Church of the Holy City

Rejoice in all the Good Things

Rejoice in all the Good Things
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
February 21, 2010

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Luke 4:1-13 Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

In today’s reading from Deuteronomy, we heard the story of the journey of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery to settling in the Promised Land. For Swedenborgians, this story is not just one of historical interest. For us, the journey from Egyptian slavery to the Promised Land is a story that symbolizes our own inner growth. We are on that journey in this life. It is a journey from the limitations of self-interest into the blessings of Godly love and love for each other. The New Testament story about Jesus is in keeping with this story. In our New Testament reading, we heard about Jesus’ temptations. This account is the only time temptations are mentioned in the Gospel narratives, but the last line in the story brings up a most important point about Jesus’ temptations. In my translation it reads, “When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time (Luke 4:13). It’s that “opportune time” that interests me. It means that the devil wasn’t done tempting Jesus at the end of this story. It suggests that the devil would come back and tempt Jesus again at some opportune time. In our theology, we are taught that Jesus was tempted all through his life, not just in this one occasion after His baptism. That teaching is consistent with the suggestion we read about in Luke, the devil left until an “opportune time.” The pairing of the journey from slavery to the Promised Land and the temptation of Jesus also makes theological sense from a Swedenborgian point of view. It is through temptations that we are brought into the Promised Land of the soul. It is by temptations that we are brought into the blessings of love that God gives us as a heavenly gift. And when we feel something of the heavenly joys of love that God gives us, we give thanks to God and rejoice in all the good things He gives us.
Swedenborg teaches that there isn’t one single devil who opposed God. Rather the devil in the Bible means all the hells taken together. So for Swedenborg there are devils in the plural, but not one single devil who is the opposite of God. This means that when Jesus was tempted, He fought against all the whole hells together. It was in his human form that Jesus was tempted. For the hells cannot approach God as He is in His essence. God’s flaming love is too pure and holy for any devil to come near it. In fact, even the highest angels cannot come near God as He is in His essence. It is with God’s Divine Human that we can become united, and it was for the purpose of union with the whole human race that God took on the human and came into our world. And through his human form, God was able to interact with the hells, be tempted by the hells, and ultimately bring them into order. Through Jesus’ temptations, he grew out of everything the earthly human form received from Mary, and He put on the Divine Human. This happened progressively throughout Jesus’ life. With the resurrection, Jesus and God became fully one and God and Man became one being.
We come to God in a similar way. We grow out of a self and world orientation and into a God and heaven orientation. For most of us, this process happens through temptations. Temptations happen when what we know we should be doing conflicts with what we are used to doing from our birth. Swedenborg’s view of our human nature is both positive and negative at the same time. In our infancy and early childhood, God and the angels are particularly close to us. They impress on our character an innocence and a love that remains with us throughout our lives. These early experiences of love and innocence are called remains because they remain with us. Sometimes they are buried deep in our unconscious mind; at other times they are present and fully conscious to us. These remains are God’s dwelling with us. God is with us in the psychic memory of those early states of love and innocence.
But as we grow up, we acquire a sense of self. This is a natural process in human development. We look to our own needs. Often, our own self-interest dominates our consciousness. We want to impress the world with who we are; in fact, we want to impress upon the world what we are. We expect the world to yield to us. We also acquire a sense of the world. We want the good things of this world. Perhaps we have high ambitions and want wealth and fame. Perhaps our wants are more modest and we want a fancy car, nice clothes, good food. If these desires don’t grow out of order, they are perfectly natural and appropriate for our development. These things we acquire upon reaching adulthood—a sense of self and a sense of the world constitute our “natural level.” Swedenborg calls this the natural level because it is formed by nature. Self and the world are two things that nature gives us with birth.
But we are born for higher things. It is also natural for us to progress above and beyond these two desires for self and for the world. If we continue our personality development, we grow into a love for God, which is the opposite of self, and we grow into a love for our neighbour, which is the opposite of the world. This progress happens through cultivation of spirituality. By this I mean that we learn what it means to love God and what it means to love our neighbour. The first stage in this spiritual development is one of knowledge. We learn the 10 commandments. We learn life lessons from the stories of Jesus in the New Testament. These days, people are also learning truths from other world religions. Over the past few years, I have noticed interest in Buddhism and Sufi poetry from those near me. I, myself, learned much helpful spirituality from the religions I studied in graduate school such as Taoism and Hinduism. The truths that teach spirituality do not have to come from formal schooling. We learn them from our parents and from the world around us, too. I think almost everybody has learned some form or right and wrong.
The spiritual truths we learn are lifted above our natural level. They form a higher level of our consciousness. The level of our consciousness that our spiritual truths are in is called the rational mind. But knowing is not the final goal of spirituality. We need to make our lives conform to what we know to be true and good—we need to act rightly and think truthfully. This is where temptations come in. Our natural level has been formed to adapt to the demands of the world and our selves. Sometimes there is conflict between what we have learned spiritually and the life we have been living. I don’t think that this conflict has to be there. I believe that for some people, their grasp of truth is enough to keep them from harmful actions and thoughts. These people would avoid wrong and think truthfully according to what they have learned. For others, and I am in this category, there is a conflict between the way I have been living and what I know to be right and true. Then temptations happen to us. The truths in our rational mind act upon our self-limiting behaviours and strive to bring them into conformity with the higher ways of living we have learned.
In my own life I can this dynamic in my own sense of rightness. If someone else disagreed with me, I would typically react in one of two ways. Either I would argue with them, and try to convince them that I was right and they were wrong, or I would think to myself that they were wrong and simply avoid their company. One can easily see how these reactions would isolate me from my fellows. It would also create enemies who didn’t like me. And it also got me into trouble with some of my professors in school. It was the program of AA that taught me how to escape from this self-defeating behaviour. There is a line in one of their books that said something like, “We had to resign from the debating society.” I didn’t like hearing that. As it turns out, I was actually on the debating society in high school. They also asked me, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” I struggled with this teaching. I began by disagreeing with it. But day after day, week after week, I went to AA meetings and this would come up time and again.
I don’t quite know when it happened, but I ultimately found myself less and less argumentative. And when I let go of this self-defeating behaviour, the Promised Land opened up before me. I was able to actually listen to others who differed from me without difficulty. That was a milestone. I could listen. And I think that the primary ingredient in healthy relationships is the capacity to listen. I was still free to speak my peace, but others didn’t have to agree. I could remain in relationship with others who saw things differently than I. I found more friends than I had known before. My own mind was more at peace with the world. I was able to love others who were different from me. This is the kind of thing that temptations bring us. And it was those truths fro AA that set me on my course of self-ammendment. We struggle with limiting behaviours and desires, and put away those desires that limit our love for God and for our neighbours. When we do this, God fills the void with love and positive feelings. God is continually working with us, teaching our rational mind and giving us the power to implement in our natural lives what we have learned. This is what is symbolized by the deliverance from slavery. When we are living in our natural level without thinking, we are slaves to our lower nature. But God does not leave us there. God teaches us how to rise above our limits and how to come into the peace, innocence, and joy of heavenly love.
This is the first week of Lent. In traditional Christian churches, people give up something for Lent. Some quit smoking; some give up red meat; some quit drinking. I would commend this to you. But I would suggest something a little more spiritual. I would ask you to think about your life. Maybe there is some aspect of your personality you are finding causing conflict in your relations with others. Maybe you have stopped talking with God. Maybe you just wish to look back on your life and see if you have made spiritual progress. Then, we can remember God and give thanks. We would never change without God’s leading. As the Source of all that is good and joyful, it is God who gives us those very heavenly loves and joys. We can take no credit for our deliverance from the slavery of self. It is all the work of God. We then find a new best friend in the risen and glorified Jesus Christ. And we also find harmony and happiness in relationship with our fellows. Then, as the writer of Deuteronomy says, “You and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given you.”