Readings: John 2:13-25, Secrets of Heaven #10143:3 (see below)
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Today we advance one chapter beyond the prologue to the gospel of John chapter two. Jesus has just turned water into wine at a wedding in the town of Cana. Now he enters Jerusalem and visits the temple. He is moved to clear it out of the people selling animals and changing currency. Which understandably causes quite a stir. Jesus clearing the temple is a story that is in all four gospels, although the gospel of John places it much earlier in the narrative than the other three.

Why were there sellers in the temple in the first place? Jewish temple practice at the time involved animal sacrifice. Observant Jews from all over the region would travel to the temple and would not be able to bring animals with them, so they could procure them from these sellers. Likewise, the temple tax could not be paid in Roman or Greek coins because of the human image of the emperor upon them, so foreign coins could also be exchanged at the temple. We must recognize that the presence alone of these sellers and exchangers was not the problem; they allowed regular people to participate in temple worship. Nor was Jesus’ issue with them a critique of Judaism itself; Jesus himself was an observant Jew and the gospels details many instances of him diligently following Jewish religious practice.

What was the issue then? The Jesus of the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke explicitly calls these merchants “robbers,” the implication being that they were taking advantage of a religious imperative upon regular people for their own gain. This is a super important critique of all religious systems. When such systems make some observance, practice, or theology necessary to one’s salvation, this opens the door to exploitation of many kinds. And we’ve all seen enough price gouging in our day to know that human beings will try to take advantage of others whenever they can.

But the Jesus in John’s gospel doesn’t call the sellers and exchangers robbers. He just says Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” In the Greek there is a measure of wordplay around the word house: he is saying you are turning a house of worship into a house of trade. This is a larger and more systemic critique. Rather than focusing on isolated abuses, he is lifting up how religious systems can themselves become transactional. A modern example might be what is called the Prosperity Gospel. It is a predatory form of evangelical Christianity that convinces vulnerable people that giving money to the church will incentivize God to provide blessings. But we know that’s not how God works. Charitable giving can certainly help expand us in empathy for those around us, but it doesn’t buy God’s favor.

So here, Jesus is making a social and religious critique of human systems, something he does a lot. We can also take it one step further in thinking about how it applies to our own spiriutal journey. In the Swedenborgian worldview, we understand the temple to represent our own mind. And it begs the question: in what ways do we allow our own mind to become a house of trade rather than a house of worship. What sellers and exchangers have taken up residence within our minds, our narratives, our perspectives that keep us focused worldly and transactional concerns rather than on a relationship with God, or on maintaining a safe status quo rather than the way God would have us evolve?

Perhaps we have experienced abandonment in the past and now we have created a hard shell to feel safe. That feels like a reasonable exchange but does it allow for growth? Perhaps we have experienced rejection and now we reject others in anticipation to protect our heart. That feels like a reasonable exchange but does it allow for connection? Perhaps at some point we came to believe that our accomplishments will bring us worthiness, so we continue to try to *earn* love and respect from others. That feels like a reasonable exchange but does it allow for inevitable imperfection? Does it allow for peace? Does it allow for the grace of God’s love?

Because God does not traffic with these sellers. God does not use them, God does not need them. So, God invites us to clear them out. This is not a judgment on them being there. We all have ways that we have learned to adapt to circumstances and to trauma, ways that we have learned to make our way through the world; all perfectly reasonable and understandable from a worldly point of view. But God’s relationship with us is not built on trade. God’s relationship with us is built on connection. And, as we learned last week, God’s purposes involve using God’s creative power to create newness within us and our world. For that to happen, for a path to be cleared for newness, sometimes these sellers of stories and these exchangers of worthiness need to be cleared out.

But as represented in our text for today, clearing out these sellers and exchangers that we have previously relied upon can create chaos. Again, like the people observing Jesus, we might have reasonable questions about whether the chaos is worth it, what it might ultimately serve, and why it needs to happen. 

So, the people asked Jesus by what authority he was acting. Because it is not unusual, as we well know from current events, for people to try to create chaos for their own selfish purposes. And what Jesus points to as his authority is the sacrifice he is going to make. His authority for clearing out the temple comes from his sacrifice rather than a desire for power. And this is a point that Jesus will make over and over again, with his words and with his life. When we human beings act with a desire for power, all that will come out of that is harm and destruction. When we act from an ethos of sacrifice (and by this I don’t mean being a doormat, but rather a holistic ethos that means we care about others just as much as ourselves), when we act from that kind of ethos of sacrifice, newness and change may *still* feel like chaos but they will ultimately lead to resurrection, they will lead somewhere better.

So Jesus says cryptically, metaphorically, that if the temple is destroyed (and chaos really can feel like destruction) then he will raise it in three days. When we act from an ethos of sacrifice, then Jesus promises that the temple can be rebuilt, meaning that a heavenly selfhood can be built within us. Swedenborg writes that the significance of three days (a number always signifying wholeness or completeness) points us towards the three pillars or tasks of our spiritutal growth: repentance, reformation, regeneration. Repentance: seeking clarity, accepting accountability. Reformation: working for change, making space for growth. Regeneration: allowing God to make us anew. As we heard in our Swedenborg reading for today, when we practice this kind of faith, love, and life, then “Divine Worship” is present in everything we do. Our life becomes the temple. Our life becomes an embodiment of Jesus’ ethos of sacrifice.

Now I didn’t necessarily intend to preach what feels like more of an Easter sermon right before Advent! But it can be helpful for us to remember where the Christmas story is heading. Birth is disruptive, as much as it beautiful, and hopeful. The sweet baby in the manger grew up and took out a whip (!) and drove the sellers from the temple, challenging us to remove anything that gets in the way of truly worshipping our God. This will be a life-long process for ourselves, and a process spanning many life-times for the human race. All we can promise is to do our part.

Amen.

Readings:
John 2:13-25
13 When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.
15 So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.
16 To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”
17 His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
18 The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
20 They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?”
21 But the temple he had spoken of was his body.
22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
23 Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name.
24 But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people.
25 He did not need any testimony about humankind, for he knew what was in each person.

Secrets of Heaven 10143:3
…purification from evils and falsities consists in refraining from them, steering clear of them, and loathing them; the implantation of goodness and truth consists in thinking and willing what is good and what is true, and in speaking and doing them; and the joining together of the two consists in leading a life composed of them. For when the good and truth residing with a person have been joined together their will is new and their understanding is new, consequently their life is new. When this is how a person is, Divine worship is present in every deed they perform; for at every point the person now has what is Divine in view, respects and loves it, and in so doing worships it.

Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, John 1:1-18, Apocalypse Revealed #940 (see below)
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Today we gently start making our way towards the Advent season by spending some time with the beginning of John’s gospel, which is known as John’s prologue. Unlike Luke and Matthew, John’s gospel does not begin with a birth narrative but rather a theological reflection. 

Part poetry, part prose, the prologue draws on what may well be an early Christian hymn, as well as ideas from the Jewish wisdom tradition, weaving it together with the introduction of the character of John the Baptist, as a witness to the coming of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God.

Part of what the author of the prologue is trying to express is the enormity of the eternal acting in, through, and upon the temporal. It describes an eternal God reaching out to enter into our human world, our human lives. The gospel writer borrows an idea from Jewish and Greek philosophy to speak about the eternal part. What we translate in English as the Word, is the greek term Logos - meaning in a broader sense “the creative plan of God that governs the world.” (1) The gospel writer uses that term in a new way, speaking about a new part of  God’s creative plan that governs the world: the incarnation of Godself as a person.

The author deliberately starts the prologue with an allusion to the first words in the bible: In the beginning… In the beginning, God spoke everything into being in the book of Genesis. And throughout the Hebrew Scriptures God would continue to speak through the law and the prophets. And now, the author tells us, that same Word, that same creative power, that same creative ethos, will enter into our world as one of us. This is what we will soon celebrate during Advent. God continuing to create. God continuing to create worlds within us and around us. The author then segues to using another poetic term with connection to the story of creation: light. In Genesis, God said Let there be light, and it was the beginning of everything. Now in the prologue we are told that the light is still shining, and it is indeed still the beginning and the source, of all life. God’s creative power is life-giving, in the beginning, and now.

A large part of the prologue is given over to a consideration of our response to God’s creative power, asking what then is our reaction to the light? How does the world react? The word translated here as world is not actually referring to the earth as a planet, but rather humanity and its domain. What will the reaction of humanity and its domain be to the on-going shining of the light? Rejection or acceptance? And what will *our* reaction be? What will our reaction be to God’s essential creativity, God’s ongoing project of creating new life? The answer here can tell us a lot about our basic stance towards the project of spirituality.

The whole of what is powerful about the notion of creativity is that creativity makes something new that didn’t exist before. Creativity is the power to make something new. Both Genesis and John tell metaphorical stories about the scope of God’s creative power on a grand scale, but the way that *we* most intimately come to know and experience God’s creative power is from the way that God is able to act inside of us. It is the experience of God creating something new within and through us. The same power whereby God created the universe helps us create a delicious meal, tell a great story, craft a beatiful toy or piece of clothing, build a community. The same power piece by piece forms new insights within our minds, or expands our capacity to love in new ways. And the question becomes again: what is our reaction to this process, to this power?

Because if we are not on board with this essentially creative aspect of God, then what are we even doing here at church? Any spiritual project, in any tradtion of spiritual journeying, has to be about newness, or it isn’t really about God, it’s about our comfort. If we really are committed to spirituality, then we have to WANT to understand things in a new way, and to not simply be affirmed in our certainty. We have to WANT to learn to love in new ways, and not simply be told who we are allowed to exclude.
And this is what much of religion, or people’s practice of it, gets wrong. (Various forms of religious nationalism, I’m looking at you). When religion becomes of project of “arriving” - getting the right belief which then confers some measure of chosenness, of superiority, of certainty, it has to necessarily reject newness, evolution, and growth, because those things threaten that elite and self-satisfied status. When religion serves the self, it wants nothing to do with newness.

The gospel of John poetically depicts this dynamic when it speaks of the light shining in the darkness. The word used to describe the response of the darkness to the light is a fascinating one. Our reading says the darkness has not overcome the light, but some translators say the darkness does not comprehend the light. And I think it is the latter that gets more closely to what we are speaking about today. 

The darkness suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s purposes. God’s presence is life-giving light, and the whole reason it is life-giving is because it is creative - it makes newness. It continually creates and evolves life within us, continually invites us to re-evaluate and grow. This is how God builds heaven within us, and how we become more loving and wise, more angelic. This is what we are all doing here, this is why we were created in the first place. God did not create us to be stagnant and self-satisfied, God created us with the intention and the invitaton that we might participate in and partner with God’s creative power, so that ultimately, we might also be able to as fully as we can experience the essence of God’s love.

Swedenborg wrote about a kind of spiritual movement, a kind of spiritual consciousness, that was dedicated to partnering with God’s creative power and he called it “The New Church.” He saw it as a necessary step in the evolution of God’s relationship with humanity, and a necessary step in each person’s spiritual journey. The earthly ecclesiastical organizations that coalesced around his writings also called themselves “The New Church” aspirationally, as a reminder of what they were looking towards, and also as a way to differentiate themselves because they were looking at Christian theology in a new way.

Two hundred years later though, this movement is no longer new and the name is super confusing. Our branch of the movement now mostly uses Swedenborgianism to refer to the tradition. Which is fine. It’s a workaday name that says what it means. But it also cannot communicate the expansive theology at the center of what Swedenborg was trying to say about God and about how religion tends to ossify and exclude and forget what God’s essential creative power is all about.

The New Church, as a name, did once apply to a new movement. Now though, I believe it applies because we are committed to newness, and more specifically committed to a God that works through newness. We believe in a God who is a compassionate loving wise force, and who is dedicated to the creation of newness within us. The word that our tradition gives to the process of spiritual growth - regeneration - literally means making of something anew. We deeply believe in this principle. We believe that this is what God is all about, the most potent and effective expression of love that God can give. And I don’t mean change for the sake of change because that is exhausting. But I do mean the notion that people, relationships, institutions, ideas all need to continue to grow and change in order to continually become the best versions of themselves. In the simplest terms, God always invites us to open our hearts and minds, not close them down.

Now, none of this means that our tradition has been all that good that being committed to newness. Being committed to newness takes courage and equanimity and sometimes we just want certainty and sameness. I sure do! But I continue to be excited and energized by the idea of the New Church — people the world over being commited to welcoming and not willfully misunderstanding the light. I want to be a part of that, and I hope you will join me.

During Advent, we will celebrate the way that Jesus made God’s creative ethos known to us. We will celebrate a God who made his dwelling among us, and who found ways to help us, even now, gain insight and growth and inspiration. What an incredible act of creative power! The ripple effects have been beyond our imagining, and with our help, I hope they will continue to flow. Amen.

(1) The New Interpreter's Bible, p443


Readings:

Genesis 1:1-5
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

John 1:1-18
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was with God in the beginning.
3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe.
8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.
11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--
13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”)
16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.
17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Apocalypse Revealed 940
…in the New Jerusalem there will be no falsity in its faith, and the people in that church will not acquire their concepts of God from any natural sight, namely from their own intelligence, or out of a desire for glory springing from conceit, but they will acquire those concepts from the Lord alone in a state of spiritual light from the Word…
…a natural sight due to a desire for glory that does not spring from conceit is present in people who find a delight in useful endeavors out of a genuine love for the neighbor. Their natural sight is also a rational sight that has inwardly in it a spiritual light from the Lord. The desire for glory in them comes from the brilliance of the light flowing in from heaven, where everything is radiant and harmonious, for all useful endeavors in heaven shine.