Readings: I Samuel 2:1-10, Luke 1: 46-53, True Christianity 394 & 395:3 (see below)
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We’ve been jumping around in the Bible this fall. Early on, we spent some time in the book of Ruth, then hung out with Jesus for a while, then fast forwarded to the end of King David’s reign. Now we jump back to the days closer to the time of Ruth again, to hear a song of praise from a woman named Hannah.

To set the context: Hannah was to become the mother of the great prophet Samuel. But as we begin 1 Samuel, we find that she is the beloved wife of a man named Elkanah and she is also barren. She yearns for a son, especially since Elkanah’s other wife had many children, and was very nasty to Hannah on that account. So, Hannah went to pray at a holy place named Shiloh. She prayed so intensely but silently that the priest Eli thought she was drunk. But once she unburdened herself to him, he added his prayer to hers, and soon she found herself with child. In gratitude, when her son was weaned, she returned him to Shiloh and to Eli, so that his life might be given in service to the Lord.

It is at this point, that she sends another prayer up to God, the one we hear in our text today. She speaks of rejoicing and of praise, but most significantly she speaks of reversal. She speaks of those with power and strength being humbled, and of those who are empty and vulnerable being lifted up. She speaks of the fact that God is in the business of resurrection, of being present to those who suffer and enacting a change in their circumstances. She sings a song of God’s providence and care for human beings. Like many instances in the Hebrew Scriptures, the story and words of her as an individual character speak to the trajectory of the Israelite people as a whole.

Hannah’s words are echoed many books later in Mary’s song, often called The Magnificat. The similarities are obvious. Both are praising God after a miraculous pregnancy, both are drawing attention to the transformation of their lowly state into a triumphant one. Their vulnerabilities are slightly different: Hannah was older and married and despairing due to her barrenness, suffering due to the expectation that women would bear children, and the fact that their worthiness was often tied to their fertility. Mary was younger, inconsequential, as yet unmarried with no real status, a Jew under Roman rule, a nobody. But both received an invitation into a different reality, and both recognized what God was doing. That when God acts, there is always a necessary upheaval. 

Swedenborg writes that our love is our life; it is what drives and motivates us.(1) So of course, the quality of that love, *what* we love, determines the direction we are going. And as we heard in our reading today, Swedenborg organizes the kinds of human love into four main categories: Loving the Lord, loving others, loving the self, and loving the world. What is key, is that none of these loves, even the last two, are inherently bad, rather, it is the order that they are in that counts. Of course we should love ourselves; God wants us to feel self-confidence and self-worth, because we are beloved in God’s eyes. We should all see ourselves as God sees us. And of course we should love the world, not only the magnificence of creation but the ingenuity and the goodness of the societies that humans have built together. God blesses human striving and learning and making. But problems come when love of self and the world are constantly and unreasonably put first all the time. These loves then become shadow versions of themselves. A habitual centering of our selfhood and our benefit above others, a habitual coveting of worldly possessions and wealth and reputation; this is an inversion of God’s wise and loving divine order. That order of things, as Hannah and Mary both knew, will lead to a barrenness of the spirit.

Yet, how easy it is for the order to get out of whack! How easy for us personally, and collectively! How easy it is to be courted and seduced by ideologies of superiority and accumulation! To believe it is a good thing to put our own interest ahead of others because we have come to believe the other is deficient or dangerous in some way. To believe it is a good thing to accumulate as much as possible just because we can, or because we think it demonstrates our cleverness. To believe it is a good thing to win at any cost because our cause is so righteous. To believe it is a good thing to never change our minds, or be open to learning, because certainty is strength and openness is weakness.

But none of those ways of thinking are the gospel. None of those things are what is communicated by the story of Advent. A sweet and cooing baby in the manger is only part of the story. The rejoicing and the angels and the gift-giving are only part of the story. The main part of the story is that God’s providence for us always involves a necessary upheaval, the work of uprooting love of self and the world when they have settled in the wrong order and planting them back where they belong, as a support for mutual love. Even a welcome pregnancy is still an upheaval, it is just one we are expecting and waiting for. And this is why the Advent lectionary usually includes a healthy amount of John the Baptist. His whole deal is “get ready, prepare the way.” He doesn’t mean settle in with a cup of cocoa. He means get ready for a necessary upheaval. He means prepare yourself for the work of changing what needs to be changed.

Both women’s songs come during a time when Israel was struggling. In Hannah’s time, Israel was still a nation of tribes, suffering under corruption and disunity. In Mary’s time, Israel was captive under Roman rule, no longer captain of its own fate. Yet, into these troubling circumstances, these women spoke of a God who saw those struggles and cared about them, who stepped in to support a change of circumstances.

Hannah would give birth to Samuel, a great prophet, who would preside over the establishment of Israel as a kingdom. Mary would give birth to Jesus, who would transform our ideas about God and jumpstart a new religious movement. But we must notice though, that God doesn’t just change the circumstances themselves, wave a magic wand that suddenly makes everything perfect. God supports change by uplifting the process of new life, of birth. In each of these stories a child is born, who would go on to make choices that would have an amazing impact.

So too is the picture of our inner lives. God doesn’t just change the order of our loves like moving chess pieces on a board. Let’s be honest, we would just move them right back to where they were. God steps in by helping us to take advantage of situations where we can grow. God steps in by saying to us, “Would you like to grow this new life, this new way of doing things, inside of you? Here is a way that you can do it. Do you accept?” And the choice is ours. We can choose whether or not to give birth to something new that will change the way we see the world, and the way that we act within it.

And the way that we act within the world, collectively, makes a difference to all of us. What is so moving about Hannah and Mary’s songs is that they are not just talking about their own journey, they are not just talking about individual people, but systems of power. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap. Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more (1 Samuel 2:5, 8). This speaks to physical, social and spiritual realities all at the same time. The necessary upheavals in our own spirit play out in the choices that we make, and the choices that we make act together to create the world we live in.

This is what makes scripture so powerful, that we can see the levels of connection. We can see that Hannah and Mary are speaking of themselves *and* Israel, as well as speaking of us and our own time. We can see that the workings of their spirits are connected to our own, our own strivings and stumblings and triumphs. We can see the world they spoke of, in essence, still resembles the world we live in. And so the mighty question of Advent is not “how will be celebrate the birth of our Lord?” but “how will we be changed by it?” What necessary upheaval will we say yes to this year?

As we consider this question, we remember from Hannah’s song: But those who stumbled are armed with strength (I Samuel 2:2:4). This is the promise of Advent, a promise that we all need. The life of the spirit, the discipline of the life intentionally lived in relationship with spirit, means the acceptance of the necessity of upheaval. There are times, like Hannah, when we are praying fervently for it, knowing it needs to come, making ourselves ready. And there are times we are more like Mary, surprised and puzzled to find it on our doorstep. But either way, the Advent call is to take a deep breath and say “Yes Lord: Reinvent me according to your will.” So then we might also sing: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior (Luke 1:46-47).

Amen.

(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Providence #78


Readings:

1 Samuel 2:1-10

1 Then Hannah prayed and said: “My heart rejoices in the LORD; in the LORD my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance. 2 “There is no one holy like the LORD; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. 3 “Do not keep talking so proudly or let your mouth speak such arrogance, for the LORD is a God who knows, and by him deeds are weighed. 4 “The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength. 5 Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more. She who was barren has borne seven children, but she who has had many sons pines away. 6 “The LORD brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up. 7 The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts. 8 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. “For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s; on them he has set the world. 9 He will guard the feet of his faithful servants, but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness. “It is not by strength that one prevails; 10 those who oppose the LORD will be broken. The Most High will thunder from heaven; the LORD will judge the ends of the earth. “He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

Luke 1:46-53

46 And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord 47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48 for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, 49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name. 50 His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. 51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. 52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. 53 He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. 54 He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful 55 to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.” 

True Christianity #394 and #395(3)

There Are Three Universal Categories of Love: Love for Heaven; Love for the World; and Love for Ourselves 

…these three categories of love are universal and fundamental to all types of love because goodwill has something in common with each of the three. 

Love for heaven means love for the Lord and also love for our neighbor. Love for heaven could be called love for usefulness, because both love for the Lord and love for our neighbor have usefulness as their goal. 

395[3] When these three categories of love are properly prioritized in us, they are also coordinated in such a way that the highest love, our love for heaven, is present in the second love, our love for the world, and through that in the third or lowest love, our love for ourselves. In fact, the love that is inside steers the love that is outside wherever it wants. Therefore if a love for heaven is present in our love for the world and through that in our love for ourselves, with each type of love we accomplish useful things that are inspired by the God of heaven. 

…if these three loves are prioritized in the right way, they improve us, but if they are not prioritized in the right way, they damage us and turn us upside down.

Readings: 2 Samuel 23:1-7, True Christianity #439, #440 (see below)
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Photo credit: Johannes Plenio

So today we hear a text centered in the final period of King David’s life. Several weeks back we spent time with the book of Ruth, the story of a loyal Moabite woman who followed her mother-in-law to Israel, and became David’s great-grandmother, establishing kindness rather than purity as central to the linage of a great king.

Now we fast forward past a couple of generations, past the great prophet Samuel and the tragic King Saul, to the end of King David’s reign. And we hear in our text what are called his “Last Words.” Now, if you keep reading in 2 Samuel, and I Kings, you’ll see that David doesn’t actually die quite yet. He continues long enough to establish his son, Solomon on the throne, and in truth, his actual final words are to Solomon, giving him advice for his future reign.

The text in 2 Samuel is David’s final public words, his final prophetic utterance as God’s anointed, and as author of many psalms, his final work of art and praise. For we remember, David was once a young boy who played the harp so beautifully that it calmed the troubled King Saul.

However, as we read the text, we certainly might pause in puzzlement. We might wonder, how can David say that the spirit of Lord spoke through him, how can David speak of ruling over people in righteousness and in the fear of God, and having a house right with God, when David himself undertook gross abuses of his power, the consequences of which played out in the bloody disarray of his family in the final years of his reign? There is a real tension that exists in the Hebrew scriptures around the exultation of King David, who was a terribly imperfect person and ruler. In fact, throughout the bible as a whole, there are many more imperfect characters than there are model ones, and as we learned through our study of the book of Ruth, even the stories of the model characters are more complicated than they might first seem.

David said: “If my house were not right with God, surely he would not have with me an everlasting covenant, arranged and secured in every part; surely he would not bring to fruition my salvation…”  It might chafe to hear David speak so, the first part being such an obvious glossing over of the disarray we will only need to turn the page to find. This is a truth filtered through the ego of a king, through the fuzzy lens of nostalgia and royal deference.

But what is it trying to communicate at its core? That the existence of God’s covenant with us, God’s promise of continued presence with us, really doesn’t have anything to do with how good we are. Now, the efficacy of the covenant certainly does, but not its existence. Can you imagine what would happen if the covenant depended on our perfection? It quite simply would not exist at all. The everlasting covenant is not centered in human power or will in any way, it is centered in God’s. And God is steadfast, period. The covenant will remain, and God promised that way back with Noah and the rainbow. Thank goodness, for we will all continue to screw up in ways both new and exciting as well as habitual and everyday.  Is our house right with God? I’m sure there are many ways we can all convict ourselves, large and small.

David’s house was certainly not right with God, in the sense that nothing needed to be improved. But it was right enough in spirit, even if there was much to be desired in execution. David was not unrepentant on the whole; he had learned many things along the way. And what he had learned was this:

The God of Israel spoke, the Rock of Israel said to me: *When* one rules over people in righteousness, when he rules in the fear of God, he is like the light of morning at sunrise on a cloudless morning, like the brightness after rain that brings grass from the earth.

What does this communicate? That while the existence of the covenant is never in question, that the chance to live into the covenant is never in question, the efficacy of the covenant, what it produces, is not guaranteed. *When* we consciously align ourselves with God’s purposes and intention, clarity and generativity are brought forth. David uses nature metaphors to express what the quality of ideal Godly rule looks like, and by extension, what it looks like when we *all* live into the covenant. He is trying to say: That dawn light filled with color that seems to hold infinite possibility within it; it’s like that. The way the earth glistens and smells alive after a rain, the way green shoots respond and push upward; it’s like that. Who wouldn’t want to live their life within that kind of moment?

But a couple of notes: first, the *fear* of God. I think we can safely read that as a reverence or an awe of God, rather than actual fear. God doesn’t not wish to evoke fear from us, even if that were to mean we stayed in line. A reverence though, a holy awe, that kind of stance puts us in our place but in a good way, it keeps us open rather than closed and cramped, and naturally invites gratitude rather than grievance. 

And second, notice that we are not promised that we will get what we want. Living into the covenant, aligning ourselves with God - the text tells us what that is like, not what it will get us. It is like the quality of being in the dawn of a day, it is like being able to see clearly, it is like feeling nourished and ready to burst into growth. Those are all qualities of life that are very different to the sense of “life going well” or having success in earthly terms or getting what we desire, even if we what we desire is good and reasonable.

David misunderstood many things, but he understood the most important thing. He needed to keep returning to God, he needed to keep God at the center of his rule and his life. David was trying. Not always succeeding, but trying. Many of the kings that would come after him would not even have that barest quality. They would nakedly, plainly, chase after their own self-interest time and again.

The key, the only key, to living into the covenant, is the quality of openness that de-centers our selfhood and centers God instead. This is not so much an act of submission as it is an act of inoculation. There is such a thing as a healthy selfhood; God has given us that gift. But, it only comes if are willing to give it up, if we refuse to cling to it. Habitual self-centering, instead, little by little builds a precarious and desperate type of success; it will never be enough, it can never countenance it’s own limit, and so it turns into something that David likens to thorns, something that in the words of one of my commentaries, “chokes life and causes pain.”(1) We heard similar language in our Swedenborg reading: that a focus on self leads to “a stifling and an extinction of love for the Lord and love for our neighbor.” These are our options, in essence. Do we want to be the ground that lets life arise, or the thorn that chokes it?

We find ourselves now in the week before Thanksgiving, where we intentionally practice gratitude in community with each other. What I like about where this text is placed in the lectionary calendar is that it identifies not only what we can be grateful for, but how gratitude naturally arises. For it is one thing to make a list and say thank you; this act of gratitude de-centers the self for a moment, and that is good. But the ongoing spiritual work of Thanksgiving is to the de-center the self first and proactively so that gratitude can flow in every moment, so that our natural inclination is always to look away from our ego and give thanks.

So we say thank you to our steadfast God, who has covenanted with us to always be present and open and ready. We are about to enter into Advent which makes much of the phrase “Do not be afraid.” We need not fear that our God is capricious, we need not fear that our shortcomings, or our history of shortcomings, will chase God away. They never can and never will, for God keeps God’s promises.

And also, we receive a personal invitation, for the shape and form and quality of the covenant, like any agreement between parties, depends upon our partnership. What do we want it to be like? Perhaps in the spirit of Thanksgiving, it can be like a bounty brought in by people who work the earth with love, like a feast born from cooperation between guests, like a table with one more chair squeezed in, like a quiet and contemplative sufficiency. Or, perhaps, as David suggests, like a clear sunrise, like morning, like the brightness after rain, like the grass that rises from the earth. All of that sounds pretty good to me.
Amen.

(1) New Interpreters' Bible, Volume II, p620


Readings:

2 Samuel 23:1-7
1 These are the last words of David: “The inspired utterance of David son of Jesse, the utterance of the man exalted by the Most High, the man anointed by the God of Jacob, the hero of Israel’s songs: 2 “The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; his word was on my tongue. 3 The God of Israel spoke, the Rock of Israel said to me: ‘When one rules over people in righteousness, when he rules in the fear of God, 4 he is like the light of morning at sunrise on a cloudless morning, like the brightness after rain that brings grass from the earth.’ 5 “If my house were not right with God, surely he would not have made with me an everlasting covenant, arranged and secured in every part; surely he would not bring to fruition my salvation and grant me my every desire. 6 But evil men are all to be cast aside like thorns, which are not gathered with the hand. 7 Whoever touches thorns uses a tool of iron or the shaft of a spear; they are burned up where they lie.”

True Christianity 439

As Long as We Believe That Everything Good Comes from the Lord, We Do Not Take Credit for the Things We Do As We Practice Goodwill 

It is damaging for us to take credit for things we do for the sake of our salvation. Hidden within our credit-taking there are evil attitudes of which we are unaware at the time: denial that God flows in and works in us; confidence in our own power in regard to salvation; faith in ourselves and not in God; [the delusion that] we justify and save ourselves by our own strength; contempt for divine grace and mercy; rejection of reformation and regeneration by divine means; and especially disregard for the merit and justice of the Lord God our Savior, which we then claim as our own. In our taking credit there is also a continual focus on our own reward and perception of it as our first and last goal, a stifling and an extinction of love for the Lord and love for our neighbor, and total ignorance and unawareness of the pleasure involved in heavenly love (which takes no credit), while all we feel is our love for ourselves. 

True Christianity 440 
The pleasure of doing good to their neighbor is their reward. The angels in heaven feel this pleasure. It is a spiritual pleasure that is eternal. It immeasurably surpasses every earthly pleasure. People who have this pleasure do not want to hear about getting credit - they love doing good and feel joy in it.

Readings: Daniel 12:1-3, Mark 13:1-8, Divine Providence 27:1-2 (see below)
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Photo by Aaron Burden: www.pexels.com/photo/white-daisy-flower-bloom-2449543/

Today’s text is often called Mark’s little apocalypse. The way Jesus is talking in it seems foreboding, even as we understand it to be metaphorical in our own time. But while he doesn’t use the actual word, what I think Jesus is actually talking about in this text is hope. And so that’s what we are going to talk about today: what hope is and why it is important. 

In the aftermath of a national election with very high stakes, some of us might be struggling to hang on to hope. For those who welcomed the outcome, perhaps you can apply these teachings to another time in your life. For many others, this is a very hard time. I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to rush anyone into having hope. It is important to take time to grieve as well, to take whatever time is needed. And, here are some thoughts on hope for whenever we might be ready.

If we recall from the gospel narrative, Jesus had been teaching in the temple. This is where, last week, we received both his warning about the abuses of those in power, and the lifting up of those outside of such power, like the widow who gave her last two coins.  It seems though, that the lesson has not really settled in for some of the disciples yet.  As they leave the temple, one disciple comments on the magnificence of the temple building.  An innocent enough comment it might seem, but in the context of their recent conversation, somewhat tone deaf. So, Jesus doubles down on his point: these massive buildings, insofar as they prop up illegitimate and abusive power structures, must be thrown down so that God’s kingdom can rise up, and be re-built in a way that supports the thriving of all people. From a Swedenborgian point of view, we would make a parallel point about our own ways of thinking. For Swedenborg, stones correspond to truths or ideas, and hewn stones to truths or ideas that arise from our own self-intelligence, which naturally attempts to serve the self. So likewise, these massive stones, these massive and far-reaching ideologies of self that we carry around inside us, these must be torn down so that we can be receptive to genuine spiritual truth, the kind of truth that serves God and neighbor. (1)

The historical context of this gospel however, is that it was most likely written around the same time as the first Jewish-Roman War. Also known as The Great Revolt, it was the first of three major rebellions of the Jews against the Romans, and it culminated in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70AD. While we can’t be sure if Mark’s gospel was written before or after the temple destruction, it *was* written during a time when such destruction was certainly foreseeable or imminent. These early Jewish Christian communities were grappling with the prospect of figuring out what it meant to live faithfully in uncertain and dangerous times, times when what little safety and consistency they had was falling down around them. While immediately after Jesus death and resurrection, his followers seemed sure he would return very quickly, by 70AD it was clear the wait would be significantly longer. They were hungry for instruction about how to live in the in-between space, live in the world in which the kingdom of God was near but not yet fully realized. 

So the disciples ask Jesus, what will be the sign that all is about to be fulfilled?  At the heart, this question asks: how will be know that everything will really be okay? And Jesus tells them, uncertainty is just part of it. Turmoil is just part of it. The human drive toward control and domination will always be with us, inside of us and outside of us. Perhaps this is something we can relate to right now. In our country, the existence of dark sentiments might feel like they are being revealed over these last several years, though to many they have been clear all along: racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, misogyny, to name just a few. Some of these forces have been creeping out from their hiding places because they are being given permission and encouragement by our leaders, some have been dragged into the light by investigative journalism. Either way, it burdens the heart to see such hatred, callousness and self-interest. So too, in Marks time, chaos seemed to reign, the reach of empire seemed ascendent and absolute. These new Jewish Christians were discouraged. Who wouldn’t be? So, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel puts it all in context: “These are the beginnings of birth pains.” This is a pain that is going somewhere. The end goal is the birthing of something new.
Our Swedenborg reading for today tells us about God’s end goal for creation; which is not obedience or veneration but a heaven from the human race, our heavenly happiness. God’s divine providence looks towards this goal in every single thing it does. I quote: “God cannot help doing this, because God’s image and likeness is in us from creation.” God’s ultimate goal, the vision of creation, is embedded in our very being, and the operative question of our spiritual life is: are we open to it? We will all find ourselves, to varying degrees, in times when the world around us appears unstable, when relationships, institutions, rituals that we relied upon seem to quiver and maybe even fall. And so we ask the most important and difficult question of the Christian life, now as then: how do people of faith live with integrity in troubled times, social, political and personal?

The answer that I have today is: we practice hope. But first I have to be clear: as written by author Brene Brown(2), based on work by C.R. Snyder, hope is not an emotion, it is a cognitive-behavioral process. The answer is not to just be hopeful. The answer is to practice hope. Hope is a positive cognitive state that is created by having goals and planning to meet them. It is a state anchored in action. Swedenborg perhaps was intuiting this when he spoke of hope being a function of our understanding and trust being a function of our heart. (3)

And let me tell you, I hate this answer. I hate everything about it. Because, what I really want hope to be is a function of the heart, something that flows into me and holds me up, that makes me feel better when I feel bad, something that lets me know everything will be okay. Something that is a gift that I don’t have to work for. But what I’m actually describing there is comfort or trust. And though comfort or trust might have some relationship to hope, they are not the same thing. Hope is something that we create, hope is something that we grow through our choices of how to interact with the world.

This is exactly why Jesus uses the metaphor of birth pains, of contractions, because hope is something that we have to actively birth into being. It can be large hope or small hope, that doesn’t matter, it is about daring to envision a worthy goal, creating a pathway that we can use to walk toward it, and then walking it. That goal can be about the person right beside us, or about humanity as a whole, it can realistic in focus, or more utopian and far-reaching. They key is that it is grounded in doing, rather than being. Like in pregnancy and labor, we grow a vision and we grow a pathway inside of us by the choices we make and the actions we take. That process is precious but it is also painful, it is also labor. It won’t always feel clear that everything will work out. Birthing is a natural human process but also deeply unpredictable. And just like the children that we might birth into being, hope is a complicated blessing.

Just like our children or other loved ones we nurture, we cherish our hope, it makes us smile, even laugh. We look forward on its behalf. We make plans. We put our shoulder to the wheel and we work, we try to make the world better.
But hope done right will also challenge us. It will make us question what we thought we knew. It will make us cry. It will make us re-evaluate and pivot and begin again. It will exhaust us. It will definitely spit out that dinner that we slaved over. It might well grow up to be something we never could have dreamed of. And as we labor, there will always be that moment when we feel like we can’t go on. 
Because, when the things we have hoped for do not come to pass, it can be tempting to think that it is naive to hope. The disappointment can fool us into thinking that we have done something wrong by hoping. But the moral weight of hope is not measured by the effectiveness of its calculations or strategies. Effectiveness is a different type of work, important but different. Hope is a product of empathy and imagination, where we see what needs to change and we envision that change happening, where we see something that is missing and we envision it coming into being. Whether the change actually happens or not is no judgment upon the impulse itself, upon the audacity, to hope. Hope is a holy impulse, sacred exactly because it is not bounded or limited by human outcomes.

So here’s the good news: that baby is getting born, one way or another. God will not and cannot do anything else other than work for heavenly outcomes for all of us. And so we have been made for this work. We have been created in the image and likeness of God, for the purpose of sharing love. For the days that we cannot bear the labor, we share the load; some days we will work, some days we will midwife, some days we will rest. There have always been in this world those who have cared for each other, who have cared enough to create systems that support dignity and humanity and equality, who worked to birth justice and restoration into this world. And guess what? It’s me and you.

So, how do we live in divided, uncertain times? We speak the truth, we act with love, and we practice hope. We speak the truth, not out of self-interest, but because truth connects us to God’s vision for the whole of humanity. We enact love, not out of self-aggrandizement, but because a fierce commitment to compassion will bring God’s vision to pass. We practice hope, we practice the discipline of hoping, the discipline of imagining goals, seeing pathways towards them, and walking those paths. No matter how small. No matter how inconsequential. No matter how unreasonable or unattainable. We practice hope because that is what we have been made for, to imagine love being birthed into the world, and to pursue that goal as wisely and as determinedly as we can. 

I still hate this answer, by the way. It’s not what I wanted to hear. I still want to wake up in the morning and just feel hopeful. But, how just like God, to make hope be something we are given an invitation to choose, something we are invited to be in relationship with. I don’t like it, but I believe it. And I believe it's the only way. So, I’ll try my best to practice hope everyday, and I hope you will too.

Amen.

1. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #8941
2. Brene Brown, Facebook Post, November 8th, 2024
3. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #6578

Readings: 

Daniel 12:1-3
1 “At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. 2 Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
Mark 13:1-8
1 As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” 2 “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” 3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, 4 “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?” 5 Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.
Divine Providence 27:1-2
I have explained elsewhere that heaven did not originate in angels who were created angels at the beginning, and that hell did not originate in a devil who was created an angel of light and was cast down from heaven. Rather, both heaven and hell are from the human race. Heaven is made up of people who are involved in a love for what is good and a consequent discernment of what is true, and hell of people who are involved in a love for what is evil and a discernment of what is false…
[2] Since heaven comes from the human race, then, and since heaven is living with the Lord forever, it follows that this was the Lord's goal for creation. Further, since this was the goal of creation, it is the goal of the Lord's divine providence. 
The Lord did not create the universe for his own sake but for the sake of people he would be with in heaven. By its very nature, spiritual love wants to share what it has with others, and to the extent that it can do so, it is totally present, experiencing its peace and bliss. Spiritual love gets this quality from the Lord's divine love, which is like this in infinite measure. 
It then follows that divine love (and therefore divine providence) has the goal of a heaven made up of people who have become angels and are becoming angels, people with whom it can share all the bliss and joy of love and wisdom, giving them these blessings from the Lord's own presence within them. He cannot help doing this, because his image and likeness is in us from creation.

Readings: I Kings 17:8-16, Mark 12:38-44, Secrets of Heaven #10122:2 (see below)
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You’ve probably noticed that I often preach about God’s presence with us. One of religion’s most powerful constructs is that of a loving deity who honors and values each individual, and who is present with everyone of us, who stands for the radical inclusion and worthiness of all. But of course, the comfort of steadfast companionship is not the only thing God does for us. While present, God is not a divine wingman, working to validate our every self-conception, or bring to pass our every whim. God is intimately present with us, yes, but God is also, importantly, apart from us and beyond us. Thankfully and blessedly, God transcends us, and our salvation and growth depend upon this fact.

Our two texts today are linked because they both mention widows, widows giving much when they had little to give. Because of their generosity, these texts are often preached around the topic of stewardship, and these widows lifted up as examples of selfless giving. While I believe that can be, and is, a worthwhile interpretation, I also feel uncomfortable focusing on the generosity of the widows and not the oppressive circumstances which fueled their destitution in the first place. When they are placed within context, I believe that we find something even more extraordinary than a simple model for generosity. We find a clue about where God is to be found and who God wants us to see.  As I just hinted, God is not only reliably found close to us, but is also found consistently outside of our assumptions and perspectives. 

So, in our Old Testament reading, we encounter the widow of Zarephath and Elijah.  First, some background.  This episode occurs during the 9th century, when Israel and Judah are divided kingdoms.  Ahab is the king of Israel and he has married Jezebel, a Sidonian princess from a kingdom to the north. The Sidonians worship a god called Baal, and Jezebel has brought this worship of Baal with her to Israel. Ahab is all over it, and builds a whole temple to Baal and other monuments to Sidonian gods besides. Then he and Jezebel start killing off the Lord’s prophets who object. The Bible tells us that Ahab “…did more to arouse the anger of the Lord, the God is Israel, than did all the kings of Israel before him.” (I Kings 16:33)

So of course, Elijah the great prophet shows up to speak the word of the Lord and to turn the hearts of Israel back to the one and only God. He begins by announcing a great drought, establishing God’s power.

As the drought ravages the land, Elijah hides in a ravine and is fed by ravens sent by the Lord. But later, when the nearby brook dries up, he is then sent by the Lord to a widow at Zarephath, as we hear in our text for today. It is important to note is that Zarephath is in Sidon. This widow is Sidonian, as is Jezebel. Now, the whole context of Elijah’s prophetic struggle here is to reestablish the power and efficacy of Israel’s (real) God over and against the Sidonian’s (not-real) God, Baal. In such a struggle, the temptation is always toward classic us-vs-them thinking. History tells us that, “my God is better than your God” quickly devolves into bloodshed. So, what does God do here? Elijah needs help, and God sends him to the other side. God sends him to a generous and trusting widow who restores him to life though the giving of her last morsel of food. We recognize that as an individual, this widow is caught in the cross hairs of forces beyond her control. As noted, she is Sidonian, so not necessarily subject the Israelite commandment to care for widows—perhaps no one is caring for her. And this drought, not her personal battle, has exacerbated her already dire circumstances. No one sees her. But God sees her. God wishes to bring Israel back into the fold, but not at her expense. God wishes for Israel to return to their covenantal identity but not in a way that causes them to despise their neighbors.

So then, this brings us to the widow in the gospel. Jesus was at the temple, and he was teaching and observing. He saw those who commanded attention and respect, the scribes, those who attached themselves to power, and who trampled upon the vulnerable to do so. The accumulation and abuse of power is a universally human tendency. We see this kind of jockeying for power abounding today as much as then, in all countries and societies, particularly in celebrity, business, and political realms. But as caught up as some people might be in the trappings of power and privilege, Jesus instead sees and lifts up one on the outside, one not seen and valued in the ordinary course of things. The widow, giving all she had, the very smallest of Roman coins, a pittance compared to what was given by the rich. This widow too, was vulnerable by forces outside of her control. Jesus had just warned of those seeking religious and political dominance by “devouring widow’s houses.” The religious leaders likely encouraged, even demanded such temple piety from the poor, even when they could barely afford it. That scribe from the text certainly didn’t see this widow, or think of her, except for his own gain. But Jesus saw her.

One widow outside of our expectations of tribe and nation, another widow outside of our expectations of power and privilege. Both seen and lifted up by God, over and above what might normally command our attention. Whenever we are tempted to turn our gaze inward, toward self-justification and control, God attempts to turn our gaze outward, always.

Our Swedenborg reading today talks about the new self and the old self. We are all born earthly with a natural focus on self-preservation, both physical and psychological. From the inside of this worldview, where everything serves self-preservation, that which is good and true for the self is called good and true in general and what is bad for the self called evil and false in general. The self is the center of the universe and the standard by which all is judged.  But this is small and cramped way to live. God wants more for us. God wants us to take the burden of ego away from us. There is a common saying: “God loves you just as you are, but loves you too much to let you stay that way.” God wants to give us the gift of self-forgetfulness, the gift of relinquishing preservation of the ego. We don’t need to take on the job of preserving our selfhood. When we open ourselves up, God will give and give and give. So God stretches us, nudges us, away from self-preoccupation, and in that stretching, creates a space in which the Lord’s own goodness and truth can flow into us. This space is called the new will and the new intellect, a space that entertains ideas about the good of all people not just ourselves, a space that practices love for all people not just ourselves. And the larger this new space is, the more we allow for the expanding, the more we are transformed, and the more we know heavenly peace. This is, as we Swedenborgians call it, the process of regeneration.

And if God is the “Grand Nudger,” what do these nudges look like? In the Word, they look like the camera panning away from the action, away from the shiny thing, away from the excitement, and showing the reality of who we are not seeing. In these texts for today, the camera pans away from the main action and reveals the collateral damage, reveals the real danger and pain of oppressive systems, reveals the dignity and the generosity of the vulnerable. 

In widening our gaze, God stretches us, pulls our attention towards something or someone outside of our expectations and assumptions. Jezebel, the Sidonian princess was such a reviled figure, so much so that her very name evokes betrayal and corruption in even secular contexts; yet God lifts up a Sidonian widow, and demonstrates how valued, redeemable, and generous she was. If we were tempted to cast all Sidonians in Jezebel’s light, we are shown how wrong that is, how opposed to God’s intention.

Likewise, when we are drawn into playing the game of power, accumulation and domination, venerating the scribes among us, simply because they have managed to attach themselves to those in influence, God lifts up the vulnerable, finding value in small, generous, authentic works, and showing us the real effects that the obsessive accumulation of power has on the world around us.

We probably would not have seen or noticed these widows otherwise. Our eyes would have been glued to the great standoff between The Lord and Baal, or the fancy scribe waltzing by leaving a trail of mystery behind him. And this is because our old will likes to be safe, right and superior. Our old will is tribal, our old will is avaricious, our old will is fearful. We see this writ large and small all around us; in politics around fears about changing demographics and immigration, in business in a reverence for the so-called “moral selfishness” that wants to call greed good, in our personal lives as we try to exercise domination or enact superiority in our relationships. God is indeed present with us as we grapple with our old will.  God has empathy for our childlike need to feel comfortable, certain, special. But God wants us to be able to have those things in ways that do not disadvantage and oppress other people.

The seeming benefits of the old will can never measure up to the gifts of the heavenly will, of the comfort, certainty and individual worthiness that is derived from the love of God. The benefits of the world and the ego are necessarily finite, self-consuming. The blessings of the divine are infinite, in an ever-increasing variety. And so our God, out of great love, draws us toward that infinite giftedness and abundance. God draws us ever out of ourselves, not because God regards us as essentially sinful or evil, but because God has dared to dream a future for us that we could never imagine for ourselves. Amen.


Readings:

I Kings 17:8-16

8 Then the word of the LORD came to him: 9 “Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.” 10 So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, “Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?” 11 As she was going to get it, he called, “And bring me, please, a piece of bread.” 12 “As surely as the LORD your God lives,” she replied, “I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it—and die.” 13 Elijah said to her, “Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. 14 For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.’ ” 15 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. 16 For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah.

Mark 12:38-44

38 As he taught, Jesus said, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, 39 and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. 40 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”

41 Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. 43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”

Secrets of Heaven 10122:2

…All the things with a person that come from heaven have connection with good and truth, and all those that come from hell have connection with evil and falsity. Or what amounts to the same thing, all things with a person which originate in the Lord have connection with good and truth, but all that originate in the person themselves has connection with evil and falsity. Since good and truth or falsity and evil are what everything throughout creation has connection with, and the human being is the place where they are received, a person has two mental powers to receive them. One is called the will and the other the understanding, the will being what receives good or evil, and the understanding what receives truth or falsity. The will formed by the Lord, also called the new will, receives good, while the understanding formed by the Lord, also called the new understanding, receives truth. But the will properly a person's own, also called the old will, receives evil, and the understanding properly a person's own, also called the old understanding, receives falsity. A person possesses the old will and understanding through being born from their parents, but they come to have the new will and understanding through being born from the Lord, which happens when they are being regenerated. For when being regenerated a person is conceived anew and is born anew. 

Readings: Mark 10:46-52, Secrets of Heaven 4063:2-3 (see below)
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We talk alot about spiritual growth in our tradition, about the spiritual work we do to regenerate ourselves, which involves looking at ourselves with honesty and courage. We are called to note all the ways in which we might act from selfishness, when we are tempted to put what *we* want above all other things. Our selfish desires can lead us astray, away from connection, community, and the common good. And so, it is important to be able to view our desires with clarity and healthy distance, so that they don’t control us. 

But that doesn’t mean that our desires—what we want—should always be viewed with suspicion. In our text for today, Bartimaeus desired something very strongly. He wanted to speak to Jesus so very much that he raised a ruckus. As he approached, Jesus asked him a question. “What do you want me to do for you?” Clearly, Jesus would have been able to see that Bartimaeus was blind. He needn’t have asked and he could have healed him without a word. But it seemed important for Jesus to know something of the man’s desire, to know what was driving him. He asked him, what do you want? Bartimaeus said “I want to see.” 

Now, contrast this with the previous episode, one we didn’t hear in our reading today but was the lectionary reading last week: a request to Jesus from the disciples James and John. These were brothers who came to Jesus and said “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” Such an arrogant demand, it seems hardly believable. Jesus, with admirable restraint, simply asks them, the same as he will soon ask Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” He knew these boys; he loved and chose them, and we imagine he knew much of their misguided enthusiasm and their stubborn misunderstanding. So, in an attempt to guide them, he tries to zero in on their desire, which they willingly laid bare. “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”  One wouldn’t be surprised if they followed up that request with a “Bro” or a fist bump. The gospel doesn’t capture Jesus’ exasperated sigh. But he would have been entitled to at least one, after a solid four biblical pages of teaching them about the relinquishment of power, the necessity of sacrifice, the value and belovedness of the least among them. They still didn’t get it. But Bartimaeus did. He didn’t want power, he didn’t want glory, he just wanted to see, and casting aside his cloak, his only possession, he used that sight to follow Jesus on the way.

Jesus knew that what we want matters. He ultimately tells Bartimaeus that his faith healed him, but Jesus understood that faith is empty, impossible in fact, without desire. It was one of Swedenborg’s main criticisms of the Christianity of his time; that faith had become nothing but saying the right words, a confession of the right precepts, utterly empty without the desire to serve and grow, and utterly perverse filled *with* the desire for the self and for power. James and John *said* they had faith in Jesus but they were still driven by a desire for glory and eminence. And that wasn't the kind of faith that Jesus was working to inspire in them. Bartimaeus’ request for sight was a personal and perhaps selfish one. But what did he do with sight once he had it? Even when given the freedom to “go” he follows Jesus instead. What we desire affects *how* we see and ultimately *what* we do.

Swedenborg writes in his book Divine Providence: our whole spirit is desire and its consequent thought, and our thinking flows from the desires of our love.(1) Spiritual, heavenly desires, driven by a love for what is true and what is good, these are what animate our life and open us up to inflow from God. God cannot flow into anything else. So, it is not surprising that Jesus would ask Bartimaeus about something so important. He didn’t want to impose something, even a healing, upon him without knowing that it resonated with Bartimaeus’ deepest self. God’s action with us is always in partnership, always with the utmost respect for our autonomy and our freedom. We are made in an image and likeness of God, and our very wanting of more, more insight, more love and more resonant action our part, is that which brings us more fully into that image and likeness. Our desires remake us, our desires regenerate us.

But, there is of course a reason that desire is often thought of in negative terms and that’s because desire can indeed be destructive, unthinking, and consuming. The craving for power in James and John was preventing them from absorbing Jesus’ clear message to them. Without interrogating that desire within themselves they weren’t going to be able to follow Jesus where he was going, to the cross and to the resurrection.

And yet, as mixed-up as they were, they *were* following him. None of us can have perfect heavenly desire. We are all works in progress, we are all bundles of mixed motivations.  And this is entirely appropriate for angels-in-training. In our Swedenborg reading for today, we are introduced to the idea of intermediate good. These are desires, motivations, and goals that are not *entirely* heavenly but can lead us on the way, that can power our process. The message of Israel’s redemption, for example, and the message of the existence of a kingdom of God attracted James and John. Even if they muddled it up with their personal ideas of glory, they were still there listening to Jesus, and there was a chance for them to evolve.

We can think of examples from the personal and social realm: we might have a desire to take care of those who we love. This is absolutely a good thing; it builds us in the practice of service and hard work, and it builds in us the practice of emotional connection. But, it only serves as an intermediate good if we stop there, if we choose *only* to take care of those we love and not anyone else. The love of taking care of those around us is a stepping stone to the love of taking care of all people. We learn the value and beauty of humanity by seeing it first in the eyes of our loved ones from our tender ages; the trick is then to transfer that value and beauty to people that we don’t know and love personally. This is the more heavenly desire; to wish for, and work for, the dignity, safety, and thriving of all people, not just our own people.

This is why our wanting is important to God. All desire communicates something. Some desires tell us about what we hope for, about ways to connect and serve, and God will infill and grow these heavenly desires for us. Some desires tell us about our fears and our doubts, and God holds those gently, attempting to draw us away from fear and into the knowledge that greater love will always prevail. We remember: what we ultimately love will affect how we see and what we see. The desire for clarity and sight led Bartimaeus to see Jesus as someone he should urgently follow. Conversely, the desire for power led James and John to see Jesus as someone who could and would grant them a preeminent position. For us right now, the fear about whether there is enough to go around, the desire for self-preservation, might lead us to see immigrants at the border as dangerous rather than desperate people fleeing political persecution and poverty. Our desire to be greater than others might lead us to see nationalism and white supremacy as mere patriotism. In our relationships, our fear of conflict might convince us it is better to dissemble and avoid, our fear of rejection might lead us to see vulnerability and authenticity as humiliating. When we find ourselves trapped inside fearful desires, God will ask us: what do we want? What do we want ultimately? Do we want true clarity, courage, honesty, compassion, connection, love, meaning, or peace? Then God *will* lead us there. But it will take time, and it will take our willingness to see our desires for what they really are. To see the selfish, fearful desires and be willing to let them go, to see the mixed up intermediate desires and be willing to let them evolve.

Bartimaeus is often lifted up as ideal vision of discipleship, specifically in contrast to James and John. But our teaching from Swedenborg, while underscoring the importance of heavenly desire, also gives us hope for these brothers. We know that their story didn’t end there.  They were learning and growing, not just through teaching but through hardship as well. God brought them through intermediate states into a higher heavenly state, one that truly understood the nature of the kingdom of God, eventually.  And so there is hope for all of us. We are all Bartimaeus and we are all James and John, still on the journey.
Amen.

(1) Divine Providence 61.

Readings:

Mark 10:46-52

46 Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus (which means “son of Timaeus”), was sitting by the roadside begging. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.”So they called to the blind man, “Cheer up! On your feet! He’s calling you.” 50 Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus. 51 “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him. The blind man said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” 52 “Go,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you.” Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.

Secrets of Heaven 4063:2-3
…When someone is being regenerated the Lord maintains them in an intermediate kind of good, a good which serves to introduce genuine goods and truths. But once those goods and truths have been introduced, that intermediate good is separated from them. Anyone who knows anything at all about regeneration and about the new self can appreciate that the new self is entirely different from the old, for the new self has an affection for spiritual and celestial matters since these constitute their feelings of delight and blessedness, whereas the old self's affections are for worldly and earthly things…The new self's ends in view therefore lie in heaven, whereas the old self's lie in the world…

[3] So that a person may be led from the state of the old self into that of the new, worldly passions have to be cast aside and heavenly affections assumed. This is effected by countless means known to the Lord alone…When therefore a person is converted from an old self into a new one, that is, when they are regenerated, it does not take place in an instant as some people believe, but over many years. Indeed the process is taking place throughout the person's whole life right to its end…Since therefore their state of life has to be changed so drastically they are inevitably maintained for a long time in an intermediate kind of good which partakes both of worldly affections and of heavenly ones. And unless they are maintained in that intermediate good they in no way allow heavenly goods and truths into themselves.

Readings: Psalm 111:1-10, Luke 17:11-19, Heaven & Hell #404 (see below)
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Well, it is only just halfway through October, but let’s get a jump on Thanksgiving shall we? Because, the story that we have heard from the bible today is all about gratitude. Jesus is traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee. He meets ten lepers and heals them. It is interesting how it happens. They are not healed in Jesus’ presence; he sends them to see the priest and it says “as they went, they were cleansed.” They suddenly found themselves healed when they didn’t quite expect it. Yet, nine of them continued on their way, only one turned around and returned to Jesus to thank him. Jesus feigns surprise, and makes sure to point out that the one practicing gratitude is a Samaritan, an enemy of his fellow Judeans. Jesus has already told the story of the Good Samaritan a few chapters earlier, and this story drives home his point: we should be wary of the walls we erect between ourselves and others, for if we pay attention it is the Samaritan, the one the Judeans call “enemy” who is actually loving God and loving the neighbor as Jesus is teaching. This Samaritan’s gratitude is lifted up as a model.

Now, I did not grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday, and I’ve very much come to appreciate the tradition of setting a day aside to give thanks for our blessings in community. Perhaps the practice is as simple as saying grace at a feast, perhaps it is the practice of going around a table to say one thing we are grateful for, perhaps it is a yearly inventory of our blessings. Gratefulness is an important practice.

I do want to dive a little deeper and ask: Why though? Why is Thanksgiving so many people’s favorite holiday? Why is the practice of gratitude often so restorative? Why do we teach our children to say “thank you” when someone does something for them?

Certainly, it is a nice thing to do, it seems the right thing to do—but why is that? I believe it is because it is an acknowledgment that we exist in community, that we rely upon each other. It is the acknowledgement of the existence of someone else, whose action made an impact upon us in some way, It is an acknowledgment that we are not islands but strands of a grand and beautiful web. Gratitude connects us to each other and to reverence.

Reverence, in the words of philosopher Paul Woodruff, is the recognition of something greater than the self.(1) Gratitude is one of the easiest and most important ways we enter into the experience of reverence. When we say thank you, we bring ourselves into the recognition of someone apart from the self, recognition of a need that we could not fulfill on our own, and therefore, a recognition that the self is not all-important or all-capable. 

Or in the words of Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor “reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human beings to sense the full extent of our limits—so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well.” (2)

This is essentially what we are doing here in church. God does not need our praise. God does not desire it. We heard that in our Swedenborg reading. We are here however, to be reverent, meaning to willingly let go of the primacy of self, and to consciously look outside of ourselves to see what else there might be, whether that be God, or community, or beauty, or insight, or countless other things.

And when we notice and/or receive these things, these gifts, church gives us an opportunity to fall on our knees in thankfulness that we are not alone in an empty world. Into this intentional space of gratitude, we speak aloud an acknowledgement of our limits, our indebtedness, and our wonder. This is the push and pull of worship: to open our eyes to what God would have us see in ourselves and others, to take our awareness outside of our selfhood, to lay down our anxieties in front of someone who cares, to sing and pray and listen and speak ourselves into community with each other and God.

In Taylor’s words, “reverence [is] the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience.”(3) Humility and curiosity are key parts of a reverent attitude, for Jesus warned us in the text for today that our preconceptions about who we should be in community with, who we should be open to and grateful for, can get in the way of true reverence.

But our preconceptions of people are not the only things that get in the way. We often erect many obstacles to gratitude and reverence in our daily lives. As Taylor points out:

“The practice of paying attention really does take time. Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than the blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else. We pay attention to the speedometer, the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable. Meanwhile, none of them meets the first criterion for reverence, which is to remind us that we are not gods. If anything these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be gods—if only we could find some way to do more faster.”(4)

I stand here convicted of this illusion just as much as anyone else. It is so easy to fall into. And what prevents this falling? It’s too simple really, but it’s simple awareness, it’s what we choose to give our attention to. We often remain so caught up in our own competence, our own opinions, our own delusions, but a simple autumn leaf and the awareness that we had nothing to do with its beauty and process and life, this can bring us around to our place in the order of things. 

So I’m going to invite us now to hear the words of the Christian mystic from the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, as she recounts a vision she had one day. If you would like, take a moment to find a small nature token, like an acorn or a stone, or a shell, and hold it in the palm of your hand as we focus on these words: 

And in this [God] showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I look at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: what can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God. (5) 

The ten lepers from our text today were healed “as they went.” And so we also go about our lives, to and fro. As we go, will we notice our various healings, small and large alike, and will they remind us to praise, to be grateful, to see that everything has being through the love of God? In Taylor’s words, can we trust “that something as small as a hazelnut [or an acorn or a stone or a shell] can become an altar in this world.”(6)

We are given oppotunities to make altars in our world every moment, with everything that we encounter. We won’t always remember to, and that’s okay. But hopefully we wil remember sometimes, and that will be enough. 

Amen.

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, p21
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p19
4. Ibid, p24
5. Julien of Norwich, as quoted in An Altar in the World, p17
6. Taylor, An Altar in the World, p34

Readings:

Psalm 111:1-10

1 Praise the LORD.I will extol the LORD with all my heart in the council of the upright and in the assembly. 2 Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them. 3 Glorious and majestic are his deeds, and his righteousness endures forever. 4 He has caused his wonders to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and compassionate. 5 He provides food for those who fear him; he remembers his covenant forever. 6 He has shown his people the power of his works, giving them the lands of other nations. 7 The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy. 8 They are established for ever and ever, enacted in faithfulness and uprightness. 9 He provided redemption for his people; he ordained his covenant forever— holy and awesome is his name. 10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise.

Luke 17:11-19

11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” 14 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed. 15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan. 17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
Heaven and Hell #404
Some spirits who thought themselves better informed than others claimed that in the world they had held to the belief that heavenly joy consisted solely in praising and glorifying God, and that this was an active life. They have been told, though, that praising and glorifying God is not an appropriate kind of active life, since God has no need of praise and glorification. Rather, God wants us to be useful to each other, to do the worthwhile things that are called works of charity. However, they could not connect any notion of heavenly joy with thoughtful good deeds, only a notion of servitude. The angels, though, bore witness that it was the freest life of all because it stemmed from a deep affection and was invariably accompanied by an indescribable pleasure.

Readings: Ruth 3:1-11, 4:13-17, True Christianity 599 (see below)
See also on Youtubeyoutu.be/9S5MDPLIt_A


Here we are in the third installment of our series on the book of Ruth. Let’s recap where we have been. Naomi is an Israelite women who goes to live in Moab due to famine. Her sons marry local Moabite women, one of whom was named Ruth. After a time, Naomi’s husband and sons die, and she has no choice but to return to Israel. She is bitter and feels forsaken by God. But, even though it means leaving her homeland, Ruth will not abandon Naomi, and so she travels to Israel with her. 

Once they arrive, they must contend with how they will survive. Ruth attempts to glean the leftovers from the harvest in the fields of a local wealthy landowner named Boaz. Boaz had heard of Ruth’s act of loyalty to Naomi and orders extra grain to be left behind for Ruth to collect. Naomi is glad to hear of this development, and points out that Boaz is related to her husband’s family and thus has a responsibly for their welfare. She calls him their guardian-redeemer, a specific term with both social and legal meanings.

Today we hear the climax and the resolution of the story in chapters 3 and 4. Naomi has a plan for securing their future, and so she gives Ruth some very specific instructions. These instructions probably sound pretty strange to us now - uncovering feet? - and we might not really feel clear about what is happening.

But what might confuse us a little in English is very plain in the Hebrew. The original text contains a lot of suggestive wordplay and euphemistic terms. Given Ruth’s model behavior in the previous chapters, our first instinct might be to resist what is suggested in the Hebrew text, to make her completely chaste, non-transgressive, uncalculating, and demure. But the fact is, Ruth takes a risk here, and acts outside of what might have been considered acceptable behavior in Israelite society. We might wonder: was it right for her to do so? Was it “right” for Naomi to ask Ruth to act in such a way? And what does “right” in this context even mean?

Boaz must have been aware of his relationship to their family, and of his responsibility as their guardian-redeemer. Yet, as of Chapter 3, he had not done anything more than allow Ruth to glean a little extra grain. We might also ask: was he intending to act? Why was he taking so long? What would have happened if Ruth had done nothing? Was it not “right” for Ruth to call him to account, to remind him of his responsibility?

Like many stories in the Bible, these characters are all very human, feeling real human emotions, acting with mixed human motives, trying their best within the context they are given, sometimes falling short, and sometimes bringing about miracles.

As one of my commentaries notes: 
“We have to acknowledge that what Ruth did was scandalous in the eyes of the world, *and* that it was an act of loving kindness.”(1) It was an act that sought to take care of her mother-in-law, to alleviate her emptiness; it was an act that gently called a “pillar of Israelite society to responsibility”(2) as well as relationship, it was an act that would heal a family and begin a line that would culminate in one of Israel’s greatest leaders.

And so the text prompts us to ask ourselves, in what ways might *we* be called to risk, might we be called to push against social norms in order to practice connective and covenantal love, what in the Hebrew is called hesed, love that enfolds people into community. Is there a place in our lives that is calling out for accountability, for relationship, for encouragement, for change, but we are constrained by what feels to us like social respectability, social expectations, and the embarrassment and fear associated with with pushing against those norms? 

Because, the next most important question to ask is: What occurs as a result of Ruth’s risk-taking? One thing, among many, is that Naomi experiences a reversal of her emptiness. Her overall and understandable bitterness drives the narrative of the first chapter. But by the end of the story, we find her heart is filled again. The narrative is signaling that her personal trajectory mirrors the trajectory of her people as a whole, that her grandchild, so precious to her in a personal way, will also play his part in leading a whole people towards redemption, as a link in King David’s familial line. An act of risk, courage and hope, grounded in hesed, that first *uncovers* and lays bare human vulnerability and need, and then culminates in the *recovery* of hope and meaning.

The text aims to drive this home in its use of language. The Hebrew scriptures often like to juxtapose similar sounding words in order to contrast their meaning. In chapter 3, we notice the juxtaposition of the word gala, meaning uncover, reveal or remove, and gaal, meaning recover, redeem, or restore. In the words of my commentary again: the “narrator encourages the audience to consider the ways in which uncovering can lead to recovering - the redemption of what was lost.” (3)

Ruth acts to uncover the feet of Boaz - and in the Hebrew this has a suggestive association. And yet, this uncovering leads to a recovering. Her vulnerability and his responsibility are uncovered, and into that place of need a relationship is formed, and dignity is recovered. 

As we go even deeper, Swedenborg writes about how the act of “uncovering” in the bible represents a removing of external things so that internal ones may be apparent(4). Often, external things (learned perspectives, attachments, anxieties, habits) get in the way of spiritual progress. But, as suggested in our Swedenborg reading, this is just part of the process, a process of redemption that has been built into the divine design. We are called to uncover the truth about ourselves, to quiet the ego long enough for truth to be revealed to us, and then to remove that which cannot serve love, cannot serve hesed. This act of faithful gala — uncovering— makes space for, makes a path for, gaal — restoration.

And so as we consider divine design, and God’s intention for us, we might ask, where is God in the book of Ruth? Even though the narrative is dealing with very human problems and very human interactions, God’s presence is very much woven into the story as well. There are no prophets speaking God’s word directly, the settings are fields and roads and threshing floors rather than tabernacles or a burning bush, and yet God feels very close to this story, we see God within this story. The way God is known in the book of Ruth is through people. There is loss, and there is death and God responds with loyalty and hesed from a daughter-in-law. There is poverty and uncertainty and God responds with mutual relationship and kindness from one who can help. There is bitterness and perceived abandonment, and God responds with new birth and new life.

In chapter 3, verse 9, Ruth asks Boaz to spread his garment, or his cloak over her. The word for cloak, kanap,  is also the word for wing, and Boaz had previously used that word in chapter 2, when he praised Ruth for her loyalty “May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” We might wonder though, how much at the time he said this, was this some vague blessing, or did he consider the reality that many times the love of God becomes real and palpable through human decision. Ruth makes that connection clear to him, that if God’s wings are to give her refuge, that refuge in a physical sense must come through him. One of the ways that God’s love finds its way to us, is by the care and concern we show each other.

And so we find ourselves back to asking the question: what is our part? We are all sometimes Naomi, sometimes Ruth, sometimes Boaz. Naomi’s bitterness was not where she began, or where she was destined to end up. She was taking a detour, a necessary and understandable one, one that we all take from time to time. But God’s wings were over her the entire time. May we all find the courage to step into our place in the divine process, the uncovering and the recovering, one that brings all people into redemption. Amen.

1. The New Interpreter’s Bible, p295
2. Ibid, p303
3. Ibid, p290
4. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #9917 and #9960

Readings:

Ruth 3:1-11, 4:13-17

1 One day Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi said to her, “My daughter, I must find a home for you, where you will be well provided for. 2 Now Boaz, with whose women you have worked, is a relative of ours. Tonight he will be winnowing barley on the threshing floor. 3 Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes. Then go down to the threshing floor, but don’t let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. 4 When he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do.” 5 “I will do whatever you say,” Ruth answered. 6 So she went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law told her to do. 7 When Boaz had finished eating and drinking and was in good spirits, he went over to lie down at the far end of the grain pile. Ruth approached quietly, uncovered his feet and lay down. 8 In the middle of the night something startled the man; he turned—and there was a woman lying at his feet! 9 “Who are you?” he asked. “I am your servant Ruth,” she said. “Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family.” 10 “The LORD bless you, my daughter,” he replied. “This kindness is greater than that which you showed earlier: You have not run after the younger men, whether rich or poor. 11 And now, my daughter, don’t be afraid. I will do for you all you ask. All the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character. 

4:13 So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. The LORD enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. 14 The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! 15 He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.” 16 Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. 17 The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.

True Christianity 599

During the battles or conflicts within us, the Lord carries out an individual act of redemption, much like the all-encompassing redemption he brought about while he was in the world. 

While he was in the world, the Lord glorified his human manifestation, that is, made it divine, through battles and inner conflict. In a similar way within us individually, the Lord fights for us while we are undergoing inner conflict and conquers the hellish spirits who are assaulting us. Afterward he "glorifies" us, that is, makes us spiritual. 

After his universal redemption, the Lord restructured all things in heaven and in hell in accordance with the divine design. He does much the same thing in us after crises of the spirit - that is, he restructures all the things in us that relate to heaven and the world in accordance with the divine design. 

Readings: Ruth 2:10-12, 15-20, True Christianity 126 (see below)
See also on Youtubeyoutu.be/7IWGyjT3p88
Photo by Henry & Co. from Pexels

Welcome to our second week journeying with the book of Ruth. Today we hear about what happened to Naomi and Ruth as they settled into life in Bethlehem. Without husbands, and more specifically, without ancestral land, they had no way to support themselves other than gleaning from the fields of others, essentially collecting leftovers from the harvest. This is how Ruth meets Boaz, a wealthy landowner. Now, as we had heard two weeks ago, the book of Leviticus stated that provision should be made in this way for widows and foreigners, people exactly like Naomi and Ruth. And it seems that this is what Boaz had been doing and we can imagine that Ruth probably wasn’t the only one gleaning leftovers from the harvest. However, we hear in the text a particular kindness from Boaz: he instructs his workers to leave extra gleanings behind for Ruth to gather.

When Naomi hears about the connection that Ruth made with Boaz, she is happy for more than one reason. Boaz is not some random benevolent landowner. He has a connection to their family, a connection that puts him in a position of responsibility for their welfare. She calls him their “guardian-redeemer.” 

This introduces another important theme in the book of Ruth: redemption. It is a theme that is explored at many levels. On one level, the term “guardian-redeemer” has specific meaning in Israelite law, one that has more to do with property and linage than with spirit or emotion. But we can also see that the book is exploring redemption in a deeper sense: how was Naomi going to be rescued from her bitterness? How might Ruth be rescued from a life of uncertainty and poverty and otherness? How might God be working for the benefit, the redemption, of the Israelite people? Scholars believe that the book of Ruth, while placed narratively in the time between the judges and the kings, was probably written much later in the days following the Israelites exile in Babylon, as commentary on how, and with what values, the Israelites might rebuild their nation. It was a book that spoke into the embodied redemption of beginning a society again.

So I thought today might be a good time to explore the idea of redemption in a theological sense. In several weeks, before we know it really, we will be entering the liturgical season of Advent, where we will hear plenty of “redeemer” language, as we tell the story of how God reached out into the world to be incarnated as a person like you and me. In the gospel of Luke, after meeting the baby Jesus, Zechariah sings “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them.” (Luke 1:68) A question we might have is: What does it mean to be redeemed? And how does a little baby born millennia ago redeem me now?

To redeem something, in basic everyday terms, means to buy, recover or exchange something, like redeeming a coupon. We give the coupon, and get a discount in return. When that idea is transferred to the world of theology, as in redemption, then we start to explore more existential shades of meaning, as we consider atonement, deliverance or rescue for ourselves personally, and how God might be involved in that.

And so we find that needing to be redeemed, reflects a situation of being or having one thing, and wanting or needing to have another. The process of redemption describes the journey from the first state to the second. The term redeemer describes someone to enables that journey to occur.

In the book of Ruth, we have our two main characters mired in a state of bitterness and poverty, and the story is tracing their journey from this first state into another different state, as we will see, an objectively better one. It tells the story of how they are redeemed physically and emotionally. Boaz helps them on that journey, and so is called their guardian-redeemer.

Likewise, in Advent, we tell a similar story in terms of the whole of humanity. The gospel of John begins with themes of light and darkness. The world was a dark place, and it seemed that people’s hearts were dark as well, and something needed to be done. Jesus, the light of the world, comes to help people on a journey of redemption, a light shining in the darkness, illuminating the possiblity of being different.
But often times, the theology of redemption is presented in very transactional terms.  A lot of traditional Christian theology pictures a God who is angry because the people of the world are so sinful, with hearts so dark that they were not listening to all the ways that God had offered redemption before. According to all kinds of ancient religion, when people transgress there must be a consequence, a price paid to God. So, some Christian theologies say, Jesus stepped in to pay that price for us, for humanity, to pay the price due to God for our sins, then and forever more. The ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate exchange, and the ultimate act of redeeming that will last forever.

So in personal terms, this is like if we do a dine and dash, and eat a meal at a restaurant but leave without paying. Jesus steps in to pay the bill, stopping the police from coming after us. Which certainly seems nice. But as Swedenborg has pointed out, this idea is undergirded by some untenable assumptions, and has some serious loopholes.

Because what Swedenborg was seeing in his own religious circles, was people praising Jesus paying the bill, but continuing to dine and dash, because, you know, Jesus was paying the bill. And Swedenborg wondered how this could ever be what the divine wanted or intended. Where was the room, where was the imperative, for human emotional and spiritual development?

And in addition, for Swedenborg, it was impossible that God should be angry and vengeful. God can only be divinely loving and wise, mourning our evil choices of course but never despising us, and never demanding restitution for God’s own sake, only desiring a holistic accountability anchored in our transformation. And if God is not angry and vengeful, demanding a price for our transgressions, then the whole redemption-as-an-exhange thing falls apart. And if it does, then what was Jesus’ sacrifice all about? How was Jesus redeeming us if not paying our bill?

So Swedenborg offered a different understanding of redemption. God, instead of solving things from outside of the process, entered into the process and life that has been ordained for us, became human, became a form that could actually be tempted by hell and used our common humanity as both a model for living and a way to concretely overcome evil and the love of power. This redeems us not by exchange, but by relationship. By entering into the process with us, God created a connection and a closeness that continues to serve us.

Because, when we consider the complexity of human experience, we see that redemption cannot ever be just about transaction, just about our bill being paid, just about receiving forgiveness, however good that might make us feel, or how grateful we might be for it. We human beings can suffer in a multitude of ways, both of our own creation, and completely not our own fault. And how we make the journey out of that suffering can be complicated. Our need is not always just forgiveness, sometimes our need is one of letting go, reframing, patience, evolution, and so many other things. Obviously then, redemption must be a personal journey, and if God is to effect our redemption, to be our redeemer, God has to be on the journey with us, has to be responsive to what we need in the moment. Paying our bill, or in traditional Christian language the forgiveness of our sins, is indeed be a good and kind thing in many a case, but is not sufficient for the totality of human spiritual development. We need more from our God, and thankfully, God gave it. God gave us a redemption that leads to partnership, that results in the kind of freedom and learning that each one of us really needs. This is a kind of redemption we must live into. Not earn, but live into. It is indeed a gift, and one given fresh every single day, not just Easter Sunday. 

And so, as we return to the book of Ruth, what kind of redemption, do we see, and shall we see, there? Today we see Boaz taking a sustained interest, seeing Ruth for who she really is, imagining what she might need in terms of protection, community, and sustenance, and providing for it. She was rescued from hunger and aloneness by a stranger enfolding her into community, and Naomi begins to be rescued from her cynicism and grief by the prospect of being seen. Next week the story of their redemption continues in both complicated and beautiful ways. The book of Ruth understands that redemption is indeed a journey, with many moving parts, actors and beneficiaries. It speaks to us clearly of redemption that is built on relationship: a more complicated way perhaps, but one that bears so much fruit. Thanks be to God. Amen.


Readings:

Ruth 2:1-12, 15-20

1 Now Naomi had a relative on her husband’s side, a man of standing from the clan of Elimelek, whose name was Boaz. 2 And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.” Naomi said to her, “Go ahead, my daughter.” 3 So she went out, entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she was working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelek. 4 Just then Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and greeted the harvesters, “The LORD be with you!” “The LORD bless you!” they answered. 5 Boaz asked the overseer of his harvesters, “Who does that young woman belong to?” 6 The overseer replied, “She is the Moabite who came back from Moab with Naomi. 7 She said, ‘Please let me glean and gather among the sheaves behind the harvesters.’ She came into the field and has remained here from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.” 8 So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. 9 Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” 10 At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She asked him, “Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me—a foreigner?” 11 Boaz replied, “I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband—how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. 12 May the LORD repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” 

15 As she got up to glean, Boaz gave orders to his men, “Let her gather among the sheaves and don’t reprimand her. 16 Even pull out some stalks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up, and don’t rebuke her.” 17 So Ruth gleaned in the field until evening. Then she threshed the barley she had gathered, and it amounted to about an ephah. 18 She carried it back to town, and her mother-in-law saw how much she had gathered. Ruth also brought out and gave her what she had left over after she had eaten enough. 19 Her mother-in-law asked her, “Where did you glean today? Where did you work? Blessed be the man who took notice of you!” Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working. “The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,” she said. 20 “The LORD bless him!” Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. “He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.” She added, “That man is our close relative; he is one of our guardian-redeemers. ”


True Christianity 126

Suffering on the cross was the final trial the Lord underwent as the greatest prophet. It was a means of glorifying his human nature, that is, of uniting that nature to his Father's divine nature. It was not redemption. There are two things for which the Lord came into the world and through which he saved people and angels: redemption, and the glorification of his human aspect. These two things are distinct from each other, but they become one in contributing to salvation. 

In the preceding points we have shown what redemption was: battling the hells, gaining control over them, and then restructuring the heavens. Glorification, however, was the uniting of the Lord's human nature with the divine nature of his Father. This process occurred in successive stages and was completed by the suffering on the cross. 

All of us have to do our part and move closer to God. The closer we come to God, the more God enters us, which is his part…

The union itself [between the Lord's divine and human natures] was completed by the suffering on the cross, because this suffering was the final spiritual test that the Lord went through in the world. Spiritual tests lead to a partnership [with God]. During our spiritual tests, we are apparently left completely alone, although in fact we are not alone - at those times God is most intimately present at our deepest level giving us support. Because of that inner presence, when any of us have success in a spiritual test we form a partnership with God at the deepest level. In the Lord's case, he was then united to God, his Father, at the deepest level. 

Readings: Ruth 1:1-22, Secrets of Heaven #1038 (see below)
See also on Youtubeyoutu.be/rZpG853SL9U
Photo: Austin Neill on Unsplash

The book of Ruth is a powerful and emotional story. Even though it is told with relative economy, the text is filled with wordplay and callbacks that are often lost in English translations. It explores themes of lovingkindness, community, immigration, loyalty, responsibility and redemption. And it is by no means straightforward; interpreters continue to argue about what the book is trying to say, even today. It is a story grounded in an ancient context, many details of which are lost to us now, but it also functions as an extended parable, one in which we can see even our modern selves reflected.

We will be spending three weeks looking at the book of Ruth together, and today we start at the beginning of the story. We are introduced to the main characters: Naomi, and her daughter in law for whom the book is named - Ruth.  We are told that the story takes place during the times of the judges, the period that followed the leadership of Moses and Joshua, but before Saul is established as the first King of Israel.

The narrative for Naomi starts out with difficulty: she and her family need to travel to Moab due to a famine in the land of Israel, but, even in this time of famine, Naomi’s personal life is full. She has a husband and two fine sons. And while her husband dies, in short order, her sons find wives in Moab and it seems that all is good. But then suddenly, Naomi is beset by further tragedy. Both her sons die, without heirs. This is a very challenging situation for a women in ancient times, particularly for a widow. Naomi would have depended on her husband and sons for survival. So, she plays the only card she has left, to return home to Israel, her homeland, where thankfully, the famine was now over.

These are the first few instances of a running theme of the book: reversals and returns. Naomi’s life went from full in a time of emptiness to empty in a time of fullness; an enormous upheaval. And in times of such upheaval, we search for solid ground, we think about what we can and should return to, in order to make sense of our lives. And so this first chapter is full of the notion of returning. Naomi makes plans to return to her homeland, and she urges her daughters in law to return to their mother’s houses. 

The implication is, of course, that they are still young enough to marry again. If Naomi had more sons, Israelite law would have required them to marry their brother’s widows, but as Naomi colorfully explains, she has no more sons and certainly will not bare any more. Orpah and Ruth should go home and begin their lives again. 

Neither want to. It is a testament to the life they all must have had as a family together that they resist. Eventually though, Orpah is persuaded. But not Ruth. Ruth makes a stand for her relationship with Naomi and refuses to leave her. 

This speaks to another theme in the story: hesed. Hesed is an extremely important spiritual principle in the Hebrew scriptures. It is often translated as lovingkindness, but that word really only gets to about half of the meaning. Yes, it is about lovingkingness, but specifically the kind of lovingkindness that draws people into relationship with each other, that binds them together as kin and community, that speaks to their responsibility to each other. It is sometimes described as covenantal love, in that it is not pure sentiment, but rather a love that understands that it is enacted again and again over time in relationship. For this reason, it is sometimes translated as steadfast love, and is often used in describing God’s steadfast love toward us. The idea being that as we experience God’s steadfast love, we are called to model and embody that love in our relationships with others.

Naomi had already spoken of hesed in verse 8, that the Lord might treat Orpah and Ruth as kindly as they had treated her and her sons. She was invoking this notion of lovingkindness and connectedness within relationship as something that should happen to them over there, back in their mother’s houses, where in her mind they would clearly be back in the proper care of God. Naomi, it seems, had exempted herself from hesed. And of course, why wouldn’t she? She had lost so very much, and she was bitter and empty. She felt like the Lord had forsaken her. She states: “the Lord’s hand has turned against me!” And so she drew herself outside of the reach of hesed, outside of the reach of God’s lovingkindness, outside of the reach of anyone’s lovingkindness.

But Ruth disagreed. She was under no obligation stay, not by her society’s expectations, but still she re-drew the circle of hesed around Naomi. We hear Ruth not only say “Where you go I will go….” but also “Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” She is speaking not only of physical presence but also of identity. She weaves the two of them into relationship at a deep level, and in that moment, creates a community of two. She speaks into being an ongoing covenant between them. She speaks the language of our Swedenborg reading, whereby we are told that union with God comes from our willing reciprocation of love, the return of love to the Lord and the expansion of love towards others.

Naomi won’t really be able to hear or feel the fullness of that gift of hesed for a while. At first, Naomi is so fully within her own bitterness that she basically ignores Ruth when they arrive back in Israel. But we cannot be too harsh with her, for that is just the way grief works sometimes. “The Almighty has made my life very bitter,” she laments. Our reversals of fortune, our losses in this life, are sometimes so very hard to take. They hollow us out, and it is hard to believe that we might ever experience fullness and meaning again. But as you might have already guessed, the story of Ruth will have something to say about that, and we will hear more as we go along.

But for now, there is one more theme that is being introduced in this first chapter. As beautiful as Ruth’s sentiments are, this is not just simple story of kindness between two people. The context of the story speaks powerfully about insiders and outsiders and the purposes of God. This is a thread that runs throughout the entire Hebrew scriptures, as we saw last week. Again and again, outsiders to the people of Israel are woven into the fabric of Israel’s story in important ways.

Ruth was a Moabite, a people despised by Israel for generations. Perhaps this is a part of the kindness that Naomi offered in advocating for their separation. Surely, they both knew the difficulty that Ruth would have being a Moabite in Israel. We can now even more fully appreciate the act of courage that Ruth offers; in drawing the circle of hesed around Naomi, she placed herself in an uncertain position. As I preached last week ago, Israel’s God and Israel’s laws consistently advocated for the ethical treatment of foreigners, but as we all know even now, the distance between the ideal and the practice; well, that is where the hard work is. As the story progresses, this sense of Ruth being an outsider to Israel hovers over everything.

Now, at the end of this first chapter, with the characters and the stakes setup as they are, it might be fruitful to to ask: where do we see ourselves reflected? This need not be prescription, only observation. Which parts of ourselves are Naomi right now, emptied out? Which parts of ourselves believe we have somehow been placed outside the circle of hesed, or that we don’t deserve to be included? Which parts of ourselves feel like an outsider, or conversely wish to despise an outsider? Which parts of ourselves are willing to fight for relationship and community? This is the power of ancient story; that we might see ourselves looking back at us through the millennia, and we might know that God journeys with us both then and now. 

I hope this doesn’t spoil things too much, but by the end of the book we will come to understand that this is not just a story about two random women. This is the story of King David’s ancestors, about how “King David’s family tree [is] rooted in the loyal behavior of a foreigner…”(1) and about how the purity of bloodline is much less important than loving, ethical and courageous behavior. And so the whole story begins with a reversal of the readers expectations: that someone designated an “outsider” would model hesed so touchingly. May we all dare to reverse the expectations of our world, to re-draw the circle of hesed, the circle of love and belonging, to include all of God’s beloved children. 

Amen.

(1) The New Interpreter’s Bible, p263


Readings:

Ruth 1:1-22

1 In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. 3 Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. 4 They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

6 When Naomi heard in Moab that the LORD had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. 7 With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah. 8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the LORD show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. 9 May the LORD grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.” Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud 10 and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.” 11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands? 12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the LORD’s hand has turned against me!” 14 At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her. 15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.” 16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” 18 When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. 19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” 20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” 22 So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

Secrets of Heaven 1038

The fact that a pact [or a covenant] is the presence of the Lord in love and charity is evident from the nature of a pact. Every covenant exists to tie people together; that is, the goal is for people to live in mutual friendship, or in a state of love. This is why marriage too is called a compact or covenant.

The Lord cannot unite with us except in love and charity, because the Lord is love itself and mercy; he wants to save us all and draw us to heaven — that is, to himself — with a powerful force. So we can all see and conclude that no one could ever be united to the Lord except through that which is the Lord, or in other words, without doing as he does, or making common cause with him. To do this is to love the Lord in return and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the only means of union. This is the most essential element of a compact. When union does grow out of it, then the Lord, of course, is present.

Readings: Leviticus 19:1-6, 9-20, 32-37, Apocalypse Revealed 586:3 (see below)
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Photo credit:  Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Something that may have been on our minds lately is the topic of immigration. We have all observed how some politicians use the specter of immigration, illegal or otherwise, to rile up their base, to center their followers in fear and anxiety and the notion of white centrality and white supremacy, creating real consequences for already marginalized and vulnerable people. This election season is no exception.

The question of immigration is complicated one, for many countries the world over. The reality is that climate change and active conflicts, among many other events, have created large numbers of refugees world wide, and many countries are grappling with the logistics of accepting and integrating these refugees effectively and humanely. It takes a lot of resources and positive intention to do so, as well as foresight. The U.S. in particular is using asylum laws were written decades ago, and I think we are finding that these laws are really not up to the task. And of course, it is particularly frustrating then, when the issue of immigration is used as a political football, rather than as an issue that we all need to come together to solve as humanely as possible. As the world and our country grapples with the question of how to manage the flow of immigration thoughtfully and charitably, I think it is worth taking a moment to see what our system of faith offers the conversation, to ask how it grounds our guiding ethos and intention.

When one is wondering how the bible talks about immigration, one often turns to a famous passage in Leviticus:

‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Lev 19:33-34)

We don’t often refer to Leviticus in church. It represents part of our history as a tradition, but the tradition has evolved over the millennia and parts of this book might feel irrelevant to our modern context. This is understandable. Leviticus represents the faith and practice of a specific group of people in a specific time period; we no longer share their context and so we no longer share many of those practices. But, it remains one of our sacred texts. Why? Because we recognize and worship the God from which it came, we recognize that as specificity may fall away, principle and ethos remains.

A good part of the book of Leviticus, which specifically includes Chapter 19, is often called The Holiness Code. We can see this reflected in how Chapter 19 begins: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy. Throughout the book of Leviticus, this statement or one similar occurs 152 times(1). But what is holiness exactly and how does it relate to all the very specific laws the book contains?

Holiness is one of those words that seems easily definable on its face, because we use it all the time, but more slippery when we interrogate it. Essentially, something that is holy is set apart, or different, or other, than what we experience in our everyday life. Think about how we understand our holy spaces, like this church. We treat them differently, reverently, because we want them to be something else, other than our everyday spaces. Or, when we want part of our everyday spaces to be holy, what do we do? We might arrange them differently, act in them differently, or speak a blessing (like grace at the dinner table) over them so that, even momentarily, the space is differentiated for us. Or perhaps you have had a holy experience? Maybe on a mountain top, or in meditation, or relationship with another. What was it about that experience that caused you to call it holy? I think it is likely because it felt different, it felt like the veil had been lifted back for a moment, you felt and saw and knew things differently, even though you were right here in the world as you always are.

This is why God is called holy. Not necessarily because God is good (although God is) or because God is powerful (although God is) but because holy is the word that we use to explain that God is “other” than us, or “beyond” us in some way. God is the source of whatever it is that is “different” to us in our experience of holiness.

But, God doesn’t want that essential otherness to equal remoteness or distance or inaccessibility. And so God is always inviting us into ways of thinking, appreciating, loving, seeing, and acting that bring us closer to God, that bring us closer to what we call holiness. And this is what the book of Leviticus is really about. It is a long list of rituals and laws the purpose of which would be to help the people of Israel live the kind of life that would let them feel and be close to God, a holy life.

But it is so important to recognize that the point of God inviting us into holiness is not for the purpose of rescue or escape, that we might become better than others, or so holy and pure that we can be drawn away from our world to get closer to God. As you might have noticed from our reading, so many of the laws were ones that would bring us into healthy relationship with the people around us. While the Hebrew word for holy means set apart, the english root for the word holy means whole, and both are getting at something important. 

Recall how many times, just in our reading let alone in the whole book, we heard the phrase “I am the Lord.” 

I will paraphrase: Leave the gleanings of your harvest for the poor, I am the Lord. Do not defraud, do pervert justice, do not anything that endangers your neighbors life, I am the Lord. Do not hate a fellow, do not seek revenge, I am the Lord. Over and over and over.

The character of God, the holiness of the Lord, was to be embodied, grounded, was to be found in the care that the Israelites showed one another. This is an ethos that we can draw from Leviticus that transcends time and context. It is as important to us now as it was to the Israelites then. And, then as now, loving our neighbor as ourselves is not just a rule to followed so that we can be called good, it is a reality to be evoked and created, it is completing a sacred circle. We are told: Love thy neighbor, align with the character of the Lord, and this holy connection with the people around us brings the holiness of the Lord into our midst.

Which finally brings us back around to immigration. The Lord entreats the Israelites to be kind to the foreigner among them, directly confronting tribalism by telling them to treat a foreigner as if they native-born, with no distinction. And how were they to be in touch with their own best motivations in this practice? Through empathy: Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. 

God understands who we are. God understands how hard it is to love others sometimes, how easily we get possessive and protective, how easily we retreat or get distracted. God understands how seductive group-based dominance and hierarchy can be, how it can provide us with a surge of powerful but shallow personal significance. God understands who we are.

So God tells us to be guided by empathy, to remember our commonalities as human beings. For the Israelites, they had a literal experience of being mistreated foreigners. These stories filled their narrative imagination, their escape to freedom defined their identity. So God called upon that memory as a guide, paraphrased by Jesus’ contemporary Rabbi Hillel as: what is hateful to yourself, do not do to another. The Israelites had a visceral experience of trauma at the hands of a despotic ruler, and God said: remember that and do not perpetuate that trauma upon others.

And the same spiritual principle works for us now. We thankfully, may not have personal stories of political persecution or trauma or displacement to guide our empathy, but we might not have to go very far in either our family histories or relationship networks to find someone who has.  My grandmother was a Latvian refugee in the second world war. I’m quite sure it changed her, as it did her whole family. And at minimum, at a basic level, we all know what it feels like to be afraid, to be despairing, to not know who we can count on, to not know where we belong, and to be afraid that we don’t in fact belong anywhere.

But we do, we all do, belong that is. This is the ethos of the holiness code. God stands apart, but only because *we* choose to be petty and small and blind. Of course God stands apart from that. But God, and God’s holiness, is deeply deeply present in the love that we show to one another, not as sanction or reward, but because when we love one other, enfold one another into community, especially when it is hard, we are living into the true reality that is the character of God, we are living into whatever it is that is behind the veil, that we can sometimes glimpse when we are quiet and open and ready.

With the eyes of our spiritual tradition, we can look upon the earthy challenge of immigration and see that it is an opportunity to practice holiness, that it is an opportunity to embody the character and ethos of God in our everyday. Of course, that is going to take a lot of work, political will, give and take, and probably some mistakes. And it also doesn’t mean that God doesn’t support healthy boundaries (and that is a topic for another day.). But what *is* clear, is that if we are looking to the bible to justify in-group and out-group thinking, it doesn’t. Our text today takes that completely off the table. That kind of thinking does not express the character of God; it is the opposite of holy. 

Our Swedenborg reading makes the distinction, that a spiritual life is not about being holy per se, but about being a vessel, a dwelling place, for truths and goods, for ways of thinking and acting, that are holy. The Lord alone is holy; may we reflect as many precious points of holy light as we can. 

Amen.

(1) The New Interpreters Bible, pg 520

Readings:

Leviticus 19:1-6, 9-20, 32-37

1 The LORD said to Moses, 2 “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy. 3 “ ‘Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths. I am the LORD your God. 4 “ ‘Do not turn to idols or make metal gods for yourselves. I am the LORD your God. 5 “ ‘When you sacrifice a fellowship offering to the LORD, sacrifice it in such a way that it will be accepted on your behalf. 6 It shall be eaten on the day you sacrifice it or on the next day; anything left over until the third day must be burned up.

 9 “ ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God. 11 “ ‘Do not steal. “ ‘Do not lie. “ ‘Do not deceive one another. 12 “ ‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the LORD. 13 “ ‘Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. “ ‘Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight. 14 “ ‘Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD. 15 “ ‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. 16 “ ‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people. “ ‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the LORD. 17 “ ‘Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt. 18 “ ‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. 19 “ ‘Keep my decrees. “ ‘Do not mate different kinds of animals. “ ‘Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. “ ‘Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. 

32 “ ‘Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God. I am the LORD. 33 “ ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. 35 “ ‘Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36 Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt. 37 “ ‘Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the LORD.’ ”

Apocalypse Revealed 586:3 
Those people who live according to the Word's truths are called saints, not because they are holy, but because the truths in them are holy; and truths are holy when they come from the Lord in them, and they have the Lord in them when they have His truths in them.