmanuel Swedenborg, Heaven & Hell #457


Readings:

Matthew 10:24-31

24 “The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master.
25 It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household!
26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.
27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.
28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.
30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.


Secrets of Heaven 4796
When angels show themselves, all their inner feelings appear clearly in their face and beam from it. Their face, then, is the outward form of their feelings and an image representing those feelings. To present a face at odds with one’s feelings does not happen in heaven.

Readings: Genesis 8:1-5, 13-19, Matthew 11:25-30, Heaven and Hell #533 (see below)
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There is a story about Swedenborg that is beloved by his followers. It goes like this: A young girl who grew up in Swedenborg’s neighborhood kept asking him to show her an angel. So one day, he agreed, and took her inside his summer-house and placed her in front of a curtain. He said, “Now you shall see an angel,” and drew the curtain aside, revealing a mirror in which the girl could see her own reflection.(1)

This charming anecdote gets at the heart of Swedenborg’s optimistic and humane theology. He says many times during his works, all human beings are born for heaven. Yes, we have to make the conscious choice to follow that path, but it is nonetheless God’s intention for all of us. Contrast this with the vision of Jonathan Edwards, an American preacher of the same period, who preached a famous sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whereby he described each of us being as spiders held by a slender thread over the pit of hell by a wrathful God who abhors us, and that it is God’s hand alone that prevents our burning forever.

Certainly, Edwards must have imagined that the specter of such a fate would provoke a necessary anxiety in his listeners, so that they might surrender to God’s grace. Fear persuades. We know this not only from religion but from politics, advertising, and from our own lives. But fear can only take us so far. It can motivate external action, but it cannot create a heavenly internal, a heart built on the stuff of heaven: mutual love. Mutual love can only be embraced through the relinquishment of fear, of self-preservation, of resentment. We can only love when we make ourselves vulnerable, make ourselves empty of our presumptions, and trust in a God who desires our eternal happiness above all.

Swedenborg’s positive vision includes such a God, one that begins with the assumption of our belovedness, not our sinfulness. Of course, we must willingly step into this vision, put our skin in the game, but it is not so much a matter of doing particular things in a particular way, or believing in particular religious notions. But rather, it is about being committed to loving the truth, even when that truth indicates we need to change. It is about being devoted to learning how to love others, even if that means hearing what we don’t want to hear. It is about trusting that the faithful practice of self-relinquishment means that the vision of our true selfhood in that mirror will become ever clearer.

And so, we heard in our Swedenborg reading today about the ultimate simplicity and accessibility of the path to heaven. He writes similarly elsewhere:

…we can see that it is not as hard to follow the path to heaven as many people believe. The only difficulty is finding the power to resist love for ourselves and love of the world and preventing those loves from taking control, since they are the source of all our evils.

Oh really Swedenborg, is that the *only* difficulty? Finding the power to resist love for ourselves and love of the world and preventing those loves from taking control? Is that all we have to do? I am sarcastic in jest, of course, for he is right: the path is not complicated in principle. We do not have to belong to a specific religion, or a specific ethnicity, we do not have to perform specific rituals or believe counter-intuitive things. We just have to try our best to leave the world a better place for us being here. We just have to try our best to love each other as much as we can. We are born for this path, and God and all the angels in heaven are behind us as we make our way. We hear this reflected in Jesus’ words, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt 11:30)

But just because the way to heaven is simple in principle doesn’t mean that the living of it is easy. It can sometimes feel pretty hard. There are many layers to this work of being a good person. There are depths to be plumbed. For example, we might find it easy to not be overtly racist, but it is much harder to face and eradicate learned unconscious racism, to accept our white privilege, or other privileges. We might find it easy to respect women in our family, but it much harder to publicly stand against misogyny in the workplace. We might find it easy to protect the earth by recycling, but much harder to divest from companies taking advantage of the earth and any convenience they might provide. We might find it easy to give our heart to someone, but much harder to authentically apologize when we are wrong, and to do the work of repair. There is always work that we can do to open our hearts, be more courageous, more loving, and more truthful.

Finding the power to resist love for ourselves and love of the world and preventing those loves from taking control. It is simple but its not small. It is straightforward but it is not easy. The work continues throughout our lives because the way to heaven is not a test, but a journey. The question is not so much “What do I need to do to become an angel?” The question is: “How free do I want to be?”

We heard in our reading about the moment that Noah and his family and all the animals were finally able to leave the ark. They had been set afloat and tossed around by the floodwaters for almost a year, and finally the waters had receded. 

Swedenborg writes: 

Going out of the ark' means freedom….The time that Noah spent in the ark, surrounded by flood water, symbolized being in captivity — that is, being tossed about by evil and falsity…

The Lord's presence involves freedom; the one is a consequence of the other. The more present the Lord is, the freer we are. In other words, the more we love goodness and truth, the more freely we act. That is the nature of the Lord's influence…

The world, our egos, have plenty to say about who we are and who we should be. The influences of hell piggyback on these messages we receive, intent on subjugating and dominating us, decreasing our sense of hope and possibility. We hear: you are not enough, you are too much, you need to look this way, own this thing, choose this product. We hear: you shouldn’t help them, it’s not your responsibility, it’s a hoax, it’s fake news, you should be very scared. We hear: you must control this, we must control them, own them, destroy them, get your way, get all the power, never apologize. We hear: your anxiety will prevent it, your disowning them will teach them, be small, be quiet, close your eyes, scroll your phone. And so we remain surrounded by the flood water, gulping for breath, splashed and sprayed and shivering, in an ark only three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high, when instead we could be living in the whole wide world.

The more we buy into what hell is selling us, the smaller and more cramped our world will be. But, the more we love goodness and truth, the more freely we act. The more we love goodness and truth, the more we are brought into the influence of the Lord and the angels. We read further:

But once a person has been set free, that is, been regenerated, they are led by the Lord through angels so gently that no yoke or dominion exists at all, for they are being led by what is joyful and pleasing, they are being loved, and they are being shown respect.

The influence of hell means only to make us nothing, and out of that nothing to have us strike out, and plunder, and scream, so to fill a void that can never be filled, to make ever more minuscule a selfhood that knows it was made for love, and to make ever larger a selfhood that is captive to avarice and superiority and fear. This is a desperate search for freedom that has instead settled on a lack of restraint.

The influence of heaven, however, is not undergirded by domination but by love and respect. The irony is that hell would have us be nothing as an insult, to break us down, but heaven would have us be nothing so that there is room for us to learn how beloved we are. The more present the Lord is the freer we are.

Now it might not always feel that way. As we grapple with the complexities of our lives, as the good choice, the right choice, becomes less and less obvious in an inter-connected and inter-dependent world, we might well feel less free, more confused, increasingly ambivalent. This is of course, normal and reasonable. Freedom is not the same thing as decisiveness or clarity. Freedom is not the same thing as ease or flow. Freedom is simply about having the ability to choose who we will serve. Freedom is about letting God pull back the curtain from the mirror and seeing our reflection there, and then really believing that it is us, that it is our future, and our present. When we believe that this true, when we know that it is so, the stakes change. We are no longer trying to be good enough, but to live into what is already true about us, into what God has already ordained for us. And on this road, even our flaws and our mistakes become a pathway for learning, a way to embrace a blessed emptiness into which God pours a love that rebuilds us.

So, as we consider our own spiritual journeys, we might also consider this quote attributed to novelist Paulo Coelho:

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.

We are all meant to be angels. And, unbecoming everything that isn’t really us, is really hard work. A lot of the things that aren’t really us, well, they really feel like they are. It will be difficult to let go. But who you were meant to be…you were meant to be an angel. In God’s past-present-future eyes, you are one. In each moment, now and forever, God is inviting us to come out of the ark, and into the sunshine.

Amen.

(1)http://newchurchhistory.org/funfacts/indexbbbb.html?p=111
(2)Emmanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell #359
(3)Emmanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #905

Readings:

Genesis 8:1-5, 13-19
1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. 

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 
15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” 18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another. 

Matthew 11:25-30
25 At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. 26 Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do. 27 “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Heaven and Hell #533
We can now see that it is not so hard to lead the life of heaven as people think, because it is simply a matter of recognizing, when something attractive comes up that we know is dishonest or unfair, that this is not to be done because it is against the divine commandments. If we get used to thinking like this, and from this familiarity form a habit, then we are gradually united to heaven. To the extent that we are united to heaven, the higher levels of our minds are opened, and to the extent that they are opened, we see what is dishonest and unfair; and to the extent that we see this, these qualities can be dispelled. For no evil can be banished until it has been seen. This is a state we can enter because of our freedom, since everyone is free to think in this way. However, once the process has started, the Lord works his wonders within us, and causes us not only to see evils but to refuse them and eventually to turn away from them. This is the meaning of the Lord's words, "My yoke is easy and my burden light" (Matthew 11:30). 

It is important to realize, though, that the difficulty of thinking like this and also of resisting evils increases to the extent that we deliberately do evil things - in fact, to that extent we become used to doing them until ultimately we no longer see them. Then we come to love them and to excuse them to gratify our love and to rationalize them with all kinds of self-deceptions and call them permissible and good.