Church of the Holy City

Garments of Salvation

Garments of Salvation
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
December 16, 2012

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Luke 1:47-55 Psalm 126

Today’s readings are all about salvation and the human condition. The readings speak over and over again about humility, brokenness, and God’s care for the downtrodden. This is a message our society needs to hear. It is about as opposite to our culture as a message could be. Our society rewards and praises the shakers and movers, the self-made men and women, the successful, the wealthy, the powerful. But Isaiah and Luke talk about the poor, the brokenhearted, those who mourn, despair, and humility. It is these who the Lord will save, and not the proud. Where in this world do we hear such a message? Where do we find such words of comfort for those who are not among the rich and powerful today?
Our readings teach us important lessons about salvation. I think we can read literally that God brings down the proud. In Mary’s song we find the following verse, “He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts” (Luke 1:51). And we also find the following verse, “He has lifted up the humble” (1:52). In those two verses we have the whole process of regeneration captured. For the whole process of regeneration is one of breaking down pride and rendering a person humble. I think that it takes a great deal of humility for a person to call on God, and to seek out God’s will for him or her. When we are puffed up with pride we need no one–not anyone else, and not God. We are self-sufficient, and we stand on our own two feet. It is only when our pride has been broken that we see our utter need for God in our life. Only when self-will has been reduced to humility do we ask for God’s love and life to come to us. Only then do we see that we don’t have the power to save ourselves.
This reminds me of a story from my days back in Florida. One night I was out at a cigar bar that I used to frequent in order to smoke my favorite Rocky Patel cigars. That night I made the mistake of being drawn into a discussion about religion. It was occasioned by Rocky Patel himself, who had had an unfortunate experience with a fundamentalist woman. He took all of Christianity to be her version of Christianity and we often would discuss our differing views. That night I told Rocky that everyone of every faith could be saved. At that point a very drunk, but exceedingly well-dressed man broke in and demanded, “Why do I need to be saved?!” I tried to say some things about ego, self-will, and the like, but his anger and inebriation made any rational discussion impossible. He kept demanding, “Why do I need to be saved?!” There were some interesting things about this person. He would ride around the city in a stretch limousine and drink only very expensive champagne. But he always sat alone, and didn’t appear to have any friends in the city. One night he agreed to come to an AA meeting with me and we rode together in his limo to the meeting. He left midway through the meeting, and in his limo on the way back he said some sad things. He said, “I’m done. If you can’t convince me why not, I’m going to end it all by morning.” This wealthy, worldly man could see no reason to go on. He did let me off the hook from this awesome responsibility. He said, “No, that’s not fair to you.”
So here we have a wealthy man. An alcoholic who can’t find sobriety, and who can’t see any reason to go on any more. And this is the man who kept demanding of me, “Why do I need to be saved?!”
So wealth and power can lead us to question why we need God in our lives. Our ego can make us think that we are sufficient unto ourselves. A slogan I have come across used the letters of ego to make a spiritual statement. It goes that e-g-o stands for “edging God out.” This is what Swedenborg says about wealth and pride.
Provided he inwardly acknowledges the Divine and wishes well to his neighbor, it is evident that it is not so difficult as many believe to enter the way of heaven. The only difficulty is to be able to resist the love of self and the world, and to prevent their becoming predominant; for from this predominance come all evils (HH 359).
Only if we set our hearts on selfish gain and wealth do they become problematic for our spiritual wellbeing.
So we have to be careful about reading these Bible passages too literally. Reading them too literally would suggest that there is something spiritually bad about being rich and powerful. And it would also suggest that those suffering and poor have some virtue just because that are suffering and poor. But this church teaches that spirituality is indifferent to issues of wealth. The wealthy are not excluded from heaven simply because they have abundance, and the poor are not favored simply because they are poor. Swedenborg tells us that,
they therefore who take the Word only according to the literal sense, and not according to any spiritual sense, err in many things, especially in regard to the rich and the poor; as that it is as difficult for the rich to enter into heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle; and that it is easy for the poor because they are poor (HH 357).
However, Swedenborg claims that the rich can enter heaven as easily as the poor.
The rich come as easily into heaven as the poor, and . . . a person is not excluded from heaven because he lives in abundance, nor received into heaven because he is in poverty (HH 357).
As always with Swedenborg, it is the kind of life that a person leads that determines whether he or she will enter into eternal blessedness and joy.
The life of everyone follows him, whether he be rich or poor. There is no particular mercy for one more than for the other; he is received who has lived well, and he is rejected who has lived ill (HH 364).
So if there is no distinction between rich and poor as to who enters heaven, how are we to understand what I have been saying about the Bible readings so far? I think that there are parts of it that can be taken literally, as I have been doing. Swedenborg tells us that the Bible is like a person wearing a coat. Most of his body is covered up, but his face and hands are bare. So what we need for salvation shines through the Bible’s literal sense, like the bare hands a d face, while the internal sense is covered up like the body covered by the coat.
But there is also a spiritual sense to riches that make them prohibitive to the heavenly way. When we consider what riches mean in a spiritual sense, then they do make heaven as difficult as it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. In Swedenborg’s system of symbolism, which he calls correspondences, riches signify an abundance of knowledges and education. In and of themselves, knowledges can go either way. A person can confirm religious truth through knowledge and strengthen their faith by seeing a multitude of interrelated ideas about God. This is a good use of knowledge. In fact Swedenborg even says that faith is perfected by an abundance and coherence of truths. Knowledges become problematic, though, when a person tries to enter religious truth by means of the knowledge he or she knows. I think of that brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. He probably knows the most about the universe of anyone today. Yet all his knowledge has made him an atheist. I heard him reason out his disbelief. And his disbelief is based directly on what he knows about science, or on his natural knowledge. His reasoning is as follows: 1) before the Big Bang there was no time; 2) if there was no time, there could be no before and after because before and after need time to occur; 3) if there was no before and after, there could be no God before the Big Bang, 4) therefore there is no God. So it is his knowledge of physics that makes Hawking an atheist. His riches are coming between him and God. For us, God is outside space and time, so all of Hawking’s reasonings are without foundation.
This discussion about knowledge, pride and spirituality brings us back to humility. All of this requires humility. To become enlightened, we need to be humble enough to realize that we do not know by our own power. We can amass facts, but they don’t become truth until God inspires them with the Holy Spirit. Then the facts we know point our way to understanding what is true and how to live. We can’t have God in our lives when we are puffed up with pride. We need to be humble enough to ask God for wisdom and love. In Mary’s song, we heard that God “lifts up the humble.” And when we have the humility to ask God into our lives, He will lift us up out of ego and into unimaginable peace, tranquility, and joy in His Kingdom forever.
Mary recognized her own humble condition. She sings, “My soul praises the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,/for He has been mindful of the humble state of his servant” (Luke 1:46-47). In fact, the whole Christmas story is an elevation of the humble. It is a story of a God who takes on a humble human form, born to a humble working-class family, in a humble barn, who is seen by humble shepherds. This is not a story of Emperor Augustus. It is not a story of Pharaohs, or kings, or Emperors. It is the story of a God who so wants humanity to understand Him and form a love relationship with Him that He came to us in a form we can understand and love: an innocent baby.
This is the message of Christmas I bring to you this morning. A message of humility. The humility of Mary, the mother whose greatest joy was in the child God had given her. The humility of the circumstances of God’s entrance into the world. When we are tempted to puff ourselves up with worldly acclaim or worldly measures of success, let us remember our God, who came to us in the most humble of ways.