The Kinship of God: From One to Many

Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34,  John 12:20-33, Secrets of Heaven 2657 (see below)
​See also on Youtube
Photo by Fayette Reynolds M.S.

Here we are in the final week of Lent, and our text balances us delicately on the precipice before everything is put into motion for the crucifixion. In the previous chapter in the gospel of John, Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. It was his greatest, most momentous sign so far and the religious authorities were getting nervous.  They imagined that Jesus would create such a movement of hope that the Roman authorities might move in and destroy the Jewish people entirely. They were afraid; can you really blame anyone under occupation feeling this way? So, they start planning to take care of the problem in-house, by arresting Jesus.

So, Jesus’ days are numbered. He travels from Bethany, where Lazarus and his sisters live, to Jerusalem just before the Passover festival.  We will hear about his entry into Jerusalem next week, on Palm Sunday. All I will say now is that the raucous reception that Jesus receives on arrival does nothing to calm the Pharisees nerves.

Jesus’ fame is spreading far and wide, and as we hear in the beginning of our text for today, some Greeks were among the crowds. They may have been Greek-speaking Jews, or they may have been Greek proselytes, we don’t really know.  What we do know, is that they wished to see Jesus. The language used, and the inclusion of Andrew and Peter recalls the original calling of the disciples in John 1. We are prompted to recognize that Jesus’ reach is expanding.  A verse before, the Pharisees have just complained in desperation: “see this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”  We begin to understand that Jesus’ call will be replicated again and again and again.

But then, Jesus words turn to a perennial, persistent human question. “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”  Using the metaphor of a grain of wheat, Jesus starts to describe something important about God’s kingdom, that experiencing God’s kingdom has something to do with going from alone-ness and individuality - like a single seed -  to much-ness, or plurality - like the many seeds.

Human beings have indeed struggled with this balance of individuality and community, to different degrees, for as long as there has been human consciousness.  On one hand, we are individuals, and ultimately our choices are our own. Our freedom, and our accountability to that freedom, is part of what makes us human.  And yet, we are also social animals, communal beings.  We yearn for and thrive in community, and being in community means sacrificing some measure of individuality and individual rights for the good of the whole. Different societies have come down on the scale in different places on this question, throughout time.

The United States, in particular, forged its nascent identity through disagreement on this question.  The war of independence was fought because the English monarch was asking for taxation without representation, was asking for submission to the overall health of the nation without allowing for individual engagement in the life of the nation. To the Founding Fathers this was unfair, not just in a political way but in a way that struck at the core of what it meant to be human. They recognized the fundamental importance of liberty and individuality to the human psyche. We wish, of course, that they had been willing to recognize that importance as it extended to all human beings, not just the white, male, land-owning ones.  But even so, they were on to something, and so enshrined liberty in the structures and institutions of this country, with careful checks and balances so that as little liberty as possible was given up in order to orchestrate a safe and effective union.

But even with their careful planning, what that balance between individual freedom and the common good looks like in practice remains an active question for us now and much of politics involves arguing about where to draw this line. And it is not just on scale of politics, nations, or civil society, that these questions arise. We strike bargains between individual needs and communal ones with each other on a smaller scale as well. When we enter into relationships with others: marriages, partnerships, friendships, parenting, we negotiate a balance of healthy submission and differentiation. This balance will be different in different contexts, but overall I think we can say, going too far in either direction can be problematic.  

And this is because we are balancing two inherently valuable things. On it’s own, a kernel of wheat - and indeed a person -  has value in and of itself. Our freedom, our singular nature is important. No one else but each of us, can decide for us to accept the love of God and let it transform us. We will always be completely alone with God in this spiritual moment.  But accepting the love of God and letting it transform us also means moving beyond our singular nature.  We are alone only so that we can be deeply loved for our uniqueness and be given the gift of choosing our life.  It is not God’s intention for us to remain in that space, for then we will be tempted into self-centeredness. Love must be shared, and so Jesus talks to us about moving from the single grain to the many….from single-pointed-ness to spaciousness, from individuality to radical kinship with others.

And it is in this idea of radical kinship that I want to introduce you to Father Gregory Boyle. Father Boyle is a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention, rehab and re-entry program in Los Angeles. In two of his books, Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir, he details the miraculous transformations that hundreds of formerly incarcerated, formerly active gang members have made in the program, which seeks to provide spaces of love, compassion and accountability in which new healthy relationships can be learned and formed.  Father Boyle seeks to re-introduce these lost and traumatized souls to their own goodness.  Yet, he insists that he has not “saved their lives” but rather they have saved him.  He finds that outside volunteers to the program often ask him what to “do” at Homeboy, and he always answers “Wrong question. The right one is: What will happen to you here?” The answer to every question about the kingdom is found in our awakened connection with each other.

He continues: “It is true enough that the could make the world more just, equal and peaceful, but something holds us back, in all our complicated fear and human hesitation.  It’s sometimes just plain hard to locate the will to be in kinship even though, at the same time, its our deepest longing.  So no matter how singularly focused we may be on our worthy goals of peace, justice and equality, they actually can’t happen without an undergirding sense that we belong to each other.  Seek first the kinship of God, then watch what happens.” (Tattoos on the Heart, p202)

To Boyle, the kingdom cannot come into being fully without us giving ourselves over to radical kinship. While that feels like a risk, radical kinship is actually God’s delight, God’s vision for us. Swedenborg expands upon the seed metaphor that Jesus uses, by imagining the same idea with fruit. In our reading, he talks about two levels of our development. The first is a state of mind that is about learning and growing in the context of our natural world, of preparing our minds through curiosity and engagement with true ideas. This level engages our precious individuality, and Swedenborg likens it to the fruit ripening, and seeds being formed within it. This ripening has a good purpose, because ripe fruit is nourishing! But stopping at this point does not take advantage of the potential that exists *within* the fruit. Thus a second state of mind develops from the process of regeneration, one that shifts from thinking to loving, from individuality to mutuality. This is pictured by a fully ripe fruit will dropping to the ground and interacting with its environment. Yes, it is decomposing, yes part of it is seeming to die…but actually it is coming to life in a new way. Most of us think we are coming to life when we are ripening, in the previous stage. And yes, that is a certain kind of coming to life. We are becoming sweeter and richer and fuller and wiser in ourselves. But, while that is important, it is not our ultimate potential, it is not the only kind of life to which God calls us. We can be a beautiful fruit upon God’s tree, and God will delight in us there, but within us there are seeds that are meant to grow new life. We are were meant to connect with the earth and be transformed, sending up new green shoots that will become a thousand times more fruitful than one seed alone. In this metaphor for our spiritual development, we see the spaciousness, the expansiveness that God has in mind for us.

This is why I chose Psalm 118 for our responsive reading today because it speaks of that spacious place.  “when hard pressed, I cried to the Lord; he brought me into a spacious place.” In Lent, we necessarily turn inward, we work on ripening ourselves with insight. This is good and necessary work.  But it is not the goal of the work, in and of itself, for Swedenborg tells us that heaven consists in mutual love, and in fact, that all the individual angels in heaven are made one by mutual love. We do the work of ripening ourselves so that we can love each other more effectively and freely.  Spiritual reflection might well *feel* solitary, but the outcome should not be solitary.  The outcome of spiritual work is that we might no longer feel disconnected from other people, we do not make them “other.”  We enlarge our tribe, we make everyone real to us, the veil of separation between us and other people falls away. As Father Boyle says, we make a decision to live in each other’s hearts.

The Greeks in our text wanted to see Jesus. Hopefully, they kept their eyes open to what was to come.  For when we want to see Jesus, this is what we will see…as he says “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  God is constantly drawing us closer to Godself and each other, reminding us of our kinship, reminding us that we belong to each other. And if at any time, we feel the weight of our alone-ness, feel the burden of our individual freedom, we can be brought into the spaciousness of God to recognize our birthright, our connectedness with each other.“First seek the kinship of God and then see what happens.”

Amen.


Readings:

Jeremiah 31:31-34

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
John 12:20-33

20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." 22 Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor. 27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—"Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." 29 The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." 30 Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." 33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

Secrets of Heaven 2657

[2] Everyone who is being reborn has two kinds of rationality: one before rebirth and the other after.
Our first rationality, before rebirth, we acquire from sensory experience, reflection on the issues of public and private life, secular studies, reasoning sparked and facilitated by our secular studies, and the spiritual knowledge we gain from religious doctrine–that is, from the Word. At the time, none of this reaches much higher than the images present in our bodily memory, which are quite closely tied to the material world, relatively speaking…
[3] After regeneration, our rational mind is formed by the Lord through the desire for spiritual goodness and truth. The Lord has a miraculous way of grafting this desire onto the truth present in our first rationality. In this way, he takes anything present there that is harmonious and supportive and brings it to life…
[4] The way it works can be illustrated by comparison with fruit on a tree. In the beginning, our first rationality resembles immature fruit, which gradually ripens, until it finally develops seeds inside itself. When it reaches the stage where it starts to separate from the tree, its state is complete…Our second rationality, though, which the Lord gives us as a gift when we have been reborn, resembles the same fruit in good soil, where the flesh surrounding the seed decays. The seed sends forth roots from inside itself, and above ground a sprout, which grows into a new tree. The new tree gradually develops until at last it produces new fruit, then gardens and whole parks, all in keeping with the urge for goodness and truth that it receives.