Welcoming the Light

Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, John 1:1-18, Apocalypse Revealed #940 (see below)
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Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

Today we gently start making our way towards the Advent season by spending some time with the beginning of John’s gospel, which is known as John’s prologue. Unlike Luke and Matthew, John’s gospel does not begin with a birth narrative but rather a theological reflection. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) The New Interpreter's Bible, p443


Readings:

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

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

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