Church of the Holy City

Love in Act

Love in Act
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
November 1, 2009

Deuteronomy 10:12-22 Luke 12:35-44

Our Old Testament passage this morning talks about serving God, and loving God. So the question arises, how do we serve God? What is meant by serving God? We have a related passage in our New Testament reading this morning. It also speaks of service. Jesus tells us to be ready for our master to return from a wedding banquet. The very master will serve his servants when he comes back, if they are up waiting for him. We are told to always be ready to meet Jesus, for we don’t know when He will call upon us. “You must always be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him” (Luke 12:40). I like this New Testament passage because of its reference to the wedding banquet. Scattered throughout the New Testament are references to a wedding. The wedding symbolizes a state in which a person is “married” to God, or united with God in a bond of love. Recall that line in Revelation, “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” (19:9). When we are united with God in a loving bond, we are always ready to meet Him. So both the Old Testament passage and the New Testament passage talk about being united with God in love and in serving God.
Before I discuss the topic of serving God, I need to clarify some of the Old Testament language. Several times people have told me about their difficulty with phrases like “fear of God,” as we heard this morning in Deuteronomy. God does not want us to fear Him. And there is a higher meaning to fear of God than what we normally take fear to be. Swedenborg talks about holy fear. He writes,
But holy fear is not so much the fear of hell and damnation, as it is of doing or thinking anything against the Lord and against the neighbor, and thus anything against the good of love and the truth of faith (AC 2826).
I take this to mean the fear of causing offence. Even in our common conversations with one another, we can find ourselves saying, “Well, I don’t want to offend you, but . . .” Isn’t this a kind of fear? A fear of offending someone or putting them off. And in our general encounters with other people, we are careful not to say offensive things, or to offend. Isn’t this a kind of holy fear? It is a respect for others, and a desire not to hurt their feelings. It is a fear of causing offense, and we all have it with one another. This is how I understand fear of God. We love God so much that we don’t want to stray from the path of love or offend against the Holy Spirit. Of course God doesn’t get offended with us. But I think all of genuine love has a quality of holy fear in it, in that we care for others and want to remain in mutual love. We have a holy fear of not breaching the love and trust we have for others. This is also true for God. Then there’s the aspect of awe. I think there’s a kind of holy fear in the feeling of awe. And in the presence of infinite love, and infinite goodness; in the presence of the Source of all life, I think we have a feeling of awe, and holy fear.
So we can now come back to our question about serving God. Here we come across a difficult term in Swedenborg. Swedenborg talks in many places about what he calls “uses.” So he says, “Serving the Lord is performing uses” (AC 7038). And uses are the very source of heavenly joy. Everyone in heaven has a use. And we find our joy here on earth by performing uses.
It is easy to take the word use in a narrow sense. We often say to lazy people, “Make yourself useful,” which means that they should get up and do some work. Or when we think of being useful, we think of plumbers, or auto mechanics, who do some concrete service for society. In fact, it is easy to think of use as being only an occupation, or some form of work.
However, I think Swedenborg has more in mind when he talks about use. I looked through the Swedenborg Concordance to find the range of meaning for uses, and I also looked at the Latin word and its Indo-European root. Some translate the Latin usus as service. That is included in the meaning of the word. But there is much, much more than that. I decided to stay with the term use for this discussion. When I went to the Latin, I found some interesting things. First of all, the Latin word is one of those general terms that has a lot of meanings associated with it. The very first definitions given for usus are wide ranging. It is defined as, “use, practice, employment, exercise, enjoyment” (C. T. Lewis, Elementary Latin Dictionary.) We do indeed find employment here. But the word branches off into practice, and some exercise. This is more like a deed—any deed. Then what are we to make of the definition, “enjoyment?” So in Latin, usus ranges from employment to enjoyment.
Then I looked up its Indo-European root and found something even more interesting. The root AV means “delight, desire.” So the root of the Latin word is entirely emotional. It is a form of delight and desire. You see how far away from employment we are now with just the Latin root for use.
So serving God through uses has very much an emotional component to it. Swedenborg employs the word in keeping with these emotional connotations. He writes, “What is love unless there is something that is loved? That “something” is use” (DLW 297). So we see that use is the object of our loves. In general, uses are those things we do to express our love for the neighbor or for God. Use is love taking form in action. So we find Swedenborg saying, “Goods are goods in act, that is, the goods of charity, which are uses” (HH 391). The good things we do are uses. The performance of some deed of love, then, is also use.
The man who is led by the Lord, is in freedom itself, and thereby in enjoyment and blessedness itself. Goods and truths are appropriated to him; there is given him affection and desire for doing good, and then nothing is more delightful to him than to perform uses (AC 6325).
See how affection, desire, blessedness and enjoyment constitute what use is.
Use is connected with charity. Charity for Swedenborg means more than building children’s hospitals, or giving to the poor—the traditional meanings of charity. Charity for Swedenborg is all the acts of love that we perform anywhere, any time. We find Swedenborg saying that uses are the acts of love that we perform, or deeds of charity.
Those who are in charity, that is, in love to the neighbor, from which is all living enjoyment of pleasures, do not look to the enjoyment of pleasures except on account of their use. For there is no charity unless there are works of charity. Charity consists in work, or in use. He who loves the neighbor as himself, perceives no enjoyment of charity except in its exercise, or in use; and therefore a life of charity is a life of uses. Such is the life of the whole heaven; for the kingdom of the Lord, because it is the kingdom of mutual love, is a kingdom of uses. Every pleasure, therefore, which is from charity, has its enjoyment from use. . . . some looking more directly, and some more remotely and indirectly, to the kingdom of the Lord, or to the Lord (AC 997).
In this passage we find that heaven is a kingdom of mutual love, and so it is a kingdom of uses. So again, use is tied to love, enjoyment, and pleasure.
But occupations are not excluded from Swedenborg’s application of the term use. The work that we do to benefit society is certainly a use. But uses are not limited to occupations.
That serving the Lord is performing uses, is because true worship consists in the performance of uses, thus in exercising charity. . . . uses consist during a person’s life in the world, in every one’s discharging properly his duty in his station, thus in serving his country, society, and his neighbor from the heart, in dealing sincerely with his fellow, and in performing kind offices prudently according to the quality of every one. These uses are especially works of charity, and those whereby the Lord is mainly worshipped (AC 7038).
We find here that uses are discharging the duties proper to one’s station. But this statement also includes being sincere. Would we normally call sincerity a use? It is. Then there is that line saying that uses are, “performing kind offices prudently according to the quality of every one.” So use is also being nice and kind.
I think we can say, then, that uses are love being expressed in act. If we love God and our neighbor, we will be performing uses in everything we do.
With a person . . . in proportion as he lives According to Divine order—thus in proportion as he lives in love to the Lord, and in charity to the neighbor—in the same proportion his acts are uses in form, and are correspondences, through which he is conjoined with heaven (HH 112).
Every good deed we do when we love God and the neighbor conjoins us with heaven. Then we are those alert servants who waited for their master to return from the wedding banquet. Then we are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb. Then we are serving God.