 Readings: Exodus 32:1-14, Secrets of Heaven 8869 (see below)
See also on Youtube We continue today in our journey with the children of Israel in the wilderness, and seeing how their challenges can be metaphorically applied to our own internal challenges. The scripture has jumped a little in time, past the transmission of the ten commandments where, having reached Mount Sinai, Moses ascends the mountain and communes with God, receiving God’s instructions for the life of the Israelites and their journey in covenant together. However, Moses takes a fair bit of time up there on the mountain with God. If you check out the book of Exodus chapters 20-32, you will find that God has much much more to say to Moses than just the ten commandments. He stays up there for was forty days and forty nights. In our time of constant contact and communication with each other, is it possible for us to even imagine what it would have been be like to not hear from Moses, their leader, for well over a month? The Israelites start to get impatient, and we hear what happened in our text today. They commission (or though some translations would argue that they coerce) Moses’ brother Aaron to melt down their jewelry into an image of a golden calf, and they begin to worship that calf and indulge in inappropriate behavior. God, of course, is annoyed. We need only imagine how we feel when someone has reneged on a promise to us for this reaction to make some sense. It feels like a betrayal. We feel wounded and disappointed and angry. However, this is the point where we pause to recognize that the bible is a human story about God, and is not the final word on God’s nature. *We* would feel wounded, disappointed and angry. God is pure love and wisdom and sees things in an eternal way. Swedenborg tells us that…..”the Word speaks of Jehovah’s reacting in that kind of way because the sense of the letter consists of ideas of things as [humanity] sees them.” (1) *We* project our human feelings on to God, *we* move away from God and interpret that distance as anger. *We* cannot fathom the complexity of the simultaneous existence of love and judgment and transmute this into God having to be convinced of mercy by Moses. And that is a fascinating discussion, but it will need to be for another day, because I have a different direction that I wish to explore. But suffice it to say, God would never actually have to be convinced not to smite us. That’s not how God works. What I would like to talk about today might seems like a very small issue in the original Hebrew, but I think it leads to some very interesting implications for our own lives. In the very first verse of our text, the people come to Aaron and say “Come make us gods who will go before us.” The word translated as “gods” here is elohim, which is both the generic plural for “gods” but also the singular word for the God of Israel. So it could also be translated as “Come make us god…” To quote from a commentary on this text “The reader must weigh whether the text is “referring to a false god *other* than the Lord or to a false image *of* the Lord.” (2) In other words, were the children of Israel asking for a completely false god (ie another god) to worship or a false *image* of the one true God to worship? What was the sin here: worshiping a statue in the shape of a calf and believing it was a god, or making the statement that this golden calf is the shape of God? This question takes on even more gravitas when we extrapolate the story to our own lives. We are invited to think about our own false idols, the false gods that we worship. But as indicated by this interesting translation dilemma, there are two ways we can look at it. The first is to ask, what is it that we are worshipping *instead* of God? What is it that we are making more important than God? And to answer this question, we can look simply to how we are spending our time, we can ask what occupies our thoughts? Where is the bulk of our energy going, physically and emotionally? What does our life worship? Security, wealth, superiority, reputation, control, body image, ideology…how much time and energy are we devoting to these things? These can all become false gods to us when we sacrifice the best parts of ourselves to them, when we bow down to them above all. The second question however is, what image might we be projecting onto God so that we might worship *that* image while *pretending* that we are worshiping God? What image are we fashioning out of our own self-intelligence, our own selfish agenda, and lifting up as a picture of who God is and what God wants? For example of how this plays out, we can think about how the current administration and some sectors of Christianity appear to be preoccupied with the appearance of strength. Do we fashion for ourselves a strongman God, an angry and judgmental God, so that we might be able to justify playing strongman ourselves, being angry and judgmental ourselves? Remember, the Israelites did not just go from a pious worship from the one true God to a pious worship of an image of a calf. They used the occasion to justify behaviors that they knew the Lord would not support. To quote author Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” I think it can be argued that the second practice, worshiping a god that we have created in our own image, is the greater blasphemy. It is one thing to worship something other than God, to replace God with something that we find more important, consciously or unconsciously. It is another level of dissembling to lie to oneself and others about who God is, to make and perpetuate a false image of God to serve our own purposes. One could say this has a lot of similarity to another commandment: taking the Lord’s name in vain. Our Swedenborg reading makes it clear that this process is worshipping that which comes from the self. We human beings are so very susceptible to this common failing, so much so that it is immortalized in our fairytales: Mirror Mirror on the Wall, who is the greatest of them all? We look into the reflection that we are pretending is God and of course *this* god says: You my Queen, You my King. You are the greatest of them all, the most devoted, and the most devout, a warrior for our cause. And we are satisfied. But it is, of course, an illusion. Just as much as the angry God in this story, the one where God’s mercy needs to be explained as the brainchild of human being. Many times, we are looking at God through a veil of our own construction. Swedenborg writes further: Nor do those truths have the Lord within them which are taken from the Word, in particular from the sense of the letter there, and interpreted in favour of personal dominion and personal gain. In themselves these are truths because they come from the Word yet they are not truths because they are interpreted wrongly. (3) The story of the golden calf is a very human story. And it is also a warning. Particularly in times of challenge and uncertainty, we crave certainty, and the surety of our rightness, and the easiest way to get that is to just make a god ourselves, and to make a god *out* of ourselves. But this is not what the life of the spirit calls us to. It calls us to a difficult practice of patience and trust and openness, one that will reveal to us our shortcomings but will also lead us to a land that will be our home. This is what our God ultimately looks like: one who leads and loves. Amen.
Readings: Exodus 32:1-14 1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” 2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD.” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. 7 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ 9 “I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. 10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.” 11 But Moses sought the favor of the LORD his God. “LORD,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’ ” 14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. Secrets of Heaven #8869 'You shall not make for yourself a graven image' means no product of self-intelligence. This is clear from the meaning of 'a graven image' as that which does not come from the Lord but from a person's self. A product of one's own understanding is meant by 'a graven image', and a product of one's own will by 'a molded image'. Having either kind as a god or venerating it is loving all that comes from self more than anything else….These are 'the makers of graven images', and the images themselves are what they hatch from their own understanding and will, and wish to be venerated as things that are Divine.
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 Readings: Exodus 17:1-7, Matthew 21:23-27, Secrets of Heaven 8445 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Yoshihiro on Unsplash We are in our third week of journeying with the Children of Israel in the wilderness, and by now the themes are starting to sound familar. And there is a reason for that: we all know there is nothing easy about extended trips with lots of people! How many of us have hurled this command towards the back seat of a car: “you stop fighting or I’m stopping this car right now!” We might well resonate with Moses’ frustrated cry: What am I to do with these people! Traveling can bring us face to face with our flaws, as we are challenged to be resilient, flexible, patient, and resourceful. This is one reason why these wilderness stories can speak to us so deeply about traveling on the path of life. All the ways in which the Children of Israel were challenged, we find in them a picture of how we are challenged, for we are all human, are we not? This week, the Israelites are still traveling from place to place. They reach a place called Rephidim and find there is no water to drink. They start sniping at Moses, and again wonder why they were on the journey at all, if they are just going to die of thirst. The Lord answers them of course, and bids Moses strike a rock with his staff, so that it might flow with water for the Israelites to drink. And like last week, this story is a picture of a kind of temptation, or spiritual challenge, we might experience during our life, from time to time. Let’s first contrast it with last week’s story. Swedenborg tells us that the story of the manna in the wilderness from last week speaks of a challenge in which we cannot see or find or feel any goodness. In terms of our experience with these difficult times, for example, this might be like sadness and disappointment with the state of the country, or political discourse, or the behavior of other human beings, it might be fear around the direction we are going, it might be cynicism that nothing we do matters. And the question for that story becomes, do we believe that the Lord is working to bring goodness and love and growth into being, in large and small ways, no matter how challenging things might seem? If we can believe that, we will see the manna available to us. This week, we get a picture of a different kind of temptation. Bread represents goodness; water represents truth.(1) The Israelites were thirsty, desperately thirsty. And this is a picture of a challenge in which we cannot see or find or feel any truth, a temptation in which we are thirsting for truth, wanting to know what is real and right and true, but for whatever reason, it feels obscure to us. (AC8568) Hmmm, can anyone resonate with this right now? We are all drowning in a sea of opinion, hot takes, and diminished or untrustworthy authority at the moment, holding fast to the narrative of our particular “team,” and it make us unmoored and off-balance. Water all around us but none we can truly drink, none that will quench our thirst. But it might be helpful at this point to make a distinction. There is a difference between “facts” and “truth” in a larger philosophical sense. Many times in our social and political realm, people say they want to know the “truth” but what they really want to know are the “facts” of a matter, facts that represent the reality of a matter as closely as we are able to discern. And this is an important thing! Transparency and accountability matter! A shared allegiance to facts is what allows conversation and collaboration to flourish. When we can no longer agree on what is a fact, conversation becomes impossible. And then, there is the larger notion of truth. Yes, the word truth can certainly be properly used to describe facts that do represent reality. But also, the word truth can describe precepts that are beyond factual proof. Ideas like: the dignity of all human beings is important; we all have a responsiblity to each other; honesty, sacrifice and service are honorable traits; God is here with us, even now. This last one, is often the final central question in many of our spiritual temptations. The Israelites were wondering “Is the Lord among us or not?” As we read the story, that doubt might seem incredible given the miracles that the Lord had already, visibly wrought for them. But I think it is a doubt that we can all recognize, right? Is this not the secret heart, the secret cry, of many of our own temptations? We look at the world right now, with all its challenges, and we wonder: Where is God? Is God among us or not? How does God engage with the world? What is God calling *me* to do? And we want answers to these questions that feel “true” to us, in that larger sense of the word. And so we resonate with the exhausted, traumatized, thirsty Israelites wondering “Is the Lord among us or not?” but turning that vulnerable wondering into a concrete complaint: how can Moses (and by extension God) let us camp here without water?” Moses is exasperated. So God engages in a little religious theatre. He asks Moses to take his staff, the very staff that convinced Moses of God’s power, the very staff that was used to convince Pharaoh of God’s power, and in front of the elders, (which were the leadership of the Israelites), Moses reminds the people of this truth once again, God listens, God cares, God will provide and God has the power to do so. As water gushes forth from the rock, and we look at that water through the eyes of correspondences, we are likewise invited to ask: What gives truth its power, it’s power in being able to speak to us, it’s power in action, it’s power to represent what is truly real? Swedenborgian doctrine is unequivocal: goodness and service gives any truth its power, and connecting with this goodness this is how God is among us. I would argue that you won’t find a more foundational doctrine in Swedenborgianism than the assertion that truth takes its life and soul from goodness. For truth to actually be true, it must forward, perpetuate and advocate for goodness, love and service. If some principle is devoid of goodness, then it can never be spiritually true, no matter if it *sounds* true to our brains, to our egos, to our emotions. No matter if it calms our fears and makes us feel better, or gets us what we want. Falsity can do that just as well as truth, maybe even more so. We see this demonstrated in our other lectionary reading for today, from the gospel of Matthew. In it, the chief priests are asked a question, but they resist answering truthfully for self-centered reasons. They chose to answer in a way that would avoid any accountability, that would simply calm the crowds and get them out of a jam. Their thinking was not based in truth but in expedience. This is the irony of that story, that they were challenging Jesus authority yet abdicated their own because they did not value truthfulness. They answered “We don’t know.” And that is not a bad answer, if meant honestly. There is definitely a lot we don’t know, all the time, and we should be willing to admit to that. But the chief priests meant the answer falsely, even if it had the appearance of truth, for there is a big difference between humility and avoidance. Instead, in the story of striking the rock with the staff, we are reminded of the basic things we *do* know. As we look for truth, as we endeavor to quench our thirst, we know that the power of truth lies in goodness. We may not know the answer to everything yet, now or ever, but we know that much. And that foundational knowledge can go a long long way. Last week, the Israelites asked “What is it?” and we were reminded that, when we look to God for sustenance, that it might come to us in ways that we don’t immediately recognize. This week, we are looking less for sustenance and more for guidance. The question is more, what do we do? How do we orient our life and our behavior? And the answer is to follow the staff to the rock and watch it make the water flow. The answer is to look for truth that finds its power in love, service, sacrifice and dignity. This is the power that quenches our thirst, and keeps us on the journey. This is how the Lord is among us. Amen.
Readings: Exodus 17:1-7 1 The whole Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place to place as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 So they quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the LORD to the test?” 3 But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?” 4 Then Moses cried out to the LORD, “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5 The LORD answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the LORD saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?” Matthew 21:23-27 23 Jesus entered the temple courts, and, while he was teaching, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you this authority?” 24 Jesus replied, “I will also ask you one question. If you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. 25 John’s baptism—where did it come from? Was it from heaven, or of human origin?”They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘Of human origin’—we are afraid of the people, for they all hold that John was a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.” Then he said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things. Secrets of Heaven #8554 The previous chapter dealt in the internal sense with a third temptation - a stage when good was lacking. The present chapter deals in the internal sense with the stage that came after the people had been given that good - a fourth temptation, in which truth was lacking. This temptation is meant by the grumbling of the children of Israel because they had no water; so they were given the truth of faith by the Lord, which is meant by the water from the rock of Horeb.  Readings: Exodus 16:1-15, Divine Providence 59 (see below)
See also on Youtube Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash I think perhaps we all can, at some point in our lives, feel some resonance with the experience of the Children of Israel. Obviously, not with their literal circumstances, but with the metaphorical sense of being in the wilderness, of feeling unmoored, lost, unsure, abandoned, afraid. We are in challenging times right now, my friends. We are experiencing a time of extreme political division in the United States, a heightened tension around questions of human rights, political competence and honesty, and the continuance of democratic ideals. Yet, there is also something about this story that might not sit right with the moment. The unease we feel right now, the way our conscience rises up in objection to violence, dehumanization, hypocrisy, cruelty - surely that is not merely grumbling. No, it is not. When there is true suffering and oppression, like when the Israelites cried out to God from the midst of slavery, this deserves to be heard in authenticity and fullness. And God did hear that, and God brought the Children of Israel out of slavery. As we heard in the sermon last week, God is always working against forces of domination, control, and superiority, and towards systems of cooperation, empathy, and care. This story though, is talking about a different way that God is shows up. A way that provides nourishment and fosters trust even into situations that are more messy and confused, especially when those messy and confused places are our own minds. While it may at first be easy to dismiss the grumbling of the Children of Israel as mere petulance, there is something deeper about it that may feel begrudgingly familiar to all of us. We can recognize the fear and grief within it. Swedenborg writes that this is exactly what is indicated by the internal sense of their grumbling.(1) And so we are challenged to ask ourselves: how are *we* processing our own feelings of fear and grief right now? We see the Children of Israel transmuting feelings of grief and fear into grievance, which is a common human reaction. What are some other ways? Grief and fear sometimes hide behind despair, anxiety, helplessness, busy-ness and control, escape and pleasure-seeking, detachment, or overwork, to name just a few. Part of the invitation of spiritual work is to notice our own strategies of evasion and to go a little deeper, to willingly take on the responsibility of processing our own insecurities, so that then we might be able to show up to our lives with greater clarity and purpose. But interestingly, this story is not so much about what *we* do. While we can infer a message about our response to our own wilderness times, this story is more about God’s action. What this story tells us is that God hears us, hears whatever our unprocessed story might be and responds with compassion. We don’t have be a fully actualized person before God will hear our prayers. God sees who we are and sees what is below the surface and responds in a way that will help us to take whatever next steps we need into fuller understanding. God stepped up into the experience of the Israelites and provided for them the most basic of securities: nourishment for the day. Many interpretations of this story talk about trust. The fact that the manna could not be hoarded, could not be kept beyond one day (except for the Sabbath) meant that the Israelites had to trust that it would be there every morning. They were being invited to salve their fear and grief and worry with the knowledge that God would show up for them consistently, that God was steadfast. But what is standing out to me about this story today, is that while it can be argued that the grumbling came from a sense of distrust, the distrust itself came from an act of forgetting, or even an active misremembering.(2) As the Israelites experienced hunger in the wilderness, they cast their minds back to their time in Egypt and remembered the food available to them there. They yearned for their full bellies in that time, conveniently forgetting that the cost of that food was unrelenting labor. They yearned for the simplicity of knowing that food would be on the table, conveniently forgetting that the cost of that food was their lack of autonomy. They grumbled about the uncertainty of the wilderness, conveniently forgetting that God had just parted the Red Sea for them, conveniently forgetting all the miracles that had led to their freedom. And so, as the Israelites wake in the morning and see the manna on the ground, they ask “What is it?” They meant it literally, as they had no idea what it was. But I also see a more poetic meaning to that question, one that points towards the forgetting that brought the manna to them in the first place. The manna in verse 4 is called bread from heaven. Throughout Swedenborg’s interpretive landscape, bread means goodness.(3) Just as bread nourishes our bodies, so does goodness nourish our soul, our heart, our mind. Goodness and love given from ourselves to others, goodness and love offered to us from other people. We cannot live without it, in a most basic emotional sense. And so metaphorically, in this story, we are invited to see how God is committed to providing us with as much spiritual goodness as we are willing to gather in each day. And then God shows up again the next morning. This arrangement is not contingent on our diligence or our foresight; we don’t have to gather enough for both today and tomorrow or next week or next month. This arrangement is contingent on God’s nature; on the ongoing giving essence of God’s divine love. But sometimes, many times, we forget. The stress of our lives, our ongoing challenges, contribute to a sense of amnesia about who God is. We might look back at previous times with longing, forgetting that *all* times have their challenges, and that God helped us through them even then. We might even look back and re-tell the story with ourselves as the hero. And then when we see the manna given to us, we look at it without recognition: what is it? Though God’s care for us has been manifest so many times before, we still ask, what is it? Trust is built on remembrance but there is so much that can distract us or tempt us from a true remembering. And while we sometimes might forget the obvious goodnesses that come to us in challenging times: the sunset, the smile, the meal, the song, the nap that we needed; what we forget *most* often is that goodness also comes through our challenges, not just in spite of them. That God does of course apply a balm to our woundedness so that healing might come to us, but not as if somehow we could get back to being un-wounded. God helps us to see how goodness might come through our woundedness, how we might integrate our woundedness into our own sense of wholeness, and to know that no part of our experience is wasted, or alienated from God’s active care. We don’t recognize the manna because, on the outside, it doesn’t always look like something that will nourish us. But if we could remember how deeply God works for us, we might see… …oh right, goodness happens when I have this kind of difficult, brave conversation. Oh right, goodness happens when I allow myself to rest. Oh right, goodness happens when I commit to doing the hard right thing. Oh right, goodness happens when I let myself grieve, or be angry, or stand up for myself. Oh right, goodness happens when I take this challenge and see what I can learn from it. Oh right, goodness happens when I put aside my version of how things are supposed to go. Father Richard Rohr writes: If I were to name the Christian religion, I would probably call it “The Way of the Wound.” Jesus agrees to be the Wounded One, and we Christians are these strange believers in a wounded healer. We come to God not through our strength but through our weakness. We learn wisdom and come to God not by doing it all right but through doing it all wrong…If we do not transform our pain, we will always transmit it. Always someone else has to suffer because we don’t know how to suffer; that’s what it comes down to.(4) In this story, with all its grumbling, we find not a judgment but an invitation. An invitation to take an active part in our ongoing transformation, one that God modeled for us in Jesus. God knows who are all are. God knows our forgetful natures, our selective memories, our desire to feel that we have some control. As we grumble, or whatever it is that we do to avoid our grief and fear, God knows it can be a stepping stone into lament, that lament can be a stepping stone into surrender, surrender can be a stepping stone into trust, and trust can be a stepping stone into loving and wise action. We are given a gentle reminder: What is it? Oh right, I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen that: In everything that it does, the Lord’s divine providence is focusing on what is infinite and eternal (4). Amen. (1) Emmanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #8402. (2) Michael J. Chan, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4573 (3) Emmanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #8414. (4) Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, “Transforming our Pain,” September 18, 2020 (5) Emmanuel Swedenborg, Divine Providence #46 Readings: Exodus 16:1-15 1 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” 4 Then the LORD said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.” 6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, “In the evening you will know that it was the LORD who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?” 8 Moses also said, “You will know that it was the LORD when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the LORD.” 9 Then Moses told Aaron, “Say to the entire Israelite community, ‘Come before the LORD, for he has heard your grumbling.’ ” 10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the LORD appearing in the cloud. 11 The LORD said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God.’ ” 13 That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat. Divine Providence 59 …divine providence focuses on our eternal state at every step of our journey. It cannot focus on anything else because Divinity is infinite and eternal, and what is infinite or eternal or divine is not in time. It therefore sees the whole future as present. Since this is the nature of Divinity, it follows that there is something eternal in everything it does, overall and in detail. …people who are engaged with divinity base their thinking on the Lord and are thinking in eternal terms even while they think about what is present to them…when we both think and live this way, then emanating divinity with us, or divine providence, focuses on the state of our eternal life in heaven at every step of our journey, and is leading us to it.  Readings: Exodus 14:9-16, 21-31, Secrets of Heaven 8206 (see below)
See also on Youtube Today we pop up right in the middle of some serious action for Moses and the Children of Israel. Let’s back up a little to set the scene, and see how we got here. One of Israel’s early patriarchs, Jacob, would have son named Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt. But due to Joseph’s success there, eventually his whole family would join him as honored citizens in that new land. Over generations, Joseph’s family grew into a numerous people, known as the Children of Israel. And unfortunately, over time, the leaders of Egypt grew fearful of the Children of Israel and enslaved them, forcing them to perform hard labor. Into this situation eventually comes Moses, an Israelite child secretly adopted into the Egyptian royal family, who after being called by God in the form of a burning bush, sets out to free his brethren. The Pharaoh, of course, has no interest in freeing such a lucrative source of labor for Egypt, but after God sends ten plagues upon him, he finally relents and lets the Children of Israel leave. And this is just about where we find ourselves in our text today. The Children of Israel have followed Moses into the desert away from Egypt and towards his vision of safety in the promised land. But eventually they come to the vast Red Sea, which hems them in and they can go no further. Even though Pharaoh agreed to their leaving, he cannot resist such a strategic gift, and he once again tries to assert his dominance. He orders his mighty army to pursue the Children of Israel and bring them back. The Children of Israel are understandably afraid, and begin to wonder if they should have left Egypt at all. But God works a mighty miracle through Moses, who parts the waters of the Red Sea in two, so that the Children of Israel might walk on dry land to the other side, and the pursuing Egyptians are drowned in the sea as the waters return. This story has been a powerfully important narrative of liberation for many peoples over time. It gives hope because it tells us not only what God will do but what God is for. God is for the freedom and autonomy of people who are enslaved and diminished, and God is against forces that dominate and degrade and take advantage. This is an important thing to know about God. The Swedenborgian interpretation brings it home to the level of our own personal psychological landscape: the domineering and hard hearted Pharaoh represents false ideas that enslave us. Perhaps we can all identify a particular idea that has gotten its hooks into us and prevents us from living as freely and authentically and as kindly as we might otherwise. Perhaps we have a story, a false but seductive story, that we tell ourselves about someone’s approval that we need, about our own lack of worthiness or conversely about our own natural superiority, a story about how we think things are supposed to go, about who our children are supposed to be, a story about what constitutes success, or honor, or safety, a story about what God wants that ever so conveniently coincides with what we also want. We all have many notions such as these, bumping around inside of us. We are all enslaved to false ideas of some kind or variety, under the thumb of a metaphorical Pharaoh, being made to do Pharaoh’s bidding, and building mighty monuments that perpetuate his dominion, all inside our own mind. But the Children of Israel represent our growing awareness that there is freedom that can be had, that there is something else beyond that which Pharaoh decrees. They represent truths becoming clearer from goodness and love. The growing recognition that the false Pharaoh idea does not serve love and goodness, doesn’t not perpetuate love and goodness, and it so must not be true after all. In this moment, we start to wriggle free from our servitude. And our text today gives us one way of understanding how God is present for us within this dynamic. Newly free, newly exploring what it feels like to think differently, we are not always free and clear right away. Reframing or reimagining how we think is often a lengthy winding process. We start to let go, we explore new ways of seeing things, but the old ideas hang on, coming back for us when we are particularly vulnerable or stressed. This is pictured by the Pharaoh’s army pursuing us, well after we thought we were finally free of them. In these times, we might feel frustrated, disappointed, afraid. The children of Israel resort to some dark sarcasm towards Moses saying: “Were there no graves in Egypt that you have brought us into the desert to die?” They are panicking. But Moses tells them simply: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still.” And from this we understand that we are not in this alone. When we wish for freedom from false ideas, from ingrained and habitual ways of thinking, God helps to preserve and grow that freedom within us. If we were to look at Swedenborg’s verse by verse interpretation of this story, every action that occurs, the pillars of fire and cloud standing in the way, Moses stretching out his arm, the waters parting and standing as a wall - they are all in various ways picturing how God works to protect us internally from the false ideas that we are trying to move away from. And what is particularly important about this dynamic is the one that is highlighted in the reading: we are active participants in the process. When we move away from false ideas, and back that up with choosing new behaviors that allow us to live in a new way, this is the dynamic into which God can act. Our false ideas, “they are constantly attempting to rush in…, but they cannot do so because the Lord's presence, residing in the goodness and truth, holds them back.” When we take our own steps towards freedom, tiny but concrete steps, good and loving steps, God resides in the growing goodness and love that is being born there, and works from the center of our being to expand our access to our new freedom, to our new ways of living. The biblical text is but a pictorial representation of a process that might well take many go arounds, but it helps us to get a sense of God’s will for us, and God’s desire to help us. But now, as with all Swedenborgian interpretation, which shows us how the bible about our own internal process, it is important to also turn in the other direction and broaden the scope, lest the message become too much about our own internal reality, or exclusively about the personal spiritual journey. The bible IS about the personal spiritual journey, but all of our personal spiritual journeys are inter-connected. The false ideas that govern our thinking, feeling and acting, ripple outward from us like the circles from a stone dropped in a pond. False ideas based in domination, control, cruelty, superiority, tribalism; they have a cost, not only a cost to our psyche, but an actual human cost, to individual people and to society. The personal and the societal work hand and hand. The Pharaoh, enslaved himself by avarice, ego, domination in own mind, turns around and enslaves the children of Israel in body. I know we seeing versions of this dynamic being borne out all around us these days, and it is heavy heavy thing. When false ideas are enacted through policy and culture they create suffering. We all have a collective responsibility to prevent this suffering, and to recognize when our own inner Pharaoh is adversely affecting the lives of others. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr has said, no one is free until we are all free. And this takes on a particularly complicated shade when we get to verses 28-30: 28 The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived…30 That day the LORD saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. We might wonder, how are we supposed to react to this? Are we supposed to be happy that the Egyptian soldiers are dead? Does the bible include this verse so we can gloat and cheer that they got what was coming? Surely not. One commentary that I drew from for this sermon pointed to the Talmud for illumination on this point, and I quote: …ministering angels desired to sing a song of praise before God in response to the decisive victory over the Egyptians. God, however, said to them: “My handiwork [the Egyptians] are drowning in the sea, and you are reciting a song before me?” These observations illuminate Exodus 14’s ethical sophistication.(1) I so appreciate how the author highlights this aspect. The parting of the Red Sea is an iconic, exciting and cinematic battle, and the ones we are rooting for, the children of Israel, are victorious! But this story doesn’t actually allow us to have it so easy. It resists being a “tribalistic, us-vs-them story.”(2) Even as we acknowledge that God saved the Israelites, we must also look at the Egyptian soldiers dead on the shore (in the very same verse, and the very same sentence), and grapple with what that means. God sees the human cost of false ideas, the human cost of division, the human cost of collective hubris and the diminishment of empathy and God grieves it all. Let’s be clear; the army was prevented by God from doing the harm that Pharaoh intended. God’s stand is not negotiable; God’s stands for the value of every human person, and means for enslavement, for dominion over others, to end, in whatever form it takes. But God looks back at the whole it, and grieves every lost life, even the ones lost while still living, like Pharaoh. And thank goodness this is so, for otherwise our God would be nothing but the captain of our particular team, and what a small God that would be. Amen.
Readings: Exodus 14:9-16, 21–31 9 The Egyptians—all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, horsemen and troops—pursued the Israelites and overtook them as they camped by the sea…10 As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the LORD. 11 They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” 13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” 15 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. 16 Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground. 21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, 22 and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued them, and all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and horsemen followed them into the sea. 24 During the last watch of the night the LORD looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion. 25 He jammed the wheels of their chariots so that they had difficulty driving. And the Egyptians said, “Let’s get away from the Israelites! The LORD is fighting for them against Egypt.” 26 Then the LORD said to Moses,“Stretch out your hand over the sea so that the waters may flow back over the Egyptians and their chariots and horsemen.” 27 Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at daybreak the sea went back to its place. The Egyptians were fleeing toward it, and the LORD swept them into the sea. 28 The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived. 29 But the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. 30 That day the LORD saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. 31 And when the Israelites saw the mighty hand of the LORD displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant. Secrets of Heaven #8206 'And the waters were a wall for them on their right and on their left' means that they were held back from falsities on every side… [2] Goodness accompanied by truth destroys, that is, removes evil accompanied by falsity, because goodness is from God and consequently possesses all power…When the evils accompanied by falsities residing with a person are removed they stand around us, as stated, like a wall. They are constantly attempting to rush in on a person, but they cannot do so because the Lord's presence, residing in the goodness and truth, holds them back. These are the considerations meant by the waters being like a wall for them on the left and on the right…Yet no one can be held back from evil and maintained in good unless they have received that ability through exercising charity in the world. A life of good, that is, a life led in accordance with the truths of faith, and therefore an affection for or a love of good, achieves this. The person who has a love of and affection for good as a result of the life they lead can be in a sphere of goodness and truth, but not one who through the life they lead has taken on the nature of evil. |
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