Readings: Leviticus 19:1-6, 9-20, 32-37, Apocalypse Revealed 586:3 (see below)
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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.

Readings: Isaiah 35:1-6, Mark 7:24-20, Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2 (see below)
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Welcome friends, to a new church year. Hopefully we have all been able to enjoy some restful times over our summer, taken some space to renew ourselves.

This is exactly what Jesus was trying to do in our text today. He had been engaged fully in ministry for a while, healing and teaching, which included some intensive debates with the religious leaders of this day. He was clearly exhausted. There are many ways that this gospel reading humanizes Jesus. The first is that we see he was not limitless; his mind and body were capable of exhaustion and overwhelm just as ours are. The second is more implied, but clearly, for Jesus to have been experiencing such tension and exhaustion over the course of his ministry meant that Jesus very much cared about his mission. He felt the stakes of it all. He wanted to succeed. Sometimes when we focus on the divine and other-worldly Jesus of the Easter story, we forget about the humanity of Jesus - he wept, he loved, he slept, he ate, he laughed. 

And he also made mistakes. Many times we don’t want to think about Jesus as someone who made mistakes. It makes us uncomfortable, for we base our entire tradition on things that he said and did. Can we base a whole tradition on someone who is fallible, even if just a little bit? But when we look at this entire story, we find that there is a deeper teaching, one that the gospel writers made sure to include. And I think we know from our own lives, we can learn just a much from our mistakes as we can from our triumphs, probably more even.

And so we have this exhausted Jesus, just trying to find a moment to himself to recharge. We know this person; he is us. We are told: He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. How frustrated, how grumpy he must have been to have yet another person come for a piece of him. He had nothing left in the tank to give. And so, as this Syro-Phoenician woman delivers her request, he lashes out at her with an insult. 

It is important not to try to explain this away. Many do, saying that it wasn’t really an insult in his day, or saying that Jesus was trying to test this woman’s faith. Neither of these things are true. It was an insult and it was intended as such. Dogs as beloved pets is a relatively modern concept, which we cannot overlay here. The woman was a gentile, of Greek and Syrian extraction. In Matthew’s version of this episode, she is explicitly termed a Canaanite, the Israelite’s antagonists of old. And even as Jesus encountered and healed different people from different places, he also had a specific mission for his beloved Jewish people. At a moment when it felt like he had nothing left to give, he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone outside of his tribe. In his exhaustion, he gave way to his own bias about this woman’s value. 

Which brings us to a discussion of a more modern concept: confirmation bias. In our increasingly divided and siloed cultural landscape, you may have heard of this idea already. Basically, it is the tendency to prefer information or interpret information in a way that validates our pre-existing views and conversely to reject information that contradicts our pre-existing views. It is the phenomenon behind what feels like the increasing intractability of all our positions, our inability to agree on even the most basic terms of fact, science, or reality. The truth is, once we have decided that something is true, our brains work very hard to justify that decision, latching on to anything that confirms it, and rejecting, ignoring, or re-interpreting anything that doesn’t. 

Studies have shown that when we receive information that confirms what we already think, our emotional centers in the brain light up. It feels really good to be right. Conversely, when we are given facts that refute what we already think, the reasoning regions of our brain “go dark.”(1) It feels less good to be uncertain or unsure, and so we instinctively avoid it. Evolutionarily, it may have benefited us to create mental patterns and structures upon which to make decisions, and to feel good when those constructs are borne out well. Could we imagine if every decision was made from zero? We’d never get anything done! But like any tendency, when it goes into hyperdrive, when we become overly reliant on the way certainty feels good, then we are tempted to constantly oversimply, to avoid flexibility of thought, and to habitually ignore reason itself. These habits, more than anything, invite us into us vs them thinking. There is no quicker way to boster our own self-esteem, our own sense of value and belonging, than to place ourselves conceptually into some sort of in-group, over and against “those people.” Confirmation bias is the way of thinking (or not-thinking) that more and more convinces us that we are right to do so.

Jesus, in his circumstances that we are considering today, was in a moment where confirmation bias could have been at play. All his life he was likely subject to a cultural confirmation bias about the gentiles, about anyone who wasn’t Jewish. The gentiles surely did the same for the Jews as well. It built up Jesus’ internal idea of who this woman was. In a moment of weakness and frustration, he relied on this bias instead of seeing the person who was in front of him. 

Yet, in a powerful moment of self-determination, the woman turns the insult around, refusing to own the intended injury but instead claiming it so that it might be wielded as a rhetorical reply in Jesus’ own style. She stood unshakable in her own dignity, and in her desire to save her daughter. 

Can we imagine then the multitudes that exist between v 28 and v 29 of our text today? The silence after her statement: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” What did those seconds hold for Jesus? There were two ways that it could have gone. Jesus could have leaned in to his confirmation bias, let his rational mind ignore what he just saw, let his emotional mind get a glow up of superiority and rightness, and interpret what she said in a way that supported the insult he had delivered. “Those Syro-Phoenicians, so rude, so conceited, who does she think she is? How dare she say such a thing to me. These people are always taking advantage.” And we can imagine his next words might have been “Get away from me.”

But they weren’t. Instead, Jesus rejected the human tendency towards confirmation bias. He let his rational mind receive new information, and reflect upon it. He saw this woman stand firm with confidence and wit, yet without rancor. He saw the lengths a mother would go to save her child, a given among all cultures and creeds. He saw the courage it took to speak up in a culture where women were socialized to be deferential. And with this new information, Jesus saw that he had acted wrongly, and chose to act differently, the second time with more compassion.

This in itself is a small miracle. It’s not actually the norm. Studies show that when human beings are presented with facts and information that refute what we might think, that we tend to dig in to our strongly held notions, rather than entertaining new ones.(2) We want to avoid  uncertainty, and especially, avoid any repentance and repair that might be a consequence of our strongly-held ideas. We are not told how Jesus felt about this episode, but we can imagine him sinking to a chair once the woman had left, feeling regret for lashing out. Having to re-evalute our ideas about the world, and especially our ideas about ourselves, is not usually pleasant. Yet, the fundamental work of the spiritual life is change and growth.

We heard in our Swedenborg reading, how even in his time, it was clear that people will defend and justify whatever they want by any intellectual means that they can. Swedenborg writes that human beings were created with a will, to act as a vessel for love, and an intellect, to act as a vessel for wisdom, and it is through these two vessels that God can dwell within us. They mirror the relationship of God’s own Divine Love and Wisdom within Godself, and they are designed to act in concert, with love being the fuel for wisdom, and wisdom being the structure for love. For the sake of our freedom of choice, and the development of our spiritual life, we human beings have the ability to both choose what kind of love we ultimately want to serve, and to see the intellectual truth of something when our hearts haven’t quite gotten the memo yet. But when self-love becomes the fuel for everything we think, causing us to abdicate the ability to see anything else, then tendencies like confirmation bias are given free reign.

Today, in this one short episode, Jesus shows us that it doesn’t have to be so. A key discipline of the spiritual life is the ability to sacrfice short term good feelings like complacency or superiority or self-satisfaction, for the chance to grow in our ideas and perspectives, for the chance to grow in wisdom. For as we grow in wisdom, we make more space for empathy and compassion within us, which in turn helps us grow even further in wisdom, a holy virtuous circle. But this circle can’t get going unless we commit to regularly challenging our own ideas, and to keeping an open mind. Studies have shown that this can be as simple as training ourselves to notice our own thought processes. (3)

I feel for the exhausted and fallible Jesus in this story, and seeing him grapple successfully with a very human tendency, increases rather than decreases my faith in what he was trying to do. This small moment is a nitty-gritty miracle, theology embodied in relationship between two human creatures. What would Jesus do? Jesus didn’t hestitate to change course when he was reminded of the humanity of another. May it be so for all of us. Amen.

1. Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, p174
2. Ibid, p181
3. Ibid, p182
   
   
   

Readings:

Isaiah 35:1-6
1 The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God. 3 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; 4 say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” 5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. 6 Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.

Mark 7:24-30​
24 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. 25 In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. 27 “First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 28 “Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Divine Love & Wisdom 395:2
From the intellectual faculty called rationality, and from the volitional faculty called freedom, a person acquires the ability to affirm whatever they wish. For the natural person can elevate their intellect to as high a light as they desire. However, a person who is caught up in evils and their resulting falsities does not elevate it further than the higher region of their natural mind, and rarely up to the region of their spiritual mind. The reason is that they are governed by the delights of their natural mind, and if they elevate their intellect above that, their love's delight perishes. If they do elevate it further and see truths opposed to their life's delights or to the assumptions of their own intelligence, they then either falsify those truths, or pass them by and scornfully leaves them behind, or they retain them in memory as means to serve their life's love and conceit in their own intelligence.

Readings: 2 Samuel 6:1-2, 12-19, Secrets of Heaven 10416 (see below)
See also on Youtube: youtu.be/PK5TJzklh7U
Not long after I decided to go with the reading for today, I began to regret it. As I read over 2 Samuel, going back and forth over the text to see what happened before and after, I started to panic a little, thinking: “I can’t draw anything good from this!” And why? Because it is too messy. There are no simple heroes or villains. It is a story of war, and no one comes out well. We may remember David, a mere boy who vanquished the giant Goliath. After that, he spent years as a loyal servant in King Saul’s court. Even as Saul’s paranoia eventually forces David to become a fugitive, he maintains his integrity in the face of Saul’s cruelty. And yet, as David gathers support and strategizes, even as Saul eventually dies at the hands of the Philistines and David mourns him with sincerity, the narrative is filled with wartime actions that seem almost casual in the biblical account but that feel deeply wrong in the larger scheme. And, as much as David is lifted up as a seminal leader, alongside his good qualities we also know that he was deeply flawed.

And in a flash I feel a distinct resonance with our own times: full of messiness and sadness and loss and injustice, full of a necessary reframing of things we thought we knew, full of a necessary reckoning with things covered over, full of dealing with things we never thought we’d have to deal with. From pandemics and insurrections to climate change and racial injustice, there is a lot to feel uncomfortable and uncertain about. Processing it all feels hard and messy and sad, as we all just try to figure out how to show up in way that is accountable and useful. I’m sure we’d prefer easier stories, easier history, an easier sacred text, but that is not what we have in front of us.

What I take from this story, though, is the recognition that God remains in all of it, not as sanction but as grace, and a reminder to pair reflection and challenge with celebration and joy. Because, in the face of all that is happening in the world,  I know that I sometimes it can feel like celebration is not allowed, that somehow joy itself in the face of injustice and pain is a betrayal. How can we be happy when so many are suffering, so much is going wrong in our world?

And certainly, there are ways that the pursuit of happiness, of momentary and external joy, can be a distraction, an avoidance, a resistance, an indulgence, that prevents us from dealing with what needs to be dealt with. We certainly need to be aware when we are doing this. But, celebration and joy around the presence of God with us is an indispensable way to connect *to* God, to feel within our bones that our God is a good God, to recognize that our God is with us, in every challenge. It is a kind of celebration that cannot be relinquished, for the sake of our own well-being.

We can see this in the picture of David dancing as the ark is taken to Jerusalem, bookended by war and upheaval on one side and David’s upcoming transgressions on the other.  It is not so much that David as a character has a consciousness of this tension; rather, the narrative itself provides us with the juxtaposition. Within so much loss and violence and turmoil, still God reaches out in order to be among humankind, to be at the very center of our lives, as the ark with God’s instructions for living would be in the center of Jerusalem. And so David dances, as do the people, and we are invited to join in.

This dancing, this expression of joy, does not erase the urgency and the gravity of the wrongs we will need to right, the catastrophes we will need to manage, the apologies we will need to make, the healing we will need to do. The dancing, the expression of joy, puts us in the space where we might be renewed, where our selfhood is forgotten, even if just for a moment, where God’s love might freely flow into our soul, our mind, our heart, so that we have the fortitude and the resilience to step into the challenges of our life and our world.

For there certainly are other ways to approach our challenges. We look at Michal, Saul’s daughter, we see her despising David as he danced, and we see a resonance with that part of us that despises freedom and joy in ourselves and in others. She admonishes David sarcastically as he returns home:

“How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!” (2 Samuel 6:20)

Her story is complicated too. As daughter of the king, she was used to privilege. And yet as a women in ancient times, she did not have access to any measure of self-determination either. She was initially promised in marriage to David by her father, Saul, when David was favored in court. Years later, after Saul had died, David called that promise due and dragged Michal away from her current husband. The biblical account tells us her husband followed behind her for miles, weeping, as David’s soldiers led her away. Of course she was salty and resentful, at minimum. Her life had been determined by powerful men who cared nothing for her own wishes. And even her own feelings ultimately do not get to be hers, as this personal episode is co-opted by the narrative to demonstrate the true end of the reign of Saul and his line.

There are ways that we have all been wronged and challenged, by particular people, by systems, by what seems like fate. Anger, resentment, and sadness are reasonable and expected reactions to this reality, especially in situations where we have no power to make things better, to right the wrongs, to change our circumstances. 

But the ways we process that anger, resentment and sadness are key. We can see in Michel what happens when life make us hard and cynical. When we see the eruption of joy in others and all we can think of is what we have lost, what has gone wrong. The biblical narrative implies that for this stance, Michal would remain childless all her life. In the natural sense, this seems an overly harsh sentence for an understandable reaction to being treated like chattel. But in the spiritual sense, we can see that nothing can be born from that type of hardness, there can be no offspring of growth and transformation from a mindset that centers our pain, instead of processing our pain, that twists the existence of hardship into an ongoing support for a ego-centered worldview. And that is a very different thing from recognizing an accountability for our own actions even as we do not excuse what has happened to us, even as we work for justice and change.

And all of this is so nuanced and difficult to sort out in our real lives. This text doesn’t tell us “don’t worry be happy.” This text doesn’t tell us to just forget about our challenges and dance. This text isn’t saying we shouldn’t feel the fullness of the injustice of the transgressions we encounter, learn about, or experience. Perhaps it is just too much to see *David* dancing, knowing that he was the one who took Michel away from her life. But is it possible to see the dancing itself as holy and good apart from him?

What instead, would it have been like if Michal could have danced? She was alone in that window looking down; what if there had been a community to dance with her, to help her remember her connection to her God and her worthiness and potential. We can have compassion for the way her perspective turned, and why, while also hoping and wishing that she might have had access to a community and a practice that renewed her, that kept her whole in spirit. Purely happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales, but the dance, connected to the ground and our heartbeat; it bridges what is and what could be in a real and primal way.

The establishment of the ark in Jerusalem is so very important to the Jewish tradition and by extension, to ours. It signals the centrality of God in our lives, about how God pitched a tent right in the middle of all our messiness, and how we might respond by building the temple of our reverential selfhood around it. What steadfastness, what an unreasonable faith God has in us! And for this gift, for this grace, we dance. Amen.


Readings:

2 Samuel 6:1-2. 12-19

1 David again brought together all the able young men of Israel—thirty thousand. 2 He and all his men went to Baalah in Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim on the ark.

12 Now King David was told, “The LORD has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. 13 When those who were carrying the ark of the LORD had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. 14 Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the LORD with all his might, 15 while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD with shouts and the sound of trumpets. 16 As the ark of the LORD was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, she despised him in her heart. 17 They brought the ark of the LORD and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the LORD. 18 After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD Almighty. 19 Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes. 

Secrets of Heaven #10416

This is clear from the meaning of 'playing' as the desire of a person's interiors to celebrate, for play is the outcome of that desire, being a bodily activity brought about by gladness of mind; and all desire for celebration and all gladness of mind come from the delights belonging to the loves that govern a person. The reason why agreement as well is meant is that every desire to celebrate has agreement residing inwardly within it; for if any disagreement or disapproval enters in, that desire perishes. The desire to celebrate resides inwardly in a person's feeling of freedom, and all feeling of freedom comes as a result of love, when nothing exists to frustrate it.

Readings: Mark 6:1-13, Secrets of Heaven #4677:8-9 (see below)
See also on Youtube: youtu.be/ucNEkdH5y0M
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

So, I feel a little crotchety standing up here and saying this but its true: I don’t like to travel.  Now, I totally like being in new and different places, that’s great.  What I don’t like is the traveling to and from new places, especially air travel.  I’m not afraid to fly, but rather, I do get anxious about all the moving pieces…packing for myself and my family, leaving to get to the airport on time, finding parking, wondering will there be a huge line at security? will I make it onto an overbooked flight?  how will I navigate an unfamiliar airport?  There are just so many variables.

I recall one time several years ago trying to make it back from Convention in California. As I touched down in Chicago, ready to make a connection, my phone dinged.  The connecting flight was delayed two hours.  Fine, that meant I had more time for lunch.  But over the next several hours, I came to dread the buzz of my phone.  Ding. One more hour delay.  Ding. Another hour.  Ding.  Another two hours.  Ding.  Flight cancelled. I checked into a hotel with nothing but my handbag and my clothes on my back, thinking of this text. No second tunic, or deodorant for that matter, for me.

This is what makes the bible a timeless document.  Instructions given to specific people in a specific time, for specific reasons, can also have something important to say to us now.  Jesus had good reason to instruct his disciples as he did.  The dangers of traveling in the ancient world (as chronicled for example in the story of the good samaritan) made pairing up a good idea. A staff, in particular, was necessary to protect against wild animals. They were not to carry money to make it clear that they were not charlatans or magicians looking to make a quick buck, as there were many of those kind around in those days. They were to stay in the first house they were welcomed to, in order to discourage an appearance of currying favor to procure fancier accommodations. They were not to carry a second tunic, something that would protect them against the cold of night, but rather, trust in the Lord that lodgings would be found. And finally, shaking the dust off one’s clothing has a precedent in the book of Nehemiah as a sign of renunciation. The disciple’s mission was urgent, and they were not to waste time in the towns that were not receptive to their preaching.

Jesus was combining common sense with a desire for accountability, integrity and resilience. His disciples would be able to adapt to their circumstances, bringing the good news to people with a sense of servanthood, not triumphalism or superiority.  And they would respect people’s freedom, moving on when it was clear that they were not welcome.  We would do well to remember the simple beauty of these instructions and what they teach us.  Like: Community is a good thing; so make a friend for the journey.  Or: Be fierce and brave in protecting those we love from harm; and we might be called upon to protect the vulnerable too.  Avoid making money an idol; recognize that it is incidental to the movement of God in the hearts and minds of individual people; we can always show love no matter how much money we have in our pocket.  Be a humble servant; what we are given and who we are is enough; we need not strive towards an ever-increasing level of comfort and convenience because, really, it is not about us.  Avoid trying to engineer all possible outcomes; for then there is no room for the movement of God and for grace to flow between people and into situations. And, always respect the freedom of others; we may not agree with them but we are doing no one any favors by being pushy.  Gentle persistence born of love is about trusting the emergence of image of God in all people, and that is very different from the kind of relentlessness is often about our own agenda more than God’s.

As we learned in our Swedenborg reading, there are two additional spiritual dimensions to this teaching.  In the Word, tunics (as do most clothing) correspond to truth, the true ideas that we clothe ourselves with, the ideas we slip into that guide our living in the world. We are not to have two tunics because, as the reading said, Divine Truth is singular, it only ever derives its being from divine love.  There are no other origins for Divine Truth, and the instruction to only have one tunic represents this fact. A second tunic would represent truths that we derive from our selfhood and our ego, truths and ideas that serve us, not Divine Love.  And it is really easy to pack that second tunic, just in case. It’s really easy to clothe ourselves in divine truth until it starts to cost us something.  For example, we might believe in the equality of all people until it means that we need to give up our privilege.  We might believe that God loves everyone until we ourselves are called to love everyone, including those we “other.”  We might believe in the glory of creation, until it inconveniences us to care for our earth.  Then, we reach for that second tunic to protect ourselves against the loss of whatever we think is indispensable to us.  We start to think we deserve our unearned privilege, or that others are inferior or different, or that we can’t possibility make a difference. But these ideas involving superiority, power, apathy (and many others) do not serve divine love, they serve our self.  They keep us feeling safe and comfortable and toasty warm.

The second idea from the Swedenborg reading is this: that all the things listed in the gospel text, in Mark and the other gospels, are all good things from the Lord.  Gold, silver, bronze, and bread represent different shades and kinds of goodness in our lives. So it is not that the disciples were never to have any contact at all with these things, but rather that they were not supposed to pack them for themselves.  They were not supposed to carry them along as if they owned them.  And this is because the goodness and truth we receive from the Lord is from the Lord alone.  We get into trouble when we start thinking that they are ours, that they originate in us, and we can and should control their coming and going.

I remember when my daughter was a much younger than she is now, and I thought that I would start giving her some responsibility when we were preparing to travel.  I gave her a backpack and told her to pack the things she thought she would need.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was a little surprised by what made it into the bag, and I had to sit down with her and pull things out one by one.  I found myself saying things like: “You never use that headband, do you really think you will need it? or “You can’t possibly need three different stuffed animals, how about just one.” (Let me say, with practice and age, she is a very competent bag packer now.)

But you can see how this is like us and God.  When we pack our own bags, we will put lots of stuff in there that doesn’t belong.  And so God will sit down with us and gently challenge us about what we think is necessary for the journey.  This is actually the process of regeneration: The Great Unpacking.  We all probably begin with one enormous unwieldy backpack, full of things that we have deemed necessary for survival, or things we picked up on the way. Sometimes we maybe let other people pack our bag and we never thought to look inside, or we were too afraid to. But, One by one, God will help us unpack the things we don’t need, the things that are too heavy and weighing us down, the things that prevent us from being the nimble and focused disciples that God knows we can be.  Do we need this armor?  No we do not.  Do we need this self-defensiveness?  Nope. Do we need this fear? No. Do we need this self-focus, do we need this worry, do I need this self-hatred, do I need this distrust?  No, no and no.

Just in case we think we can get around the idea of an empty backpack by choosing to only packing good things, like empathy, service, civility, well, its not that simple. Packing good things is better than unhelpful things, certainly, but this can only be transitional at best. Money and bread are good and helpful things, but the disciples were not supposed to pack them because the problem is our packing them into our backpack ourselves. The problem is us trying to control the goodness of God, to hoard it and use it for our own ends. And this is where it gets so hard; striving for achievement, keeping ourselves busy, pleasing other people, having enough, being healthy or accomplished—these all seem like good things. And they are. Unless we are using them to bolster our own sense of self-image, keeping them in our backpack because they make us feel good or important.  And lets face it, we all do this.

This is why it is important to sometimes take off our figurative backpack and take a look inside.  Buddhist teacher Tara Brach quotes the sage Sri Nisargadatta saying “illusion exists…because it is not investigated.” She continues: “If we are attached to untrue beliefs, it is because we have not examined our thoughts. We have not met them with mindful investigation; we have not asked whether they truly represent our current, living experience of reality.  Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.” (1)

Perhaps we are carrying around some things that we didn’t realize, things that prevent us from being present to our lives in its vulnerable and beautiful reality, that prevent us from opening our hearts in compassion to those around us, that prevent us aligning from ourselves with the influx of heaven.

Swedenborg’s book Divine Providence tells us: “The Lord is at work in the center of our being, and works from that center into everything that depends on it all the way to our boundaries, and we are living at these boundaries while this is happening.  As long as we are keeping these boundaries closed, then, no cleansing can take place.” (2) The Lord is with us, in the center of our being, and is working for our benefit.  But God will not take away our sins without our cooperation, just as it would have been unkind for me to empty my daughters carefully packed backpack without her permission.  We need to purposefully and in freedom, lay our backpack down and look inside, and be willing to learn about the value and usefulness of what we have packed. 

And one day, to our surprise, we might find that our psycho-spiritual backpack is empty, that our second tunic is neatly left in the closet, and we do not care, because we are so connected to our God that we know we will be given what we need in every moment to become an angel.  Amen.

1. Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, p116
2. Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Providence #119

Readings:

Mark 6:1-13

1 Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. 2 When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? 3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. 4 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” 5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.

6 He was amazed at their lack of faith. Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. 7 Calling the Twelve to him, he began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over impure spirits. 8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. 9 Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. 10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. 11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 They went out and preached that people should repent. 13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.


Secrets of Heaven 4677:8-9

[8] Because Divine Truth is singular - that is to say, it is derived solely from Divine Good - the twelve disciples were commanded, when they were being sent out to preach the gospel of the kingdom, not to have two tunics.
[9] All the individual instructions given in these places are representative of the celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom which the disciples were sent to preach. The reason they were not to take gold, silver, bronze, bag, or bread with them was that those things meant different kinds of good and truth received from the Lord alone.…Now because these things had to be not twofold but singular, they were forbidden to have two staves, two pairs of sandals, or two tunics.

Readings: Revelation 12:1-9, 13-17, Apocalypse Revealed 533:1,3 (see below)
​See also on Youtube ​youtu.be/7a9UIkBh-nY
Photo by Mier Chen on Unsplash

Today we are celebrating, a little late, a traditional Swedenborgian holy day, June 19th. On this day, we celebrate the amazing ways that God is always breathing life into our spiritual journeys, individually and collectively, and we celebrate the vision that this reality suggests: that God has a dream for humanity, and that God is working to help us achieve it. This vision is what Swedenborg has called a New Church, and is pictured in the book of Revelation by a beautiful city descending from the sky called the New Jerusalem. This is of course, where our church gets its name: The Church of the Holy City. It is named thus, so that as we gather together in the here and now, we also look forward and work to cooperate with what God is doing in the world and for the world. 

Now, there is another metaphor used for the New Church in the book of Revelation though, and that is “the women clothed with the sun” from Chapter 12, which is our reading for today. 

But first, a note on The New Church, as a phrase:

The Swedenborgian movement has historically called itself The New Church, on our best days we know that it is only aspirational, that the New Church will never actually be bounded by bylaws, boards, membership, and committees. We make that structure because humans beings can accomplish more when we work together, and it makes us happy to gather with each other. But the phenomenon of “church” (defined in Swedenborg’s mystical way) exists wherever people work to take care of each other, raise their hearts and minds beyond their own self, and look to a higher power to help them do that. 

Certainly, human beings have always been able to do that, so “church” (mystically defined) has always existed. But there are also times when human capacities for spirituality need revitalization, especially if the earthly structures and the forms of church that we have devised are actually starting to get in the way of people caring, loving, and growing spiritually. 

Much of Swedenborg’s works are him arguing against human theologies that *are* getting in the way, particularly the kinds where we try to buy or talk our way into salvation. There is no short cut into salvation - is always whole-person transformation and nothing less, an eternal journey towards healing and wholeness, powered by the ways we connect our faith (what we believe) with the ways that we reach out to serve and love others.

So, sometimes in human systems there needs to be a newness brought to bear — God is indeed always doing a new thing! When we talk about there being a New Church, what we mean is a movement away from trying to find short-cuts to spiritual healing and wholeness, and a movement into accepting that salvation can only occur when the love in our hearts and the faithfulness in our minds work together towards the project of mutual love. There are many in the world that already understand this! And of course, it is an ongoing lesson for us all.

But let us now return to the figure of the woman clothed with the sun. She represents this revitalization of human spirituality, this New Church, in particular, the ways that it now exists in heaven, for everything on earth is connected to everything in heaven. She is clothed with the sun because any such revitalization must have the love of God at its core, and we learned in our meditation several weeks ago that the Lord appears in heaven as the sun.

The moon beneath her feet represents the New Church on earth, reflecting those rays of the Divine sun as best we can, but not being the origin of them. Swedenborg notes that since all things in heaven and earth are connected; there could be no New Church in heaven if there is not one on earth, and vice versa. Yet, we note the *separation* of the sun and the moon in this picture; what of that? The mystical church on earth and the mystical church in heaven *are* connected, yet always working towards full conjunction. We are a work in progress, in the process of becoming ever more connected. Or, to use a Lutheran phrase to describe the character of it: “already but not yet.” We are already connected but our union is not yet full and complete. There will always be more work to do. So, what is it that actually conjoins us with God and the heavenly church? The work of love, of course.(1) We unite ourselves with God and heaven when we love what God loves and when we act in accordance with that. But let us return to that in a moment.

Because the next question is a little less heart-warming. We have already asked what conjoins, so the next question is: what fractures, what separates? What devours?

Here we come to the great red dragon from the story. The woman is in labor and gives birth to a child, representing all the humane perspectives that a revitalized human spirituality will center: God is Divine Love & Wisdom, God is always forgiving, God made heaven for all, salvation is available to all who live the kindest life they can, sacred scripture speaks on many levels, all religions can be a path to God, and more.

Yet the dragon wishes to devour such humane, useful, effective ideas, to center other ideas instead. Ideas that make God and spirituality punishing, exclusive, materialistic. Ideas that center power, rigidity, cruelty. Ideas that tell us we should be out for ourselves, that mutual love is weakness, that faith need only be the right words to the right person, that some deserve salvation more than others.

We see the dragon everywhere, everywhere around us and everywhere within. A desire to connect more authentially with others in our life might be devoured by a fear of vulnerability. A desire to connect with God more intentionally is devoured by our lack of follow-through. A desire to apologise is devoured by our sense of pride. 

A desire to be a more welcoming church, town, country is devoured by a fear of change. A desire to take care of the vulnerable is devoured by a lack of generosity. A desire for integrity and process is devoured by the hunger for power.

There is much that stands in the way. But ultimately, though the dragon and what it represents stands there waiting, what I see connecting the New Church in heaven and the New Church on earth is the phenomenon of labor: the work of it, the pain of it, beauty of it, the courage of it, and the sheer creativity of it. The phrase “a labor of love” is a phrase for a reason; we know the truth of it. We might think of the New Church, this revitalization of the human spirituality and what it can achieve, as the opposite of a black hole: something that is continually birthing new, thoughtful, caring, brilliant, helpful, comforting things that can assist in our spiritual journeys. These things might be birthed in churches, or in spiritual movements, but they can certainly be birthed in many other places too. Anywhere or anyplace that looks to learn and grow in service and love, in movements of all kinds that stand for justice, hope and peace.

And so then, our work is two-fold, to facilitate and assist in birthing the newness, the comfort, the preciousness of every tiny piece of spiritual growth we and the world might make, and then to be vigilant against the dragon that would devour them. And I hesitate to use such language, because such language is so often used to pit human beings against each other. You’re the dragon, no you’re the dragon. Battle metaphors are powerful *and* flawed tools.

But we know the world, and we know our own hearts, do we not, my friends? There *are* forces, habits, tendencies within us that will swallow our good intentions whole. And what is the world made of, but us? We need to be able to see the dragon with clarity, to know the way it is appearing within us, and work to let go of the claws that it has in us, while at the same time resisting the dragon’s sneaky disguises as “othering” or as shame, or as judgmental pride.  Instead, we look to the story and see that the child is protected by being sent up to God. We protect the preciousness birthed by the New Church by first and foremost relinquishing ownership, surrendering pride and power and merit, and centering God instead of ourselves.

There are many ways to picture the powerful story of God’s presence with us, of God’s vision for humanity. The woman clothed with the sun is a beautiful one that speaks to us on many levels. It communicates to us a timeless sense of connection, generativity, beauty and protection, as well as the reality of what stands against those things. As we celebrate New Church day, today and in the future, I hope we all might be in equal parts hopeful, clear-eyed, and willing to labor. Amen.

(1) Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #1068


Readings:

Revelation 12:1-9, 13-17
1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.
4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.
5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.
9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child.
14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach.
15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.
16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.
17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.


Apocalypse Revealed 533:1,3
A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet. This symbolizes the Lord's New Church in heaven, which is the New Heaven, and the New Church to come on earth, which is the New Jerusalem.
…The woman here appeared clothed with the sun because the church is governed by love toward the Lord; for it acknowledges Him and keeps His commandments, and that is loving Him (John 14:21-24). 
The moon appeared under the woman's feet because it means the church on earth, which was not yet conjoined with the church in heaven. The moon symbolizes the intelligence in a natural person, and faith (no. 413). And its being seen under the woman's feet means, symbolically, that it was a church to come on earth…
[3] The church in heaven does not continue in existence unless it is conjoined with a church on earth, because heaven where angels are, and the church where people are, function together, like the internal and external components in a person…

Readings: Mark 3:20-35, Apocalypse Revealed 723 (see below)
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

The gospel of Mark, as a narrative, really gets down to business quickly.  Literally, we have turned ONE page from the start, at least in my bible, and Jesus is getting into all kinds of trouble. He has already been baptized by John, called his disciples, preached all over the place and healed many people of various diseases and maladies, including leprosy and paralysis, eaten with a (gasp) tax collector and other sundry sinners and challenged the religious authorities on the subject of the Sabbath. Jesus has been very busy, and people are taking notice. Large crowds follow him around, and we start our text for today with the acknowledgment they were preventing him from even doing normal things like sitting down at a table to eat.  Understandably, Jesus’ family is concerned.  They do not yet understand what he is trying to do.  Their time will come, as Jesus’ brother James will one day be the leader of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem, after Jesus’ death.  But for now, they think he is out of his mind.

However, his late-to-the-game family is the least of Jesus’ troubles. The religious authorities and the political elites are already plotting to kill him.  By page three of the gospel. They are actively looking for reasons to denounce him and trap him, and we are treated to one of those arguments here. They recognize that Jesus is performing miracles that are beyond human means. They see the transformative nature of his works. But they attribute the power of these accomplishments to the devil. They see him heal people and free them from possession, and they call such work satanic. Jesus exposes the ridiculousness of their assertion.  Hell does not stand for human freedom and human thriving; why on earth would the devil participate in such work?  Hell seeks dominion and enslavement, not healing and not liberation. It doesn’t make any sense. Then Jesus says “Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven…”
Now, this is quite the pronouncement, seemingly in conflict with Jesus’ words and actions so far, based as they have been on the necessity for repentance and the availability of forgiveness. So, blasphemy must be pretty bad then, to elicit such a response. What is blasphemy though exactly? It is sort of an umbrella theological term, which at best can mean irreverent behavior towards that which is sacred and at worst cursing and reviling God and what God stands for.  And clearly, it is this second more troubling and serious end of the spectrum that Jesus is talking about. 

Because we are not talking about the ubiquitous OMGs that seem to clutter our cultural landscape.  Certainly, taking the Lord’s name in vain is not to be encouraged but habitual and relatively unconscious blasphemy is very different from what Jesus is talking about here in this text.  Swedenborg makes a distinction between blasphemy that originates in the understanding and blasphemy that originates in the will.  And I quote (1):

“The second kind are the ones which are so horrible, not the first. Those that come out of the will by way of the understanding spring from evil of life, whereas those that come solely out of the understanding and not at the same time out of the will spring from falsity of doctrine or from the illusions of the outward senses that deceive a person set fast in a state of ignorance.”(1)

Ignorance and thoughtlessness do not condemns us. True blasphemy is never just a misunderstanding, one cannot trip and accidentally blaspheme. Neither is it blasphemous to be skeptical about God, or even wrong about God. Paul, author of many biblical epistles, is an excellent example of this. He started out as a devoted Pharisee persecuting Christians because he thought it was the right thing to do. But as soon as he had a spiritual experience, heard from Jesus that he was in the wrong, he immediately changed his behavior completely. His will was to be zealous for God, even as his understanding led him to work against God. But since his will was not for himself and his own power and rightness, then as soon as he understood his wrongness he transformed his behavior.

However, it is entirely another thing to see and recognize the work of the Holy Spirit for what it is and call it satanic as we understand the religious leaders in our story to have done, to see resurrection and re-creation, God’s main work in this world, and to say that it is worthless and treat it with contempt. To say essentially that the vulnerability and struggle of re-creation is fundamentally the wrong way to go. We might take the German Christian church during the rise of Nazism, as an example. The German Christian church actively allowed Nazi ideology to permeate and twist the gospel. Nazi flags were hung in churches, strewn upon altars. They took the Word, full of God’s bestowal of worthiness on all creatures, and deemed it inadequate, claiming that the Nazi interpretation of the gospel, based on purity of race, was the true fulfillment of the Word.  They took God’s depth and breadth of love and made it narrow, made it an excuse for domination and superiority.  It is an understatement to call this an over-reach, even though it was. It was also blasphemy of the worst kind.  The only way to justify such a disparate interpretation is from a will for power, for nothing else can cause God’s name to be taken up in the spirit of exclusion and death. This was not a mistake in interpretation, this was not an honest disagreement, this was the will for power twisting the gospel into its exact opposite. This is blasphemy. Taking the vulnerable, transformative, resurrection message of the Jesus and making it about the dominance of one people over others.

And this is what there is no coming back from, no forgiveness. What we are capable of understanding about God stems from what we love and value. When we try our best to love God, and not our self-as-center, we might make mistakes of understanding but we are inherently open to correction because in our love for God we submit our understanding to God, we submit our own interpretations and preferences to God’s mission for the universe.  Therefore our understanding of God’s truth can and likely will change over time. This is part of our spiritual journey, our trajectory of transformation and growth. But this will not happen if our will loves ourself and our own ego above all else. Growth and change is then threatening to our sense of ego-power. We will prefer that which is static and certain for that can be more easily controlled. Being created anew is inherently uncontrollable because it involves a surrender of self, and to the self that is focused on power, such surrender is impossible. And so the blasphemy that calls God’s creative and transformative character hellish cannot be forgiven because this kind of blasphemy rejects the whole premise of forgiveness, rejects the whole notion of transformation, rejects the goodness of re-creation at all. It is a self-inflicted wound, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The lack of forgiveness comes not from God. God cannot turn away from us. As we heard in our reading, it is against God’s nature.(2) The lack of forgiveness for blasphemy against the Holy Spirit comes from rejecting the idea of vulnerability as useful, repentance as necessary, and forgiveness itself as a way forward into new ways to love.

Notice also, that Jesus, as testy as he sometimes gets, does not take these affronts personally.  He sees himself as part of God’s larger movement for all of creation, and therefore exposes the heart of the worldview that these religious leaders espoused.  It seemed that they were objecting to one troublesome man, but Jesus points out that to be against the healing and liberation that he, Jesus, brings is also to be against the whole trajectory of the Holy Spirit, to be against the character of God. The whole of the cosmos expresses God’s creative power, and every part of the universe participates in its own on-going creation, and Christ is just one part of that larger picture.

The Holy Spirit is calling us all to take part in the adventure of on-going creation. Like all adventures, it won’t all be sweetness and light along the way, but the horizon is ever expanding if we are willing to let God lead us.  And perhaps it will serve us today to think about where we are throwing up roadblocks to our own re-creation.  Where we have convinced ourselves that rightness is better than vulnerability, where we have convinced ourselves that we are so chosen and blessed that we need not stoop to care for the forgotten, where we have convinced ourselves that true Christian love is fanciful and ill-advised.
Because, blasphemy is not an act that comes from nowhere, it comes from what we have chosen to love and value. When the self is loved above all, then the movement of the Holy Spirit towards others is incomprehensible. Though it is hard sometimes, when we choose to love God, we choose to love the principles of expansion, inclusion, surrender and redemption, we choose to love the existence of a creative and blossoming universe.  And so praise be to God, the creator of wonders.

Amen.

1. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 9222:4
2. Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity 56

Readings:

Mark 3:20-35

20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” 22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” 23 So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house. 28 Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” 30 He said this because they were saying, “He has an impure spirit.” 31 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” 33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. 34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

Apocalypse Revealed 723

For blasphemy symbolizes a denial of the Lord's Divinity in His humanity, and an adulteration of the Word, thus its profanation. For someone who fails to acknowledge the Lord's Divinity in His humanity and falsifies the Word, but not intentionally, does indeed commit profanation, but lightly. But people who claim for themselves all the power of the Lord's Divine humanity, and for that reason deny His Divinity, and who apply everything in the Word to acquiring dominion for themselves over the sanctities of the church and heaven, and for that reason adulterate the Word - those people commit serious profanation.

True Christianity 56

…From these few points you can see how insane people are who think that God can condemn anyone, curse anyone, throw anyone into hell, predestine anyone's soul to eternal death, avenge wrongs, or rage against or punish anyone…In reality, God cannot turn away from us or even look at us with a frown. To do any such thing would be against his essence, and what is against his essence is against himself.

Readings: I Samuel 3:1-20, Secrets of Heaven #561 (see below)
Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

This is such a beloved story from the Old Testament; it says beautiful things about listening for the voice of God, about call and vocation, about mentorship. Well, at least the first half of it does. The second half is a little more complicated. Yes, from Samuel we learn that it is important to listen for the voice of God. But then, what will that voice say?  What will that voice call us to do? What if it involves judgment? What if it is difficult?

So, first, some background on the text: the book of Samuel comes directly after the book of Judges in the bible. Earlier on, in Exodus and later, the Children of Israel had benefited from having two strong leaders in Moses and Joshua. But then comes a more trying time, which is chronicled in the book of Judges. Tribal wars begin to escalate, the state of things starts devolving. From time to time, leaders called “Judges” rise up to carry Israel through one crisis or another, but the trajectory remains downward and increasingly out of control.  

Now, back when Joshua led the nation, he had placed the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant at a place called Shiloh. Through all the troubles, this where it remained, and where we find ourselves in the story of Samuel. Previous to our text for today, the book of I Samuel introduces us to Samuel’s mother, Hannah, who in a familiar kind of story in the bible, was a favored wife who was also barren. She prays for a child at the tabernacle at Shiloh, and promises that if her wish is granted, she will place the child into the service of the Lord. She does became pregnant, and when Samuel is old enough he becomes an apprentice to Eli, priest of the tabernacle and descendant of Aaron.  But as trustworthy and kind and diligent as Eli was, his sons, also priests, were the opposite. They were corrupt. They were taking more than their share of the people’s sacrifices, and they were sleeping with the women who served in the tabernacle.  And Eli, in his old age, had failed to curtail their excess and their abuse of their role. This is the context of Samuel’s call story.  A society rife with corruption and violence, including even the priests of the tabernacle, and as a result, communication from the Lord was rare.  It felt like God was absent, but even if God was present, no one was listening.

And into this space, the Lord spoke Samuel’s name. Two times Samuel went to Eli, thinking that his master had called him, but he had not, and he sent Samuel back to bed.  The third time, however, convinced Eli that it was the Lord who was calling Samuel, and so he counseled Samuel as to what he should do.  When the Lord called again, Samuel said “Here I am, speak for your servant is listening.”

It is such a sweet and tender scene.  The openness and innocence of Samuel speaks volumes, as does the gentle and wise mentorship that he receives from Eli.  And in the tenderness of the moment, it becomes tempting to stop right there. But this is not the end of the story. The Word that Samuel receives from the Lord contains a judgment upon Eli. Samuel delays communicating this likely painful and awkward truth.  But Eli, admirably, demands to know what the Lord said in full, and he accepts the judgment in full.  His sons cannot remain in leadership, and because he did not restrain them, neither can Eli.  And so Eli steps aside to let Samuel take on the mantle of authority as the one who speaks God’s word.

It is a beautiful call story, but you can see, if we stop too soon we don’t get the whole of it.  God communicates with the world because God loves the world, and God has hope for the world. So, it is important for us to listen for what God is saying. And it is equally important to listen even if God’s word contains judgment upon ourselves and our behavior.  

It may seem to us that the judgment upon Eli was unjust. In the chapter before, he does indeed reprimand his sons, but they do not listen to him. Eli is clearly a good man. He has a good moral compass, he was loyal to God and likely his sons’ behavior pained him considerably. But what he didn’t do is challenge the structures that allowed his sons to take advantage of others. Eli is the part of us that is trying our best but is essentially happy with the status quo. The part of us that attends to what is in front of us faithfully. The part of us that might even be pained and saddened about the ways that other people are behaving but don’t actually do anything about it.

I know I struggle with the Eli part of myself all the time. Things happen in this would that we would never sign off on ourselves, and perhaps we don’t mind saying so.  But how far are we willing to go to change the structures that support or necessitate materialism, poverty, racism, sexual abuse and harassment, and gun violence in the world, just to name just a few. Certainly, I know I go much less far than I might wish to such change things, stymied by overwhelm, confusion, apathy, embarassment or any number of impediments.

And so the difficult question before us all, is whether we —diligent, kind, steadfast Eli— have we restrained our figurative sons? Have we challenged those around us, our families, co-workers and friends, when they have crossed a line, have we called out sexist behavior in real time, have we admonished a friend for a racist joke or idea, have we resisted the dehumanization of others however and whenever it occurs?

Further, have we worked to restrain and transform the kind of ideas within ourselves that support injustice? In Swedenborg’s metaphorical universe, sons often represent forms of truth, the shape of our ideas, the way we see things. Corrupt sons are then corrupted, false, misleading ideas. Ideas like “one person can’t change anything,” “those in poverty should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” “we live in a post-racial society,” “I deserve all my personal advantages,” “those people are just like that,” “it will always be this way.” Ideas that perpetuate “othering” and dehumanization and apathy, ideas that make complex things simple and simple things complex, ideas that justify the centering of ourselves and our egos and our comfort.  How far have we been willing to go to challenge these ideas within us?  To uproot them, and strip them of their power so that the Word of God can replace them?
Eli’s failure didn’t come from trying his best to restrain the corruption and bumping up against the limits of what one person can do. Eli’s failure came from whatever excuses allowed him to ultimately overlook his son’s behaviors, to throw up his hands. He spoke to them but did nothing to change the system in which they had free reign. So, this is not about taking responsibility for everything in the world that is bad, but taking responsibility for what we can do. Believe me, I stand convicted in this pulpit as much as anyone.  

So yes, this is a hard hard Word from I Samuel today. Do we perhaps now feel something of Samuel’s ambivalence, something of Samuel’s reticence at hearing what the Lord said. But…there is good news here to be had, for two reasons.

The first is the *existence* of Samuel. If Eli is a part of us, then Samuel is too, just as much. Samuel is the part of us that is devoted, looking to be guided, wanting to hear, committed to showing up, a state fueled by what Swedenborg calls “remains” or a “remnant.”  It’s a bit of a strange term, granted, but what he means by it is that all of the good and true things that we learn throughout our lives, all of our good experiences of love and compassion we have received, these are protected by the Lord deep inside of us. This pure goodness and innocence is preserved, stored within us if you will, ready to be drawn upon when needed. And there will definitely be times when it is needed; our Eli challenges are but one way that we might drift away from or avoid the life of the spirit. But, our Samuel nature is ready to respond to the Lord, our Samuel nature provides a well-spring from which God can work with us and through us.  And this goodness that “remains” with us in this way, it is a gift from the Lord, it is God working every which way to build us up, nourish us, give us chances to succeed and change. “The Lord preserves all these states in us in such a way that not even the least significant of them is lost.” This goodness that God stores up for us is inviolable, no matter how steadfastly we might turn away.

The second piece of good news is Eli’s integrity at his judgment. Eli might have been old and nearly blind, but he knew when the Lord was speaking. The good news is that the part of us that is distracted by worldly things, worldly concerns, the part of us that is afraid or overwhelmed or anxious or weary, that part of us is still essentially and deeply good. This part of us nurtured and mentored Samuel, and recognized the importance of Samuel. It just also needs to open up to the Word of the Lord, accept the judgment and do better, to allow the rise of Samuel to occur and the word of the Lord to become present on the earth. And this is exactly what Eli did.

There is *such* hopefulness in this story. In the midst of chaos we see God doing a new thing, we see God doing what God does: re-creation. But understandably, God doesn’t begin this work with our Eli natures, as good and kind as they might be, for they are mired in the business of the world, mired in linage and tradition and the preservation of what exists. God starts re-creation with Samuel, the innocent openness that will hear and respond. Sometimes we might resist, we might feel uncomfortable about what the Lord is telling us, but that is okay, this is part of being human. The important part is that we are hearing it and recognizing it and wrestling with it, for by contrast, Eli’s sons weren’t hearing anything from God at all. Our Eli natures do not come under judgment because they are impure or imperfect, they come under judgment precisely because God is hopeful for us, and God believes in what we can do and what we can be.  And so Samuel speaks God’s Word and..“The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of Samuel’s words fall to the ground.” Amen.


Readings:

I Samuel 3:1-20
1 The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions. 2 One night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. 3 The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the LORD, where the ark of God was. 4 Then the LORD called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.” 5 And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” But Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” So he went and lay down. 6 Again the LORD called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” “My son,” Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” 7 Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. 8 A third time the LORD called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. 9 So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10 The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” 

11 And the LORD said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears about it tingle. 12 At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family—from beginning to end. 13 For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons blasphemed God, and he failed to restrain them. 14 Therefore I swore to the house of Eli, ‘The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.’ ” 15 Samuel lay down until morning and then opened the doors of the house of the LORD. He was afraid to tell Eli the vision, 16 but Eli called him and said, “Samuel, my son.” Samuel answered, “Here I am.” 17 “What was it he said to you?” Eli asked. “Do not hide it from me. May God deal with you, be it ever so severely, if you hide from me anything he told you.” 18 So Samuel told him everything, hiding nothing from him. Then Eli said, “He is the LORD; let him do what is good in his eyes.” 19 The LORD was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of Samuel’s words fall to the ground. 20 And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba recognized that Samuel was attested as a prophet of the LORD.


Secrets of Heaven #561
To explain what a remnant is: It is not just the good and true things that we learn out of the Lord's Word from the time we are small and that become stamped on our memory. It is also all the states that rise out of those things, such as a state of innocence from babyhood, a state of love for our parents, siblings, teachers, and friends, a state of charity toward our neighbor and compassion toward the poverty-stricken and needy. In short, it is all states of goodness or truth.
These states, along with the good and true things imprinted on our memory, are called a remnant. The Lord preserves them in us, hiding them away in our inner being without our slightest awareness and carefully separating them from the things that are our own — in other words, from evil and falsity.
The Lord preserves all these states in us in such a way that not even the least significant of them is lost.

Readings: Luke 14:25-35, Acts 2:1-12, Secrets of Heaven 10490:6,7 (see below)
See also on Youtube
Photo by Arnau Soler on Unsplash

Good morning, my friends. Happy Pentecost! Today we will be considering the question: What is Discipleship? What does it truly mean to “follow Jesus” in our lives as they exist in this day and age? Because, we all know of the 12 disciples in the gospels. We have had previous sermons on texts that treated of their journey, including their call. But that was a long time ago. Can we think of ourselves as “disciples” of Jesus today? What does that mean for us now?

Let’s begin with looking at the passage from Luke in our reading. Initially, it suggests that true discipleship is something unattainable for the vast majority. Who among us will truly forsake - nay, hate - our families in order to be a disciple of Jesus? Is such a thing even consistent with Jesus other teachings, such as the ones where we are told to love one another? Of course not. So we must look for a deeper meaning. What is Jesus really trying to tell us?

Swedenborg would assert that the way to understand this passage is to see how family members are being used as metaphors. The people who are typically the closest to us in our lives stand for the things that we hold closest to us in our hearts and minds. Our perspectives, our narratives about the world or ourselves, our identities and the actions we take that align with those, our habits and desires and preferences. When these desires that we are wedded to are evil, as in they privilege and support our own selfishness in large and small ways, and when these things that we think are false, again privileging our own selfishness in the same way, then yes, we need to “hate” them and cut them out. And certainly, the bibical language here is intense. We *can* have compassion for ourselves as we struggle to disentangle ourselves from them over time. But the overall message is clear: in order to be a disciple of Jesus, we need to be committed to the process of “carrying our cross.”  We need to be committed to the process of freeing ourselves and healing ourselves from everything that would cause us to create or perpetuate harm.

And while committment to this process requires many things, such as devotion, sacrifice and courage, chief among them, I believe, is humility. Because as we delve into the process of truly taking up our cross, things might not always seem so clear cut. 

This process of taking up our cross will play itself out on many levels, basically as deep as we wish to go with it. We can repent for or let go of any number of desires and ideas and their associated actions that are universally agreed to be “bad” or harmful. Anger, stubbornness, jealously, avarice, defensiveness, prejudice, this list goes on. Sometimes it is very easy to see where we have hurt someone and why. And then, the remedy is very simple. Apologise, *try* not to do things like that anymore, and eventually our diligence and our efforts make us become someone who *doesn’t* do things like that anymore. This is the process of regeneration that we spoke of last week. Eventually, we find we have cut those metaphorical “family members” from our lives, as Jesus asked. We have grown and evolved, and we hold mutual love as the ideal closest to our hearts and minds.

But sometimes the process doesn’t feel quite so simple. As we go deeper into it, we might need to increase our understanding of what are truly good or harmful desires, ideas and actions. Things that we have been taught are good or bad, might have contextual or societal elements, deeper layers, that require untangling. Separating righteous anger and from self-referrental anger, is a good example. Many of us, especially women, might have been taught that anger is always bad, and it certainly *can* be when we give ourselves over to it for selfish reasons. But, anger can actually also be a valuable guide if we are willing to learn how to regulate our experience of it. Can we learn how to avoid acting from it, and if we do, can we make sure we will willing to clean up the mess we make? Can we learn to ask questions of our anger so that we can see what is beneath it: hurt, fear, sadness? Can we learn how to harness its righteous aspects and use it to motivate our pursuit of justice?

Or on the other side of things, what if we have been taught that something is an unequivocal good, but maybe there are aspects of it that are not? Productivity is highly valued in our capitalistic society. We are groomed to achieve, and produce, and climb a ladder of ever-increasing achievement to produce both security and satisfaction for ourselves. But does it produce meaning? Does it produce community? It is good to take responsibility for ourselves, to contribute to society. But to what end? Our own exhaustion? Perhaps some reframing of this idea would help any one of our discipleship journeys.

Or, there is the notion of being useful and caring, in our tradition, and many others. We might have learned that these things are the highest good, and indeed they are! But the lessons our half-evolved selves end up taking from this might sometimes bear scrutiny. Those of us, and I’m including myself here deliberately, who tend towards co-dependence might need to pay attention to why and when we try to be useful and caring. I know for myself, if others are not OK, I find it very hard to be OK within myself. And so then in order to recalibrate my own inner tension, I try to *make sure* others are OK, which can often turn into over-functioning, and not letting other people have their own experience. I’m sure you can see how especially this plays out in parenting. Something that seems like it is good—being useful and caring—actually might not be so entirely, and might be coming from a self-centered place, an inability to regulate not feeling OK. 

And so this is where is all connects to our reading from Acts. The most important part of discipleship is not actually devotion but humility, essentially remaining teachable. Because like everything, devotion can have its dark side. It can become so rigid and unyielding, so attached to this or that ideal, that it actually prevents our growth. In my co-dependence just described, the possiblity exists of being so attached to the idea of “I’m doing something good!” that we are blind to the harm. And then, our very idea of what is “good” becomes one of those metaphorical family members that Jesus tells us to forsake. Or with the earlier example of anger, attachment to the very notion that it is always utterly “bad” means that we might miss all the really juicy and important ways it could help us grow, if we were to come at it all from a different direction.

In our Pentecost story from Acts, the most amazing thing about it was that the Holy Spirit spoke to everyone in their own language, that each person could “hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.” And they asked each other: What does this mean? When we remain teachable, when we center the question “What does this mean?” God will always be speaking to us in our own language. When we have ears to hear what is next for us to learn, God’s Holy Spirit will be present to communicate what we need. And the humility to hear it, to not throw up obstacles and objections based on our various attachments, is the bedrock quality required for taking up our cross, for being a disciple. We need to yield ownership, even over our best efforts and our best ideas.

And this means that the final thing we need to let go of is our attachment to what being a disciple will look like, our attachment to some future perfect self that we have devised. We don’t actually know where our journey will take us. We don’t actually know who we are to become and what that will look like. As Jesus stated in our reading: …those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. Discipleship is ultimately not about what we are willing to give away, but what we are willing to give up, the level to which we are willing to yield ownership over the journey itself.

I’m finding this to be a particularly hard lesson. Perhaps you are too. Or not. This is the beauty of the way the Holy Spirit speaks to us all so uniquely. What a blessed thing; to be so precious to God that we are guided so individually. For we know that there is not a language in the world, nor a language of any singular soul, that God does not speak fluently. Amen.


Readings:

Luke 14: 25-35
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said:
26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.
27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?
29 For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,
30 saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand?
32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.
33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
34 “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
35 It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Acts 2:1-12
1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.
2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.
3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.
4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.
6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken.
7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?
8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?
9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,
10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome
11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
12 Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

Secrets of Heaven #10490:6-7
…Is there anyone who does not see that these words should not be taken literally, at the very least from the fact that they say without any qualification that father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters must be hated before anyone can be the Lord's disciple, when yet it is one of the Lord's commands, that no one should be hated, not even an enemy?

[7] It is self-evident that the things which are a person's own, that is, evils and falsities in their own order, should be understood by the names of those family members, since it also says that a person must hate their own soul and renounce all their possessions, that is, the things which are properly theirs….’Being the Lord's disciple' means being led by Him and not by self, thus by the forms of good and the truths which come from the Lord and not by the evils and falsities which come from the person.

Readings: Exekiel 36:23-28, John 3:1-7, True Christianity 586 (see below)
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Today we will be considering the question: What is Regeneration? This is a particular term used in our tradition to indicate the process of spiritual growth that leads us toward having a heavenly character. It is ongoing, it is constantly evolving, it is always challenging and sometimes delightful. It is the stuff of our life. As the author Annie Dillard says: How we spend our days… is how we spend our lives.(1) If we are committed to a tracjectory that is leading us to become more loving, more generous, more responsive to otheres, then we are engaging with the process of regeneration, no matter what we might call it.

The term regenerate means to re-create or revive something somehow. In nature, a salamander can re-grow an entire limb after it has been lost. In human beings, our bodies naturally regenerate themselves gradually by replacing our cells over time. This biological contruct can serve as a powerful metaphor for our emotional lives, as note the times a meaningful experience has re-shaped our habits or our identities. In theology, the specific metaphor of being born again is often used, as in our reading. In Jesus’ words, entrance into the kingdom of God requires that we be re-generated, re-made, re-born. 

This is indeed a very potent metaphor. How moving it is, the sense of being held in the womb of God as our heavenly character is being slowly formed, built cell by cell, moment by moment, decision by decision, all the while being nourished by a loving parent who would give literally everything of itself, its own lifesblood, to this re-creation. 

So, why does the process of regeneration matter?  Because like all things, God wants us to be happy. But crucially, God wants *all* of us to be happy. And so God made our happiness part and parcel of everyone else’s happiness. Mutual love is the key to God’s kingdom.

But, we are not a collective, like bees, or other insects. We don’t naturally just act for the good of the hive. We are born with an actual sense of selfhood. And thus lies the central temptation, the central quest, of the human life. Can we balance that sense of selfhood with our relationship to others? Can that selfhood learn to exist in mutuality, to give over part of itself to others, in order to find a greater sense of wholeness?

We are born into a world that requires us to work and strive for survival. As comfortable as our society might seem, we only need to look to the news to see that we are a hairs breadth away from any number of threats to that stability. Our selfhood knows this. And so it strives for domination and accumulation, to gain from these things what feels like psychological safety at every opportunity. And herein lies the space for evil to enter the picture. And not just mustache twirling evil of substantial size, but everyday cruelty and thoughtlessness, anything that serves the centering of one particular selfhood, ours, to the exclusion of others. This is the condition we are all born into. This is what needs to change so that we can enter into the happiness and peace that God has planned for us.

Perhaps we can use the illustration of a board game. Does anyone remember the Game of Life (if that is not too much on the nose!)? The game pieces were little cars and you would put people inside them as you traveled a game board that represented the different milestones in a typical life: education, family, employment etc. It’s cute and fun, but as with most board games, the goal is to win, to beat the other players. If someone rolls an unadvantagous number on the dice, we might cheer because it will put us ahead. If we can knock then off the board entirely, even better. 

But there are some board games that are designed to be collaborative, where it is only possible to win together. And this is why the process of regeneration matters. We don’t always know exactly how to do that, how to advance our common good together, whether in relationships, communities, societies, nations. Our selfhood will have its fears and doubts about such a path, and will have plenty of learning to do. And so we do the work of spiritual and personal growth.

And like being born, this process is not always comfortable. Part of the process is tension, conflict, and crisis. Not necessarily overtly with other people, or though that *can* be part of it. But rather, an essential tension between what our selfhood wants and the practices of mutual love: listening, relinquishing, sharing, including, caring.

Swedenborg writes that we have been given a special ability that allows for our spiritual progress: the fact that our will and our intellect are separate. Our will is the driving force of our life, the engine, what we want. But it is technically possible to both want something, and also to know that this thing is not good for us, or for others. A very silly example: we might want some chocolate cake. But we also might know that in this particular case, we shouldn’t have it. Maybe we are gluten-intolerant, maybe we have already had enough sweets for the day. In young children, this separation of will and intellect is not yet complete, and so we note that if a young child wants the cake they will take the cake - there is no daylight between what they want, what they think, and what they do. But as we grow and mature, there can be a pause beween those three things. In those pauses, this is where God can act, and this where we can cooperate with God’s action. We might recall the famous quote from Victor Frankel’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning:  Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

And this is why we do things like spiritual practices, like coming to church, engaging in contemplation and reflection, meditation, journaling, or whatever works for us. We want to make those spaces between what we want, think and do to be spacious, fertile, and useful spaces, designed to help us be as loving as we can be. We do the work of re-generating our selfhood, away from instinctive and incessant self-centering, and towards the practice of mutual love. 

How does this occur? Swedenborg writes that the process begins with self-awareness. We notice, we listen, we ask: want kind of presence am I being in the world? How do my actions affect others? What am I creating with my energy? And as we gather this information, we might receive answers that indicate we are hurting ourselves or others. In a religous context, these things are what have historically been called sins. Whatever we call them though, the knowledge of them give us an opportunity to move forward. If we admit their reality without defensiveness, and feel pain on their account, this is what is called repentance.

But the process continues: from this space of accountability, we ask for help. Certainly from God, potentially from others according to context, and we take a step into a new life in which we don’t do that hurtful thing anymore. And we certainly may fail a little or a lot in living that new life, but over time, with intention and practice, we succeed. A habit that our selfhood thought was necessary to its own supremacy or survival is put aside, and we learn that we can be whole and safe without it, and in fact, that we are more whole and safe without it, within God’s plan for our happiness. 

And sharpen this point, Swedenborg writes, if we don’t follow this path, we are *unable* to love our neighbor.(2) We might be able to exist alongside them. But *love* is impossible without a willingness to enter into this process. And this is indeed what God has called us to: to LOVE one another. This is not a call about sentimental feeling. It is call into the process of regeneration, into the process of helping each other become reborn for the sake of us all. 

If we wish to wrastle this whole idea back into traditional Christian frameworks, then we see that the process of regeneration is what “saves” us. If you recall from our sermon on salvation a few weeks back, we reframed the notion of salvation as healing, as the experience of becoming whole. So when we say that regeneration is what confers salvation, it is not at all as if we try very hard to be good girls and boys, and if we reach a certain threshold, then God plucks us out of the mire and gives us a heavenly life. It’s rather that the process of regeneration saves us because it heals us. Heals us of the state of being born into self-centeredness, and the habits and learnings that our selfhood has deemed necessary, and trains us instead in mutual love, so that we can all be each other’s salvation. 

Of course, what I have outlined above is simplifed. There layers upon layers of work to do if we are willing, and we may return to central tensions at different points in our lives as our capacity to do the work has evolved and changed. Each person’s unique selfhood and context is different, so the work will look different for everyone. This is as it should be. Yet we are joined by the central and corportate quest - to become spiritual beings, become beings who have God’s spirit at our center, a center that grounds us and holds us in love and heavenly connection. Amen.
(1) Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
(2) Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity #530


Readings:

Ezekiel 36:23-28

23 I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes.
24 “ ‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.
25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.
26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.


John 3:1-7 

1 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.
2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again. ”
4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.
6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.
7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’

True Christianity 586
We can be regenerated only gradually. Each and every thing that exists in the physical world serves as an illustration of this fact. A seedling does not grow up into a mature tree in a single day. First there is a seed, then a root, then a shoot, which develops into a trunk; then branches come out of that and develop leaves and finally flowers and fruit. Wheat and barley do not spring up ready for harvest in a single day. A home is not built in a single day. We do not become full grown in a single day; reaching wisdom takes us even longer. The church is not established - let alone perfected - in a single day. We will make no progress toward a goal unless we first make a start.
People who have a different conception than this of regeneration know nothing about goodwill or faith, or how each of these qualities grows as we cooperate with the Lord. All this makes clear that regeneration progresses analogously to the way we are conceived, carried in the womb, born, and brought up.