Church of the Holy City

Reach Out from the Inside
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 27, 2009

Ezekiel 37:1-14 Matthew 23:25-28

Last Sunday I talked about church services and what’s in it for us. Among the things I mentioned was that church stimulates our internals. I didn’t say anything about the internals and what they are, though. And church will stimulate our internals only if we have them. Today I’m going to talk about what our how internals are and how they are formed.
We are not born with an internal level. We are first born with our earthly level, which communicates with this material world. Our earthly level takes care of all those earthly concerns we have such as food, clothing, housing, and income. But this does not serve our spiritual life. It is our internal levels that make us into spiritual beings.
In order for us to become raised above the earthly level and to become spiritual, our internal level needs to be opened. This is the same as saying that our internal level needs to be formed. Our Bible readings for this morning talk about this. The dry bones we heard about in Ezekiel come to life when God breathes into them the breath of life. We might also think about the creation of Adam, into whom God also breathes the breath of life. The in our reading from Matthew, we hear Jesus telling the Pharisees that they need to make clean the inside of the vessel. All of these passages refer to the formation of our internal person.
At first, when I approached this topic, I had the idea that our internals are formed by learning spiritual truths. This is indeed true to a certain extent. Swedenborg tells us that,
. . . in order to become intelligent and wise he must learn many things, not only those which are of heaven, but also those of the world—those which are of heaven, from the Word and from the Church, and those which are of the world, from systems of knowledge (HH 351).
This passage speaks to the cognitive, or mental aspects of our internal persons. We need to learn truths about heaven that the church and theology teach. In our quest to become wise, we also need to learn knowledges from this earthly world.
But learning knowledge alone isn’t enough to open our internals, or the spiritual level of our personality. What I found in my research for this talk is that opening the spiritual degree of our soul has a significant emotional aspect. It is love for the neighbor and love for God that are the driving forces behind the opening of our spiritual degree.
There are two levels to our internals: the spiritual and the heavenly. Swedenborg’s terminology gets a little confusing here, since he calls the first level of our internal person the spiritual level. The second level is called the heavenly level. Then he calls both these levels the spiritual degree. So he uses the same word for the internal person itself and also for the first level of the internal person. So the internal level, called spiritual, consists of spiritual and heavenly levels. The spiritual level is the first one that we open. It is opened by a love for performing useful services to our neighbor.
When we are born, we come first into the earthly level, which gradually develops within us in keeping with the things we learn and the intelligence we gain through this learning, all the way to the summit of intelligence called rationality. This, by itself, though, does not open the second level, the one called spiritual. This level is opened by a love for being useful that comes from our intelligence; but the love for being useful is a spiritual one, a love for our neighbor (DLW 237).
So it is love that primarily opens up the spiritual level in us. But it isn’t love alone. Notice that Swedenborg says that it is “love for being useful that comes from our intelligence” that opens up the spiritual level. So it is a combination of both love and also intelligence that opens this level. Again from Swedenborg’s book Divine Love and Wisdom: “Love alone, or spiritual warmth, will not do it, and neither will wisdom alone or spiritual light alone. It takes both together” (253).
We need that union of love and wisdom to advance spiritually. Our love for our neighbor gives us the impetus to act well with our brothers and sisters. But we need also to know how to live in a spiritual way. Wisdom teaches us how to live.
Our understanding does not lead our volition, or wisdom does not give rise to love. It merely teaches and shows the way. It teaches how we should live and shows us the way we should follow (244).
So it is both our head and our heart that lifts us up into heaven and opens our spiritual level. We need both. Have you ever found yourself wanting to help in some situation, but you didn’t know what to say or do? That would be an example of love without the wisdom to carry out love’s desires.
There is another internal level that is higher and more internal than the spiritual level. It is called the heavenly level. And again, the driving force in the opening of the heavenly level is love. In this case, we open the heavenly level by love for God. So we progress upward and inward in the progress of our spiritual level until we reach the highest level called heavenly.
In the same way, this level [the spiritual] can develop by incremental steps all the way to its summit; and it does so by our discovering what is true and good, or by spiritual truths. Even so, these do not open that third level that is called heavenly. This is opened by a heavenly love for being useful that is a love for the Lord; and love for the Lord is nothing but applying the precepts of the Word to our lives, these precepts being essentially to abstain from evil things because they are hellish and demonic and to do good things because they are heavenly and divine (237).
So living a good life, out of love for God, is what opens up the heavenly level.
We can see in this process the two great commandments that Jesus taught. Jesus told us that all the Old Testament is summed up in two great commands: love the Lord above all, and love the neighbor as your self. Loving the Lord is the highest form of love and loving the neighbor is just below it. Loving God opens the highest level called heavenly, and loving the neighbor opens the lower level called spiritual.
It is possible, however, that one can live out their life and not open up either of these levels. There are those “whose spiritual level has not been opened but is not yet closed.”
The spiritual level is not opened in us but is still not closed in the case of those who have led somewhat of a life of charity and yet do not know much real truth. . . . if we do not know the real truths that constitute wisdom or light, love cannot manage to open that level. All it can do is keep it able to be opened (DLW 253).
So we need to do all we can to learn about God and what is good. In another place, Swedenborg tells us that our faith is perfected by the abundance of truths that we know. And we saw just above that love needs teachings to tell it how to act.
I don’t want to judge, and the Bible, in fact, tells me that I can’t. But I wonder if society is more and more going in this direction. I see the people coming here for weddings, and many of them don’t have a church of their own, which is why they come here. But the church symbols don’t seem to affect them. There’s a feeling I observe that I can only call a lack of reverence. Reverence is a difficult word to define, but I don’t get the feeling that the people I’m talking about feel moved by the church structures. I’ve just come back from a National Council of Churches meeting in New York. One thing that they commented on for all the churches in the membership was how secular society is becoming. There was a shared feeling that even on Sundays, society is becoming more and more secular. At first I felt this as a problem for churches in terms of church numbers. But now, I feel it as a problem for the people who are not interested in spirituality. I think for their own welfare, they would do well to take church and religion more to heart. Finally, I see so many people who look to me to be perfectly good people, but have no use for spirituality or church. I’ve always wondered about them, and why they don’t feel the call for higher life.
For when a person has cultivated the spiritual level in their personality, there are many blessings and profound joy. We feel these blessings only dimly here on the earthly plane. But in the next life, we feel them manifestly.
Earthly people whose spiritual level has been opened do not realize that their spiritual minds are filled with thousands of love’s joys as gifts from the Lord. They do not realize that they will begin to participate in this wisdom and joy after they die (DLW 252).
We can feel some of these spiritual gifts when we are moved by the symbols of the church service. We also feel them in our work life, if we are doing what we love. But in order for us to be touched by the symbols of religion, we need to have begun the process of opening our spiritual level. Then we worship in spirit and in truth.

Church: What’s in It For Me?
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 20, 2009

1 Kings 8:62-66 John 2:13-22

Jesus says that “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20). I think that when people come together in God’s name, a very special kind of community is formed. I feel that there is a great value in attending church services, which I would like to discuss.
However, I think that the idea of church services has fallen out of favor in culture at large today. We are still feeling the effects of the outright assault on organized religion that happened during the ‘60’s. I recall a rock group I listened to then called Jethro Tull. They had a song called, “Wind Up.” In the song are the lines, “I don’t believe you; you have the whole damn thing all wrong. He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.” Then there is the John Lennon song that asks, “Imagine there’s no religion,” which he takes to be a good thing.
Many people my age are spiritual but they don’t think they need church. Some will say that they find God perhaps in a sunset. Or perhaps out in nature. They have the idea that God can be found anywhere, any time and that they don’t need to go to church to find Him. This is true. God is everywhere and can be found whenever we call out to Him. But I still feel that there is value in attending church, where people come together collectively to seek God.
Have you ever noticed that different venues bring out different aspects of our personality? Let me illustrate this by giving you some examples from my own life. I like football, and a few weeks ago I went to an Eskimos game. The football game brought out my competitive side. I shouted and cheered and stood up when the Eskimos scored. As it turns out, the Eskimos that night blew a 14 point lead to lose by 1 point. That brought out a side of my personality, too. I was mad for a few hours. Then there are those times when Carol and I play gin rummy together. It’s a fun loving time. A time for shared intimacy and mutual affection. We are happy when each other gets a particularly good hand. We congratulate each other when someone gets three aces. It’s affectionately competitive, too. We play for a stuffed monkey that I won at Capitol-X. The winner gets to display the monkey in their home. It’s like the Stanley Cup. Then there are the Tai Chi classes I go to twice a week. It’s a good aerobic workout. But it also calms my mind, and removes stress. I come home with a still mind and a tingling body, with the chi that I cultivate at these classes.
So different people, and different environments bring out different things in us. And I think that when people come together in God’s name, something precious is brought out. I think of places like Paulhaven. A deep bonding happens to everyone there—both campers and staff. The love and joy we all feel is deeply missed when we have to say goodbye. Tears flow freely and especial memories and connections are created.
Swedenborg calls these memories “remains”.
As to remains, they are not only the goods and truths which a man has learned from the Lord’s Word from childhood up . . . but they are also all the states derived thence; such as states of innocence . . . states of love towards parents, etc. . . . states of charity towards the neighbor, and also pity for the poor . . . in a word, all states of good and truth. These states with the goods and truths impressed on the memory, are called remains; which are preserved in man by the Lord and stored up . . . in the internal man (AC 561).
Places like Paulhaven generate remains. Not only that, but some environments block remains. In some worldly environments, remains cannot show through. In other places, though, remains open up and we feel the spiritual states associated with them. Church is one such place. It is a spiritually safe place where remains can come to the surface. Not only that, but church creates more remains. So one use of the church is to allow remains to shine forth and also to create more of those states of innocence and love called remains.
Another use of church is to help form our spiritual life. Swedenborg distinguishes between internal worship and external worship. Internal worship is in our hearts and consists in love and charity. External worship are the rituals we associate with church services. And external worship is of great value.
A man is continually in worship while he is in love and charity: external worship is merely the effect. The angels are in such worship, and therefore there is with them a perpetual Sabbath . . . .
But man, while in the world, ought not to be otherwise than in external worship also, for internal things are excited by external worship, and by it also external things are kept in holiness so that internal things can flow in; besides that man is thus imbued with knowledges, and is prepared to receive heavenly things; and also is gifted with states of holiness, of which he is unaware, which are preserved for him by the Lord for the use of eternal life . . . (AC 1618).
We are brought into a spiritual state of mind in worship. Sometimes I will come to church with a problem or some anxiety from the world that I want an answer for. Yet I find that after the service, my problems seem not so important. My worries dissolve and I see the greater picture of things. The problems of the world are put into perspective. They don’t seem so all important. So another value of church is to create a space of holiness where spiritual feelings and thoughts can flow in. It also puts things in perspective. Church can play an important role in forming our spiritual life.
Church also gives us a check against the messages with which society continually bombards us. A friend of mine was looking through a magazine that featured expensive homes furnished and decorated extravagantly. He told me that magazines like that keep him focused on his goals. For this person, material acquisition was his goal. Society also teaches us that self-interest is good. We are encouraged to be “self-made men.” We are taught to climb the corporate ladder and to claw our way to the top. It’s the CEO’s that are gods to the world. Still other messages from the world plaster popular magazines. There we find pictures of girls so skinny that some develop eating disorders to try to emulate these unnatural body types. Church reminds us that these are only worldly goals. God is the true CEO. Church teaches us to stay humble and realize that without God, we are nothing. It keeps our ego’s in check. Church teaches us that helping others, not stepping on their heads in order to get ahead, is what we should strive for. Where else than in church are we going to find a corrective to the messages the world preaches? So another value of church is to provide a corrective to the messages the world sends out.
Finally, church gives us a community that can’t be found elsewhere. At its best, church is like a second family. We should be able to depend on our church for support and love in what is often a cold, alienated world. In church, our deepest feelings are nurtured. Our very spiritual life is fostered in church. Our feelings about God run deep in our souls. Only in the spiritual community of church do we share our most intimate experiences of God and spirituality. That is why conflict in the church community is so painful. We can only really be hurt by those we care deeply about. People with whom I share my ideas and feelings about God are precious to me. When discord arises in the church community, we are touched in the deep recesses of our souls. We need to be especially sensitive in our church community. We need to realize that others care as deeply about God and the spiritual life as we do. We want to be there for others and care and support them in our mutual pilgrimage on earth. So church is a precious second family we can turn to for support and caring on as deep a level as we experience on earth.
So church fills a very important role in our spiritual life. It fulfills a role that can’t be found elsewhere. In church our hearts and minds are elevated to God and the heavenly life. Church puts our worldly concerns in perspective. Church is a safe place for our remains to open up. In church we build new remains that serve our spiritual condition. In church we find a corrective voice to the messages we receive all over from the world around us. Finally, in church we have a spiritual family. Our spirituality is nurtured in church, and we find a level of care we can’t find elsewhere in the world. Church is that special place where we join together in God’s name with others. Church brings out the best in us. Church is good for our souls. “O, come, let us worship and bow down.” Amen.

The Meaning of Holy Communion
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 13, 2009

Exodus 24:3-11 Luke 22:7-20

We take Holy Communion on the first Sunday of each month, here in Edmonton. Yet how often do we reflect on what the sacrament means? I thought that I would talk about the meaning of Holy Communion today.
First, let us consider communion from a Biblical perspective. We heard in Exodus about blood being sprinkled upon the children of Israel in order to consummate the covenant between them and God. It was called blood of the covenant. After this ritual, there was a sacred feast in which Moses and the elders of Israel ate in God’s presence. Then, in the New Testament reading Jesus talks about blood of the new covenant. He broke bread and served wine and called it the blood of the new covenant. The language used in the New Testament referred to Jesus passion on the cross. He refers to the bread as his flesh broken for humanity, and He refers to the wine as blood that he sheds for humankind. So the Biblical imagery of the Holy Supper is a remembrance of Christ’s passion on the cross.
Traditional Christianity teaches that by Jesus’ crucifixion we are redeemed from sin. They see the crucifixion as a sacrifice of atonement. The atonement sacrifice comes from the book of Leviticus. The Jews thought that if a person had committed a sin, they could sacrifice a lamb and the sacrifice would take away their sin. So traditional Christians see Christ’s crucifixion as a sacrifice for the sins of all humanity. If one believes that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, then one is saved.
But Swedenborg’s theology differs greatly from traditional Christianity. We do believe that Christ saves us, but we emphasize the risen, glorified Christ. It is Christ resurrected that fills us with His spirit of love and wisdom. To the extent that we receive Christ’s love and wisdom, we are in Christ and Christ is in us. This is salvation because the very atmosphere of heaven is God’s Spirit emanating from Himself. We are in that Divine atmosphere when we let God into our hearts and minds. So for us, salvation is not a matter of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, but rather a matter of us allowing Christ’s spirit into us.
This brings us to a consideration of Holy Communion. Holy Communion derives its power from the power of symbols. Here on earth, we have both a material body and a spiritual body. Our material body takes care of our earthly needs. We are not conscious of our spiritual body, but it is living in the spiritual world all the while we are on earth. The spiritual world is connected to the material world. Our material bodies have life because they are filled with life from the spiritual world. The connection between the spiritual world and the material world takes place through symbols. The symbols that particularly bring spiritual life to us are the symbols in the Bible.
The Bible is God’s Word. As such, God is present in the words of the Bible. We don’t see the Bible as a historical document. Instead, we see it as a set of symbols. The imagery we read in the Bible conjoins us with the angels in heaven, and ultimately with God Himself. So when we read about heat in the Bible, for instance, the angels understand love. And when we read about light, the angels understand truth. So the spiritual world is connected with our material life here in this world according to symbols.
The power of Holy Communion is based upon this symbolic connection between the spiritual world and the material world. Like the words of the Bible, the symbols in communion connect our material world with the spiritual world. The bread of Holy Communion symbolizes God’s love, and the wine symbolizes God’s wisdom. When we live a life of love, and when our minds are perfected by truths of wisdom, then we are conjoined with God. When this is our nature, the symbols of the Holy Communion come alive. God is actually present in the symbols of Communion, and the ritual serves to bring us into God’s presence.
Perhaps I can make this clearer by a consideration of how symbols function in our lives. We have various rituals in our society that have symbolic power. Rituals are physical acts that stimulate spiritual states. By spiritual I mean the psychological part of our makeup, the emotional and mental aspects of our persons.
If you think about our social symbols, you can see that physical acts play an important role in our emotional life. Consider the handshake, for instance. When we want to express affection, or to let another know that we are glad to see them, we shake their hand. This physical act forms a bond between two people. We could just say, “Hi, it’s great to see you,” and leave it at that. But in our soul, or in our internalized social symbols, we want to shake hands to signify our friendship. Meeting someone has greater significance when we shake their hand. The physical act of shaking someone’s hand evokes an emotional response of friendliness.
Or consider the act of holding a door open for someone. As we look back at the person we are holding the door for, there is exchanged a brief pleasantry; there is an exchange of affection. By holding the door open, we are affirming the humanity of the other person. We are, in fact saying, “I care about you.” The physical act of holding open a door, communicates a brotherly love for another person.
Then there are symbols that communicate anger or rage. When people get into a serious argument they almost inevitably resort to symbolic language. When people have shouted at each other enough, and the argument concludes with a remark like, “I hate you.” Then they slam the door. Closing a door separates the two people from each other, even as their anger has thrown a wedge between them. But just closing the door, doesn’t contain the same symbolic power of slamming the door. Slamming the door behind a person says so much more than the mere words, “I hate you!” It is a symbol that contains all the emotion of the whole argument and finishes off communication with a powerful emphasis.
So physical acts can elicit emotional responses. Certain signs stimulate our psychological states. I have been discussing social symbols, and we all can see the power they have. But if social symbols have so much power, how much more do religious symbols have! Religious symbols, or rituals, bring out deep spiritual states in us. Spiritual symbols open up our souls and the religious affections we have cultivated over the years. But the power religious rituals possess depend on our spiritual condition. Religious rituals only work if we bring the internal mindset and heart to them. Religious rituals depend on whether we have been taught to respond to them by our religious upbringing and our life.
Eating a meal with someone is an intimate act. When we eat dinner with someone, we are sharing their home, their food, and their company. We are taking in nutrition that will feed our bodies. Eating the food of Communion is dining with God. It is like that sacred feast we heard about in Exodus, and it is like the feast of Passover that Jesus ate with His disciples. When we taste the bread and wine, our bodies respond to the sensual stimulation. Our souls also respond to the stimulation from our bodies. If we are conscious of God’s inflowning life, then God can flow into us through this particular set of symbols. But the bread and wine don’t plant God in us through magic. It is the way we live that gives the physical act of eating and drinking their symbolic power. If we are hateful and deny religious truth, then the bread is just bread and the wine is just wine. Eating the bread and drinking the wine doesn’t give us God’s love and wisdom. Rather, the ritual awakens the love and wisdom we have incorporated into our lives. And eating and drinking also brings our consciousness into God’s presence. The communion opens our souls, and stimulates these spiritual powers. If our life has been an encounter with God, then the material symbols of Communion bring God to us through our souls. Communion is a complete joining of our bodies and our souls. Our bodies take in the bread and wine, and the spiritual world that is running parallel to the material world fills our soul with God’s presence.
The physical act of eating the bread and drinking the wine has the power to bring God’s presence for those who have asked God into their lives. As with all ritual, the power of the sacramental symbols of the Holy Supper are only available if we approach the Lord’s Table with the proper internal mindset. But ritual does have spiritual power. The physical act we do in communion brings heavenly communion and actually brings God’s presence to us. If we approach holy communion with a holy life, then God is present as He was to the Israelites when the blood of the covenant was sprinkled on them and they ate the sacred feast in God’s presence. If we approach communion with a holy life, then God is present as he was with the Apostles at the last supper. Ritual is powerful. Doing a symbolic physical act brings to bear our whole emotional complex in a special moment. As with a handshake, a smile, or a wedding vow, taking the Holy Communion opens our souls to heaven, to God. When approached with the proper mindset and heart, communion brings God to us.

Guilt and Feeling Guilty
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 6, 2009

Isaiah 43:15-25 Matthew 11:20-30

The past few Sundays I’ve been talking about unhealthy states of mind, like worrying and stress. In that light, I thought I’d talk about guilt today. That seems like a good candidate for unhealthy states of mind.
There are two ways to look at guilt. There is guilt, and there is feeling guilty. One can be healthy and the other is very unhealthy. By guilt, I mean the honest admission that one has done something wrong, perhaps regret over it, and the commitment to avoid doing that again. That is healthy. By feeling guilty, I mean a cloud that descends on one’s consciousness of negative feeling. It’s a strange feeling that one is bad, unclean, wrong somehow but not knowing just how, and the feeling that one should do something one wants to do but doesn’t do. I’m not too good at describing feeling guilty because I don’t feel it all that often. Swedenborg doesn’t have much to say about guilt. I looked up guilt in the Concordance and there is less than a page on guilt.
I think a lot of guilt comes from bad religion. I’m going to start by my impressions of a Catholic church I went into last year. I don’t mean to criticize Catholicism, because there is much I admire about it. I mean to be understood about only my personal impression of this church. The story I’m telling occurred when I was in the States at a peer supervision seminar. We took a break and were walking through La Porte, Indiana on a beautiful spring morning. We passed a Catholic church on the way, and it had its doors open, as they often do. One of our ministers had been a Catholic priest, and we walked into the church to meditate. I was immediately struck by a huge, larger than life sculpture on the wall behind the altar of Jesus hanging on the cross. I found this sculpture very disturbing, and not conducive to peaceful meditation on my part at all. I got up and walked around the church. All around the inside walls were the stations of the cross. These are scenes of Jesus suffering and crucifixion. One is a scene of Him being tortured by the Romans, another is Him carrying the cross, another is when He fell carrying the cross, and the stations of the cross end, I believe, with the tomb. The message, clearly, was Christ’s suffering. Another minister I know told me about the stations of the cross. He, too, was a former Catholic. He said that as a boy, he was told that all those stations of the cross in which some aspect of Christ’s suffering were depicted were each and every one because of the sins that this boy had committed. He said that he found it hard to understand how what he did today could have made something happen 2,000 years ago. He also said it made him feel guilty. The larger than life crucifix and the stations of the cross seem to me to inspire that unhealthy kind of guilt. The overriding message was Christ’s suffering. Seeing Christ suffer as a result of my sins would give me a diffused kind of guilt that I would carry around with me wherever I went, no matter what I did.
In my Swedenborgian faith, I was taught to worship the risen Christ. The whole purpose of the incarnation was for Christ to come to the human race who had lost their way. And the power of the risen Christ was that now God in His Divine Humanity could reach us as a Human in our own humanity.
A diffused, general guilt for something way back in the past clouds over the real, useful kind of guilt we need to recognize. I need to own up to my actual wrongs, and make a commitment to avoid them in the future. And even in this, I need to be realistic as to what I want to pay attention to. For instance, I don’t feel guilty when I eat a chocolate bar, or drink a milk shake, or even when I eat a bacon double cheese burger. Though, perhaps, maybe I should feel some kind of guilt over that bacon double cheese burger. But if I let my lower nature motivate me, it may be a good idea to exercise some restraint. It may be time to pray, and to get a handle on my behaviors.
Sometimes we can become conscience hounds. We become conscience hounds especially if we tend toward being a perfectionist. Then, we can imagine that we are the worst people who have ever lived. There is a good story I heard a rabbi tell about conscience hounds which I would like to share with you.
A rabbi moved to a farming province in central Russia. From a high hill, he could look over the whole landscape and note the different farms of the people in his synagogue. He was puzzled, however, by one piece of land that didn’t seem to have any crops growing on it. All the land around it had fertile soil, and the rabbi couldn’t understand why this one plot of land wouldn’t produce crops. He decided that he would pay the farmer a visit. He went to the farm, and found the farmer on his hands and knees. He looked down and saw that the farmer was picking up each seed and cleaning it off and placing it back in the ground. He would go up and down the whole plot of land, pulling each seed out of the ground and cleaning it off, and putting it back. He was so obsessed that he didn’t sleep well. The rabbi grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Get up! You need sleep! Come, let’s go into the house and get you to bed.” But the farmer said, “No, I have all these rows of seed to plant. I can’t take time off to sleep.” The rabbi insisted, and finally got the farmer into bed. He left him to sleep. The rabbi took a few steps, then turned around and shook the farmer and said, “Are you asleep yet?” The farmer said, “No.” The rabbi then turned to leave, took some more steps, and turned around and shook the farmer and said, “Are you asleep yet?” “No,” said the farmer. He did it again, shaking the farmer and asking him if he were asleep yet. I don’t know how many times the rabbi did this, but eventually he did leave. Exhausted, the farmer quickly fell asleep. He awoke much later, worried about his crops. He went to the door and looked out, and there in his field were little sprouts coming up through the soil.
This story illustrates how unhealthy we can be about our guilt. We can study our behavior under a microscope and fill our minds with what we should do and what we shouldn’t have done. We can over examine ourselves to the extent that we become paralyzed with guilt. Swedenborg tells us that the hells love to torment us by bringing up memories of bad things we have done in the past. Swedenborg writes, “When a man is tempted . . . evil spirits call up only his evil deeds that he has done . . .and accuse and condemn him” (AC 751). To us, it feels like we are the ones accusing ourselves, but, in fact it is the influence of the hells that bring up those deeds from our past, along with the accusation that we are no good and guilty.
We need to be reasonable when we evaluate our deeds. We need to accept our frailties with grace, and recognize that we are only humans, and we will make mistakes. We also need to recognize the goodness of heart we also have in us from God. Swedenborg tells us that if our hearts are good, then the evils we commit don’t condemn because they reside on our outer personality, not our inner intentions.
Healthy guilt is open admission that we may have been wrong. We accept this; we don’t condemn ourselves for it; make amends, and get on with our lives. Imagine we are walking down a residential block, looking for a friends house, and the house numbers are getting higher when we want them to get lower. What do we do? Do we feel guilty and continue walking in the same direction? No, we recognize that we are walking in the wrong direction, turn around and go visit our friends. This is what I mean by healthy guilt.
Feeling vaguely bad accomplishes nothing. And even worse than that, it can get in the way of the healthy guilt that will bring about self-improvement. We are all walking up the mountainside. We are all shedding unhealthy attitudes and mindsets and taking on more healthy and loving personalities. Healthy guilt in one step in this process. We can even feel good about guilt when it is healthy self-improvement. Perhaps the word I want to use isn’t even guilt at all. Perhaps appraisal would be a better word choice. The main point I want to make today, is that there is a healthy way to grow, and an unhealthy way to feel bad about ourselves. We can use whatever words we want to for this. I have chosen the pairing of guilt and feeling guilty and I’m not going to feel guilty for my choice of language.

The Message of the Dancing Whales
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
August 23, 2009

Isaiah 46:1-13 Luke 12:22-34

Last time we met I talked about worrying. Today I want to talk about stress. Worrying is like stress, and worrying adds to stress. But stress is different from worrying, and I feel that understanding it is important for our spiritual life.
What made me think about stress was the holiday that Carol and I just took to Vancouver Island. On our trip, we went on a whale-watching expedition that also brought us to some hot springs. On the way to the hot springs we saw some orcas or killer whales in the distance, but nothing noteworthy. Then we hiked through a forest to get to the hot springs. We soaked in the sulfurous water and totally relaxed. That alone was a high point. Then on the way back we experienced a miracle. We came upon some more orcas—these were much closer. They were leaping out of the water and landing with a huge splash. It was breathtaking. Once a baby orca and her mother both leapt out of the water together. And each time the whales leapt, we all went, “Ooooh!” All of this expedition had an impact on me. The boat ride, the hot springs, seeing the whales leap. I felt completely relaxed and peaceful. And I also felt a kind of bond with the other people in the boat who witnessed this rare event with me. I had left the city behind me and felt connected with nature. And my own personality was more natural. When we got back to land, there was nothing I needed or wanted. I was completely at peace. Even now, when I want to recapture that mood, I can think of the picture of momma and baby orca leaping out of the water together.
Then, as we were driving back through Glacier National Park, in the midst of all that beauty I thought about my mailbox at home. I’d been away for a week and a half and I was afraid that too much mail had built up and maybe the mailman was throwing away mail that would no longer fit in it. I felt a knot beginning to develop in my stomach. And in all that beauty I couldn’t seem to get rid of that knot. The stresses of civilization were beginning to overtake me again.
When Jesus talks about worry and anxiety, He uses nature imagery to calm us. He talks about the lilies of the field, the ravens, and the grass. When we are in nature, it soothes us. The calm that took me over on the whale watch made me think about my life in the city. How much trouble just being surrounded by man-made structures makes for. How pent-up I can get in the city. I compare the man-made structures of the city to the idols we heard about in the reading from Isaiah. The Isaiah passage is about the gods of Babylon. Babylon was the greatest city in the Ancient Near East. By comparison, Jerusalem was just a tiny city. Babylon had the highest technology, huge statues of their gods, and astrologers who worshipped the stars. In Isaiah, the prophet compares the gods made by man to the real God, Yahweh. Isaiah is almost satiric. He says:
Some pour out gold from their bags
And weigh out silver on the scales;
They hire a goldsmith to make it into a god,
And they bow down and worship it;
They lift it to their shoulders and carry it;
They set it up in its place, and there it stands.
From that spot it cannot move.
Though one cries out to it, it does not answer;
It cannot save him from his troubles (46:6-7).
In the city we are surrounded by structures man has created, and much of our city life is controlled by these structures. I remember my first impression of Boston, when I moved there from the farmlands of Ohio. I looked at everyone rushing all around and thought to myself, “They need to get out of the city before they can even begin to work on their spiritual life.” It was as if the city created a city personality that covered over everyone’s real self. There was traffic noise; noise from the street lamps; buildings so close they hemmed one in; sirens going off, no stars in the sky because of city lights. I used to go way up the coast to a beach just to get the city out of me.
We take on a lot more stress than we need to in our lives. We create idols we feel we must worship. There is the normal job stress we all experience. For me there are weddings to book and plan, phone calls, emails, and messages to answer, getting ready for church on Sunday—and when there is a wedding booked that same week-end, I really feel the crunch—and pastoral visits. There aeem to be a thousand little things that I seem to keep in my head until they’re done, but then there are always more to do, and inevitably something gets forgotten. This pace can create stress for me, as the occupations that others do create for them. Then there are the activities I do in my personal life that I try to squeeze in where and when I can. I go to the Tai Chi studio twice a week, and go out with Carol. But on top of that there are the idols of gold that I add on to my already busy schedule. For instance there are the articles I write for publication. They require research, which means a trip downtown to the library, reading and not-taking, writing and re-writing, and sending them off to publishers. There is also music which I fit in—including playing, composing, and recording. So I find myself running around trying to fit into my schedule more than I can reasonably accommodate. Then I don’t eat well. And when I get tired, do I rest? No, I drink more coffee so the caffeine can keep me going. This all takes a toll on my body and sometimes I get sick. So what do I do? Do I lie down and rest? No I take Day-Quill and more coffee so my cold symptoms don’t get in my way. Worshipping idols. Eckhart Tolle describes the inner workings of this kind of life excellently in his book, A New Earth. Tolle writes,
The world will tell you that success is achieving what you set out to do. It will tell you that success is winning, that finding recognition and/or prosperity are essential ingredients in any success. . . . What the world doesn’t tell you—because it doesn’t know—is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful. Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything than a successful present moment. And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action. . . .
Let’s say that you are a successful businessperson and after two years of intense stress and strain you finally manage to come out with a product that sells well and makes money. Success? In conventional terms, yes. In reality, you spent two years polluting you body as well as the earth with negative energy; made yourself and those around you miserable, and affected many others you never met. The unconscious assumption behind all such action is that the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. The outcome, which is inseperable from the actions that led to it, is already contaminated by those actions and so will create further unhappiness. This is karmic action, which is the unconscious perpetuation of unhappiness (270-271).
A woman I know in Seattle once asked me if I am at peace. I thought about how driven my life has been and told her that I have satisfaction, which didn’t cut it. Sure I have moments of peace, but I haven’t lived by it.
I think about such a life from the whale watch. Swedenborg writes that a person cannot see good from evil, but one can see evil from good. And it was from the calm of the whale watch that I could see the insanity of the stresses I can fall into. I found that what I need to pay attention to is what kind of person is doing the things that I do. I need to see my activities from the inside, not the outside. It does feel really good when I finish an article that I know is good, and it feels even better when it gets published. And when I finish a new song, there is a sweet feeling of accomplishment. I don’t need to let go of those activities. What I do need to pay attention to is how I am accomplishing the things I do. What is happening to my spirituality as I go about the things of this world. Am I being good to myself?
We can’t always be in nature. And unless a person gets ahold of themselves, one won’t find peace in nature, either. It does feel good for me to get back to work. But I came back with an abiding insight from that whale watch. What we can do is to become aware of ourselves. We can become aware of what is going on with us in the present. We can become concerned with the quality of our lives. Swedenborg tells us that regeneration has to reach even our outer life, or our external life. That means that it isn’t enough to know theology or even to love it. Theology needs to flow into the actions and into the quality of the lives we are living. This, I think is the meaning of that well-know Buddhist story. A disciple asks his master to tell him about enlightenment. The master replies, “You want to know about enlightenment? Have you done your dishes?” Creating a livable life is a spiritual undertaking. It means bringing all we know about spirituality into our day-to-day lives. Our spirituality is finally measured by the way we go about doing what we are doing. It means cutting down the stressors that we let into our lives and finding calm in every aspect of our lives. We can find peace not only in church, or on a whale watch, but even in doing our dishes.

The Worries of this World

Exodus 32:1-14 Mark 4:1-20

This talk is inspired by the parable of the sower that we heard from Mark. I have heard that parable all my life and thought I knew it well. I used it at a chapel service at Paulhaven, and heard something in it that never struck me before. It was as if I heard that line for the first time. The line I refer to is that about worrying. Jesus interprets the seed sown among thorns as follows:
Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other worldly things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful (Mark 4:18).
What really struck me was the line about worries of this life choking the word. I have worries, and I’m sure you do as well. But it never occurred to me that worrying might interfere with our relationship with God. I checked some other translations and some say that the cares of this world choke the word. Cares from the world is slightly different from worries, but I think the general meaning is the same. The message here, I think, is that worrying about the things of this world can block our relationship with God. This includes worrying about money and other things of this world.
I am taking a new perspective on my finances. Before I went to Paulhaven, I used to fret about my next bill. I would sit at home and calculate how much money I had in the bank, and about how much was going to my bills—my new car payment, my new insurance rates, my rent, my student loans—and how much I had left over to spend, and how little that was, and was I going to make it till the next paycheck.
Then I spent that wonderful week at Paulhaven as the camp pastor. I led chapel every morning. I visited the classes to help with any questions that may have come up. And I led a confirmation class in the afternoon. I watched the teens play soccer, played baseball, and ate three square meals each day on a regular schedule. And you know, the whole week I never once thought about money. That’s when it dawned on me how little I really needed to be happy.
You know, none of that worrying about my bills and my paycheck changed anything. All the debts and income remained the same. And each month I had enough to get by. These times with the recession and all make finances a high concern for many people. But I wonder if worrying about it fixes anything. What makes me upset about money is all those things I want to do for fun, that I might not be able to do—like going skiing in the mountains this winter. But that whole week at Paulhaven, doing anything other than what I was doing never occurred to me. I resolved not to worry about money anymore and to take each day as it comes. And so far I’m doing pretty good. I’m not worrying about money and I’m not sitting at home calculating how much money I have in the bank and how many bills I have to pay. And you know what? I’m happier.
Money isn’t the only thing we worry about. We worry about our families; we worry about our friends; we worry about the war in Afghanistan; we worry about taxes; we worry about the world economy. We can worry about anything we care about. In this sense, maybe the translation that talks about cares of the world fits better.
In fact, we worry most about just things that we can’t do anything about. And that’s why we worry. When things don’t go the way we think they should, and especially when we’re powerless to do anything about it, then we worry. When we see people we love in trouble, and we are unable to provide their needs, we worry. Or maybe our children heading down a troublesome path, and we are helpless to influence them and they shrug off our well-intentioned guidance, we worry. We want to fix what is wrong, and when we can’t we worry. We can take on the sorrows of the whole world and when we find we can’t do anything to change them, we worry about the state of affairs of the world. Cares of the world.
What we are doing when we worry in this way, is trying to take God’s power into our own hands. When things are out of our control, we want to take God’s place and make them go the way we think they should go. Worrying, in this sense, is not trusting in God. It’s not leaving to God the things that God’s providence guides in God’s way. When we are tempted to worry, we need to let go and let God. I think that this is why Jesus says that worrying about the things of this world choke off the word. By imagining that we are God, or that we have God’s power to make things go the way we think that they should, we are replacing God with self—no matter how well intentioned the efforts of ourselves may be.
We see the worst-case scenario in our Old Testament passage. In the Exodus passage, the Israelites are worried that Moses has been away too long. The Bible tells us that he went up Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights. The Israelites say, “As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him” (32:1). So they take the matter into their own hands. They made for themselves their own gods that they could see and touch. The true God that spoke through Moses was new and uncertain to them. They had seen in Egypt and in the land of Canaan magnificent statues of the gods of those lands. Now Moses told them about a God they couldn’t see or touch. Then Moses had been away so long they worried about whether they had been abandoned. The height of blasphemy is when the golden calf that was made by their own hands was called the gods who brought them out of Egypt. Thus they were claiming that the golden calf had done what Yahweh had done for them.
At its worst, the golden calf is a loss of faith in God. When the things we have to go through seem too hard to bear, when the cares of this world seem too overwhelming, we can doubt whether God hears our cries for help. There is a myth that some have, that says that believers in God will have things always go well for them. Some think that things will go their way if only they believe. Then, when things go badly, they wonder, “Where is God now?” I remember talking with a woman whose car broke down late at night way across town. She said, “Why is this happening to me? I’m a good girl.” I know of others who look at tragedies in the world and say that God doesn’t care about us, or still worse, that there is no God. They then give up and turn to worldly pleasures for satisfaction. They make their own gods that they can manipulate and that bring them tangible benefits, rather than keep faith in an unseen but very powerful real God.
There are many hard things in life that I can’t explain. I continue to search and question. But I wonder, how would things look if we could see them from God’s eyes instead of our limited, mortal eyes? If we had a vision of the infinite interconnectedness of everything—of how free will intersects with personal ambition and altruism and worldly limitations—of how God’s infinite love for his creation intersected with human willfulness, maybe things would make more sense to us.
But we can’t see things as God does. And we don’t have God’s power to change the world or even to fix one human being the way we think he or she should be fixed. We can only work in our limited, finite way to effect world change and to influence the ones we love as we feel we should. Then we need to let go and let God. Frost says, “My long scythe whispered to the ground/and left the hay to make.” We mow the field, but God turns the crop into hay. We need to let go of outcomes that are beyond our power.
So these reflections revolve around the startling idea that worrying can choke off the word. I interpret this passage to mean that worrying is a kind of golden calf. It’s a desire to control things beyond our control, and a kind of impatience with God’s providence. Perhaps the real answer to those things we worry about is to wait and have faith. To wait for God to act in God’s way in God’s time. I think that God knows what He’s up to.

The Sure Foundation for Your Times
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
July 12, 2009

Isaiah 33:2-16 Luke 13:22-35

When Jesus looked over Jerusalem, he lamented. He said, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Look, your house is left to you desolate.” The people of the Holy City were too involved with temple sacrifices and purity rituals to hear the message of love that goes way back to the foundations of Israel. And in our reading from Isaiah, we read that the highways of Israel “are deserted, no travelers are on the roads . . . The land morns and wastes away.”
I thought about our own society when I read these passages. Across denominational lines, attendance at church on Sunday morning is in decline. Even the mighty Catholic Church is closing its doors. There are a few pockets of Christian prosperity in the Fundamentalist denominations, which to me is even more alarming. Jesus’ words seem applicable to today’s world. We long to gather the children of the world together, but they are not willing. The houses of religion are left desolate.
This is not a message of doom and gloom, though. I do not fear for the future of the church. And despite our small numbers, we are holding our own. I do not fear for the extinction of this denomination in particular, nor do I fear for Christianity in general.
What really prompted me to think about the current state of religion in the world was an AA meeting I attended. The organizations of AA and NA are growing across the world. They number in the millions. I wondered why these organizations were growing. They ask very hard things of their members, much harder, I thought, than religious institutions do. AA asks a person to relinquish a drug with powerful addictive properties. Before a person does anything in AA, they have to give up something they love, crave, and have become physically addicted to. Then, after the addictive drug is put down, AA asks a person to change radically. They teach, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” This means that the same person, if they don’t radically change, will drink again. Part of this personality change is to create an exhaustive moral inventory of themselves, and then to ask God to remove all their defects of character. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the members of AA need to find a Higher Power. From being a hopeless drunk, AA asks its members to put down their powerful addiction to alcohol, change their personality, and to find spirituality.
Now that’s asking a lot. I think it’s asking more than churches ask. All you need to do in a church is come to church, listen to Bible readings and a sermon, and sing some songs. In fact, you could even daydream in church, and fall asleep during the sermon. Of course religion asks more than this, and we will talk about this later. And churches that ask only that are sure to fail. But still, at the bottom line, one could get away with these few things at church.
I asked Rich this question. I asked him why the very hard programs of AA and NA are growing. He said that people get beat down and tired of their lives when they suffer from addictions. Nobody comes to AA when they are on top of their game. Usually, people come to AA when they start losing things: their job, their family, their house, self-respect. When life becomes painful enough, a person will want it all to stop. There is often, maybe usually, an element of desperation in a person who comes to AA. They become willing to do anything to stop the pain.
But what about people whose lives are going good? What about people whose lives are going great? What about people who are wealthy and powerful? What about people who are succeeding in life? What about people who think they have enough? These questions seem to me to capture the trouble religion has today. People are complacent with their lives and in their complacency don’t see the need for God.
Our society is structured to provide rewards to successful people. Society recognizes those who have made it on their own. The self-made man or woman is a cultural icon. Sadly, I think society honors the rich and powerful. And the rich and powerful seem to have all that they need. Their very success seems to close the door on God, as they pride themselves on standing on their own two feet. And even the average person of ordinary means also feels that they have enough. We have iPods, television, computers, Facebook, Twitter, u-tube, and an endless array of distractions. As T. S. Eliot puts it, we are, “distracted by distraction from distraction.” Society seems to equate faith with weakness. Society feels that needing God is a sign that they can’t make it on their own. Accepting our human finitude is a blow to the self-made man or woman. The Christian virtue of humility is buried beneath the social norm of self-confidence. Our leading intellectuals are primarily atheist. I’ve been reading a book by the great philosopher Charles Taylor. When a person reads Taylor, one feels his Catholic beliefs just below the surface of his philosophy. You know he longs to speak religiously. But as an academic philosopher, he knows he can’t. In fact, his latest book is called A SecularAge, and it is an analysis of this world we now live in. The depth to which we are secular, Taylor maintains, is unlike anything the world has seen before. Most people today don’t have that desperation that an alcoholic feels. Most people don’t cry out for a change in their life.
So Christ’s words are apt today. “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” Fuelled by successes, our world sees no place for God in their lives. I am not saying that church is the only place where a person can find God. Indeed, people do find God outside church buildings. Perhaps in a forest, or a garden, or watching a sunrise, or in some other special place where God’s presence fills the air. But if that were the case, I wouldn’t mind. I think that back in the sixties people were finding God everywhere. But I don’t think that this is the case today. I see Charles Taylor’s secular age as the leading norm today. I don’t think that the spiritual quest is as alive. Rather, I think that God has simply been sloughed off.
But there are turn who do turn to God today. Usually only after they have been through some personal challenge in their lives. When the complacency that infects this world has been broken, people find that they need help. They find that they need God. They may even find that they need the spiritual support of church. Then, God gives people strength. The church gives people community. And religion gives people hope. Swedenborg states that spiritual growth usually begins after sorrow or misfortune. He speaks of “temptation, misfortune, and sorrow, that cause the things of the body and the world, thus of man’s own, to become quiescent” (AC 8). So when the successes of the world fall through, a person sees just how thin they are as a source of identity. After those misfortunes and sorrows, a person begins to have some of that desperation the alcoholic knows.
Turning to God out of desperation, though, is not where spiritual growth ends. When the desperate straits pass, complacency can set in again. Rather, spirituality takes root in the soul when a person turns to God because she or he wants God in their life. Real faith is chosen, not used as a fallback under difficult times. One sees how vast and beautiful the truths of religion are, and from a love for truth a person seeks out a greater understanding of God’s works. One finds a heart that is moved by God’s love, and one seeks to cultivate that love. Spirituality enters a person’s soul to stay when he or she realizes the words of the prophet; that God is the sure foundation for our times, not our own worldly successes. To a person of faith, religion is an attractive proposition. The life of religion is richer and of more value than a life lived for materialism alone.
How this view of religion comes to a person, I can’t say. I can’t rightly say just how it came to me. I can say that when my aspirations of university teaching fell through and I was left for years without any intellectual stimulation, I did begin to turn inward. My true heart emerged, which had been buried under religious theories and cultural studies of the religious experience. When all that intellectualizing stopped, I found my own personal faith. God came to me and I came to God. Then, all that I had learned became like so many mirrors reflecting God’s splendor. And I finally came into this profession of ministry as if I had come home after a long wandering.
I guess the call to faith is finally God’s. God says that he continually stands at the door and knocks. Sometimes I wish He would knock a little louder, though. This is why I don’t fear for the future of Christianity, nor for the future of this church. God comes to people in the way that is right for each individual life. God makes Himself known at the right time, in the right way. And if the church is truly alive with God’s Spirit, people who are searching will know it. We still need to take every measure to reach out to the world by every means we can. And we need to embody those principals of religion that give true life. But finally I know that God wants to gather his children together as a hen does her chicks even more than we do. And finally, it is God’s call. Let us all be ready when He calls us. And with a faith that is truly alive in our hearts, we will be that person in Isaiah “who will dwell on the heights, whose refuge will be a mountain fortress. His bread will be supplied and water will not fail him.”

What We Don’t Know about Heaven
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
July 5, 2009

2 Kings 2:1-12 John 14:1-4

One of Swedenborg’s extraordinary claims is that he had visions of the afterlife. And what is extraordinary to me, is that he was able to describe these visions with the precision of the scientist that he was. This claim is not all that extraordinary, though. There is a visionary tradition in the history of Christianity, in fact it is even Biblical. The New Testament records accounts where people heard voices from heaven and saw heaven opened. Paul had a vision of Christ which left him blind for three days and his companions heard the voice of Jesus. Peter, as well, had a vision of heaven. The Apostle John recorded his visions in the book of Revelation. There is a visionary tradition among the Natives of North America, in Hinduism, Buddhism, and in Islam. Then there are those near death experiences that some have which come with visions of the next life.
From Swedenborg’s writings, we think we have a fair idea of what the afterlife is like. Swedenborg talks about the spiritual bodies angels have—and all angels come from the human race, he talks about communities in the next life, and about functions and occupations we have in the next life. But then there are all those times when Swedenborg says that what he experiences is ineffable. That is, his experiences are beyond anything words can express.
The very language of angels—that is, good people who have crossed over—is beyond human speech. We all come into this angelic language, according to Swedenborg, and it is so natural that we don’t know that it transcends all language from this world. To convince newly arrived spirits just how superior their language is, Swedenborg conducts an experiment. He asks the spirits to go to their society, think of an idea and try to tell it to Swedenborg, who is still in the natural world. Swedenborg tells us then what happened:
They entered, thought of a subject, retained it, and came out; and when they tried to give expression to it they could not; for they could find no idea of natural thought adequate to any idea of purely spiritual thought, and thus words to express it (TCR 280 [5].
The spirits are convinced then about how superior spiritual thought and language is to natural thought and language. As Swedenborg says,
Spiritual ideas are supernatural, inexpressible, ineffable, and incomprehensible to a natural man; and they said that being so supereminent, spiritual ideas or thoughts in comparison with natural are ideas of ideas and thoughts of thoughts, and therefore by them the qualities of qualities and the affections of affections are expressed; . . . and from this it is evident that spiritual wisdom is the wisdom of wisdom, and is therefore inexpressible to any wise man in the natural world (TCR 280 [5]).
So we don’t have the first idea of what angels think and talk about. It is so filled with wisdom that the best of our natural thought isn’t able to understand a single angelic idea.
That passage implies that one reason for the transcendence of spiritual lang is because the experiences in the next life are beyond what we can experience here. I was intrigued by the statement that in angelic speech the “affections of affections” are expressed. All our delights come from our loves. When we are enjoying what we love, we are in our delights. And the heavenly delights of loving God and the neighbor far exceed any other joy we can know. We feel joy here when we do good to others. And we feel a peace and joy when we think about God. But the happiest we can ever be in this world is nothing compared to heavenly joy and happiness. We feel only faintly the joy that awaits us in heaven. This is one of those heavenly promises that is pleasant to contemplate. Swedenborg writes,
. . . a man who is in love to God and in love toward the neighbor, as long as he lives in the body does not feel the manifest enjoyment from these loves and from the good affections which are from them, but only a blessedness that is hardly perceptible, because it is stored up in his interiors, and veiled by the exteriors which are of the body, and defiled by the cares of the world. After death, however, the states are entirely changed; . . . the obscure enjoyment and almost imperceptible blessedness which had been with those who are in love to God and in love to the neighbor, is then turned into the love of heaven, which is in every way perceptible and sensible; for that blessedness, which was stored up and lay hid in their interiors when they lived in the world, is then revealed and brought forth into manifest sensation, because they are then in the spirit and that was the enjoyment of their spirit (HH 401).
What strikes me about this passage is how good it feels to live in mutual love with one another here in this world. There are times when we seem to be lifted up into heaven here on earth. And yet even these feelings are but a “blessedness that is hardly perceptible” compared to heavenly joy. Even though human language is inadequate to express what spiritual reality is like, Swedenborg tries to give us some idea of just how great heavenly joy is. And the source of heavenly joy comes from God Himself, who wants to save everyone and make everyone as happy as He can.
Heaven in itself is such that it is full of enjoyments, so that viewed in itself it is nothing but what is blessed and delightful, since the Divine good proceeding from the Divine love of the Lord makes heaven in general and in particular with everyone there, and the Divine love is to will the salvation of all and the happiness of all from inmosts and in fullness. Hence whether you say heaven or heavenly joy, it is the same thing (HH 397).
And everyone in heaven wants to share their happiness with everyone else. Heaven is immense and so heavenly joy is equally immense. Once again, Swedenborg tells us that sharing joy comes first from God, who wishes to give everyone all that He has.
How great the enjoyment of heaven is, may be evident only from this, that it is an enjoyment to all in heaven to communicate their enjoyments and blessings to others; and because all are such in the heavens, it is manifest how immense is the enjoyment of heaven; for, as was shown above, in the heavens there is a communication of all with each, and of each with all. Such communication flows forth from the two loves of heaven, which, as was said, are love to the Lord and love toward the neighbor. These loves are communicative of their enjoyments. That love to the Lord is such, is because His love is the love of communication of all that He has with all, for He wills the happiness of all. Similar love is in every one of those who love the Lord, because He is in them (HH 399).
We think of heaven as being a place of deep peace. There are moments in this world when we feel tranquil and at peace. Perhaps at sunrise, or in a quiet natural setting. I remember skiing up in Jasper with Carol. We stopped and looked down at the beautiful valley and Carol said to me, “Listen—it’s totally quiet.” There was no road noise, no clamor from traffic, no sirens. There was just the forest, the valley and each other. That was one of those moments of peace that we feel here on earth. But even moments such as these fall short of the kind of peace that awaits us in heaven. I spoke with a man who had actually died for several minutes before being resuscitated. He had an experience of the afterlife. He told me that there is a peace and tranquility beyond anything we feel in this world. Swedenborg says the same.
Man also, as long as he lives in the body, cannot receive the peace of heaven, thus cannot perceive it, because his perception is in what is natural. In order to perceive it, he ought to be able as to thought to be elevated and withdrawn from the body and kept in the spirit, and then be with angels. Because I have in this way perceived the peace of heaven, I am able to describe it, yet not by words as it is in itself, because human words are inadequate, but only as it is in comparison with that rest of mind which those enjoy who are content in God (HH 248).
And once again, this peace flows from God Himself. God is the source of all heavenly peace and joy. And what amazes me, is that God Himself feels joy in being united with us all in heaven. God feels joy that we are happy, and He feels joy in being conjoined with everybody in heaven. This Divine joy is shared with everyone in heaven and our joy in God and God’s joy in us becomes a loving circle.
The Divine of peace in heaven is from the Lord, existing from His conjunction with the angels of heaven, . . . From this it may be manifest, that peace in the heavens is the Divine inmostly affecting with blessedness every good they have, and giving all the joy of heaven; and that in its essence the Divine joy of the Lord’s Divine love, from His conjunction with heaven and with every one there. This joy perceived by the Lord in angels, and by angels from the Lord, is peace. From this by derivation angels have all that is blessed, enjoyable, and happy, or that which is called heavenly joy (HH 286).
These passages are a reminder about just how little we can really know about heaven here on earth. Visionaries from all traditions can point to heavenly realities. But they can only point. The actual experience is beyond what we can know here on earth. We cannot know the wisdom in heaven, we cannot know the joy in heaven, and we cannot know the peace of heaven. I think that spiritually inclined people find a more joyful life in this world than those who are consumed with worldly things. I think that spiritually inclined people find deeper experiences of peace. But our best days here are but “a blessedness that is hardly perceptible” compared to what awaits us in heaven. Meanwhile, let us try to do a good turn to our neighbors, and to try to make this one day happier for the lives we touch. And let us be mindful and give thanks to God, who gives us every good thing we know. And we can live in the peace and joy of this life, and hope for good things to come.

And They Left Their Father

Genesis 17:1-22 Matthew 4:18-25

The Judeo-Christian scriptures are filled with father imagery. In our Old Testament reading today, we heard about Abraham being the father of a great nation. And the Jews are often referred to as the children of Abraham. The story we heard also mentions Ishmael, who will also be the father of a great nation. Biblical tradition makes Ishmael the father of the Arab race.
And in the Christian tradition, God is seen as the Father, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer each Sunday. Jesus Himself refers to God as His Father. Swedenborg tells us that in heaven, everyone is seen as children of the one Heavenly Father.
Today we honor the contribution that fathers make to our lives. Fathers are often overlooked in families, while mothers receive much of the attention. A generation ago, fathers often went off to work, brought in the family income, and rested after supper. For this reason, their influence on the family was less pronounced than mothers. Though even in this role distribution, often fathers were the head of the family and often set the tone for the household.
Fathers, too, were often the disciplinarians of the family. I remember my mother threatening us when we were misbehaving, “Just wait till your father gets home!” My father was a strict and harsh man. I never confided in him. In fact, I rarely talked with him. He barked out orders and yelled at us when we needed to quiet down or when we were doing something he didn’t like. He was very critical, and found fault with almost everything I did. I was not close to my father, nor were any others of my siblings. I even found it hard to believe that he loved me. This role was almost expected of fathers in that generation. My friends talked similarly of their fathers, and some of their fathers were even more severe than my own father. I think of popular movies of the time, and the father was depicted in the manner I’m describing. The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins both had distant, severe fathers who were transformed into loving tender fathers under the influence of Julie Andrews’ feminine influence.
In the generation in which I grew up, the roles of men and women were much more fixed than they are now. Since my father was so critical and distant to me, my primary bond growing up was with my mother. I developed sensitive, artistic qualities that were not considered manly qualities. As I came into adulthood, I confronted some of these deficiencies. I tried to make myself more masculine. I worked construction. I tried to get tough. I tried to be the kind of man that I thought our society said I should be. I did like construction work, but the rest of this identity was a pose I took on like an actor would take on a role.
My relationship with my father affected how I relate to other men, as well. Until late in my life, I found myself often uncomfortable around men. And men in authority positions were even harder for me to relate to. There were some of my friends who went on hunting or fishing trips with their fathers, and I noticed that they were comfortable around men—certainly more comfortable than I was.
I think the image we have of our fathers can influence our image of God. I knew that God is loving, but when I would pray, my father’s personality came through. I saw God just as critical as my own father was. All my sins and wrongs came to the fore when I prayed. I found it hard to feel the love that I knew God has for me. Rather, the judging, lawgiver God of the Old Testament was often how God seemed to me. I know children of overbearing fathers who have even abandoned the imagery of Jesus and a Father God. While they have never told me so, I guess that it was the hard image of their own father than led them to such a theology.
But even in my childhood, there were men who became my spiritual fathers. I met some of them at church camps. They brought religion to me and showed me that being sensitive and religious and artistic could also be a part of manhood. As I went on in life I met more spiritual fathers. My teachers at the Swedenborg School of Religion were much more approachable. I could talk with them openly. I could confide in them. I could safely show them my feelings. They manifestly showed compassion and love for me. They showed me that a male authority figure could be gentle and friendly. Also some of my professors in graduate school were men more like me. I expanded my idea of what it means to be a man, and how men can relate to one another through these intellectual and caring men.
My relationship with my own father grew over time. Dad softened, and he did some really caring acts that showed me how much he really loved me. I was able in his later years to bond better with him. But the image of fathers from childhood still have a strong influence on us. To this day, I have to consciously remember my spiritual fathers when I pray, and consciously try to integrate their personalities into my conceptions of God. I have to consciously apply the characterization of Jesus that I find in the Bible, whom Walt Whitman calls, “the gentle God.”
Theologically, though, outgrowing our family notions of reality is part of our spiritual journey. I will now come back to the story from the New Testament. When Jesus calls James and John, the Bible tells us that they left their father and their boat and followed Him. I take this to be a symbol of spiritual rebirth. We receive what Swedenborg calls our natural degree of life from our parents. He even says that our soul comes from the father, and our body comes from the mother. I don’t know if this is true, but that’s how he sees it. The natural degree of life needs to be reworked in order to allow spirit to flow through it. This natural degree of life Swedenborg also calls proprium. The proprium is the life that comes from self. In the proprium are all the tendancies to evil that come from our heredity and our environment. The very idea of self, or ego, is born from our father and mother. Like James and John, we need to leave this level of our personality in order to come into spiritual life. Our paternal conceptions of how things should be, and our innate desires can be a real obstacle to our spiritual life. We can really grate against society if we expect everything we do to be the way it went in our families. In spiritual growth, we learn to adapt to things that may go differently than they did in our family life. We open up our minds to a greater world, and embrace the world as it is, not the way it went in our upbringing. Spiritually, we need to leave the self-interest we are born with in order to open up to the higher degrees of spiritual life. In Swedenborg’s system, we are born into the natural degree. Religion teaches us to open up the higher degrees, which are called spiritual and celestial. If we fail to open up these higher degrees of the self, we are left with our biological self, and self interest—an image of the natural world. We let go of ego in order to open up to the neighbor and to God. We need to leave our fathers in order to follow Christ.
Today, roles of fathers and of men and women both are changing. Men are becoming more openly caring and loving. Men don’t have to be the harsh, overbearing critical parent that they were a generation ago. They don’t need to be tough. Men today can even cry. And many women, maybe most women, are now out in the workforce as men are. In some households, men are even staying home and mothering their children while the women are at work. I received some interesting responses to the Mothers’ Day sermon I gave last Mothers’ Day. One person said that there were many people who played the role of mothers to her father in his upbringing, and that they deserved to be recognized. I also received a call from a friend who wanted to be mentioned because of the mothering he had been doing for his daughter. I told him to wait for Fathers’ Day. So I can now mention him, and all the other men who are acting in the role of loving caregiver to their children.
Unfortunately, in society today there are many fathers who neglect their responsibilities. They abandon their lovers when they get pregnant, and force women to bear the whole responsibility of raising children. The number of single parent families, which almost always means single mother families, is high today. Men need to step up to the plate and share the responsibility of raising their children. Not only is it an obligation, but it would do so much for them to be involved in the care and nurturing that comes with parenting.
It seems to me to be a step forward to have the kind of balance that we see in some households today. Fathers and mothers both working, and men and women both showing love and care openly for their children. The sad drawback, though. Is that with both parents working the kind of care I’m talking about is very hard to achieve. Though roles are becoming more balanced, is the kind of deep loving bond between parent and child available in these households? I don’t think society has yet found a good answer to this problem. Nevertheless, I still see it as a good sign that fathers are becoming more integrated into family life, into the decision-making processes about their children, and are contributing masculine love to their children as they grow up. These are great steps forward in social life. So today, we honor the modern father. And we thank him for all he does in family life.

Rejoicing Comes in the Morning
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
June 7, 2009

Genesis 28:10-22 John 21:1-14

The two Bible passages I selected for this morning both relate to morning. When Jacob awakes in the morning, He makes an altar and dedicates his life to Yahweh. And in the New Testament passage, Jesus appears to the disciples in the morning and shows them where to catch a huge amount of fish.
In Swedenborg’s correspondences, morning symbolizes God Himself. In the morning, the sun rises in the east. So the east also symbolizes God and God’s presence. In heaven, God appears to the angels always in the east. And in many Bible passages, God’s presence is in the east. When God separates the waters of the Red Sea, it is by an east wind. The altar of Solomon’s temple faces east. When the glory of the Lord fills the temple in Ezekiel, it comes from the east. This is the reason our Swedenborgian churches all have their altars in the east, as is the case with this church. Morning also symbolizes a state we experience in which our spiritual affections are keenly felt. So it is appropriate that in both these passages about morning, we have a direct experience of God’s presence. Jacob sees God at the top of the stairway ascending to heaven, and the Apostles see Jesus in the morning after a night of fishing.
There are three important aspects to both of these Bible readings. First, it is God who comes to the people in these stories—they don’t come to Him. In the Old Testament story, Jacob is on a journey and goes to sleep. He isn’t expecting anything special—it is an ordinary night and he goes to sleep at the day’s end. In the New Testament story, the Apostles are at work, fishing in the Sea of Tiberias, or as it is traditionally called, the Sea of Galilee. Second, God comes to these people in the midst of troubles. Things don’t look good when God comes to these people. And third, when God appears, abundance and prosperity result.
Let’s begin by looking at the story of Jacob. Jacob is on a journey when God comes to him. And Jacob is on that journey because his brother Esau is so mad at him that he plans to murder him. Acting on his mother Rebecca’s advice, Jacob travels to Haram to lay low until his brother cools off. So Jacob is fleeing for his life.
In the New Testament story, the Apostles aren’t having much luck with their work. They have been fishing all night and haven’t caught anything. They must have felt disappointed and, maybe, frustrated.
So in both these stories, things are going badly for the people in them. And in these spells of trouble, God comes and lifts up His people with His presence and abundance. Let’s go over the stories in a little more depth.
Jacob goes to sleep on his journey, and sees the vision of a stairway reaching up to heaven. Angels are ascending and descending on it. And at the top of the stairway, God Himself stands and speaks to Jacob. He promises Jacob that He will always be with him. “I am with you,” God tells him, “and will watch over you wherever you go” (28:15). Jacob’s response is very significant. He says, “Surely Yahweh is in this place and I was not aware of it” (28:16). In the midst of his anxieties, Jacob was not aware of God’s presence. He then realizes that this place is the gate to heaven and the house of God. So he builds an altar there, and names the place Bethel, which means “House of God.” He then makes a commitment to turn his life over to God. He says, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey . . . then Yahweh will be my God” (20, 21). And in God’s appearance to Jacob, God promises abundance and prosperity to Jacob. God tells him that, “I will give you and your descendents the land on which you are lying. Your descendents will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and the east, to the north and the south. All peoples of the earth will be blessed through you and your offspring” (13-14).
In our New Testament passage, the events follow a similar outline. The Apostles have had a disappointing night. They fished all night and hadn’t caught anything. Then, through no effort of their own, Jesus appears to them in the morning. Like Jacob, they don’t realize that they are in the presence of God. The Bible tells us that, “the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus” (21:4). Jesus tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat and their nets are filled so full they couldn’t bring them into the boat. Then John realizes that it is Jesus who is talking to them. They have been given more than an abundant catch of fish with Jesus’ appearance, but there is more. There is a fire burning on the shore and they eat bread and fish in Jesus presence.
The main point I take from these stories is how elusive God’s presence with us can be. More often than not, I think we can identify with Jacob, when he said, “Surely God is in this place and I was not aware of it.” How often do we take time to raise our consciousness to God. We fret about our bills, we go to work, we go about our daily affairs, and more often than not, our minds are not on our inner states. Even if that morning state comes to us in which our spiritual affections are clearly perceived, would we take the time to notice?
But all the while this is going on, God still comes to us. While our minds are filled with the mater of fact things of our daily lives, God is with us. Even in times when we feel lost and abandoned; when things are not going our way; God is with us. God is with us as He was with Jacob, when he was fleeing for his life, and as He was with the Apostles after a disappointing night of fishing with nothing to show for it. And in coming to us, God gives us continually of His great abundance. God gives us the great catch of fish. God gives us descendants that reach from the east to the west and from the north to the south. Some church interpret these teachings about abundance to mean material wealth. They teach that God will give us lots of money. I’ve heard these preachers on TV and wondered how they can get away with it. I wondered about the people in their congregations who never do end up getting a lot of money, and why they keep coming back.
My way of reading God’s abundance is in spiritual terms. The abundance God gives us is clear truths, more and more truths that we learn along our journey in this world. If we are open to it, we will find our minds progressively more and more illuminated with clarity in the things that relate to spiritual life. We see into the workings of God’s Providence. We learn better how the world operates. We see more vividly our purpose in life. These truths lead us into ever deeply felt affection for one another and for God. Our feelings of union and communion with each other and with heaven grow ever more deep in our spirit. And a loving community, which is what God gives us, is wealth beyond measure. These things are the abundance that God’s presence brings to us.
Since this abundance is all internal, we may not see it happening. I was recently at a youth retreat in the US. There were Bible lessons that we on staff gave, and there was recreation time in between. We all ate our meals together. There was sharing and dialogue and talking about life. Without my knowing it, the whole camp opened up with a level of caring and mutual love between teens, between staff, and between teens and staff. Without my knowing it, I was lifted up into one of those God experiences that we heard about in the Bible readings this morning. I didn’t notice it at the time. I only noticed it when I had to deal with the world after the retreat ended. How harsh and grating everything felt. How callous and unfeeling the encounters I ran into after the retreat. Only by contrast could I realize that I had been lifted up into one of those morning states in which love, joy, and spiritual delight were keenly felt.
Hopefully, there are times and places when we do have that feeling that God is with us and will watch over us wherever we go, as He tells Jacob. Hopefully there are those times when we feel God’s presence and its corresponding delight and spiritual joy. Maybe we find it in church. Maybe we find it especially during Holy Communion, when we eat and drink in Jesus’ presence, as the disciples did that morning. Maybe we find it in prayer. Or maybe, as in the stories we heard this morning, it comes to us out of the blue, without our looking for it.
Abraham Maslow calls these experiences “peak experiences.” They can transform and reorder a person’s whole life. When we feel these peak experiences of God’s presence, we want to live in such a way that we open the door for them to recur. They become the holy center of everything we strive for in life. We, like Jacob, make a vow and a commitment that the God who has manifested Himself to us will be our God. And our lives will fulfill that commitment.
So I ask you this morning to open yourselves up to God, as we partake in Holy Communion. Let us recognize that communion is a feast in Jesus’ presence. And in this sacrament, God can truly appear and be present with us. And when we leave the church this morning, let us remain open to God. God is coming to us continually. He will appear in the midst of our work and ordinary life’s activities as He did to Jacob and to the disciples. And instead of saying, “Surely God is in this place and I was not aware of it,” maybe we will be as the disciples when they ate their morning meal in the presence of the Lord.