Church of the Holy City

A Most Precious Vessel

A Most Precious Vessel
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
November 22, 2009

Haggai 2:1-9 John 6:45-63

From a literal reading of our Old Testament and New Testament passages, one wouldn’t see a connection between them. Yet from the internal sense of the Bible, there is a connection. In the Haggai reading, God says that He will “shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory” (2:6-7). The house God is talking about is the temple in Jerusalem. It had been destroyed by the Babylonians, and was now going to be reconstructed by Zerubbabel and the remnant of Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity. God says further that His Spirit remains among the people of Israel. Then in John, Jesus says that He is the living bread that came down from heaven. He is the bread of life. He says further that if a person eats His flesh and drinks His blood he has eternal life. These two passages from the Bible are united in their emphasis on God giving us eternal life. Jesus promises eternal life if we eat His body and drink His blood. And in shaking the heaven and earth and in rebuilding the temple, the prophet Haggai speaks symbolically of regeneration, or spiritual rebirth.
In Haggai, God says He will shake the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth refer to the natural level of our personality. We have higher and lower levels to our personality. Basically, there are three levels: the natural, the spiritual and the heavenly. The natural level of our personality is the lowest level, and it is the level that we all have from birth. It is called the natural level because it is formed from nature, or from biology. In the natural level is our hereditary dispositions we inherit from our parents. In the natural level are also all the survival skills we need to survive in nature. For most of us, surviving in nature doesn’t mean surviving in the wilds like Survivor Man on TV. Surviving in nature means surviving in the society we live in, and in the world around us. So our natural level is concerned with preserving our own life. In the natural level is all our knowledge of how to make a living, how to succeed in our work, how to take care of ourselves, and how to make a name for ourselves in the world. The natural level is interested in preserving the self and in the riches of the world.
We are born into the natural level of our personalities. It is a necessary level to develop so that we can function in the world, and not be dependant on others. In the natural level is the love of self and the love of the material world. Again, we need this level as a beginning point. But spiritual maturity means growing beyond this level of our personalities. If we fail to grow up spiritually, we remain concerned only with what we want. We fail to open our minds to our fellows and to God.
Now I need to back up a little. I need to consider the very source of our life. For none of us live by our own power. There is only one life, one source of life, and that is God. From the moment of conception, God begins to flow into our highest soul with life. In the inmost, highest chamber of our personalities, our soul is a vessel that receives life from God. As our bodies develop, and then our natural level, this highest soul still allows God’s Spirit to flow into us with life and with the ability to judge, reason, and make decisions. Our natural level is not conscious of this highest level, this inmost soul. The inmost soul would be in our unconscious mind.
But we have the capacity to open up, or to raise up our consciousness toward that inmost soul that is always receiving life from God. That is what spiritual growth is about. This means to change our thinking so that we are not just self-interested, but we begin to become interested in our brothers and sisters, and in the good things of God’s kingdom. This is the opening of our spiritual level. But our natural level rebels against this upward movement. The survival instinct of self preservation, and our interest in receiving the world’s riches weigh heavily on our minds. The natural level has to be shaken up before the spiritual level can begin to become operative in us. This is what is meant in Haggai by God shaking the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. The earth, the sea, and the dry land symbolize our natural level. Since we had first learned how to serve ourselves, we need to break up all those survival mechanisms that are based upon self-interest. Furthermore, there are hereditary pleasures from the world that cloud heavenly joys. We need to grow out of them, too.
The strongest belief system in the natural level that has to be shaken up is the notion that we live by our own power. The natural level thinks that it lives by its own power, that it accomplishes its goals by its own power, that it is the master of its own destiny. This mindset is the source of all evil. For when we are interested only in our own ends, we care nothing for others. We care nothing about stomping on the heads of anyone who gets in our way.
So this mindset has to be broken up. For some, this may happen gently by meditation and by spiritual education. But I think for most of us, this mindset is broken up by hardship and tragedy. When we don’t get what we want, when our dreams are broken, we begin to discover that we are not the agents of our own destiny. We begin to become less and less attached to our selfish wants. We begin to step out of the way and look to the welfare of those around us. We begin to search for what is truly good, not just what is good for ourselves.
This stage of development is symbolized by the building of the temple in Jerusalem. Building the temple means building up our spiritual life. Building the temple only happens when the earth has been shaken up. Then the temple rises in its glory, and we begin to bring God’s inflowing love and wisdom into our lives. ‘
The path of spiritual maturity is one of inward to outward. First, the spiritual level of our personality is formed in our thinking. Then our hearts become active and we want to live out the spiritual life our minds have seen to be good and right. We need to bring the spiritual life in our highest minds into the lowest level of our personality. When we are advanced in our spiritual development, the love and wisdom that has formed our inner personality is brought down into the natural level of our personalities. Our outward behavior then is one with the higher aspirations of our spiritual level.
We are now in the place where we are eating Christ’s body and drinking His blood. Only by receiving Christ in our hearts, and then bringing this Christ Spirit into our behavior can we be said to live spiritually. Everyone has God in their deepest soul. But the question is how much this Christ life is integrated with our natural behavior—into our outward life. When we say the Lord’s prayer, we pray for things to go on earth as they are in heaven. This is an image for advanced spiritual life. We live spiritually when God’s kingdom isn’t just a thought, a dream, or a belief. We live spiritually, when God’s kingdom is brought down and integrated into our natural level. Then we don’t need to be elevated out of our natural level to find communion with God. Rather, we bring God into our lives in the world. We bring heaven to earth.
I have been talking as if we are the agents of spiritual growth. But actually, we are partaking of Jesus’ body and blood. When we are advanced spiritually, then Jesus is acting in our lives, and our own will has yielded to God’s will. We have put ourselves in the flow of God’s care. It is God who has given us the power to reach this spiritual level. And we are now being led by God’s Providence. We retain our individuality, but we are vessels of God. When our natural level has been shaken enough, God can flow through our personalities. We will be aglow with spiritual light and filled with spiritual warmth. God is infinite, and each individual human is one reflection of God’s essence. When our natural level has become yielding to our spiritual level, then we show the unique aspect of God we were created to manifest. Then, as it is said in Haggai, God’s Spirit remains among us. Then we have internalized Christ’s body and blood. Then we have eternal life. So Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (John 6:53-54). Until we let Christ’s love and wisdom into our lives, we have no spiritual life. But when we bring heaven to earth in our own souls, then we live, or should I say, God lives in us.