From michael@newearth.org Mon Nov 11 05:28:29 1996 From: michael@newearth.org (Michael David) Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 00:28:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: SERMON: Testing the sermons list/newsgroup Message-ID: This is a test. From 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM Fri Nov 15 05:27:20 1996 From: 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM (Eric Carswell) Date: 15 Nov 96 00:27:20 EST Subject: SERMON: Knowing the Truth Message-ID: <961115052719_76452.3552_BHT130-2@CompuServe.COM> KNOWING THE TRUTH By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell November 10, 1996 If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. John 8:31-32 These words of the Lord are familiar to many of us. With these words the Lord was giving us some crucial guidance in what it means to follow Him and what we need to do to receive the spiritual freedom that is part of heavenly life. Note what the Lord did not say. He did not say attend church a lot of times and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free. Nor did He say read the Word enough and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free. Nor did He say pray enough and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free. Nor did He say do lots of good things and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free. Nor did He say live long enough, have enough experience and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make your free. Each of these things can be extremely valuable and can be part of what it means to abide in the Lord's word, but any of them by themselves will not lead us to know the truth that will make us free. What are the most important true ideas that the Lord wants us to know? Obviously, it isn't the relatively trivial issues such as, "Which is the right color tie for me to wear today?" or "What is the right thing for me to have for lunch today?" While nearly every decision we make including these ones has some implications for greater or lesser usefulness, in view of our eternal welfare and that of others they aren't very significant isolated by themselves. The most important true ideas that the Lord wants us to know are not facts about what is true. It isn't terribly important that we know how many books are in the Old and New Testaments or what order they come in. It isn't particularly important that a person can name all twelve of Jacob's sons or can come up with the names of the twelve apostles. It isn't a matter of saving truth that we know there are ten commandments and not twelve or eight. Facts stored in our memory are not the truth that sets us free. We can even have memorized the ten commandments by heart, know the great commandment or the "new" commandment that the Lord gave that we are to love one another as He has loved us, and still have this knowledge be no more that facts stored in our memory. What are the most important true ideas that the Lord wants us to know? The most important true ideas are the ones that allow us to see the implications of the Lord's Word for our own lives. He wants us to know the answers to the questions: Am I being too self-centered in my priorities? Am I harboring the kind of lust in my heart that is adulterous? Am I too willing to let others have their way or too influenced by their expressed needs and wants? What are the key evils the Lord would have me shun in my daily life? What are the most important uses that the Lord has called us to? Contemplating these questions a person could say, "How in the world am I going to ever know what is the true answer to them?" Obviously I cannot just read the Word until I find the place where the Lord says, "The major issues in Eric Carswell's life are . . . ." When we pray we don't expect to hear an audible voice powerfully and clearly directing us, "Do this! Don't do that!" We cannot turn to some wise person in this world to tell us these answers. Some people might be thinking at this point, "Nobody can know the right answers to the questions you said are the most important true ideas that the Lord wants us to know. So why even think about them?" Why think about them? Why should we seek the truth about these questions? Because having an ever more true answer to these questions is essential for our usefulness to ourselves and others, to our happiness, and ultimately to our salvation. So how are we going to know the truth? The Lord said, "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What does it mean to abide in the Lord's Word? It means firstly that we need have a living knowledge and understanding of what the Lord has revealed. Secondly, it means that we have to begin using it, as best we can, to live according to its implications. The Lord has forewarned us that our initial attempts to live the truth will be quite faulty. Our first understanding of what is true and good will not really be true and good. To the extent that a person has accepted evil or destructive motivations as allowable or right in an area of his life, we are told: False ideas are seen by that person to be true, and once he has confirmed those false ideas, true ideas are seen by him to be false. (Arcana Caelestia 4729:2) The story of Eve being tempted by the serpent presents one of the major stumbling blocks to us knowing and living according to the truth. In the Writings of the New Church, we are told that Adam or "Man" does not represent the first human being, but rather can represent a quality within our conscious thought. Eve represents not the first female, but rather our experience that we live, think, and make choices from our own power and ability. It is the Lord's will that within our own mind we do not sense His presence or any of the spiritual influences on our thoughts and concerns as being a force outside of ourselves. We are certainly supposed to acknowledge the Lord's reality and presence, His order and commandments, but He intends that we will feel like this is a choice that we freely make within our own thoughts. Without this sense that we live from our own power we would not be human. We would feel like robots or abject slaves fearfully following the will of an all powerful and all knowing master. While the quality in our lives represented by Eve is essential to our happiness it can also cause trouble. This is particularly true when it interacts with the quality represented by the serpent. In the story of creation given in Genesis, the serpent is one of the creatures that the Lord saw at the end of the sixth day of creation when it states: Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31) The continuing value and potentially beneficial aspect of this part of our mind is shown in the Lord's injunction to His disciples as He sent them out to preach and teach that they should, "be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16) The serpent represents the ideas that come from our sense experience. The serpent isn't the sense experience itself, but what comes immediately from this experience. For example, we constantly are bombarded with a potentially confusing mass of sense experience which our mind is constantly monitoring to see if portions of it need to be attended to. So for example as we are driving, we may suddenly focus on a tiny bit of movement among all the visual stimuli in front us that indicates that a car is about to pull out in front of us and we need to hit the breaks. Or a parent can tune into the distant and relatively quiet sound of his child crying and realize by its tone that the child is probably been injured. Or we can suddenly notice the faint aroma of smoke and realize we need to find out where it is coming from. And so on. The problem arises when the quality represented by Eve is influenced by the quality represented by the serpent such that we decide that we know better than the Lord about what is true and good, that we can directly disobey something He has commanded and it will bring us and others true happiness and fulfillment. So as stated in one of the lessons for today's service: The evil of the Most Ancient Church which existed before the flood, as well as that of the Ancient Church after the flood, and also that of the Jewish Church, and subsequently the evil of the [Christian Church], after the coming of the Lord, and also that of the church of the present day, was and is that they do not believe the Lord or the Word, but themselves and their own senses. Consequently no faith exists, and where there is no faith there is no love of the neighbor. Everything therefore is false and evil. (Arcana Caelestia 231) How are we to know the most important true ideas for our usefulness, happiness and salvation? The Lord has told us that a useful first step is to learn the doctrine or accepted understanding of what is true in the church we have affiliated ourselves with. We are told: Every one must first obtain for himself truth from the doctrine of the church, and afterward from the Word of the Lord; this must be the truth of his faith. (Arcana Caelestia 6822) To the degree that we not only learn what others have said but also read the Word and reflect on its meaning for ourselves, we can be taught by the Lord. Obviously just learning from others has some significant flaws. The Writings of the New Church describe an experience in the life after death of some people who realized that they needed to have a more reliable source of truth than just the local religious authority. Swedenborg relates the following: I saw an assembly of spirits, all upon their knees, praying to God to send angels to them, that they might converse with them face to face, and open to them the thoughts of their hearts. And when they arose, there appeared three angels in fine linen, standing before them, and they said, "The Lord Jesus Christ has heard your prayers, and has therefore sent us to you; open unto us the thoughts of your hearts." And they answered, "We have been told by our priests, that in matters of a theological nature the understanding avails nothing, but only faith, and that in such things intellectual faith is of no service to any one, because it is derived from man. We are Englishmen, and have heard many things from our sacred ministry, which we believed; but when we have conversed with others, who also called themselves the Reformed, and with others who called themselves the Roman Catholics, and likewise with other divisions of the church, they all appeared to us learned, and yet, in many things, one did not agree with another, and still they all said, `Believe us;' and some of them, `We are God's ministers, and know.' But as we know that the Divine truths, which are called truths of faith, and which appertain to the church, are not derived to any one from his native soil, nor by inheritance, but out of heaven from God; and as these show the way to heaven, and enter into the life together with the good of charity, and so lead to eternal life, we became anxious, and prayed to God upon our knees." Then the angels answered, "Read the Word, and believe in the Lord, and you will see the truths which should constitute your faith and life; for all in the Christian world draw their doctrinal ideas from the Word as from the only fountain." But two of the company said, "We have read, but did not understand." And the angels replied, "You did not approach the Lord, and you have also confirmed yourselves in falsities;" (Apocalypse Revealed 224) How are we going to know the most important true ideas we need to know? The Lord told us: "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." If we are to know the truth, we need to read the Word, consciously turn our heart and mind to the Lord in prayer, and live according to our best understanding of the truth at that point in our lives with the desire to better understand the Lord's will and commandments each day. This is the way that we will come to the truth. This is how we abide in His Word. Some people may have the thought come to mind, "But how reliable will this truth be? Will I really be able to know what I need to?" Isn't this really asking whether the Lord has the capability of leading us? One thing the Lord has warned us against is thinking that we can by our own effort earn salvation. This leads a person to a denial of the Lord's influence and working in our life, a trust in our own power to achieve salvation, and faith in ourselves and not in Him. (True Christian Religion 439) May we take our confidence in the Lord. May we be sure that He is leading us with His infinite love and wisdom just as far as we are willing to be led. May we do our part to abide in His word knowing that through this effort He will surely lead us to see the truth, will lead us to the life that He wants us to lead, and so to the usefulness and happiness that is the life of heaven. AMEN. Lessons: Genesis 3:1-13 John 8:31-36 Arcana Caelestia 231-233 All books mentioned, other than from the Bible are written by Emanuel Swedenborg and are often referred to in the New Church merely as "the Writings." We believe that they are equally the Word of God as the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. ___________________________________ from Eric Carswell Glenview, IL USA Internet:76452.3552@compuserve.com From 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM Mon Nov 18 19:57:45 1996 From: 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM (Eric Carswell) Date: 18 Nov 96 14:57:45 EST Subject: SERMON: Becoming an Angel Message-ID: <961118195745_76452.3552_BHT139-1@CompuServe.COM> BECOMING AN ANGEL By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell November 17, 1996 The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, 'See here!' or 'See there!' For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:20-21 One of the essential qualities of the Lord's love is that He wants to bless us with the greatest happiness we can know. Another of the essential qualities of His love is that our relationship with Him cannot be forced or compelled. We would not have anything of human happiness if we were just pre-programmed followers of Him. He would not really be loving if He was satisfied with this arrangement either. We can know this quality of love ourselves. Would we be satisfied with hired friends? Would we feel any pleasure at kind words that were spoken by another person solely from a fear of terrible consequences if anything else was said? Would we be grateful for gifts from someone who wanted to buy our favor and the benefits this could bring? Unselfish love only feels like love when it is freely given, freely received and freely returned. Unselfish love with us has this quality because the Lord's love has this quality. Heaven and its happiness cannot exist with any created being unless that being freely, with understanding, chooses to love the Lord and the things He loves. A machine couldn't do this. Animals can't do this. Only beings with the qualities that we call human are capable of this free choice made with understanding. While many people raised with a background of traditional Christian doctrine are inclined to think of angels as a special class of created being, the New Church presents a different idea. There were no created angels. Every angel and every devil of hell was once a human being living in the natural universe we are living in now. Every angel and every devil was born as an infant who would develop into the capacity of understanding and choosing between good and evil, truth and falsity. Every angel and every devil was provided by the Lord with essential knowledge and spiritual equilibrium that allowed him or her to gradually but with growing clarity choose to care about what was true and good for others, what were higher values, to acknowledge God under some name or to focus on dominantly self-centered and worldly goals, to seek whatever ideas might justify these value, and to reject any higher authority and power than their own understanding and what was in their own self-interest. For all adults the end of natural life brings an end to this daily process of self-definition. Children who die are automatically taken up into heaven where they become angels. This is because they have not yet acted from the adult capability of making evil their own. When that the life after death begins, each person, newly departed from this natural life, awakens to find that their spiritual life is not one of being ghost or insubstantial thing, but rather they have been given a new body for spiritual life, which has all the human characteristics, and every feel of reality that their natural body had. The Writings of the New Church describe it with these words: . . . a person is equally a person after death; and such a person that he does not know otherwise than that he is still in the former world; he sees, hears, and speaks as in the former world; he walks, runs, and sits as in the former world; he eats and drinks as in the former world; he sleeps and wakes as in the former world; he enjoys conjugial delight as in the former world; in a word he is a person as to each and all things. From which it is plain, that death is but a continuation of life, and is only a transition. (Continuation Concerning the Last Judgment 32) Awakening at first in an spiritual existence intermediate between heaven and hell that in the New Church is referred to as "the world of spirits," the person feels and reacts very much like he or she did in this world and even for a short time can continue to pretend to be better than the inner goals he or she sought in this world. For a short time hypocrisy is possible. But gradually this ability to hid inner thoughts and motivations is withdrawn. Then truly as the Lord said, ""For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light." (Mark 4:22) A person who has harbored thoughts of superiority over others will find his attitude and unspoken words coming out of his mouth. A person who has secretly allowed intense anger and disgust dwell in her mind will openly display this in thought and deed. But the person who worked to have his inner thoughts and values match the goodwill of his word and deed has nothing to fear. In fact, such a person benefits by having his heart and mind more clearly show its true desires. When the inner quality of life that an adult has made his own by the values he has lived day after day shows itself in the life after death, then those who hate the Lord and hate the truth flee from the light and life of heaven. In the presence of angels its as though they are unable to see or breathe. Instead they seek others who have values like themselves. This they find in a community of evil spirits in hell. But those who have sought live according to what was true and good in this life from some belief in God are led to see what is true and good all the more clearly and are led to a home prepared for them by the Lord in a community of angels in heaven. The fundamental perspective and values of those in this community perfectly suits the ideas and values that the person had made his own through life in this world. Life in a heavenly community is rich and full of so many useful qualities. The stereotype of an angel sitting around on a cloud playing a harp is far from the real nature of heavenly life. A reflective person in this world knows that one of the fundamental sources of joy and fulfillment comes to us when we use the gifts and talents the Lord has given us to do something useful. When we can make something, give something, help in some way, we can feel a sense of happiness and satisfaction. Part of the joy of a community of heaven is that each angel there wants to be helpful and to give to the angels around him and they want to be helpful and give to him. Each and every angel wants to be led by the Lord, wants to do what is true and good. In this sense, they get to do what they want to do all the time. In contrast, the New Church understanding of hell is not one of eternal fiery torture and torment. Everyone there is much more interested in himself and his own needs. He wants to take from others, to control them, to hurt them in so far as he can get away with it without being punished. Evil spirits of hell don't' want to be useful or helpful. Nevertheless in the Lord's order, they have to do work in order to eat. So long as they don't hurt the good they can have their dreary life. But since at the core of their heart is a desire to do evil in some form they constantly long for what they cannot do without suffering painful consequences. They are not ever free to do what they really want to do. A person's life to eternity is formed by the quality of his or her life in this world. While there are some statements in the New Testament that have been understood to mean that a person will be neither masculine or feminine in the life after death and will not live together as husband and wife, the doctrine of the New Church asserts that this is not the case. Those who have a true love of marriage [or conjugial love], after death, when they become angels, return to their early adult life and to youth, the males, however spent with age, becoming young men, and the wives, however spent with age, becoming young women. Each partner returns to the flower and joys of the age when a love of marriage begins to exalt the life with new delights, and to inspire playfulness [with the opposite sex]. The person who while he lived in the world had shunned adulteries as sins, and who has been introduced by the Lord into marriage love, comes into this state first exteriorly and afterwards more and more interiorly to eternity. As such continue to grow young more interiorly it follows that true marriage love continually increases and enters into its attractions and delights, which have been provided for it from the creation of the world, and which are the attractions and delights of the inmost heaven, arising from the love of the Lord for heaven and the church, and therefore the love of good for truth and truth for good, which loves are the source of every joy in the heavens. (Apocalypse Explained 1000:4) What do we have to do to become one of these angels? We need to seek the Lord's wisdom and help in becoming a better human being. When the Lord told Nicodemus that a person needs to be "born again" He was not referring to a single event in a person's life. He was speaking of how we need to gradually receive from Him a new heart. We are born with inclinations to be too concerned about our own needs compared to those of others, and to be too focused on worldly things. The existence of these inclinations do not condemn us. We are held responsible for the inner quality of the choices we make in freedom according to what we are capable of understanding as the truth. The Lord has given us the revealed truth that we need to know Him, to understand the life that leads to happiness for us and others, and to see the dangers of evil motivations and false ideas. If we learn about the life the Lord calls us to lead from His Word, recognize how it demands a fundamental change in our natural perspective, and seek His help to live a better life in His name, we will gradually be spiritually reborn from within. The Lord spoke of some of the qualities of heaven in His parables. He compared a tiny mustard seed to the faith with which we must begin our spiritual life. He doesn't expect us to instantly become a person who acts continuously from a rock-solid faith in Him and His commandments. He calls us to start where we are and do the best we can with what we know and are working to live according to. At times we can feel terribly flawed and weak. Our faith feels like a tiny seed. But the Lord asks us to believe in that seed and to know that with His help and our cooperation with Him this faith will grow day-by-day. As this faith grows we will become more and more like an angel. The Lord compared our lives to that of a merchant who found the perfect pearl and sold all that he had to possess it. This pearl represents a person's acknowledgment that Lord is God and that His commandments are to be obeyed. We have to be willing to give up every goal and value that stands in opposition to this acknowledgment. At times, it feels like we have to give up happiness, but this is an illusion. We really are only giving up the slavery of evil motivations and false ideas. Our conscious turning from them is what we need to do to gradually become more and more like an angel. Some people would love to believe that because there is a perfectly loving God, there is no possibility of them finding themselves living to eternity in hell. But the parable of the dragnet is powerful reminder that people really do choose the life of hell. Some people choose over and over again to twist the truth of the situation they are in to serve their own needs. They choose over and over again to fulfill their own goals and wants even if it is hurtful to others. They choose to have the spotlight of attention on themselves as much as possible. They choose to value natural things like money or things that can be owned and controlled over the benefit that these things can be when they serve their proper role. Such people day-by-day shut the door within their hearts and minds to the kingdom of God and open the door to the life of hell. The Lord gives us the freedom to do either. But He works with His infinite love and wisdom to help us to see the benefits to ourselves and others of choosing the life that would gradually prepare us to be an angel of heaven. Each of us was born to become an angel of heaven. That is the Lord's wish for our lives. But He will not make us be something that we refuse to be. He will not make us want to obey. He will not make us accept the truth in our thoughts. He will not force new motivations upon us if we do not want them. Instead He has given us freedom in spiritual things and preserves this freedom with great care. He calls us to acknowledge His existence, to attend to His Word, and to cooperate with Him in becoming the angel He sees us capable of becoming. May we realize that this part of our lives in the natural world is more important than anything else. May we daily do our part to live more and more like the angel we are would like to be to eternity. AMEN. Lessons: Psalm 15 Matthew 13:31-33,44-50 Heaven and Hell 530 All books mentioned, other than from the Bible are written by Emanuel Swedenborg and are often referred to in the New Church merely as "the Writings." We believe that they are equally the Word of God as the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. It is not so difficult as some believe to live the life that leads to heaven. Who cannot live a civil and moral life? For every one from his childhood is initiated into that life, and learns what it is by living in the world. Moreover, every one, whether evil or good, lives that life; for who does not wish to be called honest, and who does not wish to be called just? Almost every one practices honesty and justice outwardly, so far as to seem to be honest and just at heart, or to seem to act from real honesty and justice. The spiritual person ought to live in like manner, and can do so as easily as the natural person can, with this difference only, that the spiritual person believes in the Lord, and acts honestly and justly, not solely because to so act is in accord with civil and moral laws, but also because it is in accord with Divine laws. As the spiritual person whatever he is doing, thinks about Divine things, he has communication with the angels of heaven; and so far as this takes place he enters into a relationship with them. . . When a person comes into this state he is adopted and led by the Lord, although himself unconscious of it, and then whatever he does that is honest and just related to moral and civil life, is done from a spiritual motive; and doing what is honest and just from a spiritual motive is doing it from honesty and justice itself, or doing it from the heart. His justice and honesty appear outwardly precisely the same as the justice and honesty of natural people and even of evil and infernal people; but in inward form they are wholly unlike. For evil people act justly and honestly solely for the sake of themselves and the world; and therefore if they had no fear of laws and penalties, or the loss of reputation, of honor, of gain, and of life, they would act in every respect dishonestly and unjustly, since they neither fear God nor any Divine law, and therefore are not restrained by any internal bond. Heaven and Hell 530 ___________________________________ from Eric Carswell Glenview, IL USA Internet:76452.3552@compuserve.com From 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM Thu Dec 12 03:57:52 1996 From: 76452.3552@CompuServe.COM (Eric Carswell) Date: 11 Dec 96 22:57:52 EST Subject: SERMON: The Lord did not come to bring complacency Message-ID: <961212035751_76452.3552_BHT216-3@CompuServe.COM> The Lord Did Not Come to Bring Complacency by the Rev. Eric H. Carswell Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. Matt. 10:34 When the Lord was born, the angels sang, "Peace on earth, good will to men," to announce His advent. Why then did He, Himself say that He didn't come to bring peace? Obviously there must be two kinds of peace--a good peace and a bad peace. The Lord came to get rid of the bad peace to bring a true peace. What are some examples of a bad kind of peace, perhaps we should call it complacency? Consider the child who meekly obeys his parents every word--developing no sense of self, no independence, but rather an increasing dependence. It makes for a very peaceful household and a very unhealthy one. Consider the worker who takes advantage of her coworkers, consistently not doing her share but no one says or does anything. Externally the work place may be very peaceful but it isn't as useful as it could be. Finally picture an apparently tranquil marriage based on one partner dominating the other. On the outside it may seem better than another marriage which is obviously stormy at times, but on the inside it can be hollow and even filled with hidden anger and condescension. There are many different examples of external complacency that hide something far more dangerous. When the Lord said, "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword," we know that His primary meaning is not that we are to attack others or even concentrate the greatest part of our energy working to amend them. We well know the Lord's words, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck out of your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye?" Matthew 7:3-4 While the Lord is not calling us to meekly accept every injustice, to automatically take on every problem as our own burden and responsibility, He calls us to recognize that the most effective change comes from personal choice. It comes from a change within our hearts and minds. It comes from a desire to do what is loving, wise and useful because this is what the Lord want us to do. Part of being loving, wise and useful is helping others to understand what is good and true for themselves and to want change for themselves, but we will be rather ineffective, if not directly counter-productive, if we focus on fixing the world before we have progressed very far in seeking the Lord's help in fixing ourselves. What are some examples of an unhealthy complacency within our own heart and mind? A person could have so little confidence in his own thinking that he accepted patterns of thought and act from parents or peers even though they didn't fit his life and needs very well. When faced with inner doubts about his choices, he would meekly and quietly say, "Well I know that others think this is the right thing to do and they are much smarter than I am." The opposite of this state of mind would be the person who felt so assured in her opinion, so superior in her outlook that she would listen to almost nothing that others might say, would ignore or reinterpret any evidence that her outlook was flawed and would reject the past or the status quo unless it happened to coincide with her personal conviction. Such a woman might seem very peaceful in her self-assurance. Another kind of questionably good complacency is that of the person whose life is so busy with the here and now concerns of a daily schedule that significant issues aren't allowed to rise, or if they do arise are put down as quickly as possible. Still another would be the person who was so fearful of seeing personal flaws that he doesn't even look. All of these states of heart, mind and life may have a certain apparent peacefulness to them, but it is not the peacefulness of heavenly life. After the Lord spoke His words about bring not peace but a sword, He quoted a prophecy from Micah saying: "For I have come to 'set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.' And, 'a man's foes will be those of his own household.'" Matthew 10:35-36 Again, we know that these words speak more to the life of our mind than to our relationships with blood and marital relatives. Our minds are like a family of thoughts and concerns. They are inter-related but quite different from each other. Some turn outward, some are grossly self-centered and worldly, some so confused between the two, that they are hard to recognize. Some of our thoughts are concerned with the truth, others are crudely self-justifying. The Lord wants us to recognize that the reality we naturally see is often far from the genuine reality and that the solutions to life's problems that are suggested by our natural habits of thought and concern are tragically flawed. They tend to be superficial, like a wound that is healed on the surface but infected within. The Lord spoke of this tendency through the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah saying: "They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly, Saying 'Peace, Peace!' When there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14 It would be like a congregation holding the conviction that "We're all such wonderful people, if only everyone was like us." Such a congregation could gather each Sunday and nod to each other with superior smiles. It might seem very peaceful but it would also tend to be rather dead spiritually. Cemeteries can be very peaceful places, but this isn't the peace we are striving for. The Lord offers us the courage to face problems. He offers us the hope we need to face them--hope that a change can take place, hope that we don't have to face the problems alone. The prophecy of John the Baptist was an important part of the Lord's coming. He prepared the way for the Lord's appearance. Without his work, the Lord could not have been freely accepted. We as a church have been well aware of the importance of the work represented by John the Baptist. His work represents our efforts to gain a knowledge of what is true from the Word of God. We can do this through sermons, classes, and personal reading. But we also know that this knowledge of the Word won't give us anything until we see how it commands us personally to be different from some of our natural habits of heart, mind and life. We need to see in the light of truth that we have personal flaws. This recognition creates a division between the old habit and its perceived benefit and the new insight and the conviction that we want to follow the Lord. This division is as personally painful as a sharp and bitter division within a family. This is why the Lord said, "Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." Luke 12:53 We know that division and battle are not the goal that the Lord seeks. Peace is the goal--true peace, real peace, lasting peace. May we trust that this is what the Lord will bring us. May we do our part each day to face the conflict necessary to bring this peace. AMEN. Lessons: Luke 1:5-25 Matthew 10:34-39 Arcana Caelestia 4843:4-5 ___________________________________ from Eric Carswell Glenview, IL USA Internet:76452.3552@compuserve.com From 76452.3552@compuserve.com Mon Dec 16 22:26:23 1996 From: 76452.3552@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 17:26:23 -0500 Subject: SERMON: Joseph: Husband of Mary, Protector and Provider for Jesus Message-ID: <199612161726_MC1-D42-E9BB@compuserve.com> Joseph: Husband of Mary, Protector and Provider for Jesus by the Rev. Eric H. Carswell In the familiar and beloved Christmas story recorded in the gospel of Luke, Mary's husband, Joseph, is nearly invisible. Our mind's eye, trained by many a Christmas card can picture him carefully leading a donkey that bears Mary, who will shortly be ready to give birth. We can also picture him beside Mary when the shepherds arrive the night of that wonderful birth. We can picture him, but the writer of Luke says little about him. He never speaks, and only twice is a specific reaction attributed to him, both times in concert with Mary, and also both involving a sense of wonder at this young child whom they had been given to care for. If the gospel of Luke contained all that we could know about Joseph, we would know very little. It is from the gospel of Matthew that we gain a greater sense of Joseph's role in the Christmas story. It is there that we read of him pondering whether he should quietly separate from his betrothed wife when he learns that she is expecting a child that cannot be his. There we learn of the angel coming to him in a dream, telling him why he need not fear to take Mary as his wife. It was the angel who told Joseph the child's name, and so we read that it was Joseph who called His name Jesus. (Matthew 1:24) The gospel of Matthew also tells us that it was Joseph who was warned in a dream that Herod was a threat to Jesus' life and who took Him and His mother to safety in Egypt. There again the angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, "Arise, take the young Child and His mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the young Child's life are dead." (Matthew 2:20) When the little family arrived in Israel, Joseph learned that Herod's son now reigned and again a fourth dream warned him and he, Mary and the young Jesus went to Galilee. Joseph's role in the Lord's early life was essential. Mary needed a husband to protect her and her young child from scandal and social sanction. In the Jewish culture of that time, Joseph also had an important role in determining Jesus lineage. In the genealogies of both Luke and Matthew, Joseph is listed as the legal father of Jesus, through whom He was legitimately of the house of David. But beyond this legal and public need, consider that we are told that Jesus grew and developed in the same pattern that all people do, though His development was much more rapid and infinitely more perfect. Within this development a man standing in the place of a natural father would have been important. Joseph provided the material support and guidance that Mary and Jesus needed both before that first Christmas so long ago and afterwards, guiding the little family to Egypt and supporting them there and in Nazareth. What do the Writings for the New Church say directly about Joseph and the role he plays in the Christmas story? The answer is, very little. We are told that "a carpenter" represents the good of life from the doctrine of truth. (Athanasian Creed 98) This means the good things that we do from a sense of obedience to what we have learned from the Lord. Such things are indeed good, but not a very high level of good. We perform these sorts of good things when we apologize to another person because we know it is the right thing to do even when part of our mind doesn't feel the least bit sorry for what has happened. We apologize as a matter of obedience to a principle of behavior we have accepted to be good and true, not because we really feel like it. This is the good of life represented by a carpenter. It would appear that Joseph's essential role in the Christmas story has a counterpart in our own lives that also is good, but not a very high level of good. Like Joseph's role in Jesus' early life, there is a part of our mind that plays a relatively quiet role in our spiritual lives, but one that we cannot do without. Its quiet role is one of the very things that makes it hard to appreciate. The human mind finds it easier to see dramatic contrasts than small differences. Black and white stand as stark opposites, but shades of gray can be difficult to distinguish. Similarly, we can easily appreciate the difference between the truly evil person and the one who is genuinely wise and loving. The former has a potential for great evil and the latter produces many blessings by his chosen life. In the black and white difference between these two states of life, where do we place ourselves? Do we tend to see ourselves as some relatively neutral shade of gray? A knowledge of our own private failings may often suggest that we are closer to black--that we are far from being pure and white, but this suggestion is not to be relied upon. Each of us is trying--are we not? Each of us does reflect on the values expressed by our choices--do we not? Aren't each of us in our imperfection taking at least some time to think about the Lord and what His will is in our lives? Certainly, everyone begins life with inclinations to all kinds of evils. We have inclinations to all sorts of selfish and worldly desires. And we know that we must be born again or regenerated if we are to enter into the life and happiness of heaven. We also know that, in one sense, this work is the Lord's. When our old life with its inclinations is replaced by a new one, this new life is a gift from the Lord. It is not something that we have earned by our efforts, but at the same time, we know that each of us does have an essential responsibility in allowing this new life to come into existence. We know that we cannot stand with our hands at our sides waiting for the Lord to wash all the spiritual grime from our lives and turn us to dazzling white. It will not happen in a moment, and it will not happen at all unless we do our part. As we begin to advance in some area of our spiritual life, the first efforts are like a newborn life, fragile and tender. The quiet voice of a newborn conscience will cease to exist if we ignore it and act against it. We live in daily contact with life philosophies that scorn some of the ideas that genuine conscience would bring before us. Such life philosophies would place little importance in the special relationship between husband and wife and between men and women in general. They would place little importance in basic honesty and doing a just day's work, except when it would clearly advance one's own interests. Perhaps we run into ideas that question the value of spending recreation time meeting the needs of children, young people, and shut-ins. These life philosophies come to us through people we meet and things we read or watch. What we need to fear about them is that we will accept their fantasy as a reality, that we will listen to their Siren song and follow their lead. The Lord works within our thoughts to raise opposition to their enticing call. We are given times of freedom, times when we do hear the tender voice of conscience calling to us to act differently. At those moments we have a very important choice. Part of us will want to do what is evil and part will want to choose to do good. We have to choose. If we ignore the voice of conscience, if we allow its ideas to be overwhelmed by our natural desires, its voice will fade and eventually die in that area of our life. Usually we cannot picture ourselves as one of the angels in shining white who fights for the good that our conscience calls us to. As we look at ourselves in the mirror of our mind, perhaps we can think of our conscious lives as being more like Joseph than anything else. Joseph was not the father of the infant Savior and Messiah. If he could understand anything about the miracle of the virgin birth and its importance, it would probably be that the world had been given an important gift, a gift whose only source was God. We, likewise, may wonder at the growth of new loves and concerns within our own lives. We may recognize how little direct control we have over what we care about and what good ideas emerge in our thoughts. The Writings for the New Church are quite clear that while we may learn the facts of revelation like any other natural facts, by our own efforts we never acquire truths of faith; they are always a gift from the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 5664:1) Rather than crystal clear insights, the truths that the Lord gives to us often come to our consciousness slowly. At first our understanding can seem more the product of a dream than anything reliable. Like Joseph wondering at this young child that had been given into his care, we may wonder at the miracle of our own regeneration, when we catch some glimpse of its life. But its life is not our life. Its life is a gift from the Lord. A gift more valuable than any a child's wildest imagination could ever picture under a Christmas tree. Perhaps our responsibility can be likened to that of Joseph in caring for and nurturing the growth of a new life. The insight and enthusiasm gained from listening to a powerful sermon or the moment of enlightenment following a prayer for help will vanish unless its life is prolonged by conscious choices in our day to day lives. Joseph had to make significant sacrifices for the sake of the infant Jesus--a child that he knew was not his own. Fleeing to Egypt and living there for a number of years would have been a challenge greater than most of us would willingly face. And apparently going back to Nazareth after their return from Egypt would not have been his first choice. Recall that Nazareth had such a poor reputation that one of the disciples, when he was first called, asked, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth." In a somewhat similar way, living according to a demanding morality can be a significant challenge today. And it is such a challenge partially because the battle is not glorious nor are the rewards usually direct. There are times when people may think that you are being almost quaint because you are standing up for some principle of honesty. They may consider you rather dowdy for your unwillingness to go along with what passes for conventional morality these days. You may even be scorned for committing the great modern sin of infringing on someone else's freedom of choice by implying that what they are choosing is evil. It is hard to stand up for what is true and good partially because we know that a part of our mind would agree heartily with our worldly critics. At times our allegiance to what is true is an allegiance to something that we accept but do not feel to be our own, much like Joseph accepting Jesus as a son to raise, but knowing that He was not his own child. Perhaps we can imagine that Joseph had times when he wished that the miracle of the Lord's birth had occurred in another man's life, when he wished that his family could be perfectly normal and he could just fit into the rest of society. He had been chosen, though, for the quiet but important job of providing a home for the Messiah to grow up in. It was his job to quietly work away day by day as a carpenter providing the necessities of life while Jesus prepared for the work of His adult life. Like Joseph providing a family and home for Jesus, each of us has the daily quiet work of keeping our lives in basic order, doing what jobs that come before us and avoiding situations that might be a danger to the tender presence of the Lord in some area of our spiritual lives. While there are times of dramatic challenge like the threat of Herod to the young Jesus, mostly it is quiet day to day work. Perhaps we can gain strength from the realization that this work has such great importance, importance like that of the role that Joseph played in that first Christmas story so long ago. Perhaps we can recognize with a touch of awe, the miracle that the Lord would work within each of our lives. The miracle of our regeneration is the Lord's loving gift to us. May we, in our daily lives, provide His life with a home that His presence with us may grow in strength and wisdom, shedding blessings and light on ourselves and all whom we touch with our lives. AMEN Lessons: Matthew 1:18-25, 2:13-15, 19-23 Arcana Caelestia 5664 Arcana Caelestia 5664 . . .the truth which is of faith is never procured by anyone, but is insinuated and given by the Lord, and yet seems as if acquired by the person himself, it is said that it will seem as truth procured by them. It is known in the church that truth is insinuated and given by the Lord; for it is taught that faith is not from a person but from God; thus not only confidence, but also the truths of faith are from Him. Still it appears as if the truths of faith were procured by the person, for he is profoundly ignorant that they flow in, because he does not perceive it. The reason why he does not perceive it is that his interiors are closed, so that he cannot have perceptible communication with spirits and angels; and when the interiors are closed the person can know nothing whatever about influx. Be it known however that it is one thing to know the truths of faith, and quite another to believe them. They who merely know the truths of faith, fill their memory with them just as they do with the facts of any other branch of knowledge. These truths the person can procure for himself without such an influx, but they have no life, as is plain from the fact that an evil person, even the worst, can know the truths of faith just as much as an upright and pious person. But as before said with the evil these truths have no life; for when an evil person brings them forth he regards in every one of them either self-glory or gain; so that it is the love of self and of the world that inflates them and makes a sort of life but it is such life as there is in hell, which is called spiritual death. Hence it is that when he brings them forth, he brings them forth from the memory, and not from the heart; whereas he who believes the truths of faith brings them forth from the heart at the same time as from the lips; for with him the truths of faith are so deeply rooted in as to have their root in the outer memory, and to grow from there toward what is interior or higher, like fruit-bearing trees; and like trees they deck themselves with leaves, and at last with blossoms, for the sake of the end of bearing fruit. So it is with such a human being. He also aims at nothing else through the truths of faith than uses, which are the practices of charity, which to him are the fruits. These are the truths which person cannot procure for himself, even in the smallest degree; but they are freely bestowed on him by the Lord, and this in every moment of his life, indeed, if he will believe it, without number in every moment. But as each person is of such a nature as to have no perception of their flowing in, for as before said if he had the perception he would resist, because he would believe that he would then lose his own, and with his own his freedom, and with his freedom his delight, and would thus become a thing of nought, it is therefore brought about that a person does not know but that he procures truths of himself. This then is what is meant by saying that it will seem as truth procured by them. Moreover in order that a heavenly own and heavenly freedom may be bestowed on a person, he must needs do good as of himself and think what is true as of himself; but when he reflects he should acknowledge that these are from the Lord. ___________________________________ from Eric Carswell Glenview, IL USA Internet:76452.3552@compuserve.com From leewoof@novalink.com Tue Dec 17 17:07:26 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 12:07:26 -0500 Subject: SERMON: "Anticipation," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <96Dec17.120818-0800_est.2728-9+165@bifrost.novalink.com> Anticipation A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, MA, December 1, 1996 Readings: Isaiah 64:1-12. Longing for the Lord to come. Mark 13:24-37. The coming of the Son of Man in the clouds. _Arcana Coelestia_ #6895.2. The Lord's spiritual coming. Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn. (Mark 13:35) I hope all of you had a nice Thanksgiving, as Patty and I did--sharing meals with family and friends, and spending the day visiting with each other. Now that Thanksgiving has gone by we are beginning a magical time of year. It is especially magical for children, who do not have to worry about staging Christmas, but can simply enjoy it. Yes, Advent season is upon us again! For children, the four weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas seem like an eternity. In my grow-ing up years I remember counting down the days with my brothers and sisters until it would finally be Christmas day. Sometimes we would even put the countdown on the kitchen calendar. Then there are the Advent calendars, with little doors opening up to reveal a surprise picture for each day leading up to Jesus' birth. This is a time of anticipation. A time when the young and young at heart can hardly wait for the days to go by. A time of wondering what the surprises will be on Christmas day. A time of looking forward to days spent with family and friends. However, it is not an easy time of year for everyone. If we have recently lost a loved one; if we live far from our family, or are not on good terms with them; if we are weighed down with the cares of providing a happy Christmas for others, such as our children... These and other trials can turn Christmas into a difficult time for us. This can be especially hard, since we feel that Christmas should be a happy time. If it is not, the contrast between our expectations and the reality is all that much harder to bear. This contrast of light and darkness, joy and pain at this season is not a coincidence. As much as our society accentuates the positive in Christmas, it is a festival that, in its very essence, involves both the positive and the negative side of our experience. For those of us in the northern hemi-sphere, Christmas happens in the winter time, when days are short and nights are long; when plants are dormant and snow and ice are taking over the landscape. We do not know exactly what time of the year Jesus was born. We celebrate Christmas at this time of year, not so much because it reflects the actual date and time of Jesus' birth, but because of the symbolism and traditions in the festivals that occur at this time of year. In many cultures there is a festival of lights just when nature provides us with the least light and the most night. Our culture's practice of putting up decorative lights for Christmas follows in this tradition. Just when things are darkest, we put up hundreds, even thousands of lights in our houses, along the streets, and in our town squares to remind ourselves that there is new life emerging even in the dead of winter. As Christians, at this time of year we celebrate the greatest emergence of new light and life: the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whether or not Jesus was born in winter, he was born at a time of spiritual winter for humankind. Religion had degenerated from its true purpose of teaching people love and compassion, to something that mostly involved external ritual devoid of its deeper spirit. We were like sheep without a shepherd. Even those who wanted to live a good and spiritual life had difficulty finding any guide to show the path. We were in danger of losing our sense of God and spirit altogether. Yet it is at these times that we as human beings also feel our greatest longing for God and spirit. When things are going well for us, we often do not stop to think about the true source of all the good things in life. But when things are not going well, and we feel dead inside, then we begin searching for something more. We are more likely to be searching for--to be waiting in anticipa-tion of God at these times than at any other. This is just what was happening in our reading from Isaiah. The prophet starts with an anguished plea to the Lord: "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!" Don't we often feel like this when the going is difficult? Don't we often wish that God would, in a sense, tear the sky open and come to us in a blinding, all consuming flash that would give us new life and new purpose? Isaiah probably wrote these words during or just after the time when the Jews were held captive in Babylon. This was a time of great hardship for them. Their hopes for national glory had been smashed by the captivity, and their spirits as well as their bodies seemed to be imprisoned in Babylon. Even after they returned to Judea, they had a heartbreaking task in rebuilding their shattered nation from the scraps of it that were left. For the ancient Jews, this was the darkest time in their history since the period of Egyptian bondage--which was before they even became a nation. They longed to see once again the awe-some deeds that the Lord had done among them in earlier times. Yet it seemed that the Lord was hiding from them--was angry with them and even punishing them for all the ways they had broken the Lord's commandments and their covenant with the Lord. Everything was in ruins. Still, there was hope. A feeling. An anticipation of a new coming of the Lord among them with divine power to save. They could not believe that the Lord would forever hold back from coming and helping them in their pain and anguish. This hope was only partially and temporarily satisfied for the Jews. Their nation was restored, but never to its former splendor, and mostly under foreign domination. They were able to rebuild the temple, only to have it destroyed again by the Romans in the year 70 AD. To this day, the Jews have not been able to rebuild the temple--the centerpiece of their worship. Yet the hope of new life--of the Lord coming in power--was satisfied much more fully in a way they did not expect. Many people missed it altogether. That coming is the centerpiece of our Christmas holiday and, indeed, of our religion. It is the coming of the Lord on earth to save us, not so much from political oppression and material anguish, but from the spiritual oppression of false belief and wrong living. Without the Lord's coming, our destructive ways of living would take over our lives and enslave us much more fully and deeply than any earthly king or nation ever could. Our reading from Mark speaks of the same longing for the Lord's coming in our times of struggle and darkness. This coming, says the Gospel, will be at a time when "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken." All the great lights--the sun, moon, and stars--will have failed at the time of the Lord's coming. Only then will we see "the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. We as individuals often have the same experience of the Lord coming into our lives. In our church, we read the Gospels' predictions about the time of the Lord's coming as figurative, not literal events. We do not believe the stars will literally fall from the sky. We know that the stars are far, far bigger than the earth. Even if they could travel the billions of miles that separates them from our earth, they would burn the planet to a crisp long before they reached it. No, the sun, moon, and stars that are darkened within us are our feelings of love for the Lord and each other, our faith in the Lord's presence with us, and our knowledge of spiritual things that we turn to for guidance at our times of spiritual darkness and night. When these fail... when we feel that there is no life left in us--and especially when we feel there is no _spiritual_ life left in us--then we are at the time of spiritual winter. This is when we most long for the Lord to come into our lives with new light and warmth. As the Gospel says, we do not know just when this will happen. That is what hope and anticipa-tion are all about. We may think the time is right, but perhaps we still have a little farther to go before we are truly ready to accept the Lord into our hearts in a new way. We are advised by Mark to "keep awake--for we do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn." This is the hard part. As children, we felt we just _couldn't_ wait for Christmas to finally come. Of course, a lot of our impatience had to do with our desire for new stuff--new toys to play with that would be _all our own_. This is not a very spiritual reason to anticipate Christmas, and most of us eventually grow out of it. As the years go by, we realize that the pleasure of getting new posses-sions wears off with time, and still we have not reached our deepest sense of joy. For many of us, when the material attraction of Christmas begins to wear thin, there is not much left of the season. We begin to dislike and even dread Christmas because instead of bringing us joy, as we feel it should, it brings us a sense of loss. Yet the loss of a materialistic attitude toward Christmas is really a spiritual gain. Not that there is anything wrong with giving and receiving gifts on Christmas. The wise men gave gifts to celebrate the Lord's birth. Celebrating through the spirit of giving is a good and healthy part of our Christ-mas festival. But if that stays at the center of our Christmas celebration, we will have lost the deeper joy of the holiday. If we begin to feel an emptiness about the materialism and commercialism of Christmas; if Christ-mas seems to grow cold and dark for us, and we experience it as a time of sadness or apathy, then in that darkness of spirit we may be ready and waiting for the real, divine light that comes at Christmas. We may be feel an anticipation of the Lord's birth as an infant within us. This is the infant of a new spiritual life from the Lord that can grow and mature within us as we care for it with love. Yes, Christmas does come at a dark time of year. It is no accident that we celebrate Christmas close to the time of the winter solstice, when nights are longest. It is also during the time of our own inner winter solstice that we are most ready for a festival of lights to come in celebration of the Lord's new birth within us. Are we ready for that birth? Are we waiting for it? This is a time when we can wake up our spirits in preparation. For, as the Gospel says, we do not know when the time will come--when the master of our spiritual house, our Lord Jesus, will come to us. Responses to: leewoof@novalink.com From leewoof@novalink.com Tue Dec 17 17:07:40 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 12:07:40 -0500 Subject: SERMON: "Comfort and Joy," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <96Dec17.120834-0800_est.2737-7+174@bifrost.novalink.com> Comfort and Joy A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, MA, December 8, 1996 Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11. Comfort my people. Mark 1:1-8, 14, 15. Prepare the way of the Lord! _Arcana Coelestia_ #2682.2. Comfort in despair. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. (Isaiah 40:1) On this second Sunday of Advent, I would like to continue our theme from last week: the contrast of light and darkness at Advent--the contrast we experience when the light of the Lord comes into our own darkness. Our reading from Isaiah highlights a different dimension of this contrast. Our personal times of darkness are also times of pain and despair. When we have experienced this despair, the Lord comes to us as a comforter, until at last our tears of pain turn into a song of joy. This is what Christmas is all about. In _The Messiah_, Handel captures the essence of these feelings in a musical rendition of this passage from Isaiah. We can feel through words and music the great pain and suffering that we all experience at one time or another in our lives, and the great comfort of the Lord's coming into our lives after we have suffered. "Comfort ye. Comfort ye my people." The words of our reading continue, "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins." When we have been through a particularly difficult time, isn't this just how it feels? That for everything we did wrong, we have not simply received a "punishment that fits the crime," but have had double the pain and sorrow come back to us for all the mistakes we have made. Our behavior is like a bolt of lightning, but the repercussions are like thunder that keeps on rumbling and rolling along, echoing off hills and mountains with a terrifying and depressing roar--a roar that shakes us to our foundations. When our wrong actions come back to us, it is like a storm crashing around our head. Yet after the stormy night comes the calm and peaceful day. There is nothing quite like the calm after a storm. Objectively speaking, there may not be all that much difference between the average sunny day and a sunny day after a storm. But it certainly _feels_ different! When we have just been through a storm, the air seems clearer, the sun brighter, and the colors more vivid. I suppose the rain does clear away some of the airborne dust and smoke. But what really makes that day after the storm seem so bright and wonderful is the contrast between dark and light. It is the same contrast that makes Christmas such a wonderful season. What is the purpose of all these sharp contrasts in our lives--contrasts between darkness and light, despair and joy? Isaiah continues, A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley and hill shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." Somehow, the pain of receiving "double for all our sins" prepares a highway for the Lord. It is a highway through the desert of our own feelings of spiritual emptiness. Swedenborg helps us understand how this spiritual highway is prepared in our desert. Though the life passages he describes are painful, it is a comfort to know they are a normal, even healthy part of our spiritual development. When we are being spiritually reformed and renewed, says Swedenborg, we must become reduced to a state of mind in which we feel that we know nothing at all. We must reach a point at which we feel completely ignorant--when we feel that everything we have held onto as real and true is nothing, and even that we ourselves are nothing. This does not square very well with current pop psychology, which always seems to encourage us to feel _good_ about ourselves; bad feelings are to be avoided at all costs, because they tear down our sense of self. Yet if we are to grow spiritually, our sense of self is exactly what needs to be torn down. I remember very well when I was a teenager in high school. It was a painful time for me--as it is for a lot teens underneath the brave exterior. I had many conflicting feelings of being a great person and being a terrible person. However, there was one area where I really thought I had it together. That was in my beliefs. The fact is, my stated beliefs were not all that different at that time than they are now. The problem wasn't so much that the beliefs themselves were wrong. Rather, I made them wrong in practice because there was too much of myself tied up in them. I was _right_, by golly--and that meant all those other poor folks around me were _wrong_. This state of mind fits very well Swedenborg's description of the person who has yet to go through the spiritual refining process. Things that actually were true were turned into something false because ego got in the way. Religion is not about some people being right and other people being wrong. It is about loving and caring for each other--about using the truth that we do understand to make people's lives happier. The church's teachings continued to percolate in my head. Eventually, I came to a point where I realized that everything I ever believed might be wrong. I really didn't know one way or another. The funny thing is, even though all the Swedenborgian concepts were still just as clear in my mind as ever, in a sense I knew nothing at all, because I had no idea whether these things were _true_ or not. Maybe this physical world _was_ all there was to life, and there was no God or spiritual world at all. Maybe everything I had ever learned about religion was just wishful thinking. I didn't know. And this is exactly when the Lord can finally find room to get in. For me, at that point in my life, it felt like a crisis of faith in my beliefs. It was very much like a lightning and thunder storm shaking my inner house to its foundations--for I had intended to devote my life to those beliefs. For others it may be a crisis of faith of a different kind. It may be a crisis of faith that there is anything good left to life--that there ever _was_ anything good to life. It could be a crisis of faith in ourselves. We may wonder if we are any good at all. It could be that we feel there is just too much stacked up against us, and there is no way we can make it through. In a sense, our readings tell us that these feelings really do represent the truth. Isaiah continues, A voice says, "Cry out!" And I said, "What shall I cry?" All people are grass; their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows upon it. Surely the people are grass. Compared to a mere breath of the Lord, we are like grass. In the larger scheme of things, we are insignificant. Our exaggerated sense of our own brilliance or stupidity, of our own greatness or depravity... all of these come to nothing in comparison to the vastness of the universe--and especially in comparison to the vastness of God. There is no good in us that we can call our own. Nor is there any evil in us that we can call our own. By ourselves, we are nothing. Once again, pop psychology would object. But it is precisely when we realize that we are nothing that we can become the best person we are capable of being. For it is precisely when we recognize our own insignificance that we become open, not just intellectually, but with our whole heart and soul, to the realization that the Lord is everything. It is precisely when we hit a sense of personal despair and nothingness that we can receive comfort and joy from the Lord. The grass withers, the flower fades. But the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings! Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear. Say to the cities of Judah, "Here is your God!" Yes! It is exactly when we recognize our own nothingness that the glad tidings of comfort and joy can pour into our souls. Then our ears are at last open to the message proclaimed by the prophet, "Here is your God!" God is with us all along. But as long as we are full of ourselves, we leave no room for the Lord. There is no room in the inn. As long as we think we have all the answers; as long as we cling to our own importance in comparison with others; as long as our thought in any way centers on ourselves to the exclusion of other people and of God, then we leave no room for the Lord in our lives. The advent season, then, is a time for emptying our _selves_ out in preparation for the Lord's new birth into our lives. The beginning of Mark's Gospel picks up this message of preparation for the Lord's coming. John the Baptist was the messenger sent before the Lord's coming to prepare the way. He became the voice crying in the spiritual wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord!" After John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus himself continued to proclaim the good news, saying "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news." We can only believe the good news of the Lord's coming when we set aside the bad news of our own fixed attitudes that block the way of the Lord into our hearts. When we do clear away our self-induced roadblocks, then the Lord can truly be born in us. Then we can feel deeply and fully the comfort and joy of Christmas. See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; His reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; He will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, And gently lead the mother sheep. The comfort we feel when the Lord comes newly into our lives after a time of pain and sorrow is the beginning of a new journey of spiritual growth. When disaster strikes, and our friends and family comfort us, the pain in our heart is gradually healed. The Lord will also comfort us and heal the spiritual pain within if we will open ourselves up to that healing. Then, as we continue along our spiritual path, we will move beyond the comfort of feeling that a new, God-centered life is replacing our old self-involved way of being. We will move to the joy of a richer and fuller life in the Lord than we ever could have imagined before. This is the comfort and joy that the Lord offers to each one of us. Responses to: leewoof@novalink.com From leewoof@novalink.com Tue Dec 17 17:07:53 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 12:07:53 -0500 Subject: SERMON: "New Beginnings," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <96Dec17.120845-0800_est.2728-5+177@bifrost.novalink.com> New Beginnings A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, MA, December 15, 1996 Readings: Isaiah 60:1-3, 17-21. Arise! Shine! For your light has come. Matthew 1:18-25. The birth of Jesus the Christ. _Arcana Coelestia_ #6858. The Lord cleared away evil spirits. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:21) It is hard to believe that Christmas is only a week and a half away! Every year we know it is on its way. Then Thanksgiving comes, and we get involved in lots of holiday preparation and activity. Before you know it, Christmas sneaks up on us again. Our time here in church on the four Sundays of Advent does give us a sanctuary from the holiday bustle. It gives us a chance to take care of more than the outward trappings and wrappings of Christmas. The sanctuary of our Sunday morning services gives us a sheltered time to prepare ourselves spiritually for the Lord's coming so that Christmas does not sneak up on us unawares--so that we feel the spirit of Christmas in our souls. Without our Sunday morning services, how many of us would take even an hour a week out of our busy schedules to contemplate the spiritual side of the holiday? Let us contemplate once more the spiritual side of this holiday. On Christmas, we celebrate the Lord's birthday. It is the biggest birthday party in the world! We can easily get cynical about all the commercialism. But another way to look at the eruption of activity surrounding Christmas is this: it must have been quite an event that could inspire such a huge outpouring of energy and activity every year! Even if a large part of our society--and part of ourselves too--has lost touch with the central event of Christmas, the power of that event continues to pulse through our world nearly two thousand years after it happened. What could possibly have packed such a wallop that it still inspires our greatest outpouring of energy after all these centuries? From a material perspective, there is really no accounting for it. A baby was born. Another birth among the billions that have happened up to our time. So what! Take away the spiritual level of our universe, and Christmas doesn't make much sense. It is a mid-winter holiday that has burst at the seams. Our cynical side wants to say that it is driven largely by profit motives. However, we wouldn't be here in church if our thinking were limited to that low, materialistic level. We know... we _feel_ that something much greater is behind all the hoopla of Christmas. A baby was born. There was a new beginning. Not just any new beginning, but the greatest new beginning the world has ever known. A new beginning that has not faded with time, but has continued to gather strength and power as the centuries go by. A new beginning that has grown in power because it is a new beginning of spirit, of life, and of love. When Jesus was born, we humans had reached a low ebb spiritually. From our early, almost instinctual closeness to God represented by the idyllic life in the Garden of Eden, we gradually fell from a oneness of love in God to a more intellectual grasp of religion pictured by the ancient city-builders: Cain, Nimrod, and the builders of the Tower of Babel. The Babel of our fallen intellect was dispersed as we began speaking different languages--holding different opinions that conflicted with each other. We lost our steady eye on the Lord's truth and began to follow our own faltering paths instead. When this happened, the Lord could no longer reach us through our hearts or even through our minds. Rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience took over. We had to be kept in line by outward conditioning, like Pavlov's dog, rather than through the Lord flowing into our souls from within. The ancient Hebrew religion, with its complex system of laws and strict penalties for disobedience, was a far cry from the time when Adam and Eve were first put in the Garden, when they walked with God in the cool of the day. Yet even this severe religion could not keep us in line. As the time of the Lord's birth approached, religion and morality gave way before the lures of political power and wealth. Herod, king of the Jews, made a show of religious devotion by building a temple larger and grander than the previous ones. But his piety was superficial. When he felt that his rule was threatened by rumors of the coming of the long-prophesied Messiah, he engaged in deception and then murder in an attempt to stop the great event from happening. He intended to keep his throne even if it meant killing the Lord's anointed one. By the time Jesus came, those few people who did still attempt to keep religion alive were hopelessly entangled in the legalities and external forms of religious tradition. The spirit of love and mutual understanding was lost. Those who sought that real and deep religion had hardly anywhere to turn; even their religious leaders had become caught up in legalism to the exclusion of spirituality. It was at our world's lowest ebb that the Lord came to us as flesh and blood. It was when all the other methods of reaching us had failed. People disregarded or trivialized the life-changing messages of the prophets; new prophets grew fewer and farther between as people listened to them less and less; scripture had become a book for rote learning rather than for inspiration to a good and caring life. We had become spiritually lost. According to our church's teachings, there were even more problems than meet the eye from a study of history and the Bible. As we declined spiritually here on earth, those who went on to the spiritual world were building up a bigger and bigger roadblock against the love and truth that comes to us from the Lord. When we die, says Swedenborg, we take our inner character with us. If that character is selfish and materialistic, we add to the spiritual atmosphere of selfishness and materialism that influences people on earth. Spirits like this had grown so much in numbers and strength that they were invading the lower heavens. There, they blocked the angels' ability to reach out to people on earth and lead us toward a heavenly way of life. We humans were not only choking out the external ways of receiving religion through learning from scripture and from spiritual teachers; we were also choking out the inner paths toward God and spirit. In this low ebb of our spiritual life, the Lord made a new beginning for us. The Lord could no longer count on finite, fallible human beings to carry the message to us. It was time to come and do the job in person. It was time to clear the path of the Lord into our lives. The Lord did this in several ways while he was living here on earth. One of the best known ways was to give us new teachings about the real meaning of religion. The New Testament--especially the Gospels and the Book of Revelation--give us a radically new understanding of what it means to live a spiritual life. Following the Lord is not a matter of mere obedience to avoid punishment and reap a reward. It is a process of changing our hearts so that everything we do comes from love for God and for each other. Yes, we need to eradicate the evil parts of ourselves. However, we should not do it merely to avoid punishment. Rather, we should do it because evil _hurts_. It hurts ourselves; it hurts other people; it hurts the Lord. The Lord taught us about real spiritual life, not just by giving Sermons on Mounts, but also by walking through the valleys of human vice and corruption and shining his light there, too. The Lord did not just _teach_ us how to live spiritually. He _showed_ us how to live spiritually by his own example. These ways of clearing the path of the Lord can be clearly seen in the Bible. Another way that cannot be seen so clearly is reflected in our reading from Swedenborg. For us to have the freedom and the ability to choose a spiritual life, the evil spirits that were clogging the spiritual world had to be removed. As long as they were there, it was like the sun trying to reach the earth through dense and stormy clouds. Very little of the Lord's light and warmth could make it through. During all the times Jesus was teaching, preaching, and healing in Palestine, he was doing inner work also. He was struggling against the evil spirits who were clogging the way. He was clearing them out of heaven and pushing them down to their own home in hell, where they could indulge in their own destructive desires without ensnaring good and innocent people in the process. We see only shadows of these inner struggles in the Bible. Yet knowing our own inner struggles against our evil tendencies, we can sense that the Lord must have faced much deeper and more harrowing struggles. We face only our own evils and the sometimes negative influences of our families, friends, and other acquaintances; the Lord faced the accumulated evil of all of humankind. In doing so, he gave us the gift of a new spiritual beginning, both for our world as a whole and for each one of us as individuals. The passing of religious eras is a matter of history; the passing of our own inner spiritual stages is a matter of intense personal experience. Like humanity as a whole, we have our early, innocent stage of trusting in our parents and in the Lord. We also pass through the more intellectual--and often argumentative--years of school and learning. As young adults, and right into middle age, we easily get caught up in an externally enforced obedience to the material strictures of our society. If we don't work, we don't eat. If we work harder or better, we get more goodies. This forms the core of our own spiritual low ebb. Outward pressures to "be good" only carry us so far. At some point, these pressures either cease to keep our destructive tendencies under control, or we reach a point where we are no longer willing to have our life dictated by material possessions and our desire for power and status. The old motives for living have reached their end. It is time for a new beginning. This is exactly the new beginning the Lord offers us through the events we celebrate at Christmas. Our Lord was born as a baby--a perfect manifestation of the tender, new, spiritual beginnings that the Lord offers to start in our own spirits. Jesus grew among us in spirit and in power, and showed us the way to a new kind of living. It is a way of life based, not on looking out only for ourselves, but on caring for each other as we follow the Lord's guiding hand. There are many new things at Christmas. New toys, new books, new bicycles, new computers, new dolls. These new things give us joy for a time, but eventually they grow old and fade away. There is one new gift at Christmas that is always new and never fades. It is the mutual love that is renewed in our hearts every time we accept the new birth of the Lord Jesus into our hearts and our lives. This new beginning is the deepest and truest meaning of our Christmas celebration. Responses to: leewoof@novalink.com From leewoof@novalink.com Wed Dec 18 18:39:46 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 13:39:46 -0500 Subject: SERMON: Classic sermon by the Rev. Louis A. Dole Message-ID: <96Dec18.134036-0800_est.2719-9+193@bifrost.novalink.com> A Sermon by the Rev. Louis A. Dole "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." (Deuteronomy 5:5) Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-13, 39-40 Revelation 11 Psalm 27 All religion is based on three essential principles: the acknowledgment of God as the object of worship, the sense of obligation to Him as evinced by a life according to His precepts, and the acceptance of a Divine revelation which makes known who and what God is and what His precepts are. These three principles are of necessity involved in every religious system. Religion cannot exist, even in name, if any of them is wanting. Each or all of them may be perverted by false doctrine and an evil life, but they must exist either in their true or in a perverted form. The savage worshiping his idol feels bound to certain duties and observances imposed upon him by oral or other tradition, which he accepts as the authoritative teaching of his deity. Even in this crude system the three essentials are to be found. A true religion consists in the acknowledgment of the true God, a life of genuine goodness, and belief in an authentic revelation. As we look back over the history of mankind, we find that--distinct from the multitudes who worshipped idols, a court of mythical divinities, or the forces of nature--there have in every age been at least a few who worshipped one God, a God who, though invisible to bodily sight, had given them a specific revelation. In historic times, amid the spiritual darkness of the world, the Old Testament was given, which directed the thoughts of Israel to one Divine Being, the Creator and Preserver of the universe. After the coming of the Lord, the Christian Church was formed, also accepting the Hebrew Scriptures and proclaiming the worship of the same God. The Christian Gospels supplemented and confirmed the Law and the Prophets; the Old Testament was read in the light of a new interpretation, but not a word was erased. Belief in the one God, the duty of obedience to Him, and the recognition of the Bible as the express declaration of His will and law were still the three essentials of the church. Among these three essentials, that which relates to the Divine object of worship occupies the foremost place. When the lawyer asked the Lord, "Master, which is the great commandment of the law?" Jesus answered, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment." The idea one has of God more than anything else determines his thought and his acts. He who believes in a living personal God dwells in a very different personal atmosphere from the man who recognizes only an abstract first cause. And he who believes in a personal God but thinks of Him as angry and vindictive cannot regard Him with the same feelings or maintain the same relation to the neighbor as one who is impressed above all else with the greatness of the Divine love. A life spent in terror of an arbitrary despot is quite different from the life that is made glad by the constant recognition of the Lord's goodness. When we know the Lord as one who is very near to us, constantly caring for us and seeking to guide and to bless us, our relations to Him become most vital, and we are filled with a desire to put away all that is evil in His sight. In the opening chapters of Genesis and in the last chapter of Revelation we are told of the "tree of life." The "tree of life" pictures the Lord as the source of every blessing and happiness. We are told that the tree of life was "in the midst of the paradise of God," and also that by shunning evil we may come to enjoy the fruits of that tree forever. We think of a paradise as a place of external beauty and abundant life, but the paradise of God is no mere external paradise. For even an external paradise cannot of itself bestow happiness; people can he miserable anywhere, no matter how sumptuous the living or how beautiful their surroundings, or how happy their associates may be. The paradise of God is a state of inner beauty. And this cannot be given to us without effort on our part. So it is written, "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." Paradise as a state of life is gained only through effort. It is reached as the culmination of a pilgrimage in which difficulties are overcome. For this reason the Bible is in considerable part a narrative of wars and conflict. Eternal life is won as we overcome evil within ourselves. War has been a conspicuous part of human history, particularly in the history of so-called Christian nations. The wars mentioned in the Bible describe the battles of right against wrong, of good against evil, which have to be fought in the human heart and mind. Men have always easily been led to fight against other men, but we should recognize that it is the unwillingness to fight against evils in our own hearts which is the real cause of these wars in the outward world. Wars must take place within or without, and if men refuse to fight against and overcome pride, ambition, the love of power, the love of conquest, and the desire to rule over rather than to serve the neighbor, these loves will continue to break out in open hostilities and wars. "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst or the paradise of God." The same tree of life was in the midst of the Garden of Eden at the beginning of man's history. The tree of life is the recognition of the Lord as love itself and life itself, the source and fountain of all love and life. Its being in the midst of the garden means that the Divine love is the central, inmost, and governing principle of all true human life. We are created to look to the Lord as a plant looks to the sun, to open all our faculties to the reception of life from the Lord. The Lord loves us. He made us to receive His love. He always has given and always will give to us all that we will receive from Him. This law of the Divine nature is the essential law for human nature, for man was created in the image and likeness of God. As we overcome our selfish tendencies and receive His love in their place, the Lord dwells in us. He often speaks of dwelling in us, and He invites us to come to Him and to abide in Him, "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." There is no other genuine life than that of love. It exists in its fullness in the Lord. It grows in us as we learn of Him and keep His laws. Going back to the Garden of Eden story, we see there pictured the quality and condition of life when men lived in innocence and in close dependence upon the Lord. How lovely, how intelligent, and how happy life must have been! The love and wisdom of the Lord were seen in everything. The world of nature pictured them. It can be so again, and it will be when the commandments are kept and our evils are overcome. The Word closes with John's vision of the Holy City. In it the bright promises of the Word are gathered up. The city is said to be "the measure of a man." The promise is not solely for the life to come, not only for heaven, but for earth. The Holy City is not merely a lovely vision; it is a definite ideal of life for us as individuals and for society; a practical plan of life, whose principles have been made known and clearly declared--the principles by which it is established in heaven, and by which it will be established upon earth. The first of these principles is the acknowledgment of the Lord as God, and the second is the keeping of His commandments. These are the "two witnesses," who, though overcome for a time, were restored to strength, and prevailed. We should not seek to live from any other principles or to put our reliance on any other strength. We should see and rejoice in the progress that the world has made, but if we think that it is the result of human wisdom, we put our trust in ourselves rather than in the Lord. We are living in a materialistic age, and sometimes the future seems dark. It is dark if we have no light outside of ourselves to which we may look. "Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." When doubts arise, we should immediately he moved to say, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." In all His Word and in all His works the Lord is saying to us, "Surely I come quickly." Patiently let us wait. Earnestly let us continue to work, watching for the indications of His providence. And to the one only Lord and Savior be all the glory. Amen. Responses to: leewoof@novalink.com From proxy@newearth.org Fri Dec 20 13:49:26 1996 From: proxy@newearth.org (Philip N. Odhner) Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 08:49:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: SERMON: "I was thirsty and you gave me drink" Message-ID: Here is a sermon that was written by Bishop (then Rev.) Philip N. Odhner and preached by him in South Africa on Mar. 1, 1959; in Bryn Athyn on Sept. 6, 1959; and read on March 17, 1996 in Bryn Athyn by Rev. Dushan Sever. FIRST SERMON ON THE PARABLE OF THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS "I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink. When saw we thee...thirsty adn gave thee drink? Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matt. 25:35, 36, 40) When the Lord on the cross saw that all things had been acomplished that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, He said, "I thirst." (John 19:28) The Lord's thirst was a Divine Spiritual thirst. It is a thirst for the Divine Truth and Divine Good in the Church, through which there may be the salvation of the Human Race. The Lord said, "I thirst," when He knew that all things had been accomplished that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, that is, when He knew that all things of His glorification had been accomplished through which there was the Divine Human, in which the Divine was made accessible and conjoinable to men. In these words therefore we hear the longing of the Lord's Divine Love that there might be those who would receive Him in His Divine Human, His longing for a genuine Church which would acknowledge Him, His longing for the reception by the Church of the Truth and Good of His Divine Human. This was His Divine end from the beginning of creation, for this He had striven with the human race in all the former ages and Churches, for this He had come into the world and assumed the Human and glorified it. And when He had done all things to make possible the conjunction of Himself with the Human Race, His Love longed for that conjunction, for the reception of His Divine Human life in the Church. When the Lord said, "I thirst," they gave Him vinegar to drink. And by this is signified, that the Church which came into being did not receive and acknowledge the Divine Human of the Lord, but had truth mixed with falsities, the truth of faith separated from love and charity. For this reason the Lord came again into the world to establish a New Church in which there could be the reception of the truth and good of His Divine Human. Will those who are called to the New Church feel His thirst and give Him drink? In man, thirst signifies the affection of the true. And if this affection, in man, is genuine then there is in it that which corresponds with the Divine Spiritual thirst of the Lord. For there is in it the longing that the human of man might be reborn and saved, the longing that man's human might be formed and opened to receive the Truth and Good of the Divine Human. If this is not present in the affection of the true, at first in a latent way, and then more and more openly, it is not a real affection of the true, and not a genuine spiritual thirst. There are affections of the true which are not genuine. There are thirsts for knowledge and understanding which are not good but evil, which do not open the mind to the Lord but close it. Between these affections we must learn to discriminate, before we can know that real affection which is the neighbor who is to be loved. Most have the love of learning, the love of knowing, from which they daily acquire knowledge of many things, some of which are for natural uses, and most of which are for no other end than the delight of knowing them. This love can be of great use in filling the memory of man with things which are tools for his thinking. But it may exist without any affection of the true. And it is an easy prey to the love of honour, reputation, and gain. The love of understanding, of reasoning, of coming to brilliant conclusions on the basis of what one knows, may also be mistaken for the affection of the truth, and thus as a genuine spiritual thirst. There are many obvious examples of those who have such a love of reasoning and yet have no love of truth at all. Where our difficulties in telling what is a real affection of the true commence, is with those who have a love of knowing and understanding the things of the Word and of the Doctrine of the Church. Because many love to think and talk about these holy things, it appears as if they are affected with them, when yet we know from the Word that many love to think about these holy things from a merely natural love without anything of sipritual love being in it. They who are in faith alone, or in faith separate from charity, have such an appearance of the affection of the true. They love to study, think and talk about the things of religion, but in such a way as to leave untouched their life's love and its intentions and thoughts. If you look into your own life you will observe that the things of your religion have as it were their own compartment in your mind. All the terms of theology have as it were a meaning in that compartment, but no meaning anywhere else. There are of course the common truths of moral and civil life which reach into other compartments of the life, but these are such as to be common with other churches and religions, so that there is, so to speak, no difference in the other compartments between a man of the Church and others in the world. And you will observe that you tend to think that this compartment of religion is the internal with yourself, and that the other compartments are your external, which are necessarily somehow made different from others by that internal. And when we speak of the affection of the true, our thought almost always applies this affection only to that separated religious compartment of the mind. If we want to know and understand the truths of theology, as existing in that compartment, then we think we are in the affection of the true. It is a great mistake to think of that religious compartment as our internal. We can have a very highly developed religious compartment without having any effect on our life's love and its intentions and thoughts. All that is in that compartment is merely abstract terms that have no meaning in life for us whatsoever. In fact, it may be said that our greatest danger, at this time in the Church, is that we may mistake such a developed religious compartment as our internal, and mistake the delights of knowing and understanding in that compartment as the affection of the true. Such an understanding must indeed be developed with us, but to regard it as an end in itself, to regard it as an internal life in itself, is a grievous error. If isolated in that compartment, the things of theology become like a kind of algebra. It becomes a thing of formulas, which we can manipulate as formulas, and even solve equations, and yet the letters or symbols in themselves mean nothing at all to us, nothing more than the x and y or a and b of an algebraic equation. So we can manipulate the terms celestial, spiritual, natural; and rational, natural, sensual; good and truth; good of truth and truth of good; falsity of evil and evil of falsity; and yet they may mean nothing to us more than x and y. How can we call such a separated theological compartment our internal? Does the existence of such a complex theological algebra elevate and make new our life in some mysterious way? Can we call the love of that theological reasoning and equationing the affection of truth? Is this the thirst that is the neighbor to be loved? Everyone can clearly see that regeneration is not the manipulation of a set of terms, no matter how much those terms may seem to put on life by reason of their juxtaposition one to another. Regeneration is to be in the things, and in the order of the things, which the terms represent and signify. And the affection of the truth is the affection of seeing the things in life which are true, and it is not the affection of the terms which represent and signify those things. If we deceive ourselves into thinking that the terms are truths, then we will never come into an affection of truth. We will then never know that we do not have the truth, that the truth is not in us, and we will never thirst for it. It is a kind of spiritual drunkenness, and the thirst for that kind of term-truth is like the thirst of a drunkard. It is fantastic and purely imaginative. In it we think we see all kinds of things which we do not see at all. It is divorced from reality. Just ask yourself what you actually see in yourself when you read or think or speak of some truth. Do you really see something, or is it merely a term? For example, you know many things about the spiritual world, about the laws of heaven and of hell. Do you really see these things in your life, so that you know what they are, or are they just terms which have no meaning in your life? We know that the marriage of conjugial love descends out of the marriage of the good and true. Do we see this good and true in our marriages, or is it all just a kind of vague shadowy terminology, which we acknowledge in the abstract and reject in the reality? The thirst for the true is the thirst to see the true in reality, to see the actual forms of the good of life. If we will cease getting drunk on the terms of religion, and lead the understanding to see the actual good and true, and the actual evil and false in our human things, we will receive a thirst for the true that will open our minds to receive the Divine True of the Lord. Pay attention to your own mind. Look at your loves. Examine them in your thought. Analyse them. See what they really are. See if you can see the truth of the Word there. If a man does this, he will find that he knows very little and that he understands hardly anything at all. And he will realize that in his human things he is in need, and lacks all things. Then can the thirst start with him, a longing for truth that will burn in him, and cause his mind to open and imbibe with love what is given to him from the Lord. So it is said in the Apaocalypse, "To him that is athirst will I give of the fountain of the water of life freely." And by this is meant that to those who desire truth out of any spiritual use, there will be given to them all the truth that is conducive to that use. To desire truth out of spiritual use, is to desire it for the sake of that new human life which can receive the life of the Divine Human of the Lord. Sometimes those, who wish to deride the usefulness of the Church, will ask, in a sarcastic manner, where the differences in the life of the Church and the life of the world can be seen. They will ask to be shown in so many words where the new plane of the life of the Church is. If this were asked out of the great longing for that life and that plane, if it were asked out of the desperate need of it, then it would indicate a real thirst for the true. But if it is asked in derision, then it is asked out of faith alone and out of a complacent satisfaction with the old life and the old human. All of us may at times feel that derision. But only they who are being regenerated feel the actual despair of seeing the truth in their life, and only these feel the thirst for it which may be satisfied from the fountain of the water of life. The affection of the true is sometimes called in the Word the love of the true for the sake of the true. This could be mistaken to mean the love of knowing the true for the sake of knowing it, thus that the abstract true is an end in itself. But what is meant is, that that understanding of the true, which is given to us, if in an abstract compartment of the mind, is for the sake of seeing the actual truth in life. It would be good for us if, at the end of each day, we should reflect as to whether or not we have come to see anything of actual truth in that day. Not just to have learned a new term, or to have learned to manipulate some term, but to have seen it in our own life, in such a way that we know what it is. If we did this, we would come to thirst, and many times we would experience a despair that we have seen nothing, and perhaps even been cast into doubt about what we had previously seen. And yet in this, we would come to understand in a real way, what it is that the Lord thirsts for in us, and our hearts would be prepared to receive His Truth. And then too we would begin to know the signs of this thirst in other men, and to love them fof it, knowing that they have with them an affection which is of the Lord. To see the true in the human things, in the life, is to see it in a form which does not appear immediately or directly to be of the Word. It is therefore likened to a thirsting and a giving to drink to others, to the least of the Lord's brethren. And yet in so doing we would indeed be making possible that for which the Lord longs for out of His Divine Love. AMEN Lessons: Exodus 17. John 19: 13-30. Apocalypse Revealed 889. From 76452.3552@compuserve.com Tue Dec 24 04:35:42 1996 From: 76452.3552@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 23:35:42 -0500 Subject: SERMON: The Joy of the angels at the Lord's Birth Message-ID: <199612232336_MC1-DBE-E65A@compuserve.com> The Joy of the Angels at the Lord's Birth by the Rev. Eric H. Carswell December 25, 1992 Then the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11) These words of the angel were truly good tidings of great joy for all people. Although neither the shepherds nor anyone else in the world really understood the importance of what was begun that night, the angels did, and they had been unceasingly awaiting this event for centuries. They knew why there was cause for great rejoicing. The promised Messiah, the Savior and Redeemer of mankind, had finally been born. The unbounded joy of the heavens was seen by the shepherds. Suddenly with the angel who had spoken to them there was a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." (Luke 2:14) Why were the angels so joyful? We can hear the excitement in the voice of the angel that spoke to the shepherds. And we can imagine the shiver of wonder that must have filled the shepherds as they heard the resounding sound of the angelic multitudes praising God. What was the source of the angels' joy? What did the birth of the Lord on earth mean to them? The angels had known that the Lord would be born on earth ever since the first hint of evil had appeared in mankind. At the moment that the first of the Lord's people began to turn away from innocently following Him the angels could foresee in a general way what would happen. With the human mind working the way that it did and does, the angels could foresee that the power of evil, once begun, would gradually increase. (cf. Arcana Caelestia 4687:2) With horror they recognized that eventually the human race would turn so far away from the Lord that it would no longer know anything true nor be able to do anything good. They recognized that the human race would turn completely from the Lord's life and His blessings, and they knew that when a complete separation took place, the world and the human race would be destroyed. Yet at the time of the first hint of evil, the Lord immediately foretold in prophecy that He would be born as a Savior for all people. By prophecies given to people on earth, both they and the angels knew that the Lord would make His advent. He would come as the Word made flesh, as a light to the world. He would let His infinite soul slowly fill a natural body. He would allow a mind to form within the workings of a natural brain - one precisely like yours and mine. He would learn the stories and laws of the Old Testament just like a child today can learn them. Then He would do something that no finite mortal could. He would slowly reveal to that natural mind and to the universal spiritual world the infinite life within revealed truth. He took words and ideas of truth that could exist within a human mind and showed their hidden glory. This revelation was an essential part of His mission on earth. It was an essential part of the process that we call the glorification. The Lord showed the infinite wisdom and the infinite love that had been hidden by the darkness of evil and the obscurity of limited human thought. The Lord Jesus Christ gave a power to revealed truth that is the salvation of all who seek to follow it - to all who follow revealed truth while seeking to serve their fellow human being. The Lord became the Word made flesh so that we might behold His glory, so that we might have the light that will give us life. All this lay in the distant future when the Lord's birth was first prophesied. Yet the prophecies themselves had great power. Yes, they were reassuring words, but they were something more. Faith in the promise of these prophecies, faith in the Lord who was to come, brought about a loving relationship between human beings and God. (Arcana Caelestia 2034) This faith gave life and blessings to countless people. It sustained many in the human race till the Lord's birth actually occurred. Over and over again, the Lord renewed the promise of His coming. But much time passed, and the promise of the Messiah was nearly forgotten. A few held onto their hope and waited, looking daily for the Lord to come. Wise men far distant from Judea watched the night sky looking for the sign that the Messiah had been born, and when they saw the star of wonder, they journeyed to bring gifts to the young infant. An old man in Jerusalem also waited for the Savior. When Simeon saw the infant Jesus and held Him in his arms, from a contented heart he spoke the remarkable words, "Lord, now let Your servant depart in peace, according to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all people: A light to give light to the Gentiles and the glory of Your people Israel." (Luke 2:29-32) Simeon certainly understood something of the meaning of the Lord's birth. Yet almost no one else in the world did. But the angels knew what the advent meant. The prophecies of the Lord's coming had been essential for the angels too. We are taught that if the process of the Lord's glorification had not been shown to the angels through the internal sense of the Word and also in the rites of the Jewish Church, the Lord would have been obliged to come into the world immediately after the fall of the first church, the Most Ancient Church. (Arcana Caelestia 2523:1) For the angels the Old Testament served as a detailed prophecy of even the smallest aspects of the Jesus' life. From the Old Testament the angels knew the actual thoughts and perceptions of His whole life in the world. The prophecy sustained hope with the angels. It held in check their fears when they foresaw the growing power of evil. Their concern was not just a general concern for a mere matter of principle or for the battle of evil against good in an abstract form. They were concerned with the salvation of each individual soul. They could see that the possibility of anyone getting to heaven was greatly endangered. The angels were keenly aware of the state of the church with the human race. We provide a foundation for them. When the church is weak and ignorant, the foundation is threatened. We are told of the sadness of angels when the church is misled by false ideas and motivated by evil. Yes, the heavens are dependent on the church on earth. If the church should completely fail, the heavens presently associated with us would have to be transferred to rest on other earths, and life would cease on this earth. However, the concern of the angels was not for their own welfare. Their concern was for the happiness of others. They seek above all else to bring happiness to others. We read that "to save a soul from hell, the angels would regard death as nothing, indeed if it were possible, they would undergo hell for that soul." (Arcana Caelestia 2077:2) The angels suffered with and for those who wandered in spiritual darkness. They mourned over the sadness that filled the lives of so many. They waited and could do little to make life better for all who suffered. They waited, praying, hoping. They knew that the darkness and suffering would end when Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer, came in glory. So it was that when the Lord was born, the angels rejoiced. They rejoiced the night of the first Christmas so long ago. And with joy they brought the news to a small group of shepherds who were in the fields that night watching over their flocks. Yet they knew that the Lord's birth was only the beginning. Jesus would grow from infancy to adult life. He would undergo continual battles against the mind-numbing power of evil. His battles would continue to the final trial of the cross. The completion of His work would come as He rose from the tomb on the first Easter. He rose not merely as Jesus, but as the infinite God, Jesus Christ our Lord appearing in flesh and blood. On the first Christmas, the angels knew that much had to occur before mankind was truly safe from misery and spiritual emptiness of hell. But after centuries of waiting, hoping and praying for this event, it had now begun. In the words of the angel, the birth of the Lord was indeed good news of great joy for all people. When we consider the Lord's birth, we too can be joyful. If the Lord had not come, we would not be alive today. If the Lord had not bowed the heavens and come down, nothing could save us from the natural patterns of thought and choice that bring us and others pain and hurt, that bring the reality of hell to us. It is valuable for us to come to an acknowledgment of the destructiveness within these natural patterns of thought and choice. But something of the true spirit of Christmas is shown in the joy of the angels. Their joy was not because they directly benefited by the advent. The nature of angelic love is to feel another's joy as its own. The joy of the angels was for all mankind. In their joy they recognized the significance of the advent for the lives of so many people. We can form some idea of their joy if we think of what the Lord's coming means to all those whom we love. When we watch them learn and grow, it is not always easy. Perhaps we worry that they are making bad choices and that we cannot prevent it without taking away their essential freedom. It is then that we need to remember the Lord's coming. Because the Lord was born into the world, He is able to be very near to teach and lead our loved ones with His infinite wisdom and infinite love. He has come for them to lead them to receive as much of the joy of heaven as they possibly can. We can perhaps realize with joy that things may not be as hopeless as they sometimes seem. Yes, we need to remember to help those around us as prudently as we can, but we can be encouraged by the thought that an infinite and loving God is near and also working unceasingly with them. And as we see their joy when they do what is good and right, we can feel something of this joy as our own and give thanks to the Lord. The sense of another's joy is magnified many times with the angels. This is the joy with which the angels celebrated the birth of the Lord. They were rejoicing at the Lord's expression of His love and mercy to all of us. If we can enter into this joy of the angels, we will sense something of the true joy of Christmas. When this joy fills our hearts, we may echo the words of the angelic chorus, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." AMEN Lessons: Isaiah 40:1-2,9-11; Luke 2:1-20; Arcana Caelestia 2523 All books mentioned, other than from the Bible are written by Emanuel Swedenborg and are often referred to in the New Church merely as "the Writings." We believe that they are equally the Word of God as the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. ___________________________________ from Eric Carswell Glenview, IL USA Internet: EHCarswell@compuserve.com From leewoof@novalink.com Sat Dec 28 15:52:22 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 10:52:22 -0500 Subject: SERMON: Jesus Christ is Born! Message-ID: <96Dec28.105118-0800_est.2733-3+54@bifrost.novalink.com> Jesus Christ is Born! A Christmas Sermon by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Readings: Isaiah 10:33, 34; 11:1-10. A shoot will come from the stump of Jesse. Luke 2:1-14. The birth of Jesus Christ. Arcana Coelestia #3900. The Lord's coming means his presence within us. "To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord." (Luke 2:11) Christmas day! What day held more excitement for us as we grew up? For most of us, it was the biggest day of the year. The day we counted down to for weeks, even months, in advance. A magical day, with lights on the trees and houses--and that special Christmas tree in our living room that carried so many memories with it. If there was snow for Christmas, it was even more magical, with a blanket of whiteness outside that provided a bright contrast to the long, dark nights of winter. At Christmas time, we sing beloved songs that we do not sing any other time of year. One of my warmest memories of Christmas is of going out walking through the snow, caroling at the houses around the neighborhood. Christmas is a season bigger than life. Of course, if there are problems in the family, they become bigger than life at Christmas too. More than at other times, we notice when someone is missing from our household. If we are not getting along with each other, the friction is all the more painful at Christmas time because we feel that, especially at this time of year, we should be happy and joyful. Even if things are going well in the family, Christmas can be a frenetic time. There are presents to buy or make and to wrap; baking and decorating to do; family gatherings to arrange and attend. And when it is all over, we may have to worry about how to pay the bills we just racked up. Yet at the center of all our Christmas joys and sorrows, beyond the hustle and bustle of our preparations and celebrations, lies the sacred event that gives life and meaning to it all. Jesus Christ is born! The Lord, the sovereign God of all the universe, has bent the heavens and come down to live among us, as human as we are. While we were busy with other things, Jesus Christ--the Lord--has been born into our world. What does this mean? Jesus Christ is born? We all know the story of Jesus' birth. The words we read each year at Christmas are familiar. How the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child from the Holy Spirit who would be the Son of God--and that he would have a kingdom that would last forever. How the baby was laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. How the angels announced the birth to the shepherds, and they went to see the baby who was born to be the Messiah. We recall the story of the wise men come from the east to bring presents of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant king--and how they foiled Herod's plan to kill the child. How Joseph was warned in a dream, and fled to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. And we know that the child grew and became strong in spirit. But what does it all mean? What does it all mean to us? In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah prophesied a time when the Lord of hosts would level the forest, cutting down the tallest trees with an ax--even the majestic cedars of Lebanon. "The lofty," he said, "will be brought low." Life does that to us sometimes. Just when we think everything is going fine, we are flattened by a great blow--like an ax leveling the tall trees in the thick forest of our lives. Since the blow seems to come out of the blue, we may feel that is God that has done this to us. Where else could such a thing have come from? Who else would have the power to tear down in one sudden blow what has taken so many years to grow and mature? This is very hard to take. We all know that we are not perfect--that we have done things and continue to do things that we know we shouldn't. If we searched through our inner thoughts and feelings, hidden within most of us is a sense that some day, something may happen to us because of the mistakes and the wrong choices we have made. But most of us do not feel we deserve to have our lives flattened--and when it happens, we may feel angry at God for allowing it to happen. After the devastation, we see a clearcut forest, with stumps reaching on for miles. We see desolation where there used to be lush greenery and pleasant paths through the woods. Yet in this devastation the Lord does not leave us without hope. "A shoot will come out from the stump of Jesse," Isaiah prophesies, "and a branch will grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him." That shoot--that branch--is the Lord Jesus Christ who was born among us nearly two thousand years ago. It is also the Lord Jesus Christ who can be born within each of us today--at this very moment. It is "the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord." This is the new growth that can come from the desolation we often face in our lives. Our forest may be clearcut, but it is not dead. Our spiritual roots are still alive, reaching out for life-giving water and nourishment so that we can begin healing and growing again. A new spirit of wisdom and understanding grows in us--wisdom that we used to have no room for in the dense thickets of our busy lives. Through the experience of struggle and difficulty, our character deepens. We learn that to pull through our hardest experiences, we must turn to each other--and to the Lord--for comfort and strength. When we do turn to the Lord in a new way from the pain of our struggles, we gain a new knowledge and appreciation of who the Lord is. We also get a new perspective on the experiences we have been facing. As Isaiah says, the Lord "will not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he will judge the poor." When we are depressed or in difficult circumstances, we feel very sharply that we are the poor of the earth. We feel that we have lost so much that we held dear--that little is left. Yet the Lord does not look at our outward circumstances. The Lord does not judge by outward appearances. Yes, hardships and disasters in this world give us pain for a time. But the Lord looks at the heart and the spirit within us. The outward circumstances of our lives change and pass away. But the character we build in our souls lasts forever. The Lord "will strike the earth"--the earth of our everyday experience--"with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he will kill the wicked." Not wicked people--when we choose evil and damaging ways of life, we bring about our own destruction. No, the wicked thing that the Lord destroys is our own wrong and hurtful thoughts and feelings. When Jesus Christ is born in our lives, he kills the anger we feel when we do not get our own way. The Lord kills the jealousy we feel when we see someone who is richer or more beautiful or luckier than we are. The Lord kills our desire to get more for ourselves through dishonest practices; our unfriendliness toward people who do not think the way we do. "Righteousness will be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins." As this new righteousness and faithfulness from the Lord grows stronger and stronger in our lives, it gradually clears away all the wickedness in us--all that is wrong and hurtful inside of us. We may still face the same pain and the same struggles, but we will face them with a new and stronger spirit. "Then the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child will lead them." We will still have the frightful wolfs, leopards, and lions of harsh outward experiences and painful inner struggles to face. But when the Lord Jesus Christ is born and grows in our lives, we face our struggles with a new spirit of love and trust in the Lord. We know that however much life may rip at us with its claws and teeth, it can never touch the spirit within us, because our spirit is grounded in the Lord. When the knowledge, the peace, the love of the Lord have been born in our hearts, our outward hardships become tame. They become the friend that challenges us to grow in spirit and in love for each other. This is what Christmas means. This is the truly good news that we celebrate on Christmas day. The news that Jesus Christ is born, not just into our world, but into our own hearts and lives. The news that our tears of hardship and pain can be transformed through the Lord's presence into tears of joy. "The angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.'" From leewoof@novalink.com Sat Dec 28 15:52:33 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 10:52:33 -0500 Subject: SERMON: Good News of Great Joy Message-ID: <96Dec28.105119-0800_est.2736-4+60@bifrost.novalink.com> Good News of Great Joy A Christmas Eve Sermonette by the Rev. Lee Woofenden, Bridgewater, MA 1996 Readings: Isaiah 40:3-11. Prepare the way of the Lord. Matthew 1:18-25. The birth of Jesus the Christ. True Christian Religion #774. Jesus comes when our truth is filled with love. This evening we celebrate the greatest event that has ever taken place--the greatest event that ever will take place. It is not a victory in war, nor is it a world championship in sports. It is not a triumph of medicine or technology. It is not a great scientific breakthrough, nor even a political or economic breakthrough. It does not fit into any of our usual categories of great events--for it is in a category all its own. It is unique in all our history. Though the world is still not sure exactly what happened, we number the years of our history forward and backward from this event. What is the great event that forms the centerpiece of our world's history? It is the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Not a great, flashy current event that would, in our day, have its brief fling with fame on our news media and then be forgotten a few days, weeks, or years later. The birth of a baby. A birth that was noticed by only a few shepherds, prophets, and wise men who were told by angels. A birth that took place, not in the ornate halls of a royal palace, but in a village--and in that village, not in a comfortable inn or house, but in a place where animals lived. This is how our Lord, the God of the universe, chose to come to us. "A bruised reed he will not break," says the prophet. (Isaiah 42:3) Our Lord did not want to overwhelm us with grand miracles, forcing on us a belief that would be only skin deep. No, our Lord came to us gently, with the innocence of a baby, wooing us to love him--not demanding, but asking graciously for our faith, our love, and our obedience. Our Lord stands and knocks at the door, waiting for us to open it and let him into our lives. Yet behind that gentle innocence there is a power that goes beyond all our finite human conception. The soul of the baby Jesus was God, the infinite, omnipotent creator of the universe. Within that tiny being that Mary held in her arms was all the power of divine love and wisdom--all focused on that one, small time and place. We may wish that we could have been there to witness the wondrous events of our Lord's birth and life. The angels heralding his birth; the wise men from the East bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; the boy Jesus in the temple, listening to the teachers and asking them questions; the colorful and compelling preaching; the teaching given with authority and power; the loving work of healing the sick. Wouldn't our faith be so much stronger if we could only have seen the Lord with our own eyes? If we could have heard his powerful words? If our loved ones could be healed by the touch of his hands? The Lord gives us something much more precious than physical healing or the sound of his voice. He does not leave us desolate; he comes to us in spirit and in truth. After nearly two thousand years, we continue to celebrate the physical event of the Lord's birth as a baby on earth. Yet it is the spiritual event within that gives that physical event power. It is the Lord coming to each one of us today--right now--that is the real reason we continue to celebrate an event that took place so many centuries ago. Physically, the Lord needed to be born only once. But spiritually, he is born just as often as we receive him into our hearts in a new way. He gave us an example for all time--the example of his life on earth. That example is recorded in the Bible for us to read and learn from. We all know the story of the Lord's birth. We know something of his teachings in the Bible. We know that he taught us to love one another as he has loved us. Our knowledge of the Lord's teachings is good. It enables us to live as human beings rather than as animals. It gives us a moral and ethical horizon that goes beyond the mere instinct for survival and reproduction. It beckons us to live from higher principles--principles of love and mutual understanding. But the mere knowledge of these teachings is not enough. We may know that we should be honest in business, but if we do not bother to put it into practice, it means nothing. We may know that we should treat other people the same way we would wish to have them treat us, but if we cannot get outside of our own feelings of hurt or annoyance enough to empathize with the way others feel, our knowledge of the Golden Rule means nothing. We may know that we should live by the Lord's teachings, but if we do not follow through with action, our knowledge is mere words, signifying nothing. What is the difference between knowing and following the Lord's teachings? The difference is love. By itself, a knowledge of the wonderful events of Christmas--as magical as they are--will not change anything. But if we love the Lord and love other people with a warm, sympathetic, and caring love, then our knowledge about the Lord's birth is transformed into a real and living birth of the Lord within our hearts and minds. This is a birth that cannot stay inside of us; it overflows into every part of our life, and into every relationship. It is a birth that transforms us, not from the outside, like a political or scientific breakthrough, but from the inside--from deep within our soul. When we accept the Lord into our hearts in welcoming love, then the great power that was focused on the baby Jesus can also be focused on us. We can never fully receive that power as Jesus did. But as much as we do receive it, we become new people--people born, not from mere human decisions and actions, but from the will of God. This is the good news of great joy that will be for all people. It is the good news that Jesus was born, not just once, two thousand years ago. No, Jesus is born as often as we accept his love and his teachings into our hearts, and express them in our lives. It is a birth of new appreciation for our family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. It is a birth of new joy and contentment in serving the needs of others--physical, emotional, and spiritual. The Lord's birth in us is our own rebirth as a new person, moved by mutual love and understanding, and serving our fellow human beings with kindness and joy. "Behold, I bring you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord." From leewoof@novalink.com Mon Dec 30 00:08:34 1996 From: leewoof@novalink.com (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 29 Dec 1996 19:08:34 -0500 Subject: SERMON: Bringing In the New Message-ID: <96Dec29.190730-0800_est.2737-1+77@bifrost.novalink.com> Bringing In the New A New Year's Sermon by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, MA, December 29, 1996 Readings: Psalm 98. Sing to the Lord a new song. Matthew 9:16, 17. New wine in old wineskins. Arcana Coelestia #5354.2. New motivation and understanding. It was wonderful to have so many people here for our Christmas Eve service. It is inspiring to see that many full pews--even if most of them are in the back of the church! Maybe next year we will have to rope off the back five pews. Just kidding! Seeing so many people in the pews gives us something to work for as a church as we enter the New Year. During the next few months, as we formulate our plans for growth and outreach, I plan to present to you a few sermons on the spiritual and interpersonal aspects of becoming a congregation that welcomes new people and strives to serve their spiritual needs. However, today I would like to focus on the spiritual meaning of the New Year for us as individuals. In some ways, our beginning the year at this particular time is arbitrary. The Jewish ceremonial New Year comes in the fall, on a day called "Rosh Hashanah"--which literally means "head of the year," or "beginning of the year." This goes along with the Jewish practice of counting days from sunset to sunset. We are familiar with this way of counting days from reading the first chapter of Genesis, where it says, "and there was evening, and there was morning, one day, ... two days," and so on. I have often thought it would be more appropriate to start the new year in the spring, when nature starts its new year of growth and reproduction. However, like the parallel between the Jewish day and year, our year starts in the middle of the "night" of the seasons--just after the winter solstice, when nights are longest and days are shortest. There is at least one way this time is just right for the New Year. Our New Year comes right after Christmas--right after we celebrate the birth of our Lord. From a Christian perspective, this is indeed the beginning of everything new. When the Lord was born into the world, it was the beginning of a new religious era and a new church--the Christian church. As we have explored in our Advent sermons, when the Lord is born into our own hearts and minds, it is the beginning of a new, spiritual person within us. We all have an idea of what it is like to become a new person. If we look back at our earlier life, we can see things that we have given up because they were wrong. It may have been something related to our physical health, such as drinking, smoking, or overeating. It may have been in the way we get along with other people. Perhaps at one point we decided to start listening more to our husband or wife, our children, our friends. Perhaps we decided not to say hurtful things about other people--either to their face or behind their backs. Or it may have been something inside of us, such as resolving to be content with what we have, and not jealous of what others have; or deciding that we are going to make a real effort to love even the people we have considered to be our enemies. If you can, think back to one of those points in your life when you made a change for the better. Think of what your life was like before that change, and what it was like afterwards. When we make this kind of a change, don't we feel like a new person afterwards? When we have kicked the habit--whether that habit is physical, interpersonal, or spiritual--isn't it like a new day, or a new year, opening up in our lives? This is the newness of life that comes when we receive the Lord into our lives in a new way--when Jesus is born in a part of ourselves that had formerly been dark and destructive. Our custom of making resolutions at the New Year is no accident. Spiritually, making changes in ourselves is the real meaning of a New Year. Our personal changes often do not coincide with the New Year on the calendar. Still, this is a good time to think about what it means to turn the page to a new chapter of our lives. Jesus teaches us about this in our brief reading from the Gospel of Matthew: No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved. (Matt. 9:16, 17) When we kick a bad habit, our life has to change in more ways than just giving up the habit. Take drinking too much as an example. Some people find they have to stop drinking altogether to avoid drinking too much; others are able to continue drinking moderately. Either way, our lifestyle will change. We will either stop visiting the liquor store altogether, or we will go there much less. If we used to drink in bars, we will not be visiting them so much, or not at all. This immediately brings up the issue of the friends we have had. Will we be able to continue with our old friendships? Or will some of them have to cool off or even end because alcohol was a central part of the friendship? To the extent that we have built our lives around drinking, our lives will have to change in more ways than we may have realized when we made the decision to stop drinking. However, if you can pardon the image, the alternative is to put the "new wine" of our newly made resolution to stop drinking into the "old wineskins" of the things we always used to do. When the new (or unfermented) wine goes into old wineskins with their leftover dregs, the new wine ferments, spoiling it for our new taste in beverages and bursting the wineskin, too. If we try to keep living the same way we did before, only changing one little thing, it will not work. To continue with the drinking example, if we keep buying as much liquor as we used to, keep going to the bars, and keep hanging around our old drinking buddies, soon our new resolution will be broken as we fall back into our old habits. Drinking is just one example. Each one of us can think of a bad habit or two of our own that we have kicked, and the new wine in old wineskins image will work just as well. Of course, looking at the habits we have kicked in the past is the easy part. Looking at the ones we have right now--the ones we know we ought to kick--is much harder. When we do think back on past victories in our personal lives, we will usually find that the change did not come without a struggle. We may have made several attempts before succeeding. Or it may have been months or years before that itching to go back to our old ways finally left us--before we could stop clashing with those old wineskins. It is likely that we will have a similar struggle with whatever we are facing now. Mulling over past victories does have its virtues. If we know we have made it through in the past, we will have that much more confidence that we can make it through again. When we feel our resolve slipping, we can turn to our past successes as a way to shore up our strength and make it through our time of weakness and indecision. Yet there is another place we must turn besides our past. If our victories over the things we find wrong in ourselves are to be certain and lasting, we must recognize that the power for victory comes from the Lord. And we must make the change because we know it is what the Lord would have us do. There can be many reasons to give up a bad habit. If we have a temper and it gets us into trouble at work, we may find it expedient to control our temper in order to keep our job and make career advances. If we get caught telling stories about people behind their backs, the loss of people's trust can do real damage to our social standing. We had better stop telling stories, because we do want people to think well of us. The problem is, if we are only controlling our temper to stay out of trouble at work, what is going to stop us from losing our temper at home? If we stop telling stories about people, but still think badly of them within ourselves, what will we do when we get an opportunity to show our disdain or anger for them in a way we think nobody will discover? If we give up a bad habit for any other reason besides knowing from the Lord's teachings that it is wrong, we are merely covering it up. We are not making any real change in our inner character; we are just making sure nobody else sees what we are really like inside. Sooner or later, our real thoughts and feelings will come out. If we try to cover them up, they will build up until they find an outlet for expression. We can only make genuine change if we change the inner thoughts and feelings behind the wrong things we do. And we can only do this if we recognize that the thoughts and feelings themselves are wrong--not just the trouble we get into when people find out about them through our hurtful words and actions. Our spiritual New Year can be truly new only when we accept the Lord as the real standard of right and wrong, and follow that standard both in our inner feelings and in our outer actions. When we do accept the Lord into our hearts--when we do change our attitudes as well as our behavior--then not only does our behavior change, but we gain a new sense of joy in our lives. This is the joy spoken of in our reading from Swedenborg. We feel a wonderful sense of joy and fulfillment simply in doing good things for other people, without any thought of what we might get in return. When we learn something new that can help us with a problem or issue we have been facing, we feel happiness just as if we had discovered a pearl of great price lying hidden in the field. Then, when we look back on the pleasure we used to get from our old ways of living, that pleasure pales, and even becomes distressing. We cannot understand how we could have enjoyed doing the things we used to do. When we compare the joy of our new way of living with the self-centered pleasures we used to get from our old way, there is simply no comparison. We are likely to think, "If only I had done this sooner, things would have been so much better!" Yet that is what our spiritual New Year is all about: changing our lives for the better. When our spiritual New Year has come, and we have felt the joy of living anew from the Lord, then we can sing with the Psalmist: O sing to the Lord a new song; Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord; bless his name; Tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, His marvelous works among all the peoples; For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. Happy New Year!