The Determining Reality

Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 51:1-17, Secrets of Heaven 20, True Christianity 773 (see below)See also on Youtube
Photo by Merlin Lightpainting: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-with-blue-hair-and-blue-eyes-11138000/
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Okay, here we are in Lent. The part of the liturgical year when we are asked to take the blinders from our eyes and really sit with our failings, to not shy away or make excuses, but to face them head on. With the emphasis on spiritual growth and regeneration in the New Church, I used to joke to my Lutheran classmates that it is Lent all the year round with Swedenborgians, but of course, that is not necessarily sustainable.  Like a breath in and a breath out, we need times to focus and times to rest, times to mourn and times to celebrate.  And today, we enter into the practice of seeing and feeling what we have done wrong, and what we can do better going forward. Soon enough, we will be celebrating Easter, we will be bathed in the joy of the resurrection. But for now, with courage and seriousness, we recognize our limitations, we recognize our shortcomings, we recognize our capitulations and our complicity.  We confess.  We convict.  

But it is important that we do so in the context of God’s essential character.  This is how Psalm 51 begins, by establishing the qualities of God that make reconciliation and relationship possible.  It begins with asking that God “have mercy” or “be gracious,” the language reflecting the famous benediction from Numbers 6:25  “The Lord bless you and keep you. the Lord make his face to shine upon and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”  These are things that the Lord is known to be, thus they are called forth in blessing. The psalmist asks for mercy because God has shown mercy so many times before.   

Bur really, how can the psalmist be so sure?  We are further told that God shows mercy “according to your unfailing love.”  The word here translated as unfailing or steadfast love is hesed.  This word is used frequently in the psalms and is central to God’s character.  It is a little more complicated than the phrase “steadfast love” though….it is inherently relational and covenantal.  It is about acting appropriately in a relationship, about knowing how to *maintain* community and relationship.  When God is showing mercy according to hesed, this is not just about sentiment, or even loyal sentiment, it is about the wisdom that knows how to love well, how to maintain connection.

And God also shows mercy according to God’s “great compassion” which is also sometimes translated as “tender mercies”. This Hebrew word is related to the word for “womb.”  So it might well be better translated as “motherly compassion.”  This is how we are to be held as we make known our sin, as we look unflinchingly at our own failings. We are held in God’s womb, safe and surrounded with God’s motherly compassion. So, we learn from the psalm that God will give mercy because God will always be there, God knows how to be in relationship, God sticks around when things get messy, God has abundant compassion.

And so we can enter into the rest of the psalm, we can enter into the practice of repentance because, as bad as it feels, as scary as it feels, it is remarkably, impossibly, NOT existentially dangerous to us. It *feels* existentially dangerous to admit we are wrong.  Our survival instincts kick in because we don’t want to endanger our relationships as they stand, our dynamics of power, our structures of privilege. For example, it might be really hard for a parent to admit they are wrong to their child, because it seems like their child may not respect their authority anymore. Or, I ask myself, Why so hard to admit to my husband when I am wrong?  Maybe I think I will be less lovable, less worthy of love, maybe I don’t want to concede some kind of power that I think I have? Even with small things, small admissions, let alone the big ones, our fight or flight systems kick in, and we are ready to encounter abandonment, to encounter loss of respect and power. In a survival world, power and respect are everything. And using *that* framework, admitting wrong-doing to God, the most powerful being of all, should be suicide. But God turns that whole deal on its head.  “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart you will not despise.”  The world often *does* despise brokenness…just see how we talk about poverty, about mental illness, about addiction. The world sees weakness and cannot bear to encounter what it means, that it could easily be each of us, for the one thing we all share is humanness. For God though, our brokenness, our wrongness, our failing is held in the context of our belovedness. God expects much from us, because we are loved so completely.

And so, We can be sure of our safety in repentance because, in the words of one of my commentaries: “The reality of God’s steadfast love is more fundamental than the reality of sinfulness.  While sin is inevitable and pervasive in the human situation, it is not ultimately the determining reality.” (1)

The determining reality is the Divine Love of God.  Evil and sin do not have existence in and of themselves, rather they are situations that involve a lack of, or denial of, or perversion of, the love of God.  An Example from science: “cold” is not actually a thing. I feel ridiculous preaching this in the middle of February, but it’s true; In and of itself, coldness does not exist.  Coldness is the absence of heat.  Cold comes about by the removal of thermal energy from a system. Likewise, evil is the turning away from divine love, the removal of divine love from a system; it has no true existance of its own. And of course, this removal of Divine Love is never enacted by God, but rather when we remove ourselves from God’s presence, like a teenager who retreats to their room and shuts the door. Lent is about taking a look these times, and these tendencies.  Taking a look at the times we have not trusted in the presence of God, taking a look at the times when we surrender to false idols and false suppositions, taking a look at the times we have not trusted the determining reality of love, not trusted that God will not despise a broken and contrite heart. 

As we will learn with the Easter story in several weeks, God demonstrated as clearly as possible that God does not despise brokenness. Jesus’ broken body on the cross was a “sacrifice acceptable to God”, not because God was angry and demanded the death of something innocent as an appeasement. Jesus broken body on the cross was God’s broken body, God’s broken heart, God’s ultimate statement of steadfast, motherly compassion. The cross is communicaing: “Here, look, there is nothing you can do that I haven’t seen, that I haven’t felt.”  There is simply no state of brokenness that is too broken to be held within God’s love, no state of brokenness that cannot experience resurrection, that cannot experience vivification, that cannot feel the renewal of life.

But we must open the door.  We must believe in the solidarity that God is communicating.  We must dismantle the walls around our hearts.  We must crush the defensiveness, cast away the pride, stare down the fear.  And if we do, God has promised life.  God has promised mercy….and not the world’s mercy, which is often a reluctant bestowal of appeasement, a half-hearted condescension, a distracted forgetting.  God’s mercy entails entrance into a cycle whereby resurrection is the answer to loss, every time.

As characterized by St. Bonaventure: God’s creation, God’s perfection, is a circle.  In a circle, there is nothing left behind, nothing left outside. Verse 10 of our psalm harkens back to this primordial creation when it says “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”  This hebrew word for create, bara, is used to indicate an exclusively divine activity, the kind of creating that only God can do.  And thus the Message Bible translates verse 10 as: “shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.”  We heard in our Swedenborg reading that this work of creation is on-going. Our mothering God is always hovering over the waters of our crazy life, our chaos, our brokenness, looking to speak a word that will separate the light from the darkness.  We might cling to the darkness for our various reasons.  But, the creation of a pure heart, a new heart, can only be done when we bear open our chests and let God get to work in us. 

Another way of looking at this is from the author Glennon Doyle. She coined a new word to describe her experience of transformation: “brutiful”, an amalgamation of beautiful and brutal. An addict who rebuilt her life, Melton recognizes that showing up to the parts of her life that were hurting and broken, embracing her humanness, is what helped her become, in her words, “better, kinder, softer, stronger.” This is not the idea that suffering itself is beautiful, this is not about martyrdom, but rather, the idea that beauty and love can never be contained. Beauty and love and truth will find their way to us, like water flowing on a circuitous path, looking for the way that is open to flow. Beauty and love and truth will flower from even the smallest encouragement; we’ve all seen plants growing and flowering in between the cracks in concrete.  Beauty and love and truth will reach deep into loss and pain and bring out resurrection, if we let them. Because that’s the way that God works, a divine circle of loss and renewal.

So, Help us, Lord, to find balance in this Lenten season, let us step into the divine circle. Let us see, that if our Lent experience is all beauty, then perhaps we are not being honest with ourselves. If our Lent experience is entirely brutal, then perhaps we are forgetting the love of God.  Let our path be “brutiful,” let our path be one of abundant creation. Let God shape a Genesis week out of the chaos of our lives.

Amen.

(1) The New Interpreter’s Bible p447


Readings:

Genesis 1:1-5

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


Psalm 51:1-17
1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. 4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. 5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. 6 Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place. 7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. 10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. 13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you. 14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, you who are God my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. 15 Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise. 16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. 17 My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise. 


Secrets of Heaven 20

And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. This is at the outset when a person starts to realize that good and truth are something superior. Thoroughly external people do not even know what good is and what truth is, for they imagine that everything which comprises self-love and love of the world is good, and that everything that panders to those loves is truth. Thus they do not know that the things which they imagine to be good are in fact evil, and that those which they imagine to be true are in fact false. But when a person is conceived anew, first they start to recognize that the good in them is not really good, and then, when they enters more into light, to recognize the existence of the Lord and that the Lord is good and truth themselves.


True Christianity 773

…These are the two goals of [the Lord’s] Coming. His ultimate purpose in creating the universe was exactly this: to form an angelic heaven made up of people…The divine love that God has, and that is his essence, cannot intend anything other than this, and the divine wisdom that God has, and that is God, cannot produce any other outcome than this. 

The universe was created for the purpose of having an angelic heaven made up of members of the human race, and also for the purpose of having a church in the world, since the church gives the human race access to heaven. In addition, saving people, which requires that they be born in the world, is itself an ongoing act of creation. For this reason the Word sometimes uses the word "create," and means by it "forming people for heaven. "