From leewoof@mediaone.net Sun Jan 6 23:43:37 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 18:43:37 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "A New Heaven and a New Earth," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020106184305.00a137a8@pop.ne.mediaone.net> A New Heaven and a New Earth By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, December 30, 2001 Readings: Isaiah 65:17-25: A new heaven and a new earth "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. "Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For like the days of a tree will the days of my people be; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain nor bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. "The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain," says the Lord. Revelation 21:1-5: A new heaven and a new earth Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the tabernacle of God is with humankind, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" The one who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new!" The Last Judgment #73: The state of the world from now on The state of the world from now on will be just as it has been before. This is because the immense change that has taken place in the spiritual world does not force any change on the outward form of the material world. So there will be civic affairs just as before; peace treaties, alliances, and wars just as before; and all the other events, great and small, that take place in human communities. . . . However, the state of the church will not be the same from now on. Yes, it will look much the same outwardly; but inwardly it will be different. Outwardly, the churches will be divided the way they have been. They will still go on teaching their doctrines, and there will be similar religious practices among non-Christians. But from now on, people in the church will have more freedom of thought in matters of faith--that is, in the spiritual issues that have to do with heaven--because spiritual freedom has been restored to us. Sermon: Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. (Isaiah 65:17, 18) It is a beautiful promise that we are given, both in the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament and in the prophet John in the New Testament. In Isaiah, the Lord tells us of the future creation of a new heaven and a new earth. This new society will be so peaceful and secure that all the former things--weeping, crying, infant mortality, early death, theft and military conquest--all these things will not even be remembered anymore! Even the animal kingdom will be transformed, with the (former) carnivores and the herbivores eating peacefully together. "They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain," says the Lord. The apostle John, who is the prophet of the New Testament, sees this beautiful vision fulfilled, describing it in the end of his strange and powerful spiritual vision, which we know as the book of Revelation. "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . . And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new!'" Emanuel Swedenborg--unlike the hundreds of religious figures who predicted that the great Last Judgment was about to come, followed by the new kingdom of God--said that in his day, the mid-1700s, the Last Judgment had already happened! We missed it here on earth, he said, because it was not a physical event observable by material eyes, but a spiritual event that only spiritual eyes could see. John's vision took place in the spiritual world, and so, Swedenborg said, did the events that they predicted. And it was because his spiritual eyes were opened by the Lord that he could see them, while the rest of the world went on its way all unaware of the momentous changes taking place in the higher realms of reality. Still, we have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as living in a new age. Scientific knowledge has mushroomed in the last two hundred years, and technology along with it, so that things never even conceived of in Swedenborg's day are now so routine we don't even think about them. We take it for granted that if we need to get to a place that is fifty or sixty miles away, we can hop in the car and be there in an hour or so. For Swedenborg, such a trip meant many hours astride a horse, or bumping along in a horse-drawn carriage. We flip a switch, and the light goes on. This would have been considered magic in Swedenborg's day! And we pick up the phone, or sit down at the computer keyboard, and instantly we are communicating with someone on the other side of the country, or on the other side of the world. Such things were simply impossible in the eighteenth century. And yet, have things really changed all that much? Yes, we do have far greater knowledge, and our technology is light years beyond anything Swedenborg knew. But have _people_ really changed? Has human society really changed? There were people at the turn of the last century who believed that war was a thing of the past, and that the new era of science and of new spiritual understanding was even then ushering in the peaceable kingdom so beautifully described by Isaiah. World War I was called "the war to end all wars"; but its aftermath led inexorably to the even more terrible World War II. The United States itself--which we like to think of as the most enlightened nation yet to grace this earth--has engaged in one war or another nearly every decade of its existence. Even now, our country is engaged in a "war against terrorism" that has already killed at least as many innocent civilians in Afghanistan as the number of people who died in the horrible attacks of September 11. I used to say that slavery had been all but eliminated from our world. However, in a recent online debate I found out, to my chagrin, that although few if any countries still have laws on the books condoning slavery, the practice itself is still going strong throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in conditions of slavery not only in the third world, but in the developed nations. This includes the United States, where many legal and illegal immigrants and others have been reduced to unpaid servitude in American homes and clandestine manufacturing operations. Meanwhile, and all the scourges of human greed and lust for power continue to operate in our society, apparently as strong as ever. The crime rate in our cities continues at a high level, with thefts and murders taking place every day. Corruption in business and in government is daily news in the media. And as for the freedom that Americans are so proud of, and that we see as one of the distinguishing characteristics of our nation, it is frightening to see how overwhelming is the support among the American people to give up those freedoms one by one, in exchange for the security against outside threats that our government is promising us in return. And so we find ourselves in the ironic position of giving up our personal rights and freedoms in the cause of a war that is supposed to be defending freedom and democracy against the forces of terrorism and despotism. Have things really changed all that much? Or are we just doing the same things all over again, but in a more high-tech way? Though Emanuel Swedenborg is sometimes called a prophet, he actually made very few predictions about the future. In fact, in _The Last Judgment_ #74, just after the section we heard earlier, he says, "I have had various conversations with angels about the state of the church from now on. They have said that they do not know what is going to happen--only the Lord knows that." However, in _The Last Judgment_ #73--the second-to-last numbered section in the book--Swedenborg does make this "prediction": The state of the world from now on will be just as it has been before. This is because the immense change that has taken place in the spiritual world does not force any change on the outward form of the material world. So there will be civic affairs just as before; peace treaties, alliances, and wars just as before; and all the other events, great and small, that take place in human communities. Sound familiar? Yes, Swedenborg confidently predicted that after the Last Judgment took place, things would be pretty much the same in our world as they had been before. No cataclysms with sun, moon, and stars falling to earth and burning it to a crisp. No great battles in the sky with hosts of angels routing hordes of devils, and hurling them to earth to inflict terrible plagues upon the unfortunate inhabitants of this realm. No locusts looking like horses prepared for battle, with the tails of scorpions, tormenting people for five months. All of these things--and the many other cataclysms described in the prophetic books of the Bible--were never going to take place in this world, Swedenborg says, but describe _spiritual_ events in symbolic language. And, says Swedenborg, they have already taken place. The great battles and disasters described in Daniel, Isaiah, Matthew, and Revelation were accomplished over two hundred years ago, in the spiritual world. And except for those precious few people who read about it in Swedenborg's writings, no one here on earth even knew the difference. And yet, this is exactly what Swedenborg predicted would happen. We wouldn't even know the difference. Things would go on just as they had before, with wars and rumors of war, civic affairs both good and bad, human communities functioning as they have always functioned, people living their lives day to day and year to year as they always have. For those of us who long for a new world, this can be a painful and stubborn fact. Things just don't seem to change very much, or very fast. We have a wonderful vision of that loving, peaceful kingdom that will envelop our earth when the enlightenment of the new spiritual age does its work. And then we read the newspaper or watch the news on TV. Things sound pretty much the same, don't they? But there is a difference. It is not a difference in outward affairs--as much as technology has changed the face of our society. It is a change in the inner quality of our existence. Continuing from Swedenborg once again: However, the state of the church will not be the same from now on. Yes, it will look much the same outwardly; but inwardly it will be different. Outwardly, the churches will be divided the way they have been. They will still go on teaching their doctrines, and there will be similar religious practices among non-Christians. But from now on, people in the church will have more freedom of thought in matters of faith--that is, in the spiritual issues that have to do with heaven--because spiritual freedom has been restored to us. Spiritual freedom has been restored to us. That is the critical change that has taken place for us since the Last Judgment. Up to Swedenborg's day, the church still held sway over human minds. Few and courageous were those who dared to defy the church and disagree with its teachings on any subject--including science. And those who did defy the church often did not live to tell the tale, or were forced with threats of torture and death to recant the views they had so painstakingly coaxed out of the world of nature. The church governed people's minds through fear and by force of arms. And the spiritual atmosphere, choked as it was with evil spirits, supported the church in that despotism of the mind and the body. All of this ended with the Last Judgment. The Lord decisively cleared away all the choking influences of spiritual evil that had been restricting the flow of light and warmth from heaven and from the Lord. And though that great confrontation in the spiritual world barely registered a ripple here on earth, the state of the church and of human minds was forever altered. Spiritual freedom was restored. The church could no longer dictate to the learned world or to the masses what they were to believe, and enforce it by brute force. The scholarly world was cut loose from the strictures of religion, and scientific discovery blossomed. Even more important, people were freed from the inner compulsion they felt to believe in the teachings of the church or spend eternity in hell. Many simply left the church, no longer able to accept its teachings or its validity. Those who stayed felt more and more that it was their choice whether to believe or not--both in general and when it came to particular teachings of the church. Mentally and spiritually, we entered a whole new world. This is the "new heaven" that Isaiah, John, and Swedenborg speak of. It is the new heaven of freedom, rationality, and choice that we all inhabit in our hearts, minds, and spirits. We no longer have to blindly accept what the church teaches us. We can now decide for ourselves what we will believe--and how we will carry those beliefs into action. And this is where the new earth comes in. The Lord has already accomplished the great spiritual battles that were necessary to prepare the way for the New Jerusalem to come down onto our earth from heaven. The path is clear. We have the knowledge, the understanding, the insight we need, if we will open our minds to it. What is left is the hardest part for us: putting all that knowledge and spiritual insight into practice. The Lord did the large-scale spiritual work for us. Now it is our turn to accept the gift of new spiritual freedom that the Lord has given us, and use it to change our world. The Lord will not do it for us. We must roll up our sleeves, get out in our community and our world, and do the work of transforming our society from the inside out, from bottom to top. Clearing the way spiritually was the Lord's job. Making it happen here on earth is our job. Amen. From leewoof@mediaone.net Sun Jan 6 23:58:34 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 18:58:34 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "How to Make Life More Difficult," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020106185744.019c1160@pop.ne.mediaone.net> How to Make Life More Difficult By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, January 6, 2002 Readings: 1 Samuel 14:24-30, 37-46: Saul's foolish vow Now the men of Israel were in distress that day, because Saul had bound the people under an oath, saying, "Cursed be any man who eats food before evening comes, before I have avenged myself on my enemies!" So none of the troops tasted food. The entire army entered the woods, and there was honey on the ground. When they went into the woods, they saw the honey oozing out, yet no one put his hand to his mouth, because they feared the oath. But Jonathan had not heard that his father had bound the people with the oath, so he reached out the end of the staff that was in his hand and dipped it into the honeycomb. He raised his hand to his mouth, and his eyes brightened. Then one of the soldiers told him, "Your father bound the army under a strict oath, saying, 'Cursed be any man who eats food today!' That is why the men are faint." Jonathan said, "My father has made trouble for the country. See how my eyes brightened when I tasted a little of this honey. How much better it would have been if the men had eaten today some of the plunder they took from their enemies. Would not the slaughter of the Philistines have been even greater?" . . . And Saul asked God, "Shall I go down after the Philistines? Will you give them into Israel's hand?" But God did not answer him that day. Saul therefore said, "Come here, all you who are leaders of the army, and let us find out what sin has been committed today. As surely as the Lord who rescues Israel lives, even if it lies with my son Jonathan, he must die." But not one of the men said a word. Saul then said to all the Israelites, "You stand over there; I and Jonathan my son will stand over here." "Do what seems best to you," the men replied. Then Saul prayed to the Lord, the God of Israel, "Give me the right answer." And Jonathan and Saul were taken by lot, and the men were cleared. Saul said, "Cast the lot between me and Jonathan my son." And Jonathan was taken. Then Saul said to Jonathan, "Tell me what you have done." So Jonathan told him, "I merely tasted a little honey with the end of my staff. And now must I die?" Saul said, "May God deal with me, be it ever so severely, if you do not die, Jonathan." But the men said to Saul, "Should Jonathan die--he who has brought about this great deliverance in Israel? Never! As surely as the Lord lives, not a hair of his head shall fall to the ground, for he did this today with God's help." So the men rescued Jonathan, and he was not put to death. Then Saul stopped pursuing the Philistines, and they withdrew to their own land. Matthew 11:16-19: Eating and drinking "To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' But wisdom is proved right by her actions." Sermon: Jonathan said, "My father has made trouble for the country. (1 Samuel 14:29) When I chose the title "How to Make Life More Difficult" for today's sermon, I did not intend it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, as they say, "Life is what happens when you've made other plans." The experience of the last few days--though I hope never to repeat it--did give me some excellent material for today's sermon. So in addition to the rest of what I want to say to you today, here is a quick and easy way to make life more difficult: Step 1: Buy a computer Step 2: Install a new operating system. For me, this was quite sufficient to make life more difficult! Step 2, in particular, has made my life difficult for about a week now. First, I had to reinstall the new operating system two or three times--and most of my software along with it--in order to get it working properly at all. Then a few days after I'd finally gotten it installed and working (I thought), all digital hell broke loose. Now, after two solid days of battling off several massive virus infections and reinstalling things two or three more times, each time correcting errors I made the last time, I think I have things working again. (Please, God?) And there are even a few improvements over the way my computer was set up before! One of the obvious lessons in this for me is that change is usually harder than we think it is going to be--and the bigger the change, the greater the challenges and obstacles that will be thrown in our way. So here's a second, surefire way to make life more difficult: Step 1: Make a major change in your life. At one point, when I was in the middle of about the third or fourth re-installation, I was about ready to throw in the towel and simply put my computer back the way it had been before. But there were things the new operating system could do that the old one couldn't, and I realized that if I went back, I would lose the benefits that had caused me to upgrade in the first place. Similar considerations drive us on when we resolve to make a change in our lives. When we make promises and resolutions to ourselves that we are going to change something in our life--whether we do it as the traditional New Year's resolution or at any other time--we have generally decided that something about the way things are now is broken, or just isn't as good as it could be. Especially when it comes to making a major change in our lives, we generally don't do it unless we have a vision in our minds of how life could be better if we carried through on the change that we have decided we want to make. That, in itself, can and will make life more difficult for a while. To use a simple--and real--example, let's say I resolve not to stay up late anymore. The minute I actually try to carry out that resolution, I find that though my intentions may have changed, my habits have not. I have been used to getting a lot of work (or play!) done late at night, and I have mentally arranged my daily schedule with that in mind. So I hit midnight, and I still have a lot of things to do--things that need to be done by tomorrow morning. So now I'm between a rock and a hard place. I can go to bed as I'd resolved to do, but not get the work done, with the consequences that flow from that. Or I can stay up anyway, finish the work, and feel bleary-eyed in the morning--not to mention kicking myself all day for violating my new resolution right off the bat. You can insert the appropriate New Year's resolution into this situation. And sad to say, most New Year's resolutions don't survive one week into the new year. As soon as we find ourselves between that rock and that hard place; as soon as we find that we're actually going to have to work and struggle and experience failure in our efforts, we tend to drop our fine resolutions and go right back to the way things were before. But not without kicking ourselves for our weakness, and digging ourselves even deeper into the pit labeled, "It's no use. There's no way I'll ever change for the better." Do you want to make life more difficult for yourself? Just promise yourself to break a long-standing habit or change one of the less desirable parts of your character, and you'll have enough mental and emotional trouble to last for quite a while. And yet, we humans are built so that we can never be quite satisfied with ourselves if we are not changing, learning new things, growing in new ways. Not only does life become uninspiring if we always do everything the way we've always done it; but there are parts of ourselves that just plain need changing. There are parts of ourselves that are hurtful both to ourselves and to the people around us. For example, even though I use the excuse that I have to stay up late because I have so much work to do, I end out getting _less_ done, because I'm tired the next day and work much less efficiently than I do when I've had a good night's sleep. Besides, like anyone whose batteries are running on empty, I can get downright grumpy and hard to live with when I haven't had enough sleep. So we humans will keep on making our resolutions--and breaking them almost as often as we make them. Every once in a while, we will actually succeed in changing something about our lives--and that will give us the boost we need to keep going. If it's something significant, the change usually won't happen until we've made several false starts, and then done a lot of struggling, praying to God, and turning to others for help in overcoming our old habits. Change makes life more difficult. But if the change is for the better, the difficulty will be only for the short run; then the benefits will take over, and bless us for the long run. Sometimes, however, the promises and resolutions we make for ourselves aren't so wise in the first place. Sometimes even with the best of intentions, we make life unnecessarily more difficult for ourselves. And that brings us to our Old Testament reading for today. Saul was the first king of Israel. Before that, the people had been led by people such as Moses, Joshua, the various "judges," and then Samuel. None of these people were kings. All of them were led directly by God as they, in turn, led the people. So in effect, God was leading the people through various human leaders who were answerable directly to God. Though this arrangement generally worked well, once the people had been in their Promised Land for a few generations, they had had enough of this informal divine leadership, and demanded of Samuel that he anoint them a king. After resisting this request, and on God's behalf telling the people how hard life would be if they rejected God's leadership and insisted on being led by a king, Samuel, prompted by the voice of God, finally capitulated to the people's demands and anointed a king to rule over them. That king was Saul. Good-looking and very tall--he literally stood head and shoulders above the people (1 Samuel 9:2, 10:23)--Saul also turned out to be headstrong, and often foolish. He did lead the people in a few quick victories over their enemies, which established his popularity and his kingship. But then his new status went to his head, and he began to disregard God's orders as given through Samuel, and follow his own way instead, whenever it suited him. Often, his way was not very wise. In today's story, the Israelite army, under Saul's leadership, was gaining a great victory over their most intractable enemy: the Philistines. This victory was precipitated by Saul's son Jonathan, who bravely went out against the entire Philistine army with only himself and his armor bearer. Because of his faith that God could give them the victory, the two of them threw the Philistine army into a panic; and when the rest of the Israelite army saw what was happening, they rallied and routed the Philistine army. However, Saul had bound his army by a strict--and foolish--oath that they were not to eat any food before the evening come and victory was gained over their enemies. Jonathan, of course, was already in the Philistine camp when his father pronounced that oath, so he didn't know about it, and he ate some honey as the troops moved along through the woods. This set the stage for the conflict that followed between Jonathan and his father. This story is a lesson in how to make life more difficult than it really needs to be. Saul and his army already had enough difficulties for that day simply in battling their enemies, without adding more difficulties by binding themselves not to eat anything while pressing the battle forward. As Jonathan said, it would have been better if the men of the army had eaten something along the way to give themselves more strength for the battle. This goes for our inner battles, too. God does command us to overcome our inner enemies--those bad habits and character flaws that we resolve to change each year as the new year begins. But we tend to make things even more difficult for ourselves than they have to be. It's hard enough to overcome a bad habit. But sometimes, thinking it will be an incentive, we also deny ourselves some simple, harmless pleasure that we enjoy until we have overcome that bad habit or character flaw. For example, we may vow not to play a musical recording we especially like until we have lost ten pounds or quit smoking. There is no need to afflict ourselves this way. God put the pleasures of this earth here for us to enjoy--as long as we are engaging in them sensibly. Jonathan tasted a little honey, and his eyes were brightened. We, too, need to taste some of the honey of life's pleasures along the way as we struggle against our inner enemies. So to adapt a popular platitude: as you struggle to fulfill your New Year's resolutions, don't forget to stop and taste the honey. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@mediaone.net Mon Jan 14 04:43:34 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 23:43:34 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Steadying the Ark of God," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020113234229.022551f0@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Steadying the Ark of God By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, January 13, 2002 Readings: 2 Samuel 6:1-8: Uzzah steadies the ark David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the Lord Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark. They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart and they brought it with the ark of God from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill, and Ahio was walking in front of it. David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord with all kinds of instruments made of pine, and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums, and cymbals. When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. The Lord's anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God. Then David was angry because the Lord's wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah. Matthew 8:1-4: Jesus touches and heals a leper When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, "See that you don't tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." Arcana Coelestia #878.7: Uzzah touching the ark The ark represented the Lord; so it embodied everything sacred and heavenly. When Uzzah reached out to the ark, it represented our own power, which is our ego. And since our ego is unholy, the word "hand" is left out--though it is understood. It is left out so that the angels would not sense that something so profane had touched what is holy. Apocalypse Explained #700f.30: Uzzah touching the ark Uzzah the son of Abinadab died because he seized the ark with his hand, since "touching with our hand" means communicating. We communicate with the Lord through the goodness of love. Yet Uzzah was not anointed as the priests and Levites were--and when they were anointed, this caused them to represent the goodness of love. Also, the cherubim on the mercy seat that was on the ark symbolized a safeguard to make sure that the Lord would not be approached except through the goodness of love. Sermon: When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. The Lord's anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God. (2 Samuel 6:6, 7) The story of "the sin of Uzzah," as our reading from 2 Samuel traditionally known, is a favorite one for skeptics to bring out as evidence that the God of the Bible is not worthy of our belief. Such a simple and natural act--steadying the ark to keep it from falling--and poor Uzzah is struck dead by God! Who could believe in such a petty, oversensitive God? Even king David found this hard to take. He responded to God's destructive anger against Uzzah with anger of his own. Naturally, he was also very much afraid. As the story continues, instead of bringing the ark up to Jerusalem as he had planned, he took it aside to the home of a man named Obed-Edom. It wasn't until David saw that the Lord blessed the household of Obed-Edom because the ark was there that he finally did bring the ark up to Jerusalem, three months after his original attempt. Now, let me be right out front and say that I don't believe God strikes people dead. Ever. Yes, I know that the Bible says he does. But this is what our church's teachings call an "appearance of truth." When we humans are in a state of mind that is very far away from the love and truth of God, then God's love looks like wrath and anger to us, and God's truth looks like a destructive, deadly force. And since the Bible must reach out to us even in our lowest and most distant states of mind, it often speaks in terms that we'll understand and appreciate--but that aren't the way things really are from God's point of view. A wonderful passage illustrating the principle that God appears to us according to our own character is Psalm 18:25, 26. The Psalmist is addressing the Lord when he says: With the loyal you show yourself loyal; With the blameless you show yourself blameless; With the pure you show yourself pure; And with the crooked you show yourself perverse. Like a good parent, God is willing to have us believe that he is angry with us and will punish us for doing wrong, if that's what we need to believe to motivate us to straighten out our act. But in fact, the punishment only appears to come from God. It is actually evil itself that punishes us, as expressed in this passage from Jeremiah: "Your own wickedness will punish you, and your backslidings will convict you. Consider then, and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God, and have no awe of me," says the Lord God of hosts. (Jeremiah 2:19) And two chapters later in the same prophet: "Your own conduct and actions have brought these things upon you. This is your wickedness. How bitter it is! How it pierces to your very heart!" (Jeremiah 4:18) With these thoughts in mind, we can return to the story of Uzzah reaching out and touching the ark, and dying as a result. To us today, this seems like a punishment all out of proportion to Uzzah's actions. But in the context of his own culture, it makes more sense. Some background will help. Uzzah and his brother Ahio, who were guiding the cart on which the ark was being carried, were sons of Abinadab, in whose house the ark had been for a long time--at least twenty years, according to the figure given in a passage in 1 Samuel (7:2). Having spent that much time with the ark in their house, Uzzah and his brother must have known that there were very strict rules about how the ark was to be handled. One of those rules was that no one was ever to touch the ark. Even when the ark was carried, it was always carried by the poles on either side of it, without touching the ark itself. Uzzah would also have known from the recent history of the ark, just before it came to its house, that death and destruction came very quickly to those who did not treat it with proper respect and reverence. (See 1 Samuel chapters 5 and 6.) And further, the proper mode of carrying the ark was not on a cart; the priests were supposed to carry it on their shoulders--holding it by its rods, of course. If the ark had been carried properly, this whole episode could not have happened, because there would have been no cart holding the ark, and no oxen pulling that cart who could have stumbled. Seen in this light, and in this context, the "sin of Uzzah"--and its severe punishment--begins to make a little more sense. Uzzah knew the rules, but he broke them anyway. From our perspective, it looks like he was trying to protect the ark. But from the perspective of an Israelite of that time, reaching out and touching the ark was a sign of supreme disrespect for it--and for the Ten Commandments, which were in the ark, and the God who gave those Commandments. It was a sign that Uzzah was more confident in himself and his own power than he was in the power of the ark of God to take care of itself. Once again, I don't believe that God literally struck Uzzah dead; that is only how it appears to us. However, the people of those ancient times were steeped in superstition, and they believed strongly in the life-and-death power of the supernatural. For them, a serious breach of sacred protocol such as Uzzah committed when he reached out and touched the ark would be quite sufficient to bring powerful spiritual and psychological forces to bear--forces that could very easily cause Uzzah's instant death. We know that people who believe strongly enough that they are going to die can cause their bodies to shut down even when there are no natural causes sufficient to kill them. Uzzah's own consciousness of his terrible sin--according to the beliefs he had been steeped in all his life--was likely what killed him. And so the saying of Jeremiah came true for him: "Your own wickedness will punish you." What can this story possibly mean for us today? After all, most of us don't believe that God will strike us dead if we improperly handle something sacred to us, such as the Bible. In our culture, cases of divine vengeance smiting sinners to death on the spot are quite rare! We can begin to get at the deeper meanings in this story if we consider the state of mind Uzzah was in when he reached out and grasped the ark in order to steady it. He thought that he, Uzzah, could guide and direct the ark of God. He thought that his own hand was more powerful than God's to keep the most sacred physical embodiment of God's presence among his people on its course. At the moment when Uzzah reached out and steadied the ark, he thought that he was more powerful--more in control of the situation--than God. Do we ever think this way? It isn't all that hard to come to the conclusion that God really isn't in control of the situation here on earth. One look around us at all the war, poverty, disease, and injustice in the world is enough to convince us that something is seriously out of whack around here. Why doesn't God get things under control? Why doesn't God right the wrongs, and bring justice to all the earth, as the Bible promises? Perhaps it is because God really isn't in control--or just doesn't care enough about us to bother. At any rate, it certainly does seem that if we don't get busy and fix things up around here, God isn't going to do it for us. So who's in charge here, anyway? Doesn't everything depend upon us? Why shouldn't we reach out and grab hold of the course of this world's social evolution before things go to complete ruin? It's a lot better than waiting for a God who doesn't seem at all ready and willing to take charge and fix up our world. Isn't this just the same kind of thinking that was running through Uzzah's hand as he saw the oxen stumbling, and reached out his hand to steady the ark? It was all up to him, wasn't it, to make sure that no harm came to the ark? And it's all up to us, isn't it, to make sure that no harm comes to this world of ours--to its people and its natural environment. Yet our attempts at building the perfect society have been dismal failures. Throughout the ages, humans have attempted to build empires in their own images--and the result has been war, slaughter, oppression, and slavery. Even those who sought to be "benevolent dictators" ended out presiding over despotism and disorder. In the twentieth century, we thought we could do it better. We set up totalitarian states falsely named "socialism," "communism," and even "capitalism," and tried to force our populations to become a society of perfectly socially adjusted, altruistic people who lived one for all, and all for the one. None of these social and governmental experiments has worked. They have all been based on the idea that if the right enlightened group of human beings (us!) could just get into power, we could fix up this world of ours through the sheer force of our own enlightened theories and ideas. We believed--and apparently still continue to believe--that we are better than God at running this world. And we are wrong. Our so-called "enlightened theories" have only made things worse. We have reached out our hand to steady the ark, and millions of people have died. Sooner or later, we will realize that we can never get our world on the right track through the so-called power of human ingenuity. We have tried over and over again to get things right, and it hasn't worked. We are still trying--and will probably keep trying for many more years before we finally admit that human intelligence is simply inadequate to the job of guiding our world. Our minds are limited, finite, and faulty. The job is too big for us. Only the mind of God can guide such an incredibly complex organism as our earth--with all the amazing complexities in the world of nature, and all the staggering diversity of its human cultures and peoples. And only when we turn to God for guidance will we even begin to gain the insight that we need to act wisely and constructively even in our little corner of the world, let alone being able to run a nation or the world as a whole. Let's return to the ark for a moment. Why was it so sacred? The ark itself was nothing particularly spectacular. It was a wooden box overlaid with gold, and with golden cherubim (winged human figures) on its cover. Yes, it might have been impressive to an ancient Israelite with all that gold--but nothing for people to be struck dead over. It was not the ark itself, but its contents that made it sacred. Within the ark of God were the Ten Commandments--the most sacred core of the ancient Jewish law, spoken in God's own voice from Mt. Sinai, and written in God's own finger on the stone tablets that were the only contents of the ark. These Ten Commandments summarized and symbolized the entire law of God. An awe and reverence of the Ten Commandments, and the ark that contained them, was an expression of awe and reverence for the entire Word of God--for all of God's divine commandments, teachings, and laws. These are the same laws that govern our universe and our world. They are the laws that govern all of human society, and every human community. They are the laws that govern our own individual lives every day, and every moment. In the end, these divine laws cannot be violated any more than the law of gravity can be violated. They are fixed and eternal--and all people who set their face against them will, in the end, bring certain destruction upon their own heads because they are flying in the face of the very nature of reality. If we think that we can run our world or even our own individual lives better than God can, then we, like Uzzah, are reaching out and steadying the ark of God. And like Uzzah, in our pride and arrogance we will bring our own destruction upon ourselves. But if we recognize in our heart, mind, and life that the Lord is truly in control--and that this is good--then we can once again bring the ark of God up to Jerusalem with singing and dancing, and place God's eternal laws at the center of our lives where they belong. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Mon Jan 21 17:02:52 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 12:02:52 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] Serving the Lord Message-ID: <200201211203_MC3-EEBF-EA75@compuserve.com> Serving the Lord by the Rev. Eric H. Carswell January 20, 2002 I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: "Whom shall I send, And who will go for Us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me." (Isaiah 6:8) Each day we have many opportunities to respond to the Lord as Isaiah did. As it is clearly stated in the Arcana Caelestia, " . . . when people who are perceptive have feelings of compassion they know that they are being alerted by the Lord to offer help." (Arcana Caelestia 6737) In our day-to-day lives the Lord regularly tries to open our eyes to see ways in which we can serve Him by serving our neighbor. Every time we say the Lord's prayer we ask that this world become more like His heavenly kingdom. We are assured that there are countless uses of many kinds and varieties being served each day in heaven. Likewise in this world there are a huge variety of tasks. There are the humblest and simplest tasks that keep this world operating efficiently, cleanly and safely. Ranging upward from these often menial jobs is an array of roles stretching all the way to the highest and most important opportunities that can come before us. These are ones in which we can help the Lord touch another human being with love and wisdom in a way that will affect their lives forever. There is a story, which perhaps you've heard before, that illustrates this possibility. It is told by a teenager. One day he as he walked home from school he spotted a classmate trudging home with his arms hopelessly full of books and papers. This classmate wasn't someone he really knew. He seemed rather shy and distant from others in most situations. But as the teen watched a bunch of the stuff in the classmate's arms slipped and fell to the ground. With barely a thought the teen rushed over to help pick up the scattered books and papers. He offered to help carry some of them and, on the spur of the moment, invited the classmate to his house for a snack and a visit. The teen remembered it as a pleasant event, but nothing particularly memorable in his eyes. Months later his classmate told him that the reason he was walking home with his arms so full was that he had cleaned out his locker because he was feeling so isolated and hopeless that he was going to take his own life. But into this bleak grey mood someone had come to help him when he dropped part of his load, had invited to his house, and talked to him like he was a worthwhile human being. The classmate told the teen that his small kindnesses had given him hope. It had saved his life. Probably few of us will have such a dramatic opportunity to intervene in another's life, but as we consider all that can be done we should be able to recognize that there are so many potential useful actions and roles for which the Lord daily says, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" It is His desire that we receive His life within our own, that His spirit work within ours to serve others. This is illustrated in another statement of Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, Because the Lord has anointed Me To preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives, And the opening of the prison to those who are bound. (Isaiah 61:1) The poor, the brokenhearted, the captives and the bound are all people who are in need of the Lord's teaching and leading. Each of the different problems represents a spiritual state of mind. Some represent the difficulties caused by not seeing what is true and others the results of evil loves or destructive motivations. Spiritual sickness and poverty can come from not seeing the truth or from caring too much about the wrong things. One's mind can be held prisoner by false beliefs or unchecked drives. Each of us needs the Lord's teaching and leading. We need it for our own happiness and peace and we need it if we are going to be helpful to others. Our ability to help others is distinctly influenced by our own spiritual progress or lack thereof. All of us are sometimes spiritually poor, brokenhearted, captive or bound. At times, we are faced with the challenge of being poor among other poor, or being a captive seeing the need of another to be set free or of being the blind leading the blind. Jesus read the words of this second prophecy of Isaiah while in Nazareth and in a synagogue. Speaking to His listeners, He added, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears." (Luke 4:21) The Spirit of the Lord was upon Him. When Jesus spoke these words, He could do so with a heartfelt sense of mission. They expressed not a recital of duties that must be done, but rather described what the Lord loved to do more than anything else--to help others to a better life. As with Isaiah's free response to the call for someone to help, "Here am I! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8), the Lord did His work of redeeming and saving us because it was what He wanted to do more than anything else. We know the Lord's life gives us an image that we are to follow. Jesus said, "For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you." (John 13:15) And He told His disciples, When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor your rich neighbors, lest they also invite you back, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. (Luke 14:12-13) The dinner or supper that the Lord spoke of is an image of all the good things that we can do for others as an expression of our Christian lives. (See Arcana Caelestia 2371) True charity involves tending to the needs of those who are around us. It isn't too hard to do when the recipients are not only willing to accept the help we offer but are grateful for our efforts. Charity is an easy affair in these instances. It becomes a much more challenging matter when the one whom we are trying to help, whether stranger, child, friend or spouse, wants nothing more than to continue with the destructive behavior that we would like to help led him or her away from. Like inviting the maimed and the lame to a dinner, being genuinely helpful to those who are in a negative mood may not be a very appealing idea. The words of Isaiah say, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, Because the Lord has anointed Me. . . ." To be anointed by the Lord means to receive from Him the love of doing what is good. When this love reigns in our hearts, we have been anointed by the Lord. There are some indications that the Lord has given us as to whether charity does indeed reign in our hearts. The Arcana Caelestia states, Where there is no charity there is love of self, and therefore hatred against all who do not favor self. Consequently people who are like this see in the neighbor only what is evil, and if anything good, they either see it as nothing, or put a bad interpretation upon it. It is just the other way with those who are in charity. By this difference these two kinds of people are distinguished, especially when they come into the other life. With those who are in no charity, a feeling of hatred shines forth from everything they do. They wish to examine everyone, and to judge him; they desire nothing so much as to find evil in him, having continually in mind to condemn, punish and torment. But those who are in charity scarcely see another's evil, but observe all that is good and true in him, and put a good interpretation on what is evil and false. Of such disposition are the angels, for they have this from the Lord. (Arcana Caelestia 1079) When we compare what is said about those in no charity and those in charity, such as the angels, we would probably not entirely recognize ourselves in either description. We are trying to follow the Lord, but we realize that we are often less than angelic in our loves. When we look outward to serve others, we can also recall the Lord's command that we should first take the log out of our own eyes before we try to take the speck of dust out of another's eye. We have been warned that there are numerous evils that lie hidden in good deeds that are done for some ulterior motive whether it is natural reward and recognition or earning heaven for oneself. True charity does not carry a sense of superiority. Before Isaiah could freely respond to the Lord's call, he was healed by the Lord. He knew that he was unclean and was humbled by it. But an angel came with a glowing coal and touched his lips. This represents a purifying of the interior quality of his thoughts and motivations. (Arcana Caelestia 1286) If we are to serve the Lord, we need to see our own need for help from Him and from those around us. There must be shunning of evil. Many times we are told by the Lord that the first rule of charity is not to do evil to the neighbor. (E.g., True Christian Religion 435) Unless the natural inclinations to evil that influence our thoughts and loves are put away, any good that we do will be tainted by the evil that lies within. If someone specifically sets out to minister to the spiritual needs of those around himself apart from fighting against his own evil inclinations, then he would not be able to help others very well and would be quite likely to develop feelings of righteousness. If you have not tried to recognize and shun your own evils, you will hardly have the necessary wisdom to truly help the spiritual needs of others and in fact are not likely to even hear the Lord's call for someone to send. We have the very sure promise that as we do the daily work private work of shunning evil thoughts and deeds, a change will gradually take place in our minds. Our old habits of mind will gradually be displaced by new ones. We will less often seek to examine those around us seeing spiritual or natural faults and failures, and more and more we will see all that is good and true in them. Gradually we will receive a new spirit from the Lord. He will ever be present in us, and we will be in Him. Haven't there already been times in your life in which you found yourself wanting to help someone else without any thought of superiority or thought of reward? For a time you have been anointed by the Lord with the oil of love. That love will be received by us ever more fully as we continue to reject the destructive thoughts and loves that the hells employ to cause us and others misery. This a private work, a spiritual battlefield whose quality is hardly known to anyone but the individual himself. For those who have had their ears and eyes opened by the Lord, each day He calls for us to go forth for Him. He calls us to serve others. He calls us to help bring the blessings of heavenly life to them. Those who hear His call are among the mightiest and most wonderful people, though often these qualities can be unrecognized by the wider world. Isn't this the quality reflected in these final words from a novel describing the heroine? "She had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling there was always something better she might have done if she had only been better and known better. Her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partially dependant on unhistoric acts and on the [people] who live faithfully their hidden lives . . ." May our ears be open for the Lord's call many times each day and may we be ready to respond with willing hearts and understanding minds. "I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ?Whom shall I send, And who will go for Us?' Then I said, ?Here am I! Send me.'" (Isaiah 6:8) AMEN. Lessons: Isaiah 6:1-8, Luke 4:16-21, Charity means love toward the neighbor and compassion, for anyone who loves his neighbor as himself also has as much compassion for him in his suffering as he does for himself in his own. Arcana Caelestia 351 The Lord's presence is relative to the state of love toward the neighbor and of faith present in a person. It is in love toward the neighbor that the Lord is present, for He is present in all good, and not so much in so-called faith that is devoid of love. Faith devoid of love and charity is something severed or disjoined. Wherever conjunction exists there has to be a conjoining agency, which is exclusively love and charity. This may become clear to anyone from the fact that the Lord has compassion on everybody, loves everyone, and wishes to make everyone eternally happy. A person therefore who is devoid of the kind of love that leads him to have compassion on others, to love them, and to wish to make them happy, cannot be joined to the Lord because he is not at all like Him, and is in no sense the image of Him. Arcana Caelestia 904:2 And she took pity on him' means being alerted by the Divine. This is clear from the meaning of 'taking pity' as an influx of charity from the Lord, for when anyone looks with charity on someone in distress, as Pharaoh's daughter does here on the child crying in the box made of rush, a feeling of compassion is aroused. And since the feeling is stirred by the Lord, it is an alerting by Him. Indeed when people who are perceptive have feelings of compassion they know that they are being alerted by the Lord to offer help. Arcana Caelestia 6737 All books mentioned, other than from the Bible are written by Emanuel Swedenborg and are often referred to in the New Church as "the Writings." We believe that they are equally the Word of God as the revelation of the Old and New Testaments. From leewoof@mediaone.net Mon Jan 21 19:13:29 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:13:29 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Building the Temple of God," by Eli Dale Message-ID: <4.1.20020121141239.01c04c38@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Building the Temple of God By Eli Dale January 20, 2002; Bridgewater, Massachusetts Readings: 1 Kings 6:1-7; 11-14; 37-38 Luke 21:5-6 Apocalypse Explained 478.3 Sermon: "So Solomon built the house, and finished it. . . . He was seven years in building it." 1 Kings 6:14, 38. At the time Solomon was building the temple, the Israelite nation was in the process of pulling itself together. The ark of the covenant has been brought by King David, Solomon's father, to the newly established capital city Jerusalem and installed in a tent. The actual original tabernacle was apparently at Gibeon. The priestly function of sacrifices was still scattered and in confusion. Yet, we might wonder why a temple was built at all. The Israelites, once a loose confederation of families, then a nomadic mob in the desert, then foreign settlers in Canaan, had come of age as a nation-state, with a bona fide king. During half of its history to this point, God had been a nomad or foreign settler with them. When the people Israel had matured to the point of wanting an earthly king, God said, "They have rejected me as their king." (1 Sam 18:7). Acquiescing to the establishment of an unnecessary intermediary, God, always ready to deal with the waywardness of these interesting if maddening human creatures, grants the people a king. King number one, Saul, let it go to his head, so disqualified himself. King number two, David, was a good king, in that he was (usually) extremely honorable and was devoted to the Lord. It was David who established Jerusalem as his capital city. He brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. And then he got this weird idea. "Oh my," he said one day, "I live in a house but the Lord lives in a tent." (2 Sam 7:2). [Now, if David is the author of Psalm 139, we can see that this was indeed a weird notion because David knows God doesn't live in a specific place. The Psalm says, "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there." Nevertheless, David says with chagrin, "I live in a house but the Lord lives in a tent!" The Lord was quick to reply, "Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, 'Why have you not built me a house of cedar?'" (2 Sam 7:7). In the same message, the Lord informs David, in a little play on words, "the Lord will make you a house." Then the Lord says that it will be a son of David's who builds the Lord a house, but still God never says, "What a terrific idea!" Knowing the broader scope of the story as we do, we know that Solomon's magnificent temple will be destroyed. It will be rebuilt. The replacement will be destroyed. That one will be rebuilt, and that replacement will be destroyed. And reading on from there, we know that in the establishment of the New Jerusalem, there is no temple "for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb" (Rev. 21:22). Why does Solomon, king No. 3, build a temple? When Solomon begins his reign, the Lord comes to Solomon in a dream at the principal high place of sacrifice and says, "Ask what I should give you" (1 Kings 3:5). God is duly impressed when Solomon asks not for power or riches but for a "listening heart." He desires a listening heart so that he may govern wisely and discern good from evil (v. 9). Now in his doing this, we could conclude that Solomon has built a place for God to dwell--within his own being. One might think a temple would be unnecessary. But notice that he wants his wisdom--his listening heart--so that he may govern well. He is thinking of his people. He is thinking communally. His is thinking relationally. The whole people need a place for God--or so it appears to them--just as they had needed a king. Solomon knows God will not/cannot dwell in a place--he says as much in his temple dedication prayer--but still we need a place to house--not God--but to house our faith in God, our relationship to God. And God asks Solomon not to lose sight of that distinction. Solomon begins to build. God barges in and says, "Concerning this house you are building, if you will walk in my statutes, obey my ordinances, and keep all my commandments by walking in them, then I will establish my promise with you, which I made to your father David. I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel" (1 Kings 6:11-13). God says "About this house--it's not about any house. It's about obedience. Obedience is the key to getting me to dwell with you." Still, Solomon builds the temple. Well, we all build temples. Right in the face of a God who says, "so who needs a house, already?" we build. We must. As material beings struggling to understand and relate to a spiritual reality, we make models: "God is like this, God enjoys that, God is present here." But these models are only conceptions, only metaphors. If we're smart, we recognize the metaphor for what it is. But the human condition tends toward the concrete and we begin to refer to a piece of real estate as a "church." Friends, we all and the commitment in faith we have made to each other and the good and truth we nurture in your lives--we are the church. This building is a building. The building is important to the church and it is appropriate that a church take care of its worship hall--its place of gathering the faithful. But when you hear the word "church," what comes to mind? A building, or a group of people? This building is a metaphor. And most of our ideas about God and faith are metaphors. So we design our conceptual model and something happens to destroy it. We have a crisis of faith and God's dwelling place with us lies in ruin. Our doubts and fears may even carry us away and hold us captive. But we cannot live without a picture of who or what God is. To bring God into our lives again, we build another concept for God to dwell within. Aha, now we have it right! Now God is present, and again, here come the marauding hoards and again we lose our temple. Historically, it was at the building of the final temple that God replaced the temple metaphor with reality: God showed up in person. Do we want a place for God to dwell? Well, here it is--within the very flesh of the human condition. What does a temple look like? Like a person. Where is the ark where we hold the Divine covenant? In the human heart. Where do we meet God? In our everyday-ness. Jesus made two temple predictions. In one, when speaking of the temple built by humans, he said "not one stone will be left upon another" (Luke 21:6). In the other, when speaking of himself, he said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). Whether you are wandering in the desert of your faith, making the effort to form a more steady relationship with your faith, establishing a formal order of faith practices, or following that oddball rabbi around the holy land, there is a way to dwell with God. God needs no dwelling place. The Divine arranges for us to use a tabernacle or a temple or the living Lord so the we have what we need to forge, sustain, be reminded of, return to, or continue a relationship with the Creator. This relationship--like all relationships--has conditions. You cannot be in relationship with another being by ignoring or dissing them. In this case, where the being is our very creator, life giver, and order of creation, this being says what the conditions are, as part of the order. The conditions are not threats, but information. Relationship with God requires that we not put something else in God's place, that we not create a false God, that we not expect or demand things of that are out of God's character or nature. Relationship with God requires that we stop on a regular schedule to remember who we are and whose we are, laying claim to the image and likeness with which we were endowed. Relationship with God requires that we recognize the long line of human succession that brought us here, that we know our nature and where it comes from, that we see--and sometimes need to forgive--those who gave us a chance to participate in this amazing adventure called life. Relationship with God requires that we protect the life God has made, even someone else's life; that we don't betray our promises--either the promises we make or the promises that we receive; that we not misrepresent the promises God has made to creation. Relationship with God requires that we trust God to provide for us and not engage in a zero sum game that says "in order for me to have, you must not-have," that we care about our fellow travelers, always speaking the truth, refraining from gossip and slander, being honest in our dealings with each other, and that we view our neighbor's good fortune as good. Mostly, relationship with God requires that we trust we can become the kind of person who can live up to those conditions. That we accept this relationship covenant as a promise of who--in our likeness and image of God--we really, truly are. These are the commandments in the ark--"commandments" which, through our faith, turn into our very nature. In the outer court of the temple, we bring and make our sacrifice for the expiation of our errors. We try to clean up our act. We give over to our Creator something that is precious to us and say "forgive me." In the next chamber of the temple, we tend the everlasting light of God which shines for all of creation, throughout the universe, and we burn the incense of our prayers reaching up to God to make contact, and we offer the simplest of offerings--bread--a straightforward, simple goodness, renewed daily. And then even more inwardly into the temple, away from the sacrificial blood and the confession, past the prayers, and offerings, we come to the core of what God wants to give us. The inner sanctuary of the temple contains an ornate box within which resides the basics of our relationship to the author of our lives. Inside a box, inside a room, inside a temple, inside a city, inside a nation, inside the lives we live together, there are 10 simple rules for being in tune with God. Deeply inside of ourselves is our love. In a God-filled life, in a temple where we intend to provide dwelling for the Divine, we find our covenant of relationship. In a phony temple, built to sham God, others, and ourselves into believing we are holier than we really think we need to be, there is also a covenant, but it will be of a different order. We always have an ark in our metaphorical temple. There is always something inside the ark that guides our behavior, that forms our values. A false covenant in a "for show only" temple will form an ungodly nature, sacrificing good and truth on the altar of fear and selfishness. The real covenant will form us into faithful, loving--sometimes conscious-stricken--people. We could be pursuing a relationship with ourselves, sacrificing good and truth--or we will pursue our relationship with the Divine, sometimes stopping to make a sacrifice to get back into right relationship. Ultimately, eventually, our temple construct will be torn down. We will not need it anymore. It will have fulfilled its purpose in either serving the god of "self" or will bring us into the New Jerusalem, where the Lord, dwelling within our own humanity, is the only temple. -------------------- Specializing in books on Emanuel Swedenborg and his religious philosophy. To see my current eBay auctions, please click here, or follow this link: http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewListedItems&userid=leewoof For featured items and a full listing, visit my eBay page at: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/leewoof/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@mediaone.net Mon Jan 21 19:33:45 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:33:45 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] Sermon signature correction Message-ID: <4.1.20020121143005.02b12638@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Dear Sermon list recipients, My apologies for putting the wrong signature at the end of Eli Dale's sermon. The proper signature is below. For those who don't know her, Eli Dale is a student minister currently doing an internship at the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. She is a member of the Swedenborgian Church of Portland, Maine. Eli is currently attending seminary at the Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts, with the intention of entering the ordained ministry of the Swedenborgian Church. --Rev. Lee Woofenden ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@mediaone.net Mon Jan 28 22:48:09 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 17:48:09 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Inheriting the Mantle," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020128174721.02760e18@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Inheriting the Mantle By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, January 27, 2002 Readings: 2 Kings 2:6-15: Elijah's mantle Then Elijah said to Elisha, "Stay here; the Lord has sent me to the Jordan." And he replied, "As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you." So the two of them walked on. Fifty men of the company of the prophets went and stood at a distance, facing the place where Elijah and Elisha had stopped at the Jordan. Elijah took his mantle, rolled it up and struck the water with it. The water divided to the right and to the left, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground. When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, "Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?" "Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit," Elisha replied. "You have asked a difficult thing," Elijah said, "yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours--otherwise not." As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, "My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!" And Elisha saw him no more. Then he took hold of his own clothes and tore them in two. He picked up the mantle that had fallen from Elijah and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. Then he took the mantle that had fallen from him and struck the water with it. "Where now is the Lord, the God of Elijah?" he asked. When he struck the water, it divided to the right and to the left, and he crossed over. The company of the prophets from Jericho, who were watching, said, "The spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha." And they went to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. John 16:5-7, 12-15: Jesus promises the Spirit of truth "Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, 'Where are you going?' Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth: it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. . . . "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you." Apocalypse Explained #395: The meaning of Elijah's mantle Elijah represented the Lord as the Word, which is the genuine doctrine of truth. Elisha continued that representation. And the mantle symbolized divine truth in general, which is the Word in its most external form. . . . Elijah's mantle falling upon Elisha symbolized the transfer to Elisha of that representation of the Lord as the Word. . . . Dividing the waters of Jordan with Elijah's mantle, first by Elijah and afterwards by Elisha, symbolized the power of Divine truth in its most external form. The waters of Jordan symbolize the first truths through which people are introduced into the church--and these first truths are the kind that are in the most external level of the Bible. Sermon: Elisha picked up the mantle that had fallen from Elijah and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. (2 Kings 2:13) "Inheriting the mantle." It is a phrase that comes to us from this story of Elisha's mantle--or cloak--falling from him as he was carried up to heaven in the whirlwind, and Elisha, the junior prophet who traveled with Elisha as his student, picking it up and receiving with it "a double portion" of Elijah's spirit. And just as Elisha then had to take a position of leadership, it has come to mean inheriting not only the spirit, but also the responsibilities of our elders. That is exactly what I want to talk to you about today. And though our services usually focus on our spiritual life and growth as individuals, today I would like to broaden the scope and look at our spiritual life and growth as a church. When I attended this church as a youth in the 1970s, during the first half of my father's pastorate, I remember there being many elderly people in the church. I could name some of them, but I'd certainly forget others. Those of you who have been with this church that long will remember them anyway, whereas to the rest of you, the names would not mean very much. Today, as we look around the church, hardly any of that generation is left. In fact, unlike the usual conception of the smaller church as consisting most strongly of the elderly, we are rather short of elders in our church. While it is a hopeful sign for the church that the bulk of its current membership still has decades of life stretching out ahead, it can also be a little disconcerting to realize that the people who used to run our church when we were younger aren't here anymore. Now it's up to us. The mantle has fallen from our elders to the very people who are sitting in this church today, along with the others who don't happen to be here today. It is up to those who regularly take part in our services and activities; who attend our meetings, plan our programs and activities, and handle all the many details of keeping the church going. We are now the church. There isn't any other church but us. Yes, we have also inherited some money from the earlier days of our church. Even the financial support we receive from the denomination and from our Massachusetts Association comes almost entirely from the investment income derived from money donated to the church many, many years ago. But along with that money, we have inherited the church itself. The mantle of the Swedenborgian Church has fallen on our shoulders more and more, as we have seen our beloved elders taken up into heaven to be with their loved ones who went before them. For many of us, this may not be a welcome turn of events. It was more comfortable--and less work!--when there were others older than ourselves to keep the place going, and to look up to as mentors and guides. It's a little like the difference between Christmas as a child and Christmas as an adult. The children have a lot more fun. Why? Because they're not the ones making Christmas happen! They can just soak it all in, while their parents and grandparents do all the work, and then pay all the bills. It is easy to come to church each week and soak in the service, to attend the different workshops and programs while others are planning and running them, and doing the rest of the work of keeping the church going. But when we have to do it ourselves, we realize how much work it is to keep even a smaller church like this one going. And we may long for the "good old days" when others did most of the work, and we could just sit back and enjoy it. But there is another side to this story. One of the problems of Christmas as kids is that you are at the mercy of your parents (and grandparents, aunts, and uncles) as to what gifts you will be given. You may have desperately wanted those Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, but your parents didn't like fighting games, so they wouldn't get them for you. Or you may have desperately wanted that big make-up kit, but your parents thought you were too young for make-up--and you didn't have enough money to buy it for yourself. So you had to settle for other presents that may have been good, but they weren't the thing you wanted most. Similarly, in the church it is a lot easier to let our elders run things. But as younger people, we didn't always like the _way_ they ran things. They had their particular notions of how a church and a Sunday School ought to be run. Even if we had different ideas, they were still in charge. And as long as they were running the show, the show was going to be run the way they wanted it to be run. This could sometimes leave us out in the cold. Each of you who attended this church as a younger person, or who attended a different church, can probably remember ways you thought the church could be better, but knew that the elders of the church would never stand for it. Some of you may have left your original church because it simply wasn't serving your spiritual needs. Some may have left this church, and come back later when your own life circumstances changed and you felt the need of it. And we know that many have left, and so far have not come back. One of the problems of the older generation running the church is that sometimes their idea of what the church should be just doesn't do much for the younger generation--and the church is in danger of losing the younger group. Of course, there are other reasons people leave the church, which may have nothing to do with the way the church is run. But when we think about it, we realize that the "good old days" were never quite as good as we fondly remember them when our life in the present begins to feel too much like a grind and a rat race, and we long for the times when someone else did all the work. However, the other side of this question is that when we are the ones running the church, we can arrange the church so that it better fits our idea of what church really means. We can move forward in areas where our elders thought things were just fine the way they were. And at the same time, we can look forward and outward to others who may come along in the future, and to the younger generations coming after us, and work to keep the church moving forward so that it will meet their spiritual needs as well. The core of my message for you today is this: you are the church. And we can make this church into whatever we want it to be. If there are parts of it that we inherited from our elders that we still like, we can keep those parts. If there are other parts that our elders may have liked, but that don't do much for us, we don't have to keep doing things that way. We can renew the church in ways that are more meaningful to us. We have already done this in many areas. It is an ongoing process. Before I came here, the church changed its service time in order to have a coffee hour where we could get together, enjoy one another's company, and get to know each other better--not to mention having a chance to welcome newcomers into our church family. Since I came, we have gradually moved to more variety in our worship service, bringing in services that focus on praise or thankfulness in addition to the focus on repentance of our traditional First Order of Service. More recently, we made a major change in the way we run our Sunday School, so that instead of meeting an hour before church, the children now join us for the beginning of the service, and have their classes during the rest of our service. And we have made many other changes, small and large. Some of us may mourn the passing of the old in some of these areas. We had grown familiar with our church the way it was, and it doesn't feel quite so much like "real" church to us anymore. Others, perhaps, couldn't wait for things to change in one area or another, and don't miss the old at all. And some of us may be anxious for still more change to happen. This is all part of the normal process of change and growth in a church. In our individual lives we have to give up our old ways, and even our old friends and family members, before moving into a new phase of our lives. These partings can sometimes be very painful. And yet, they are necessary to keep us from stagnating. They are necessary to keep our lives flowing, moving forward, moving toward greater love and understanding, toward more compassion and responsibility for one another, toward living more and more in the image and likeness of the Lord our God. It is the same in the church as a body. We may mourn the passing of the old. But the Lord purposely arranges that "the only constant in this universe is change." In nature, the only things that don't change, move, and grow (at least in our time frame) are things that are not alive. And the church is a living, growing entity, not an inanimate rock. It must continually be renewing itself: leaving behind the old and moving into new territory. If this makes us uncomfortable, we can at least know that we are not alone. In our New Testament reading, Jesus is preparing his disciples for the time when he will no longer be physically present with them. He has told them that he is going to go away from them to the one who sent them. In plain language, he was telling them that he--who, you remember, was only thirty-three years old at the time--was going to die, and return to God in heaven. And his disciples were filled with grief because of this. They had been with him only three short years, and now he was telling them that he was leaving them for good? This they could not accept. At one point Peter even took Jesus aside and remonstrated with him. "This will never happen to you!" he said. Jesus' response seems a bit too harsh: "Get behind me, Satan!" he rebuked Peter, "You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (Matthew 16:22, 23). The very vehemence of Jesus' reply to Peter should put us on notice that change--even very painful change--is a part of God's plan for our spiritual growth and eternal well-being. In our Gospel story, as the moment of Jesus' leaving his disciples draws nearer, instead of resistance and rebuke, there is grief and comforting. By this time the disciples have realized that their Lord and Master really is going to leave them. And they are filled with grief. Yet the Lord says to them, "I tell you the truth: it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you." And then he informs them that he has been holding back on them. "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear," he tells them. "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth." It is good that the Lord should no longer be physically present with his disciples? How could that be? How could it be better than having him with them every day, teaching them, guiding them, comforting them, encouraging them, showing them by his own powerful example what real spiritual living is all about? How could anything be better than that? It similar to a question some of us may be asking: How can it possibly be better to have our parents, grandparents, and all the other elders we used to look up to gone from this earth? One answer is found in the thoughts of the Rev. Chauncey Giles, from _The Chauncey Giles Yearbook_ (1910), as presented in the upcoming February issue of _Our Daily Bread_: Those who have passed into the spiritual world and are bound to us by genuine love are nearer to us and can give us greater help than ever before. They understand us better, they have a more accurate knowledge of our spiritual wants, and they can touch the secret springs of our soul with inconceivably more wisdom and skill. Neither the Lord nor our loved ones who have died are absent from us. In fact, they are more strongly present than ever before, because they are with our spirits, helping and guiding us from within in ways that they could never do while they were here with us on earth. Yet they do this with such a deep regard for our freedom, and with such great love for us as the people we are, that they are willing to leave the decisions about our lives in our own hands. They have also left the decisions about the church in our hands. And now it is our turn to carry forward their work. We have inherited their mantle, which fell from them to us as they went up to heaven. And so I ask in closing: What do you want this church to be? Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@mediaone.net Fri Feb 8 15:01:10 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2002 10:01:10 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Rebuilding Our Temple," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020208100015.01f2bb08@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Rebuilding Our Temple By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, February 3, 2002 Readings: 2 Kings 22:1-13: Repairing the temple Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for thirty-one years. His mother's name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah; she was from Bozkath. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and walked in all the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. In the eighteenth year of his reign, King Josiah sent the secretary, Shaphan son of Azaliah, the son of Meshullam, to the temple of the Lord. He said: "Go up to Hilkiah the high priest and make him get ready the money that has been brought into the temple of the Lord, which the doorkeepers have collected from the people. Make them entrust it to the men appointed to supervise the work on the temple. And make these men pay the workers who repair the temple of the Lord--the carpenters, the builders and the masons. Also make them purchase timber and dressed stone to repair the temple. But they need not account for the money entrusted to them, because they are acting faithfully." Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, "I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord." He gave it to Shaphan, who read it. Then Shaphan the secretary went to the king and reported to him: "Your officials have paid out the money that was in the temple of the Lord and have entrusted it to the workers and supervisors at the temple." Then Shaphan the secretary informed the king, "Hilkiah the priest has given me a book." And Shaphan read from it in the presence of the king. When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, he tore his robes. He gave these orders to Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam son of Shaphan, Acbor son of Micaiah, Shaphan the secretary and Asaiah the king's attendant: "Go and enquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord's anger that burns against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us." John 2:13-22: Jesus clears the temple When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove them all from the temple area, both the sheep and the cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!" His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me." Then the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." The Jews replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Apocalypse Revealed #192: The symbolism of the temple The temple symbolizes three things: the Lord, the church in heaven, and the church in the world. These three make one, and cannot be separated from each other. Sermon: Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, "I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord." (2 Kings 22:8) Our Bible readings this morning speak of both the destruction and the rebuilding of the temple. And as I contemplated these readings while preparing the thoughts I would present to you today, I could not make up my mind whether to focus on our individual spiritual growth as usual, or to continue last week's broader look at our church as a whole. Then it occurred to me that this isn't necessarily an either/or situation. We can look at both of them together because they are essentially the same thing, only on a different scale. Each of us as an individual is a microcosm, whereas the church and the wider human community are macrocosms. The smaller reflects the larger, and vice versa. Swedenborg puts it this way in _Divine Love and Wisdom_ #319: The people of ancient times called a human being a microcosm because an individual reflects the macrocosm, which is the universe as a whole. But these days, people do not know why the ancients described a human being in this way. All we see of the universe, or macrocosm, in an individual human being is that we are nourished and live physically from its animal and vegetable kingdoms, and that we hear and breathe by means of its atmosphere. But these are not what makes us a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of the universe and everything in it. Rather, the ancients called the human being "microcosm," or "little universe," because of their knowledge of correspondences (which the most ancient people had), and from their contact with the angels of heaven. Heaven's angels know from what they see around them that everything in the universe, if considered as to its function, resembles the human form. In other words, the universe as a whole functions on the grand scale just as an individual human being functions on a small scale. And this is true of everything in between, too. So when we look at the way our church works, we are also looking at the way each one of us as an individual works, and vice versa. One of the things that we know, both about the church as a whole and about ourselves as individuals, is that sometimes we lose sight of the purpose of our existence. We may think that the church has a whole different reason for existing than we as individuals do. After all, the church is a religious sort of thing. It's all about God and heaven and spirituality and all that stuff. But we're just plain, ordinary people; and we're all about . . . what? What are we all about anyway? Are we all about working and eating and drinking and wearing clothes and having houses and driving cars? No. None of these is what we're really all about. These are simply things we do in order to achieve our greater goals. Or at least, that's what these material things are _supposed_ to be, and not ends in themselves. So what _are_ we here for? What _is_ our greater goal? Didn't God put us here, like the church, to be all about God and heaven and spirituality? About love and understanding and serving our neighbor and our Lord? Aren't we really here for exactly the same reasons that the church exists? In fact, what would the church even be if it weren't for the people who make it up? It would be nothing. As I said last week, we _are_ the church. There is no other church but us. Yes, there is the Bible, and there are the writings of our church, and there are constitutions and bylaws for our congregation and our denomination. There are thousands of Swedenborgian books and periodicals that we can read. But all of these were produced _by_ people, _for_ people. And all of them were in some measure inspired by the Lord to show us the way to truly be the church for one another, and for God. So it's really no different whether we talk about the church as a body or about you or I as individuals. We are all here for the same reason, whether we realize it or not. We are all here to learn how to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and how to love our neighbor as ourselves. The church exists to help us learn and practice this, and we as individuals exist to help one another learn and practice this. The real church is not a building or a constitution or even a set of beliefs. It is the living body of humans who gather together to support one another in learning and practicing our faith. Jesus knew what the church, or the "temple," really was. He told his fellow Jews that if they destroyed the temple, he would rebuild it in three days. They didn't understand. They thought the temple was a building--just as we sometimes think the church is a building. But he knew what the church really was. The temple he had spoken of was his body; it was the living presence of God with us as a human being. Our church is not a building either. It is the living presence of each one of us, and of all of us together as a body. And especially it is the living presence of the Lord Jesus among us, forming us into the body of Christ. That is the church. The building and the constitution and even the teachings of our church are simply tools that we use to do the work of the church. They are tools that we use in doing the work God has put us here on earth to do. Sometimes we lose sight of this. Sometimes we get crazy ideas about what we're here for. We think we're here to have the best looking body, or the nicest house, or the most money, or the smartest brain, or the most physical pleasure, or the most toys. Or we think we're here to tell everyone else what to do. And when we start acting on these crazy ideas, our lives start falling apart. We spend so much time making money that we forget about our families and friends, and our relationships start to fall apart. We start thinking we're so smart and that everyone else should do what we say, and pretty soon no one can stand being around us anymore. We may build up a beautiful body, but we're so vain about it that the only one who gets any pleasure out of it is ourselves--and we're never quite satisfied, either. When we start going after any of these other things, our temple starts to fall into disrepair. Our priorities are all wrong. The stones of truth and mortar of love that are meant to form a solid structure of character start getting loose. Our mental and emotional character begins to get dilapidated, with one ethical principle falling down here, and another piece of our moral code falling down there, until the temple of our spiritual character begins to look more like a ruin than a magnificent structure built for the glory of God. This is exactly what had happened with the children of Israel when King Josiah took the throne at the tender age of eight years. Most of the kings who had come before him were corrupt and evil in God's sight, having substituted idol worship for the worship of God, while committing all kinds of immoral, unethical, and illegal acts. They had lost sight of God's good and righteous laws. They had become a lawless people who ran after every idol that came their way from the polytheistic, idol-worshipping people among whom they lived. They had even placed idols in the very temple of the Lord, while allowing its structure to gradually crumble into disrepair. This was the situation when King Josiah, now a young man, ordered the repair of the temple. He had seen enough of the disrepair and neglect of the things of God. He decided that it was time to repair and renovate the temple, and to rededicate the people to their spiritual roots. So he arranged for honest workers to be paid from the regular offerings that the people made at the temple. The workers were to use that money to repair the temple and restore it to its original order and beauty. And as they did this, they found a lost treasure: the Book of the Law--their most sacred scriptures, given to them by God in generations past. Of course, our congregation has had some fairly recent painful experience with church renovations. It was during renovations to the church in the summer of 1994 that the fire broke out that destroyed the roof of our sanctuary and the steeple along with it. And those of you who were here at that time lived through that terrible destruction, as well as the process of rebuilding and repairing our "temple." It wasn't until the fall 1998, when the steeple was rebuilt and fitted with a communications antenna, that the exterior of the church was fully restored. And even today, the interior is not completely whole. We are still missing our pipe organ, and most of the beautiful ceiling beams in our sanctuary. During the renovations, this congregation also discovered a treasure. It is something that we had known; but perhaps, like the Book of the Law, it had gotten lost under the clutter in the struggle to survive as a congregation, and had faded from our memory. When we saw the church building half destroyed, but the church itself--the _people_ of the church--only grow stronger, we knew and experienced that the church is not the building, but the people. And there is something more that we are gradually discovering as we metaphorically "read the Book of the Law"--as we follow out the meaning of the discovery that the church is really the people, and that we exist as a congregation for the people. This church, like most others in our denomination (not to mention most other Christian churches), had been in a long, slow decline for many decades leading up to the 1990s and that dramatic low point in 1994 when fire almost took our sanctuary away from us. Of course, part of this decline was due to our society's move away from church attendance and toward more and more secular activity. The Christian Church as a whole was in major decline through much of the twentieth century--especially between the fifties and the nineties. And our church declined along with it. However, I believe there was a greater issue involved in the church's decline. As a denomination, and in most of our local churches, we had lost sight of the reason for our existence. We had lost our "Book of the Law," which is summed up in the two Great Commandments: love the Lord above all, and love our neighbor as ourselves. We had more and more focused our energy on our own survival--which is an inward-looking focus--and had become more and more disengaged from the wider neighbor of our community, which we are commanded to love and serve. We had strayed from the path that our Lord showed us in the Bible. As a result, we continued our decline, to the point where the very existence of the church that we were trying to preserve was in serious question. Only gradually are we realizing that it is as we look outside ourselves that our church--the real church that is the people--gets repaired and rebuilt. It is as we look out into our community and search out needs that we can fill, spiritual wants that we can supply, that we begin to draw people into our congregation, and to build up and grow once again. It is as we reach out to our community with services such as our wedding ministry and our public workshops that we rebuild our temple--the temple that is the body of Christ. And the more we focus ourselves on the task of serving the Lord by serving our neighbor; the more we follow this Law of the Lord that we have rediscovered in the process of rebuilding our church, the more we will find that the real church will be rebuilt and restored not only to its former glory, but to something even greater than it has been before. The more we seek out ways to serve the people of our community, the more we will become the church that we are truly meant to be in God's plan. What works for us as a church works for us as individuals, too. Each one of us is a church on the smallest scale. And if we have lost and forgotten what the Lord created us for, then our own temple has fallen into disrepair, and the living Book of the Law has gotten buried under the clutter of our busy secular lives. As we work to rebuild ourselves into the glory for which the Lord has created us, we, like King Josiah, must rededicate ourselves to that living Law that we discover once again, buried in the clutter. Both as individuals and as a church body, we must remember and live out every day those two great commandments: to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Mon Feb 11 15:17:58 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 10:17:58 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] Actions and Words Are Not Enough Message-ID: <200202111018_MC3-F17E-B3FF@compuserve.com> Actions and Words Are Not Enough By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell February 10, 2002 Not everyone who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 7:21) Growing up most of us have seen stage magicians or read about people with magical powers who invoked their magic with special incantations. They might say "abracadabra" or "hocus-pocus" and then something amazing would happen. Probably many a young child or early adolescent has longed for this kind of magical power that could be tapped with the right wave of a hand and the right words. But we know that life isn't this simple. But there is a more pervasive belief in "magic" that tends to influence nearly everyone. When faced with a difficult task many a person has mulled over in his or her mind if there wasn't some short cut to getting the task done. When faced with financial needs a person can wonder if there isn't some easy way to hit the jackpot. When faced with difficult interactions at work or at home, a person can sometimes search for a simple "magic bullet" solution that eliminate all the problems with no more than a small amount of effort or at least without the person facing and working on the need for significant personal change. In religious life this hope for magical solutions can exist as well. People of many religions have envisioned various words and deeds as having remarkable power to win God's favor. For example, wouldn't attaining happiness be easy if all we had to do was call on the name of the Lord? Wouldn't it be reassuring if we could just go through the right set of ritual practices and be guaranteed a heavenly home? What if a person was feeling sad, oppressed, frustrated, or scared and called "Lord, Lord" and immediately a powerful sense of peace, calm, and quiet happiness descended. It would be even better if we could do it once in our life and be fixed forever. But this isn't the way the Lord has created us and the world of spiritual forces in which we live. He said explicitly, "Not everyone who says to Me, ?Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven." Words alone won't bring us peace and happiness. Actions alone won't do it either. We don't earn happiness or heaven. Happiness and heaven come from our heart or will and to receive it we need to receive the profound spiritual change that is regeneration. A change of heart is necessary. We also know that receiving happiness is not a matter of convincing the Lord. He wants to give us as much happiness as we can receive. He wants each of us to go to heaven. The light and warmth of His love and wisdom shines on us constantly. And we receive it differently when we are in good state than when we are in a bad state. He doesn't have to change. We do. But personal change is hard. Over and over again people have turned their mind to solutions that avoid deep personal change. The medieval Christian church developed concepts and practices that inclined people to think that they could make up for their bad deeds by prayers, contributions to the church or by going on a pilgrimage or Crusade. As it were, the magic of the right words or actions would erase the spiritual consequences of their chosen life. The leaders of the Protestant Reformation recognized that words and actions could not earn a person heaven. But instead of finding the real path to heavenly life, an equally magical concept was developed: Instantaneous salvation. As it were, due to His love and power, God could wave His hand over the most sinful individual, wipe away all the evil, and the person would be immediately ready for all the joys of heaven. But this view of how a person can receive heaven is a fantasy. How we live our lives in this world is very important. But mere words and action alone will not bring the life of heaven to us. If we think of them superficially, they won't even guarantee that we will be effective in our work or appreciated by the people around us. Considered superficially our words and actions don't guarantee that we will be decent human beings. We know that a person can attend church, read the Word, say prayers, and live a basically moral life, yet he or she can still harbor envy, impatience, and distrust in his or her heart. And this means that person still would not be happy, because they would not have life of heaven within heart Each of us needs to consciously work together with the Lord to allow Him to bring about the miraculous changes in what we fundamentally care about and are motivated by. This is regeneration. For this to happen we need to learn from Lord, seek the necessary insight to recognize the evil motivations and false ideas that regularly mar our lives, acknowledge them to the Lord, pray for help, and then fight the influence of these evil motivations and false ideas can have on our words and acts. But while regular effort is essential, the action apart from the thought and will behind it does not earn happiness. Our actions come from some kind of marriage of will and thought within our minds. Every least thing that happens within our thoughts, moods, words, and actions has its life and energy from something we care about or love. We have affections of widely varying qualities and focus. Some are stronger than others. Some are fairly obvious in their focus and others are much more subtle?so subtle that we may have great difficulty identifying their quality and what aspects of life influence them. And these affections don't exist without ideas, beliefs, sensed reality or experience to support them. Consider the implications of the following passage about the necessary origin of good and truth within our lives: Good has its origin in the Lord, and likewise truth; for the Lord is Good itself and Truth itself and these two in Him are one. For this reason good in the angels of heaven and in people on earth is good in itself only so far as it has been united to truth; and truth is truth in itself only so far as it has been united to good. It is well known that every good and every truth is from the Lord. Therefore, as good makes one with truth and truth with good, it follows that for good to be good in itself and for truth to be truth in itself, they must make one in the recipient; that is, in an angel of heaven and a person on earth. (Divine Providence 10) These two things, love or good and wisdom or truth, each from the Lord, must come together in our lives in the things we think, say, and do. So long as they exist only in our minds as abstractions, they have little reality or affect on who we really are. When they come together in act they are as it were married within us and become a part of who we really are. Concerning this marriage the book of the New Church, Divine Providence, states: There is a marriage of good and truth in the goal [of our thoughts and actions], and there is a marriage of good and truth from that goal in the effect. The marriage of good and truth in the goal is a marriage of the will and the understanding, that is, of love and wisdom. There is such a marriage in everything that a person wills and thinks, and in his consequent conclusions and purposes. This marriage enters into the effect and, indeed, produces it; but in the process good and truth appear to be distinct, because what is simultaneous then produces what is successive. For instance, when a person wills and thinks about being fed, clothed, having a home, conducting any business, performing any work, or engaging in any discussion, he first wills and thinks about these things, or forms his conclusions and purposes, simultaneously; but when he has reduced into effects what he has willed and thought, the one follows after the other; nevertheless, they continue to make one in his will and thought. In these effects, uses relate to love or good, while the means employed to furnish the uses relate to the understanding or to truth. (Divine Providence 12) An important thing for us to recognize is that any single action can come from innumerable different loves and be given direction by innumerable different sets of ideas. A woman can do her job well because she wants to truly help other people, or because she wants to be well-regarded, or because she wants to be paid, or because she wants to grow in power or authority. This coming Valentines Day, a husband could bring his wife flowers and even expensive jewelry because he wants to express his love for her, or because he doesn't want to get nagged for not suitably acknowledging the day, or he may hope his gifts will lead her to reward him in some way, or even because he wants to manipulate and control her with a sense of obligation or guilt. The actions proceeding from these different motivations and thought may appear similar on the surface but they will be fundamentally different in their origin. There are several important ways that this idea applies to relationships in this world. Many people are tempted to think that they can earn love and friendship. We can think, "If I can just find the right words, the right actions, I will be loved." If the person we hope to be loved by is angry, or just cool and distant, we can tell ourselves that we just need to find a different set of words to speak or actions to change them. We continue to search for some magic key. We think "If I just did it right everything would be fine." The problem isn't always that we are at fault. The state of mind of another depends not on environment but on his or her response to that environment. We cannot by our efforts make others respond in a friendly or loving way. If a wife is trying to get along with a husband, if she comments on something she can be perceived as arguing or nagging. If she is quiet, she can be perceived as ignoring. If she is nice, her actions can be sensed as buttering up. A person can think if only I had done or said things right everything would be okay. He can tell himself "If I was perfect everything would be fine." This applies to many other events and issues that we can be concerned about. We can think if we just act in the right way everything will turn out well--that we can change the heart of an enemy. If we put in enough work, work hard enough, do it the right way, things will go the way we want them to. And it doesn't necessarily work. The Lord doesn't guarantee the world around us will go as we wish, that people will behave toward us as we might hope or wish for. What He calls us to is an inner peace, inner fulfillment within our efforts. It is the initial marriage of motivation and thought that determines the true quality of any act. Consequently, the Lord told us that calling on His name, may mean nothing at all. It may be utterly empty of any desire to have his qualities of love and wisdom in our lives. Yes, we do want to use our best understanding, patience, and care. We want to use our words wisely, and consider our actions. But we can realize in some areas of life these words and actions do not have absolute value. The results depend on the response of others We are building on sand if our peace of mind and happiness depends on others. We are building on a rock if we realize that our happiness and unhappiness come from our own response to life. It comes from own heart. We cannot earn happiness or heaven by words and actions. Yes, prayers, efforts to do the Lord's will are essential. But they cannot earn heaven. A fundamental goal that we need to seek is to cooperate with the Lord to bring about a change of heart?a change of heart that will come when good and truth are married within our lives. AMEN. Lessons: Matthew 7:21-29 Because anyone's will is his love, and God's will is the Divine love, it can be seen what is meant in the spiritual sense by "doing the will of God" and "the will of the Father," namely, that it is to love God above all things, and the neighbor as oneself. And since to love is to will, so it is also to do; for what people love, that they will, and what they will they also do. Therefore "doing the will of God" or "of the Father" means doing His commandments, or living according to them from the affection of love or charity. This is what is meant by "the will of God" and "of the Father" in the following passages. In John: God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him. (9:31). In Matthew (that the one who does the will of the Father who is in the heavens shall enter into the kingdom of the heavens): Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. (7:21). In the same: Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.(6:10). Apocalypse Explained 295:3 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 leewoof@mediaone.net Sun Feb 24 22:18:59 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 17:18:59 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "When the Time is Ripe," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <4.1.20020224171740.013c6d00@pop.ne.mediaone.net> When the Time is Ripe By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, February 24, 2002 Readings: Amos 8:1-13: A basket of ripe fruit This is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit. He said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the Lord said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple a will become wailings in that day," says the Lord God; "the dead bodies will be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!" Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel large, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: "Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble for this, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be stirred and sink again like the river of Egypt? "On that day," says the Lord God, "I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day. "The days are surely coming," says the Lord God, "when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. They will wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they will run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. In that day the beautiful young women and the young men will faint for thirst. Matthew 13:24-30: The parable of the weeds Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. "And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in the field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?' "He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' "The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' "But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers: Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'" Apocalypse Explained #911: Wheat and weeds "While everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds, and then went away," symbolizes that while we are living a worldly and materialistic life, evils from hell secretly introduce false ideas into us while we are unconscious of it. . . . "When the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well," symbolizes that when truth increases and brings forth good things, false ideas from evil are mixed with them. . . . "The slaves said to him, 'Do you want us to go and gather them?'" symbolizes the separation and removal of false ideas that come from evil before the true ideas that come from goodness are accepted and grow in us. "But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them' " symbolizes that in this way truth that comes from goodness, and its increase, would also perish. For true ideas are mixed with false ones among Christians; and these cannot be separated and the false ideas rejected until we are spiritually reformed. Sermon: But he replied, "No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers: Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn." (Matthew 13:29, 30) We are now solidly in the time of Lent--a period of forty weekdays before Easter traditionally set aside for repentance and self-denial. And it just so happens that today we have our final lesson from the Old Testament for this church year. That lesson is from the book of Amos, who did the prophets proud with his messages of gloom and doom, alleviated here and there by a ray of hope and promise. So today I'll fulfill my prophetic duty and do some afflicting of the comfortable; and next week, as we move into the New Testament, Kelly will have an opportunity to comfort the afflicted. But seriously, we do need to take stock of our lives from time to time. As Swedenborg points out in his theological style of speaking, it is easy for us to fall asleep spiritually. It is easy to find ourselves just drifting along, absorbed in the concerns and the values of this world. It is easy to forget that we are here for a higher, spiritual purpose as we struggle just to keep up with all the daily demands that this life continually throws at us. And as Swedenborg also points out, when we drift along on the material level like this, we pick up a lot of false notions along the way; false notions that come from our tendency to be absorbed primarily in ourselves and the material world; false notions that get mixed in with our good intentions, so that pretty soon, even though we began our spiritual life with the good seeds of truth sown in the soil of our minds by the Lord, as we live out our lives we find that the stalks of wheat are hopelessly mixed up with the weeds of our own faulty ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. We become fields of wheat and weeds so thoroughly entangled with one another that there seems little hope of straightening our lives out. While we have many good intentions and do many good things, we remain addicted to attitudes and behaviors that are busily tearing down everything our better self is working so hard to build up. If we have our stubborn sins that we can't quite seem to repent of, we are not alone. One of the modern sports of journalists and historians is to dig up dirt on all the leading figures in our history and in our current society. It can be upsetting to hear that the heroes of history that we were taught in school to revere turn out to have had clay feet. From our country's founding fathers--Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and so on--to more recent figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, we find out that indeed, "We _all_, like sheep, have gone astray; each of us has turned to our own way" (Isaiah 53:6). We don't like to hear the dirt about the great figures we have looked up to for inspiration. We may even become angry with the historian or journalist who has the gall to unearth some sexual misdeeds or shady dealings or oppressive action or other hypocrisy in our particular heroes. And yet, assuming that the character flaws thus unearthed are real, to get angry at the ones who unearthed them amounts to killing the messenger who carries bad news. The fact is, not a single human being, no matter how great in the eyes of society, has ever been perfect. As Jesus said, "No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18). And as annoying and even painful as it may be, the positive side of muckraking is that it reminds us of this fact: we humans are imperfect and fallible; there is always evil mixed in with the good in us. Of course, recognizing that even the greatest leaders among human beings have their dark side does not mean we can just relax and not worry about our own sins--which sometimes seem much smaller by comparison. Of course, we are meant to deal with one another and with ourselves not only with a critical mind, but also with a merciful heart. Yet we shouldn't be so "merciful" as to say, "Well, if Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King could do it, I guess it's okay for me to do it." Because every one of us, from the least to the greatest, will one day have to answer for the wrongs we have thought, said, and done. And though we may still end out in heaven, those wrongs will have had their damaging effects, both on our own souls and on the souls of those people around us who have been at the receiving end. As long as we continue to live on this earth, we are never "off the hook" when it comes to the need to face our own sins, admit them, take responsibility for them, and with the Lord's help, struggle to overcome them. And it is a struggle. Our reading from the prophet Amos puts the case clearly, with a painful juxtaposition of good and evil that mirrors our own experience of life. In the opening verses of the chapter, we are given a brief but beautiful visual serenade: the Lord shows Amos a basket of summer fruit. Some Bible commentators, in an effort to tie this pleasant vision in with the decidedly unpleasant accusations of sin and prophecies of doom and destruction that fill the rest of the chapter, have interpreted this fruit as being overripe and ready to rot--an image of a society that is morally and ethically overripe and about to disintegrate. And while there may be something to that metaphor, Swedenborg gives a _good_ interpretation to the basket of summer fruit. In his posthumously published _Summaries of the Internal Sense of the Prophets and Psalms_, Swedenborg interprets the opening verse of this chapter, with its image of a basket of summer fruit, as being a new thing in our religious life, and as a "new church," or new spiritual stage, replacing our previous worn out and used up form of religion. And though he doesn't specifically interpret the meanings of the basket and the summer fruit in this passage, we can piece together their meaning from his explanation of parallel passages elsewhere in the Bible. A basket represents the human will, or motivation, as a container for goodness. Our spiritual summer is when we are in a phase of acting from love and kindness. And fruit represents the kind and thoughtful words and actions that we bring forth to others when we are in this state. So the basket of summer fruit that God showed Amos at the beginning of this prophecy represents the feelings of love and the acts of kindness that we become engaged in when we turn our lives over to the Lord and begin living a spiritual life. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, even when we have turned our lives over to God and have begun living in a more thoughtful, loving, and caring way, our old selfish and materialistic attitudes are still present within us, just looking for opportunities to destroy the goodness and truth that is beginning to grow in our lives. In fact, it is only when we finally start a serious effort to turn our lives around that we begin to realize just how far off the track we have gotten. It is by contrast with the beautiful basket of ripe summer fruit that the horrors following in the rest of the chapter look so horrible. We have gotten a glimpse--a vision--of a better, more loving, more spiritual way of life, and our old ways and the ways of society look all the worse by comparison. So it is intentional on God's part that the beautiful basket of summer fruit comes just before the accusations of evil intentions and behavior, and the prophecies of doom and destruction if we do not repent from our sins. When the light of divine truth and the warmth of divine love begins to shine into the shadows of our unthinking and materialistic lives, _then_ we realize just how flawed we are, and just how much work we have to do. Then we realize that the joy of our first discovery of a new relationship with the Lord and the church must give way to the sobering reality of a lifelong struggle against our particular character flaws, our particular addictions, our particular wrong ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Of course, God will give us our Sabbaths of rest from that struggle along the way. We cannot struggle day after day, week after week, year after year without respite--and the Lord knows this. Each of us has experienced those wonderful (but often all too brief) times when everything seems to flow: when we are getting along with the people around us, our work is going well, and we can relax and enjoy life. These times help to recharge our spiritual batteries so that we will have the energy and the will to face our next round of challenges. And the next round of challenges _will_ come. The painful and unwelcome message of the parable of the weeds is that as long as we are living here on this earth, we are a mixture of good and evil inextricably intertwined and growing together. Each of us has our wonderfully good parts: those aspects of our personality that the people around us come to know, appreciate, and love. And each of us also has our stubbornly annoying and even destructive parts: those blindnesses and rough edges that are continually chafing against the people around us and cutting into their flesh, causing friction and pain both with them and in our own souls. Each of us has our weeds of selfishness and materialism growing up among our wheat of love and kindness. And the surprising twist to Jesus' parable is that we are instructed not to attempt to root out those weeds in our personality before our metaphorical harvest is ripe. We would think that as soon as we notice any wrong in ourselves, we should immediately and vigorously root it up and stamp it out. And often this is a good idea. Yet it some cases it can do more harm than good. Sometimes when we intend only to root out the flaws in our character, we end up rooting out our newly sprouting spiritual virtues as well. Let's use a straightforward, physical example--with apologies to those who may be struggling with this particular issue. Let's say we have a tendency to overeat, and it affects our health, our relationships, and our self-image. When we turn over a new spiritual leaf, we may say to ourselves, "This is the time to overcome my eating problem. I recognize that this is a wrong in my life, and it's time to put an end to that wrong." Perhaps we will be successful--and if so, that's wonderful! Yet especially if it is a longstanding issue with us, it is just as likely that our next attempt to go on a diet and shed those extra pounds will be no more successful than our previous attempts. If this time around we have additionally imposed upon ourselves the stricture that now that we have rededicated our lives to God, it is our _spiritual_ duty to stop overeating, and that we are sinning against God if we don't stop it, then if and when we fail once again we could easily become so discouraged and disillusioned with our new resolve to live in a more spiritual way that we simply throw up our hands and give up on any efforts at all to move forward on the spiritual path that God has laid out before us. This would be an example of trying to root out the weeds before the wheat has grown to the harvest. Instead of being a good thing, we would have rooted out the wheat of our new dedication to spiritual life along with the weeds--and ended out with no harvest at all. So there is also a comforting side to these messages of sin and repentance. When we are faced with an obvious evil in our lives, and yet all our efforts to overcome that evil prove fruitless and it remains stubbornly rooted in our lives, this does not mean that we are forever lost, and are inevitably heading toward hell. Yes, our struggle must continue. But perhaps the meaning of our failures along the way is simply that the time is not ripe. Perhaps there are other ways we need to grow and mature within ourselves, and in our relationships with others, before we will be ready to face some of the more longstanding and difficult evils that we are involved in. Perhaps that particular weed in our personality will simply have to grow up along with the wheat of new and developing goodness in our lives. Perhaps we must await the time when both are ripe, so that the wheat in us can be harvested, while the weeds of our remaining addictions and wrong behaviors can finally be cut out of our lives and thrown into the spiritual fires of destruction. That time of judgment and sorting out will certainly happen after we die. Yet we can also look back and see those turning points when our lives shifted from one phase to another, and we left our old self behind for good. These, too, are the times of harvest. And if we continue to tend our spiritual fields, God will give us these harvests toward eternal life. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@mediaone.net Tue Feb 26 04:56:31 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 23:56:31 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] Swedenborg books listed on eBay Message-ID: <4.1.20020225235338.01f2a4a0@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Dear Swedenborg Reader, I have listed several inexpensive older copies of various books by Emanuel Swedenborg this week, along with my last copy (for now, at least) of the big pictorial biography of Swedenborg, and several other books of interest. For a full listing of my current eBay offerings, please go to: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/leewoof/ FYI, I will be out of town from this Thursday, the 28th, through Sunday, March 3, and will not be able to respond to emails until I return. Any books whose payments arrive during that time will be shipped out on Monday, March 4. Now on to the books: Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision A Pictorial Biography & Anthology of Essays & Poetry New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988 Paperback, 558 pages. A new, unused copy with slight shelf wear http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1517667939 Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg Translated by George F. Dole New York, NY: Swedenborg Foundation, 1976 Paperback, 426 pages, Used, Pages clean http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518905443 Heavenly Secrets (Vol. 1), by Emanuel Swedenborg New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1981 Paperback, 542 pages, Used, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518908006 The Four Doctrines: The Lord, Sacred Scripture, Life, Faith, by Emanuel Swedenborg New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1967 Translated by John Faulkner Potts; Edited by Alice Speirs Sechrist Paperback, 325 pages, Used, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518910655 Divine Providence, by Emanuel Swedenborg New York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1905 Hardcover, 605 pages, Used, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518957348 Other books of interest: My Religion, by Helen Keller With a frontispiece photo of Helen Keller New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1928 Clothbound, 208 pages, Used, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518944480 The Gist of Swedenborg, compiled by Julian K. Smyth & William F. Wunsch Extracts from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg on various subjects New York: Swedenborg Foundation, copyright 1920 Hardcover, 110 pages, Used, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518968631 The New Church World Assembly, London, July 1-6, 1970 Hardcover, 79 pages, Good condition http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518972385 The Big Adventure, by Gwynne Dresser Mack A book for reading aloud to children five to ten years old (Current reprint of 1988 Second Edition) Saddle-stitched, 16 pages, Brand new, unused copy http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1518975201 Enjoy! --Lee Woofenden -------------------- Specializing in books on Emanuel Swedenborg and his religious philosophy. To see my current eBay auctions, please click here, or follow this link: http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewListedItems&userid=leewoof For featured items and a full listing, visit my eBay page at: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/leewoof/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@mediaone.net Tue Feb 26 05:06:47 2002 From: leewoof@mediaone.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 00:06:47 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] My apologies! Message-ID: <4.1.20020226000440.01f81600@pop.ne.mediaone.net> Dear Newearth Sermons list readers, Please accept my apologies for the non-sermon message about my book offerings on eBay. I intended to send it to the Swedenborg discussion list, and clicked on the wrong address in my address book! Sincerely, --Lee Woofenden From leewoof@leewoof.net Fri Mar 8 22:28:50 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 17:28:50 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Your Prayer Has Been Heard," by Kelly Milne Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020308172651.0261b840@mail.leewoof.net> Your Prayer Has Been Heard By Kelly Milne Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church, March 3, 2002 Bible Readings: Luke 1: 8-16 Luke 1:57-66 "But the angel said to him: Do not be afraid, Zechariah, your prayer has been heard." I'm sure we all have heard the story of John the Baptist, how he baptized people--including tax collectors and soldiers and how he prepared the way for Jesus. What a job that must have been! But our story today focuses on John's birth. To refresh our memories on John's birth, we know that an angel came to Zechariah, John's father. Now Zechariah was married to Elizabeth, they were both old in age and Elizabeth was barren. We read in Luke chapter 1: "Once when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of the incense came, all the assembled worshippers were praying outside" So if we look at this passage a little closer we now see that Zechariah is alone in the temple. The passage continues: "Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear" Okay, so I know that Zechariah was a real human being since he was scared out of his wits when he all of a sudden saw an angel standing near himself. I don't know about you, but I would probably have the same reaction. And then the first thing the angel says to him is "Do not be afraid, Zechariah..." Not the most realistic request for Zechariah at that moment. But then the angel continues, "Your prayer has been heard." What an amazing statement! An angel of the Lord telling you that your prayer has been heard. So, simply put, it means that God heard the prayers of Zechariah and Elizabeth that they wanted children. To make it even more amazing, imagine that God hears our prayers. . . . What a concept! Not too far-fetched for us to understand as Christians. I mean, for most of us we probably communicate with God, oh say, every day. Or sometimes that every day may turn into every hour or every minute. I think that it amazes me most that God would actually take the time to listen to me. I mean, how many of us must talk to Him every day? It just shows that He does care about each one of us very deeply--more than we can even begin to understand. I can even attest to the fact that prayer works! As you may or may not know, Mike and I have been trying to start a family for some time now. Well, after going through test after test, treatment after treatment, we finally put it all in God's hands--in short we prayed. And to my amazement God listened. This prayer thing really works! We are traveling in the next few months to Colombia to adopt the baby that God has had waiting for us. So I can relate to the joy and amazement that Zechariah and Elizabeth must have felt when they found out, after such trying times, that they would be having a baby. Not just any baby, but a baby that would be special in the eyes of the Lord. The angel also told Zechariah "And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous--to make ready a people prepared for the Lord" What an enormous responsibility! Can you imagine? Oh, yes, not only are you going to have a child you waited forever for, but this child will prepare the way for the Lord! How do you not, as a parent, watch every little thing you do in raising this child? Fortunately the answer is easy--PRAY. But is it that easy? Sure it is. When we remember that we can. How many times have you faced a situation that was very difficult? Did you take control over the situation? Were you the strong one that took care of everything? Did you pray for that strength or did you forget that God was there for you? Well, now I have just described myself in most situations. It isn't easy to remember that we don't have to be in control all the time. God is the one in control; we just have to let Him. I mean, there must have been a point when Zechariah and Elizabeth decided that they would just pray about their situation and leave it at that. You know, it actually takes a strong person to give up everything to God. Isn't that what He is there for anyway? But Zechariah doubted what he was seeing and hearing. "Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." The angel answered, "I am Gabriel, I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time."" Hmmm . . . a husband who comes home and can't speak? Oh, where was I? So now it comes time for Elizabeth to give birth. "When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy and they shared her joy. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah, but his mother spoke up and said, "No! He is to be called John." They said to her, "there is no one among you relatives who has that name." Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child. He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone's astonishment he wrote, "His name is John." Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God. The neighbors were all filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things." Zechariah now knew wholeheartedly that God heard his prayer and answered it. Not all our prayers will be answered in the way that we want them answered but we can rest assured that they will be heard. That God loves us enough just to listen to us and to know what is best for us, even though we may not. I will leave you with this quote that always makes me smile. "Give your troubles to God; He will be up all night anyway." ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Mar 10 22:54:17 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 17:54:17 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "A Matter of Death and Life," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020310175331.025a4b40@mail.leewoof.net> A Matter of Death and Life By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, March 10, 2002 Readings: 2 Kings 4:27-37: Elisha raises a woman's son from death When the man of God saw the woman coming, he said to Gehazi his servant, "Look, there is the Shunammite woman; run at once to meet her, and say to her, Are you all right? Is your husband all right? Is the child all right?" She answered, "It is all right." When she came to the man of God at the mountain, she caught hold of his feet. Gehazi approached to push her away. But the man of God said, "Let her alone, for she is in bitter distress; the Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me." Then she said, "Did I ask my lord for a son? Did I not say, Do not mislead me?" He said to Gehazi, "Gird up your loins, and take my staff in your hand, and go. If you meet anyone, give no greeting, and if anyone greets you, do not answer; and lay my staff on the face of the child." Then the mother of the child said, "As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave without you." So he rose up and followed her. Gehazi went on ahead and laid the staff on the face of the child, but there was no sound or sign of life. He came back to meet him and told him, "The child has not awakened." When Elisha came into the house, he saw the child lying dead on his bed. So he went in and closed the door on the two of them, and prayed to the Lord. Then he got up on the bed and lay upon the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes on his eyes, and his hands on his hands; and while he lay bent over him, the flesh of the child became warm. He got down, walked once to and fro in the room, then got up again and bent over him; the child sneezed seven times, and opened his eyes. Elisha summoned Gehazi and said, "Call the Shunammite woman." So he called her. When she came to him, he said, "Take your son." She came and fell at his feet, bowing to the ground; then she took her son and left. Luke 7:11-17: Jesus raises a widow's son from death Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. Heaven and Hell #445: Death and resurrection When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs' breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are. We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Bible, "death" means resurrection and a continuation of life. Sermon "Young man, I say to you, rise!" (Luke 7:14) With these few, simple words, Jesus raised a widow's son from death back to life. When someone close to us has died, we might wish Jesus could be here today, say these words again, and bring our loved one back to us. And the fact is, there are modern miracles taking place all the time: cases where people who even twenty or thirty years ago would have died from their condition are instead restored to life, sometimes living on for many more years before leaving this earth for good. Even as we mourn the loss of loved ones, it is also good to be thankful for the longer presence of those we might have lost, but who have stayed with us those extra years. Still, when death does come to someone we love, it can be very painful. And especially when that death has just happened, about all we can do is comfort one another, and share our thoughts and feelings, and the many ways in which the one who died touched our lives. Only as time passes after the death of someone close to us can we begin to get more perspective. Then we can also begin to explore more deeply the meaning of death, and where our loved one has gone. I know that some here have experienced loss very recently--something I could not have anticipated last week when I saw that today's reading was about Jesus raising a widow's son from death, and chose the topic "A Matter of Death and Life" for today's sermon. Yet recognizing that today's topic may have particular poignancy for some of you, perhaps it may still be helpful to go ahead as planned. Divine Providence has struck again in another way: we are now in the middle of our four part series of public workshops on "Life, Death, and the Afterlife." This past Wednesday, the Rev. Andy Stinson and I offered an overview of "Heaven and Hell." Today I would like to offer you a similar, but much briefer, overview of heaven, hell, and the in-between "place," or state, called "the world of spirits." For some of you this may be new; for others, it will be review. Either way, it helps to mentally "visit the spiritual world" from time to time. Of course, there are many different views of heaven and hell, ranging from the literalists' heaven of angels sitting on clouds playing harps and devils burning in hell, to mystical notions of leaving behind our individual consciousness and merging with the Divine from which we came. Emanuel Swedenborg, whose twenty-seven years of experience in the spiritual world is the main source of our church's understanding of heaven and hell, steered a middle course between these two. Both hellfire and angels in the clouds, he said, were symbolic images, not literal descriptions. Yet we do retain our individual consciousness in the spiritual world; and if we have chosen heaven, we do have a very close relationship with the Divine. Central to our church's concept of death and the afterlife is the idea that death is simply a transition from one world to another. This earth, we believe, is simply a training ground for our real home, which is in the spiritual world. And death is the journey we take from one world to the other when our time here has been completed. Sometimes this may come sooner--even far sooner--than we think it should. Yet we can have faith that whether a person dies young or old, that person is in the care of the angels and of God. In fact, the moment of death is probably one of the most peaceful times that any of us will have experienced up to that point. We are attended at death by the highest, most loving angels, who give us such a sense of peace and of being fully and unconditionally loved that no matter how traumatic the events leading up to our death, all is forgotten in the blessedness of the moment. And those who attend a dying person often get a glimpse--a sense--of the peacefulness that the dying person is entering into. However, before long we move away from these angels, and through a series of stages, return to a set of surroundings and a daily routines much like the ones we left behind on earth--so much so that according to Swedenborg, many people do not even realize they have died. After all, in the spiritual world everything around us corresponds to what is inside us; and when we have just died, all of our experience has been here in the material world. So it is not surprising that at first, the new world we inhabit will be much like the old. Yet now we are in that intermediate state between heaven and hell that Swedenborg calls "the world of spirits." This is where any outward thoughts and actions that do not fully harmonize with our true, inner character are gradually peeled away, until our words and actions are in complete harmony with our true thoughts and feelings. Whereas at first we had lived an outward life similar to our life on earth, including the social masks we had worn, now our outer life is fully expressive of our inner life. Even our face and figure becomes more beautiful or more ugly, depending on whether we have chosen the beauty of loving God and our neighbor, or the ugliness of loving only ourselves and material pleasures and possessions. Unfortunately, some people do choose to put their own power and pleasure first. Some people don't care who they have to hurt in order to get to the top. Some people even get pleasure from taking advantage of others, and inflicting physical and emotional pain on them. In other words, some people build hell within themselves while they are here on earth. We are not _sent_ to hell after we die. Rather, if we have chosen selfishness and materialism as our gods, we are already in hell even while we are still living on earth. In the world of spirits, this fact is simply revealed. When our true, inner self is laid open for others--and ourselves--to see clearly, we then choose of our own accord to make our bed in hell. Swedenborg's startling message about hell is that God never sends anyone to hell; rather, we send ourselves there by our own choices. If there is an eternal hell, it is not because God wants there to be one, but because we insist on it! "Why would anyone ever choose to be in hell?" you might ask. First, it is important to understand that hell is not a place where people are burning up in eternal fire, or being skewered on the Devil's pitchfork. Rather, hell is the kind of human society that results when all the people in it are trying to get pleasure for themselves at everyone else's expense. For those who enjoy things such as dominating others and stealing other people's money, there is at least some pleasure to be had in hell. Sometimes the evil spirits in hell are successful in carrying out their terrible schemes. Then they have pleasures. But soon those they have oppressed, robbed, or otherwise injured will rise up and wreak their revenge on them. Then they experience the torments of hell. This mutual hatred in action is the meaning of hellfire. In short, God does not punish anyone in hell. Rather, the evil spirits in hell take great pleasure in tormenting one another--and thus the evil punishes itself. Plus, the devils and satans in hell are forced to do regular work, or they get no food and clothing. Of course, they hate to do anything good or useful for anyone, so this work galls them, and adds to the unpleasantness of their lives. Yet they endure it all for the opportunity to indulge their sick pleasures as often as they are able. But enough about hell. Let's move on to a more cheerful subject. Just as we build hell within and around ourselves when we put ourselves, our possessions, and our own pleasures ahead of God and our neighbor, so we build heaven inside ourselves when we put God first and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This does not mean that we are supposed to treat ourselves badly, or be lax and foolish about providing for the material needs of ourselves and our family. It's not a matter of spiritual things being good and material things being bad. Rather, it's a matter of keeping things in their proper order and priority. It is only when we put ourselves and the material world first that they become evil. If we keep them in their place, secondary to loving God and loving our fellow human beings, then taking care of our own material, social, and psychological needs, and those of our family, is a good thing. When we provide for ourselves and our family to have healthy bodies and all the necessities of life--not to mention some good, healthy recreational pleasures--then we are putting ourselves into a position where we can better serve the needs of the people around us. In other words, we put ourselves in a position to do God's will here on earth. So the teaching of our church is that the life that leads to heaven is not one of depriving ourselves and withdrawing from the world; rather it is a life of active engagement in the various activities, businesses, and services of this world, and in the various forms of recreation that keep us healthy and give us innocent pleasures with our family and friends. The life of heaven is a life of joy, and we are best preparing ourselves for heaven when we learn to enjoy all the healthy pleasures of this life. However, heaven is not one big long vacation. Though the angels do enjoy all the music, sports, games, and other recreations that we have here, their greatest pleasure comes from an active life of serving others in the ways that they love most. Their greatest satisfactions come, not from gaining pleasure for themselves, but from knowing that they are giving others happiness and joy. No angel is forced to work. Rather, they go about the kind of work they have chosen with heartfelt joy and dedication. The "eternal rest" of heaven is not a rest of idleness, but rather the inner restfulness and peace of being able to express our love to others in useful, practical, and enjoyable ways without having to struggle within ourselves about what we want to do with our life or how to go about doing the work we love. Heaven, in other words, is a community where everyone's joy is to give joy to others, and where the angel-people serve one another simply because they love God and they love other people, and want to make them happy. As I've said many times before, and will say many times again, we do not have to wait until after we die to experience this beautiful state of being. Perhaps we will never experience it quite as deeply and fully here as we will in the spiritual world. And as long as we are here, we will always have our struggles and our difficult times. But if heaven is something we build within ourselves, then we can be--in fact, we must be--building it within and around ourselves right here on earth. This is where we face the deeper meaning of death. This is where our stay on this earth truly becomes a matter of death and life. Because there is another kind of death that all of us must be willing to go through if we are to find our place in heaven. Yes, our body must die before we can become angels. But there must also be an inner death before we can be spiritually resurrected as angels. What is this death? It is the death of our old self. It is the death of our old bad habits; our old self-centeredness; our old focus on material possessions and pleasures. We come into this world absorbed in our own pleasure and pain, and as we enter adulthood, our lives tend to be focused on the material necessities of life. Yet as necessary as these things are during our stay here on earth, we will never find our way into heaven if we do not move beyond them. We cannot choose the time of our physical death. But we do face a decision between death and life every day. It is the decision of whether we are going to live this day, this hour, this moment thinking of God and our neighbor first, or thinking of ourselves and our own pleasures first. If we wish to enter spiritual life, we must be willing to let our old self die. We must be willing to gradually but persistently put aside every wrong desire, every false thought, and every useless and hurtful action. We must be willing to put our own popularity, our own power, our own pleasure second, and put the happiness of the people around us first. Of course, we will never fully achieve this ideal. We are imperfect beings, and at times we will fail. Yet if we continue to make the effort; if we continue to work on ourselves; if we continue to rededicate ourselves to the Lord's way, then the Lord will raise us from spiritual death to heavenly life just as he physically raised the widow's son from death to life. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Sun Mar 17 20:31:59 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 15:31:59 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] The Holy Spirit Message-ID: <200203171532_MC3-F61B-CD9A@compuserve.com> THE HOLY SPIRIT March 15, 2002 by the Rev. Eric H. Carswell "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (John 14:18) When the Lord spoke the words of our text, He was preparing His disciples for the time when they would feel deserted. They would feel like little children who had lost their parents. The disciples were used to being with the Lord each day. They were used to seeing and hearing Him, walking and talking with Him. Their life revolved around Him. But it could no longer. It was important for the Lord to go even though His disciples could not easily understand why. He told them, "Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you." (John 16:7) Somehow this Helper would be better for the disciples than the familiar presence of Jesus. It was to their advantage that He was going. He would come to them again. The Helper that the Lord promised His disciples is the Holy Spirit. Sometimes in the New Testament it is called the Counselor or in the Greek language, the Paraclete. The Holy Spirit is the Divine truth. (True Christian Religion 139) But it is not an image of truth fighting. It is not an image of truth judging. The Holy Spirit is called the comforter or helper. It is the Divine truth leading us, helping us and comforting us. The Holy Spirit is one way that we can think of the Lord. The Holy Spirit is the work of the Lord's wisdom as it goes forth to led people to heaven. It is the Lord gently opening the thoughts of a baby boy as he begins focus on the wide world around him. It is His firm leading as a young girl starts to recognize that responsible behavior leads to a happier life at home and in school. It is the source of the insight that a wise mother has for the most important needs of her children. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit that can help give serenity to the aging man who is no longer able to be as active as he used to be. The work of the Holy Spirit is the work of reforming and regenerating all who adapt themselves and their lives to receive the Lord. The Holy Spirit is an expression of the Lord's infinite love taking form in perfect wisdom. It is the Lord accomplishing the fundamental goal of all creation. If we define the work of the Holy Spirit broadly it seems that it has been active since the beginning of creation. Certainly the Divine Providence has been active from the first moment of time. However, something special came into existence after Jesus finished His work in this world. Remember the Gospel of John comments about a statement that the Lord made with these words: "But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified." (John 7:39) Many Christian theologians feel compelled to complete this phrase to say the Holy Spirit was not yet given. The translations of the Word that we use add this word. This is incorrect. In a very real sense, the Holy Spirit did not exist yet. The Lord's presence with the human race was different before Jesus was glorified. Before His advent, the Lord led each individual by the presence of angels and good spirits when that individual was in a state of mind that would allow for their presence. If a person felt the urge to serve his neighbor, the Lord could be present by means of angels to guide that affection to serve others. If the person felt hatred or envy, the Lord could not directly guide him away from this hatred, because angels or good spirits could not draw near to that state of mind. When the ruling affection in people's thoughts was dominately good, the Lord could easily lead them to do good things. But as the human race as a whole slowly turned away from the Lord and a love of serving their neighbors, it become more and more difficult for the Lord to lead each individual and the power of evil gradually increased. When nearly all desire to do good had perished, the human race was likewise nearly cut off from heaven and life. Something had to change and change drastically. But what could be changed? It is contrary to the Lord's love to force a change on us. Such a change would take away our freedom and the possibility of us ever enjoying the happiness of heaven. If the Lord had forced us to change, the result would have been a race of obedient human robots. If the human race could not be forced to change then what could be changed? The Lord had to change the way that He reached out to human beings. He had to change the way that He would be present with each of us today or else we would be hopelessly damned to hell. So the Lord bowed the heavens and came to earth. Because the Lord was born on earth, fought against each one of the hells and gave a new order to the heavens, reorganizing them into a more perfect form - because He did these things, He can now be present with us as the Holy Spirit even when our dominate state of mind is not good or charitable. He can still be with us and lead us even when we don't truly love doing what is good and true. We can be sure of His presence. What is the presence of the Holy Spirit like? What if someone asked you if you had received the Holy Spirit? All of us can answer, "Yes." to this question. Whenever we have had even a glimmer of light of what is true, it is part of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Whenever we have had some insight into how to help another person or how to better live our lives, it is part of the presence of the Holy Spirit. All understanding of what is true comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit. We can have people who bring certain information to our attention, but it is always the Lord Himself who allows us to see what this truly means. Not everyone receives the Holy Spirit in the same way. The presence of the Lord as the Holy Spirit does not come to us entirely apart from our choices. The Lord told His disciples that the world cannot receive the Helper, the Spirit of Truth because it does not behold Him or know Him. But the disciples could receive that Spirit. The Lord told His disciples that they knew the Holy Spirit because He abided with them and would be with them. The world in our minds cannot receive the Holy Spirit. Excessive concern for natural things or our own short-term well-being blocks out the light that the Lord would shed on our minds. How can we receive the Holy Spirit more fully? The most important thing that we can do is develop an desire to know and understand the truth because we want to live a better life. The Writings refer to this desire as "the affection for truth." Stated simply, this means that if we are truly concerned about being useful and helping others, a part of our mind will be constantly on the lookout for the knowledge and wisdom that will help us do our work. We can see this clearly in many examples in this world. The things that we have dedicated our lives to are what we find ourselves thinking about the moment that our mind is free to wander. An affection for truth expresses itself in a desire to learn from the Lord. It is not good enough to run into some workable ideas on how to live our lives and help others. What we need is something that we can get only by going to the Lord. Consider the following statement that focuses on what makes the church with each of us. The church comes from the Lord and it exists in people who go to Him and live according to His commandments. No one at the present day denies that the church is the Lord's, and that because it is the Lord's, it is from the Lord. It exists in people who go to Him, because the Lord's church in the Christian world is founded on the Word, and the Word is from Him and from Him in such a way that it is Him. The Word contains Divine truth united to Divine good, and this also is the Lord . . . Moreover, the church exists in people who go to the Lord for the further reason that it exists in those who believe in Him. And no one can believe that He is God the Savior and Redeemer, Jehovah who is Righteousness, the door by which one must enter the sheepfold (that is to say, the church), the way, the truth and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through Him, that the Father and He are one, besides many other things that the Lord Himself teaches - no one, I say, can believe these things unless he gets his belief from the Lord. No one can believe these things without going to the Lord, because He is God of heaven and earth, as He Himself also teaches. Who else should one go to? Who else can one go to? (Conjugial Love 129) An affection for truth is not so much an overwhelming desire to pile up in memory more and more information, but rather to learn and truly see what the Word of the Lord means for our daily choices. The work The True Christian Religion states the case rather strongly. It says that for Christians who have the Word of God available to them, that the Word is the sole medium through which we can draw near to the Lord and into which the Lord enters. (True Christian Religion 142) We must be led by the Lord through His Word. We can allow the concerns of day to day living to crowd out any thoughts of higher and more lasting things. But to do this we have to ignore many indications that we should be thinking of these more lasting things. The words, tone of voice, facial expressions and actions of our friends, or children, or spouse can give us the little indicators that something isn't quite right. Something very important is being ignored. These signals can be dismissed as momentary irritations or they can cause us to raise our thinking and recognize that we are forgetting the more real and lasting parts of life - our relationships with our loved ones, with those who need us and benefit most directly from our attention and love. The Lord can work most directly with us through the knowledge and understanding that we have gained from His Word. Sadly enough for some people the Word has become a sealed book. A background of false assumptions has blinded them from seeing what the Lord is trying to teach in His Word. Some have been led to apathy by the idea that attempts to live a better life come from a selfish desire for glory and merit and are unnecessary. In its worst form this is the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. Those who firmly believe this false interpretation and live according to it do not make the effort to recognize and fight evil loves and false ideas influencing their actions and thoughts. The Lord has a very difficult time coming to them and leading them, because they don't sense any need to be led. For all their complexity, the Writings for the New Church have only one end in mind - the reestablishment of the fundamental basis for true Christianity. Each of us, as individuals, is to turn from the evil loves that seek to express themselves in our lives and we should try to serve our neighbors. These fundamental ideas can be attacked on many fronts and the Writing seek to insure that none of these attacks can be successfully made - providing we form our thinking from their pages and the pages of the Old and New Testaments. The Lord give us a special promise. It is contained in the last book of the New Testament, the book of Revelation. It states, "Let him who thirsts come. And whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely." (Revelation 22:17) The book of the Writings, The Apocalypse Revealed tells us that these words mean that anyone who from love desires to learn what is true will be taught by the Lord. The Lord will come to us if we want Him. (Apocalypse Revealed 956) The Holy Spirit will lead our thoughts and our loves till we see what is true - not merely what is true in some abstract sense, but what is true for us individually, how that truth applies to our relations with others and how we should live our lives. The Lord told His disciples that He would not leave them as orphans, that He would come to them. He also comes to us, teaching and inspiring, ever leading us to receive as much of His life as we can. The Lord wants us to think of His constant presence and feel the comfort of His guidance. He want us to carry a certain inner peace as we live our busy lives. It is the peace of confidence - the confidence of someone who is ready to meet His maker - the confidence of someone who knows that he is trying to follow the Lord. The Lord want us to have this peace. His word for his disciples are also words for each of us. "Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you. Don't let your heart be troubled or be afraid." The Lord will not leave us as orphans He will come to us. AMEN. Lessons: Isaiah 60:1-3, 19-22 John 14:15-31 "The Spirit" which those believing in the Lord are to receive from Him means the life coming from the Lord that is the life of faith and love. . . "The Spirit" which believers were to receive, also called "the Holy Spirit", means the life brought by Divine Truth coming forth from the Lord. This life is the spiritual and heavenly life itself present in a person. The reason why it says "the Holy Spirit was not yet because Jesus was not yet glorified" is that while He was in the world the Lord Himself taught Divine Truth; but when He had been glorified, which was after the Resurrection, He taught it through angels and spirits. That holy influence present with a person, coming forth from the Lord through angels and spirits, whether in a discernible manner or an indiscernible one, is the Holy Spirit there. For in the Word Divine Truth coming forth from the Lord is called "holy." This explains why the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of truth and why it is said that He would lead into all truth, that He would not speak on His own [authority], but speak what He hears from the Lord, and that He would receive from the Lord what He was to declare, John 16:13, 14. It also explains why the Lord, when He was going to leave the disciples, breathed into them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit, John 20:21, 22. "Breathing" means the life of faith, so that the Lord"s breathing into someone means imparting the ability to understand Divine Truths and thereby receive that life. So it is also that "the Spirit," being a name derived from "breathing", is a derivation also of "blowing" and of "wind"; and this is why the spirit is frequently called the wind. Arcana Caelestia 9818:14-15 All books mentioned, other than from the Bible are written by Emanuel Swedenborg and are often refered 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 leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Mar 18 00:15:15 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 19:15:15 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Sent Out to Preach and to Heal," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020317191409.023775e0@mail.leewoof.net> Sent Out to Preach and to Heal By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, March 17, 2002 Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8: Isaiah's commission In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Luke 9:1-6: Jesus sends out the twelve When Jesus had called his twelve disciples together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He told them: "Take nothing for the journey--no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them." So they set out and went from village to village, preaching the gospel and healing people everywhere. Apocalypse Explained #825.3: Speaking and acting from the Lord Good works are all the things we do, write, preach, and even speak, not from ourselves but from the Lord. And we act, write, preach, and speak from the Lord when we live according to the laws of our religion. . . . As much as we live according to our religion, we are led by the Lord. And as much as we are led by the Lord, the things that we do are good, since we are led to do good things and speak the truth for the sake of goodness and truth, and not for the sake of ourselves and the world. Doing useful things is our joy, and the truth is our delight. We are taught by the Lord daily what we must do and say, and what we must preach or write. For when evil things are moved away from us, we are constantly under the Lord's guidance, and we have enlightenment. Sermon: When Jesus had called his twelve disciples together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. (Luke 9:1, 2) When we read the Gospels--the stories of Jesus and his disciples--it is easy to simply read them as history. These are events that happened long ago to people who have long since lived out their lives on earth, and have gone on to eternal life. These stories are at a safe distance from us. A two thousand year distance. Of course, if our interest in the Gospels is purely academic, this works just fine. We can study the history and culture of Bible times, and learn all sorts of fascinating tidbits from archaeology and parallel literary sources to round out our picture of the life and times of Jesus, Peter, James, John, and the others. We can fill our minds with a great deal of intellectual knowledge about the Bible stories. There are whole libraries full of books and whole colleges full of scholars to help us do just that. But we don't come to church to study an interesting historical and literary specimen. We come to church to encounter God in the company of fellow spiritual seekers. And if we approach the Bible in this spirit, it can never be a mere historical and literary experience of a distant time and place. It is speaking to us! And it is speaking to us here and now! Let's read those verses again, as if they are addressed to us: Jesus has called you and I, his disciples, together, and has given us power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases. He is sending us out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. That's a little different, isn't it! Perhaps a little too uncomfortably close to home? Jesus gives _me_ power and authority to drive out all demons and cure diseases? Don't be ridiculous! I'm not a doctor. And I'm certainly not an exorcist! How can these words possibly be aimed at me? The disciples were special people, chosen by the Lord himself. I can't be expected to do what they did. And what about this business of preaching? That's for ministers! As for healing, I'm happy to leave it to the doctors. These are some of the excuses we might make to avoid facing the force of the Lord's commission to us. With these excuses, we can escape our discomfort, and slip back into the comfortable role of an observer of what _others_ are commanded to do. The Lord will not force us to answer that call. If we choose not to think of it as being directed at us, we can let the words go in one ear and out the other, without making an impact on anything on their way through. We can choose to remain right where we are spiritually. Unfortunately, this really means that we will be coasting downhill. And sooner or later, we will realize that we are heading for the bottom of the hill. The Lord's words _are_ directed at us. The Bible is God's word to all people. And each one of us is most definitely included in "all people." The Lord is offering _us_ power to drive out demons and to cure diseases. Some of us may take that call literally, becoming doctors or nurses or other health practitioners, engaged in the work of healing people from physical illnesses. Others become psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, engaged in the work of driving out the demons of neurosis, dysfunction, and all manner of emotional and psychological demons. Yet for many others, the call is not a literal one, but a metaphorical one--a "correspondential" one, to use Swedenborg's term. Yes, some people are called to heal physical diseases and drive out the demons that in today's secular world we call "mental illness." But we are _all_ called to heal ourselves and one another spiritually and emotionally, and to drive out spiritual demons such as hatred, revenge, jealousy, anger, disdain, and even such demons as apathy and depression. These and other influences from hell can "possess" us just as surely as demons possess human beings in the Gospels and in popular horror films. The message of our Gospel reading for today is that the Lord is giving us the power to drive these demons out, first from ourselves, and then from those around us--if they want our help in their efforts to free themselves from their inner demons. And the Lord is giving us the power to heal our spiritual and emotional wounds--those open sores we carry around from painful encounters with others, or that we have inflicted on ourselves. And we are given power to heal one another's inner wounds as well. It is a power we can exercise every day. We can exercise it toward ourselves when instead of being harshly critical of ourselves, we practice self-forgiveness. This does not mean papering over wrongs in ourselves that we need to be working on. Rather, it means recognizing that like every other human being on the planet, we are not perfect, but are works in progress. It means not dwelling morbidly on our faults and shortcomings, but instead minimizing them by focusing as much of our energy as we can on doing good things for ourselves and for others. Sometimes we can gradually starve out our faulty attitudes and behaviors simply by giving them less and less of our time and attention. We can exercise our God-given power to heal others every time we come in contact with another person--whether it is in person or by phone, email, or letter. Our words and actions can either wound or heal. We wound others when we focus on their bad parts and condemn them for it. We wound others when we assume they have bad intentions, or are just plain bad people, and treat them that way. We wound others when we bind their faults and shortcomings to them more firmly. Though we may not think we have any effect on the people around us, the fact is that people tend to live up--or down--to our expectations. For example, if we say to someone in our family, "You're so selfish! You're always doing selfish things!" they will be much more likely to actually be selfish--especially around us. Even when we are dealing with the faults and shortcomings of those around us, we can heal rather than wounding. It's all in our attitude toward the other person, and in how we express our thoughts and feelings. First we need to change our own attitude. We need to see the person we are dealing with as someone capable of becoming an angel--someone God is actively working on to fashion into an angel. And then we need to realize that our job is not to attach their faults more firmly to them, but rather to drive a wedge between them and their faults. The business of healing people spiritually is the business of separating them from their wrongs--their evils--and moving those evils farther and farther away from them. Parents, teachers, and others who are involved with bringing up children have a special responsibility to do this with their children. Children, especially, respond very strongly--and often immediately, to our expectations. Of course, like the rest of us, they've got their rough edge. Sometimes they're going to act up no matter how well we treat them, and no matter how consciously we apply spiritual principles to their upbringing. With kids as with everyone else, there are going to be those times when all hell breaks loose! Yet our attitude toward them, and the way we treat them day in and day out, will have a huge effect on whether that hell is a temporary thing that breaks out only to be overcome, or whether it settles in and takes over our children's character. If we think of them as little devils or little criminals, and treat them that way, they will obligingly become that for us. I believe that the majority of juvenile delinquents in our culture got that way, not because they chose to become bad people, but because they were treated like delinquents by parents, school, and society in general, and they lived down to those expectations. We can heal our children instead of wounding them by treating them like people who may be temporarily possessed by devils, but who are really angels in the making. Instead of saying, "You're always selfish"--or nasty, or surly, or mean, or whatever the wrong behavior is that we see in them, we can say things like, "I know you can be better than that," or "I know there is a good person inside of you." And instead of being nasty or surly or mean back to them, we can treat them with the kindness and respect that we would like them to show to us. This does not mean letting them walk all over us! It is our job to remain firm in our resolve against accepting and condoning their wrong attitudes and behaviors. It does mean that as we provide direction and discipline, we do it with love in our hearts, keeping in mind the Lord's goal for each one of us: to turn us into beautiful, loving, and wise angels, joyously engaged in serving one another's needs and contributing to one another's happiness. Though we don't have such direct responsibility for the behavior of other adults as we do for the behavior of our children, the same principles apply in our dealings with adult family members, friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances. Yes, as Jesus says, we do have to be "as shrewd as snakes" (Matthew 10:16) in our dealings with our fellow human beings. If we do not act with wisdom and discernment, we will not only be taken advantage of, but we will miss opportunities to heal hidden wounds that we would not even notice if we didn't pay close attention to a person's words and actions, and seek ways to heal those inner wounds instead of inflicting even more pain on the person by our reactions. At the same time Jesus told us to be "shrewd as snakes," he also said to be "as harmless as doves." The physician's motto is, "first, do no harm." We are dealing with many wounded people every day. Our first responsibility is not to wound them even more. If we do our best to live according to the laws of our religion--such as doing to others what we would have them do to us--we will be a healing influence in their lives. So far we have been talking about the healing that the Lord sends us, his disciples and apostles, out to do. But the Lord also sends us out to preach the kingdom of God. I think it would be safe to say that if we're reluctant to go into the world as healers, we're twice as reluctant to go into the world as preachers. Sometimes I think we ordain people just to make it safe for the rest of us _not_ to preach! But that's not the Lord's plan. Yes, he sent out just twelve disciples with the command to preach the kingdom of God. But in the very next chapter, he sent out seventy-two. And as he sent them, he said, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest field" (Luke 10:2). If we simply extrapolated from twelve to seventy in perhaps a few months, by the time we reach today, two thousand years later, the numbers would come out that we are _all_ called and sent out to preach the kingdom of God. How do we do this, when most of us haven't been to theological school? Well, you're in church today! You are coming before the Lord in prayer, hearing God's Word read, and receiving a spiritual message, and sharing the experience with others here in church. All of this becomes a part of your mental and spiritual equipment. And all of it is to be used in spreading the good word to others, just as it was spread to you. To illustrate this, please raise your hand if you became a part of this church or are here today because someone you know (perhaps your parents) originally brought you to church, or you were invited by someone who was a part of this congregation. This is the power of preaching to one another. We preach to one another whenever we share the good news of what God has done for us and is doing for us. We preach the kingdom of God whenever we offer to others the same blessings that our church has given us for our own lives. We share the good news whenever we break out of our self-imposed barriers of shyness or awkwardness, and tell friends and family members (whom we think might be receptive) about the source our own spiritual strength and help. This doesn't necessarily involve preparing finely worded statements to impart to our listeners. It can be as simple as what one of our dear departed members was doing shortly before she died. Irva Miller loved the teachings of our church; but she was not one to "preach" to people. Still she found ways of spreading the good word. When she was no longer able to do all her own housework, she hired a woman to come in and clean for her. As this woman did her work, she noticed a special glow about Irva that all of us who knew her felt. After a while, she asked Irva where she got that special glow. And Irva began to tell her about our church. She shared a little bit here and a little bit there. And she gave her pamphlets about our beliefs. If Irva had lived a little bit longer, it wouldn't surprise me if that cleaning lady were a member of our congregation today. If Irva Miller could preach the good news of God's kingdom at the ripe old age of eighty-six, then each of us can certainly do the same, in our own way. The Lord is saying to each one of us, as he said to Isaiah long ago, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And the Lord is listening for each one of us to respond, "Here am I. Send me!" ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Wed Mar 27 20:26:35 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 15:26:35 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "A King Laughing in the Mud," by Eli Dale Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020327152453.055844e0@mail.leewoof.net> A King Laughing in the Mud By Eli Dale Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church, March 24, 2002--Palm Sunday Children's Sermon Today is a special Sunday--do you know what it's called? Palm Sunday. Do you know why it is called that? When Jesus was in the last week of his life, he rode on a donkey into Jerusalem, the city that is the center of Jewish life, and along the way people threw coats and palm branches into the road before him. But why did they put palm branches in the road? Have you ever heard of "rolling out the red carpet"? That is something we do so that important people don't have to touch the ground as they go around. The palm branches kept King Jesus out of the dust and the mud of the road. Now the Jesus I have come to know by reading the Bible is not someone who needs to be separated from the dirt. He never seems to be afraid of getting dirty. So I would like to do something different with the palms today than we have done in years' past. Palms are special. The meaning of the palm tree in heaven is: using our senses to know what is good and true. Our senses are: see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. One way to use our senses is to hear the stories by or about Jesus. Jesus tells us what is good and true. I'd like to ask the Sunday School students from the older class to join me to do a blessing of the palms now. As you pass the palms from one to another, we'll sing this song: Blessed are the poor, they will have the kingdom Blessed are the sad, they will have comfort Blessed are the meek, they will inherit Blessed are the hungry, they will be filled. Now I'd like you younger students to take palms to everyone in the room. Make sure every person has a palm branch for the day. Bible Readings Isaiah 58:6-9 Is not this the fast that I choose: To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, And bring the homeless poor into your house; When you see the naked, to cover them, And not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn And your healing shall spring up quickly; Your vindicator shall go before you, The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; You shall cry for help and he will say, Here I am. Luke 19:33-48 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?" They said, "The Lord needs it." Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, And glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God." Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, "It is written, 'My house shall be a house of prayer' but you have made it a den of robbers." Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard. God bless the hearing and understanding of your holy Word. Adult's Sermon "Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard." Jesus was pretty clear about his mission: "I have come to call sinners to repentance" (Luke 5:32). To repent is to turn around. To do evil is to face away from the light of heaven. To repent is to turn to face the light of heaven. And what odd goods-and-truths are illumined in that light! Jesus tried to tell us about them: love and pray for your enemy, be generous to those who betray and violate you, provide for others as if God has provided for you, love--in and by your actions--in the same unflinching, all-encompassing way that God loves the world--as a sun shining on good and bad alike. Jesus came to get us to turn around--to turn our understanding upside down, to turn on its head the way we have made meaning of the world. He does this with teachings and stories and humor. I think Jesus was a lot more humorous than we take him. After all, isn't it disrespectful to laugh at the incarnate God? Come to think of it, how can you not laugh at something so delightfully unbelievable, so absurd? The kingdom rules are absurd--give your shirt to the one who steals your coat--that's absurd! This is the laughter of wisdom. Jesus comes as our king, riding on a donkey. Have you ever seen anyone ride on a donkey? Not a mule, now. Mules are handsome creatures. In correspondence, mules and donkeys are about the same--intellectual faculties that allow us to know the truth. But in material life, mules and donkeys make a very different impression from each other. Donkeys are absurd. How could anyone look at Jesus sitting on an ass and take him seriously as a king? Kings ride horses or mules--or they ride in chariots. Donkeys are comical animals and are not a good way to make a positive impression. I would like to consider that Jesus was--humorously--giving us one more of his backwards messages, one more statement of the absurd, one more "Do you get how it's not like you think it is?" instruction by coming into the royal city sitting on an ass. Yes, it fulfills scriptural prophecy, but the prophecy was probably pretty shocking when Zechariah delivered it: "Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem" etc. (Zech 9:9-10) Right! Some guy on a donkey foal is going up against chariots--sure. I'm sorry, that is absurd. Well, Jesus calls us to be absurd over and over: to do the counter intuitive, to have faith in spite of the apparent reality of our infirmities, to give out of our poverty rather than our wealth, to lose our lives so we will gain them, to be the greatest by being the least; to invite the poor, crippled, and lame to the banquet of life; to share our last meal even with the one who will betray us. The world tells us it is absurd to allow a king to get muddy and dusty on his triumphal ride into the royal city. So we, the people, ready to do the right thing, throw palm branches and coats in the road, to keep him out of the mud. But if we think Jesus is the kind of king who is afraid of mud, we still don't understand him. The bulk of his relationships were with the broken and the lost--right there in the mud. Jesus is close to the end of his ministry now. He has told a lot of the stories he is going to tell and has healed a lot of the sickness he is going to heal. Now, as he rides his little donkey into Jerusalem, this is practically our last chance to misunderstand him, because by Friday, he'll be dead. By Friday, he will be covered in mud, in spit, in sweat, and in blood. It's not our job to protect him from that. But he told us what our job is. Jesus calls us to be absurd and to turn around. Jesus throws the wheelers and dealers out of the temple in a scene that is often labeled "Jesus cleanses the Temple." When he is in Jerusalem's holiest place, with the people who are presumably the religion's most honored and honorable people, he has to take action to clean the place up. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because "you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God" (19:44). A few verses before the "cleansing the temple" scene, Jesus meets Zacchaeus, a tax collector. As soon as Jesus makes contact with Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus cleans up his own act. A person who has been a lackey for the oppressors suddenly decides to go straight. Unlike the Pharisees and lawyers, Zacchaeus does recognize the time of his visitation from God. Sometimes that is easier than at other times. But because Jesus is "always teaching in the Temple," we always have the opportunity to come to this recognition and then turn around and clean up our act. Let me tell you a story. One day, I was caught between wanting to be fit and wanting some ice cream, so I proposed to Nor, my husband, that we walk the three miles to the ice cream store. We looked on a map and discovered that the most direct route went, not by the roads, but by the train tracks. That sounded lovely, so off we went. As we walked along the train tracks late on a summer's evening, my delight in strolling along a grassy way distant from traffic began to turn to the creeps. No one knew where we were or where we were going and we were not visible to the normal hubbub of life. I started to ask, "What if some deranged homeless person jumps out of the bushes and murders us." Then I began to imagine a deranged homeless person jumping out of the bushes and murdering us. Then I began to look for a deranged homeless person jumping out of the bushes and murdering us. I was on high alert all the way to the Dairy Queen. After we got our cones, I told Nor I would be more comfortable walking back along the street instead of along the train tracks. At the time we were walking to the Dairy Queen and I was obsessing about the homeless and the deranged, someone else's story was going on at a donut shop on Route 1. A young man was talking to a police officer, trying to find out where he could spend the night. Four days earlier, he had been tossed out of his home in Rhode Island and he had walked to Maine, where his father lived in a northern town. The police officer radioed ahead to the men's shelter in Portland and gave the young man directions on how to get there and left him to walk a few more miles of his journey. While Nor and I were walking home, on the streets now, we came to the bridge back to Portland and there was a young man resting on the railing. We said "Good evening." And he asked, "Can you tell me how to get to the Arnie Hanson Center?" Why sure, we knew exactly where that was. We started to give him directions, but it was clear that we would be crossing the bridge together, so we said, "Let's get over to Portland and we'll give you directions from there." As we walked, he told us how he had walked from Rhode Island to Maine and how in the morning he would go back to his father's house. To leave out the boring details, our house was close by, so we went there, I called the shelter to make sure they still had room, and Nor drove him to the shelter. Now here's the point: I was all obsessed about meeting a homeless person--and I met one! And like Jesus and like the kingdom--he was not at all what I expected him to be. He was not deranged or murderous. He just needed a few minutes of our time. I had decided to go back home by way of the streets because I wanted to throw palm branches in my own path to keep myself out of the mud. I wanted separation from the ruder side of life. But God had a different plan. And just in case I didn't get the idea, the Divine Guy, who on earth was young, homeless, and walked everywhere he went, sent me a guy who was young, homeless, walking, and--oh yeah, on his way to his father's house. This is humor. Jesus is laughing and saying, "Do I have to make this any more obvious? As you have done to the least of these, so you have done unto me." "Turn around!" he yells at me. "This is the face of homelessness, not your crazy fantasy. Now do something!" Part of the joy of this encounter was that I did not notice any of the irony of this set-up until much later. I was too busy being exactly where Jesus wanted me--in the moment with someone who needed a little of my time. When we said "good evening," that opened a door and Jesus barged right through it. The young man ended up giving me so much more than I gave him. He gave me a wake-up call. I eventually recognized the time of my visitation from God. Jesus has given us an assignment to be as present, as incarnate, as at-risk as he was. He dined with the people you don't want to dine with. And he got dirty with them, too. And he called them friend. If you've been throwing palm branches in your own path to keep yourself out of the mud of Jesus' incarnation, I invite you to stop. Incarnation is about getting muddy. If you have avoided saying "good evening" to someone because they were the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong political party, or in the wrong neighborhood, I invite you to find your voice. Let's prepare now to bring Jesus into our lives, to prepare for our communion later this morning, by making ourselves vulnerable to his presence and his mission, by understanding that he feeds us and then we feed others. Communion and Palm Ritual When we turn around, what do we find in those kingdom principles that used to seem absurd to us? We find other people. All of Jesus' teachings have to do with relationship--either relationship with God or with each other. We are called to make the world a kingdom place by taking action that touches the lives of other people--whether that means gathering around a common table to share a meal or that means getting into the mud with each other. Jesus asks us to weave our lives into the web of community by how we respond to others and their circumstances. Each person here is a member of at least one community. I'd like to invite you to a ritual of weaving--as a way to declare yourself to be part of the fabric of God's people, a thread in the tapestry of humanity by weaving your palm branch into this framework. I invite you to declare that you are part of a pattern of being. A century ago, the Rev. Chauncey Giles wrote this about the web of life: Thus the web of life has been woven. Every truth we have learned, every fruit of goodness we have borne, every success and disappointment, every hope and fear, every joy and sorrow has entered into it. It is indeed a mingled web, checkered with many bright and dark threads. But we see the web on the wrong side; indeed, we cannot see the real fabric at all. It is as though we should judge of the fine texture and glossy green of the leaf from the dead mould and crumbling stones out of which it is organized. With those who become regenerated, the spiritual side is all brightness and beauty. The threads, many of which seem so dark to us, shine to the sight of the angels as if woven of sunbeams. The finer substance of every affection, truth, and act has entered into the texture of life. (From the Chauncey Giles Yearbook, 1910) Benediction Prayer: May the absurd delight you May you find yourself in the mud May you tend to the weaving of life May Jesus call you friend -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Apr 1 02:22:39 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 21:22:39 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Roll the Stone," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden and Eli Dale Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020331212121.05ab4ac8@mail.leewoof.net> Roll the Stone A Dialog Sermon by the Rev. Lee Woofenden and Eli Dale Bridgewater, Massachusetts, March 31, 2002--Easter Sunday Readings: Matthew 27:57-66: The burial of Jesus As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus' body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a large stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb. The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. "Sir," they said, "we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I will rise again.' So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first." "Take a guard," Pilate answered. "Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how." So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard. Mark 16:1-3: The women approach the tomb When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?" Matthew 28:2-20: The Resurrection And there was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you." So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me." While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, "You are to say, 'His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.' If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Apocalypse Explained #400.14: The stone & the earthquake The great earthquake that took place when the angel came down from heaven and rolled back the stone from the mouth of the tomb means that the state of the church was entirely changed. For the Lord then rose again, and in his human nature took upon himself all power over heaven and earth, as he himself says (in Matthew 28:18). The angel rolling away the stone from the mouth of the tomb and sitting on it means that the Lord pushed aside all the false beliefs that had blocked access to him, and opened up the access to divine truth. The stone symbolizes the divine truth that the [ancient] Jews had falsified by their traditions--for it says that the chief priests and Pharisees sealed the stone with a guard (Matthew 27:66), but that an angel from heaven rolled it back, and sat on it (Matthew 28:2). Sermon: And there was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. (Matthew 28:2) Lee: Easter is a day of change. _Huge_ change. Yes, the birth of Jesus Christ that we celebrate every year at Christmas time was the turning point in our world's spiritual history. Even our calendar bears witness to this, with its years numbered from the date of Christ's birth. But it was the event of Easter--the resurrection of Jesus Christ--that originally changed our Lord's followers from a scattered, disheartened bunch of emotionally crushed and grieving people into an energized, focused, and spirit-filled community of faith that would go out with zeal to spread the Good News, building the human foundations for the Christian Church. In the spirit of change, today Eli and I are going to offer our Easter Sunday message as a conversation between the two of us. We invite you to listen in as we share our thoughts on the huge change that Easter represents. And especially, this Easter we are going to focus on that big old rock that was rolled in front of the Lord's tomb, and then rolled away on the first Easter Sunday. It may seem funny to preach about a rock on Easter Sunday. After all, isn't Easter about the Lord's resurrection? But that rock is what the people who were opposed to Jesus thought would seal his fate forever, and put to rest all those wild predictions that he would rise again after three days. And spiritually, our church's teachings say that the rock over the entrance to the Lord's tomb symbolizes all the false ideas, both in the surrounding culture and in us individually, that block our access to the Lord. Eli, perhaps you have more thoughts on what this stone means, and how it got there? Eli: Oh, Lee, there are so many ways that we block our access to the Lord--all of them effective! As you say, the stone belongs both to the greater culture and to each of us individually. In the Crucifixion story, we see a culture-wide rejection of good and truth which leads to a horrific injustice. When the ruling powers want to set a seal on the stone that is rolled across the entrance to the tomb, it is as if they are trying to pull the wool over the people's eyes. "There is no cause for alarm. All danger is contained. Everything is normal. It was all that guy's fault, but we got him." This story is very real, very present, very much about us, but because it _seems_ to be about ancient people long ago and far away, it can be hard to relate to. And because it seems to be about corrupt power structures, it can be hard to feel empowered to do anything about it. It is _tempting_ for us to fail to see how this story of injustice and scapegoating, this story of business as usual, this story of powerlessness in the face of angry, frightened power-holders is alive and well today, in many nations, including our own. Yet, we cannot dust off our hands and say, "Oh well, what do you expect me to do? It's the government's fault and you can't get them." That stone comes in all shapes and sizes, including personal sized. Each of us gets ample opportunity to put our own interests ahead of someone else's, to protect our own needs and power, and thereby roll that stone between us and heaven. Whenever I say, "Oh I suppose I should write that note card or make that phone call, but maybe I'll do it tomorrow" (and I can say that for weeks on end!), I put a stone between myself and divine guidance. Whenever I say, "Oh, everyone else does it [fill in your favorite bad habit]; it can't be all that bad"; whenever I say, "Oh, there's that street person pan handling again, I'd better cross to the other side"; even when I say, "Oh, I can have another piece of cheesecake," I am blocking the light! Where does that stone come from? Fear, I think. Fear that I might not get enough, fear that I might lose status, fear that I might have to face myself and not like what I find there. Lee: Hmm. Fear. I hate to say it, but you just stepped right into the middle of one of those debates that goes on in my head, and, I think, in our society generally. (Maybe you knew that. . . .) What keeps us--as individuals, as a society, as a world--from living up to the wonderful potentials that God created us for? What keeps us involved in conflicts and wars, in self-defeating habit patterns and malfunctioning relationships? The answer of today's enlightened psychology is that it is our fear and pain that keeps us down. Traditional Christianity rejects that notion, saying instead that it is _sin_ that keeps us down. Or to put it in somewhat less charged language, it is our desire for personal power, material possessions, and physical pleasures--and in particular, our willingness to put these ahead of love for God and love for our fellow human beings--that is the "stone" covering the entrance to the tomb, keeping the Lord's potential presence in our lives safely dead and buried. The "fear and pain" theory emphasizes what we have suffered and do suffer--what is _done_ to us. The "selfishness, materialism, and sin" theory emphasizes our own complicity in the wrongs of the world--what _we_ do to others and to ourselves. What strikes me now is that _both_ of these are present in the story of that stone blocking the entrance to the tomb. It was materialism and grasping for power on the part of the ruling powers that put the stone over the tomb, and placed the guards that were meant to keep it there. And when the earthquake struck, both the guards, on the one hand, and the women coming to tend to the Lord's body, on the other, were struck with _fear_. Eli: Well, I'm glad you brought the "pain" part of the issue into the discussion, even if you don't think it is the "right answer." Personal pain may express itself as fear. I don't think we would tend to be so materialistic and selfish if it weren't for fear. Sometimes that fear is buried very deep. After all, if you have a big enough house, why get a bigger one? If you have enough furniture, why get more furniture? If you ask, "Don't you already have enough?" the answer may look self centered: "I want it and I can afford it, so why not?" Those of us who don't have even-bigger houses can get self-righteous and label that "plain old selfishness driven by plain old selfishness"--i.e., "sin." But if you try to take any sized house or any amount of furniture away from a person, I think the reaction you would get is fear. Most Americans have far more than we need and far more than most other people in the world, but we would be afraid to lose it. Maybe we shouldn't differentiate sin and fear. Maybe being afraid is a sin. One of heaven's favorite greetings to us earth-beings is, "Be not afraid." Maybe that is the basis of repentance! But personal pain also expresses itself in despair, and this too is a major block to heaven's light. I remember one Easter when I was a kid and we were having an Easter egg hunt. One of the children had not found any eggs. When the rest of us became aware of that, we tried to trick her into finding eggs, so she would be successful. Yes, I know that is codependent, but we wanted to bring her into the fun. So we would lure her over to where we could see an egg and try to get her to find it, but she was in such despair by that time that she couldn't (or wouldn't) find the eggs she was tripping over. I don't see too much wrong with the modern model of "fear and pain" as blocks to God. Not all fear and pain is done "to" us by some other agent. We can do them to ourselves as well. Jesus told his disciples he would be killed and he was. He also told them that he would rise again. But they didn't believe him. Their disbelief was the result of having greater faith in their despair than in his promise. That stone separated both friends and Pharisees from the Lord. Lee: I think we're heading toward some of the same conclusions, but from different directions. It is not that I think the modern fear and pain model is the "wrong answer," but that it is not the _whole_ answer. More to the point, fear and pain are one side of the coin, while selfishness, materialism, and sin are the other. Whether someone is doing it to us, we're doing it to them, or we're doing it to ourselves, what it amounts to is that we get off track--and that seals the Lord in the tomb within us and among us. _All_ of these things block out the Lord's presence. This makes us less human than we could be, and our relationships more broken than they need to be. But what is amazing about the Easter story is that the stone doesn't _stay_ over the entrance of the tomb. Here we all are, each of us caught up in our own favorite mode of falling short of the glory of God. Some of us are into fear and pain. Some of us are into sin. Some of us are into guilt, or depression. And some of us come up with other ways to keep the Lord dead and buried. What I love about the story of the women approaching the tomb early Sunday morning is that they were asking, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb." They knew they couldn't do it. And yet they went anyway. Even when they believed that their Lord was dead, and weren't sure they would be able to do anything at all, they approached that place of deadness where they felt he was. But they didn't find him dead. The stone was already rolled away by an angel of God. They had no use for the spices they brought with them to anoint a dead body. Instead, they encountered the risen, living Jesus, and found themselves clasping his feet in fear and joy all mixed together. And if, on a deeper level, the Bible story is _our_ story, then this must mean that our particular "stone" can be rolled away, too. Eli: There are two interesting points to that part of the story. The first is that the women turned their wills to do the right thing: they turned toward heaven's light, to embrace the good. Even without having the vaguest idea _how_ they could accomplish their goal, they set out to do it because it was the right thing to do. Swedenborg tells us that this is exactly how life works. Act as if you are the one who is acting and the Lord, who _is_ the good you are trying to do, will flow into the matter. It looks like your work, but it turns out to be the Lord's work. Of course the stone will be rolled away, and not by us, just as soon as we "intend and do" that which is good and true. No matter how big a mess we have made of our lives, if we dive deeper into ourselves, into our "God place" where the Lord always dwells, new heavenly energy will open up our lives, rolling the stone away. When I signed up to go to seminary, I didn't have any idea how I would pay for it. I signed up for classes anyway. One day I was praying to God to help me find the money only for the coming semester. Then I went about my life and started cleaning out some old files. In those files I discovered a US Savings Bond I didn't even know I had. My mother had given it to me years before and I filed it, knowing I had to wait several years before I paid it any mind. I asked God to help me find the money and I literally _found_ it! The second interesting part of the story is this: reality was different than the women thought it would be and they had to make a new plan. They went to anoint their dead and instead they found life. This is the kind of surprise which can inspire us to put the stone back over the tomb because we're not getting "our way" or because we don't recognize this new reality and think that God has not answered our prayers. But it is the Lord's will we seek to be done. It's obvious in this story, but in our lives it isn't always so obvious. Lee: Aha! So _our response_ to the change is just as important as the change itself! Like the little girl in your Sunday School who couldn't find the Easter eggs even when she was tripping over them, the stone could be rolled away, and we could have a whole new life laid out in front of us--and yet we wouldn't accept it. We could be like the guards, or the chief priests who paid them off, and keep living in just as broken and self-defeating a way as we did before, regardless of the amazing miracle that has just taken place. Or we could recognize the miracle that God has accomplished in our life, and let it renew us--just as the Lord's resurrection renewed the emotional and spiritual life of the women who came to the tomb, and of the other disciples. They accepted his resurrection skeptically at first, but then with wonder and joy, and finally with a zeal that impelled them to go out and change the world. They spent the rest of their lives spreading the good news of the Lord's resurrection, forgiveness of sins, and new life in a growing community of the faithful whose lives were transformed by the presence of the risen Jesus in their hearts and minds. That growing community served one another--and the wider community--from a sense of faith, of mission, and of love. Eli: When we do our personal regeneration, the final step is to _be new!_ We accept the change in ourselves; we lay claim to it. Earthquakes and angels may make us afraid to go forward, but that is our birthright and that is how we show love to the Lord. In this season of resurrection and rolling away of stones, we invite each of you to let something die, something that will rise in new form. Let a tendency to criticize die into a habit of praise; let a tendency to disbelieve die into a vision of hope and possibility; let a tendency to tell your side of the story die into a desire to listen deeply to another's story; let a tendency to take care of your own die into radical acts of charity. Die into goodness and life! Amen. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Mon Apr 1 14:13:46 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 09:13:46 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] Believing in the Promise of Easter Message-ID: <200204010914_MC3-F7FA-CBEE@compuserve.com> Believing in the Promise of Easter By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell March 31, 2002 Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." John 20:29 The good news of the first Easter morning was more than the disciples could understand or easily believe. All the experience of their lives and particularly the terrible memory of the events of Good Friday gathered together in their minds as compelling evidence that Jesus was dead and gone forever. We can imagine the dashed hopes and sense of emptiness they might have felt. Now what were they to do with their lives? Return back to their homes and jobs and take up again the lives that they had led before the Lord called them as disciples? The Lord had tried to prepare them for this time of doubt and heartache. He had foretold of His death and resurrection, but His statements and the meaning He intended to convey by them were not remembered by the disciples. In the Gospel of Luke, the Easter story is told with the news that the Lord had risen being brought to the disciples by the women. They had heard it from the mouths of two angels who told them: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen! Remember how He spoke to you when He was still in Galilee, saying, ?The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.'" (Luke 24:5-7) The Gospel of Luke records that then the women remembered hearing the Lord foretell that this would happen. They went and told the eleven disciples and the other followers of Jesus, but the response was: "And their words seemed to them like idle tales, and they did not believe them." (Luke 24:11) In the Gospel of John we are told the story a slightly different way. As part of that account Mary Magdalene was the first one to see the Lord after He rose. She told the disciples what she had seen and heard from Him. That evening most of the disciples were gathered in a closed room and the Lord appeared to them. It is described with these words: Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, "Peace be with you." When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. (John 20:19-20) But not all the disciples were present that evening. One in particular is mention, Thomas, called Didymus. He did not believe it when he heard what had happened that evening. He was quite specific in his need for proof. He said: "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe." (John 20:25) It was apparently more than a week later that the disciples were again gathered together, this time with Thomas present and again the Lord appeared to them. Can you imagine the chagrin that Thomas might have felt when the Lord directly addressed what Thomas had previously said? Jesus spoke to him saying: "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing." (John 20:27) Thomas responded with the powerful affirmation, "My Lord and my God!" and then we read: Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." (John 20:29 ) Ever after Thomas has been known as "Doubting Thomas." But we can recognize that we aren't all that different from him over and over again in our lives. The Lord has wonderful promises for us. He promises to care for us and lead us to a better life than we can possibly imagine. He has foretold to us that some things that we will tend to think are good are in fact dangerous and evil and that some things we tend to think are sad, unfortunate, or to be avoided are, in reality, part of the pathway to a better and happier life. Consider the hope and promise contained in the following words: Peace holds within itself trust in the Lord, the trust that He governs all things and provides all things, and that He leads toward an end that is good. When people believe these things about the Lord they are at peace, since they fear nothing and no anxiety about things to come disturbs them. (Arcana Caelestia 8455:1) And reflect on this further description of this state: Those who trust in the Divine . . . remain even-tempered whether or not they realize desires, and they do not grieve over loss; they are content with their lot. If they become wealthy, they do not become infatuated with wealth; if they are promoted to important positions they do not consider themselves worthier than others. If they become poor, they are not made miserable either; if lowly in status, they do not feel downcast. They know that for those who trust in the Divine all things are moving toward an everlasting state of happiness, and that no matter what happens at any time to them, it contributes to that state. (Arcana Caelestia 8478:3) We can know these words. We can hear them over and over again, and yet believing in them is not easy. Part of our mind is convinced that if the Lord is caring for us certain things will go the way we believe they should. If they don't go that way we can wonder if the Lord knows or cares about what is important for us. In that state of mind we are like "Doubting Thomas." We will believe in the Lord's care when we see it with our own eyes and experience with immediately before us. Otherwise, we will remain in doubt. We can know the teaching that the Lord is working in the tiniest details of our lives with a full and complete knowledge of everything that has happened and everything that we care about and hope for. We can know that miraculous intervention by the Lord is contrary to His order. The following passage from the Arcana Caelestia describes this truth: Divine Providence does its work out of sight and in ways beyond comprehension, for the reason that a person may be able in freedom to attribute that work either to providence or else to chance. For if providence performed its acts in seen and comprehensible ways the dangerous condition would then exist in which a person would first believe, because of what he has seen and comprehended, that those acts were providential, but after that would move away into a contrary belief. (Arcana Caelestia 5508:2) Miracles or obvious examples of direct Divine intervention will not in themselves produce healthy belief. This was true in the past and is certainly true today as described in the following passage: They would have even less effect at the present day when nobody acknowledges that there is anything which has its origin in the spiritual world, and when anything miraculous that occurs and is not attributed to natural causes is refused recognition. For a refusal to recognize that the Divine flows in and governs on earth reigns everywhere. If at the present day therefore one who belongs to the Church were to witness utterly Divine miracles, he would first deduce that they had a natural origin and sully them with this, then dismiss them as fantasies, and finally mock whoever attributed them to the Divine and not to natural causes. The fact that miracles have no effect at all is also clear from the Lord's words in Luke, "If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead." Luke 16:31. (Arcana Caelestia 7290:4) So we are called to believe because the Lord has taught us what is true and good in His Word. We are told: People of today ought to believe what they do not see, as is also clear from the Lord's words to Thomas, in John, "Because you have seen Me, Thomas, you have believed; blessed are those who do not see and yet believe." John 20:29. The truth that contingencies which are otherwise attributed to chance or luck are due to Divine Providence is indeed accepted by the Church; yet there is no real belief in it. Who does not say that God has saved him, who does not give thanks to God when, seemingly by good fortune, he gets out of some great danger? Also, when he is promoted to important positions or comes into wealth, does he not also call this a blessing received from God? Thus the member of the Church accepts that all contingencies are attributable to providence, even though he does not really believe this. (Arcana Caelestia 5508:5) The good news and joy of Easter is that the Lord has conquered all and reigns as our all-loving and wise God. The good news is that He is watching over us, our loved ones, and the causes in this world that we can care so much about. We can be sure that we will face times of doubt and concern, just as the disciples did. Part of our mind will also tend toward the perspective of Doubting Thomas. We will want the assurance of proof that the Lord knows and cares, that He is indeed leading us and our loved ones to a better and happier life than we would ever lead ourselves to. As we think of that first Easter morning and the joyful news that the Lord had arisen may we look for the promise of that rising in our own lives. This Easter sermon will close with the following quotation from the Arcana Caelestia that speaks of the Lord's resurrection within our own lives. "The morning" in the proper sense means the Lord, His coming, and so the approach of His kingdom, [also] the rise of a new Church, for that Church is the Lord's kingdom on earth. That kingdom is meant both in a general and in a particular sense, and indeed in a specific sense, the general being when any Church on earth is established anew; the particular, when a person is being regenerated and becoming a new human being, for the Lord's kingdom is in that case being established in him and he is becoming the Church; and the specific, as often as good flowing from love and faith is at work with him, for this is what constitutes the Lord's coming. Consequently the Lord's resurrection on the third morning, Mark 16: 2, 9; Luke 24: 1; John 20: 1, embodies in the particular and the specific senses the truth that He rises daily, indeed every single moment, in the minds of regenerate persons. (Arcana Caelestia 2405:8) AMEN. Lessons: John 20:19-31 Doctrine of the Lord 35 Since the Lord's Human was glorified, that is, made Divine, therefore, after death He rose again on the third day with His whole body. This does not happen to any human being, for a people rise again only as to their spirit, and not as to their body. In order that people might know, and that no one might doubt, that the Lord rose again with His whole body, He not only declared it by the angels who were in the sepulcher, but He also showed Himself in His Human body before the disciples, saying to them, when they believed that they saw a spirit, Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself handle me and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see me have. And when He had thus spoken, He showed them His bands and His feet. Luke xxiv 39, 40; John xx 20. And further: Jesus said to Thomas, Reach hither your finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither your hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing ... Then said Thomas, My Lord and my God. John xx 27, 28. That the Lord might still further prove that He was not a spirit, but a Man, He said to the disciples, Do you have any meat here? And they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and of a honeycomb. And He took it, and ate it before them. Luke xxiv 41-43. Since His body was not now material, but Divine substantial, therefore He came into the disciples, the doors being shut. John xx 19, 26. And after He had been seen, He vanished out of their sight. Luke xxiv 31. 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 leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Apr 8 00:00:40 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2002 20:00:40 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "Who Is My Neighbor?" by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020407195945.022e6720@mail.leewoof.net> Who Is My Neighbor? By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, April 7, 2002 Readings: Leviticus 19:11-18: Laws on how to treat our neighbor You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord. You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall rebuke your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Luke 10:25-37: The Good Samaritan On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live." But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" In reply Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.' "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise." The Heavenly City #84-86: Who is our neighbor? Unless we know what it is in other people that we are to love and show kindness to, we might show kindness to harmful people in the same way we show it to good people. Then our kindness would not really be kindness, since harmful people use anything good done for them to hurt others, but good people use it to help others. A common view these days is that we should consider all people to be equally our neighbor, and that we should help people who are too poor to support themselves. But good Christian sense tells us we should take a close look at how people are living and show kindness to them accordingly. Deeply religious people make these distinctions, which means they show kindness to people intelligently. But superficially religious people cannot make these distinctions, so they show kindness to people indiscriminately. The difference in people has to do with the good qualities in them. This is something every religious person should understand. Since all goodness comes from the Lord, he is our neighbor in the highest sense and on a level above everyone else. We get our ability to be one another's neighbors from him. So the more people have the Lord inside them, the more they are our neighbor. Sermon: "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29) This is the question that the expert in the law asked of Jesus. Apparently, his initial question, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life," hadn't produced a sufficiently complicated response. In fact, in the Luke account, Jesus turned the question right back on the lawyer: "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And the lawyer had a ready answer: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself,'" both quoted from the Hebrew scriptures. That was enough talk for Jesus, who simply replied, "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live." However, if everything were that simple, lawyers would soon be out of business! So Jesus' questioner had to make it more complicated. "In order to justify himself," the story continues, "he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'" This provided the setting for the parable of the Good Samaritan. Of course, we are all familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. In fact, if we asked the average person to name a parable, this one would probably be the first one (and perhaps the only one) to come to mind. However, we may not realize just how pointed--even barbed--this parable was for Jesus' listeners. Priests and Levites were the top of the social ladder in Jewish society; to make them the villains of the piece (after the robbers themselves) was social blasphemy. And it was even more blasphemous to make the hero a Samaritan--one of the hated group of Holy Land residents who mixed Jewish and pagan practices in a way that was spiritually adulterous to any good, practicing Jew. Because the parable itself is so engaging, it's easy to miss the fact that a funny thing happened on the way to answering the lawyer's question. Did you notice it? Jesus didn't quite answer the original question--at least, not the way we would expect it to be answered. The lawyer had asked, "Who is my neighbor?" For him, the obvious answer would be, "My family and friends, and the people of my race and nation." But Jesus didn't say that. We, of course, live in much more enlightened times. We would never limit the neighbor to people in our own family, community, or country. (Or would we?) We, instead, would expect Jesus to say that the neighbor was the person who fell among thieves. In other words, anyone who is hurting and in need is the neighbor we are to love. But Jesus didn't say that, either. What Jesus did do was to adroitly turn the answer around, in a kind of spiritual aikido. He turned the momentum of the lawyer's question--which was intended to put Jesus off balance and trip him up--back on the lawyer himself, giving him, not the answer he wanted to hear, but the answer he needed to hear. He gave the lawyer an answer that would not allow him to continue pretending that his intellectual, legalistic arguments constituted true religion. He showed the lawyer that true religion always involves active engagement in love, kindness, and compassion toward our fellow human beings. "Go and do likewise," Jesus told him. The lawyer had no clever response to this simple, powerful command. But we still haven't answered the question, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus, in his spiritual aikido, turned the question around to read, "Which of these three do you think _was a neighbor_ to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" And the lawyer was obliged to respond, "The one who had mercy on him." Though the lawyer still couldn't bring himself to say "the Samaritan was the neighbor," he did get to the core of the matter: it was the Samaritan's mercy--his love, compassion, and goodness--that made him a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers. This is the basis on which Swedenborg says, somewhat more abstractly, "People are our neighbor according to the good qualities from the Lord in them. So goodness is our neighbor" (_The Heavenly City_ #91). And a little more fully in another place: Goodness is our neighbor in the broadest sense, since people are our neighbor according to the kind of good qualities they have from the Lord. And since goodness is our neighbor, love is our neighbor, because all goodness comes from love. So people are our neighbor according to the kind of love they have from the Lord. (_The Heavenly City_ #88) What is Swedenborg saying here? He doesn't leave us in any doubt. As we read earlier: Unless we know what it is in other people that we are to love and show kindness to, we might show kindness to harmful people in the same way we show it to good people. Then our kindness would not really be kindness, since harmful people use anything good done for them to hurt others, but good people use it to help others. (_The Heavenly City_ #84) In other words, when we seek to follow the Lord's commandment to "love our neighbor as ourselves," we are required to use prudence and intelligence in exactly how we show love and kindness to our neighbor. We must consider the quality of the person's character, and show our kindness accordingly. And specifically, we must show love and kindness to bad and destructive people differently than we do to good and loving people. I am well aware that many people these days think that assessing people's character and treating them accordingly constitutes bias and discrimination rather than love and charity. Some claim that we should act the same way toward everyone, equally distributing our favors and kindnesses, with no distinction between one person and another. And I am perfectly comfortable in saying that I believe this attitude and approach is dead wrong. But instead of presenting a lot of theoretical arguments, let's consider a scenario (not original to me) that could easily happen in real life. Imagine yourself standing on a busy street corner in the city, watching the crowds of people passing by. Suddenly, you see someone tear around the corner at breakneck speed and rush down the sidewalk, disappearing into the crowd. Fifteen or twenty seconds later, someone else comes rushing up the same street the first one had arrived on, pauses at the corner, and looks in all directions, trying to see where the first one had gone. But the he has disappeared by now. So the second person turns to you and says, "Which way did he go?" Do you give the right answer? Your first impulse might be to say "Yes, of course I would point the second person in the right direction." But the fact is, I haven't given you enough information to make a good decision. It all depends on who these two people are. If the first one was a crying child, lost and scared, and the second was a distraught and frantic adult, the answer would be quite obvious. If the first was a man with a bag of loot slung over his shoulder, and the second was a police officer in hot pursuit, the answer would also be obvious. Of course, under these circumstances, we would tell the pursuer which way the first one had gone. But what if the first were a man fleeing in terror, and the second a man brandishing a knife, with murderous hatred and rage written all over his face? Or what if the first were a kid running scared, and the second was a local bully or gang member yelling, "I'm gonna kill him! Which way did he go?" Under these circumstances, if you were to direct the pursuer in the right direction, you would be helping him to harm another person. Legally, this would be considered aiding and abetting a criminal act. Morally and ethically, your "kindness" to the pursuer is anything but kindness, because it would not only lead to possible harm to the one being pursued, but it would also strengthen the pursuer in his wrongful behavior. Of course, many of the situations we find ourselves in each day are not so stark nor so critical. Most of our decisions do not involve immediate, life-threatening situations. Instead, they involve milder--and often murkier--circumstances in which the answers aren't so clear. And yet, the same principle applies. Despite the popular saying (which was itself intended to turn around a very negative phrase), we are not to be random in our acts of kindness, but definite and thoughtful. "Kindness," says Swedenborg, is "doing good things sensibly so that good will come from them" (_The Heavenly City_ #100). In other words, living a spiritual life--one filled with acts of charity and kindness--does not involve turning our brain off and being indiscriminately "nice" to everyone who crosses our path. It involves engaging our thinking minds, evaluating each situation we face, and making decisions--sometimes very difficult decisions--about which course of action is likely to lead to the most good in the long run for the people involved. When we are dealing with a difficult or destructive individual, this may mean practicing a "tough love" that the person will not appreciate at all, and that may be very painful for us, too. Yet if our ultimate goal is the person's long-term good, then taking the narrower road is practicing love toward our neighbor far more deeply and truly than simply going along with that person's destructive ways. Instead of supporting the person's evils, we are acting in such a way that the goodness in the person may ultimately be able to show itself. The teaching embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan that the goodness and love from God in another person is our neighbor can be a very challenging one. And yet, if we are willing to tune our ears to this deeper message within Jesus' well-known words, we will learn to truly love one another, deeply and wisely, just as the Lord loves us. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@mediaone.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Apr 14 20:51:25 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2002 16:51:25 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "A Cantankerous Dinner Guest," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020414164930.0277d690@mail.leewoof.net> A Cantankerous Dinner Guest By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, April 14, 2002 Readings: Exodus 24:9-12 The elders of Israel eat with God Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself. But God did not raise his hand against the leaders of the Israelites. They saw God, and they ate and drank. The Lord said to Moses, "Come up to me on the mountain and stay here, and I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction." Luke 11:37-54 Jesus eats dinner with a Pharisee When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee, noticing that Jesus did not first wash before the meal, was surprised. Then the Lord said to him, "Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But give what is inside to the poor, and everything will be clean for you. "Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone. "Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. "Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it." One of the lawyers answered him, "Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also." Jesus replied, "And you lawyers, woe to you also, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. "Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute.' Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all. "Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering." When Jesus left there, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say. Apocalypse Explained #695.6 Spiritual dinners To prepare a dinner or a supper and to invite people means the same as giving people something to eat and drink, or giving them bread and wine, namely, to do good to our neighbor and to teach what is true, and in this way to be bound together in love. However, if we do these things in order to be rewarded, we do not do them for the sake of goodness and truth, and so we do not do them from the Lord, but for the sake of ourselves and the world, and therefore from hell. But if we do them, not in order to be rewarded, but for their own sake, namely, for the sake of goodness and truth, we are acting from the Lord, who is the source of the goodness and truth in us. Sermon: When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. (Luke 11:37) Picture the scene. You have invited a visiting minister to dinner at your house. Everyone in the house washes their hands before dinner, but your honored guest simply sits down at the table--and you know he's been out in the streets among the crowds, where there are plenty of germs to pick up. You think it's strange that this supposedly enlightened person has skipped such an obvious step before eating. Doesn't he have better manners and sense than that? Perhaps this so-called "minister" isn't very enlightened after all. You semi-tactfully mention to him that perhaps it would be a good idea to go wash his hands. And you walk right into a hornet's nest! All of a sudden, this guy is pointing out all your faults--and doing it right in front of your family and the other guests you have invited to eat with this important personage. How embarrassing! And how rude! Who does this fellow think he is? And the worst part about it is that he's hitting much too close to home. Those things he's saying . . . nobody is supposed to notice them. And if they do, they're certainly not supposed to mention them. Doesn't he know how polite society works? Live and let live. After all, everyone cuts corners here and there. And the fact is, we do have to take care of ourselves first. Later on we'll get around to all that other stuff about justice and love. What fun would life be if we didn't live it up a bit, and enjoy the perks of our position? This guy is no fun at all. I though it would be a real coup, having him under my roof. Very prestigious. But it's become a real fiasco. Wait. I see that one of my other guests isn't pleased about all this, either--and he's telling the guy so. Now _he's_ getting ranked out, too! What a bust! We'll figure out afterwards how to take this cantankerous dinner guest down a peg or two. This, more or less, is the scene in our Gospel story. Now, I think I can speak for most of us in saying that if we were to invite someone to dinner, and that person proceeded to give us and our whole profession a severe dressing down, we would be very upset! And probably very angry as well. However, in this case, the cantankerous dinner guest is none other than Jesus Christ. And the story of that cantankerous dinner guest is found right in the Bible--which we are supposed to respect as holy. This puts us in a difficult position. Jesus was clearly engaging in rude and antisocial behavior. Yet we cannot simply dismiss him and his behavior without discarding core teachings of the Christian Church about the sacredness of the Word of God, and about looking to the life of Jesus Christ as the primary pattern for our own life. This is just the type of conundrum--just the type of paradox--that the Jesus of the Gospels seems to like throwing us into. It is a Zen koan. The obvious answer must be wrong. And there _is_ no obvious answer. This forces us (if we are willing to stay with the sacred text) to discard our familiar ways of thinking about things, and look deeper. In fact, the entire Gospel story--in fact, the entire Bible--is constructed by God specifically and masterfully to jar us out of our usual ways of thinking and acting, and set us on a new path. If the Bible all made sense to us immediately, it wouldn't be doing its job. So here we are, once again, faced with a Jesus who is acting in a manner that would deeply annoy and offend us if he were to act that way today, in our house. And let's grant that he _is_ acting that way today, in our house--or at least in the "house" of our minds. The Bible is not merely a story of some colorful characters who lived several thousands of years ago. It is God's word to us, today. And this story is talking to us, today. What is the message it is trying to get through to us? Of course, we would all like to identify with Jesus in the story. After all, we are the one whose life is so pure that we can point out the faults in others without a trace of hypocrisy, right? Well, I think every one of us has at least enough awareness of our own faults that we would not try to maintain this position. Jesus may have lived the perfect, sinless life, but which of us would claim to be doing the same? No, my friends, I'm afraid we are going to have to bite the bullet and admit that if there is anyone in the story that we must identify with, it is the Pharisees and lawyers whom Jesus is dressing down. Instead of being the perfect paragon of righteousness and love, we all, if we are honest, must admit that there are times when we don't practice what we preach. We bind heavy burdens on others, pointing out their faults and looking down on them because they aren't as good as we are, and yet we won't lift a finger to face some of those very same faults in ourselves. We live comfortably in our own minds, assuring ourselves that _we_ don't have the problems--it's those _other_ people who are all messed up. And so we spend more time complaining about how everyone and everything around us ought to change, while neglecting to work on the one person we _can_ change: ourselves. Now we're beginning to see more of the context of that rude display by the cantankerous dinner guest. The fact is, everything Jesus said and did was for a purpose. He had a job to do--and he didn't have much time to do it in. Thirty-three years to change the course of spiritual history for the entire world; for the entire universe. And just three years of public ministry to bring his message to the people of Palestine--that crossroads of the world--and through them to the rest of humanity. Three years. Three years to bring the message that the kingdom of God was at hand, and that people must repent--must change their ways in order to accept God's kingdom to avoid being destroyed by their own worldliness and selfishness. He couldn't afford to waste any time with irrelevant social niceties. There was critical work to be done. We get the sense that the dinner had barely begun when Jesus launched into his tirade against the Pharisees and lawyers. Didn't he know that it was considered essential by these people to wash one's hands before eating? Of course he did. He knew the customs of his people. Was he baiting them by not washing his hands? He very well may have been. He must have known that these scholars of legal minutiae would notice, and pounce on him, for not following their customs and laws. We get the sense that he intentionally set things up for a conflict. It would have been a simple matter to wash his hands before the meal--and all could have proceeded peacefully. But he didn't. And when the Pharisee, his host, expressed amazement at his flagrant violation of religious custom, he had a ready answer. He turned the tables on those social leaders who thought they were the most righteous of all, pointing out in sharply defined words and images just how far away they were from the kingdom of God that they claimed to own. What was he trying to accomplish? Didn't he know that these people would get angry at him? Didn't he know they would turn against him? That they would, in fact, crucify him precisely because of episodes such as these? Yes, he knew. He predicted well beforehand that the religious leadership would arrest and crucify him. He was under no illusions that his tough words would find fertile ground in their minds. And yet, he went ahead and spoke out anyway. Most of us, if we are faced with people who have power over us but who are acting in an unethical, immoral, and unspiritual way, will avoid confronting them about it. Whistle-blowers generally do not fare very well; and we have no interest in becoming the recipient of a modern day social and financial crucifixion. We take care to protect ourselves. But Jesus had a job to do, and nothing--not even the prospect of his own death at the hands of those he was sharing dinner with--would turn him away from doing his job. Jesus himself told us what that job was a number of times. One of the clearest was in his famous conversation with Pilate just before his crucifixion: "You are a king, then!" said Pilate. Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." (John 18:37) "For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth." Of course, when we are sworn in at the courtroom, we figure it is our job to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." Even the painful and embarrassing parts. But the rest of the time, we'd rather hold back in many situations where "politeness" requires that we _not_ tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Jesus, on the other hand, was "sworn in" for his entire life. He was spiritually pledged to God _always_ to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This was the very reason he came into the world. And so, when the Pharisee invited him to dinner, he did not see it as an occasion to hobnob with the better classes, enjoy a fine meal, and get feather in his cap. He saw it as another opportunity to testify to the truth. And if we believe he was who he said he was--the son of God, who was one with the Father--then we must believe that everything he said about his hosts at that dinner was the truth. He was not merely complaining and blowing off steam, as we often do. He was telling the simple, unvarnished truth. And in an odd sort of way, this showed more respect for his hosts, the Pharisees and lawyers, than the crowd of people who regularly sucked up to them and told them what they wanted to hear. When we tell people what they want to hear, we are generally doing it, not out of respect for them, but for what we hope to gain by currying their favor. We don't really respect or care about them--not about the deepest part of them: their inner self, their immortal soul. We care about keeping harmonious relations with them, so that our own life may go forward peacefully, without conflict, and perhaps with a bit of profit for ourselves. Jesus didn't care what these people could do for him. He had no regard whatsoever for the positions of social power and authority they could confer on him if he played their game. He had no interest in flattering them in order to curry their favor. Rather, he did them the favor of looking into their souls and telling them truthfully what he found there. He laid it all out for them, and then left it up to them how they would react. He gave them the respect of at least considering the possibility that they might be willing to look truthfully at themselves, and change their ways so that they would be headed to heaven instead of to hell. Most of them reacted with jealousy and anger. But we know that his strong words got through to at least a few of them. He did gain some followers from among the wealthy and influential classes. Nicodemus. Zacchaeus. Joseph of Arimathea. These three from the upper classes were among those who had their lives turned around through their encounters with Jesus. And if Jesus had gone along with their rules, these people would have gone to their graves still untouched by the grace of God; still heading for the hell of the hypocritical. How will _we_ hear Jesus' strong words? How will _we_ react when we read the Bible and find that it is pointing out all our faults? All our shortcomings? How will _we_ react when our religion and our God require us to repent, give up our faulty attitudes and addictions, our self-righteousness and destructive indulgences? Will we, like the bulk of the Pharisees and lawyers, oppose our Lord fiercely, arguing for our own righteousness? Looking for loopholes through which we can escape personal responsibility for our own behavior? Or will we allow those words to penetrate our soul, and root out the wrongs within us? Will we allow the Lord to turn _our_ lives around, so that we can gain spiritual life? Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Apr 28 23:30:27 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 19:30:27 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "A Day Late and a Dollar Short," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020428192919.0266ad60@mail.leewoof.net> A Day Late and a Dollar Short By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, April 28, 2002 Readings: Joshua 24:19-27 "You cannot serve the Lord" Joshua said to the people, "You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good." And the people said to Joshua, "No, we will serve the Lord!" Then Joshua said to the people, "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him." And they said, "We are witnesses." He said, "Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel." The people said to Joshua, "The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey." So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem. Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God; and he took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord. Joshua said to all the people, "See, this stone shall be a witness against us; for it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke to us; therefore it shall be a witness against you, if you deal falsely with your God." Luke 16:1-13 The parable of the shrewd manager Then Jesus said to his disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' "Then the manager said to himself, 'What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' "So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' "He answered, 'A hundred jars of olive oil.' "He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' "Then he asked another, 'And how much do you owe?' "He replied, 'A hundred bushels of wheat.' "He said to him, 'Take your bill and make it eighty.' "And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into eternal homes. "Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? "No servant can serve two masters; for a servant will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." Arcana Coelestia #9211 Taking credit for our actions When we do good things for the neighbor, it should come from the heart. We should believe that nothing we do from ourselves has any worth, but only what we do from the presence of the Lord within us. Only the Lord has worth, and only the Lord is righteous. When we believe this, we do not think we deserve any credit or reward for anything we do from ourselves; rather, we attribute everything good to the Lord. And since the Lord in his divine mercy is the one really doing the deeds, we attribute everything to pure mercy. When we are led by the Lord, the idea of reward doesn't even occur to us. And yet we still do good things for our neighbor, from the heart. Sermon: Summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, "How much do you owe my master?" He answered, "A hundred jars of olive oil." He said to him, "Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty." Then he asked another, "And how much do you owe?" He replied, "A hundred bushels of wheat." He said to him, "Take your bill and make it eighty." (Luke 16:5-7) Let's face it: there aren't any good guys in this parable--unless you count the whistle-blower who brought the manager's dishonesty to his master's attention in the first place. The manager was probably a slave or indentured servant of the master. Yet he was a trusted one, and the master had put the management of his property into his hands. Perhaps the master was an absentee landlord, as in another of Jesus' parables, and therefore did not know firsthand what his wrongly trusted servant was doing. Though it is not plainly stated in the parable that the manager was in fact, squandering his master's property, we can assume that he was based on his actions. Instead of defending himself, which would have made sense if he were innocent, he immediately went into damage control mode. He knew the jig was up: he had lost his job. So the question was, what to do next? Perhaps he was an older man, or perhaps as property manager he was used to taking it easy and letting others do the work; at any rate, he apparently did not have the physical strength to do manual labor for a living. And to beg in the streets would be demeaning for a slave of his stature. However, he hadn't been fired quite yet. He still had management of his master's books. So instead of preparing the accounting of his management that his master had demanded of him, he engaged in some creative accounting of his own. In collusion with his master's debtors, he cooked the books in their favor, so that they would not only be grateful to him, but would also be subject to blackmail should they not be quite grateful enough to provide him with room and board after his master had terminated his position. Clearly, this manager was a self-serving cheater, and nothing like a good guy. The debtors, for their part, were quite willing to engage in falsifying their creditor's books in their favor. So much for "honesty is the best policy." No good guys here. And what about the master? Apparently he found out very quickly what his manager had done. Did he take him to court and hand him over to the judge, and the judge to the officer so that he would be thrown into prison until he had paid the last penny? (Matthew 5:25, 26). No! Instead, he praised the manager for his shrewdness! Praised him for his clever, self-serving dishonesty! Apparently the slave was a character after his master's own heart. Which makes us wonder how the _master_ got rich. No good guys here, either. What can we make of this mess? How could Jesus tell us a parable filled with scoundrels, and then use it as the basis for several important lessons? First, the Bible is specifically constructed to break us out of our complacency. It _is_ possible to read the Bible without being shaken up and puzzled by it . . . . but only if we aren't paying attention--or are so used to the Bible stories that we no longer notice what they are really about. Sometimes reading them in a new translation helps us to get a fresh view of what the stories are really about. Once we do start paying attention, we find all kinds of things that, well, quite frankly, just don't make any sense, or seem downright wrong! We are taught that God is good, and yet the Bible often uses metaphors for God that are anything but good. What about God as a thief coming in the night? (Matthew 24:42-44; 1 Thessalonians 5:2; Revelation 3:3, Revelation 16:15). Last time I checked, thievery was against the law, and considered evil by every human society. Yet with this vivid imagery the Lord tells us to be on guard, and make sure we are living right, because he will come to us like a thief in the night--and if we aren't ready, we'll be in trouble! The obvious reference is to our death: we do not know when it is coming, so we need to live _today_ in such a way that we will be prepared for that final, spiritual accounting whenever it comes. But death is not the only time we come to an accounting. This parable is about those times in life when we come to a time of accounting while we are still very much alive and kicking. It is less scary than the metaphor of the thief in the night, because in this case, if we have wasted our lives, we still have a chance to do something about it. It reminds me of a time when I got a notice from my bank that a check had come in for which there were insufficient funds in my account. Most banks would have simply bounced the check. But mine called and said, "If you can get the funds into your account before the end of the business day, we'll negotiate this check instead of returning it." Now, truth be told, I had been neglecting to balance my checkbook each month. So when I made a mistake, I didn't catch it--and I had less money in my account than I thought I did. I drove to my bank (which is in another town) and made a deposit, and this time, I avoided the nuisance and embarrassment of a bounced check. In the parable, the manager has obviously been engaged in activities a lot worse than not balancing the checkbook. He has, in fact, been wasting his master's property, probably embezzling funds and living it up while his master's "checkbook" suffered. And now he has come to his day of accounting. Bounced checks aside, I suspect all of us have had this experience at least once in our lives. Perhaps it was when we were young, living it up as if we were immortal the way young people often do, taking excessive risks and burning our candle at both ends. And then something happened that brought us up short. Perhaps one of the buddies we were drinking with went out and got into an accident and was killed or severely injured. Perhaps one of our friends got pregnant and had her life turned upside down. Or perhaps we simply graduated from school and all of a sudden realized that Mom and Dad weren't supporting us anymore, and the fun was over! This "accounting" can also come farther along in life. The so-called "mid-life crisis" that many people go through in their late forties or early fifties can be seen as such an accounting. We reach a certain point in our lives, and suddenly say to ourselves, "What in the world have I been doing all this time?" And looking back on our lives, we realize that we really haven't been doing much. That we have been running on a treadmill and getting nowhere. If this is part of a spiritual awakening, we realize that we have been living entirely for ourselves and our own family, and have not done much of anything for anyone else--and especially not for the Lord. We realize that we have wasted the gifts God gave us. This is the accounting that the manager in the parable was facing. It had been fun while it lasted, but now he had to give an accounting of what he had been doing with his master's property. And one of the implicit lessons is that nothing we have is really ours. Everything we have is a gift from God, who created the universe and everything in it, and created each one of us, too. We can't claim credit for anything we have or anything we are. And yet, we have been treating the things of this world, and ourselves, too, as if it were all our personal property. Like the manager in the parable, we have taken what is our Master's, and have embezzled it for our own use--for our own pleasure and position. When all of this is hitting us like a ton of bricks, it is anything but pleasant. Let's face it: that manager was scared! He was about to lose his cushy position where he didn't have to worry about anything. And it was so obviously his own fault that he didn't even bother trying to mount a defense. Just as Joshua had said to the people of Israel thirteen hundred years before, when they were beginning their new life in the Promised Land, this manager knew that "he could not serve his lord." In the words of Joshua: "You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God." When we are in this position, we realize just how far away we are from serving the Lord as we are commanded to do in the Bible. And we feel terrible. We feel scared. We think there is no hope left for us. And we are tempted to give up. That is exactly where the story doesn't turn out the way it is "supposed to." In popular movies and novels, this is the point in the story where the bad guy gets his comeuppance. Either he gets shot dead in an exciting gun battle, or he gets nabbed by a daring constable or shrewd detective, to serve out the rest of his sorry life in a well-deserved prison cell. But that's not what God has in mind for us when we realize that we have misused our lives. Instead, the Lord, in the person of the master in the parable, asks us to give an accounting of our lives. The Lord asks us to look over our lives, and see if we have used well or badly the gift of life that he has given us. And when we do, to use the words of the parable, we realize that we have gotten ourselves into a position that we cannot dig ourselves out of, and where begging for mercy would be useless. We've messed things up badly, and now it is time to take the consequences. But wait! Maybe we can pull at least some shred of good out of this after all! We haven't been sentenced yet! We still have some time left! Hmm. Let's see what we can pull off. And so the shrewd manager gets busy. He goes to his master's debtors, and starts making deals with them. "You owe my master one hundred jars of oil? Quick, make it fifty! You owe my master one hundred bushels of wheat? Quick, make it eighty!" Let's use our last scrap of standing with the Master to try to bring at least some good out of this mess we're in, so that at least if we're rejected from the Lord's household, we'll have something to fall back on. After all, we've spent a lot of time and energy getting ourselves into this position, and it would be a shame to see it all go to waste. In fact, when we find ourselves in a position where we know we have been wrong, and where we know that no amount of arguing or begging is going to get us out of it, it is time to start figuring out what we can gain from what we have been doing all this time. The hopeful message of the parable is that even though it looks as if our lives so far have been wasted, and we will have to throw it all away, in fact we have built up a lot of knowledge and experience that will be useful to us now that we have turned over a new leaf, and turned our lives over to the Lord. The beautiful message of this parable is that the Lord never wants to condemn us, no matter how badly we have messed up our lives. The Lord is always looking for ways to bring good out of bad. And so, instead of condemning the shrewd manager, the master commended him for acting shrewdly--for having the will and the prudence to bring at least some good for himself out of the dishonest and unfaithful way that he had been living. As we look back over our lives and realize that we have not been living up to the standards of the Lord and the church, we can do the same. It may look like we have been merely running on a treadmill and getting nowhere. But in fact, we have built up knowledge, experience, and positions in this life that can be good and useful if, instead of wasting them on the continual pursuit of money, possessions, and personal pleasure, we instead turn them toward doing the work of the Lord. We do not have to give up our job, our possessions, our friends and family--unless they are dragging us down to a bad life. But the Lord does ask us to take everything we have acquired--our possessions, our knowledge, our positions in this world--and turn them toward doing the work of loving God and our neighbor instead of serving only ourselves. This is the meaning of "making friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth." Everything we have done so far is not wasted. We may be spiritually a day late and a dollar short. But once we decide to stop serving money and start serving God, even the dishonest, wasteful, and downright stupid and destructive things we have done become part of the experience on which we can build a new life dedicated to the work of the Lord. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From Reubenbell@aol.com Mon Apr 29 02:18:17 2002 From: Reubenbell@aol.com (Reubenbell@aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 22:18:17 EDT Subject: [Sermons] Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Message-ID: FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE Rev. Dr. Reuben P. Bell Swedenborg Chapel, Sudbury, MA April 28, 2002 "You formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139:13-14) There are psychologists who maintain that even as adults we carry a primordial memory of our earliest days - even those of our development in our mother's womb. I don't think we do, but I am not a psychologist; at least we could all agree that our ordinary, accessible memory does not reach back that far. Why? Partly because of what we read today in Psalm 139, a dialogue of King David with the Lord, "I was made in secret," he said, "when I was woven together in the depths of the earth." (139:15) That marvelous process, from which a single cell proliferates into a living, breathing, new person, is completely hidden from view. To King David the process was a total mystery. To Swedenborg the revelator, who as a scientist first had written a major treatise on embryology, much of it was known, from the very good science of his day. But much of it still remained a mystery. In this day, of powerful and elegant science - genetics, molecular biology, and chemistry - we have unraveled an astonishing portion of that mystery; but even now, many of the most basic principles of development still remain unknown.This we do know: You began as two cells (gametes) one from each parent, each carrying half of the DNA that you would need. These combined into one completezygote, a single cell with your identity locked up within it. This divided again and again until you were a solid ball of cells (morula), then more, until the ball was bigger and hollow (blastula). And then, as it grew and grew, and those cells began migrating as if each one knew when to move, and where to go, this tiny living mass elongated, with a front and a back, and a left and a right, and the rudiments of organs. This was the gastrula, the real beginning of a person in form, with a big head, limb buds, and a tail! And then you continued to grow, steadily and perceptibly, until you drew a breath, and joined the human race. You've probably seen the pictures of all the stages of this process, and a truly marvelous process it is; but with all the knowledge that modern Developmental Biology has brought to bear upon it, the more we know about it, the more we are inclined to feel not arrogant, but humble, as King David must have felt, in the face of such a mystery. David said to the Lord, "You formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well." (139:13-14) And the Lord said to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." (1:5) What can this mean? "Fearfully and wonderfully made," for sure, but did the Lord know you in the womb, as you were forming? Listen to this, from The Divine Wisdom n. 75: "THE LORD CONJOINS HIMSELF TO A PERSON IN THE MOTHER'S WOMB AS SOON AS CONCEPTION TAKES PLACE, AND FORMS HIM. Life, which proceeds from the Lord Himself is present from first conception and is what gives form. This is because in order to be the form of life which a human being is, and in order to be an image and likeness of God, which a person also is, and in order to be a recipient of love and wisdom, which are life from the Lord, thus a recipient of the Lord Himself, a person must be formed by life itself. The Lord teaches that if a person loves the Lord he is in the Lord and the Lord in him, and the Lord has His abode within him. All this work of preparation in the womb the Lord does for Himself. This is why Jehovah, who is the Lord, is called in the prophet Isaiah: Creator, Former, and Maker from the womb (Isaiah 43:1; 44:2, 24; 49:5)." Did the Lord know you in the womb, as you were forming? What does He tell us? In Matthew He says this, in no uncertain terms: "Surely, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Always. And everywhere, I think it is safe to say. "Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book, before one of them came to be." (Psalm 139:16) Yes, the Lord knew you in the womb, as you were forming. So after all this forming, this stepwise development, through all those stages, and shapes, what happens? You're born into the world. No mystery here, or is there? The physiological events of labor and delivery are no longer a mystery at all. That's called Obstetrics. It's an elegant series of events, but none of them really baffling any more; and if the doctor can just keep from interfering, the whole process pretty much drives itself. So where's the mystery? Not in the natural world at all; but in the spiritual events at work within the process. Where? Right there before us, yet hidden from view, outside the reach of our natural eyes. Once again we go to the Writings for information about spiritual development. What happens at birth but not before? We become fully human. In The Divine Wisdom (n. 82) we find that from the earliest beginnings, there are two receptacles in the developing embryo, one for the will and one for the understanding, and these flow in as Divine love and wisdom from the spiritual world, in combination, as the life force of creation. But, we're told, "nothing whatever of the will or of the understanding is present in the formation [of these receptacles]." Here's what it says: "A person's will and understanding do not begin until the lungs are opened, and this does not take place until after birth; then the will becomes the receptacle of love, and the understanding becomes the receptacle of wisdom. They do not become such receptacles until the lungs are opened, because the lungs correspond to the life of the understanding, and the heart corresponds to the life of the will, and without the cooperation of the understanding and will, the person has no life of his own, as there is no life apart from the cooperation of love and wisdom by means of which the embryo is formed and vivified. [Complete spiritual] life is not possible from the beating of the heart alone, but is only possible from the conjunction of this with the respiration of the lungs. There is life in the embryo before birth, but the embryo is not conscious of it." (n. 83) So as development proceeds, the receptacles for the Lord are prepared; but He is not fully present in His abode until the heart and lungs are conjoined in independent life. From the spiritual perspective, being born is not just the next stage; it is truly the beginning. So once we have emerged from the womb, and taken those first breaths, once our heart and lungs are working together in true correspondence with the spiritual influx of Divine love and wisdom, what next? Are we done? Not at all. An eternal lifetime of work lies ahead of us. It is obvious that a newborn isn't done; a baby would perish if left all alone. And Conjugial Love n. 134 says that humans, among all the animals, are born with no knowledge at all - blank slates. But it also says, "...they are born free of knowledge so they can gain all knowledge and move on to understanding it, and through this to wisdom. And they are born with no love so that they can achieve all love by using their skills intelligently, and so that they can achieve love for the Lord through loving their neighbor. This joins them to the Lord, which makes them become human and live forever." The sky's the limit! You, a human, can be educated all the way to heaven. And even the aging process, that we dread, and deny, and try so hard to conceal, is normal human development - it's in the genes. So development, both physical in this life, and spiritual, here and beyond, never ends. But what about our souls and spiritual bodies? How do they keep developing, as our eternal life unfolds? First of all, we learn a wonderful lesson in Heaven and Hell n. 414. In a description of the next life and how things work there, we are told that "to grow old in heaven is to grow young," and in The Divine Providence this is explained, by saying that "...all who have lived well, when they enter heaven, come into the state of early manhood they reached in the world and continue in it to eternity, even those who had been old and decrepit men in the world. Women, too, although they had been shrunken and old, return into the bloom and beauty of their youth." (DP 324) Think about that for a moment. What a wonderful thing to know... Our spiritual bodies, perfect as they are beneath the ravages of time and entropy on our natural bodies, are our real bodies, for eternity. I like that. But what about your soul? What did the Lord say to Nicodemus, who wanted to know about his prospects in the kingdom of heaven? He said "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Nicodemus didn't get it. His mind was stuck in the natural, just like you and me most days, and the idea of being "born again" made no sense. But Jesus was talking about his soul. "Most assuredly," He said to him, "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Now "water" in the Word always means truth in some form, and "Spirit" means Divine truth coming to us as the Divine Proceeding, from the Lord Himself through the heavens, into our rational minds. "Water and the Spirit": the things we humans were born to learn and use, to educate us all the way to heaven.Your soul has a form, imparted by the life that flowed into you as an embryo, establishing those receptacles we read about - making you a receiver of life and truth and love. And just as your body grew and changed and developed in complexity, so does your soul grow, and change, and develop, from an animal to an angel - but only if you so desire; only if you get the education and live the spiritual life. The textbooks for this education are ours: the Word with its genuine truths - "no-brainers" like the Ten Commandments, and the Parables from the Lord Himself, and His sermons and sayings throughout the New Testament; and those wonderful rational teachings of the New Revelation. Where do we learn of the soul's embryology? Go to the Arcana Coelestia, Volume I, Chapter 1, which explains, almost word-for-word the Genesis creation story. No longer just myth or cryptic ancient lore, what unfolds there is the stepwise process of the soul's creation, coming-into-being, and development, changing from "formless and void," to enlightened, to fruitful, and finally to heavenly. Here is the soul's development, laid out in pragmatic, recognizable stages of natural to spiritual to celestial life; it's a sermon for another day. And if you were to lay these teachings out, side by side with the biology of human development, all the way to its end, you would see that the processes are the same. And why not? There is only one reality, and that is heaven and its Creator in human form, flowing into and giving form to all that is natural. I urge you to read that part of the Arcana Coelestia. But beware: Things will never look the same again if you do. You were born with no knowledge so that you can "gain all knowledge and move on to understanding it, and through this to wisdom." (CL 134) Now it is permitted. You must be born again. Not to "enter a second time into [your] mother's womb and be born," as Nicodemus misunderstood it, but to go through that same process with your soul. And where is the womb of our souls? Right here, in your life on earth. That's where the process goes forward; that's where it happens. And here's the vitally important part: If it doesn't begin to happen here, it cannot happen at all. Those who become spiritual in this life can finish their spiritual embryology in the next. Those who do not will not. So what you do here counts: your education in the truths that lead to good, going forth together to take you to heaven. How would you explain it to Nicodemus, or to someone like him, who probably lives on your street, works in your office, who knows you from your school or your childrens' activities? Nicodemus was affirmative, and wanted to know, and he had the tremendous good fortune of running into the Lord Himself for his education. Those other people: they're yours to teach. How would you explain that they must be "born again"? Relax, it's simple: When your soul (which is your mind) begins to love the Lord, which means that it wants to do what He commands, and when it begins to love the stories from the Word for the truth in them, and when it begins to love the wonderful things in the Writings for the New Church because they are true and useful; and when this soul wants to do good things to people, and not to do bad things any more, then it is born again. Not done... just born. But once born, it can develop forevermore. The Lord does the work, just as life flowing into the embryo forms it and makes it grow, although it seems that we do it of ourselves. And when we are done, we will give thanks, just as King David did, saying to the Lord, "You formed my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." AMEN THE LESSONS Psalm 139:1-3, 13-16 1O LORD, You have searched me and known me. 2You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. 3You comprehend my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways. 13For You formed my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother's womb. 14I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. 15My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, When I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book, before one of them came to be. John 3:1-9 There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him." Jesus answered and said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, "You must be born again." The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit." The Divine Wisdom n. 84 THERE IS A LIKENESS AND ANALOGY BETWEEN THE FORMATION OF A HUMAN BEING IN THE WOMB AND HIS REFORMATION AND REGENERATION. A person's reformation is altogether similar to his formation in the womb, with this difference only, that for a person to be reformed he must have will and understanding, while in the womb he has no will and understanding; but this difference does not exclude the likeness and analogy. For when the Lord reforms and regenerates a person He leads his will and understanding in like manner. But through the will and through the understanding there is an appearance that the person himself leads himself, that is, wills and acts from himself, and thinks and speaks from himself; and yet he knows from the Word and from doctrine from the Word that it is not himself but the Lord, consequently that all this is only an appearance. In his reformation the two higher degrees of person's life are opened in him, and these were the dwelling-places of the Lord in his formation; also the lowest degree is reformed, which was inverted and reflected from birth. From this analogy and likeness it is clear that the person who is being regenerated is as it were conceived, formed, born, and educated anew, and this so that as to love he may become a likeness of the Lord, and as to wisdom an image of the Lord, and, if you are willing to believe it, the person is thereby made new, not alone in having a new will and a new understanding given to him, but even a new body for his spirit. The former things, indeed, are not erased, but are put aside so as not to appear, and through love and wisdom, which are the Lord, new things are formed in the regenerate person as in a womb; for such as the will and understanding of a person are, such is that person in each and all things. From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Wed May 8 19:02:32 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 15:02:32 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] Let not Your Heart be Troubled Message-ID: <200205081502_MC3-FCBF-ED56@compuserve.com> Let not Your Heart Be Troubled By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell May 5, 2002 "Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me." John 14:1 "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." John 14:27 We do indeed have troubled hearts during many seasons of our lives. Concerns large and small can well up in our thoughts. We can even be troubled by the idea that our lack of peace and happiness is a sign that we don't really believe in the Lord or trust in Him. Sometimes reading these words from the Lord, we can get the idea that a spiritually advanced person will feel peaceful at all times. But this is a mis-impression. When we can know, believe, even feel the Lord's presence and work in our lives, we will have strong underlying peace and happiness, but we don't live constantly in this state of mind. Perhaps you can think of a recent time when you've sensed something of this underlying peace and happiness coming from a recognition that the Lord was working with you and your loved ones. You can probably also think of a recent time when the Lord has seemed distant and relatively powerless in the face of the issues you see before you in your life or those of people near and dear to you. We can sometimes think of ourselves as being spiritually weak or having not traveled very far on our spiritual pathways if we have times when our faith is challenged or our heart is deeply troubled, but consider this example from the Lord's life in this world: Every temptation entails some kind of despair, or else it is not temptation; and for that reason comfort follows. A person who is being tempted is subjected to anxious fears which produce a state of despair over the end in view. The conflict brought about by temptation does not consist in anything else. One who is quite certain of victory does not experience any anxiety, nor thus any temptation. Since the Lord underwent the most dreadful and the cruelest temptations of all it was inevitable that He too should be driven into feelings of despair which He put to flight and overcame by His own power, as becomes quite clear from His temptation in Gethsemane, which is described . . . In Matthew, He began to be sorrowful and in agony. Then He said to the disciples, My soul is utterly dejected even to death. And He went forward a little and praying fell on His face, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will but as You will. Again, for the second time, He went away and prayed, saying, My Father, if this cup cannot pass from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done. And He prayed for the third time, saying the same thing. Matthew 26:36-44. In Mark, He began to be terrified and in great agony. He said to the disciples, My soul is wrapped in dejection, even to death. He went forward a little, fell on the ground, and prayed that if it were possible the hour might pass from Him. He said, Abba, Father, all things are possible to You; remove this cup from Me; yet not as I will but as You will. This happened a second and a third time. Mark 14:33-41. These quotations show the nature of the Lord's temptations - that they were the most frightful of all; that He suffered agony from the inmost parts of His being, even to the sweating of blood; that He was at the time in a state of despair over the end in view and over the outcome; and that He received comfort repeatedly. (Arcana Caelestia 1787) When the Lord calls to us and says, "Let not your heart be troubled" He is not speaking from a perspective that knows nothing of this state of mind and why it can come to pass. After His years of battling and conquering in every temptation, He could still be more deeply troubled in heart than we could ever imagine. One of the things that causes the troubles in our lives is how important the here and now tends to seem to us. What if, whenever you were troubled or concerned about an issue, a friend would always say to you, "How important will this issue be a hundred years from now?" Take the example of adult who at times mourns the fact that he or she isn't married and it doesn't appear likely that this person will ever be married. A hundred years from now such a person who has tried to live a good and useful life will, without fail, have been experiencing the happiness of a marriage "made in heaven" for years and years. We can know this is the case, but does it automatically end the sadness of the present. No, it doesn't. It seems that the Lord referred to this different perspective when He told His disciples, "You believe in God, believe also in Me." (John 14:1) Belief in God can be thought of as our best attempts to think from a perspective of eternity--such as, the thought of what life will be like a hundred years from now--but we do live in the here and now. Believing in the Lord's Divine Human can mean believing that He isn't just present in the long-term, but is also present in this very moment. He is working to bring us as much happiness and peace now as we can possibly receive. For those who can believe in His presence and work in the here and now, their eyes can be open to daily blessing large and small. These will not mean that there won't be sadness also over things that aren't what they should be, but it does mean that such people won't face each day as a long and dreary greyness of troubles and disappointments. The Lord spoke about the different sources of happiness that a person can seek when He said, "My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (John 14:27) The peace that "the world" gives never lasts and is always at risk. There can always be the desire for more and the fear of loss. These troubles are inspired by evil spirits that are present with our thinking, as described in the following passage from the Arcana Caelestia: I have also noticed another kind of influx which does not take place through the spirits present with a person but through others who are sent out from some community in hell to the sphere emanating from that person's life. They talk among themselves about the kinds of things that are unacceptable to the person, which results generally in a flowing into him of what is in many different ways troublesome, unpleasant, dejecting, and worrying. Such spirits have often been present with me, when I have experienced in the province of my stomach those who poured in feelings of anxiety - not that I knew where the feelings came from. Yet on every occasion I found out who they were, and then I heard them talking to one another about the kinds of things that were unacceptable to my affections. Avaricious spirits in the same region have sometimes been visible, though in a slightly higher position; they have poured in the kind of anxiety that results from concern for the future. I have also been allowed to rebuke those spirits and to tell them that they correlate with undigested food in the stomach which produces bad breath and so is nauseating. I have also seen them being driven away; and once they were driven away, anxiety completely disappeared. I have had this experience a number of times so that I could be quite certain that those spirits were the source of the trouble. This is the kind of influx that takes place among those who for no good reason are anxious and depressed, and also among those who are undergoing spiritual temptation. During temptation however there is not only a general influx of such spirits but also a particular stirring up by spirits from hell of the evils the person has put into practice. 'Those spirits also pervert and put a wrong interpretation on the forms of good that the angels use to fight with in temptation. A state such as this is what the person who is being regenerated enters by being let down into what is wholly his own. And this happens when he immerses himself too much in worldly and bodily interests and needs to be raised toward spiritual ones. (Arcana Caelestia 6202) Likewise we are told in another passage of the Arcana Caelestia of spirits who love to trouble us. [There are] in the spiritual world . . . spirits who hold on tenaciously to their point of view and also spirits who take a conscientious stand on issues that are not vitally important . . . [T]heir nature is such that they make meticulous enquiries into matters into which no such enquiries at all ought to be made. Consequently, because they burden the consciences of simple people they are called 'the conscientious ones'. Yet they have no knowledge of what true conscience is, because they make all issues into matters of conscience. For if a thing is subjected to minute questioning or to doubt and the mind is anxiously fixed on such, ideas supporting this attitude and weighing the mind down are never absent. When such spirits are present they also bring a feeling of anxiety that registers in the part of the abdomen located immediately beneath the diaphragm. They are also present with a person during temptations. I have talked to them and have noticed that their thoughts do not extend to any concern for matters that have greater purpose or that are vitally important. They were incapable of paying any attention to reasons offered to them because they persisted in holding on tenaciously to their own opinion. (Arcana Caelestia 5386) The Lord has given us many such clear and direct examples of spiritual influence in the Writings of the New Church because He wants us to recognize the reality and impact of their presence in our lives. Consider the implications of the following passage about the perspective that the Lord would lead us to have on our own thoughts and motivations: If a person were to believe as things really are, which is that everything good and true comes from the Lord and everything evil and false from hell, he could not have been found guilty of any offence or had evil ascribed to himself. But because he believes that it begins in himself he takes evil as his own; for his belief causes this to happen. Thus evil clings and cannot be separated from him. Indeed the person's nature is such that he would be indignant if anyone told him that his thoughts and desires came from others and did not begin in himself. (Arcana Caelestia 6324) The Lord calls us to be led by Him. He calls us to turn to Him for help and for guidance. He knows that we will have to work at this. The Lord has promised us that coming to a real faith in Him will take battles against the natural perspectives that catch our attention and lead us to crave worldly indications that we and our loved ones are okay and will be well in the continuing future. He wants to bring us a peace that is deep and powerful. This peace is described in the following words: Peace holds within itself trust in the Lord, the trust that He governs all things and provides all things, and that He leads toward an end that is good. When a person believes these things about Him he is at peace, since he fears nothing and no anxiety about things to come disturbs him. How far a person attains this state depends on how far he attains love to the Lord. Everything bad, especially trust in self, takes away the state of peace. People think that someone bad is at peace when he is calm and cheerful because everything is going right for him. But this is not peace, it is the calm and delight belonging to evil desires that merely simulates the state of peace. This delight, being the opposite of the delight belonging to peace, turns to undelight in the next life, for that is what lies hidden within it. In the next life outward things are rolled away one layer after another through to inmost things at the center. Peace is at the center of all delight, even of the undelight of a person governed by good. So far therefore as he casts off what is external the state of peace is revealed and he is filled with bliss, blessedness, and happiness, the source of which is the Lord Himself. (Arcana Caelestia 8455) The Lord knows that there will be times in this world when our minds are troubled. He does not dismiss these times as mere mortal weakness. He knows that they are part of our necessary pathway to heaven. He will be with us at each step of this pathway and yet He knows that we will not sense this presence, just as He felt distant from the Infinite God when He underwent His temptations in the world. But even within these times He is very near and powerfully working within our lives. May we seek a faith in His loving care. May we pray for His healing during times when our hearts are troubled. AMEN. Lessons: Psalm 46 John 14:1-3, 27 Apocalypse Explained 365:6-7 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. Jesus said, Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid (John 14:27). This verse reflects the Lord's close relationship of love with those who think true ideas from the good motivations in their mind; therefore "peace" means tranquility of mind from that relationship; and as such are protected by that relationship from the evils and falsities that are from hell, for the Lord protects those who have such a relationship with Him, therefore He says, "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." This Divine peace is in a person, and because heaven is with it, "peace" here also means heaven and in the highest sense, the Lord. But the peace of the world is from successes in the world, therefore from a person's relationship with the world, and because this is only external and the Lord, and consequently heaven are not in it, it perishes with the life of a person in the world and is turned into what is not peace; therefore the Lord says, "My peace I give unto you; not as the world gives do I give to you." Similarly: Jesus said, These things I have spoken to you that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have affliction; but have confidence I have overcome the world (John 16:33). Here, too, "peace" means internal delight from a close relationship with the Lord, from which come heaven and eternal joy. "Peace" is here opposed to "affliction," because "affliction" means being infested by evil loves and false ideas, which those have who are in Divine peace so long as they live in the world; for the flesh, which they encompasses them, craves after the things of the world, from which comes affliction. Apocalypse Explained 365:6-7 From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun May 12 18:05:43 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 14:05:43 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020512140403.026e37c0@mail.leewoof.net> The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, May 12, 2002 Readings: Zechariah 6:1-7: Four chariots and their horses I looked up and I saw four chariots coming out from between two mountains--mountains of bronze. The first chariot had red horses, the second chariot black horses, the third chariot white horses, and the fourth chariot dappled gray horses. Then I said to the angel who talked with me, "What are these, my Lord?" The angel answered me, "These are the four winds of heaven going out, after presenting themselves before the Lord of all the earth. The chariot with the black horses goes toward the north country, the white ones go after them, and the dappled ones go toward the south country. When the steeds came out, they were impatient to get off and patrol the earth. And he said, "Go, patrol the earth." So they patrolled the earth. Revelation 6:1-7: The four horsemen I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest. When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, "Come!" Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword. When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a penny, and three quarts of barley for a penny, and do not damage the oil and the wine!" When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. The White Horse #7: Understanding the Word of God Only people who are enlightened understand the Bible. Our human rational ability cannot comprehend divine, nor even spiritual things, unless we are enlightened by the Lord. Because of this, we understand the Bible only when we are enlightened. When we are enlightened, the Lord gives us the ability to understand truth, and to comprehend the things that seem to contradict each other. The Bible in its literal sense does appear inconsistent, and in some places seems to contradict itself. Because of this, people who are not enlightened may explain and apply it in such a way as to confirm any opinion or heresy, and to defend any worldly and physical desire. When we read the Bible from the love of truth and goodness, we are enlightened from it, but not when we read it from a love of fame, profit, or reputation--meaning from selfish love. We are enlightened when we are actively engaged in a good life, and through this in a love for truth. We are enlightened when our inner self is open, so that our inner person can be lifted into the light of heaven. Enlightenment involves an actual opening of deeper parts of our mind, and being lifted into the light of heaven. Sermon: I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest. (Revelation 6:1, 2) For thirty years now, there has been a highly popular job hunting guide in print, updated yearly by its author, Richard Nelson Bolles. The author's formula for finding a fulfilling career is built around two fundamental questions: What do you want to do? Where do you want to do it? Having sold upwards of four million copies, it has certainly helped at least hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of people find fulfilling careers. The book's title: _What Color Is Your Parachute?_ I don't expect this sermon to have anywhere near the reach or impact of that book. However, there is a book that has had a far deeper impact on not just millions, but billions of people. That book, of course, is the Bible--which we regard as the Word of God. The Bible has outsold all other books since it was first printed in Germany around 1455 by a man named Johannes Gutenberg with his brand new high tech printing press that used movable metal type. Ever since the Bible completed the journey from hand-copied scrolls to printed books, it has been kept in print not merely three decades, but nearly five and a half centuries. And though my question for you today, based on the book of Revelation, is not nearly as catchy as the title of the popular career guide, your answer will affect not only your career here on earth, but your eternal career. The question is: What color is your horse? Our reading from Revelation gives four choices: you can have a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, or a pale horse. To understand the symbolism of these horses, and what they mean for us, let's look at the context. First, these horses appear one by one as the first four of seven seals are opened up. Those seals are on a scroll held in the hands of the Lord God, who sits on a great throne in heaven. Though we are used to books with pages and bindings, in the ancient world scrolls were a much more common form for books. The sacred scriptures of the ancient Jews were written on scrolls. In their synagogues from that time right up to the present there is kept, with great veneration, a scroll containing the Torah, or Law, which consists of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It's fairly obvious, then, that the scroll held in the hand of God is none other than the Word of God. And as the seals on this scroll are opened, out come four horses of four different colors. So we can figure that these horses have something to do with God's Word, which we commonly call the Bible. However, we don't have to guess at this connection. It is made explicit later on in the book of Revelation: I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and _his name is the Word of God_ The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of kings and Lord of lords. (Revelation 19:11-16. Emphasis mine.) Here we are told plainly that the rider on the horse is the Word of God. A literal translation of a verse from the Psalms suggests that the horse itself is also related to the Word of God: Gird your sword upon your thigh, O mighty one, in your glory and majesty. In your majesty ride on victoriously upon the word of truth and the meekness of righteousness. (Psalm 45:3, 4) Here the mighty one, namely, the Lord, is riding "upon the word of truth." And how could we picture this other than as riding on a great and powerful horse? To be more specific, Swedenborg interprets the image of the horse in the Bible as symbolizing our _understanding_ of the Word of God. It helps us to grasp this symbolism if we remember that motorized vehicles did not exist in Biblical time. Horses, and horse-drawn chariots and wagons, were the fastest and most sophisticated means of travel. And how do we travel in our minds and spirits? We travel in our thoughts to various destinations. Even while you are sitting right here in church, I suspect some of your minds are traveling to your mother's day dinners, and beyond! We ride upon our horse of spiritual understanding when we guide our thoughts to various destinations based on our views of what God is teaching us in the Bible. And wherever our thoughts go, sooner or later that is where our lives will go as well. So it is fairly easy to see that a horse, in the Bible, represents how we view the Bible--how we understand the Word of God. With this in mind, I ask again: What color is your horse? You can have a white one, a red one, a black one, or a pale one. In our story from Revelation, white is clearly the most desirable color for your horse: I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest. In compact language, the white horse symbolizes "people who are engaged in truth from goodness" (_Apocalypse Revealed_ #295, under "The Spiritual Sense"). In other words, we are riding on the white horse when we read the Bible--God's Word--in order to understand spiritual truth so that we can use it in doing good other people according to the Lord's commandment that we should "love one another as he has loved us" (John 13:34). When we wish to understand God's truth in order to correct our own faults and live good lives of love and service toward others, then we metaphorically have a bow in our hands, and are given a crown, and we ride forth into life as a conqueror bent on conquest. The bow in our hands is a solid rationale for understanding and using the teachings of the Bible. This is important, because as Swedenborg says in our reading from his little book on _The White Horse,_ if we are more interested in our own righteousness and glory than we are in being taught by the Lord, we can draw all kinds of contradictory meanings from the literal meaning of the Bible, and support any false dogma that happens to support our own desires. Only with a true framework for understanding can we gain genuine truth from the Bible. And we develop that true framework for understanding when we go to the Bible not to support our own pet theories and doctrines, but to see what the Lord wants to teach us that will help us be better, more thoughtful, and more loving people. When we do this, we have a bow in our hands that is a genuine understanding of the Bible's teachings, which we can use to fight off all sorts of false and damaging attitudes and beliefs that would tear us down and reduce us to mental and emotional slavery to various addictive habits and bad ways of living. And further, we are given a crown, the sign of royalty, symbolizing the victories that we gain over our faulty attitudes and wrong ways of living when we go to God's Word in order to learn and follow what God wants to teach us. Spiritually, we "ride out as a conqueror bent on conquest." Not conquest and domination of others, but conquest over our own inner enemies: the enemies of false thinking and wrong desires. That is the white horse. Next comes the red horse, which is described this way: When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, "Come!" Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword. In a good sense, fiery red is the color of love. But the rider of this red horse takes peace from the earth, and makes people kill each other. So instead of representing love, in this context red symbolizes the fires of selfishness and hatred that take away our peace, and cause us to burn with jealousy and anger toward others. We ride a red horse when we go to the Bible, not to learn how to love one another, but to support and justify our own wrong desires so that we can keep on living selfishly and materialistically, pretending that it is the will of God. We can see this sort of red horse in action when we read news stories of corrupt priests and televangelists who justify their highly destructive behavior by claiming that they are under the cover of God's grace or of the sacraments of the church. And we do it ourselves when we use our religious knowledge, not to correct ourselves, but to justify behavior that we know is contrary to the will of God. The black horse comes next: When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a penny, and three quarts of barley for a penny, and do not damage the oil and the wine!" Black is the color of darkness. Though it can be useful in providing contrast so that we see the white of true understanding better, in itself black is the absence of knowledge and understanding. It is the darkness of mind when we are plunged into ignorance and false thinking. We ride the black horse when we have no interest in understanding spiritual truth, but would prefer to argue based on materialistic ideas and a superficial understanding of the Bible. Notice that a voice is heard bargaining about the price of wheat and barley--just as we prefer to debate and argue about the truth when we have no interest in actually following it. Any parent has this experience when their children do not want to do what they are being asked to do. Speaking for my own children, they are masterful lawyers when it comes to avoiding cleaning up their messes or going to bed! We become masterful religious lawyers, too, when we don't want to hear and follow what God is telling us to do. And then we are riding on the black horse. The pale horse is the worst of all: When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. The red horse symbolizes our understanding of the Bible when we have no good in mind; the black horse when we would rather argue about the truth than follow it. The pale horse is when both of these are together in the worst way: it is when we desire neither to do good nor to understand the truth, but have wholly given ourselves over to our own self-centered and destructive ways. This is spiritual death, and "Hades," or the underworld of darkness, follows in our wake when we are riding the horse of spiritual death. When we are on this horse, we bring upon ourselves the inner death of spiritual famine and plague, letting our destructive cravings run wild like "the wild beasts of the earth." The Lord sets before us these four choices: the white horse of reading God's Word from a desire for love and goodness; the red horse of reading it to justify wrong behavior; the black horse of reading it in order to debate and argue about the truth; and the pale horse of abandoning ourselves to selfish and materialistic living. What color is your horse? ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun May 19 22:28:14 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 18:28:14 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "The Prayers of the Saints," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020519182705.0233b008@mail.leewoof.net> The Prayers of the Saints By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, May 19, 2002 Readings: Psalm 65:1-8: A Psalm of praise and prayer Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; To you our vows will be fulfilled. O you who hear prayer, To you all people will come. When we were overwhelmed by sins, You forgave our transgressions. Blessed are those you choose And bring near to live in your courts! We are filled with the good things of your house, Of your holy temple. You answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness, O God our Savior, The hope of all the ends of the earth And of the farthest seas, Who formed the mountains by your power, Having armed yourself with strength, Who stilled the roaring of the seas, The roaring of their waves, And the turmoil of the nations. Those living far away fear your wonders; Where morning dawns and evening fades You call forth songs of joy. Revelation 8:1-5: The opening of the seventh seal When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel's hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake. Apocalypse Revealed #278: "The prayers of the saints" "The prayers of saints," means insights of faith that come from the love of kindness in people who worship the Lord from spiritual goodness and truth. "Prayers" mean different aspects of faith together with kindness in people who pour forth prayers, because without faith and kindness, prayers are not prayers, but meaningless noises. "Saints" mean those who are involved in spiritual goodness and truth. Sermon: Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel's hand (Revelation 8:3, 4) The chapters suggested in the Dole _Bible Study Notes_ for today's lesson cover the opening of the seventh and last seal that had closed up the scroll in the hand of God, leading to seven trumpets being sounded in succession. After each trumpet, there is one or another variety of disaster, destruction, and death: hail and fire mixed with blood; a blazing mountain thrown into the sea; a star named Wormwood falling from the sky; a third of the sun, moon, and stars turning dark, and so on. Now, I dutifully read through Revelation chapters eight and nine, plowing through all that death and destruction. But as those of you who attend the Wednesday evening Bible studies know, just a few weeks ago we finished going through the entire book of Revelation. And quite frankly, I've had enough death and destruction to last for a while! So today you can relax. I'm not going to preach about death and destruction. Fortunately, throughout the book of Revelation, in the midst of all the darkness, there are bits of light shining through. Chapter 7 is an interlude of peace and worship after the opening of the first six seals. And at the beginning of chapter eight, after the seventh seal has been opened but before the trumpets begin to sound, we also have a brief interlude of peace and of prayer. My soul, hungry for something more hopeful and uplifting, latched onto verses three and four--especially the memorable phrase, "the prayers of the saints." So this morning, instead of talking about death and destruction, I'd like to offer some thoughts on one of the ways we can _avoid_ spiritual death and destruction, namely, genuine prayer. But first, let's talk about who these "saints" are--since this turns out to be essential to understanding what real prayer is, also. For our brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church, "saints" has a specific meaning: a holy man or woman of history elevated to the status of saint by the church in recognition of his or her highly spiritual life. Many Catholics even pray to the saints--though they're apparently supposed to pray _with_ them, and ask the saints to pray _for_ them. Perhaps they believe that God is too busy to hear all of our prayers--and besides, the argument goes, our prayers will have more pull with God if someone important, like a saint, brings them to God's attention instead of little old me. Friends in high places, you know. However, the Bible is very clear about where our worship and prayers should be directed. Twice in the book of Revelation (19:10 and 22:8, 9), John falls at the feet of an angel to worship him. Both times, the angel stops him, saying, "Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God! (Revelation 22:9). The angel makes it clear that our prayers should not be directed to any human being, saint, or angel, but only to God. Further, at the time the book of Revelation was written, the Catholic Church didn't exist yet, and the formal process of canonization was still many centuries in the future. So the "saints" mentioned here could not possibly refer to the saints of Catholicism. Who are the "saints," then? Swedenborg gives a simple and very useful definition: "'Saints' mean those who are involved in spiritual goodness and truth." In other words, saints are people who devote themselves to the way of the Lord by following the Lord's truth from a desire to be good and loving to others. This definition harmonizes very well with the way the word "saint" is used in the Bible. If you look it up in a Bible concordance, you will find that it is used, not just for people who have died, but for good people in God's congregation right here on earth. And you won't find any complicated legal process of canonization! What does this mean? This means that you and I are saints when we are listening to God's truth and living according to it. It means that everyone who does this, of whatever faith or creed, is a saint. And we don't have to do miracles in order to achieve that status! We simply have to devote ourselves to the ways of the Lord. Now we can begin to understand why it was "the prayers of the saints" that went up to God together with the smoke of the incense from the golden censer of the angel. And we can gain greater insight into when our prayers will work, and when they will not. Here's the short version: our prayers work only if they come from genuine spiritual love in our hearts, and a real desire to live good lives of loving God and showing kindness to our neighbors here on earth. Let's let Swedenborg explain the situation: Worship does not consist in prayers and in outward piety, but in a life of kindness. Prayers are only its outward expressions, since they come out of us through our mouth. So our prayers have the same quality as our lives. It does not matter whether we act humble, kneel, and sigh when he pray. These are external things, and unless they come from inner realities they are only gestures and sounds without life. In everything we say there is love. All people, spirits, and angels are their own loves; for our love is our life. It is the love itself that speaks, and not the person without it. Therefore our prayer has the same quality as our love. Spiritual love is kindness towards our neighbor. To be involved in that love is true worship; praying is what comes from it. We can see from this that the essence of worship is a life of kindness, and that praying is a tool and an expression of worship. In other words, the primary way that we worship is through a life of kindness, while prayer is a secondary form of worship. So we can see that people who place all divine worship in verbal piety, and not in practical piety, are greatly mistaken. (_Apocalypse Explained_ # 325.3) Or, putting it more simply, he writes: True worship of God is unknown to those who think that all worship consists in acts of adoration and prayer, and thus in speaking and thinking, and not in actions flowing from the good of kindness and of faith. Yet the reality is that when we offer adoration and prayer, the Lord pays attention only to what is in our heart--that is, to what we are like inwardly as to love and the faith that comes from it. (_Arcana Coelestia_ #10143.5) What it all boils down to is that our prayers make a difference only when we live as if we mean them. It is summed up nicely in the saying, "Pray to God but row away from the rocks." God does not listen to our prayers if we have no love and kindness in our hearts and do not make the effort to actually live by what we have prayed for. Prayer without the inner attitude of faith, love, and kindness that true prayer comes from is just meaningless babble. God is not so vain as to enjoy our praise and flattery for its own sake. God enjoys our prayers and listens to them when they come from a humble heart and a willingness to live according to the teachings of the Bible. And the most fundamental teaching of the Bible is that we love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:28-31). In our reading from Revelation, the difference between prayer offered by a saint and by a sinner is symbolized by the different effects of the prayers. The prayers of the saints (those who live in faith and kindness) rise up to God with the smoke from the angel's censer. But when the angel takes that very same censer, with the very same fire from the altar of God, and hurls it down to the earth, instead of the sweet smell of incense ascending up to God there come "peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake." In this context, the earth--as compared to heaven where the angel is standing--represents our lives when we have devoted ourselves to earthly and material things rather than to spiritual things. If we are more interested in our own power, pleasure, and possessions than we are in loving God and showing kindness to our neighbors, then our prayers have no good effect. In fact, God doesn't even listen to them, because as God said to Samuel, "the Lord does not see as mortal see; they look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). When we pray, the Lord looks at what is in our heart, and not at what comes out of our mouth except as it reflects what is in our heart. If our heart is not dedicated to God and the neighbor, but instead is dedicated to our own pleasure, then prayer does very little good. In fact, it will probably bring us into conflict with God instead of bringing us closer to God. Our prayers come from our heart. And if our heart is selfish, we will pray mostly for things for ourselves. Very often, those things will be exactly the opposite of what God wants for us. So God won't answer those prayers. Or to be more accurate, God will answer those prayers by saying no. When we realize that God is not answering our prayers the way we want them answered, we are likely to get angry at God, and even to deny God's existence. Our anger and our arguments against God are symbolized by the peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and earthquake. What does all this mean? It means that true prayer and true worship are not words and gestures, but a life devoted to the ways of God. Ritual and prayer are important and helpful, but definitely secondary to living according to God's commandments--especially the commandment to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). In fact, coming to church and saying our prayers have meaning only if they are an expression of our heart's devotion to loving the Lord and loving our neighbor. If we do have that devotion to love and truth in our hearts and minds, then prayer becomes a wonderful way of talking with God, and also listening for God's answer. Because prayer is truly a conversation, just as real as when we talk with one another. Perhaps God does not talk to us in words that we can hear with our ears; but God does speak with us from within, if we are truly listening. How does God answer us? I'll let Swedenborg have the last word. In one of his best-loved statements about prayer, he writes: Prayer, regarded in itself, is talking to God, and at the same time some inner view of the things we are praying for. Answering to this there is something like an inflow into the intuition or thought of our mind, which brings about a certain opening of our inner self toward God. But this experience varies according to our state of mind, and according to the essence of what we are praying for. If our prayer comes from love and faith, and we are praying about and for only heavenly and spiritual things, then there is something like a revelation present within our prayer, which shows itself in our feelings in the form of hope, comfort, or an inward joy. (_Arcana Coelestia_ #2535) ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Jun 2 21:15:51 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2002 17:15:51 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "The River of Life," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020602171051.0380c670@mail.leewoof.net> Dear Sermon Service subscribers, As you'll read in the sermon below, this was the last Sunday of the regular church year in Bridgewater. Though we will continue to hold services, I do not write out my sermons during the summer. Therefore, this will be the last sermon until the next church year starts in September. I hope you have enjoyed the sermons this year, and I look forward to sharing them with you again in the fall. Meanwhile, I invite you to visit my web page at www.leewoof.org, where you will find all of the sermons I have written since I was ordained in 1996. Have a wonderful summer! Blessings and love, --Lee ------------------------- The River of Life By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, June 2, 2002 Readings: Genesis 2:10-14: The river watering Eden A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. Revelation 22:1-7: The river of life flowing from God Then the angel showed me the pure river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign forever and ever. The angel said to me, "These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place." "Behold, I am coming soon! Blessed are those who keep the words of the prophecy in this book." Apocalypse Revealed #932: The symbolism of the river of life "And he showed me a pure river of water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb." This symbolizes Revelation now opened and explained in its spiritual meaning, where the Lord reveals abundant divine truth for those who will be in his new church, which is the New Jerusalem. "The pure river of water of life, as clear as crystal" symbolizes the divine truth of the Bible in abundance, translucent from its spiritual sense, which is in the light of heaven. Sermon: Then the angel showed me the pure river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1, 2) Here we are at the end of another church year. It doesn't seem so long ago that we were at the very beginning of the Bible, studying the creation story in Genesis. And now we are at the very end of the Bible, in the last chapter of the last book: Revelation. This book has been mysterious and perplexing throughout the nearly two thousand years since it was first written. There have been many attempts to explain its symbolism. And the mere fact that its language is so obviously symbolic has helped to keep alive the idea that there are deeper meanings in the Bible through a very literalistic period of our spiritual history. Today, the reigning view throughout most of Christendom is that the primary meaning in the Bible is the plain meaning of the words--what we Swedenborgians call the "literal sense." Many people on the conservative end of the Christian spectrum even go so far as to flatly deny that there is any deeper, spiritual meaning in the Word of God. They insist that the Bible is literally true as it stands, and must be read and believed in literally. Yet even they have a hard time maintaining this hard-line literalist stance in the face of many of the symbolic images used in the book of Revelation--as I have discovered in various conversations with evangelical Christians. What they probably do not realize is that this literalistic view of Scripture is a relatively late arrival on the Christian scene. Throughout most of the history of Christianity, up to the time of the Protestant Reformation, it was simply assumed that there were deeper, spiritual meanings in the Bible. The question was not whether such meanings existed, but how to get at them. And the arguments were over various different interpretations put forward by various Christian teachers. The problem was that no one came up with a consistent and convincing method of interpretation to arrive at the spiritual meaning of the Bible. Also, the idea of allegorical meanings different from the literal meaning became increasingly abused by some theologians to justify certain Catholic doctrines and practices that the Protestant reformers came to see as contrary to genuine Christian faith and life. Unfortunately, in seeking to purify the church from these wrongs, the Reformation theologians threw the baby out with the bathwater, altogether rejecting the idea of spiritual meanings in the Bible. The current literalism that exists in a large segment of the Christian Church is the result of this over-reaction to the misuse of symbolic interpretation of the Scriptures. And though the literalists claim that theirs is the only true way to read the Bible, it developed as a serious alternative to spiritual interpretations only in the last five hundred years of Christianity's two thousand year history. In other words, Biblical literalism has no historical claim to being the original and true way of interpreting the Bible. Just the opposite. In reviving the belief that the Bible has a spiritual meaning, Emanuel Swedenborg was simply returning the Bible to its original high status as a book that reaches up to God through many levels of meaning. What Swedenborg added that had been missing throughout all the centuries of Christianity was a consistent, reasonable, and universal means of interpreting the Bible to arrive at its deeper meanings. Swedenborg's interpretations of Scripture--and of the world of nature as well--rest on a system of symbolism that he called "correspondences." Rather than being arbitrary and based on guesswork, as previous methods of Bible interpretation had been, Swedenborg taught that these correspondences were based on a living relationship between the physical and the spiritual worlds, and between the spiritual world and God. The universe, he said, is an expression of the nature of God, and every single thing in it expresses some particular attribute or aspect of God. So when we look out at the world of nature, we are looking at a physical manifestation of the Creator. Correspondences are the key that unlock the relationship between the physical world and the spiritual world, and enable us to see what each thing in the physical world says about its Creator. If this is true of the world of nature that God has created, how much more must it be true of the Word of God! Every Christian recognizes that the Bible is where God tells us who he is and what he is like. Swedenborg simply brings this belief to its logical conclusion, stating that every chapter, every verse, every word of Scripture, in its spiritual meaning, reveals something specific about the nature of God. We no longer have to grope in the dark to understand why the Bible contains all those wars, strange rituals of animal sacrifice, mysterious prophecies, and many seemingly irrelevant stories. All yield to us deeper meanings that are spiritual, personal, and practical at the same time. This very knowledge of the deeper meanings of Scripture is, Swedenborg says, "the pure river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God." We are living in the times described by the book of Revelation. The battles that take place in that book are not literal battles, but spiritual ones. The entire vision was seen by John not in the material world, but in the spiritual world. And the battles of truth versus falsity, good versus evil are going on all around us in the world today. Materialism is battling against spiritual values--which, in turn, are defending God and spirit against the onslaught of materialism and secularism, seeking to lift humanity up to a higher level. Good and evil are also battling it out within the very walls of the Christian Church. Our news media gives us continual revelations of evil and destructive practices in various branches of the Christian Church. Evils that had in some cases been going on for centuries, the knowledge of which was suppressed or denied by the church, are now coming out into the light of day. And the battles to overcome those evils are taking place in the courtroom as well as in the organization of the church. Yet in the midst of all the conflict and turmoil of our times, something beautiful and clear is flowing. Whether we realize it or not, the river of life is already flowing from the throne of God into our world. In fact, the river of clear, spiritual understanding and truth that is flowing more and more strongly into our world is the underlying source of our society's ability to penetrate more and more deeply into the true nature of humanity and all its institutions, exposing ancient evils so that they can be faced and overcome. We can fight against and overcome the evils of humanity only when we see them. And though the evening news may seem depressing with its continual litany of conflict, war, greed, and oppression, the very knowledge of those wrongs in our society begins to put the tools in our hands that we can use to overcome them. The same is true in our individual lives. We often hear it said that "people are so materialistic these days," and "this is the Me generation." Some have argued that this is the most selfish and materialistic culture that has ever lived. And yet, haven't these twin evils been in the human heart since the dawn of recorded history? Our history is the history of human conquest and oppression, of greed and lust for power. And all this history is simply the aggregate of millions of individuals who have lived for themselves rather than for their neighbor. Though the outward forms of politeness have held through some parts of our history, when push came to shove, people went for their own power and gain, and their governments expressed that through making war with those who stood in the way. This is not the most selfish generation. But perhaps it is the first generation in which the external restraints on our behavior have been relaxed enough so that what was really in the human heart all along is finally showing its ugly head. Human technology has advanced our ability to control nature and generate wealth to an extent that has never existed in the history of human civilization. It used to be that only the minuscule part of the population that happened to be the ruling class could aspire to great wealth and luxury. Now anyone can aspire to that. There are more "self-made millionaires" alive today--many of whom came out of very humble circumstances--than there have ever been before. And in our culture, even ordinary middle-class people can aspire to greater income and physical luxuries. It is not the human heart that has changed in our culture. Rather, it is the ability of the human heart to go after its desires. And now we are seeing more clearly what has been in the human heart all along. Complaining about the selfishness and materialism of our culture is beside the point. Of course humans are selfish and materialistic; they have been throughout all recorded history. What is new is that we are now clearly realizing that. And further, we are gradually coming to the conclusion that it is not good to be selfish and materialistic--that there are higher values that we humans could and should strive for. Those higher values are the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb. The crystal clear water of divine truth is flowing out into our world in a way that has never existed before. As it does so, it is showing the true nature of human society and the human heart. It is showing what has existed spiritually all along, but our eyes were too dim to see it. This is not something to be lamented, but something to be celebrated! At last the scales are falling from our eyes, and we are seeing our true situation! At last we can see clearly, and make a thoughtful, intentional choice about which way we wish our culture, and our individual lives, to go. At last we can decide our future, rather than simply following the inexorable course of human history. The clear water of divine truth puts the power in our hands to make our future different that it otherwise would be. It gives us the insight and the strength to face the evils in our society and in ourselves, and to overcome them with the greater power of God's divine truth. For us as Christians, the most concentrated form of that divine truth is found in the Word of God. And for us as Swedenborgians, that fountainhead of divine truth, which has been stopped up so long by human materialism and corruption, has now been broken open through the revealing of the deeper, spiritual meaning of the Bible. Swedenborg's writings are not a new edition of God's word. Rather, they are a message sent from God through the mind of Swedenborg to open up what has been in the Bible all along, but was hidden from our eyes because we were too focused on material things to look for it. As Helen Keller said in her book _My Religion_, (now re-edited and in print as _Light in my Darkness_) Swedenborg "did not make a new Bible, but he made the Bible all new!" The effects of Swedenborg's writings have suffused themselves throughout our culture, raising the level of spiritual thinking everywhere through many brilliant and influential people who read Swedenborg and had their minds shaped by it, and, in turn, reshaped our society. We in this church have the great privilege of having direct access to the source of that new enlightenment. We have available to us the key that unlocks the floodgates that have been blocking the flow of the divine river of life for so many centuries. But this is much more than a privilege, with the exclusivism that word implies. It is a responsibility. Once the truth has flowed into our minds, it is becomes our task and our mission to put that truth to work in our lives. Truth means nothing if it is mere intellectual knowledge. It has meaning only when it changes our lives. It has meaning only when we become better, kinder, more loving and thoughtful people from knowing it. Planted by the river of life is the tree of life, bearing its fruit every month. We who are planted by that river must also continually bear fruits of love and kindness. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Mon Jun 3 15:08:11 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 15:08:11 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Sermons] Gathered in His Name Message-ID: <200206031039_MC3-1-A6-EB18@compuserve.com> Gathered in His Name By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell June 2, 2002 "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20) What is it that gathers us together week by week, month by month, and year by year? We believe there is something powerfully good and useful about the ideas the Lord wants to teach us and the life that He wants us to live. These two things are described by the terms, faith and charity. Faith describes all that we can understand about the Lord and how we should live our lives and charity describes that life itself and the goodwill or kindness in our hearts that can stand behind all the useful things that a person can do in his or her day-to-day life. We have dedicated ourselves to gathering in the Lord's "name." Many of us have grown up with habits of attending Sunday worship. From this perspective it seems like a nature and even expected behavior. But from the perspective of a person who doesn't have this background, attending Sunday worship can seem like a strange way to use a good deal of time on one day of the week. For some, they could not imagine missing the sleep in time that they get on Sunday mornings. For others, they use the time to do chores, exercise, or just having a very low-key relaxed morning. If a person is accustomed to this perspective, can you imagine the difficulty in getting that person to gather every week to hear a story read and a theme related to it presented? Would people gather just to watch as a candle is lit, to sing some songs, or to share some quiet time? We don't gather for just the externals actions of Sunday worship. We gather because we believe in the Lord. We believe that He is the one who has created this world and each of us. We believe that there is a life to come after each one of us ends our natural life here in this world. We believe that the Lord has important things to teach us about what we should and shouldn't do. He has important things to teach us about what we should and shouldn't make as important goals in our choices. We believe that by seeking His wisdom and love in His Word and through prayer, and by seeking His help in living according to this wisdom and love, that our lives will be distinctly better. We believe that gathering as we do in the Lord's name makes a huge difference for each of us. The preceding portion of the Gospel of Matthew today's text, "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them." (Matthew 18:20), expands on its fundamental idea. The disciples had approached the Lord with a question about who would be greatest in the kingdom of heaven. The Lord's response was to call a little child into the middle of their gathering. He said, Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me. (Matthew 18:3-5) We gather in the Lord's name by being like little children who acknowledge that without the Lord's help we can be neither useful nor happy. Without the Lord's help we cannot know what is truly right or wrong. This state of humility is not a perspective that comes naturally or easily to us. Each of us tends to believe in and trust our own perspective on what works and doesn't work, on what is right and wrong. We tend to want to act independently, to stand on our own. While both of these qualities can have a useful context in this world, they are dangerous in our relationship to the Lord. We need to be converted from our natural adult perspective and become "as little children" in our relationship to Him. Receiving this humility is what it means to receive a little child in the Lord's name. We can turn to the Lord humbly seeking His help, His wisdom, and His love, He will surely come to us. The Lord then told His disciples: But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes! If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life lame or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into the everlasting fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire. (Matthew 18:6-9) Through these words the Lord described the spiritual dangers of not humbly following His commandments. The Lord used such powerful language because He knows that we tend to identify with and see the usefulness of our natural patterns of perceiving the people, things and events around us. We tend to feel quite attached to the values that come naturally to us. They are like precious parts of our natural body such as a hand, a foot, or an eye. But if these natural inclinations lead us away from the Lord the harm it will do us and those around us is gigantic. Immediately after speaking of ugly images of self-amputation and hell fire the Lord reminds us of how much He understands our natural state and how much He wants to help us. He said, "For the Son of Man has come to save that which is lost." (Matthew 18:11) What follows next in this section of Matthew is a version of the parable of the lost sheep. Through this image the Lord wants us to know and believe that every step we take toward becoming a better human being and everything we can do to help others in this process brings great joy in heaven. We gather in the Lord's name each Sunday, we have adult education classes, operate our schools, and make our best efforts to invite new people to "come and see" the ideas and life of the New Church because we believe these are all huge aids to the Lord in finding the lost sheep. They help the Lord touch people's lives with understanding and lead them to care about things that they hadn't previously thought were important. What we are dedicated to doing as a congregation helps people change their lives for the better and supports them in knowing and believing that they are loved. But when a group of human beings tries to gather together, there will be conflicts and disagreements. There will be times when we are deeply concerned about the choices another is making. One inclination of people in this situation is to shun the individual or gossip with others about what we perceive to be the offending individual's misdeeds. The Lord spoke of this when He gave the three levels of attempted intervention for a situation in which "your brother sins against you." (Matthew 18:15) First He described a one on one conversation, then a conversation with the individual with one or two other people. Finally the Lord said, "And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector." (Matthew 18:17) These describe increasing levels of confrontation or depth of disagreement. It describes what is first a very gentle and personal approach and then progresses from there to strong and major statements of disagreement. Even when we need to fundamentally separate ourselves from a portion of a person's life because it seems so disorderly or hurtful, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to apply this to every aspect of our relationship with that person. So while a parent might strongly state that a young adult daughter should not do certain things while she visits home, she can still be invited there. There are some restrictions on what she does and doesn't do there because the parents want their home to be a place where people gather in the Lord's name, that is, a place which strives to emulate the values and life that the Lord calls us to live. Part of this life includes reaching out to others who do not yet know or believe what the Lord teaches. Part of it includes a realization that certain values, principles and behaviors are incompatible with the Lord's presence and with a truly useful and happy life. We gather in the Lord's name when we try to live according to His love and wisdom. This does carry specific expectations of what we will and won't do. Consider the powerful language used in the following passage: The name of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Word means nothing other than His acknowledgment and living in accordance with His commandments . . . This and nothing else is meant by the Lord's name in these passages amongst others: Jesus said, You will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. Matthew 10:22; 24:9, 10. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst. Matthew 18:20. . . .Can anyone fail to see that the Lord's name in those passages does not mean merely His name, but acknowledging Him as Redeemer and Savior, and at the same time obeying Him, and finally having faith in Him? (True Christian Religion 682) This congregation has been blessed with many people who have faithfully tried to learn from the Lord and live according to what He teaches. They have gathered together for worship, instruction, and all the different interactions that build the health and unity of this church. May our dedication to gathering in the Lord's name be ever renewed. May each of us seek to acknowledge His power, His commandments, and to truly believe and live according to them. AMEN. Lessons: Matthew 18:10-20, The names contained in the Word all serve to mean different realities, each name embodying in a nutshell all the characteristics, thus the nature and state of that reality to which it refers. A person who is unaware of the fact that a name serves to mean the nature and state of the reality to which it refers can only think that no more than the name is meant when that name is mentioned. Thus he can only think that when the Lord speaks of His name no more than this is meant, when in fact what is meant is the essential nature of the worship of Him, that is to say, every aspect of faith and charity through which He is to be worshiped, as in Matthew, Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them. Matthew 18:20. Not the name is meant here, but worship flowing from faith and charity. Arcana Caelestia 6674:1-2 "Jehovah's name" or the "Lord's name" does not mean the name itself, but all things of love and faith. This is a reality that comes from the spiritual world. There the names used on the earth are not uttered; but the names of the persons who are spoken of are formed from the idea of all things known about them combined into a single word. In this way names in the spiritual world are expressed; consequently names there, like all the other things, are spiritual The names "Lord" and "Jesus Christ," even, are not uttered there as on the earth, but in place of those names a name is formed from the idea of all things known and believed respecting Him; and this idea is made up of all things of love to Him and faith in Him. This is because these in the complex are the Lord in them; for the Lord is in everyone in the goods of love and of faith that are from Him. As this is so, the quality of everyone there, in respect to love to the Lord and faith in the Lord, is immediately known if he only utters "Lord" or "Jesus Christ" by a spiritual expression or spiritual name; and for the same reason also, those who are not in any love to Him or faith in Him are unable to speak His name, that is, to form any spiritual name of Him. From this it is now clear why by the "name" of Jehovah, of the Lord, or of Jesus Christ, name is not meant in the Word, but everything of love and of faith whereby He is worshiped. Apocalypse Explained 102:2 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. _______________________________________________ sermons mailing list sermons@lists.newearth.org http://lists.newearth.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons From EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com Sun Jun 16 17:28:10 2002 From: EHCARSWELL@compuserve.com (Eric Carswell) Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 13:28:10 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] Peace from Trusting in the Lord's Loving Guidance Message-ID: <200206161328_MC3-1-26C-911F@compuserve.com> Peace from Trusting in the Lord's Loving Guidance By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell June 16, 2002 When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" Revelation 6:10 The souls under the altar cried out in sadness. They cried out the Lord that a problem had not been fixed. They cried out wondering how long would it be until this problem was fixed. We can know this state of mind ourselves. We can recognize a distressing situation in our own lives, in the lives of loved ones, or in the institutions and communities we care about, and sadly reflect, "Lord, how long will it be until this problem is solved?" For example, a woman can know that she tends to be impatient with others. She can acknowledge this problem to the Lord and being trying to change this life habit. But over and over again, she recognizes too late that has once again expressed impatience in ways that were hurtful to others. She could cry out to the Lord, "How long will it be until this impatience no longer troubles me and those around me?" A primary foundation of the church in a person is that individual's faith in the Lord. Faith in this sense means a deep and profound acknowledgment in the Lord's love, wisdom, and guidance. It means a recognition that we need His help if want to live truly happy and useful lives. It carries a confidence that the Lord has been, is, and will be watching over every least aspect of our lives and is unceasingly working to lead us to the highest and greatest possible eternal happiness and usefulness. In the book of the Writings of the New Church, The Doctrine of Faith, we're given the following definition of faith: The universal of the Christian faith on a person's part is that he should believe in the Lord. For by believing in Him conjunction [which is a close relationship of love] with Him is effected and this is the means of salvation. To believe in the Lord is to have trust that He will save: and because no one can have such trust except a person who lives a good life, therefore, this also is meant by believing in Him. (The Doctrine of Faith 36) The Lord calls us to seek a growing confidence in His loving and powerful guidance of our lives. This confidence affects us to the very core of our lives. We are told in the Arcana Caelestia: Peace holds within itself trust in the Lord, the trust that He governs all things and provides all things, and that He leads toward an end that is good. When a person believes these things about Him he is at peace, since he fears nothing and no anxiety about things to come disturbs him. (Arcana Caelestia 8455:1) While the Lord wishes this peace for us, He has also stated in the Beatitudes, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." (Matthew 5:4) It isn't that sadness and mourning are desired states in themselves. The Lord doesn't want us to be sad, but He knows that real happiness will not come to us unless we are willing to receive His help in changing our lives. We won't receive much benefit from this help unless we do our part to bring about change and we won't do our part or seek the Lord's help unless we come to a state in which we feel a deep sadness about the harm our current faults and flaws are causing. Peacefulness can be a wonderful state of mind, but it can also be the apparent state of a person who is feeling no responsibility for his life or who isn't feeling a need to change some aspect of it. This state of apathy or resigned acceptance isn't the peacefulness the Lord wishes for us. Picture a man whose relationship with his children is relatively superficial because he knows little about them and has told them very little of what he values or believes in. The man may have shared the same house with these children for years, but neither would know each other very well. Why would this happen? Perhaps the man had placed such a comparatively low value on spending time with his children that other, and in his eyes more important, priorities absorbed his time and attention. If some event causes him to focus at least momentarily on the emptiness in his relationship with his children how would we hope he would feel? Would we want him to shrug his shoulders and say to himself, "That is just the way things have to be."? Wouldn't we rather hope that he would feel a deep sadness that he had missed opportunities in the past to be a part of his children's lives? Wouldn't we rather hope that he would dedicate himself to changing his previous patterns of uninvolvement? If this father's recognition of the cost of his previous choices led him to a changed way of life, his initial sadness would, in the long run, be a source of blessing. The Lord doesn't want to be sad, but He knows that we absolutely must be willing to seek His help and do our part to change if we are going to have true and lasting happiness. He also wants us to have a deep faith that if we are seeking His help and trying to do our part that this will allow Him to lead us and change us in exactly the ways we need to change. And the Lord wants us to recognize that sometimes His time frame for what should be changed and when it should be changed is quite different from ours. His methods are beyond our understanding and recognition. We're told that "There are thousands and thousands of hidden ways, scarcely a single one of which is known to mankind, by which the Lord leads a person from the life of hell to the life of heaven." (Arcana Caelestia 9336:3) The souls under the altar spoken of in Revelation reflect a clear example of how the Lord knows that it is sometimes important to allow a situation that isn't what it should be in the long run. This was true in the element of the Last Judgment that is reflected in this story from Revelation and it is also true for us today. The Lord knows that it is essential that important changes in our lives must take place "little by little." (see Arcana Caelestia 9335:2) Change will come as we receive the Lord's love and wisdom as our own. It will come as we intentionally and over time shun the evils in our lives that have harmed us and those around us. The sacrament of the Holy Supper represents our reception of the Lord's life within our own as we seek His help in daily living better than we have in the past. The bread represents all of the better, more healthy inclinations and motivations that the Lord seeks to bring to our lives. These new loves and affections will focus our attention and give us the strength and commitment to do so many things that are required in following the Lord, serving our neighbor, and wisely caring for ourselves. The wine represents all of the wisdom, insight, even "common sense" that the Lord would bring to our thoughts. >From these gifts we will recognize what we should and should think, say, and do. The bread and wine represent the Lord's life being received within our own. It is His greatest desire that we receive these gifts. The Lord knows that we will have times when we don't understand why things are or are not happening the way we wish they would or as fast as we wish they might. He knows that there will be times in which our hearts cry out, "How long, Lord, how long?" Even as we may mourn aspects of the present and wish they could be changed in an instant, we need to acknowledge that the Lord has a plan and a hope for us. He wants us to have deep faith in His loving care. He wants us to trust that we are being guided by Him in countless ways that we cannot know. May we pray for this trust. AMEN. Lessons: Revelation 6:9-11 At the present day too people belonging to the Church who have filled their minds with worldly and also earthly ideas and have acted in such a way that the truths of faith have become tied up with them are sent down to the lower earth, where they likewise have battles to fight. These battles continue until their worldly and earthly ideas have been separated from the truths of faith and other notions have been introduced, of such a nature that they cannot be linked together any longer. Once this has been accomplished those people are raised from there into heaven; for until such ideas of theirs have been removed they cannot possibly be in the company of angels, since those ideas are full of darkness and defilement that do not accord with the light and purity of heaven. Those worldly and earthly ideas cannot be separated and removed except by means of battles against false ideas, battles which take place in the following manner: Those on that lower earth are molested by illusions and by false ideas based on them which emanate from inhabitants of the surrounding hells; but the Lord employs heaven to rebut those illusions and false ideas and at the same time to introduce truths. These truths seem to reside with those undergoing the conflicts. All this being so, the spiritual Church ought to be spoken of as a militant Church. But at the present day it is rarely militant with anyone in the world; for while a member of the Church is living in the world he does not experience conflict, because of the wicked crowded around him and because of the weakness of the flesh in which he lives. In the next life a person may be held firmly by the bonds of conscience, but not so in the world, for if in the world people are subjected to any degree of despair, as normally happens to those undergoing conflicts, they instantly break those bonds. And if they break them they give in; and if they give in they are done for so far as their salvation is concerned. This explains why the Lord allows few within the Church at the present day to enter into battles against false ideas on behalf of truths; those battles are spiritual temptations. Arcana Caelestia 7090:3-4 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 leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Sep 9 00:29:43 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2002 20:29:43 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "Welcome Home!" by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020908202836.03138428@mail.leewoof.net> Welcome Home! By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, September 8, 2002 Readings: Micah 4:1-5: They will sit under their own vines and fig trees In the last days the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples, and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. They will all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord of hosts has spoken. All the nations may walk in the name of their gods, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever. John 14:15-27: We will make our home with them "If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever: the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore; but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Those who have my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and show myself to them." Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, "But Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?" Jesus replied, "Those who love me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me. "All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." Arcana Coelestia #2048: The spiritual meaning of a house In the Bible, "a house" means what is heavenly because it is at the inmost level. So "the house of God," in the broadest sense, means the Lord's kingdom, in a less broad sense it means the church, and in a specific sense it means an individual person in whom is the Lord's kingdom, or church. Sermon: Those who love me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (John 14:23) Here we are at the beginning of another church year--my seventh with you as your pastor! For many of us, returning to the sanctuary after a summer of holding services in the Sunday School room is like returning to an old, familiar home. There is a certain sense of peace, comfort, and relaxation in the sanctuary. And it's not just because we have cushions on the pews! This is where we hold our worship services; this is where we feel especially close to the Lord. Are there people among your family or friends that you are so close to that when you walk into their house, it is like walking into a second home? Whose houses you can simply relax in, and feel like you belong there? If you do have such a second home, think for a minute about its construction and its decor. Is it the same style of house as your house, or different? Are the rooms decorated with similar colors and artwork to those in your house, or are they different? Some of you may be thinking, "What does it matter?" And that's exactly my point. When we feel at home in someone else's house, the construction and the decor of the house usually don't have much to do with it. It is the spirit we feel there that matters. It is whether we share similar thoughts and feelings, similar values and outlooks, similar loves and philosophies of life. These are the things that make us feel at home with one another. On the other hand, if we do not hold these things in common, we feel like the proverbial fish in a tree when we are visiting the home of a family member or acquaintance. Their home may be beautifully built and cozily decorated, but if our mind and heart are in a different place from the inhabitants of that house, we will not feel at home no matter how nice the physical surroundings. Another way of putting this is expressed in the popular saying, "Home is where the heart is." Now, legally speaking, this "house" that we are sitting in right now belongs to the Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. That society consists of its members, with the Church Committee and its officers being the responsible parties when the membership is not in session at an annual meeting of the Society. But that is just the legal side of things--which is, after all, a worldly and human viewpoint. None of the members of this church would normally say, or think, "this church belongs to me." Unless we're in a business meeting or "thinking business," we don't usually even say "this church belongs to us." In fact, we say just the opposite: "We belong to the church." Isn't that interesting? We say that our house belongs to us, but we say that we belong to our church. Of course, we don't mean that we belong to the church building, the way the building that is our house belongs to us (if we own our home). Instead, we mean that we belong to this congregation. We are a part of the group of people that calls this building its church home. So even in our common language, we glide effortlessly between the idea of the church as the building and the idea of the church as the group of people that gather in this building to worship together, learn together, share our joys and sorrows together, and come into the Lord's presence together. And what is it that makes this place a church? Is it the building, or is it the people? In fact, it's not really an either/or question. The answer is both. But the church building is a church because the people who gather here are a church, rather than the other way around. Think about it. Why is there a church here in the first place? Because back in the 1800s a group of people who shared a common Swedenborgian faith wanted a place to gather together to share in worship, learning, and church fellowship--and they built this building for that purpose. The building is here because of the people, not the people because of the building. And if there ever came a point where no group of people wanted to gather in this building, the building itself would gradually fall into disrepair, until eventually it would be torn down and something else put in its place. There is a living relationship between people and their buildings. The buildings shelter the people and give them a place to live and work, worship and play. Yet it is the people who keep the buildings in repair as long as those buildings are serving some use. Though we think of buildings as solid and permanent, it is really the human mind and heart that keep the buildings standing on their foundations year after year, and century after century. What are our houses, then, but an expression of the human spirit? And what is a house of worship but an expression of the deepest levels of the human spirit--our relationship with our Creator, and with the heavenly and spiritual parts in one another? This is exactly what Swedenborg expresses, in compact form, in our reading from _Arcana Coelestia_ #2048. "In the Bible," he writes, "'a house' means what is heavenly because it is at the inmost level." This, of course, is the positive meaning of a house. We all know of houses in which there is little that is heavenly going on. In fact, some houses are more like a little hell. However, though these may be houses, they are not "homes" in the best sense of that word. A house is truly a home only when love and friendship reign there--when mutual understanding and affection are the daily fare that sustain the people who live in it. In fact, the more love and friendship, understanding and affection there is in our household, the more we know deep down that this is truly a home--the more we feel at home there. Of course, for most of us, our actual homes are--or have been--a mixture. We have times when our home life is truly wonderful, other times when it is truly terrible. And we have plenty of times when our home life is just drifting along on cruise control, and not making much of an impression on us one way or the other. All of these things we have been talking about in relation to our individual houses are just as true when it comes to our church home. Like a house, a church is a place where people gather together and spend a part of their lives together. And like a house, we eventually get fairly familiar with one another. Yes, we're probably on better behavior than we sometimes are at home. But the more we get to know each other and the more comfortable we get with one another, the more likely we are to "let it all hang out," to use a phrase from the sixties. And though ideally we do try to feel, think, and act a little better in church than we do at home, when we are at the church we are still the same people. Underneath it all, we are carrying around the same strengths and weaknesses, the same virtues and vices, the same heavenly and hellish parts of our character that we have when we are at home. Because of this, it is inevitable that the church, too, will go through its ups and downs; its times of heaven and yes, sometimes its periods of hell; and its times of simply drifting along on cruise control. A congregation is only as good as the people in it. But wait a minute! That's not quite true. I've neglected to mention whose house this really is. Yes, legally, civilly, humanly it belongs to the Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. But we know better. We know that this house of worship does not belong to us. We know that this is the house of the Lord. And that is what makes it different. That is what gives it a character all its own. That is what causes even the architecture of the church to reach upward toward God, in a way that we would never consider in building a house for our family. This is not our house. This is God's house. And if the church truly is God's house, then it is not true to say that a congregation--a church family--is only as good as the people in it. Because there is one greater than any of us here in this house. There is a being here who is more loving, wise, compassionate, understanding, and kind than all of us put together. In fact, there is a being of infinite love and infinite wisdom sharing this house with us right this very moment. There is a being who wants to make this a home for all of us--and for many others--in the deepest, most heavenly and spiritual way possible. There is a being who longs to fill us with the love and kindness, the thoughtfulness and concern for others, the perceptiveness and spiritual intelligence that will make this church a far greater and more wonderful home for us than we could ever imagine. There is a being who wants to take away all the troubles and fears of our hearts, melting them in the secure knowledge that we are safe and secure in the arms of infinite love. There is a being who being who wants to give us the deep, inner peace of the soul that the world can never give. This is the home our Lord Jesus wants to share with us. This is the home of peace, comfort, and a sense of utter belonging that he wants to give us. And the Lord will give us this home if we accept it by loving him in return, which means loving our neighbor--our fellow human beings--just as the Lord loves us. "Those who love me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." Welcome home. From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Sep 15 18:25:59 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 14:25:59 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "Resting in the Lord," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020915142507.01f88f60@mail.leewoof.net> Resting in the Lord By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, September 15, 2002 Readings: Genesis 2:1-7: The seventh day of creation Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their vast array. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a mist would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground--then the Lord God formed a human being from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being. Matthew 12:1-14: Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath." He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and yet are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath." He left that place and entered their synagogue; a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, "Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. "He said to them, "Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath. Will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him. True Christian Religion #694: Eternal rest from labor Eternal rest is not idleness, since idleness reduces the mind, and with it the whole body, to a state of feebleness, lethargy, stupidity, and sleepiness. These are not life, but death. So they can't possibly be the eternal life of the angels in heaven. Eternal rest is a rest that banishes all these ills and makes us alive. This can only be something that uplifts our mind. So it is some interest or task that excites, enlivens, and delights our mind. And this depends upon the useful service for which, in which, and towards which our mind is directed. This is why the whole of heaven is seen by the Lord as a vessel full of useful activity; and the angels are angels according to the use they serve. The pleasure of service carries them along, just as a favorable current carries a ship, and gives them eternal peace, and the rest that comes from it. This is what is meant by eternal rest from labors. Angels are alive just as much as their mind is focused from providing a useful service. Sermon: So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. (Genesis 2:3) Today, as Sunday School starts up again for this church year, it is our pleasure and joy to have the children with us for the beginning of the service. And it is a special joy to have new families and new children joining us and making our church and Sunday School a richer (and livelier!) place. This year the Sunday School will use Series 4 in the _Bible Study Notes_ by Anita S. Dole. And just as I have done in the last three years, this year I will usually (though not always) use the readings that the children are learning about in their Sunday School classes as one of the readings for my sermons. Though these stories have become mighty familiar to those of you long-time members who have followed the "Dole Notes" for many years, I like the thought of parents, and the rest of the adults, following the same stories the children are learning. For the parents, it will provide common ground in talking with their children about their lesson for today. And for the rest of you, I hope my sermons throughout the course of the year will provide some new thoughts and insights. The genius of the Dole Notes is their four year curriculum cycle, which guides the Sunday School classes through the entire sweep of the Bible story each year. Each year offers a different series of stories covering the major events of the Bible narrative. Once four years have passed and the cycle starts over again with Series 1, most of the children will have moved on to an older class. They can then study the familiar and well-loved stories at a deeper level, appropriate to their age. This continues right up through the adult lessons, which delve most profoundly into the spiritual meanings in each story. The result for children, teens, and adults who follow the Dole Notes for a number of years is a grasp of the Bible as a seamless whole: a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along with this is a growing sense of the Bible as a vast parable telling a spiritual story. It is the story of our own spiritual rebirth and growth. It is also the story of the spiritual progress of humankind as a whole. And, of course, at its deepest level the Bible is the Lord's autobiography, telling us in rich metaphorical language about who our Lord, God, and Creator is--and especially about his infinite love for us, his infinite wisdom in taking care of us, and his infinite power in drawing us into his arms just as much as we will let him. Of course, the Bible is a huge, long book--well over a thousand pages in most editions. And despite the masterful way in which the Dole Notes give us not just one, but four one-year-long overviews of the Bible, we can still get lost in all that detail, and miss the big picture. There is so much complexity that we may be tempted to throw up our hands in despair of ever grasping it all, and of seeing how it all relates to our own spiritual journey. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the Lord has given us a summary of the whole spiritual story in just thirty-four verses at the very beginning of the Bible. That summary is the story of the seven days of creation. Two weeks ago in our final summer informal service we explored what some of those seven days mean in terms of our spiritual stages. It all begins with our minds shrouded in spiritual darkness, when we are still focused on our own comfort and pleasure and on the things of this world. And then God says, "Let there be light," as the light dawns on us that there is a higher purpose to our lives; that God is calling us to leave behind our self-centered and worldly focus and move toward a life inspired from within and above. The first six days of creation give us an amazingly beautiful summary of every spiritual development along that path. They give us a living picture of each birth within us of new capacities for understanding and love at deeper and deeper levels--and of all our struggles, trials, and triumphs along the way. And at the end, the creation story gives us the beautiful promise of that seventh day of rest from all our labors: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their vast array. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. However, before we go on to explore the spiritual meaning of this final day, let's take a brief look at its literal meaning as it developed in the Jewish Church, the Christian Church, and finally in the new Christian Church that we believe is now dawning upon this earth. To start out, there is no better way to summarize the ancient Jewish perspective on the Sabbath than to read the Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the foreigner within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11) This commandment refers directly to the description of the seventh day of creation. From the statement that God rested from his work on that seventh day, it concludes that people, and even animals, should not do any work on that day either. So for the ancient Jews, the Sabbath was especially a day of rest from labor and from business. It was also a day set aside for the ritualistic worship of animal sacrifices and grain offerings. Of course, even today the practice of taking at least one day per week off from work continues throughout much of the world. Not only does our body need regular periods of rest so that it can repair and rejuvenate itself, but our mind also needs regular breaks from focusing on its work. Otherwise, like an overused muscle, our mind loses strength and elasticity, and our work becomes an increasingly uphill grind, while we become less and less efficient, and less satisfied in it. The ancient admonition to take regular periods of rest from our labors continues to have force in our lives today. However, as our reading from Matthew shows, the Lord interpreted the Sabbath differently than the ancient Jewish church in which he grew up. He had been taught a Sabbath of strict rest from labor, codified in many detailed laws of what could and could not be done on the Sabbath. He rejected that view not only theoretically, but in practice. Of course, this got him into hot water with the Pharisees--one of the leading groups of religious lawyers who saw it as their job to enforce not only the original laws of Moses, but also the many laws that had grown up around it over the years. Even such a simple act as picking heads of grain and rubbing them together to separate the grain from the chaff in order to eat the grain was considered unlawful labor, and thus was condemned as Sabbath-breaking. Jesus had no patience for this type of literalistic, legalistic interpretation of the Law. He pointed out places in the Scriptures themselves where David--the great king of Israel--had broken the literal law by eating the sacred bread of the Lord's presence, which only the priests were supposed to eat. And the priests themselves, he pointed out, break the Sabbath by working on it. (We ministers have to take a different day off!) He then gave a new and more spiritual interpretation: "It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." This shift from a literal and legal interpretation to a more spiritual interpretation of the Sabbath had its effect on the Christian Church, which tended to be less rigid about prohibition of any kind of physical labor on the Sabbath. Of course, some of the more conservative Christian branches and sects have practiced a prohibition of labor on Sunday (the Christian Sabbath) that rivals that of the ancient Jews. However, it is universally true among Christians that the focus of the Sabbath has moved away from not working, and toward the practice of worship and of learning about God and spirit. Sunday is seen by Christians primarily as a day to focus on the Lord, the Bible, and learning about spiritual life. And especially since the last Jewish temple was destroyed in the year 70 AD, this has become the focus of the Jewish Sabbath also. Swedenborg picks up on this new focus for the Sabbath. He writes: When the Lord was in the world . . . he did away with the Sabbath as an occasion on which representative worship--the kind of worship established among the Israelite people--took place, and made the Sabbath day a day for instruction in teachings about faith and love. (_Arcana Coelestia_ #10360) Today we join other Christians in observing each Sunday as a day of worshipping the Lord and of learning the ways of spiritual life. However, we still haven't dealt with the Lord's teaching that "it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." Doesn't this explicitly violate one of the Ten Commandments, which says we are not to do any work on the Sabbath? If we read the commandments literally, yes. But Jesus also said, "The spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing" (John 6:63). And Paul explained, "He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6). In other words, in establishing Christianity, the Lord laid aside the old covenant based on adherence to external, ritualistic laws, and replaced it with a covenant based on following the Lord's spirit from within. This clears the way for us to understand how the Lord's teaching that it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath does not abolish, but fulfills the Law. Swedenborg's spiritual interpretation of the law of the Sabbath provides the missing link. Physically, we labor when we are working against resistance. If we are digging a hole in soil that is full of rocks and roots, or scrubbing a floor that has many tough, greasy, ground in stains, we really feel the effort. We literally do our work in the sweat of our brow! However, if the soil is already a loose, rich loam, or the floor simply has a minor spill on it, we hardly think of it as work, because it is so easy to do. If we think of labor this way--as working against resistance--then we can get a clearer picture of the spiritual meaning of the six days of labor. The six days of labor are the times in our lives when it is a struggle to keep ourselves on the right path and do the right thing--or to keep up our spirits in the face of frustration, discouragement, and despair. Spiritually, we labor when we are working against the resistance of our own old habits and lower tendencies, and against all the forces around and inside us that tend to tear us down. We labor when part of us wants to follow God, and live a constructive, kind, and spiritual life, but another part wants to forget all that, and just do what feels good to me right now. We labor when we get so discouraged that we start to think there is no way we could possibly live the kind of life shown to us by the Lord. We do have to go through our six days of labor, over and over again. Our old self does not simply lie down and play dead because we have decided we now want to live a spiritual life. It fights against us every step of the way. Our old habits and our old character die hard. Overcoming them, and putting the Lord's path in their place, is our spiritual labor. The promise of the Sabbath of rest is that if we will do our labor through all of those six days; if we will stay the course and overcome our old self-indulgent and defeatist self; if we will turn to the Lord to give us the will, the understanding, and the strength to engage in that labor, then in the end, we will come to a time when our inner labors are at an end. We will come to a time when we love to do the work of serving others; when doing our daily work does not feel like work at all, because we are busy in the Lord's work--and we enjoy every minute of it! This is the eternal rest from labors that the angels enjoy. It is not a rest of idleness, but a rest of joyful, single-minded useful activity--and, of course regular breaks for worship, leisure time, and fun! This is resting in the Lord. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@leewoof.net Wed Sep 18 15:52:35 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 11:52:35 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] Recent issues of Our Daily Bread on eBay Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020918115136.01f906a8@mail.attbi.com> Dear Swedenborg Reader, As an experiment (and because I have some issues with huge printer overruns!), I have now listed a couple of recent issues of Our Daily Bread on eBay in a "Buy It Now" only form, for $0.99 each (the lowest price eBay will allow for multiple item auctions). These two issues are part of a four-part series on the fundamental teachings of the Swedenborgian Church. They are available on eBay as individual copies: Heaven and Hell--October 2002 Contents: There Is a Reporter, by Edwin G. Capon Heaven and Hell are Relevant Now, by Kit Billings Is There Really a Hell? by Richard H. Tafel, Sr. Heaven, and How to Attain It, by William Beales Book Notice: Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1563929350 The Word of God--August 2002 Contents: The Lord's Word, by William R. Woofenden The Open Word, by George F. Dole The Book Unsealed, by Lee Woofenden The Little Red Book, by Othmar Tobisch Book Notice: Bible Study Notes, by Anita S. Dole http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1563935761 These issues are good not only for personal reading, but to give to family members and friends as readable introductions to particular teachings and ideas of Swedenborg. (Please note that I will be away this weekend--Friday through Sunday. If you buy any of these copies during that time, I'll bill/ship them as soon as I return.) I also continuously list sets of back issues (including the two issues above) on eBay for a very low price. The set currently listed has 54 back issues, on many different topics. It is at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1563385060 A note about the pamphlet I listed on "Rebirth and Reincarnation," by Charles A. Hall. Five days after listing them, I discovered another small stock of the pamphlets. So despite the statement in the listing that these may be the last copies available, I will be relisting these pamphlets after the current auction is over. This will give an opportunity for those who were outbid in this auction to try again. (They have proved even more popular than I expected!) I have put a note about this at the end of the listing. The current listing is at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1563091499 Also still listed: The Life of Emanuel Swedenborg Together with a Brief Synopsis of his Writings, both Philosophical and Theological, by William White Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., late 1800s Hardcover, 272 pages, Out of Print, Good Condition http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1563090260 For a full listing of my current eBay offerings, please click on one of the links at the end of this message. Enjoy! --Lee Woofenden -------------------- Specializing in books on Emanuel Swedenborg and his religious philosophy. To see my current eBay auctions, please click here, or follow this link: http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewListedItems&userid=leewoof For featured items and a full listing, visit my eBay page at: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/leewoof/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Wed Sep 18 16:34:12 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 12:34:12 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] Apologies again! Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20020918123215.02ed1150@mail.leewoof.net> Dear Sermon List subscribers, Once again, I apologize for sending an eBay-related email to the Sermons list. It was intended for the Swedenborg list. (At least the issues of Our Daily Bread mentioned in the notice have sermons in them! ) Blessings to all, --Lee From leewoof@leewoof.net Fri Oct 4 23:22:51 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 19:22:51 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "The Tower of Ego," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021004192213.02bec678@mail.leewoof.net> The Tower of Ego By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, September 29, 2002 Readings: Genesis 11:1-9: The Tower of Babel Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that mortals had built. And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Revelation 14:6-8: Babylon has fallen! Then I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth--to every nation and tribe and language and people. He said in a loud voice, "Fear God, and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship the one who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water." Then a second angel followed, saying, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." Arcana Coelestia #1304: The Tower of Ego It is the nature of religion that when kindness to the neighbor departs and selfishness takes its place, the teachings of faith are considered unimportant unless they can be turned into worship of self. People who are like this do not think worship is holy at all unless it exists for the sake of self--meaning it is self-worship. This applies to all selfish love. In fact, people who love themselves more than others hate everyone who is not subservient to them, and show no favor to them until they do become subservient. Further, as much as they are not restrained, they plunge onward into exalting themselves above God. I have been shown by vivid experience that self-love is like this when it is given free rein. This is the meaning of "a city and a tower." Selfish love, and every desire springing from it, is the filthiest and most unholy of all things, and is hell itself. Sermon: Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:4) We recently passed the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks last year, and our church has not memorialized them except for some conversation on the anniversary itself in Bible Study. However, I felt called by today's Bible story, and this will be my version of a remembrance, and a memorial, and a call related to the attacks of September 11. I should say before I begin that I suspect some of you will disagree very much with what I have to say. For you, I would mention that we have a couple of open Sundays here in the next month when I will be away, first at the youth retreat a couple weeks from now, and then at Convention's General Council meeting in two more weeks. So if you have a different perspective on how we might view--from a spiritual perspective--the current world events, and our country's involvement in them, I invite you to lead the service one of those Sundays and say your piece! For today, I will offer my perspective. It is not intended to be primarily a political perspective, but a perspective based on my view of God's way for this world, and God's working in history. So today I am going to say some things that may be a bit controversial, and may or may not sit well with you. However, this also is the spirit of our country: that we speak our piece, and have an open discussion. And it is the spirit of our religion that we consider prayerfully, in the light of our teachings--the teachings of our God--what we believe we should do, and what direction our country should go. That is my preface. Now on to the sermon. As our military mops up from our most recent war, we are already beating the drums for the next war. Having changed the government in Afghanistan, we now seem to think it will be a good idea to go ahead and do the same thing in Iraq. In fact, the war in Iraq never really stopped. The U.S. has mounted some kind of attack against one Iraqi installation or another almost every month ever since we expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. So it wouldn't be accurate to say we are going back to war with Iraq, because the war against Iraq has never ended. But let's put this in perspective. There are numerous wars, large and small, going on all around the world right now. India and Pakistan are fighting over Kashmir. Ethiopia and Eritrea are involved in a border dispute. Russia is prosecuting a war in Chechnya. Israel is in conflict with many of its neighbors. Within the last decade there have been wars in Colombia, Congo, Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Algeria, Sri-Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Northern Iraq, Iran, and Ethiopia, among others. Many of these are still going on. Over a thousand people die in wars every year. Some years it is tens or even hundreds of thousands. And the wars keep going on. As we look over this conflict-ridden world of ours, we ask, Why? Why are so many people attacking and killing one another? Why can't we all just get along? Then we look around our own communities, and even our own families, and we see the same thing. People in conflict with one another. People attacking each other--if not physically, then verbally. People hurting and even killing one another--again, if not physically, then emotionally. There are people in our communities who hate one another. And there are people in our own extended families that we don't get along with. We may be in active conflict with them, or we may have an interpersonal cold war going on. And again, we ask, Why? Why can't we all just get along? This is what the story of the Tower of Babel is all about. Of course, there had already been jealousy, anger, and murder in the Bible. Cain, the first person ever born in the Bible story, had killed his brother Abel. Lamech, the first man who took two wives in the Bible story, had killed both a man and a child in revenge. And humankind had become so wicked that they were destroyed by the great flood en masse, with only Noah and his family surviving. After the flood, we find the genealogies of Noah's three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. This genealogy is really a "table of nations," since each son mentioned is the name of one of the nations of the ancient world. This was the Hebrew view of how the world became populated by various peoples and cultures, all descending from Shem, Ham, and Japheth. By the time of the Tower of Babel, then, humanity had become differentiated into nations, tribes, and families, each living and believing in its own way. And yet, despite the great variety in culture, outlook, and lifestyle, we read in the beginning of Genesis chapter 11 that "the whole earth had one language and the same words." We know what it means metaphorically when someone is "speaking the same language" as we are. It means that they understand us, and we understand them. Despite any differences in outlook, there are common goals or values that we share with that person. We have a basis for working together. The people who built the Tower of Babel had such a common purpose. And they expressed it quite clearly: "Come," they said, "let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." Did you notice their purpose? It was "to make a name for themselves." In other words, to demonstrate how great they were. Their "common purpose" was not to do anything for anyone else, but to stoke their own egos. Their city and tower were to be a dazzling monument to themselves. The stories up to the Tower of Babel showed humankind descending from its early golden-age closeness to God and kindness toward the neighbor, down into jealousy, anger, and conflict. However, it is left to the story of the Tower of Babel to reveal the underlying cause of that discord and strife, and to show its inevitable results. The story of the Tower of Babel shows why and how we came to be the conflict-ridden, war-torn world that we are. It tells, in metaphorical language, how we came to be a world of many nations and cultures in perpetual conflict with one another, with wars ripping through every decade of our existence somewhere in the world. At the same time, it names the source of all the conflicts in our communities, in our families, and even within ourselves. That source is what today, in the terms of popular psychology, is called "ego." Yes, there is a healthy self-love that all of us need so that we will take good care of ourselves as a basis for serving others. We are not talking about this kind of healthy self-love. The ego represented by the Tower of Babel goes far beyond that. It is the oversized ego that causes us to think we are greater and more important than others, and that they should serve us, rather than the other way around--which is what the Lord taught. It is the ego that, in the words of those ancient city-builders, is all about "making a name for ourselves." It's all about showing how great we are, and forcing others to acknowledge that greatness and to serve our every wish and whim. This sort of ego at the core of all our conflicts today. And this desire for power and dominance over others is the essence of our ego, even if outwardly it doesn't appear that way. For example, we all know of those who are "passive aggressive"--who don't press themselves forward, and yet use their own subtle way of controlling others through various means. Ego doesn't necessarily come out in the way we usually think of it. Yet it's all about putting ourselves first. Swedenborg uses the Latin word _proprium_ to describe the ego. It is our sense that we own ourselves, we live from ourselves, and we are pretty darn important. This is the common thread that runs through all the wars of humanity, and all the conflicts we are engaged in. The core goal of every war, on one or both sides, is dominance over others. And along with that goal of dominance is the desire to possess the wealth of others. These are the two fundamental loves that, when they turn the wrong direction, are the source of all our evils: the desire for dominance from self-love, and the desire to possess the property of others (or their beauty, talent, material pleasures, and so on). In simple terms: power-lust and greed drive all our wars and all our conflict. And in all wars, there is a sense that we are the greatest--and we're going to prove it to everyone, even if we have to kill them to do it. Right now our country is definitely feeling its oats. We suffered a bruising defeat in Vietnam thirty years ago--and that cooled our war ardor for a time. But it did not change our underlying character. We continued to engage in lesser wars here and there around the world, projecting our power wherever we felt that it was in our national interest. And over time, the lessons of Vietnam seemed to fade from our national consciousness. We moved back toward open, full-scale war against our international neighbors. Yes, we have given many reasons why we must fight this or that war, and they all sound very noble. And maybe a few of them were. But we shouldn't fool ourselves. We take pride in being "the world's only superpower." And we think the world would be a lot better place if we were running the show--or if people were at least running things the way we think they should be run. We have now taken it as our task and our right to decide what kind of government various nations around the world should have, and to replace governments we don't like, either by secret coup or by open force of arms. We are building our tower up to heaven, where we intend to look down from our height and rule over all that we see below us in the world. And a new word is being to describe our nation, which was never applied to us in our earlier years. That word is "empire." Our nation was never designed to be an empire. In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson urged Americans to pursue "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." And though this was not the vision of all the founders of our country, it was the reigning spirit of the foreign policy of this country for the first century of its existence. Yet now we have come to the point where the word "empire" begins to feel appropriate to who we are as a nation. We have built an enormous and highly sophisticated military, and we are using it continually to project our power around the world. There have been many empires throughout the history of the world. In the Bible, we read of the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Roman Empire. History tells us of dozens, even hundreds more that have come and gone. They have all met the same end. They had their period of flourishing greatness, and then they declined or were overthrown. Their city was built to a certain prestige, and their Tower of Babel to a certain height, and then they descended into confusion, corruption, and defeat. This inevitable fall was powered by the same forces that caused them to raise themselves up to worldly greatness by force of arms. It was caused by the very ego and power-lust that caused the people of that nation to turn their weapons against their neighbors, conquer them, and make them subservient. As Swedenborg wrote, "people who love themselves more than others hate everyone who is not subservient to them, and show no favor to them until they do become subservient. Further, as much as they are not restrained, they plunge onward into exalting themselves above God." This selfish love and hatred for those who do not serve our needs is the bitumen that holds our Towers of Babel together. And when, instead of the mortar of mutual love, it is the oily tar of ego and greed that binds us together, those slippery bonds last only as long as we have a common outside enemy to keep us from turning on ourselves. Once we reach the point where we are no longer being regularly victorious over those common outside enemies (and I'm speaking of all the empires that have ever existed), our egos turn inward, and that great tower of empire inevitably comes crashing down around us in internal discord, political intrigue, and civil war. Unlike mortar, the tar of ego burns quick and hot when it is ignited. And every nation or empire held together by ego and desire for power and wealth will inevitably end in the flames of discord and defeat. When we are building our Tower of Babel to show our own greatness, we also pass over the stone of divine truth as our construction material, and instead use the human-manufactured brick of our own social, political, and religious theories. And we have only to turn on the television or radio, or pick up the nearest newspaper or news magazine, to find a torrent of arguments as to why our country is perfectly justified in extending its power around the world through our military and economic might. We are always acting only from the noblest motives. And don't mention the word "oil." That has nothing to do with it! It is the same in every empire. It is always our God-given or natural right to rule over others, and direct the affairs of the world. And every empire that has operated on that principle has, in due course, crumbled into the dust of destruction and defeat. Our nation has a decision to make. We must decide whether we are going to follow the course of every empire in grasping for world dominance, only to meet the inevitable defeat once we overextend ourselves and descend into internal conflict and decline. The warning shots have already been fired over our bow. Those warning shots have come in the form of an escalating series of attacks against our people and our nation. They have been fired by those who feel the weight of our economic and military dominance bearing down on them, and depriving them of their liberties and their lives. The attacks have been mounted by groups of people who have lost friends, family members, and loved ones because of our actions around the world. The attacks on the Word Trade Center and the Pentagon that took place a year ago are only the latest warning that we have gone seriously astray from the peaceful principles of international friendship and honest commerce with all nations on which our country was originally founded. And we know that the enemies we have made are still very much alive, and they are already considering what their next attack might be. We do not have to continue on the path toward war and destruction that we have so far chosen. We do not have to keep building our Tower of Babel with the brick of plausible arguments and self-justifications for war, and the tar of "our national interest"--or more accurately, our national self-interest holding it all together. We could choose God's way instead. We could use our military only for its rightful job of self-defense in case of unprovoked attack. We could base our relationship with other nations purely on a desire to be of service to our world neighbors in any way we can. Instead of building an empire, with the inevitable destruction that will follow, we could build a beautiful temple constructed of the stone of divine truth, and the mortar of mutual love. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Oct 6 19:13:30 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 15:13:30 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "Angel Visitors," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021006151232.02f76f68@mail.leewoof.net> Angel Visitors By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, October 6, 2002 Readings: Genesis 18:1-15: Three visitors foretell Isaac's birth The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them, and bowed low to the ground. He said, "If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way--now that you have come to your servant." "Very well," they answered, "do as you say." So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. "Quick," he said, "get three seahs of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread." Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree. "Where is your wife Sarah?" they asked him. "There, in the tent," he said. Then he said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son." Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, "After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?" Then the Lord said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say, 'Will I really have a child, now that I am old?' Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son." Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, "I did not laugh." But he said, "Yes, you did laugh." Luke 1:5-19: Gabriel foretells John the Baptist's birth In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well on in years. Once when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshippers were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous--to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well on in years." The angel answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news." Sermon: The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them, and bowed low to the ground. (Genesis 18:1, 2) Our two Bible readings for today tell the same story. It is a story of unexpected transformation for people who had become settled in their ways. It is a story of new birth when no birth was ever expected. It is a story of God working through the angels to bring newness of life to those who have become old in spirit. When the Lord spoke to Abraham and Sarah through the three angel visitors, Abraham was ninety-nine years old, and Sarah was eighty-nine years old. I guess you could say that people at this age are likely to have settled into their life routine. For Abraham and Sarah it been many decades since they had much hope of any change in their situation. They had no child--no heir to carry on the wonderful promises God had made to them. Over ten years earlier, they had taken the stop-gap measure of having Abraham father a child through Hagar, Sarah's servant woman. At least this way, they figured, there would be a child of Abraham to receive his inheritance, rather than it going to Eliezer of Damascus, the steward of his household--who had no blood relationship with Abraham. And through Hagar, Abraham did have a son named Ishmael. But things didn't go so well with Hagar and Ishmael--and Ishmael's position as an heir was looking shaky. Still, what could be done? Sarah was in her eighties. Enough said. Though we don't know the exact ages of Zechariah and Elizabeth, we are told that they, too, were both "well on in years," so that Elizabeth was past the age of childbearing. The angels didn't care about that. They were sent to deliver good news. Each of these women was to have a child, a son, in her old age. Abraham had already laughed at this idea when God gave him the news in a vision not long before the three visitors appeared (Genesis 17:17). And in our story for today, it is Sarah's turn to laugh. Who had ever heard of such a ridiculous thing? A baby born to a ninety-year-old woman? Sometimes we feel like we're in our nineties spiritually, too. We feel that we have seen it all and done it all, and there is nothing new under the sun. We see nothing ahead of us but the same old routine. And inwardly, we see no hope that we will ever think or feel differently than we do now. We are stuck in a pattern. And we are tired of that pattern. We are discouraged by the stubbornness of our problems and struggles, by the stubbornness of our own character. And when we have been stuck there, perhaps for many years, we begin to think that this is what our life is going to be like forever. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I used to travel back and forth across the country by bus. The trip took three days and nights from coast to coast. And I remember the feeling that started to hit me about two days in. I began to get the distinct feeling that I was going to be riding this bus for the rest of my life! I would be sitting in this seat watching the scenery go by, sleeping uncomfortably in a half-reclining position at night, and sharing my life with strangers, day in and day out, with no end. By the morning of the third day, I began to resign myself to this fate. And I still had another night to get through. It wasn't until morning dawned after that third night of restless napping that the realization hit me: I'm not going to be on this bus forever! And as we approached that final stop, where I would get off, there was a tremendous sense of relief. My existence would not be an interminable, uncomfortable bus ride! New things would happen--new scenes and new phases of my life. Yes, life would go on. God had greater things in store for me. This was the wonderful news that the angel visitors carried to Abraham and Sarah, and to Zechariah and Elizabeth. For them, it was a miracle. A child born in old age to couples who had lived through many decades of childless marriage. A child born to those who had long since resigned themselves to the fact of their childlessness. This child to be born would be a vessel through whom God would bring great blessings not only to their own family, but to the whole community, the whole nation, the whole world. Through Isaac came Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel, and the passing down to us of the entire Old Testament of the Word of God. And John the Baptist became the great desert prophet who prepared the way for the Lord to come among us in power and glory, turn the tide of humanity, and become our Savior forevermore. These angels were bringing amazing, wonderful news. News that, despite the laughter and skepticism of those who heard it, would completely transform their future--and ours--forever. And this news came not from the angels themselves, but from God. It is a curious thing in the story of Abraham and the three visitors, the visitors are sometimes identified as men (as in Genesis 18:2), sometimes as angels (as in Genesis 19:1), and sometimes as the Lord (as in Genesis 18:1). And though at first they are presented as three men, Abraham addresses them as "Lord"; and in the later part of the story, it is a single voice that speaks. These visitors have a sense of the transcendent and mystical about them, as if we can see them . . . but not quite. As if they are men . . . no, angels . . . no, they are actually the Lord. In truth, Jehovah God never appears directly to anyone. As God said to Moses, "You cannot see my face, for no one can see my face and live" (Exodus 33:20). In explaining this, Swedenborg writes: No person, nor even any angel, can see the Lord's face, since it is divine love--and no one can sustain the divine love as it is in itself. To see the Lord's face would be like putting our eyes directly into the fire of the sun, which would instantly destroy them. (_Apocalypse Explained_ #412.16) And yet, in the very same chapter of Genesis in which God said "no one can see my face and live," we read, "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend" (Genesis 33:11). What's going on here? The secret is that God uses intermediaries. Many times in the Bible we read about "the angel of the Lord" appearing to people. That angel often speaks in the Lord's own voice, as if the angel were Jehovah God. Swedenborg explains that since we could not survive a direct encounter with God, in order to protect us and communicate with us at the same time, God fills an angel with the divine presence, and sends the angel to us. And not only do _we_ experience it as God's presence, but the _angel_ also, during that time, has the sense of actually being God. This lasts as long as God is using the angel as an intermediary. This is what happened with Abraham when he saw the three visitors. It also happened with Hagar, Jacob, Moses, Balaam, Gideon, Manoah and his wife, and many others. The angel visitors were not only angels--they were the Lord's presence and voice speaking with people on earth, bringing them vital news of events to come, or commandments of the Lord that they were to carry out. Whether the angels are entirely filled with the Lord's presence as the ones who came to Abraham were, or whether they are conscious of their own identity as Gabriel was when he came to Zechariah, all the angels who come to us are on errands from God. They are carrying messages from God to us. It is the joy of every angel to do God's will; and no angel would come to us unless God sent him or her on a specific mission, with a specific message. What is the message in our Bible stories for today? That God has more in store for each one of us. I don't expect that any of us will literally have children at the age of eighty or ninety. But there are other kinds of births that we can experience, no matter what our age. If we have been stuck in a pattern for many, many years, our angel visitors may give us the message that it is time to move on--that our life is about to take a new turn. If we are down and discouraged, believing that things will never get better, our angel visitors may reveal some new light and hope to us, which will lift us up and give us a new reason to live. If we have resigned ourselves to being the same old "us" forever and ever, amen, our angel visitors may show us that God yet has new things for us to learn and experience, new ways for us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Now, I know that it is rare for us to be literally visited by angels. Most of us have probably not heard the words of an angel delivering a message to us--though we may have felt the presence of the angels at particularly difficult or significant times of our lives. However, we do not have to personally receive an angel visit to know that the Lord has a message for us. We know that every story in the Bible is not only about people who lived thousands of years ago. Every story in the Bible is about _us_. When we read of the angels coming to Abraham and Sarah, to Zechariah and Elizabeth in their old age, we know that through those angels, God is also promising wonderful new things in the lives of each one of us. And though we may laugh at God's message, yet the miracle _will_ take place for us if we are willing to listen, and continue to follow God's surprising will. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Oct 21 02:30:44 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 22:30:44 -0400 Subject: [Sermons] "A New Name," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021020223001.0234ad00@mail.leewoof.net> A New Name By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, October 20, 2002 Readings: Genesis 35:1-15: A new name for Jacob Then God said to Jacob, "Go up to Bethel and settle there, and build an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau." So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, "Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone." So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had, and the rings in their ears, and Jacob buried them under the oak at Shechem. Then they set out, and the terror of God fell upon the towns all around them so that no one pursued them. Jacob and all the people with him came to Luz (that is, Bethel) in the land of Canaan. There he built an altar, and he called the place El Bethel, because it was there that God revealed himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother. Now Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and was buried under the oak below Bethel. So it was named Allon Bacuth. After Jacob returned from Paddan Aram, God appeared to him again and blessed him. God said to him, "Your name is Jacob, but you will no longer be called Jacob; your name will be Israel." So he named him Israel. And God said to him, "I am God Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will come from your body. The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac I also give to you, and I will give this land to your descendants after you." Then God went up from him at the place where he had talked with him. Jacob set up a stone pillar at the place where God had talked with him, and he poured out a drink offering on it; he also poured oil on it. Jacob called the place where God had talked with him Bethel. Revelation 2:12-17: The letter to Pergamum To the angel of the church in Pergamum write: These are the words of the one who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live--where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city--where Satan lives. Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality. Likewise you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit says to the churches. To everyone who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give a white stone, and on the stone a new name will be written, known only to the one who receives it. Arcana Coelestia #145: A new name In the Bible, a name means the essence of a thing. Seeing something and calling it by name means recognizing its nature. . . . Being called by a new name means that a person's character will change. Arcana Coelestia #2009.5: A new name Being called by a new name means becoming another person. In other words, it means being created anew and reborn. Sermon: After Jacob returned from Paddan Aram, God appeared to him again and blessed him. God said to him, "Your name is Jacob, but you will no longer be called Jacob; your name will be Israel." (Genesis 35:9, 10) To everyone who overcomes, I will give . . . a white stone, and on the stone a new name will be written, known only to the one who receives it. (Revelation 2:17) A new name. It has a certain appeal to it. Most of us have had our same old name for many, many years--ever since we were born, in fact. Of course, some of us--mostly those of the female persuasion--have changed our last names. And these days it has become fairly popular in some circles--again, mostly among women--to adopt a new first name as well. It is also a regular practice in certain cultures to be given a new name at the time adulthood is reached. And people who join certain religious and spiritual organizations are given new names to celebrate and symbolize the occasion. Personally, I've never changed my name. Of course, I've been _called_ a few names from time to time. But I have also, in my younger years, been given quite a few new names. Some of them stuck for a while. I'm talking about nicknames. I expect that most of us had various nicknames when we were younger. For some, it has become our regular name. Others are still called by a nickname among family members and close friends. And some nicknames have long since passed out of use, together with our younger years. For me, the nickname that stuck the longest was "Hairy." That's spelled H-a-i-r-y. Those of you who have known me for a decade or more may not be surprised to hear that I was once called "Hairy." After all, I kept my long hair many years after it had gone out of style. In fact, two decades after the sixties were over, I still had that long, flowing mane. But that's not why I got the nickname "Hairy." When I was a kid, half the young guys walking down the street had long hair. So long hair was nothing remarkable. In fact, I got the name one day in our neighborhood in Missouri when I was about seven or eight years old. I had just gotten the annual beginning-of-summer crew cut. As a joke, one of the teenage boys in the neighborhood greeted me with, "Hi, Hairy!" This made me so mad that I charged at him with fists flying--without, however, managing to inflict any damage. He and the other kids who were there thought this was so funny that they all started calling me "Hairy" just to get my goat. The name stuck, I got used to it, and it became my regular name among my brothers, sisters, and neighborhood friends for many years. Only later on, it was much more appropriate to my actual appearance! So there's the story of my new name. But unless I grow my hair long again--or get a crew cut--you'll just have to stick with "Lee" for now. The story is not entirely frivolous. Like the story of many nicknames, it illustrates something about the deeper meaning of names. A name, inwardly and spiritually speaking, represents the quality of the person or thing being named. In my case, the name "Hairy" was at first an ironic reference to my _lack_ of hair, and later became appropriate to the large _quantity_ of hair. In the Bible, there are several stories of people receiving new names. Abram, of course, became Abraham when God renewed the covenant with him and predicted the miraculous birth of Isaac, who would inherit the covenant. At the same time, Abram's wife Sarai received the new name of Sarah (Genesis 17). In our Old Testament story today, for the second time Abraham's grandson Jacob is given the new name of Israel. He had first gotten the name three chapters earlier, in the famous scene in which he wrestled with an angel--or with God, depending on how you read the story. As the story goes, the being Jacob wrestled with--who is identified only as "a man"--saw that he could not overpower Jacob, and said to him, "Let me go." Jacob, however, knowing that this was no ordinary mortal, insisted on receiving a blessing from him first. He was then given the new name "Israel," with this explanation: "You have struggled with God and with humans, and have prevailed" (Genesis 32:28). The name Israel can mean "he struggles with God." However, it can also mean that God struggles and prevails, which, I believe, goes to the deeper levels of meaning in the new name. In fact, both Jacob's old name and his new one involve struggle. The name "Jacob" literally means "he grasps the heel." This was a reference to the way Jacob came out of his mother's womb, grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau, who was born just before him (Genesis 25:26). But "grasping the heel" is also a Hebrew idiom meaning one who deceives others, usurping their property and their position. Jacob was aptly named. In his young adult years he cheated both his brother Esau and his uncle Laban through shrewd dealing. He was a man who struggled for position in the world, not scrupling to climb on the heads of those who were not as sharp and ambitious as he was. In fact, he sounds like a lot of people who make up our society today. In this materialistic world of ours, it is common for people to struggle for many years, even all their lives, for money, position, attractiveness, and pleasure. Television, radio, newspapers, and magazines--and now the Internet--are full of appeals to our desire for material possessions and power. And we spend billions each year in an attempt to satisfy these desires. Our old name is "Jacob." When we are focused primarily on the things this world has to offer, our lives are a struggle. We grasp the heel of others, trying to use them to pull ourselves up to a higher position. We engage in the tricks of the trade--whatever our trade happens to be--in order to get ahead. And we feel a certain pleasure, however momentary, whenever we achieve one of our physical, material, or social goals. We are Jacob, climbing a ladder not to heaven, but to a higher position in this world. And this struggle can occupy our entire lifetime if we allow it to do so. Yet eventually, we find that a life of seeking material possessions, pleasures, and power does not satisfy. We continually set new goals, assuring ourselves that when we achieve _this_ one, we will finally be happy. And then, when we achieve it, our happiness quickly fades, like a flower that blooms and is gone. We may be stuck in this cycle for many years. Setting yet another goal, struggling to achieve it, and finding that we are no happier than we were before. It begins to feel more like a rat race than a challenge. Life gets old and stale. When we finally begin to realize that the material goals we have set for ourselves will never satisfy, _can_ never satisfy, this is when God is waiting for us, offering us a new and deeper struggle--and a new name to go along with it. This is when we can finally begin to struggle, not for the temporary pleasures of this world, which quickly fade and crumble into dust, but for the deeper joys of the spirit that God is continually offering to those who are willing to turn their lives inward and upward, and to put out the deeper effort needed to prevail in the higher struggle of life. This is when we are given the new name of Israel. Though life is still a struggle--and will be, perhaps, for as long as we live on this earth--we are now struggling, not for the temporary and ultimately disappointing pleasures of this world, but for the eternal joys that come as we develop our deeper, and truly human, self--as we allow ourselves to be formed into an image and likeness of God. Unlike the material goals that we reach, only to have them fall to pieces in our hands, each new goal achieved in our spiritual struggle brings us greater happiness and new joy that is not temporary, but stays with us day after day, week after week, and year after year. As we overcome the inner obstacles in our path, the result is a closer and deeper relationship with our loved ones, greater peace and harmony within ourselves as we make our way through the outer turbulence of life, and a growing sense of the abiding presence of the Lord God deep within, continually pouring new love, new insight, and new life into us. As we feel this transformation taking place within us, we will realize the meaning of the new name that the Lord has bestowed upon us. Swedenborg expresses the nature of this new name, this deeper life, in _Apocalypse Explained_ #148: "And on the stone a new name will be written, known only to the one who receives it" means an experience of deeper life unknown to all but those who have felt it. This follows from the meaning of a name as the character of our experience. In this passage, it refers to what it is like to experience a deeper life, since it says, "a new name, known only to the one who receives it." If we are not living a deeper life, we have no idea at all what this deeper life is all about. We are living a deeper life when we love the Lord; and we cannot love the Lord unless we recognize the divine nature in his humanity. Loving the Lord also means living according to his teachings. The deeper life is a spiritual life, which the angels of heaven have. But superficial life is a materialistic life, which is the kind of life everyone who is _not_ in heaven has. When we live according to the Lord's teachings, and recognize the divine nature in his humanity, our deeper mind is opened, and we become spiritual. But when we do not live in this way, and do not accept the Lord, we remain materialistic. The experience of deeper, spiritual life is unknown to us if we do not have heavenly love. As long as we are in our "Jacob" phase, we have no idea of the greater adventures and deeper satisfactions that lie ahead of us when we are ready to give up purely material pursuits, and turn our lives toward the higher work to which God is calling us. We think that life would have no meaning if we weren't always seeking more money, more beauty, more physical pleasure, more power, more _something._ And yet, as necessary as the basics of physical life are to us while we are here on earth, our life truly begins only when we set our goals on higher things, and see material things for what they are: tools to achieve the greater work of God. For those who have never ventured into the higher realm of love, truth, and _spiritual_ beauty, all of these things will seem not only vague, but completely boring. But for those of us who have taken even the first steps into the new life that the Lord offers us, our old, material pursuits will never satisfy us again. Of course, we will still enjoy the pleasures of this world. But our true satisfaction will come from achievements that are measured not in money or position, but in new insights gained and put to work in our lives, and especially in love given and received. These will be our new goals. And every one that we achieve will bring us more fully into the joy and inner peace that the Lord gives us. This is the deeper, spiritual life unknown to those who remain focused on material goals. Yet Swedenborg offers us another, even deeper thought in explaining the new name. He writes, "We are living a deeper life when we love the Lord; and we cannot love the Lord unless we recognize the divine nature in his humanity." The new, deeper, and more fulfilling relationships with the people around us are a wonderful gift that comes with the new name that the Lord gives us. However, we do not gain its deepest joys until we realize that the Lord our God is intensely, humanly, personally with us. Until we, as Christians, realize that the Lord Jesus Christ loves us--loves each one of us, loves me, loves you powerfully, fully, deeply, and intimately, we cannot know the full joy and peace of the spirit. God is not some distant, detached being who created us and then left us alone. No, the Lord our God is with us here and now, ready to love us, to guide us, to give us an inner peace and joy that we cannot possibly conceive of until we open ourselves up to the Lord's presence within and around us. This, my friends, is a struggle supremely worth engaging in! "To everyone who overcomes, I will give . . . a white stone, and on the stone a new name will be written, known only to the one who receives it." ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Tue Nov 5 01:45:35 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 20:45:35 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Our Escape from Egypt," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021104204428.02637148@mail.leewoof.net> Our Escape from Egypt By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, November 3, 2002 Readings: Exodus 12:31-42: The Israelites Escape from Egypt During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, "Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord as you have requested. Take your flocks and herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me." The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and leave the country. "For otherwise," they said, "we will all die!" So the people took their dough before the yeast was added, and carried it on their shoulders in kneading troughs wrapped in clothing. The Israelites did as Moses instructed, and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold, and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians. The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. Many other people went up with them, as well as large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds. With the dough they had brought from Egypt, they baked cakes of unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast, because they had been driven out of Egypt, and did not have time to prepare food for themselves. Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the Lord's divisions left Egypt. Mark 7:1-8: Jesus speaks on tradition Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands-- that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe: the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.' You abandon the commandments of God, and hold to human tradition." Apocalypse Explained #717.17: Mere tradition A church comes to its end when salvation becomes merely a matter of knowing what the Bible says, and not living according to it. With the ancient Jewish nation, this happened through the traditions by which they falsified the Word of God. The truths of the Bible become traditions when we are not living a life of kindness. The truths of the Bible also become falsities when we separate faith from kindness. Sermon: The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and leave the country. . . . And the Israelites asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold, and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians. (Exodus 12:33, 35, 36) In the opening scene of the popular 1964 musical "Fiddler On the Roof," we are given the secret of what keeps the Jewish community in the little turn-of-the-century Russian village of Anatevka together: TRADITION! Tradition! Tradition! TRADITION! Tradition! Tradition! The song continues: Tevye & Papas: Who, day and night, must scramble for a living, Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers? And who has the right, as master of the house, To have the final word at home? The Papa, the Papa! Tradition. Golde & Mamas: Who must know the way to make a proper home, A quiet home, a kosher home? Who must raise the family and run the home, So Papa's free to read the holy books? The Mama, the Mama! Tradition! Sons: At three, I started Hebrew school. At ten, I learned a trade. I hear they've picked a bride for me. I hope she's pretty. The son, the son! Tradition! Daughters: And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix, Preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks? The daughter, the daughter! Tradition! Tevye, the father of the household, concludes the scene by affirming, "Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof." I suspect that as I was reading the words to the song, you took exception to some of the roles prescribed for the papas, the mamas, the sons, and the daughters. They are very traditional roles. And though these roles have by no means entirely disappeared from our society, we modern Americans, both male and female, like to think that we have freedom to live and work the way we want. And we especially believe that we are free to marry who we want. The idea that our father--in consultation with the local matchmaker, of course--would choose the person we are to marry strikes us as being not "traditional," but feudal. As the story unfolds, it turns out that Tevye's five daughters are not happy with this tradition either. Tevye stands helplessly by as one daughter after the other marries the man she loves, rather than the one he had chosen for her. And before the story has ended, the whole Jewish community in Anatevka is uprooted from the home where they had practiced their traditions. The story is one of struggle between the traditions that hold the community together, and the inevitable change that bends, and finally breaks, those traditions. Almost 1,900 years before the era in which "Fiddler On the Roof" is set, Jesus found himself in the middle of the same tension between tradition and change. His disciples, most of whom were rough, rural Galileans from the north, apparently did not feel the need to follow the exacting traditions of the scribes and Pharisees, who were leaders of the southern, city-dwelling Jews. The Lord's disciples violated those traditions by eating without washing their hands (Parents: aren't you glad your children aren't listening to this?!), and the scribes and Pharisees challenged Jesus to account for the behavior of his disciples. Never one to shrink from a challenge, Jesus gave them more than they had bargained for, calling them "hypocrites" who clung to human tradition while abandoning the commandments of God. If we had continued the story, we would have heard Jesus attacking and shredding the very roots of the ancient Jewish traditions on ritual cleanness and uncleanness. Though there was a struggle among the early Apostles, before the first century of Christianity had come to a close, it had been firmly established that Christians need not follow the Jewish traditions, nor even observe the ritual of cleansing and sacrifice decreed in the Law of Moses. The Christian Church was founded on the rubble of religious traditions that had developed over a period of at least two millennia. And yet, the Lord did not utterly cast tradition out of the church. It is true that he had no use for the entangling web of strict and complex traditions that the religious leaders had progressively laid on the people. But he perceived a kernel of spiritual reality underneath the religious and social accretions of the centuries. He stripped away all those extra layers, leaving us with two simple, meaningful rituals that fulfilled everything the previous complex system had sought to accomplish. In place of all the rituals of cleansing, Jesus established the sacrament of baptism as a symbol of the spiritual cleansing that we must all undergo to become truly Christian. And in the place of all the rituals of sacrifice, he established the Holy Supper as a symbol of our need to come into the presence of the Lord, and together with our fellow believers, accept the Lord's love (symbolized by the bread) and the Lord's wisdom (symbolized by the wine) into our lives. The Lord commanded us to observe these two rituals for all time. And they have formed the core of all the ritual traditions that have developed in the Christian Church. What is the message here? Tradition does have its place. The glue of outward ritual and prescribed behavior can hold our families and communities together when we might otherwise be driven apart by interpersonal friction, and by outside forces beyond our control. Yet when tradition takes over as the primary focus of our lives, it becomes a heavy and restrictive weight, pressing us down with deadening restrictions on our free will. When tradition gets control of us, it gradually squeezes the life out of us in its ever-tightening coils. It was this deadening influence of overbearing tradition that Jesus struggled against in the religious institutions of his day. And the same forces of crystallized tradition that brought the ancient Jewish church to its final reckoning have been at work in the Christian Church ever since it broke free from the traditions that had built up over the previous two thousand years. Eighteen centuries after the Christian Church broke away from Judaism, Emanuel Swedenborg found the Christian Church to be just as burdened down with deadening tradition and dogma as was the Jewish Church of Jesus' day. It is now over two hundred years from the beginning of the new Christian era proclaimed by Swedenborg. Yet the religious organizations that name themselves after the spiritual New Jerusalem described in Swedenborg's writings have adopted much of the tradition of the earlier Christian Church--and we have developed some of our own. Just as there was a kernel of goodness in the great mass of tradition that Jesus railed against, so there is a kernel of goodness in the Christian tradition we have inherited. But though our traditions have kept us together as a church, they have not helped us to move forward, reach out, and grow. Over the past century, we Swedenborgians have clung to many of our traditions, while the world has moved forward at a faster and faster pace. As the gap widened, our church's appeal to the people of our culture waned, and we experienced a century of drastic decline, dashing all the golden hopes of the early Swedenborgians, who envisioned our church moving forward into a glorious and ever-growing future. Perhaps the growing clan of Jacob had similar golden hopes when they moved from their famine-stricken home in southern Palestine to the grain-rich land of Egypt, where Joseph, the long-lost brother, had become a powerful ruler--ensuring they would receive special treatment. Perhaps when they settled into the rich Nile river delta they thought they had "made it," with their troubles at an end, and their wealthy future assured. Yet in two short centuries (the 430 years in our reading is measured from the time Abraham first sojourned in Egypt, not from the time Jacob and his family went there), their descendents found themselves enslaved and bitterly oppressed by the Egyptians. What does this have to do with our religious traditions? In the Bible's spiritual symbolism, Egypt stands for the knowledge we have gathered together into our memories, both about the material world and about spiritual life. In other words Egypt stands for all the information we have learned. When Joseph advised the Egyptians to store up grain during the seven years of plenty to tide them through the seven years of famine predicted in Pharaoh's dreams, it was an apt symbol of how we store up knowledge of good behavior and sound thinking during our good times, which tides us over during our times of struggle. The type of knowledge that Egypt represents is just the sort of knowledge Tevye lists as part of the tradition that held his community together. He says: Here we have traditions for everything: how to sleep, how to eat, how to work, how to wear our clothes. For instance we always keep our heads covered, and always wear little prayer shawls. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, "How did this tradition get started?" I'll tell you . . . I don't know; but it's a tradition, and because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects of him. Tradition--the knowledge of how we are supposed to behave in every situation--can be very reassuring. Like the fertile land of Egypt, it looks like it will take care of our every need, and sustain us through thick and thin, year after year. But over time, the hand of tradition gradually, almost imperceptibly, changes from a hand of helpful guidance to a heavy hand of compulsion and oppression. The traditions that parents and grandparents willingly adopted become irksome and restrictive to their children and grandchildren. Jacob and his family moved willingly to Egypt. Their descendants became slaves there. Must we, then, leave all our traditions behind in order to move into the future? Is it necessary to give up everything that has made our church dear to our long-time members in order to welcome a growing number of newcomers into our beloved faith community? No, it is not. Jesus distilled the ancient Jewish traditions into the two new traditions of baptism and the Holy Supper--traditions that remain meaningful to this day. And as we read in Exodus, the descendants of Jacob came out of Egypt rich with in articles of silver and gold, in clothing, and in livestock--symbolic of the good, true, and useful elements that can be pulled out of the suffocating mass of outmoded tradition that must be left behind. We do not have to leave behind all our traditions in order to move forward. But we do have to be the masters, and not the slaves, of our traditions. If, as Tevye admits, we do not know how our traditions started, and if we cannot give good reasons why they should continue, it may be time to re-evaluate the way "we've always done it." It may be time seek out the kernel of good that we can take from our old traditions, and start new traditions that not only serve those of us who are already part of the church, but serve the people of our community who would benefit from the great blessings our church has to offer. This is where Swedenborg offers a crucial insight. Again, from _Apocalypse Explained:_ A church comes to its end when salvation becomes merely a matter of knowing what the Bible says, and not living according to it. With the ancient Jewish nation, this happened through the traditions by which they falsified the Word of God. The truths of the Bible become traditions when we are not living a life of kindness. The truths of the Bible also become falsities when we separate faith from kindness. When our church--at whatever level--becomes merely a matter of knowing the teachings of the Bible and the church, and of knowing how things are "supposed to be done," it ceases to be a living, growing church, and becomes enslaved to tradition. When we think it is more important to preserve the "proper" way of doing things than to serve our neighbor and our community, then the living Word of God has become a dead letter. This is when we must leave our old mass of traditions behind, and begin anew--yet still preserving the best from what we have inherited and built up. Our church has already begun to do this. And the engine that can carry us forward, perhaps a bit reluctantly, on this new endeavor is the desire to serve the people of our community--people who are crying out for the beautiful insights and the loving community that we have to offer. We are moving toward a time of visioning and planning in our congregation. And we will soon be considering new proposals for our church's Massachusetts Association and its properties. Our first reaction may be to resist any change. Change is scary. Things might go wrong. We might lose what we have so carefully preserved all these years. Yet simply clinging to the way we have always done things means allowing our traditions to enslave us. And while the richness of religious tradition can be a powerful force to hold us together, the forces of growth and change are even more powerful. And when the two forces of tradition and change collide with each other, it is time to listen to the Lord's call to move forward--yet still preserving the best of what we have inherited. There is a good reason to move forward. People need what this church has to offer. This community needs our church's clear teachings of God's love and of spiritual light. Are we ready to listen to the Lord's call to move out of our remaining bondage to the past, and carry the rich treasures of our church forward into a new land of wider usefulness? Are we ready for our congregation, our Association, our denomination, to reach out and grow beyond anything they have ever been in the past? The Lord has given us this challenge: You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good deeds, and praise your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16) ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Nov 10 20:09:41 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 15:09:41 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Drinking the Dust of Our Idols," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021110150852.0304b740@mail.leewoof.net> Drinking the Dust of Our Idols By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, November 10, 2002 Readings: Exodus 32:1-6, 15-20: The Golden Calf When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him." Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me." So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt!" When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord." So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterwards they sat down to eat and drink, and got up to indulge in revelry. . . . Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, "There is the sound of war in the camp." Moses replied: "It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear." When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned, and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it. Luke 9:1-6: Jesus sends out the Twelve When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He told them: "Take nothing for the journey--no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them." So they set out and went from village to village, preaching the gospel and healing people everywhere. Arcana Coelestia #10465: Mixing the dust with water And sprinkled it on the face of the water means a mixing together with truth. This is clear from the meaning of "water" as truth. And since it says that the dust into which the calf was ground up was sprinkled on the water, the meaning is that the falsity resulting from hellish delight was mixed together with truth coming from heaven. The reason why truth coming from heaven is meant by this water is that the water descended from Mount Sinai, and "Mount Sinai" means heaven, from which divine truth comes. Sermon: And Moses took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. (Exodus 32:20) What a scene! The Israelites eating, drinking, and dancing wildly around a golden calf as Moses, who has just endured forty days on Mt. Sinai without food and water in order to bring God's laws to the people, comes down to see what they have done in his absence. To put the scene in perspective, at this point it is only about four and a half months since the Israelites had been brought miraculously out of Egypt. First there were the ten plagues inflicted on the Egyptians, culminating in the death of the firstborn of everyone in the land except for the Israelites. Then, when Pharaoh changed his mind about letting the Israelites go, and sent his charioteers after them, pinning them against the sea, the Israelites experienced the miracle of the parting of the waters of the sea so that they could escape across it on dry land--while the Egyptians, who went in after them, were drowned by the returning torrents of water. Then, when they had traveled only a few days into the desert, the Lord provided water to quench their thirst. And soon afterwards, when they complained that they were hungry, the Lord provided them manna and quail to eat. Once again, he provided them water, this time through a miraculous stream coming out of a rock. He then proceeded to aid them in conquering their first enemy in the desert, the Amalekites. Certainly, if any show of force could have reached the hearts and minds of the Israelites, all these miracles would have! Finally, when they were camped at Mt. Sinai, God caused the mountain to smoke and tremble, and the people heard the voice of a powerful trumpet growing louder and louder, until they themselves trembled with fear. They then heard God's himself speaking the words of the Ten Commandments from the mountain in a loud voice. There could be no doubt--could there?--that a powerful God had brought them out of Egypt, cared for them in the desert, and was now giving them laws that they were absolutely to obey. Among those laws was this one: You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4-6) Yet only forty days later, Moses came down from the mountain only to discover that the people had made a golden calf out of their own earrings, and were worshipping it as their savior, who had brought them up out of Egypt. How could they have forgotten so quickly all the things God had done for them, and the commandments he had spoken to them so loudly and clearly from the mountain? There's an old saying that goes, "You hear what you want to hear." Of course the people had heard God's voice from the mountain. But had they really _heard_ it? This was a people that had just come from a land where they had been slaves for several generations. And they were used to being slaves; they were used to not being responsible for themselves. Even when Moses came, on a commission from God, to free them from their slavery, after initially accepting him, it wasn't long before they stopped listening to him. It was not only the Egyptians who had to be convinced to let the Israelites go; the Israelites themselves had to be convinced, through the ten plagues, that it really was their destiny to be freed from slavery. And even after they were freed, they continued to grumble, and to resist Moses and the commandments of God. In short, the Israelites were not all that interested in the ways of God. They preferred physical and material pleasures to the word of the Lord, and the freedom and responsibility that go along with it. Left to themselves, they would have remained slaves, wholly engrossed in physical pleasure and pain. They were not interested in spirit, in wisdom, in love. And so, although they did experience the miracles that the Lord had done for them, and did hear his words, these things did not sink deeply into their consciousness. These events and these commandments did not make the strong impression on them that we might expect, because their minds and hearts were closed to the way of love to the Lord, love to the neighbor, and a willingness to be led by the Lord in all things. It was less than two months from the time they had heard the Lord commanding them not to make any idols, and they were already worshiping an idol they had made. It still seems amazing. And yet, how successful have we ourselves been in leaving behind our idols, and following the Lord fully and wholeheartedly? Of course, in our day and age we are not tempted to make a golden sculpture and worship it. We're much too sophisticated for that! Instead, we set up other kinds of idols: money, power, beauty, success, our own intelligence and rightness, pet theories and pet peeves that we continually harp on to any audience we can hold captive. These are just a few general categories of modern-day idols that we set up for ourselves. Each of us, if we take an honest look at ourselves, can get much more specific about the particular idols we have set up--the attitudes, behaviors, addictions, shortcomings that we put front and center in our lives, even though we know they are contrary to the way that the Lord has shown us to think, feel, and live. And haven't we each had times when we gained some great new insight, and made a new resolve to live differently from now on? Perhaps sometimes it worked! But mostly, I suspect, it was not long before we forgot our high resolve and slipped right back into our old way of thinking and acting. Just like the Israelites, we go right back to worshipping the same "golden calf" that we have always worshipped in our Egyptian slavery to the habits that we have adopted from our material (and rather self-centered) life in the world. We're not all that different from the ancient Israelites. We do the very same thing, only on a different level. And like the Israelites, when we slip back into our old habits, we probably think that the Lord doesn't notice it anyway. "As for this fellow Moses," we say--the one who brings us the word of the Lord--"we don't know what has happened to him." Once we slip back into our old habits, that insight we got in church, or while reading the Bible, or while taking a peaceful walk in the woods, or while talking to a close friend--once we slip back into our old habits, the insight and resolve that came to us from the Lord have slipped into the back of our minds, conveniently forgotten, out of sight, out of mind, allowing us to continue living just the way we have always lived. And yet, that insight, that experience, is not totally forgotten. It may have moved out of our consciousness for a time, but it is still hidden in the depths of our mind and heart, communing with God in our soul, waiting to re-emerge when the time is right. Moses did come down from the mountain, carrying the tablets with the Ten Commandments that the people had heard God speak from the mountain forty days earlier. And when he saw what the people were doing, he threw down those tablets and broke them to pieces--just as the people had rejected and broken the commandments through their behavior. Then Moses took the calf they had made, burned it in the fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water of a stream that came down from Mt. Sinai (see Deuteronomy 9:21), and made the Israelites drink it. Yes, in our lives there comes a time when our bad attitudes, and the bad habits that go with them, have gone too far, and we realize that it is time to make an end of them. Whereas before the commandments of the Lord had seemed distant and theoretical, coming from the remote mountaintop, now they are up close and personal, right here with us. We realize that we have broken them, and that our violations are hurting both ourselves and the people around us. We know that we must change. And yet it is a bitter pill to swallow. We have seen the truth. That is the stream flowing down from Mt. Sinai. But the effects of our violations flow onward together with the new truth in our mind, just as the powder of the burnt and pulverized idol mingles with the water of the stream. And whether we like it or not, we must drink the bitter water. We drink the dust of our own idols, and it gives a bitter taste to our new and deeper understanding of the truth. It is the bitter water of knowing what we _should_ have done (or not done), and living with the results of what we _did_ do (or neglected to do). It is seeing the effects on our family, our friends, our co-workers. And it is living with the lasting impact that our behavior has had on our relationships with others. It is living with broken and lost relationships, and knowing that if we had listened to the Lord's voice earlier, this might not have happened. (Then again, it might have happened anyway! Living with the uncertainty is part of our struggle.) While our old life may grow fainter and more distant with the years, its effects are always with us. We also continue to be affected by our old habits and attitudes in the way we think and feel. Having been in the wrong for such a long time, it will be harder for us to see things rightly. It will be harder to clearly understand what is true, and what course we should take. We will always have a tendency to fall back into our old ways of thinking. Because we once established a pattern of ignoring the word of the Lord when it conflicted with a habit of ours, the Lord's word to us will now take a different form. For the first set of tables of the Ten Commandments, the "the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets" (Exodus 32:16). But for the second set, God commanded Moses to chisel out the tablets, and then God wrote on them the same words that had been on the first set (Exodus 34:1). The first set, of course, had been broken by Moses in his anger at the Israelites' quick violation of them. Here is the meaning: Because we willfully turn away from God in our motives, thoughts, and actions, we cannot accept the truth in pure form as it comes from God. We cannot receive the commandments on the tablets that God makes. The truth instead has to be accommodated to our fallen state--written on tablets that Moses, a human being, chisels out. This is the secret of why the Bible contains so many harsh and difficult passages. This is why so many things in the Bible are spoken from the human perspective, rather than God's perspective. This is why there are things written in the Bible that if taken literally, are not true, but rather are the way God's truth looks to us when we resist and oppose it. For example, the Bible often speaks of God's anger toward human beings. And yet God, who is pure love, can never be angry with us. The Bible speaks of God's anger, not because God is actually angry, but because when we are stubbornly opposed to the ways of God's love, refusing to listen to God's commandments and obey them, then we set ourselves against God's love. God's love then looks to us like anger, because it opposes our wrong and evil behavior, and the false ideas that we adopt to rationalize our actions. Because of our own unwillingness to listen to the voice of God's love as it seeks to guide us toward happiness, we hear something very different from what God is saying. The truth behind that harsher voice is still the same, just as the words God writes on the new tablets are the same. But the tablets are the work of Moses. God's word comes to us in a way that is not as clear and beautiful as it might have been if we had not worshiped at the golden calf of our own materialistic and self-centered desires. Yet, the promise is still with us. Our road through the difficult and often painful desert of life will be longer and harder than it might have been. But if we persist, always returning to the spiritual journey that the Lord has set before us, we _will_ reach our spiritual destination. If we continue to move forward on our life journey, we will come to dwell in our Holy Land of spiritual life, mutual love, and joy in the presence of the Lord. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Nov 17 21:44:06 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 16:44:06 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Mapping Out Our Future," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021117164304.028539a8@mail.leewoof.net> Mapping Out Our Future By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, November 17, 2002 Readings: Joshua 18:1-10 The division of the land The whole assembly of the Israelites gathered at Shiloh and set up the Tent of Meeting there. The country was brought under their control, but there were still seven Israelite tribes who had not yet received their inheritance. So Joshua said to the Israelites: "How long will you wait before you begin to take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you? Appoint three men from each tribe. I will send them out to make a survey of the land and to write a description of it, according to the inheritance of each. Then they will return to me. You are to divide the land into seven parts. Judah is to remain in its territory on the south and the house of Joseph in its territory on the north. After you have written descriptions of the seven parts of the land, bring them here to me and I will cast lots for you in the presence of the Lord our God. The Levites, however, do not get a portion among you, because the priestly service of the Lord is their inheritance. And Gad, Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh have already received their inheritance on the east side of the Jordan. Moses the servant of the Lord gave it to them." As the men started on their way to map out the land, Joshua instructed them, "Go and make a survey of the land and write a description of it. Then return to me, and I will cast lots for you here at Shiloh in the presence of the Lord." So the men left and went through the land. They wrote its description on a scroll, town by town, in seven parts, and returned to Joshua in the camp at Shiloh. Joshua then cast lots for them in Shiloh in the presence of the Lord, and there he distributed the land to the Israelites according to their tribal divisions. Luke 14:28-30 Counting the Cost Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will you not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, "This fellow began to build and was not able to finish." True Christian Religion #620 A spiritual map Spiritual rebirth must take place through faith and kindness. And without truths that teach and guide us, being reborn would be like sailing on a vast ocean without a rudder, or without a ship's compass and charts. It would also be like riding a horse in a dark forest at night. The inner, mental vision of people who possess, not truths, but falsities (which they believe to be true) is like the sight of people whose optic nerves are blocked: the eye appears to be intact and seeing, while in fact it sees nothing. . . . In such people, the rational, intellectual capability is blocked upwards, and open only downwards. As a result, the light of reason becomes like the light of their eyes, so that all their opinions are mere imagination, strung together out of pure fallacies. Such people are like astrologers standing in public squares with long telescopes and issuing empty prophecies. This is what would happen to all people who study theology if the Lord did not open to them genuine truths from the Bible. Sermon Joshua said to the Israelites . . . "Appoint three men from each tribe. I will send them out to make a survey of the land and to write a description of it, according to the inheritance of each. (Joshua 18:3, 4) As we arrive at the events in our story from the book of Joshua, the Israelites, under Joshua's leadership, have completed the initial conquest of the Holy Land. Coming north from the Sinai Peninsula after forty years of wandering in the wilderness, they first conquered the land on the other side--the eastern side--of the Jordan, where the tribes of Reuben and Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh requested and received their inheritance. Then they crossed the Jordan and followed a classic "divide and conquer" strategy. First they cut a slice through the center of the land, overcoming the resistance there. This is where the two tribes of Joseph (Ephraim and the other half tribe of Manasseh) and the tribe Benjamin would receive their inheritance. So the youngest sons of Jacob--the sons of his favored wife Rachel--inhabited the center of the land, where Jerusalem also was. The Israelites then swept through the southern part of the land, where Simeon and Judah would receive their inheritance, just across the Dead Sea from the tribe Reuben. This meant that three of the four eldest sons of Jacob, who were sons of Rachel's sister Leah, would inhabit the southern part of the land. From this southern part of the land, all the later Jewish people would descend, after the northern tribes were taken captive by Assyria and never heard from again. Finally the Israelites, still under Joshua's command, conquered the northern part of the land, where the remaining tribes received their inheritances. These included Naphtali, Asher, and later Dan, three of the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, the women-servants of Rachel and Leah, and also Issachar and Zebulun, the two sons born later to Leah. And what about Levi, the third of Leah's first four sons? The Levites had been set apart as a tribe devoted to the service of the Lord, including the priesthood and the various functions of worship and teaching the law of Moses. They did not receive a unified tribal inheritance. Instead, they were given forty-eight towns scattered throughout the allotments of all the tribes. In this way, the presence of the Lord would be felt throughout the land through the Levites, his special representatives. To sum up, the eldest sons of Jacob that received tribal inheritances all lived in the southern part of the land, the middle sons generally inhabited the northern part, and the youngest were mostly situated in the center, with representatives of each of these three echelons inhabiting sections of the land on the other side of Jordan. And the Levites were settled in towns throughout the land. There were a few loose ends--such as the tribe of Dan running out of room in its inheritance by the Mediterranean Sea, and conquering and moving into new territory in the far north of the land. But in general, it was a well-ordered plan for allotting the land to the various tribes of Israelite nation. Of course, this orderly plan didn't come about by chance. Some of the tribes requested and received particular stretches of territory because they suited their occupations as herdsmen. Others were rewarded with certain territories because of their strength of leadership. And the rest, in our reading for today, were given their territories by the drawing of lots. Drawing lots is a method that today we might call leaving it to chance; but to the Israelites, it meant leaving the decision up to the Lord. This drawing of lots took place after Joshua had sent out surveyors to map out the land and divide it up into suitable parcels. Mapping out the land. It has a certain ring to it, don't you think? But more than that, it is a necessary step to take before we embark on _any_ undertaking. Jesus used a different metaphor to express the same idea. It would be foolish, he pointed out, to begin on a building project without first sitting down and estimating the cost to see if we have enough money to complete it. And in order to estimate the cost, we need to have a blueprint, a plan, a _map_ of the building we intend to construct. To give another example, let's say we decide at some point in our lives that we want to change careers. Before we do so, we will need to take stock and make a plan. Will we have to return to school for additional training? If so, for how long, and how much will it cost? Can we live for that long on reduced work hours and income, and with greater expenses? What will we have to rearrange in our lives in order to make it possible? Yes, before we embark on any new plan, we need to sit down, count the cost, and map out our future. Of course, we also need to put our trust in the Lord, and have faith that if it is the Lord's will, a way will be found. Our lives are an interplay between the Lord's work and our work--just as the Israelites sent out a crew to map out the land, but then let the Lord decide which tribe would settle where. And even after they settled in their tribal inheritances, given to them by the Lord, they still had to finish the work of subduing the remaining inhabitants of the land, who had had not been entirely wiped out in the initial conquest. Yet as in that initial conquest, they also had to trust in the Lord's strength, not their own, for the victory. Perhaps some of us are at a point where it is time to survey the new land in which we find ourselves, and map out a future for ourselves. This tends to come at a time when we have already accomplished much of what we had previously set out to do--just as the Israelites had already accomplished the initial conquest of the land. At these times, find ourselves on that momentary plateau of peace. This peace is represented by the setting up of the tabernacle at Shiloh, in the center of the land. The name Shiloh means "peace." For us, it is the peace that comes after we have struggled to reach particular goals we have set for ourselves. Though we may not achieve them completely--just as the Israelites had not yet fully conquered the Holy Land--we do come to a time when all our work and struggle have borne fruit. We come to a time when we have largely attained the goals we set for ourselves in earlier years. And we can now take a certain satisfaction in our achievements, and feel a certain peace at the center of our being, knowing what we have accomplished with the Lord's help. Yet this is also the time when we naturally begin to think, "What next?" Perhaps we have finished our schooling, and it is time to move on into our chosen career. Perhaps our previous employment has come to an end, and we need to move on to a new job. Perhaps our last child has left the nest, and we need to refocus our lives on new goals. Perhaps we realize that our current religious practices have brought us as far as they are going to, and it is time to take new steps, and tread new ground, in our spiritual life. Perhaps it is time to begin a new and deeper relationship with the Lord. At any such turning point, any plateau of peace just before we move into the next phase, it is wise to send out an mental survey team. It is wise to map out the land around us, and having clearly discerned our options and our possibilities, put our lives into the hands of the Lord to guide us on our next steps. If we rush pell-mell into the first thing that presents itself, the results are not likely to be good. Instead, we need to give ourselves time and space to reflect, to consider our future carefully, and to spend time with the Lord in prayer, asking for the understanding and wisdom we need to map out our future. For each one of us, the map will be different. But the allotments of the different tribes suggests a pattern that we might consider no matter what our next steps may be. Each part of the land has a particular correspondence, a particular symbolism. Collectively, they represent every aspect of our lives. And though we don't have time to consider each of the twelve tribes individually, we can look at their overall groupings, and gain an understanding of what elements must be present in our plan. First (in time, if not in importance) our plan must be practical and useful. This is represented by the two and a half tribes that settled on the other side of Jordan. This was the remotest part of the land; as such, it represents the life of our outward behavior. A good plan cannot be merely theoretical. It cannot even be purely spiritual. It must involve an active engagement in good and useful service to our fellow human beings. Yet as millions know who are caught in the rat race of working merely to provide for our material necessities, work alone is not satisfying. To add soul and life to our work, we need a connection to the deeper aspects of life. This is represented by the center of the Holy Land, where Benjamin and the bulk of the two tribes of Joseph settled. In the center of the land of our being is the spiritual side of our life, where Jerusalem and the Temple--our conscious worship and prayer life--are located. And though we may have to spend most of our time attending to the things of this world, if our plan is to be a good and true one--one that will have real meaning and depth--we must also allot a regular "inheritance" of our time to developing our spiritual life. Moving south, we find the land of Judah and his immediate brothers. The south, closer to the equator and to the warmth of the sun, represents the life of our loves, our emotions, our feelings. Just as no plan of life has any meaning if God and spirit are not at the center of it, so it has no life if we are not motivated by love in the things we do. It will not do to pick out a future for ourselves that may be practical and sensible, but that we do not love. We must find something that we can put our heart into, something that we can feel joy and satisfaction in. Mapping out our future is not a cold, calculated process. It is a process that involves listening to the good, warm, and living desires of our inmost heart. And finally, as the deeper and higher motives of our heart move us forward, we also need to engage our heads--our thinking, rational, intellectual capacities. These are represented by the tribes in the northern part of the land, cooler than the southern lands, but also a crossroads, more engaged with the realities and practicalities of the surrounding world. Yes, we need to use all the knowledge and understanding we have gained through our years of experience, and continue to learn more, in order to map out a good, loving, useful, and sensible future for ourselves. As Swedenborg says, in moving forward on our spiritual journey--which is the process of spiritual rebirth--we must have the truth that can teach us and guide us on our way. Otherwise we are like a ship at sea without compass, chart, or rudder. In fact, when we are beginning a new phase of our lives, we may well have to learn a whole new set of skills, and gain a whole new set of insights, in order to move forward purposefully, with a clear and coherent plan for our future. A good map for our future, then, involves at least four key elements: 1. It is practical and useful. 2. It includes regular time to develop our spiritual life. 3. It is something we love--something that engages our heart. 4. It uses our knowledge and understanding--and involves learning new things, too. But wait! There is one more detail that must be included to round out our map. Though Jerusalem and the temple are situated at the center of our spiritual land, there are also forty-eight towns for the Levites--the Lord's special servants--scattered throughout the entire land, north, south, east and west. This serves as a reminder that God and spirit are not to be reserved for our Sunday worship. Rather, the Lord is to accompany us everywhere we go, and our spiritual beliefs are to be our guide in everything we do. Whether we are learning, loving, or going about our daily work, God and spirit are to be our constant companions, continually lifting up to a higher level everything we think, feel, and do--even our most menial tasks and simplest pleasures. If we remember that the Lord is with us always, then our entire life will take on new dimensions and new depths of joy and peace. Mapping out our future. It may take some extra time--time that we may feel we can't afford. And yet the time we spend consciously considering our options and planning our future in the light of the Lord's teachings will richly repay us year after year. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Mon Nov 25 02:58:14 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:58:14 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "Giving and Receiving," By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021124215732.02808c50@mail.leewoof.net> Giving and Receiving By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, November 24, 2002 Thanksgiving Sunday Readings: Deuteronomy 24:17-22 Leave the gleanings for the poor Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this. John 4:31-38 One sows and another reaps Meanwhile his disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." Then his disciples said to each other, "Could someone have brought him food?" Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying 'One sows and another reaps' is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor." Arcana Coelestia #4459 Spiritual poverty and wealth In heaven, those who are least are the greatest, those who are humble are the most highly honored, and those who are poor and needy are rich and affluent. . . . People are called poor and needy in heaven when they believe in their heart, with feeling, that nothing that they have comes from themselves, none their knowledge or wisdom comes from themselves, and none of their power comes from themselves. In heaven, people like this are wealthy and have an abundance. The Lord gives them total wealth because they are wiser and richer than others. They live in magnificent palaces, and dwell among all the treasure troves of heaven's wealth. Sermon: The saying 'One sows and another reaps' is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor. (John 4:37, 38) One of the most powerful and enduring fictions of human society is the idea that we can own things. A large part of our legal, civil, and social system is based on property ownership and the right to possess what is "ours." And in this society, our sense of self-worth tends to be heavily bound up in how much money we make, and what we can afford to buy and own. What sort of a house (or apartment) do we live in? Do we own it or rent it? What kind of car do we drive? How nice are the clothes we wear? We even have phrases like our "net worth," which is the dollar value of everything we own minus everything we owe. How much are you worth? Can it be counted in dollars? And more fundamentally, do any of us really own anything? Of course, legally we can and do own things. The law says that if I hold title to a piece of property, then I own it, and I can generally do with it what I wish. If I decide to sell it, the money is mine, and I can use it to buy something else, which I will then own. So in one sense, it's obvious that we can own things. And yet, civil law itself is simply an agreement among people that we are going to treat certain things in certain ways. We human beings of this society have written laws saying that if I hold a particular officially sanctioned piece of paper, and it is registered with the county (or perhaps the state), this gives me an exclusive right to use and benefit from the property or other items described on the piece of paper. And since almost everyone in our society agrees to abide by the laws giving me that right, we all maintain together the persuasion that we own this or that piece of property. We all agree on it, therefore it must be true. And as long as we do generally agree on this system, it does provide some framework for sorting things out among ourselves--whether justly or unjustly. However, it is good to keep in mind that this business of possessions and property ownership is not an ultimate reality of the universe, or a God-given right, but simply a human system that we have agreed upon for our own purposes. In an ultimate sense, we really don't own anything. We simply have a limited level of outward control over certain things that we call our own. That control is tenuous at best. If our employment situation changes, or the laws change, or disaster strikes, or we ourselves die or become incapacitated, then all our sense of ownership can be very quickly wiped out, and we can suddenly have little or nothing that we can call our own. Things pass into our hands and pass out of our hands, and our control over that is far more limited than we like to think. Ownership is a fleeting thing. In earlier millennia, when legal systems weren't so well developed, and human civilization was much simpler than it is today, the sense of personal ownership was not such a central aspect of society. (And this is still true in some so-called "primitive societies" today.) In Old Testament times, when the Israelites moved into and conquered the Holy Land, though it was at times referred to as a "possession," it was also carefully pointed out that the land was an "inheritance"--in other words, a gift--from the Lord. The land itself could not be sold; only the use of it could be sold for a certain time period. Every fifty years, any land that had been "sold" was to revert back to the original family whose inheritance it was. David, the Psalmist, summed up when he wrote, "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it" (Psalm 24:1). And this brings us to the reality of the situation, beyond all human laws, agreements, and commonly held fictions. The fact is, none of this is really ours. It is all the Lord's. The Lord God made the entire universe and everything in it--including us. And while we imagine that we own things for a shorter or longer time, God in fact owns everything, rules everything, and even keeps everything in existence moment by moment, from eternity to eternity. We don't own anything. Everything we have is a gift from God. And the things we have are not the sort of gift that God gives to us, and then it is ours. They are the sort of gift that God is continually giving us, like water running out of a faucet, which would be gone if the flow were cut off at the source. We think material things are so solid, so permanent, so real. We can grasp them; they are solid, stable, dependable. And yet, all these seemingly solid things are made of trillions upon trillions of tiny little atoms that have practically no substance to them, but are mostly infinitesimally small particles--or perhaps just waves--zipping around and creating force fields that we feel as solid matter. If the energy behind them were taken away, if their motion were stopped, they would instantly collapse into nothing--and that seemingly solid pew that you are sitting on would simply vanish. The energy behind them is God's love. The reason your pew--and my pulpit--are not vanishing right now is that the Lord wants them to be here, and is continually creating and sustaining them for us. They are permanent, not because matter is permanent--for matter is evanescent and fleeting, made mostly of empty space. Your pew and my pulpit are still here because the Lord wants them to be. This church, and the grass and flowers and streets and buildings, the sky and earth, the sun and stars, and everything else in this world have a sense of permanence about them because the Lord's will is permanent and eternal, and the Lord continually creates everything in the world around us as a pure gift of love. And here we are, thinking that we own things. That they are ours. The sooner we realize that we that we own nothing; that we are nothing on our own; that everything we have and everything we are is a pure gift of God, given to us continually, moment by moment, out of pure, tender, infinite, eternal divine love, the sooner we will see our real place in this universe--and the sooner we will gain the happiness, joy, and deep inner peace that the Lord wishes to give us now and forever. No matter what human law and custom says we own, no matter what we vainly think is "ours," we are all the recipients of fantastic, incredible gifts from the Lord. Forget the house and the car--as nice and even necessary as those may be. Take a look at the world around us. Take a look at the trees, the flowers, the sky, the clouds, the sun, moon, and stars, the wonders of a single tiny insect flying by, and of the entire universe as far as our largest telescopes can reach. All of it is a gift to us from God. Consider our own bodies, so incredibly intricate and complex that even our most advanced science has barely begun to understand the most basic aspects of its function. We walk around in it all day, and rarely stop to think that we are a walking, talking miracle--a miracle of human form and function designed by a loving God. Our own bodies are an incredible gift from God. And then there are all the people around us. Just look around here in this church for a moment. This is a church full of miracles. People of all ages. Children, young people, adults, elders. Every one of us is a miracle, and we have been given to each other through the love and grace of God. Consider your own family. Perhaps we don't always get along with everyone in our family. But every member of our family is a miracle given to us by God. The same goes for our community. Then consider that there are billions of these human miracles inhabiting this earth. And every one of them is unique--different from every other. Yes, the entire world of nature and the entire world of human society has been given to us as a huge, incredible gift from the vast love of God. None of it is our own. Yet all of it is given to us to enjoy, to learn from, to share with, to grow into. Everything around us, both what we think of as good and what we think of as bad, is God's free gift, given to us for our pleasure and enjoyment, for our learning and growth--and if we will appreciate it and use it well, for our eternal good. Once we understand and accept this (and we resist it with every fiber of our being!), we realize that we have all received far, far more than we have ever given. Everything we have and everything we are, everything we have experienced, learned, or felt has been a gift from God--even those that came through others. As the Apostle John said, "From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another" (John 1:16). This is what Thanksgiving is all about. It is all about recognizing all of our wonderful gifts; all of our wonderful blessings from the Lord, and being thankful for them. No matter what we have suffered and what we have lost, we have all been given far more than we have ever given in return. Even the beloved things and people we have lost were gifts from God--and the more precious the gift, the harder its loss. Yet these treasured possessions, these dear loved ones, have enriched our lives, and continue to enrich our lives with so many blessings! We have all received blessing after blessing. And the Lord asks something in return. Just as the Lord has given everything to us, we are to give everything to one another. Wealth and poverty mean nothing in the eternal scheme of things. But what we do with what we have--whether it is much or little--will stay with us eternally. We have freely received a wondrous wealth of gifts, material and spiritual, human and divine. Now it is our turn to give ourselves as a living gift of love and service, of help and support to one another. We like to think of ourselves as the farmer harvesting the field, and generously leaving the gleanings for those poorer than ourselves. Yet we ourselves are the gleaners, receiving the generosity of God's harvest. And once we realize that we are poor and needy, that we have nothing of our own, then we will finally be prepared to be truly rich. Because true riches are not riches of the world, but riches of the spirit. They are the riches of love and understanding, of joy and inner peace. The Lord has done all the hard work for us. We have only to go around and reap what he has sown--and do it with humble thanksgiving for God's grace and love. And in return, we are simply asked to show to others the same generosity of love, understanding, and kindness that God has so richly given to us as an eternal blessing. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From leewoof@leewoof.net Sun Dec 15 03:28:25 2002 From: leewoof@leewoof.net (Lee Woofenden) Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 22:28:25 -0500 Subject: [Sermons] "The Advent of Faith," by the Rev. Lee Woofenden Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20021214222714.027a32c0@mail.leewoof.net> The Advent of Faith By the Rev. Lee Woofenden Bridgewater, Massachusetts, December 8, 2002 (Transcribed and edited from audio tape) Readings: Isaiah 9:1-7: Unto us a child is born Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan-- The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest, as men rejoice when dividing the plunder. For as in the day of Midian's defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor. Every warrior's boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and for ever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. John 1:1-18: The Word became flesh In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'") From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known. Arcana Coelestia #2405.8: The advent of love and faith In the Bible's genuine meaning, "the morning" refers to the Lord, his coming, and the approach of his kingdom. . . . For us as individuals, the morning comes when we are being reborn and becoming new people. When this happens, the Lord's kingdom is being established in us, and we become a part of the church. And in particular, the morning happens whenever the good that flows from love and faith is at work in us, since this is what the Lord's coming means. Sermon: The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:2) This morning, as I offer my first service for you during Advent, I'm thankful that I have the Advent candles in front of me because that is where I am getting my theme for the four upcoming services that I will be offering for you: this Sunday, next Sunday, Christmas Sunday, and our Christmas Eve service. Fortunately, our Sunday School Director is following the same tradition for the names of the Advent candles that I want to use--and that is following the Apostle Paul when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:13, "These three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love." For our Advent candles we also have, in addition to faith, hope, and love, a candle for joy. So for these next four services I will be offering sermons on "The Advent of Faith," "The Advent of Hope," "The Advent of Love," and on Christmas Eve, "The Advent of Joy." Of course, I am one week off, because the Advent candles started last week, while I am starting this week, since I did not preach last week. As I said to the children earlier, Advent is a season of darkness and also of light. It a season of darkness because this is our season of winter. Christmas comes very close to the winter solstice, which is the longest night of the year, when we have the least light and the most darkness. And that is very appropriate to the state of the world in which the Lord came. The Lord came at a time when the people were walking in darkness, and were desperately in need of light. And just as in the original coming of the Lord into our world in the time of darkness, we celebrate his birth at the time of the greatest darkness of our seasons. And yet, it is also a festival of lights. That is the wonder of the Advent season: the light that is shining out in the darkness. Of course, the darkness that I am talking about here is not physical darkness. As far as we know, the people back in the times when Jesus was born had just about the same amount of physical light as we have today. The sun hasn't gotten any brighter or dimmer, and the seasons are about the same. So we are not talking about physical light. The light we are talking about is spiritual light. And you don't have to be a Swedenborgian with a knowledge of symbolism and correspondences to know that light is a symbol for truth--and especially for God's truth. The light we are talking about is the light of truth, the light of understanding, the light of wisdom. Another way that we express this difference between darkness and light spiritually is by speaking of faith and the absence of faith. And this is my theme for today: the advent of faith, the advent of light into our world. Now we have to ask the question, "What is faith?" There is a popular misconception going around that faith is what we have when we are not really sure of something--when we don't know for sure, so we say, "I have to have faith." And there is a meaning of faith in which that is true. For example, we do have to have faith that the Lord is working for us even when we don't clearly see it ourselves. And yet, the true meaning of faith, according to our teachings, is believing something because it is true. Faith is believing something because it is true. The misconception about faith being meaning believing something when you can't see or understand it came partly from a conversation between Jesus and Thomas. Moving from the beginning to the end of the Lord's life for a moment, after Jesus was resurrected most of his disciples saw him at a time when they had gathered together in a room. But there was one disciple who didn't see him. His name was Thomas, and he was not there when Jesus first appeared to the disciples. They told Thomas about it, but he didn't believe them. He said: Unless I see him; unless I can put my hand into his side and put my finger in the nail prints, I won't believe. Later, they all came together again, and Thomas was with them this time. Jesus came among them again, and he said to Thomas: Look, see, it is I. Put your hand in my side, put your finger in the nail prints, and you will have faith; you will believe that it is I. And Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God." Then come the critical words--one of the places where we have gotten the misconception that faith is believing something that we can't understand. Jesus said to Thomas: "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29). People have often taken this to mean that it is very blessed to believe in Jesus when we don't really understand, when we haven't seen the Lord in our life. And yet, the kind of seeing that Thomas insisted on before he would believe was seeing with his physical eyes. He would only believe if he saw with his physical eyes that Jesus was there in front of him. What Jesus was saying in reply was not that we shouldn't see with our spiritual eyes, but that those who are unwilling to believe anything except what they see with their physical eyes will never have true faith. Because the seeing involved in true faith is seeing with our spiritual eyes, seeing with the eyes of our mind, seeing with our inner eyes, God's presence. It is seeing that inner light. Faith is not believing something we can't understand. Faith is truly seeing with our spiritual eyes, with our inner vision, the truth and wisdom and presence of the Lord. This is the faith, this is the light, that we celebrate as it comes into our world at the darkest time. We celebrate at this season the advent of faith. In humanity's darkness that faith was missing. We read in the passage from Isaiah of "the people walking in darkness." People walking in darkness. Those who had, not physical darkness, but spiritual darkness. It was a time when the church had become corrupt. It was a time when the religious leaders were more interested in their own power, privilege, and wealth than they were in showing the people the way to the Lord. Jesus spent much of his ministry trying to bring to the light the people who were in the darkness. He also upbraided the religious leaders, who should have been showing the people the way to God, but instead were binding heavy burdens on them that were heavy to bear, and yet not lifting one of their fingers to help them (Matthew 23:4). It was a time of great darkness in the world. The Lord had tried sending prophets; he had tried sending priests. None of it had worked. It had helped for a little while, but then the people went right back to their backsliding, until there was so much darkness in the world that the Lord said: I looked, and there was no man. There was no one that I could send. And therefore with my own arm I came to save the people, to lead the people (Isaiah 41:28; 59:16). There came a time when only the Lord's personal presence in this world could bring us out of the great spiritual darkness that we had plunged ourselves into. This was the advent of faith that we are speaking of. That great time of darkness in all of humanity is also reflected in our own lives. We each go through our times of light and of darkness. It is one of the beautiful teachings of our church that the spiritual progress of all of humankind is also reflected in our own individual spiritual process. We begin in a very primitive state as infants, not able to know or do much of anything, completely helpless, very instinctual. We grow through many stages and reach adulthood, having gone through a childhood sometimes pleasant and sometimes unpleasant, with our ups and downs. Eventually we reach a time in our lives when we realize: I am walking in darkness. I don't understand what's going on in this world. I don't understand where I am going. My life does not have the kind of meaning that I want it to. I don't have the kind of love in my life that I want. I can't feel or express the Lord's presence in my life. I am walking in darkness. Just as the people of this earth walked in darkness, we come to our times when we realize that it is dark, not outside, but inside. It's dark in our heart. It's dark in our mind. These are exactly the times when, if we are willing, we can open ourselves up to that new birth, that birth of light--the light of the Lord shining into our hearts and minds. As long as we think we know what's going on; as long as we think we understand, that we can figure it out for ourselves, we are not open to God's presence. But when we truly realize: No, I don't understand; I can't figure this out; I need help; I am in darkness--then we are open to the Lord's coming into our lives. The Lord is born into us in our darkest times. Just when we think that our life is about to end. Just when we think there is no hope left. Just when we think that our faith will no longer be with us. This is when the Lord makes a new birth. This is when we are ready. This is when we are ready to say to the Lord, "Come to me. I need you. I need your help." As we think about this season of darkness, we realize that the Lord has come to us and will come to us whenever we are in our times of darkness, and will bring us the light that is his wisdom, his presence. We see his teachings in the Gospels, resurrecting all of the dead teachings that had been given many centuries before, and yet had been lost to humankind. We read where he brings us the light in his own words and through his own example. God has given us the entire Word, the entire Bible, so that we may have the light of his presence. We also know from our teachings that just as there are comings of the Lord into the world on the large scale for all of humanity, and just as there are times of darkness in the course of our lives when the Lord is born in us, there can also be everyday times when the Lord comes into our life with his light. Every time we don't understand, every time we don't see our way and we pray to the Lord and ask for help and receive inspiration, receive help, this is the Lord coming into our life. Swedenborg says that we experience a morning in our life "whenever the good that flows from love and faith is at work in us, because this is what the Lord's coming means." Whenever the goodness that comes into our life from the love and faith that we are willing to receive from the Lord--when this starts moving and working us, then it is also the Lord's coming. Every time this happens. Every time have darkness, the Lord is waiting to be born into us. Every time we have darkness, every time we don't understand, every time we are wandering and lost inwardly, the Lord is waiting for us to open ourselves up to him so that he can be born into our lives with new light and new inspiration. As we move into and through this season of Advent; as we see the beautiful candles being lit one by one, I hope and pray that each of you will also be able to feel that light coming into your life. And even more than that, I hope that each of us will be able to open ourselves more fully to that light of the Lord being born into us, to the advent of faith that the Lord wishes to make for each one of us today and every day. Amen. ____________________ Pastor's email address: leewoof@leewoof.net Church web site: http://www.ForMinistry.com/02324NJC Denominational web site: http://www.swedenborg.org These sermons are a ministry of the Bridgewater New Jerusalem Church. If you wish to support the church that sponsors them, please send your contribution to: New Jerusalem Church 88 Central Square Bridgewater, MA 02324 We also accept credit card donations via PayPal: https://secure.paypal.com/affil/pal=LarryC%40TMLP.com New PayPal users must complete a simple sign-up. Make your donation to LarryC@TMLP.com (Treasurer), Bridgewater Society of the New Jerusalem. Thank you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: