Church of the Holy City

Love Makes a Person and a Church
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
May 29, 2011

Mark 10:35-45 Acts 2:41-47 Psalm 66

Last Sunday I talked about the Divine Human of the Lord, and how we are made in God’s image. I said that we are human because God is human first. Today I would like to explore what exactly it means to be human.
We can think of being human by virtue of our body. That is, we have a head, arms and legs, and a torso, and that is our human form. But in fact, our body is simply a vessel that responds to our soul. Our body is made of material elements, but our soul is made of spiritual elements. And it is actually our soul that makes us human.
Simply put, our soul is what we love. We are human because we can love. In fact, we are human because of our loves. It is love that makes us human. Love is who we really are. What we love is our very life. Take away love, and we wouldn’t want to do anything. But love always strives to come into action. We want to enjoy what we love, and we want to do the things we love. So love needs some way to come into being. It needs some power to act. This is what truth is. We can think of truth as the know-how to get done what we love. Truth tells us how to bring into action what we love. Say we love someone who is short of money. When we love them, we want to help. So we ask ourselves, “How can I help them?” Truth tells us how to help them. Truth may tell us to take them shopping for food. Or it may tell us to fill up their gas tank. Or it may tell us to take them to the employment office to help them find work. This is what the early Christians did, as we heard in today’s reading from Acts. There we read, “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need” (2:45). Truth is the way love takes form. It tells us how to love. So who we are is our loves, but our loves need truth to take action. So the human form is both love and truth. So Swedenborg writes,
The human form is nothing else than the form of all the affections of love; beauty is its intelligence, which it procures for itself through truths received either by sight or by hearing, external or internal. These are what love disposes into the form of its affections; and these forms exist in great variety; but they all derive a likeness from their general form, which is the human form (DLW 411).
We can think about love a little further. There are loves in the plural–that is many things we love. And there is love in the singular–one overarching thing that we love above all. The one, overarching thing that we love above all else is called our ruling love. I may love skiing, or music, or eating. But none of these things can be considered the ruling love. These are affections that flow forth from the ruling love. They are like small streams that flow forth from one great river.
A person’s very life is his love; and such as the love is, such is the life, yes, such is the whole person. But it is the dominant or reigning love which makes the person. This love has many other loves subordinate to it, which are derivations. . . . The dominant love is as their king and head; it directs them; and through them . . . it looks to and intends its own end, which is the primary and ultimate of all (TCR 399).
We can get an idea of what we love by looking at the things that we enjoy. We enjoy doing what we love. And we don’t enjoy doing what we don’t love. So what we enjoy is a signal of what we love.
All that gives enjoyment, satisfaction, and happiness to any one, comes to him from and according to his ruling love. For a person calls that which he loves enjoyment, because he feels it (TCR 399).
So we have many different kinds of things that we love–as I mentioned in my own case, skiing, music, eating, etc. But all these enjoyments flow forth from the one reigning dominant love.
Swedenborg seems to think that there are only four basic dominant loves: Love to God and the neighbor, and love of self and the world.
There are two loves from which, as from their very fountains, all goods and truths arise; and there are two loves from which all evils and falsities arise. The two loves from which all goods and truths are, are love to the Lord and love toward the neighbor; but the two loves from which are all evils and falsities, are the love of self and the love of the world (TCR 399).
These four loves are what make a person. And they are also what make the church with a person. According to Swedenborg, it is love itself that makes the church in an individual person and in church communities, and in the whole church on earth. He describes the church as internal and external. The internal of the church is like its soul; and the external of the church is like its body. The internal of the church is love to God and the neighbor and the external of the church are the rituals like the Holy Supper, Bible readings, and preachings.
Those who place divine worship in frequenting places of worship, hearing preachings, going to the Holy Supper, and he who does these things with devotion . . . are of the external church. But they who at the same time believe that such things are to be done, but still the essential of worship is the life of faith, that is, love towards the neighbor and love toward the Lord; these are of the internal church. . . . Still, with everyone who is of the church there must be both, namely, an external and an internal. If there are not both there is no spiritual life in him; for the internal is as the soul, and the external is as the body of the soul. . . . But they who are in externals and not at the same time in internals are not of the church (AC 8762).
Clearly, it is the internal that truly makes a church. In the passage we just heard, Swedenborg says, “the essential of worship is the life of faith, that is, love toward the neighbor and love toward the Lord.” He repeats this point over and over again.
The internal of the church consists in willing good from the heart, and in being affected by good . . . But the external of the church is to perform rituals in a holy manner . . . (AC 6587).
Again, “Love and the derivative faith is the internal of the church. There is no other faith meant which is the internal of the church than that which is of love or charity” (AC 1798).
These considerations bring us back to our earlier reflections on what it means to be human. Our humanity is what we love. We now see that the state of the church is also according to what a person loves. The internal of the church is the same as what makes for a heavenly person. The internal of the church is to will good from the heart and to be affected by good. And just as it is with an individual, there are the same four loves that make or destroy the church: love of the lord and the neighbor, and love of self and the world.
The two loves from which are all goods and truths, which as was said, are love to the Lord and love toward the neighbor, make heaven with a person, they also make the church with him. The two loves from which are all evils and falsities, which, as was said, are love of self and love of the world, make hell with a person; for they reign in hell; consequently also they destroy the church with him (TCR 399).
Swedenborg also gives illustrations of what the four loves look like. The hellish love of self looks only to what benefits one’s self:
Love of self is to wish well to one’s self only, and not to others except for the sake of self; not even to the church, one’s country, human society, or a fellow citizen; it is also to do good to them only for the sake of one’s reputation, honor, and glory . . . (TCR 400).
We saw a suggestion of self love in our Bible reading from Mark. In it, James and John, puffed up with selfish pride, ask to sit at the right and left hand of Jesus. They say, “Let us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory” (Mark 10:37). The other disciples become indignant, and Jesus mildly reprimands them,
Those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant . . . For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve (Mark 10:42, 43, 44, 45).
By contrast, the heavenly love of God and the neighbor looks to do good to everyone–individually, and collectively in the church and in society:
Heavenly love is to love uses for the sake of uses, of good deeds for the sake of good deeds, which a person performs for the church, his country, human society, and the fellow citizen (TCR 400).
In our Bible readings, this love is illustrated by the early Christian church. Acts 2:44-47 describes the shared love of the early Christian church.
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor or all the people.
This is a beautiful picture of all that the Christian church stands for. You can see the mutual love that reigned among these early Christians as they broke bread together and shared their possessions.
Just as the soul needs a body, so our loves need to fill our whole person. Our love of God and the neighbor want to come forth in good and loving deeds to the church and the world around us. When we have love of God as our reigning love, then all the lower loves–love of the world and love of self are filled with heavenly love and life. With God at the head we can love the world and ourselves in a godly manner.
If the love of heaven is inwardly in love of the world, and by this in love of self, the person does uses in each from the God of heaven. In their operation, these three loves are like will, understanding, and action. The will flows into the understanding, and there provides itself with means to produce action (TCR 394).
When we are in this condition, our heads can well be in the clouds, and our feet will still be standing on the earth. We will be a heaven individually, and a church individually.

He Shall Lead His Flock
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
May 22, 2011

Isaiah 40:1-11 John 10:1-10 Psalm 23

What I take from these Bible readings is an emphasis on the Divine Humanity of God, whom we know in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus says that He is the gate through which we need to enter in order to be saved. He says,
The man who enters through the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out . . . and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. . . . I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. . . . I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (John 10:2,4, 7, 9, 10).
Jesus is telling us that He is the one from whom we have eternal life. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says in John 11:25. Jesus Christ, as the Divine Human is a Being that we can understand and form a relationship with. It is to Jesus Christ that we pray. It is to Jesus Christ that we appeal in times of trouble. It is Jesus Christ in whom we rejoice when we feel close to God.
Jesus tells us to come to Him, not to the Father. He says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” John 14:6. God in His infinity is beyond our comprehension. The power of the New Church is that it has the Divine Human to whom it can relate. Jesus explains His relationship to the Father. The Father is in Him as soul in body.
Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. . . . Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me? . . . it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me (John 14:9, 10, 11).
This passage from John expresses the Swedenborgian idea of God perfectly. Jesus says that it is the Father, living in Him, who does the work. We understand God the Father to be Jesus’ soul, and Jesus Christ to be God incarnate, which means God in a body. God and human are completely merged in Jesus Christ. Jesus’ soul is the infinite Creator God and the infinite Creator God has a human form in Jesus Christ.
In Genesis, we are told that we are created in the image and likeness of God–as humans. And when God appeared to the prophets and Patriarchs of the Old Testament, He often appeared as a human. God was so human that Jacob could wrestle with Him (Genesis 32:22-30). The Elders of Israel ate a sacred feast on Mount Sinai when Moses brings them the law, and they see God. We read,
Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 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 these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank (Exodus 24:9-11).
Notice in this passage that God has feet.

What I think is most important in this is the idea of a Human God. For us, God’s Divine Humanity is none other than Jesus Christ. But to me, the human gods of other world religions are in keeping with our own teachings. Buddhists revere the Buddha, and other divine bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are Buddhas who postpone their own entrance into Nirvana in order to bring all beings to enlightenment. They have a heaven that emanates from them into which a person can be born who calls upon their name. I know of a Buddhist guru who thinks of Jesus as one such Bodhisattva. Although strictly speaking these are not gods, nevertheless they function as gods and are called upon to save their followers. In Hinduism, there are Shiva and Shakti, Vishnu, Brahma, and other deities. I suppose that a criticism could be levelled that Hinduism can degenerate into idolatry when practiced unthinkingly. But to those who penetrate to the depths of Hinduism, the human forms of God are incarnations–called Avatars–of the one great power Brahman. I affirm these images of Divine Humanity in other religions as akin to our own devotion to Jesus Christ. But to me, these gods do not form a real part in my belief system. They are not from my own culture, and I would not fully appreciate their power if I tried to adopt them for my own. No, I am a Christian, and for me, Christ is the gate keeper. For me, Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. I mention these other deities as instances of God’s Divine Human Form.
There are two ways Swedenborg comments on the Divine Humanity of God. One way is to talk about God as a person. So Swedenborg says,
God is the essential person. Throughout all the heavens, the only concept of God is a concept of a person. The reason is that heaven, overall and regionally, is in a kind of human form, and Divinity among the angels is what makes heaven. . . . It is because God is a person that all angels and spirits are perfectly formed people. . . It is common knowledge that we were created in the image and likeness of God because of Genesis 1:26, 27 and from the fact that Abraham and others saw God as a person (DLW 11).
In this understanding of God, we can picture the risen and glorified Jesus Christ as the ultimate and first person. We all have our humanity and personhood from God the First Person.
The other way Swedenborg talks about God’s Humanity is by describing God’s infinite love and wisdom. Love is God’s Being and Wisdom is the way God comes to us. So Swedenborg calls love reality and wisdom manifestation. Wisdom is the way love manifests.
In the Divine Human, reality and manifestation are both distinguishably united. . . . They are distinguishably one like love and wisdom. Love occurs only in wisdom, and wisdom only from love. So love becomes manifest when it is in wisdom (DLW 14).
In this understanding of personhood, love and wisdom are what constitute our humanity, too.
The human form is nothing else than the form of all the affections of love; beauty is its intelligence, which it procures for itself through truths received either by sight or by hearing, external or internal. These are what love disposes into the form of its affections; and these forms exist in great variety; but they all derive a likeness from their general form, which is the human form (DLW 411).
And our humanity, understood as love and wisdom, comes from God’s love and wisdom. This is because God is the First and Creative Person in whose form we are all created.
Love or the will strives unceasingly towards the human form and all things of that form. . . . From this it is clearly evident that life (which is love and the will therefrom), strives unceasingly towards the human form. And as the human form is made up of all the things there are in a person, it follows that love or the will is in a continual endeavor and effort towards the human form, because God is a Person, and Divine Love and Divine Wisdom is His life, and from His life is everything of life (DLW 400).
This discussion of personhood may be a little abstract. But when we think about it, we find that all we are as people are what we love and the intelligence to bring that love into being. Love and wisdom are not just abstract ideas. Love has a reality and wisdom also has a reality. And lest we get too abstract, Swedenborg brings these ideas into actual bodily form. Our love and wisdom first begin to activate the two hemispheres of our brain. Then the brain acts into the lower reaches of our body through nerves that spread all through our bodies. So our whole body responds to what we love and our understanding of how to bring that love into action. So even in his somewhat abstract discussion of love and wisdom, Swedenborg anchors his discussion to the body.
Reality and its manifestation are distinguishably one in the Divine Human the way soul and body are. A soul does not occur without its body, nor a body without its soul. The divine soul of the Divine Human is what we mean by reality, and the divine body of the Divine Human is what we mean by the divine manifestation (DLW 14).
This is how Swedenborg considers the Divine Humanity of the risen and glorified Jesus Christ. And God is in Jesus Christ as a soul is in the body. “It therefore stands to reason that God is a person and in this way is God manifest” (DLW 16).
We can speculate about other forms of God. Some like to think of God as pure energy. Others see God as Nature. But I think that Biblically, and in Swedenborg’s theology, we are taught to see God in the form of Jesus Christ. Throughout His life on earth, God and Man became totally united in Jesus so that Man became fully God and God became fully Man. Jesus tells us, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11). Jesus is the gate through which we are to enter when we approach God. Jesus tells us, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” John 14:6. To some, this is called anthropomorphism, which is a big word for making God into a human. But those who say that, fail to reflect on the truth that we are human because God is human first.

Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Have Believed
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
May 15, 2011

John 20:19-31 Revelation 1:4-8 Psalm 118

In our reading from Revelation, John exhorts us to take to heart the things that are written it that book, because the time is near. John says further that Jesus Christ has made us a kingdom of priests, as was said of the Israelites as far back as the book of Exodus (19:6). And in John’s Gospel we are told that we have true life in the name of Jesus Christ.
The time when we will confront Jesus Christ is always at hand–every moment of our lives. The potential for us to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people is always with us–every moment of our lives. And living in Christ’s name is a reality that we can experience always–in every aspect of our lives.
More is meant by living in the name of Christ than simply calling ourselves Christians. And more is meant than that horrible doctrine that says only those who worship Jesus are saved. You know I heard of a fundamentalist church who said that Gandhi was in hell, because he wasn’t a Christian. Yet I think that Gandhi embodied the Christian life more than many of those who call themselves by His name. Living in the name of Jesus Christ means living in the things that He taught. And foremost among those things are love for the whole human race, peacefulness, and humility. These are all virtues that Gandhi demonstrated in his life.
Also among the important things that go along with living in the name of Jesus Christ is the belief that He rose from the dead. This is important to believe because the resurrection is what makes Jesus one with God. Jesus Christ was the only human who rose body and soul. Ordinary humans leave behind their physical bodies and only our souls rise into the eternal life. But Jesus had made his body so divine that even His physical body rose into eternity. He proved this to His disciples by eating a fish when they thought they were seeing a ghost (Luke 24:42-43).
This concept was hard for Thomas to accept. In John’s Gospel, he says,
Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe (John 20:25).
Jesus appears a week later to Thomas and asks him to put his finger in Jesus’ hands and side. Thomas in humility says, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus says something that is of special relevance to us all. He tells Thomas,
Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed (20:29).
That is where we all are. Few of us, perhaps none of us have actually seen Jesus. And I would venture to say none of us have put our finger into his pierced hands, feet, and side. And yet we believe. We have not seen, and yet we choose to live in the name of Jesus Christ. And I would also venture to say that the more committed we are to life in Jesus’ name, the more we feel connected to Jesus, and the more we feel ourselves filled with Christ’s Holy Spirit.
Swedenborg calls this living in an affirmative principle. He describes two ways to approach spiritual realities. One is the affirmative way, the other the negative way. The affirmative way is to begin our faith journey with a belief in truths because they are in the Bible and because God has taught them. From there we develop more sophisticated belief systems. The negative way is to doubt everything spiritual until it is proven to us by means of reason or by means of scientific evidence. In other words, the negative principle doubts everything spiritual unless it is seen, heard, touched, or otherwise proven first.
There are two principles, therefore; one which leads to all folly and insanity, and another which leads to all intelligence and wisdom. The former principle is to deny all things, or to say in one’s heart that he cannot believe them before he is convinced by things which he can apprehend, or perceive by the senses: this is the principle that leads to all folly and insanity, and it is to be called the negative principle. The other principle is to affirm the things which are of doctrine from the Word, or to think and believe in one’s self that they are true because the Lord has said them: this is the principle that leads to all intelligence and wisdom, and it is to be called the affirmative principle (AC 2568).
For those in the affirmative principle, spiritual truth makes more and more sense as we live a spiritual life. Wherever we look, we find confirmations of what we believed early in our faith journey. Every bit a man of the Enlightenment, though, Swedenborg is all in favor of using science, knowledge, and rationality to support and to confirm spiritual truths.
But those who are in the affirmative, that is, who believe that things are true because the Lord has said so, are continually being confirmed, and their ideas enlightened and strengthened, by what is of reason and outward knowledge and even by what is of sense; for a person has light from no other source than through reason and knowledge . . . (AC 2588).
Swedenborg describes this way of seeing things in a beautifully poetic passage. He says that angels in the highest heaven do not see physical things, but when they see objects, the correspondence of what they stand for flows into their minds.
They do not see the objects, but the corresponding divine realities flow directly into their minds and fill them with a blessedness that affects all their sensory functions. As a result, everything they see seems to laugh and play and live (HH 489).
So it is for us, too, when we are in the affirmative principle.
The case is different for those who are in the negative principle. If a person starts out doubting God, or doubting Jesus’ resurrection and won’t believe without proof, the proof they want will never come. They will confirm themselves deeper and deeper in doubt, and rely more and more on scientific facts alone and unenlightened reason. They will always find a way out of spiritual truth no matter how many arguments are given them.
Those who are in a negative state in regard to a thing being true because it is in the Word, say in heart that they will believe when they are persuaded by reason and outward knowledge. But the fact is that they will never believe; and indeed they would not believe if they were to be convinced by their bodily senses, by sight, hearing and touch; for they would always be forming new reasonings against the things, and thus end by altogether extinguishing all faith . . . (AC 2588).
But we need to be clear about one important point. The affirmative principle that Swedenborg talks about is not blind faith. Swedenborg affirms healthy questioning. He wants people to question the truths they grew up with and to see whether one’s early doctrines are genuinely true or not. So while affirming early basic truths, Swedenborg challenges us to test them against sound reason and Scripture to see if they are, in fact, really honest to goodness truths.
First the doctrinals of the church are to be learned, and then exploration to be made as to whether they are true; for they are not true because heads of the church have said so and their followers confirm it, inasmuch as thus the doctrines of all churches and religions would have to be called true, merely according to country and birth. . . . From this it is plain that the Word is to be searched and it is to be seen there whether they are true (AC 6047).
Swedenborg himself rejected some of the doctrines he grew up with. One such doctrine was the doctrine of the trinity which teaches that God is three persons who have one essence. He abandoned that doctrine for the one he teaches in his theology that God is one person, namely the risen and glorified Jesus Christ. I, myself, have rejected some of the truths I grew up with in this very Swedenborgian church. And I imagine that some of you who have come here from other faiths have also done some searching into the doctrines you were brought up with. This kind of inquiry is not the negative principle Swedenborg talks about. Rather, it is a good way to discover what is genuinely true and what makes the most sense. So Swedenborg says in True Christian Religion that faith is nothing other than truth.
After we have sifted through the doctrines we believed early in life, then we can explore all the sciences and systems of knowing that the world has to offer.
Afterward when he or she is confirmed and thus in an affirmative mind from the Word that they are truths of faith, it is allowable for him or her to confirm them by all the knowedges that he or she possesses, of whatsoever name and nature; for then, because affirmation reigns universally, he or she accepts the knowledges which are in agreement, and rejects those which by reason of the fallacies that they contain are in disagreement. By means of knowledges faith is corroborated. Wherefore it is denied to no one to search the Scriptures from a desire for knowing whether the doctrines of the church in which he or she was born, are true, for otherwise he or she can in no way be enlightened. Neither is it to be denied to him or her afterward to strengthen himself by means of knowledges . . . (AC 6047).
This church is rather unique in its emphasis on reason and questioning. Many other churches preach that church doctrines are to be accepted on faith alone and without question. We, on the other hand, encourage questioning, searching, and testing the truth value of our teachings. When we find truths that make sense to us, we can strengthen them by other doctrines–even from other faith traditions from all over the world. We can strengthen our beliefs by philosophy, by science, and by common sense. This, in fact, makes our own belief system all the more strong, because we have been convinced by our own intellect.
But all of this depends on an affirmative attitude with regard to faith. We need to begin by affirming the basic truths of religion or spirituality. Then we can refine our belief system and search its doctrines for more and less true concepts. Finally, when we have searched our beliefs for genuine truths, then we can strengthen it with other truths and by reasons. Thomas required actual physical confirmation of Christ’s resurrection. We don’t have that possibility. We are those who believe without seeing. Yet for us, to see things any other way just doesn’t make sense. To see things any other way is blindness.

Burning Hearts
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
May 1, 2011

1 Kings19:9-13 Luke 24:13-35 Psalm 116

The reading about the Apostles on the road to Emmaus is an interesting story. As two disciples are walking along the road, Jesus Himself appears to them and walks along side them. Although they walk about seven miles together, they do not recognize Jesus. It isn’t until Jesus breaks bread with them that He is recognized.
There are some other plot elements to the story. It begins with sadness and it ends in joy. In the beginning, the disciples are sad because of the crucifixion and they are also somewhat perplexed about stories about the empty tomb. And the story ends in joy, when the disciples actually recognize Jesus and realize that He has risen from the grave.
I’ve often wondered why the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus. Did Jesus appear in a different form? Or is it more about the state of mind that the disciples were in. All we are told in scripture is that, “They were kept from recognizing Him.” What kept them from recognizing Jesus? Was it Jesus Himself? Or was it something else?
I have an idea that I would like to share with you. I think that part of what kept the disciples from recognizing Jesus was their own state of mind. They had expected Jesus to be the Messiah whom the prophets said would take over the throne in Jerusalem. All through the Gospels, we see that the people of Israel had expectations of Jesus that He Himself denied. According to the beliefs of the Jews in Jesus time, the Messiah was to be a worldly ruler from the lineage of King David. He would assume the throne in Jerusalem, drive out the Romans, and usher in a time of world-wide peace when all of the nations would come to Israel and be taught the Law of Moses. At the birth of John the Baptist, his father sand a song about Jesus and John. About Jesus, Zechariah sang,
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us . . .
salvation from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us–
to rescue us from the hand of our enemies;
and to enable us to serve him without fear (Luke 1:69, 71, 74).
The disciples with whom Jesus walked had the same expectations. They told Jesus, “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). They were utterly baffled and completely disappointed when Jesus was crucified and did nothing to liberate Israel from the hand of the Romans.
Is it possible that their own understanding of what the Messiah was supposed to be kept them from recognizing Jesus? Perhaps they were so focussed on their disappointments that they didn’t recognize the glory that was around them. Perhaps they were so caught up in their own shattered hopes, that they didn’t see the risen and glorified Lord right next to them.
There are story elements that support this interpretation. After Jesus disappears, the disciples recall their walk with Jesus. They say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). If they had been paying more attention to their own spirits, and to Jesus, they would have noticed that their hearts were on fire. They would have felt Jesus presence and perhaps recognized Him when He taught them as He had so often in His ministry. But instead, their own disappointment and misunderstanding were occupying their minds to the extent that they shut out the emotions they were feeling and the identity of He who walked along side them.
I like this interpretation because it is something that I think we all can relate to. How often do we pay attention to the fact that Jesus is walking beside us every day of our lives? How often are we so caught up in “Getting and spending” that we don’t pay attention to the spiritual realities that surround us all the time. The words “Getting and spending” come from a poem by Wordsworth called “The World Is Too Much With Us.” And I think that for a lot of us, the world is, indeed, too much with us. How much of what we think we desperately need, do we really need? Or yet, how much of what we think we really need to do, do we really need to do? How much pressure do we need to take on? How much worry, fret, and anxiety do we really need to accept into our lives? These are the kinds of things that shut out the peace of God. These are the kinds of things that blind us to the presence of Christ in the world and in our lives. These are the kinds of things that turn our hearts into images of the world and block the inflowing image and likeness of God into which we are all created.
I bring up this point because I, myself, suffer from this same spiritual sickness. I can get so caught up thinking about the many tasks ahead of me, that the actual import of what I have to do becomes ten times greater than they really are. I think that we all do have much to do in our busy lives. But there is a solution. When we approach our life’s tasks with the notion that what I need to do is what is right in front of me, and not think of all the other things that I need to do, some of the anxiety lessens. It is when life piles item upon item on our plate, and we fill our minds with visions of everything that needs to get done–before we can actually get at those things–then we become a basket filled with worry, stress, and anxiety. Then, our mind becomes filled with the world and we shut out the peace that is right with us at all times–that can be with us at all times.
We need to take time to quiet our minds, in order to feel Jesus walking by our side. We need to find a quiet place and a quiet state of mind in order to let the world spin without us, and let in Christ’s peace. We can do this, I think, even in the midst of our busy lives. By working one thing at a time, and keeping a presence of mind as we work, we can keep an attitude of calm in the midst of a storm. Things will get done, but the memory of what we have done and the anticipation of what needs to be done can dissipate. Then, the task at hand is all we are in, and that can be handled calmly, with presence of mind, and in peace.
We can also blind ourselves to truth when we are too invested in our own ideas–as paradoxical as this sounds. We can become too married to our own way of doing things to see anyone else’s way of doing things. We can become too sure that we are right and others are wrong to be open to a better way of doing things, or another way of seeing things. We can become too filled with ego to open our hearts to others’ feelings and other ways of living that aren’t our own. When we do this we can become the problem, not the solution that we think we are. We can get in the way of God’s way and replace it with our own ego-driven understanding of the way things ought to proceed.
This same issue works spiritually. Our own ideas of God and our own ideas of our spiritual needs can actually interfere with God’s actual presence and with God’s still, small voice in our hearts. How often are our prayers filled with things that we want, and want God to give us? I mean material things and even spiritual things. We can ask God for direction in life when we have issues in the world to deal with. But we can also ask God for spiritual qualities that we think we need. I have found myself asking God to help me achieve a spiritual goal that I had set for myself. I didn’t even think to ask whether God wanted this for me. In our prayer life, we need to be open to hear God’s voice to us. We need to quiet our own thoughts enough to feel God’s presence and God’s will for us. Otherwise, we are just like the disciples who were kept from recognizing Jesus by their own preconceptions of what the Messiah was supposed to be. It was their own ideas of God that kept them from seeing God right next to them.
Let’s not blind ourselves by our own power to see. Let us listen for that still, small voice in our hearts that is God’s constant presence with us. Let us not close off God’s influx with worldly concerns. Let us not close our eyes to God’s true nature by images of God we form from our own private wants and perceived needs. God is walking beside us all the time. Let us quiet our busy minds and open a channel for Him to reach us. Our hearts are burning within us. Let us feel our burning hearts, and not pay attention instead to the many distractions we can fabricate from our own minds. Then, when we see Jesus walking beside us in our lives, our hearts will be filled with joy–just as the hearts of the disciples did when Jesus was recognized as He broke bread.

Hope for the Whole Human Race

Isaiah 25:6-9 John 20:1-20 Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26

The Easter message is a message of hope for the whole human race. On the natural level, it means that death is not the final word. Easter teaches that there is life after death. And that there is the hope of living in heaven forever in loving relationship with the risen and glorified Lord. On the spiritual level, Easter teaches that there is hope of deliverance from all the aspects of our lives that vex us. Easter gives us the hope that peace and love will prevail in the end, and that we will find a way to live in harmony with our God and with one another.
We live on earth but for a short time. Our true home is in the heavens. Swedenborg teaches us that God’s intention in creating us was to have a heaven from the human race. In Divine Love and Wisdom n. 330, Swedenborg writes, “The goal of creation is a heaven from the human race.” God is love itself, and it is God’s desire to enter into a loving relationship with the whole human race. Love is the happiest state a person can know, and when one considers that God’s love is infinite, there is no end to the joys that God can give us. Lovers want what is good for their beloved, and they want their beloved to be happy. And to the extent that it is possible, lovers try to give their beloved everything they can to make them happy. How much more is this the case with God, who is love itself. Swedenborg has much to say about this. And his discussion is so beautiful and clear I can’t resist quoting him at length.
Two things make up the essence of God, love and wisdom; but three things make the essence of His love–loving others outside of itself, desiring to be one with them, and making them happy from itself. . . . loving others outside of itself, is known from the love of God toward the whole human race; and for their sake God loves all the things He has created . . . desiring to be one with them, is known also from His conjunction with the angelic heaven, with the church upon earth, with every one there . . . . Love also, viewed in itself, is nothing else than an effort to conjunction; therefore, that this object of the essence of love might be attained, God created human beings into His image and likeness, with which conjunction may be effected. That the Divine love continually intends conjunction is manifest from the words of the Lord, that He wills that they be one, He in them and they in Him, and that the love of God may be in them (John 17:21-23). The third essential of God’s love, which is making them happy from itself, is known from the eternal life, which is blessedness, joy, and happiness without end, which God gives to those who accept His love in themselves; for God, as He is love itself, is also blessedness itself; for every love breathes forth from itself enjoyment, and the Divine love breathes forth blessing, joy, and happiness itself to eternity. Thus God from Himself blesses angels, and also people after death, which is effected by conjunction with them (TCR 43).
It is to give us all these blessings of love and happiness that we were created. And heaven, which is being in God and God in us, exists in order for us to live in these blessings of love and joy forever.
These blessings are ours when we are conjoined with God. And Easter gives us the hope that we can be joined with God. God came down to earth in the form of Jesus in order to make this conjunction possible. Before the incarnation, God Spirit was blocked. The forces of darkness were overpowering the forces of light. Therefore, in John’s Gospel we read, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (1:5).
Our understanding of the incarnation is different than that of traditional Christianity. Traditional Christians say that Christ came to earth in order to bear our sins on the cross. But we are responsible for our own sins. Jesus’ crucifixion did not take away our sins. A little introspection will show this. Rather, for us, God came to earth in order to unite the infinite Divine with the Human Christ so that God and man became one.
. . . a conjunction of the Infinite or Supreme Divine with the human race was effected through the Lord’s Human made Divine, and . . . this conjunction was the purpose of the Lord’s coming into the world (AC 2034).
Then, because God has a human body, God is now present to us in a more direct way than was possible before the incarnation. So Swedenborg writes,
When the Human was made Divine, and the Divine was made Human, in the Lord, there was an influx of the Infinite or Supreme Divine with man, which could not otherwise have existed at all (AC 2034).
This is the reason for God’s coming to the earth in the form of Jesus Christ. God is now present on earth in His Divine Human in a way that wasn’t possible before. The union of the Infinite Divine with the Divine Human is what gives us the power to receive God’s Spirit in our lives. God can come to each and every one of us directly through His Humanity. We can commune with Jesus as with any other human with one great exception. Jesus gives us all the life, love, and joy that we have. Jesus gives us the ability to enter into positive relationships with each other. And we can love each other and God because of the Spirit that comes to us through the Divine Humanity of the Lord. This is what salvation means for us.
The Lord came and united the Human Essence to the Divine Essence, so that they were altogether one . . . and at the same time He taught the way of truth, that every one who . . . should love Him and the things which are of Him, and should be in His love which is love toward the whole human race . . . should be conjoined and be saved (AC 2034).
It is God’s Spirit, acting through His Divine Human that gives us the power to resist and overcome sin. It is God’s Spirit, acting through His Divine Human that lifts us up and out of our fallen nature. Jesus Himself teaches this. He says, “But when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself” (John12:32).
This is what gives us hope spiritually. It means that we are not trapped in unhealthy behavior patterns that we may have acquired in our upbringing. It means that we are not doomed to follow self-destructive habits that we may have acquired. It means that there is another way. It means that the way we have been doing things does not have to be the way we always must do things. It means that God can lift us out of all limitations and bring us into joys we cannot imagine. God acts on us throughout our whole lives and even into eternity. He continually shows us how to move out of one lesser way of living into one better way of living–and then He gives us the power to change.
There is no limit to the progress we can make spiritually with God’s help. Step by step, inch by inch, we grow as seeds in a garden. As I suggested above, we are responsible for our own spiritual growth. God did not take away our sins on the cross. Through the process of self-examination and self-modification we are able to move out of sin and into love. (For sin is nothing else but love twisted.) This is what is meant by the blessing we sometimes use in our church. “God keep our going out and our coming in from this time forth, and even for ever more.” The blessing means that we go out of our shortcomings and come in to greater happiness and heavenly joy. The Easter story gives us the hope that this is possible. “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself.” We will find the insight to change, with God’s help. We will find the power to change, with God’s help. We will find people around us who can support us and lead us, with God’s help. So Swedenborg writes, “The man who is made new by regeneration . . . is withheld from evil by an influx of the life of the Lord`s love, and this with all power” (AC 3318).
This is what the resurrection did. God’s Infinite Being united with His Divine Humanity so that the Human became fully Divine and Divinity became fully Human in one person. This is what is meant by that passage in John, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him” (13:31). The Son of Man is glorified by God’s Spirit completely filling Him, and God is glorified by being in the Son of Man fully. Humanity and Divinity meet in one total union in the risen and glorified Christ. And that union gives us all the power to be children of God, as John puts it,
To all who received him, to them he gave the power to become sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (1:12-13).
Now risen and glorified, Christ gives us all the joys that His infinite love can possibly give to His own beloved human race. It remains but for us to accept it–here on earth, and afterward eternally in heaven.

The Love of God in the Face of Human Sin

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is almost the catalogue of human sin and weakness. It shows the many ways we can act on our worst instincts. It shows envy, mob violence, intimate betrayal, mockery, self-interest, and negligence. These sins are bad enough when they are done amongst each other. But when we consider that these sins were levelled against our God, then they become all the more terrible. The crucifixion shows humanity at its worst.
And at the same time, when we consider Jesus’ reaction to the crucifixion, we see divinity in all its glory. Despite being confronted with all these terrible human sins, in Luke, Jesus forgives the whole human race. Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). This statement shows how powerful is God’s love for the whole human race. It was for love that God assumed the human, and came to us down here on earth. And in his horrible crucifixion, God’s interest was still on the human race that He so loves. Jesus’ divinity was so manifest that the centurion guarding him said, “Surely this man was the Son of God.”
As we go about our spiritual journey, we need to keep both these themes in mind. We need to be aware of human evil; and we need to be aware of Divine forgiveness. We can picture ourselves in the presence of Jesus Christ at any time, and measure ourselves against God’s divine forgiveness and our own shortcomings. To make this idea concrete, consider one of Jesus’ parables. In the parable about the sheep and the goats, Jesus says, “Whatever you did to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did to me” (Matthew 31:40). We are each and every one of us God’s creation. And God lives in each of us. When we meet another person, we are meeting God in him or her. What we do to that person we are doing to God in that person. That is one way of noticing Jesus’ presence in our lives. But we can also see Jesus with us by means of an inner vision. We can picture Jesus with us as we go about our daily lives. Jesus is actually with us all the time. The only time there is separation between Him and us is when we fall away from His teachings. And even then, Jesus is still with us, it is us who distance ourselves from him in our own hearts. We can picture our union with Jesus when we are in a spiritually good space. We can see Jesus smiling on us, or we can picture ourselves resting our heads on Jesus’ breast as we read the Apostle John did. Then we can picture Jesus forgiving us when we do hurtful actions–or even actions that show an indifference to our neighbors–recalling that Jesus forgave the woman who wept over Him in Luke 7. She was called a sinful woman, and the Pharisee whom Jesus was dining with questioned Jesus allowing her to caress Him. But Jesus taught the Pharisee a lesson in forgiveness and love. Jesus told him,
Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven–for she loved much (Luke 7:44-47).
What forgives this woman are her tears and her love. I would imagine that she was aware of her status as a sinful woman, yet her love for Jesus changed her status completely. In order for us to be forgiven, I think that it is important for us to be aware of our own fallen nature. We need to be aware that at every moment of our lives, we need God’s love and forgiveness in order for us to find heaven’s joy. We need to remember that we do not have our spiritual gifts because of our own power. It is God’s Spirit in us that gives us our gifts. The love we have for others, the joy we have in our meditations about God, our own capacity to forgive others–these are all God in us. And should we be tempted to claim them as our own, we will lose them. Recognizing our utter dependence on God’s grace, as did the woman, is what will save us.
Do you think that you are capable of calling for Jesus’ crucifixion? Do you see yourself capable of being caught up in the spirit of a crowd and having your own feelings stirred up? Have your feelings of spite ever grown when you find yourself in a group of others who are also spiteful about someone? Are you capable of envy for those around you who are very good at what they do, particularly something that you do as well? Do you see yourself capable of turning your back on a friend when you are in a group of others who are talking him or her down? Do you see yourself capable of ignoring a problem you could solve simply because you didn’t want to bother with it? Maybe not. Maybe so.
These are some of the human weaknesses that led to Jesus’ crucifixion. It was envy that led the Pharisees to bring Jesus up on charges. It was the spirit of mob violence that called for His crucifixion. It was intimate betrayal that led Judas to hand Jesus over to the Pharisees. It was self-interest on the part of the Jewish leaders that saw Jesus as a threat to their own power. And it was negligence on the part of Pilate that caused him to wash his hands of the whole matter. Good Friday is a time for us to reflect on the ease with which we can fall away from Godliness, into the place of human sin and error. But we also have the promise that Jesus is always pulling for us, always forgiving us, always calling us back to Him. Though He suffered emotional betrayal and experienced the very worst that humanity is capable of, Jesus still forgave. Even though Peter denied knowing him out of fear, Jesus still called him to ministry after His resurrection. We may fall short of God’s ways. We may sin and display spiritual weaknesses. But we also may acknowledge it when we turn away and ask Jesus for His forgiveness. Like the sinful woman in Luke, when we acknowledge that we are capable of sin and that we have committed it in moments of weakness, we can still come to Jesus, who will never turn us away. In humility for what we may have done, what we are capable of doing without divine help, and what we can do with God’s help, we may come to Jesus and find love and forgiveness.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:28-29).

Your God Reigns!
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
April 17, 2011
Palm Sunday

Isaiah 52:7-15 Matthew 21:1-11 Psalm 118

Palm Sunday is a day for celebration. It celebrates the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, while people received him with shouts of joy, spreading their cloaks in front of Him. They recited a line from Psalm 118, which we read this Sunday, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” That same psalm speaks of parading up to the altar of the temple waving palms fronds. In our reading from Isaiah, we heard about watchmen who shout for joy when the Lord returns to Zion. (Zion was where the temple was in Jerusalem.) The Isaiah passage celebrates God redeeming His people from the destruction of former conquests. God’s glory will be manifest. Isaiah says, “Kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see.” In fact, all the world will see God’s deliverance. Isaiah says, “All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.”
These passages bring to mind the many ways and times we celebrate what God has done in our lives. We may celebrate what God has done for us when we are healed from illness. Beethoven wrote a beautiful string quartet to celebrate being delivered from a long illness. He called it a song of prayer for deliverance, and it is one of my favorite string quartets of Beethoven. We may celebrate a new job, or feel grateful for the one we have in a difficult economy. We may celebrate in prayer. We may celebrate in a church. We may celebrate in a quiet word of thanks spoken only in our hearts.
But what brings the deepest and most heartfelt celebration is when we feel God moving in our souls. Palm Sunday was one special day of celebration. After it, Jesus returned to teaching as he had done before it. And those special times when we feel a particular closeness to God may not always last throughout the other times in our lives. Today, though, we celebrate those times in our life when it feels as if God has filled us with His Spirit and we feel a particular closeness to God. It is as if we see God with an inner sight, and we are filled with joy. We, like the psalmist, say, “You are my God, and I will praise you; you are my God, and I will exalt you.”
The Isaiah passage celebrates God’s power after Jerusalem had been ruined by Babylon. Though the city had been devastated by Babylon, this prophesy tells the Israelites that God will reign again in Jerusalem. He tells the Israelites, “Burst into songs of joy together, you ruins of Jerusalem, for the LORD has comforted His people, he has redeemed Jerusalem.” It is often the case in our lives that we feel God most strongly when we have gone through some kind of struggle–either physical or spiritual. I’ve already mentioned things like illness or work issues. Maybe our life is difficult and we are beset with trouble, and worry, and strife that comes to us seemingly undeserved. Then there are other struggles of a more spiritual nature. There may be issues in our character or personality that we have wanted to change. Maybe our trust in God is wavering. Maybe we have a certain sin that is disturbing our peace. Maybe we feel we have lost our spiritual footing and are wandering without clear guidance. These are times when we echo the psalmist’s words, “The LORD has chastened me severely.” We know that God never does chasten us, as the Bible suggests. This line would be called by Swedenborg an “appearance” of truth–not actual truth. But when we are in desperate straits, it may feel like God is heaping burdens on us, almost that we cannot bear. But when these times subside, or a solution is found, when we are no longer disturbed by our difficulties and peace returns–these are the times when we celebrate God’s return to Zion. Then we sing for joy along with the psalmist, “I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation. . . . the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
What I like about the Psalms is that they speak to the whole human situation. In them we find lines of struggle and even despair. But they usually don’t end there. Usually, after the verses about trouble, there are verses about gratitude to God. This is the case in today’s psalm. We didn’t read the whole psalm, as I wanted to emphasize the celebration of Palm Sunday. But in the early parts of the Psalm, we find the words, “In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free.” This pattern is so much like the lives we all lead. We go through periods of struggle. And we go through periods of celebration for deliverance. Swedenborg suggests that we need to go through trials and struggles in order to shake up our love for the world and our self-interest. Only by means of trials and struggles are our externals broken up and our spiritual internals able to shine through them. Our internals are made up of what Swedenborg calls remains. They are all those innocent feelings of love that we were gifted with in childhood, and continue to be gifted with throughout our lives. These shine through our external degree when it has been broken down by temptations, or trials and struggles. Swedenborg describes this process:
The second state [of regeneration] is when a distinction is made between the things which are the Lord’s and those which are the person’s own. Those that are the Lord’s are called in the Word remains; and here are especially knowledges of faith which have been learned from infancy. These are stored up, and not manifested until he comes into this state; which is a state rarely attained at this day without trials, misfortune, and sorrow, that cause the things of the body and the world . . . to become quiescent” (AC 8).
After our worldly interests have been broken up, then the remains of truth and love can show themselves in our external person. That is the time when we celebrate God entering Zion. That is the time, especially, when we feel God working in our lives. And God indeed is working more powerfully in our lives in these times. By breaking up our external person, God can bring His love and wisdom more deeply into our lives. We feel God closer because He has penetrated our souls and our personality more profoundly.
God’s love is continually flowing into every person always. But we are not always in a state of mind to accept it. Only after we have gone through trials and temptations does God’s love become part of our whole person. Before periods of temptation, God is so far above our consciousness that He is only present as life itself. After temptations, God flows down into our very personality and life. Swedenborg writes, “temptations remove what is of self-love and of contempt for others in comparison with self, consequently what is of self-glory” (AC 3318). After going through these periods of trial, our external person becomes aligned with the love that flows in from God. All the things we call spiritual knowledge, or truth, are nothing more than vessels that hold love, or good. Truth is nothing more than love put into language. Before temptations, the truths we have learned resist God’s love and serve self and the world. But after they are softened by temptations, then they are able to receive God’s love. Our whole personality changes into a humble, mild disposition.
When therefore the vessels [or truths] are somewhat tempered and softened by temptations, then they begin to become yielding to, and compliant with the life of the Lord’s love, which continually flows in with man. Hence then it is, that good begins to be conjoined to truths, first in the rational man and afterward in the natural . . . . From these considerations it may now be evident what use temptations promote, namely this, that good from the Lord may not only flow in, but may dispose the vessels to obedience, and thus conjoin itself with them (AC 3318).
Last Sunday we looked at the three levels to the human personality. There is the internal, the rational, and the natural. The truths that Swedenborg is talking about above are in the rational and natural degrees of our personality. While we always have God in the deepest level of our soul, in order to actually feel God’s Spirit and in order for us to become angelic, God’s love needs to penetrate down into the rational and natural degree of our personality. It is by means of temptations that our rational and natural degrees are made compliant with the love flowing down from God. And that is why, after the periods of struggle we go through, we so often feel God’s presence more keenly than before. God actually has entered our lives more deeply. God has come into our rational and natural degrees, so we feel Him more closely. The truths we have in our memory now lead our steps into what is good and loving.
I need to be clear about one point, though. God does not bring about our struggles and trials. He does not lead us into temptation. We fall ill because of our body’s biology. There are viruses and bacteria out there. And our bodies are subject to stress, fatigue, and aging. We encounter economic hardships because we live in a society that has an unjust distribution of wealth. We encounter spiritual struggles, not because God gives them to us. Rather it is actually because God is flowing into us with His love that we feel struggles. We want to hold on to our ego-driven ways, and God’s love is unselfish and reaches out to everyone. So our innate drive for self kicks against God’s inflowing love and we feel struggles. While God doesn’t bring on any of these trials, He turns them all to our spiritual wellbeing.
But as we progress spiritually, step by step we celebrate with joy our new awareness of God. Like the residents of Jerusalem, our hearts shout and sing as we welcome the Lord into the Holy City of our souls. It is times like this, that the words of Isaiah seem so fitting,
How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation;
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!” (52:7)

Life from the Lord
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
April 10, 2011

Ezekiel 37:1-14 John 11:17-43 Psalms 130, 131

In our Bible readings this morning, we heard about God giving life. In Ezekiel, we heard about dry bones that were in a valley. They came together, and God breathed into them the breath of life. Then in our passage from John, Jesus gives life to Lazarus, who had been dead for four days. There are two ways to look at these stories, naturally and spiritually. On the natural level, these stories tell us that our very life itself is from God. On the spiritual level, we are taught that God lifts us up into spiritual life, and gives us the joys of heaven.
The natural level of this story is not how things appear to us. It doesn’t feel like we have life from God. It feels like the life we have is ours. It feels like we live by our own power. But his is only an appearance. The life we have is given to us. God alone is life itself; we are only recipients of life. Swedenborg tells us,
Man is nothing else but an organ, or vessel, which receives life from the Lord, for man does not live from himself. The life which flows in with man from the Lord is from His Divine love (AC 3318).
So everything that we call life is God’s Holy Spirit in us. All those millions of chemical reactions that go on without our knowing or even without our power to control is God flowing into our souls, and our souls flowing into our body. Our life is God in us.
All the good we do and all the truth we understand is also God’s Holy Spirit in us. In this case too, God is Good Itself and Truth Itself. We are mere recipients of God’s good and truth. Our life consists only of those things that we love and those things that we understand. (This idea was first put forth by the philosopher David Hume.) The things that we love and understand are called goods and truths. Goods are what we love, and truths are what we understand. These two constitute who we are. Therefore Swedenborg says that, “the very essential of life consists in thinking good and willing good . . . these things are not of man, but of the Lord, therefore, all life flows in” (AC 4151).
Some Christian churches teach that good works do not save us. They say this because they believe that we can do nothing good. They exaggerate a line from Isaiah that Luther took up. It goes, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). And they are afraid that if we try to do good by our own efforts, we will believe that we deserve heaven. They believe that people will think that they deserve heaven because they have done good. In some regards, they are right in this. To claim that we deserve heaven because we have done good is very injurious to our spiritual wellbeing. Swedenborg calls this claiming merit for our good works. But we are still called upon to do good deeds. Jesus tells us,
I am the vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he trims clean so that it will be even more fruitful (John 15:1-2).
John the Baptist confirms this when he says, “every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matthew 3:10). So it is clear that we are called to bear fruit, which I take to mean do good things. But it is harmful to take credit for the good we do. This is as strange a teaching as is the teaching that we live from God, not ourselves. It sounds strange because we do good by choice and by an act of will. We try to do good and we do good by our own effort. At least that is how it looks to us. But when we do good, we need to remember that we are only recipients of good and truth. We are able to do good because God’s goodness is in us. This is implied in the Swedenborg passage I cited above which said, “the very essential of life consists in thinking good and willing good . . . these things are not of man, but of the Lord” (AC 4151). But Swedenborg is even more clear in this. “No one ever has good and truth which is his own, but all good and truth flow in from the Lord” (AC 4151). All life is from God. All good is from God. On our own, we can do nothing. Everything we do is from God’s life in us and all the good we do is from God’s goodness in us. So Jesus says, “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). This is why we cannot claim merit for the good we do and this is why we cannot claim that we deserve salvation because of the good things we do. It tarnishes the good we do with self-righteousness. We need to keep humble, and not claim the good we do as our own. If we claim it as ours, we will be like the Pharisee that Jesus denounces in Luke 18:9-12. In that passage,
The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like all other men–robbers, evil-doers, adulterers–or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.
This Pharisee is puffed up with pride for all the good he does. Yet Jesus says that he is not justified before God. “For he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14).
So far we have been looking at life itself as a gift of God. Now we turn to spiritual life. On a spiritual level, it is God who gives us spiritual life. The dry bones in Ezekiel signify a person who is not yet regenerated. Lazarus’ death symbolizes the same thing. We are born into the world an image of nature. We are reborn into heaven as an image and likeness of God. Now we are entering into Swedenborg’s mysticism. By mysticism, I mean the condition in which a person is joined with God, or in which God is actually in the person and the person is in God. Jesus describes this in John, “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (14:20). In one sense, God is always in everyone. He is in us as life itself. But God isn’t in us completely until we let His love and wisdom into our lives. We are only fully conjoined with God when we return His love–”you are in me, and I am in you.”
Before God is in us spiritually, we are in thick darkness. We are formless and void, as is described before creation in Genesis. We need to be lifted out of our darkness in order to come into heaven. Our minds need to be enlightened so that we understand spiritual truth and our hearts need to become purified so that we can love unselfishly. This is the teaching of Jesus, Swedenborg claims:
He taught the way of truth, that every one who . . . should love Him and the things which are of Him, and should be in His love which is love toward the whole human race . . . should be conjoined and be saved (AC 2034).
But knowing the way of truth is not enough. Believing is not enough. We need to actually let God’s Spirit shine down into our personalities so that we are reborn spiritually. God flows into us from our inmost soul down into our very behavior–and everything in between. Swedenborg breaks the human personality down into three degrees: the internal, the rational and the natural. On earth we are only conscious of our rational and natural degree. We may have moments of inner peace and joy that seem to come over us when our higher degrees are more open to us. But for the most part, we are not fully conscious of these higher degrees. We become fully aware of them when we come into the next life.
Our spiritual regeneration happens when God flows into our higher degrees and our higher degrees flow down into our natural degree. Swedenborg tells us that,
there is a continual Divine influx of celestial and spiritual things through the internal man into the external; that is, an influx of celestial and spiritual things through the rational man into the natural (AC 3085).
But our natural degree begins an image of the world, and we need to be reborn into an image of heaven. We learn a lot of things from a lot of sources–from our upbringing, from religious study, from conversation, from experience. Some of what we learn is true and some is false. I once heard a person say how his truths changed in life. He grew up thinking, “Anything you don’t do perfectly is not worth doing at all.” But in later life he abandoned his perfectionist attitude, and now operates under the statement, “Easy does it.” As we pray and stay open to God, our natural degree is perfected. The truths in our natural degree are elevated, and our falsities are dispersed. So our natural degree is reduced into conformity with our internal degree. Swedenborg describes this process:
Divine good flows into the natural man, than is, into the knowledges outward and inward, and doctrinal teachings therein, for these are of the natural man so far as they are in its memory; and that by this influx it enlightens, vivifies, and disposes into order all things therein; for all light, life, and order in the natural man is from an influx from the Divine (AC 3086).
Our natural degree becomes more open and able to receive influx from our higher degrees as we remove obstacles. The obstacles to influx are chiefly selfishness and worldliness. We need to be ready to abandon truths that only serve self and to take on truths that teach us how to love God and our neighbor. Our inner degrees sift through the knowledges we have in our natural level and lift up into our conscience truths that are heavenly. These then become our guiding principles. This process continues throughout our life on earth and into the next life.
This is the process that brings our dry bones to life. By removing the obstacles to influx, our higher degrees flow down into our natural degree and make it into an image and likeness of God. This is actually God flowing through the degrees of our personality, giving us the breath of spiritual life. This is how we are elevated into heavenly thought and feelings. This process happens to us with our effort and without our effort. At times we need to consciously reject limiting doctrines. And at other times, we will have intuitive perceptions about truth that come from our higher degrees. But whatever the means, it is actually God lifting us ever upward to Himself. It is never a process that we can take credit for.
The man who is made new by regeneration . . . is withheld from evil by an influx of the life of the Lord`s love, and this with all power (AC 3318).
All our life, and all our spiritual life is a gift from God. As Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” We are indeed called upon to do good and to bear fruit. But we can never claim the good we do for ourselves. It is God in us doing the good, lifting us upward out of self into an ecstatic relationship with Himself.

The LORD Looks at the Heart
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
April 3, 2011

1 Samuel 16:1-13 John 9:1-41 Psalm 23

Our Bible readings this morning concern different ways of seeing. In the Old Testament reading, we heard about how man sees, and we heard about how God sees. In our reading, we heard about Samuel being sent to anoint a new king after Saul. Samuel is sent to Jesse in Bethlehem, to look at his sons. For God tells Samuel that one of Jesse’s sons will be king. When Samuel first sees Eliab, he thinks to himself that Eliab is the one who will be king next. Apparently, Eliab is tall and strong–a fitting king. We know this because God tells Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him” (1 Samuel 16:7). Eliab was like Saul, Israel’s first king. Saul, too was tall and strong. We are told that, “as he stood among the people he was a head taller than any of the others” (1 Samuel 10:23). So to Samuel’s thinking, Eliab would be the next king, as was Saul before him. But although this is Samuel’s own thinking, he yields to God’s word. One by one, all of Jesse’s sons are brought before Samuel, and God rejects them all as the next king. Then Samuel asks if these are all Jesse’s sons. Jesse says that there is still one more, David, who is tending sheep. When David comes to the prophet, God tells Samuel to anoint David as Israel’s next king.
David is peaceful and mild, being a shepherd and a singer. There is a striking contrast between him and Sau. Saul was also chosen by God, but the people found him quite to their liking. He stood head and shoulders over the others. This was the kind of king a person would want to lead them in battle. But what about David? David was just a boy when he was anointed, and not trained in the arts of war. He was a mere shepherd. In the eyes of man, David would not be a likely choice for king. But God chose him to be Israel’s next leader. And God’s words to Samuel are words to us as well. God tells Samuel,
The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart’” (1 Samuel 16:7).
To the outward appearance, to the eyes of man, David is not a likely choice for kingship. But in the eyes of God, who looks at the heart, David is chosen to be the next king of Israel. In King David, we see the contrast between how the eyes of man see, and how the eyes of God see.
In our New Testament reading, we find the contrast between blindness and sight everywhere. Our story begins with a man born blind. Jesus gives him sight. This is the first contrast between blindness and sight. It is a physical image–a blind man who can see. But as the story progresses, blindness and sight become symbols. The story begins to contrast believing that Jesus is the Christ and disbelief that Jesus is the Christ. The first contrast concerns belief that the miracle even took place. We are told, “The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and received his sight” (John 9:18). They go to the man’s parents and ask them if he is their son, and if he had been born blind. Saying just as little as they can, the parents admit that he is their son and that he was born blind. The next contrast is whether Jesus is of God or a sinner. The Pharisees say that Jesus is not of God because he does not keep the Sabbath. They say this because Jesus healed on the Sabbath, which they consider work. The Ten Commandments forbid working on the Sabbath. Others say that no sinner can do such miraculous things. The blind man himself testifies to Jesus’ godliness. He says,
We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing (John 9:31-32).
A striking blindness overcomes the Pharisees. They deny the miracle of sight that happened right in front of them and condemn the blind man who praises Jesus for restoring his sight. They say, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they throw him out of the synagogue. The final play on sight and blindness becomes spiritual. Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into the world, so that the blind may see and those who see will become blind” (John 9:39). The Pharisees ask, “What? Are we blind too?” Jesus then talks of sin in relation to blindness and sight, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (9:41). A similar line is in Luke 8:10, Mark 4:12, and Matthew 13:13-14. Mark’s line goes as follows,
To those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,
they may be ever seeing but never perceiving
and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven (4:12).
When I hear these words, I can’t help but think of some people I know who can’t seem to see God’s hand working in their lives or in the world around them. For me, everywhere I look I see God. Just looking at a flower, and its beauty, is clear testimony to me of God’s work. Why would such a beautifully designed living thing come into this world? When I see nature falling asleep in the winter and waking up in the spring and look at the great cycles of the seasons, I see God’s hand. Snow and biting cold does not kill nature–it merely puts it to sleep. Then as the weather warms, the plants come back to life after their period of dormancy. When I think how a single cell is impregnated and grows and develops into a heart, lungs, a brain and head, limbs and becomes a living human being capable of self-direction, I see a divine miracle. When I look back on my life and see the changes and growth that I have been through almost without my knowing it, I see God acting in my life. And yet I have friends who tell me, if there were a God, they would see evidence somewhere. I am not judging such people. I am simply expressing surprise and wonder that something that seems to obvious to me is so hidden to others. Are these those whom Jesus says are, “ever seeing but never perceiving?”
But for us the most important seeing is how we see ourselves. How are our thoughts, feelings, and actions measuring up against our understanding of Godliness? Jesus taught in parables so that His deeper truths would be hidden in the simple nature stories. When we are ignorant of truth, we are not responsible. But that doesn’t leave us off the hook. It is still incumbent on us to seek God and try to learn God’s ways. It is still incumbent on us to remain prayerfully connected with God. And in our prayerful connection with God, God will reveal to us more and more about how to live in His kingdom. He will reveal to us sins we are to get rid of, and show us good things we are to love and do. He will open our eyes and give us sight.
And the more we see, the more we are responsible for. But the upside of this is that the more we become responsible for our spiritual development, the deeper God penetrates our lives with His loving and joyous Spirit. Our faith may start out very simple with something like the Ten Commandments. But from a very simple start, God will open our minds further if we seek Him and His kingdom. We learn truths from many different sources–conversation, study, reading spiritual works, inspiration, and life’s experiences. If we begin our spiritual journey with faith as small as a mustard seed, we can grow into a faith as grand as the tree that birds nest in. Swedenborg tells us that faith is perfected according to the abundance of truths we learn. These truths reinforce each other and the more we learn, the more support we have for what we have learned.
So far we have been looking at sight from a human perspective. We not consider sight from God’s perspective. Here, the words that God spoke to Samuel come in:
The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart’” (1 Samuel 16:7).
God looks at our heart. He doesn’t look at our dress, our money, our status, but how our heart is. We are all children of God. And God sees us as His children. God loves us with the kind of love a mother has for her children. And God judges us with a mother’s love. God looks at what we are trying to do. God looks at our intentions. God does not make up a list of our right and wrong deeds. He looks at what we are trying to do right now. We all fall short of the ideal. We may have done things in our past that we regret. But what really matters is what we are trying to do right now. Are we walking with God? Are we walking into the light? Is our heart turned toward goodness and godliness? Do our actions stem from goodwill? Are we but trying to turn toward God? These are the kinds of things God looks at. I once heard a man say, “When we take one step toward God, God takes three giant steps toward us.” We don’t need to be saints to find God’s love and joy. As the Big Book in AA says, “We claim spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.
We may falter at times. We may stumble around in the darkness. But if we are still seeking God, and remaining prayerfully connected with Him, He will hold us up when we falter; He will lift us when we stumble. God is with us in all of our wanderings, stumblings, misguided actions, blindness, and trials. God is with everyone, everywhere. God seeks continually to bring light into our darkness, so that we may see. God is a “lamp for our feet and a light to our path,” the Psalmist says (119:105). With God in our hearts, may our light shine before men.

Disjunction from Good
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
March 13, 2011

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 Matthew 4:1-11 Psalm 32

We are now in the season of Lent. Lent began with Ash Wednesday, which was last Wednesday. We will be in the Lenten season until Easter. In the old Christian traditions, one would observe Lent by fasting and giving up some vice. By fasting, I do not mean abstaining from eating altogether, but rather abstaining from meat, or red meat, or some other dietary restriction. In today’s society, to some Lend has come to mean giving up smoking or drinking, or some other destructive habit. In Lent, the church traditionally emphasizes sin and human frailty as we lead up to the crucifixion and then Christ’s triumphant resurrection. Nobody wants to hear about sin. But I think that a clear, rational understanding of the dynamics that make for sin is very useful for a person’s spiritual wellbeing.
The issue of sin is very clear from our readings this morning. I am following the Common Lectionary that many Christian churches use, and it prescribes these Bible passages for the first Sunday in Lent. We read about the original sin, which cast Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. And we read about the temptation of Jesus after His baptism.
The Genesis reading can sound misleading. It can make the tree of the knowledge of good and evil appear positive. The serpent tells Eve that the forbidden fruit will make her like God, knowing good from evil. And the woman thinks that eating the fruit would be, “Desirable for gaining wisdom.” These lines make the tree of the knowledge of good and evil appear positive. If it would make a person know the difference between good and evil, wouldn’t that be good?
The real meaning of this passage, though, is summed up in a few key words. Those words are spoken by the serpent. He says that Eve will be, “Like God.” The sin of eating the forbidden fruit is making oneself into a god. It means trusting human knowledge instead of revealed truth. It means trusting in self and what the self knows on its own, and not trusting in the inward perception of truth that comes from God and God’s Word. Being like God means trusting in what can be proven scientifically. It means believing only in what you can see, touch, hear, smell, or taste. In other words, to be like God means to trust only in information we gather from our senses. When we believe only what we understand by reasonings based on our senses, then we make human intelligence into a god.
I have spoken with such people. They can appear smug and proud that they stand on proven truth, not childlike belief. They can look down on those who have simple faith. In fact, they can look down on those who have a highly developed belief system. In fact, they can look down on everyone but themselves.
This is love of self in a negative sense. We need self-esteem in order to love others. If we are crippled by destructive images of self, we are not in a position to support others. We will think we are not worthy. We would think we are incapable of anything good. This is a destructive self-image. So we do need what could be called a positive self-love. This means that we love ourselves enough to pass love along to others. When theologians write against self love, they are talking about something we would call pride, or arrogance. Swedenborg calls it contempt for others compared with self. When person is filled with evil self love he or she looks down on everyone else besides the self. This is when self love becomes evil.
There are lists of sins, and descriptions of the various kinds of evil that a person can commit. In the middle-ages, there were seven deadly sins known to all. These were anger, sloth, envy, pride, gluttony, lust, and greed. But there is a simpler way to look at sin. There is a way of seeing sin that makes it less disturbing to consider. It can be summed up in one simple sentence. “Evil viewed in itself, and also sin, is nothing else than disjunction from good” (AC 4997). Evil or sin is that which separates a person from what is good, and what separates a person from the love that flows into us continually from God.
But Swedenborg does go further in describing evil. For Swedenborg there are two fountains of evil: love of the self and love of the world. The worst of these is self love. Self love is directly opposed to love of God. For when a person makes him or herself out to be god, then one is in opposition to the true God. Then, everyone who doesn’t favor him or her is hated.
He loves no one but himself, and others only so far as they make one with him. Hence he turns the attention of all to himself, and entirely averts it from others, most especially the Lord; and when many in one society do this, it follows that all are disjoined, and each looks upon another as an enemy; and if any one does aught against him, he holds him in hatred, and takes delight in his destruction (AC 4997).
This is the nature of a person who has figuratively eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the kind of person who makes a god of themselves.
The other kind of evil is less severe. It is called love of the world. Swedenborg describes this as a desire to possess all the wealth of the world, and all the possessions of everyone else. Although Swedenborg says this is less evil than the love of the self, I think that it may be more problematic in today’s society. I think that society teaches this sin as a virtue. Our society teaches us to strive for gain and wealth. Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra have written best-selling books on how to achieve success. They even cite spiritual laws you can use to acquire wealth. Some New Age establishments even say that there is a law of attraction that will give you wealth if you correctly meditate. Swedenborg defines love of the world as coveting, “the wealth and goods of others, and desires to possess all that belongs to them; whence also arise enmities and hatreds, but in less degree” (AC 4997). Let me be clear. I don’t think that wealth is evil in and of itself. And wealth can be used to better society as Bill Gates is doing. In this sense, wealth is a blessing to society and to the person who has it. It all comes down to how a person reacts to wealth. I can think of three ways in which wealth becomes a sin.
One way is for wealth to make someone think they are better than others. Wealth makes some people look down on those who are middle class or poorer. I remember when I was at Harvard that some people would size me up by the clothes I was wearing and decide whether I was worthy of talking to. I remember talking with someone in a bar in Boston. I asked him, “How much does a person’s self worth depend on his money here?” The guy looked askance at me and said, “What are you–one of those ultra-librals?” Then there were some wealthy people, usually old money, who didn’t care how much money I had, who would treat me as an equal personally. So one sin that derives from wealth is similar to that of love of self–the idea that wealth gives one the right to look down on others.
Then there is that old sin from the middle ages–greed. Some wealthy people never have enough. I heard one man of wealth interviewed on TV. The interviewer said, “I consider you a wealthy man.” The man replied, “Moderately wealthy, you always want more.” This is a craving for more and more wealth as Swedenborg describes it. It is a desire to possess “riches and wealth for their own sake” (DP 215). And when you set your heart on wealth, you will never be at peace, satisfied, or content.
The third, and probably worst form of love of the world depends on one key phrase. Swedenborg describes love of the world as primarily coveting, “the goods of others.” In other words, the sin of worldliness is wanting to take away what belongs to someone else. Ultimately to take away everything from everyone and to possess the riches of everyone by any means possible. I remember back in Florida relaxing, smoking a cigar in a cigar club. An acquaintance I knew came in and wanted to know what were good cigars for him to purchase. I showed him some very fine cigars in the club, but then he did something very strange. He pointed to one of my own cigars and asked me, “How much for your cigar?” I told him that the cigars I showed him were just as good, in fact, better. But he held out for my cigar. Perhaps that is a mild example of worldliness. This guy didn’t want a good cigar; he wanted my cigar.
Both love of self and love of the world disjoin a person from their neighbor. They throw up walls between their brothers and sisters. So much for sin and how it disjoins people from God and each other. It remains now to reflect on what it means to be good and how being good conjoins people together.
While evil and sin are disjunction from good, and oppose love for God and for the neighbor, goodness is conjunction with God and with the neighbor. Swedenborg describes the nature of good, and how it conjoins one to God and heaven,
Good is conjunction, because all good is of love to the Lord, and of love to the neighbor. The good of love to the Lord conjoins one to the Lord, and consequently all good which proceeds from Him; and the good of love toward the neighbor conjoins one to heaven, and to the societies there (AC 4997).
All good flows out from God as its source. Think of good as everything that brings people together. Kindness, friendliness, good will, service, generosity, empathy, compassion, and the like. Whatever can be seen as an expression of love is good. Good flows forth from God, so when we do good, then God is in us and we are conjoined with God. Jesus says, “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine you have done to me” (Matthew 25:40). This implies that God is in each one of us, and when we do good to our neighbors we are doing good to God who is inside them. And doing good to others joins us together. Imagine a realm where everyone is trying to make everyone else happy. Imagine a realm where everyone does good to everyone else. That is what heaven is like. And when it happens in this world, then heaven is on earth.
In this season of Lent, let us reflect on the two great directions we can go in life. We can disjoin ourselves from God and our neighbors. Or we can conjoin ourselves with God and our neighbors. This is a simple way to view sin and goodness. And is so often the case, in simplicity is the greatest truth.