Church of the Holy City

Come, Follow Me

Come, Follow Me
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
January 29, 2012

Jonah 3 Mark 1:14-28 Psalm 62
Our reading from Psalm 62 ends with a simple, and seemingly obvious statement: “You reward everyone according to what they have done.” It is self-evident that our spirituality shows in what we do, not just what we believe or think. As self-evident as this may be, there are Christian churches who think that it is faith that saves. They will argue with great conviction that good works do not contribute to our salvation. This, despite the plain sentence from Psalm 62, “You reward everyone according to what they have done.”
Our Bible readings this morning call our attention to what we do, and to what we are. They bring up the unwelcome topic of evil and of repentance. I see three steps in these Bible stories. The first is leaving our home and family to follow Jesus’ call. The second is to repent from evil by our own effort. And the third is to allow God to purify us through a recognition that everything good that we do is God acting in us. In preparing this sermon, I drew on a lecture by Rev. George Dole called, “A Four-Step Model.”
Jesus’ call to Simon, Andrew, and James represents the first of these three steps: leaving home and family to follow Jesus. On the natural level, this story speaks of the maturing process whereby a person comes into their own. In a sense, we all leave our parents when we become adults and start to think for ourselves and make life decisions for ourselves. Whether we actually leave home or not, we come to a point where we outgrow our parents as authorities in our lives, and become our own person. On a spiritual level we go through an analogous process. We outgrow what Swedenborg calls proprium. The very sense of self that we acquire upon attaining adulthood becomes a stage we need to move past. The early self is self-interested, egotistical, and filled with worldly ambition. We have drives and passions that are unhealthy. Swedenborg claims that we inherit a tendency to evil that we may or may not act upon. All these things are in the part of our personality called the proprium. We must grow out of the proprium. Nearly every world religion sees spirituality as a growth process. Some see the process as one of moving from ego and limited consciousness to all-loving compassion and expanded consciousness. I like the symbol used by Hinduism and Buddhism. They both see our spiritual development in the lotus flower. The lotus flower begins as a seed in the mud at the bottom of a pond. As it grows, it raises up through the murky water of the pond. Then it reaches the air and sunlight and becomes a beautiful flower. The Hindus and Buddhists compare our growth to enlightenment to the growth of the lotus flower up into the sunlight. It is God’s voice that calls us out of the murky depths of our proprium. When we hear His voice, we begin our spiritual journey into heavenly joy.
The story of Jonah represents the second step in our spiritual growth. The people of Nineveh are told to repent by the prophet Jonah. And they heed his word. They fast and put on sackcloth. The king even issues a proclamation for everyone and all the animals to fast and for the residents to call upon God for compassion. In this story, we have what Swedenborg calls an appearance of truth. An appearance of truth is a statement in the Bible that is not factual, even though it is in the Bible. In the story of Jonah, we are told that God planned to destroy the city of Nineveh. This is how God appeared to the writers of Jonah. But God never destroys any person, let alone any city. God is only love, and cannot do any evil thing to humans. Stories about God bringing destruction to people or cities are all appearances of truth. But let us not stray too far from the main point of our Bible stories. That is, the subject evil and repentance. When the people of Nineveh hear Jonah’s preaching they respond to him. They repent of their evil ways. We are not told exactly what is evil about them. The Bible does mention violence. And the Israelites would have considered the Ninevites idolaters. But whatever they did wrong, they repented and called on God.
I consider this a second level of repentance because it is done by human effort. The people of Nineveh act by their own power and strength. They do public displays of repentance such as fasting, wearing sackcloth, and the king, himself, sits down in the dust, calling upon God. In our early stages of repentance, we fight sin as if from our own will power. Some people do outward acts as the people of Nineveh do. Protestants as very leery of human effort in the process of salvation. They are suspicious of people who repent and who do good acts as a way to salvation. They are suspicious for good reason: they think that people who do these things believe that they have earned heaven by their good deeds. The truth is, if we do good deeds, we cannot think that we have earned heaven or deserve it in any way. When we do good, it is because we love what is good and do it for good’s own sake–not for the sake of reward. But we must by all means do good deeds. We must flee from or fight evil intentions, thoughts, and actions, and we must to good, kind, and loving things.
These considerations bring us to the third step in spiritual growth. I find this stage in the story of Jesus and the evil spirit. The man who is possessed by the evil spirit says nothing to Jesus. He does not cry out to be healed. It is all Jesus’ doing. As Jesus is preaching, an evil spirit cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” I find the way this story develops interesting. Jesus doesn’t set out to heal the demon possessed man. Rather, He is preaching in a synagogue and suddenly the evil spirit cries out. I take this to mean that the power of Jesus’ presence was felt by the evil spirit, and he couldn’t bear being in Jesus’ presence. This is the way spiritual temptation happens to us. As God enters our souls more deeply, our own sins become more apparent in the presence of all Goodness. God is indeed always in our souls at the deepest level. But our consciousness is not always filled with God’s love and wisdom. God needs to enter all the levels of our lives from the lowest to the highest. And as God flows down into our lives, we make room for Him by removing all that would block His love.
God gives us the power to remove any and all obstacles to His love and life. Swedenborg tells us that,
a person must purify himself from evils and not wait for the Lord to do this immediately; otherwise he may be compared to a servant with face and clothes fouled with soot and dung, who comes up to his master and says, “Wash me, my lord.” Would not the master say to him, “You foolish servant, what are you saying? See; there are water, soap, and towel. Have you not hands, and power in them? Wash yourself.” And the Lord God will say, “The means of purification are from Me; and from Me are your intentions and ability; therefore use these My gifts and endowments as your own, and you will be purified (TCR 436).
So God gives us the insight to see what we need to work on, and God gives us the power to make changes in our lives. But I cannot stress how important it is for us to realize that the power to make changes in our lives is from God. If we try to battle the evils in our proprium with our own strength it is like one of those Chinese handcuffs. You know, those woven tubes that you can easily put your fingers into, but when you go to pull them out, the tube tightens around your fingers and you can’t pull your fingers out. Our very effort is what makes the tube tighten up. Or it’s like the story of “Tar Baby” by Uncle Remus. Tar Baby was a doll made of tar. When Br’er Rabbit gets mad at Tar Baby and punches him, his fist gets stuck in the tar. Then Br’er Rabbit punches Tar Baby with his other fist and it gets stuck. So both Br’er Rabbit’s hands are now stuck to Tar Baby, which makes him even madder. He kicks Tar Baby with his foot and it gets stuck. Finally, Br’er Rabbit kicks tar Baby with the other foot and now all Br’er Rabbit’s hands and feet are stuck to Tar Baby. The more he tried to overcome Tar Baby, the more Br’er Rabbit became stuck to him. Or it’s like that joke where a person says, “Whatever you do, don’t think about a pink elephant.” What is the first thing that will come into our minds? When we dwell on our shortcomings and try to fight them by our own power, spiritual progress will be a never-ending struggle. We need to consciously realize that God gave us the illumination to see where our lives need amendment, and we need to realize that God can lift us up out of the murky waters into the light.
This is all contrary to appearance. It looks like we are doing the good work. It looks like we have decided to follow Christ’s call. But what we are actually doing is allowing God into our lives and minds. In Divine Providence #191, Swedenborg writes, “Our own prudence is nothing. It only seems to be something, as it should. Divine Providence, since it involves the smallest details, covers everything.” Our own prudence is nothing. Everything we direct ourselves to do; every choice we make, every evil we recognize, every prayer to God for help, none of this is done by our own power. It is all God acting in us. This is the meaning of Swedenborg’s statement that human prudence is nothing. All those little choices we make in our lives; all those little decisions we make moment by moment, all our best decisions are God working in our minds to lead us out of proprium and into heaven. When we look back on our lives, and see where we have come in our development, we are at a loss to say just how we got to where we are. It was the sum total of all those small decisions–God working in us–that brought us to where we are today, and made us who we are today. Swedenborg compares this process to the shooting of an arrow. If the arrow was just slightly off when it leaves the bow, it will miss a target meters away. God watches over these small increments of our spiritual direction and corrects us when we veer from the mark. In Divine Providence, Swedenborg writes,
What else can the Divine Providence have for its end than the reformation of the human race, ans its salvation? And no one can be reformed by himself, by means of his own prudence, but by the Lord, by means of His Divine Providence. It thus follows that unless the Lord leads a person every moment, even every part of a moment, the person falls back from the way of reformation and perishes. . . . It is like an arrow shot from a bow, which if it missed the direction of the mark in the least when leaving the bow, at a distance of a thousand paces or more, would miss it immensely. So would it be if the Lord did not lead the states of human minds every part of a moment. The Lord does this according to the laws of His Divine Providence; and it ids in accordance with these laws for it to appear to a person as if he led himself; but the Lord foresees how he leads himself, and continually provides accordingly (DP 202).
This is how I see the miracle of Jesus casting out the demons in our Mark story. Jesus saw the sickness, and acted to purify the demon-possessed man. So God sees what we need, purifies us, and brings us into ever more clear heavenly light–without our even knowing it.
When we realize and accept that it is God that is giving us the insight and power to change, the Chinese handcuffs magically fall off and we are delivered. When we recognize and accept that it is God that is giving us the insight and power to change, we don’t get angry at Tar Baby and end up stuck in its sticky tar. When we recognize and accept that it is God that is giving us the insight and power to change, we won’t conjure up the pink elephant. We will see heaven’s beautiful sunbeams. We are lifted up into the light. As we approach God, God approaches us. I have heard it said that when we take one small step toward God, God takes three giant steps toward us. Let us, then, make room in our souls for the descent of the Holy Spirit, which begins when we hear the call of God, of His prophets, and when we make room for His divine love in our hearts.