The First Commandment

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; April 6, 2025

Readings: John 12:1-11 (children’s talk); Deuteronomy 15:7-11; Secrets of Heaven §§2023, 1150

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           The first of all the commandments is that we’re to love the Lord with all we have (Mark 12:29, 30). It’s easy to recognize that this commandment is important… but to actually keep it is a tall order. What would it look like if we were to actually put this commandment first? That’s what we’re going to be exploring today.

The story of Mary anointing the Lord’s feet is about loving the Lord. It’s easy enough to see that what she did was an act of love. Of course, we don’t have the opportunity to literally anoint the Lord’s feet. But there are ways in which we can follow Mary’s example.

            But this story is challenging in a couple of different ways; so let’s talk about the challenging parts. If we’re thinking that we’re meant to follow Mary’s example, then what’s probably most challenging about this story is the degree to which she physically humbles herself before Jesus. Of course the Lord, if He’s the Lord, is great and worthy of our reverence. But it’s one thing to think that, and another to be willing to do what Mary did. Would we be willing to wipe his feet with our hair? We’ll come back to these ideas later on.

            The other aspect of this story that might feel challenging is the statement the Lord makes about the poor. Judas says that the oil could have been sold and the money given to the poor, but the Lord sets that suggestion aside. He says, “For the poor you have with you always” (John 12:8). It might sound like He’s saying, “There are always going to be poor people—you’re never going to be able to fix that problem, so don’t bother trying. Spend your money on symbolic things instead.” But that’s not what He’s saying. His statement about the poor is actually an allusion to a passage from the book of Deuteronomy; and if we know what that passage says, then the Lord’s words in today’s story from John land pretty differently. Here’s that passage from Deuteronomy: [read 15:7-11].

            The Lord absolutely wants His people to help the poor and the needy. He says, “the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land’” (Deut. 15:11). In other words, the poor and the needy are always going to be there, and that’s precisely why we need to be willing to help them. The people who were with the Lord in Lazarus’s house in Bethany probably would have been familiar with the book of Deuteronomy. So perhaps when Jesus said “the poor you have with you always,” they remembered that Deuteronomy says, “the poor will never cease from the land.” The Lord wasn’t telling them that selling the oil of spikenard and giving the money to the poor was a bad idea—ministering to the needy is an ongoing labor that He expects His people to participate in. It was just that ministering to Him—anointing His feet with the oil—was also a good thing to do. It was a “both/and,” not an “either/or.”

            Here are a few more thoughts about that passage from Deuteronomy: There was a reference in the middle of it to “the year of release” (v. 9). The passage indicates that people might be reluctant to lend to their neighbors if they know that the year of release is close at hand. Earlier in this chapter from Deuteronomy, the Lord tells His people that every seventh year is to be a year of release: in that seventh year, all debts are to be completely forgiven (vv. 1, 2). So if you lent something to somebody during the first year, your debtor would have six years in which to pay you back, and your investment would probably be returned to you. But if you lent something near the end of the sixth year you almost certainly weren’t going to get it back, because when that seventh year began the debt would be wiped out. The Lord tells His people not to think this way. He tells them to simply give what is needed. He says that if they do, He will bless them in all their works and in all to which they put their hand (v. 10).

            It’s also noteworthy that this passage keeps on using the words “brethren” and “brother.” “You shall open your hand wide to your brother” (v. 11) This is because of the spiritual meaning of these words: “brothers” symbolize charity, or states of charity in other people (AR §32; SH 2360.2; AE §746.6). The point is that we’re meant to serve the charity or the good in other people—when we serve our neighbor, we should be trying to make what is good increase. To do this, we have to serve thoughtfully and with good judgment. You can’t really go wrong with giving food to the hungry, but if you give money to someone who then uses that money to buy illegal drugs, nothing good has been accomplished. This idea helps us refine our concept of what it really means to serve the neighbor—what it doesn’t do is excuse us from serving the neighbor. That’s a labor that the Lord expects us to participate in.

Today’s sermon is about loving the Lord, not about loving the neighbor. But if we’re going to understand what it means to love the Lord, we need to understand how important it is to Him that we show charity to our neighbors. If you love someone, you do what they want. In John the Lord says, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (14:15), and He also says, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12). And in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told: [read SH §2023].

If you want to love the Lord, serve your neighbor. Love the people that He loves. If we were to perform innumerable acts of devotion, and kneel before the Lord just as Mary did, but we thought nothing of our neighbor and despised acts of charity, our devotion would be meaningless to Him. If we’re going to keep the first commandment, and love the Lord, we have to keep the second commandment, and love our neighbor.

But there’s more to it than that. Mary anointed the Lord’s feet with costly oil, oil that could have been used to help the poor, and the Lord said that what she did was good. It’s not that giving to the poor would have been bad—it’s just that what Mary did was also good. It’s a both/and, not an either/or. Loving the Lord definitely involves serving the neighbor, but there’s more to it than that.  Because we can serve the neighbor without letting the Lord come anywhere near our hearts. That’s what we see in Judas: he said that Mary should have served the poor, instead of anointing the Lord’s feet, but he said that because was the keeper of the money box, and he knew that if that oil had been sold, he would have been able to pocket a bit of the profit. So people’s motives for performing acts of charity aren’t always heaenly. Even if we aren’t thieves or purely in it for ourselves, like Judas was, we sometimes do good deeds with ourselves in view. We do good deeds so that we can hang trophies on the wall in a secret room inside our minds. The good deeds are still being done, and the neighbor is still benefiting, but we aren’t keeping the first commandment when we do good without ever lifting up our minds to the Lord.

The point of all of this is that we’re called, or invited, to make room in our lives for moments in which we express love directly to the Lord. We’re invited to make room for acts of love and devotion to Him—like the act that Mary performed when she anointed the Lord’s feet instead of giving money to the poor. We probably shouldn’t try too hard to pin down exactly what these acts of love and devotion are supposed to look like or feel like. But a phrase that’s worth reflecting on is “adoration of the Lord.” We turn now to our final reading for today, which is also from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church [read SH §1150].

The essential in all worship is adoration of the Lord from the heart. Worship, of course, is what we do in church on Sunday… but it’s more than that. Worship is a way of life (see SH §§1618, 7884). If we’re going to live that life—a life that has God in the midst of it—adoration of the Lord from the heart is essential. Now in this context, the word “adoration” doesn’t mean what it might mean in an everyday context. In everyday life, if you say you adore something, that probably means you think it’s cute. “Adoration” is sometimes used to describe silly kinds of love. But the word “adoration” originally had to do with worship. In this passage from the Heavenly Doctrine, “adoration” describes the feelings and the attitudes and the behaviors that are proper to worship. Instead of “adoration from the heart” you could also say “heartfelt reverence”—maybe that makes the concept easier to understand. But that word “heartfelt” needs to be there. This passage isn’t talking about a motion that we go through or a posture that we assume with our bodies when we come to church: it’s talking about an affection. It’s talking about adoration of the Lord.

That final reading said again what was said already: that we can’t actually adore the Lord, or love the Lord, unless love to the neighbor is present with us. Love to the Lord and love to the neighbor are inseparable. But again, this doesn’t mean that if we do a good deed for a neighbor, we automatically check both boxes. We do express love for the Lord when we obey His commandments and serve the people He loves; but it’s also good, and important, to approach Him directly, like Mary does in the story from John.

There are two important questions that follow from these ideas. The first is, what does adoration of the Lord look like—how do we do it? The second is, are we willing to do it?

There are actions that the Word teaches us to take that are clearly meant to set the stage for adoration of the Lord. Sunday worship is an opportunity to practice adoration of the Lord. Yes, it’s good if people learn something when they come to church on Sunday—but more fundamentally, the reason we’re supposed to come to church is that it’s a way of showing that the Lord is important to us, an opportunity to show that we care about the Lord. Praying is another action we’re taught to take. We can pray to the Lord anytime, anywhere; and when our prayers are heartfelt, we’re communicating our affection to Him directly. That can be adoration of the Lord. But of course, we’re talking about things that are very personal. No one can tell us what to feel, or how to express our feelings. So we come back to the question that the children were asked: what will you do to show the Lord that He’s important to you?

I said earlier that we would revisit Mary’s physical gestures of humility. She made herself very low before the Lord. She had to, if she was going to wipe his feet with her hair. She anointed Him with oil, and that oil represents love—love that she poured out to Him. The fragrance of that oil filled the house. Was humbling herself the way she did a necessary part of her expression of love? In many ways the answer is yes. Love and humility are intertwined. If you really love someone, you don’t think twice about serving them. Especially if that someone is the Lord.

Mary didn’t have to do what she did. No one made her do it, and that’s important. Affection can’t be compelled. She wanted to adore the Lord. Would we be willing to do what she did? Are we willing to set ourselves aside so completely, and show Him our affection and our gratitude? If we were so willing, what would we do about it?

Amen.

Because I Live

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; March 30, 2025

Readings: John 11:20-44; Revelation 1:17, 18; Apocalypse Revealed §58

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            The Lord says, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). He doesn’t say that He’s alive, or that He has life. He says He is life. And that’s the idea we’re going to be focusing on today—the idea that all life, including the life that we feel within ourselves right now, is the Lord’s.

            The number of passages in the Word that assert this truth is significant. Clearly this is an idea that we’re supposed to pay attention to. We’re only going to hear a few of those passages today. Our first reading is from the first chapter of the book of Revelation. This is a description of what happens after John sees the vision of the Lord in the midst of the seven lampstands. We read: [vv. 17, 18].

            So John is overwhelmed by what he sees, and he falls down as dead. But the Lord touches him, to comfort and revive him (v. 17). And as He comforts John, the Lord says, “I am He who lives” (v. 18). Now we’re going to turn to the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, and look at what we’re taught in the book Apocalypse Revealed about the meaning of these words. This reading is printed on the back of your worship handout. We read: [§58].

            There are a lot of important statements in that reading. “There is only one life, namely God.” We are merely recipients of His life. And He is life because He is love and wisdom—these things constitute life. The fire in our hearts and the light in our minds are what make us feel alive. That fire and that light are the Lord’s. The bottom line is just what the Lord says in that closing quote from the gospel of John: “Because I live, you will live also” (14:9). We live because He lives.

            So why is this teaching significant? Rather, what changes when we understand it? It’s one of those ideas that’s easy to accept in a general way and hard to accept in a specific way. If God is God, then of course life, in general, comes from Him. That isn’t so hard to believe. But to believe that my life—the life that I feel in my mind and in my body right now—is His is a little more challenging. It takes some humility to accept this. Actually it takes a lot of humility. Humility doesn’t always come easily. But if we push ourselves into a humble state of mind, what we find is that humility is liberating. Because we get to stop pretending. Yes, we depend on God. He gives us everything, which means that we have everything to be grateful for. To see our lives that way is wonderful.

            And of course, we all want to feel alive; and if we want to feel that way, we should know where to find life. Medically speaking we’re all completely alive. We’ve all got beating hearts. But it’s obvious that there’s more to life than having organs that function. People sometimes say that they don’t really feel alive. Think of someone who lives to work—someone who has no time for anything except work and maybe a bit of sleep. Or think of someone who’s incapable of trying anything new, because they live in fear. We might say that those people aren’t really living.

            People try lots of things to make themselves feel more alive. Some of these things are constructive—or at least not destructive. They go for walks in gardens. They take vacations. They splash cold water on their faces. But people also do destructive things in the name of “really living.” They take crazy risks. They do things that are deeply selfish, imagining that selfishness will make them feel free and therefore more alive. We all want to feel alive. It makes such a difference to know where that feeling actually comes from.

            Our reading from Apocalypse Revealed said that people are merely recipients of life. This is one of those foundational truths that the Heavenly Doctrine repeats over and over. So, for example, in the book Secrets of Heaven we’re told: “A person is nothing other than an organ or vessel which receives life from the Lord, for a person does not live of himself” (§3318.2). We are organs that receive life—just like a lung is an organ that receives oxygen. We can also think of ourselves as vessels that receive life. A “vessel” can be a cup or a bowl, and that image works well enough—we hold up the cup, and the Lord fills it. But there are also vessels in our bodies. Maybe when that passage says that we’re vessels that receive the Lord’s life, the real meaning is that we’re like blood vessels through which His life runs.

            If we think of ourselves as organs or vessels that receive life, then our responsibility or our role in the process of living becomes clear: we need to make ourselves ready to receive. A cup cant receive anything if it’s turned upside down. A clogged or blocked blood vessel can’t do its job, and can even cause us to die. We need to clean out the vessel, and turn it right way round. Here’s what we’re taught in Secrets of Heaven:

On account of the hereditary evil into which a person is born, and on account of the evil of his own doing which a person acquires to himself, these vessels with him are set the wrong way round for receiving [the life that flows from the Lord’s love]. But insofar as it is possible for this inflowing life to do so, it resets those vessels to receive it. (§3318.2)

This passage goes on to say that the vessels in our minds can’t be reset until the selfish loves that hold them in place are softened. Love of self and love of the world calcify our minds and keep them in an unreceptive state. That calcification needs to be broken up, and this is accomplished by temptations. Temptations are about letting go of the hard loves we cling to—especially our pride. Pride is the most brittle of all things. To relinquish those hard things is to choose humility, which is soft. Humility is willing to be worked with. When the Lord’s love flows into a willing mind, it resets those vessels that were turned the wrong way round. Little by little His inflowing life takes those parts of us that were backwards and brittle and selfish, and heals them, so that we can receive His life—and feel His life—like never before (see §3318.3, 4).

            What this means in practice is that we feel more alive the more we cooperate with the Lord—the more we work with Him, the more we listen to Him, the more we obey Him. We feel more alive the more we “do it His way.” And that’s because all of the teachings that He gives us in His Word are instructions on how to turn the cup the right way round. He tells us not to murder, commit adultery, steal or lie—and that’s because those behaviors invert and calcify our minds. To put it really simply, we feel more alive when we do the right thing. Because when we do the right thing the Lord can be present, and the Lord is life.

            The catch is that we don’t feel more alive when we do the right thing, and then try to fill our own cups. It’s not uncommon for people to lead functional, orderly lives, and wonder why they don’t feel happier. The problem may well be that they’re trying to do it on their own—from themselves and not from the Lord. We can check all the right boxes on the outside—get our work done, drive the speed limit, clean the house and kiss the kids goodnight—but if we aren’t choosing to open our spirits to the Lord, then there’s no life flowing into us to fill those good deeds. We’re meant to be like blood vessels through which His flows. The vessel needs to be open at both ends. Love and life are meant to flow from Him into the works of our hands, and so into the world. If we’re doing the right things, the vessel is open at the bottom; but if it’s pride that’s driving us to do the right things, then the vessel is closed at the top. That stream of life—that awareness of being unexpectedly filled with the breath of life—comes to us when we wrestle our pride to the ground. When in our hearts we say, “Thy will be done” (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2).

            Of course there’s that part of us that doesn’t trust the Lord—that doesn’t believe that obeying Him will make us happier than doing what we want, doesn’t believe that we’re stronger when we admit we need Him, doesn’t believe that humility will set us free. It appears to us that we live on our own and that we’re happiest when we rule our own lives—and to our pride, anything that challenges these appearances is a threat. The Lord’s teachings, the teachings we’ve looked at today, can feel threatening. Trusting Him—believing Him—is something we choose to do. In John He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (11:25, 26). The first step is to believe Him; the goal is to live and believe in Him. In Secrets of Heaven we’re told:

[Evil spirits cannot comprehend] that they do not start to live until the life of evil desires and false persuasions in which they are immersed is annihilated. They believe that if they were deprived of these no life at all could possibly be left to them, whereas the truth of the matter is that once they have got rid of the life of evil desires and of false persuasions they start to live for the first time…. (§2889)

When we get rid of the junk and let the Lord flow in, we start to live for the first time. We won’t know what we’ve been missing until we give Him a chance.

            He wants us to feel alive. He wants that because He loves us, and He knows that if we didn’t feel alive we would have no identity, and could feel no joy. Here’s another teaching from Secrets of Heaven:

The reason why the life which comes from the Lord alone seems to everyone to be intrinsically his own lies in the Lord’s love or mercy towards the whole human race. That is to say, His will is to make that which is His every person’s own and to confer eternal happiness on every person. (§4320).

Life is His, but He lets us feel His life as though it were our own because He loves us. It’s that simple. The takeaway from this is that He doesn’t want us to feel like we have no life or identity of our own. He doesn’t want us to feel like we’re just extensions of Himself, or like we’re just robots that are operated by His spirit. He wants us to feel alive, and free.

            It seems like a paradox, but we’re told that the more closely we’re conjoined with the Lord, the more distinctly we appear to ourselves to be our own person, and at the same time, the more clearly we recognize that we are the Lord’s (Divine Providence §42). The angels in heaven know that the Lord alone is life. They can actually feel His life flowing into them. They know that it would be outrageous for them to claim that they have anything good apart from Him. They also know that He wants them to make His life their own—so they make it their own (Secrets of Heaven §3742). They live the life He gives them. They are alive, and they are free.

That’s what He wants for us. He says, “Because I live, you will live also” (John 14:9).

Amen.

In Full Measure

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; March 23, 2025

Readings: Mark 12:41-44 (children’s talk); Luke 6:37-45; Secrets of Heaven §2057.2

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           What we’re going to talk about now is the love that the Lord wants us to have for our neighbors. We know we’re supposed to be loving. Nobody says otherwise. But there’s loving and then there’s loving. Believe it or not, we can love the people around us more and better than we do right now. When it comes to love, the ceiling is high. Astonishingly high. And the more we love the better our lives will be. The Lord challenges us to love more than we do right now—and He also promises us that we can.

            To begin with, we’re going to revisit what He says in the gospel of Luke, chapter 6—the passage from which our recitation was taken. The recitation is all about love. I’ll reread the recitation, and then we’ll hear what the Lord says in the verses that follow [read vv. 37-45].

            We already talked about giving in full measure. That’s what the Lord wants us to do. Give to other people. Give them your all. He’s going to take the measure that we give Him and fill it to overflowing (v. 38)—and the best response to that spirit of generosity is to gratefully pay it forward. In another part of the Gospel he says, “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8).

            There’s a resonance between the beginning of that reading from Luke and the end of it. Near the beginning the Lord says, “Give, and it will be given to you” (v. 38), and near the end He says, “A good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good” (v. 45). What He wants us to do is take the good things—the treasures—that are in our hearts, and bring them forth. Give them away.

It's important to note that He also says that our love can be like His love. “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher” (v. 40). He is our teacher. We can’t be above Him, but our love can be like His love.

            The next thing the Lord says in that reading is that we’re not here to fix other people. We’re not here to tell other people what they’re doing wrong, or how they could love better. It’s not the speck in our brother’s eye that we need to worry about—it’s the plank in our own eye (vv. 41, 42). At the end of that reading He talks about bringing forth good fruit. He says that “every tree is known by its own fruit” (v. 44). Are we bearing good fruit? That’s the question that we need to concern ourselves with. Not what that guy’s doing, or that guy or that guy. Are we going good, or doing evil? That’s the measurement that matters.

            The message of today’s sermon, if it’s distilled into a single statement, is that giving to other people in full measure will make us happier than any other thing can. You could also simply say that loving other people will make us happier than any other thing can. This is not a revolutionary idea. It’s not hard to accept. But it’s one thing to nod when we hear statements like these, and another thing to really live like they’re true. In practice, today’s message is challenging. It challenges everybody in at least two ways.

            First, the Lord asks us to love so much—to be so unselfish. The ceiling is so high! It can be hard to believe that we’re capable of that kind of love. It’s much easier to say, “Sure I’ll be loving… but on my terms. I’d like to stay in my comfort zone, thank you.” Which amounts to saying, “I like the idea of love, but I’m not sure I can love that much.” And the second reason why today’s message is challenging is that there’s always that part of us that simply doesn’t agree that putting others first is what’s going to make us happy. There’s always the voice that says, “Actually it’s my turn to be first. This time it’s about me. I do want the biggest piece of cake.” There’s something in us that insists that we’re happiest when we do what we want. The Lord’s message in Luke 6 and in other parts of the Word contradicts that part of us. In that sense, His message is challenging. It’s easy to nod and accept what He says, but hard to really believe it—because to believe it is to do it.

            What we’re going to do now is consider some teachings that illustrate why it is that loving as the Lord wants us to love really does make us happier than any other thing can. These teachings also make it easier to see what it means to love as He wants us to love—because love and the happiness that comes from love are inseparable. If we understand one, we understand the other. And finally we’re going to consider the most important question, which is: how do we receive this kind of love? How do we learn to love more or to love better than we already do?

            We’re going to turn, now, to a teaching from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, from a book called Secrets of Heaven. This teaching is about heavenly love, which is also called mutual love. In other words, it’s about the love that’s shared by everyone who goes to heaven. And it makes it easy to see why unselfish love makes people happier than selfish love. The teaching is printed on the back of your worship handout, in case you want to follow along while you listen. We read: [§2057.2].

            The angels in heaven love their neighbor more than they love themselves. Angels, by the way, are simply people who have died and woken up in the spiritual world, and chosen to live in heaven, because the love that fills the heavens matches the love that they have chosen for themselves. The Lord hopes that we will become angels. But the angels in heaven love everyone else in heaven more than they love themselves. That’s a high bar. The thing is, the angels still get more than they give. They give everything away, and they still get more than they give. Because everyone in heaven loves unselfishly, there’s a sense in which each of them is at the center of heaven. The reading said that, “The heavenly form is such that everyone is at it were a kind of center, thus a center of communications, and consequently of happinesses, from all.”

This becomes easier to understand if we make the scale a lot smaller. Imagine a room occupied by ten people, and each of the people in that room loves their neighbor more than they love themselves. Everyone in that room would lay down their life for anyone else in the room, if they had do. Everyone in that room is therefore receiving all of the love that nine other people have to give. Now imagine a room occupied by ten people who love themselves most of all. When push comes to shove, each of the ten people in that second room will take what they want, even if that means taking it from somebody else. Everyone in that second room is receiving all of the love that they can give themselves—and that’s it. They’ve each got one person looking out for them. But the people in the first room each had nine people looking out for them.

And if the number of people in each room was increased to a hundred, then everyone in the first room would be surrounded by ninety-nine other people who were prepared to sacrifice something for their happiness, while the people in the second room would still only have one person looking out for them. Selfish love can never be bigger or more powerful than we are ourselves—and we aren’t very big or very powerful. At least, not when it comes to spiritual things. But unselfish love is boundless. It only grows the more it’s shared. So the reading from Secrets of Heaven says, “on this account, as the Lord’s kingdom increases, so the happiness of each angel increases.”

In another part of the Heavenly Doctrine—in a book called Divine Love and Wisdom—we find a passage that says, “to feel another’s joy as joy in oneself, that is loving” (§47). This is a really good definition of love. And this statement also illuminates how it is that unselfish love makes us so happy. When we love other people, we feel their joy as joy within ourselves. Imagine watching a child that you love at play. Let’s say she has a doll, and she’s feeding toy vegetables to her doll, and she’s having a grand old time. Left to yourself, you’d probably find no delight whatsoever in dolls or wooden onions—but because you love that child, you rejoice to watch her play. Her joy gives you joy. And think how happy we would be if we could rejoice that much in all of the good things that all of our neighbors enjoy.

That passage from Divine Love and Wisdom goes on to say, “But to feel one’s own joy in another and not the other’s joy in oneself is not loving.” And this qualification is important, because sometimes we think we’re loving unselfishly when actually we aren’t. Sometimes we feel our own joy in someone else, and we think that that’s the same thing as loving generously, the way the Lord teaches us to love. In other words, sometimes we mistake “this person makes me happy” for “I love this person.” If we value someone primarily because they make us happy, then we’re liable to stop valuing them as soon as they stop making us happy. And of course this isn’t love. It’s fundamentally selfish. Real love looks to the other person’s happiness, not to our own. “To feel another’s joy as joy in oneself, that is loving.”

So we come back to the idea that love—the love the Lord wants for us—involves giving it all away. Giving in full measure. Being willing to put ourselves last, if that would be useful. This spirit that gives away all the love it has always ends up with more than it had to begin with.

Now we come to our final question: how do we love this way? How do we learn to be so unselfish? How do we find it in ourselves to give so much, when we don’t feel like we have that much to give? The Lord gives us an answer to these questions, right there in our recitation from Luke: “Judge not, and you will not be judged. Condemn not, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you” (6:37, 38).

It will be given to you. Love is the Lord’s to give. Our job is to prepare our container—our measure—to receive what He gives. And the first thing we need to do is make sure that that container isn’t full of judgment and condemnation and unforgiveness. If contempt or resentment is governing the way we regard people, how can we expect ourselves to feel a generous outpouring of love towards those people? In Isaiah the Lord says, “cease to do evil, learn to do good” (1:16, 17), and it’s pretty clear that we need to do those two things in that order. Evil is like dirt. If you’ve got dirt in your cup, and you want to give your neighbor a drink of water, the first thing you need to do is clean your cup. We love better when we put effort into cleaning up on the inside.

The hard part is that contempt and self-righteousness and unforgiveness—and all other evils—like to hide. The parts of our minds that house these things do their best to stay out of the light. That’s what last week’s sermon was all about. This is why spiritual growth takes time. This is why the ability to love as the angels love is something that we grow into—not something that we have as soon as we decide that we want to have it. We need to work with the Lord to bring His light all the way down into the caverns of our hearts, so that He can drive away the things that inhibit our ability to love. This takes time, and that’s okay.

In the meantime, it’s good to know what the goal is. It’s good to remember that the Lord thinks we’re capable of loving like the angels love. He believes that we can learn to give in full measure. He made us to love that way. Love is the Lord’s to give; and if it’s His to give, and our hearts have room to receive it, then who or what can stop us from loving? In the 23rd psalm, the psalmist says to the Lord:

You anoint my head with oil;

My cup runs over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

All the days of my life;

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord

Forever. (vv. 5, 6)

Amen.

Coming Into the Light

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; March 17, 2025

Readings: 2 Samuel 7:12-22 (children’s talk); 2 Samuel 12:1-10; Secrets of Heaven §10661

            We’re going to turn, now, to another story about King David—a story that’s very different from the one that we just talked about. In the story we just talked about, we see some of David’s best qualities: we see his devotion to the Lord. This next story is about one of David’s lowest moments. It’s about the aftermath of his affair with Bathsheba. Here’s a summary of that affair: David committed adultery with Bathsheba while her husband, Uriah, was away at war, fighting in David’s army (2 Sam. 11:1-14). Later Bathsheba sent word to David, informing him that she was pregnant (v. 5). For a while David somewhat desperately tried to hide what he’d done; the “solution” he eventually fell back on was to arrange to have Uriah killed in the midst of a battle (vv. 6-25). So David committed adultery, and he committed murder.

We’re not going to spend any more time talking about these things that he did. It’s obvious that he shouldn’t have done them. Instead, we’re going to focus on the aftermath of these things. David tried to resume normal life. He married Bathsheba (v. 27), and her child was accepted as his legitimate child. For a time it seemed that his secrets were going to stay secret. Uriah’s death seemed like just a casualty of war. It seemed that David had simply married Uriah’s widow.

And at this point it’s useful to remember the story that was read to the children—useful to remember that the Word doesn’t present David as someone who was bad through and through. He had a relationship with the Lord. He thought of himself as a servant of the Lord. In many ways he was a servant of the Lord. The Lord was with David. David probably thought of himself as “mostly a good person.” In the wake of his affair with Bathsheba he probably felt ashamed and afraid, and he wanted to leave all of those things behind and hide them, and go back to being “mostly a good person.” Now we’re going to hear how that went. We’re going to hear about the message that the Lord sent to David, after all these things had happened [read 2 Sam. 12:1-10].

David thought that his secret was secret. It didn’t occur to him that Nathan’s story was about what he himself had done—because he didn’t think that Nathan knew about those things. He thought that Nathan was reporting to him about a real situation. So he pronounced judgment on this heartless man who had stolen a poor person’s lamb. Then Nathan told him, “You are the man” (v. 7). And think of how those words must have terrified David. All of the veils that covered his secret were ripped apart at once.

The thing that’s most remarkable about this passage is that, before he realized that Nathan’s words were a parable, David was genuinely outraged with this rich man who stole from the poor. The story says that his “anger was greatly aroused against the man” (v. 5). He knew exactly how wrong this rich man’s actions were, and he was upset by them. But in this rich man’s actions he saw no reflection of the things that he had done.

To David’s credit, he stopped hiding from the truth as soon as Nathan finished speaking. What he said in response to Nathan was simply, “I have sinned against the Lord” (v. 13). But up until that moment he’d been holding a double standard: for other people to abuse power and prey upon the weak was outrageous, but he was allowed to do those things himself.

 Of course, David isn’t the only person ever to have held a double standard. Everybody tends to see other people’s actions one way, and their own actions another way—even when the actions are essentially the same. So, for example, we might aggressively tell someone to stop speaking to us so aggressively. We might judgmentally observe that that other person is so judgmental. The Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church has this to say:

It is extraordinary how anyone can scold another intending to do evil and say to him: “Don’t do that, because it is a sin,” but he finds it very difficult to say that to himself. The reason is that saying it to oneself involves the will, but saying it to someone else merely comes from a level of thought not far removed from hearing. (TCR §535)

In short, it’s much easier to see sins in other people than to see them in ourselves. The reason for this is that seeing sins, or flaws, in other people doesn’t require us to do anything more than think about them. It’s easy to think that this or that is bad. But to see sins, or flaws, or bad behavior in ourselves, we have to dig into our will—what we want. Because things that we want don’t feel bad, even if they are bad. So we have to recognize and acknowledge that gap between what we want and the truth—and that takes work.

            What we’re really focusing on today is this idea that things that we want don’t feel bad, even if they are bad. Another way to put it is, evil is something that other people do. What we do never feels evil to us—at least not in the moment—because we want to do it. And what we want feels good. The Heavenly Doctrine says that a person, “calls good everything that he feels with delight” (AR §908). But our ears still hear the truth. Our brains still know what’s right and what’s wrong. So there’s a gap between what we know and what we feel. And often, instead of letting the one confront the other, we hide them from each other. We let the light of truth shine on other people, but not on our own affections. At least, that’s our tendency. And what we’re talking about today is the difficult work of pushing past that tendency. If we’re going to be good people, we have to be so honest with ourselves. Way more honest than we often want to be. We have to let the Lord’s light shine on all of us—even the bad stuff.

            One of the lies that hell tries to tell us is that if we’re honest about a failing in ourselves—if we admit that it’s known to the Lord, and especially if we admit that it’s known to other people—then that evil is branded upon us. Our identity is cemented: we’re the person who does that bad thing. Hell whispers all kinds of lies about how we can never change—our sin is an anchor that will forever drag us down. But it’s the other way around: when we’re honest about our failings it becomes easier to escape from them. And the more honest we are, the easier it becomes. The Lord’s light is a healing light.

            We’re going to turn, now, to a longer reading from the Heavenly Doctrine, which explores some of these ideas in more detail. This reading is from Secrets of Heaven, and it’s printed on the back of your worship handout [read §10661].

            Left to ourselves, we’re “completely in the dark so far as spiritual things are concerned.” Left to ourselves, we just don’t know about the Lord or eternal life. In a different passage we’re told that at the start our lives we really know nothing at all about the good of charity, or how happy that good can make us (SH §8462). Left to ourselves, all that we know has regard to the world and to ourselves. And the things that we call good are worldly things that benefit us—like being wealthy, for example, or having things go the way we want them to go. And we just don’t really get that when we take what we want, but at someone else’s expense, that’s evil. This is why we need to be taught from the Word. We need the light of the Lord’s truth to shine on us. Learning that truth isn’t the point—the point is for us to learn the truth and live it, so that it becomes good. But the light is an absolutely necessary tool. We just don’t know what goodness or what love really is until, somehow, in some way, we let the Divine light show it to us.

Of course no one here is completely in the dark, when it comes to moral and spiritual things, because we’re all adults, and we’ve all been taught something about what’s really good. The hard part is that it isn’t enough to let the light that’s been shared with us stay “up there,” shining on all our lovely thoughts. We need to let it come all the way down, so that it shines on that thing that we just did. We don’t learn the truth so that we can know what good and evil look like in theory, or in other people: we learn it so that we can know what good and evil look like in ourselves. So we need to look at ourselves—really honestly. We need to ask: “According to the truth that I know from the Word of the Lord, what name do I need to give to that thing that I did?”

This kind of honesty isn’t just hard—it’s scary. It can seem to us that if we’ve done something bad, and we let light shine on that bad thing, then we will be judged and damned. But it’s the other way around: the moment in which we choose to be honest is also the moment in which hell’s grip on us begins to weaken. Nathan came to David with a hard message, and David answered, “I have sinned against the Lord.” That was the moment in which he gave up his denial—so it was the moment in which change became possible. The Lord’s light is a healing light.

Listen to what He says in the gospel of John:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God. (3:16-21)

The Lord says pretty clearly that people who are doing evil don’t want to come into the light. He also says that the light has come into the world—and clearly He’s talking about Himself. He is the light. And He came into the world because He loved the world. He didn’t come to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Coming into the light can be so painful—and terrifying—but when we come into the light, we are not inviting the Lord to condemn us. We are doing exactly the opposite.

When we hide from the truth, the hells have all the cards. Because our eyes are closed—so they can do what they want. And they weave webs to keep us trapped. But when we’re honest with ourselves, things start to become simple again. To come into the light is to say, “I did this, and because I know I did it, I also know I can choose not to do it again.” And the Lord is on our side.

            This is why it’s important to put the David and Bathsheba story in context of David’s whole story. Nathan’s words to David were hard. The message was that adultery and murder are not okay—when we break the Ten Commandments there are painful consequences. David had to face those consequences. But the Lord was with him. He was more than just a sinner. The Lord was with David before Nathan said, “You are the man,” and He was with him afterwards—perhaps more so than before. The light of truth might show us things that we don’t want to see; but if we’re really seeing in the light of truth, we will also see the mercy of the Lord. In His light, we see light (Ps. 36:9).

Amen.

It's Easy to Be Contemptuous

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; March 9, 2025

Readings: 2 Samuel 6:14-22 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §4750.5; Matthew 5:38-48

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           Today’s sermon is going to be about contempt. In that reading from 2 Samuel we see a pretty good illustration of contempt: Michal looked down at David as he leapt and whirled before the ark, and she “despised him in her heart” (6:16). And when she spoke to David about what she’d seen, her words dripped with sarcasm: “How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself in the eyes of the maids of his servants…” (v. 20). We’re not supposed to think of Michal as a villain. There’s an earlier story in which she courageously helps David escape from Saul, her father (1 Sam. 19:11-17). She’s not a bad guy. But what we see in today’s story isn’t one of her finer moments. It’s pretty much a textbook example of raining on somebody’s parade.

            The thing is, her contempt is awfully relatable. It’s easy to imagine her rolling her eyes as she watched David dancing. It’s easy to hear the biting edge in the words she speaks to him. Contempt is a familiar thing. It’s a common thing. In some ways, there isn’t a lot to say about it, because we know we shouldn’t be contemptuous. But it’s easy to be contemptuous. People express contempt, in big ways and in small ways, all the time. And how often do we think contemptuous things, even if we don’t say them aloud?

            So in the first part of this sermon, we’re going to look at some of the things that the Lord teaches about contempt. We’re going to consider what contempt really is, because when we do that it becomes a lot easier to see why we should avoid it. But knowing that contempt is bad isn’t the hard part: the hard part is disentangling ourselves from it. So in the second part of the sermon we’re going to look at some teachings from the Word that can help us resist contempt. And lastly, we’re going to look at what we can do to strengthen ourselves against other people’s contempt.

            There’s no passage in the Scriptures or in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church that gives us an exact definition of contempt; but our next reading, which is from the Heavenly Doctrine, gives us a pretty good idea of what it really is. This passage begins by talking about self-love, and as always, it’s important to remember that when the Doctrines talk about self-love, they aren’t talking about taking care of ourselves, or believing that we’re worth taking care of. They’re talking about selfish love—love that puts self above all other things. We read from the book Secrets of Heaven: [§4750.5].

            So, fundamentally, contempt is a symptom or a product of selfish love. The reading spoke of “contempt for others in comparison with oneself,” and that kind of language is common in the Doctrines. Contempt is always about a comparison, and the comparison always favors us. To have contempt for someone is to give ourselves permission to view them as less than ourselves. To have contempt is to dismiss another person—to belittle them, or their ideas, or their feelings. The reading said that self-love is essentially hatred, and it said that contempt is a stronger indicator of the presence of that hatred than “the display of superiority which is called arrogance.” This doesn’t mean that arrogance is good—it isn’t good. But there are passages in the Heavenly Doctrine which indicate that people can have an arrogant or haughty “air” about them and nevertheless be honest people (e.g. SH §2219.5; SE §§4746, 4749). That arrogance is something they’ll have to sort out, but there might be some charity underneath it. Contempt, on the other hand, proceeds more or less directly from hatred.

            This is an alarming teaching, because it’s so easy to be contemptuous! Michal’s disdain for David’s ridiculous dancing is so normal, so relatable. Contempt often flies under the radar when we evaluate what’s good or bad in ourselves or in the world around us. One of the simple takeaways of today’s sermon is that contempt is often just as bad—just as hurtful—as whatever it is that we’re contemptuous of. If not more so.

            The thing is, we always have a reason for our contempt. And most of the time those reasons even make sense. Why did Michal despise David? Well, because his behavior was embarrassing. He was leaping and whirling and showing too much skin in the process. She was kind of right that that behavior didn’t suit the dignity of his position as king. And in addition, he was her husband, so his embarrassing behavior felt personal to her. She had reasons for not liking what she’d seen. But of course, she didn’t have to despise him on account of these things, or speak to him so contemptuously. She could have simply said, “So maybe next time you should wear some trousers under your linen ephod.”

            Sometimes our reason for our contempt is that we find another person’s behavior or opinion silly or stupid or embarrassing. But actually, a lot of the time our reason for feeling contempt is stronger than that: a lot of the time, contempt is our reaction to things that offend us or threaten us. David’s behavior reflected on Michal, because she was his wife, and that’s probably why her reaction to him was so strong. When someone insults us, it’s not uncommon for our reactions to be tinged with contempt. When someone has hurt us, we often want to belittle them in our thoughts. In other words, contempt is often a defense mechanism. It isn’t a good defense mechanism. But at the same time, most of the things that we want to defend ourselves against are real. Most of the time we have good reasons for wanting to defend ourselves. So reacting is justified, but reacting contemptuously is not justified. There’s a simple principle from the Word that can help us navigate this tension, and keep contempt out of our reactions: that principle is “don’t fight evil with evil.” The Lord never uses that specific phrase—but listen to these familiar teachings from the gospel of Matthew: [read 5:38-48].

            These teachings are beautiful, but they’re also challenging. Probably the most challenging thing that the Lord says here is “I tell you not to resist an evil person” (v. 39). Really? We’re not allowed to resist at all? It’s pretty clear that we’re not supposed to fixate on these words and separate them from the rest of what the Lord is saying in this passage. What He’s teaching us to recognize throughout this reading is an internal quality—a spirit that is able to respond with love even in the face of evil. We’re not supposed to fixate on small pieces of the message and separate them from the point He’s making. He doesn’t want us to submit to evil. What would happen to the world if good people never resisted evil people? Neither do we have to let ourselves get slapped around. The point is that we mustn’t respond in kind. Don’t fight evil with evil.

            In the Heavenly Doctrine we read:

Who can fail to see that these words [from Matthew 5] should not be taken literally? Who is going to turn his left jaw to one who has smacked him on the right jaw? … And who will not resist evil? (SH §9049.5)

This passage goes on to say that the reason why evil “should not be resisted” is that “evil can have no harmful effect at all on those governed by truth and good, for they are protected by the Lord” (ibid.). In a different passage we’re told that good people and angels,

… do not wish the retaliation of evil for evil, but from heavenly charity they forgive freely; for they know that the Lord protects from the evil all who are in good, and that He protects according to the good with them, and that He would not protect if on account of the evil done to them they should burn with enmity, hatred, and revenge, for these drive away protection. (AE §556.8)

Clearly the protection that these passages are talking about is primarily spiritual. Evil can hurt our bodies. But it can’t hurt our spirits—not if the Lord is with us. But when we choose hatred and revenge, we drive the Lord and His protection away. So when the Lord tells us to “turn the other cheek,” the point is that answering violence with a spirit that is not violent leaves us stronger and safer than we would be if instead we answered with a violent spirit of our own.

            Contempt is fundamentally hateful. To belittle someone or dismiss them is to lash out at them. Even if we keep silent, and merely think contemptuous things, we’ve still lashed out in spirit. And that’s taking an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth (cf. Matt 5:38). “You hurt me, so I’ll despise you.” That’s fighting evil with evil, and it drives the spirit of the Lord away from us. A little bit of contempt may seem like a small thing, but it’s enough to push away His protection.

            What the Lord tells us to do instead is love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who hate us (v. 44). He tells us that if we do these things, we’ll be children of our Father in heaven, “who makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good” (v. 45). With these words He invites us to remember the difference between the dismissive ways that we may be inclined to react to people, and the way that He looks at us. If we can catch even a glimpse of the way He looks at His people, our contempt will wither—because what right do we have to look down on someone that He, the Maker of the universe, loves?

            And of course none of this means that the Lord thinks it’s okay when people do evil to us. Our reasons for feeling bothered by the things that other people have said or done are often real and valid, and we don’t have to like the ways that other people treat us. But the Lord wants us to find safety in Him, and His compassion, instead of arming ourselves with contempt, and defending ourselves that way. The bottom line is “love your enemies.” Don’t fight hate with hate.

            Finding safety in the Lord is also the core of the answer to the last question I said we’d look at today, which was, “how do we strengthen ourselves against other people’s contempt?” People often say things like, “don’t worry too much about what other people think of you.” “Don’t let another person’s opinion be the measure of your worth.” “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” There’s truth in these ideas. But human beings are social by design, and it’s hard for us to truly stop caring about other people’s opinions of us. Besides, we should care at least a little bit about what people think of us. If someone thinks we’re behaving badly, they may have a point. We should at least be willing to listen. But we can’t let someone else’s opinion have too much power over us.

            One thing we can do to find peace in the midst of these tensions is let the Lord’s opinion matter most. Let His opinion of us matter most. Because the Lord is never contemptuous. Never dismissive. Even when we do the wrong thing—when we go astray, like the lost sheep in the parable (Matt. 18:12-14)—we are precious in His sight. He says, “Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish” (v. 14).

            This idea brings us back to the story about David and Michal. Michal said something contemptuous. David’s response to her wasn’t exemplary in every respect, but he got one thing right, which was that he put the Lord first. He said, “It was before the Lord…. Therefore I will play before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this, and will be lowly in my own sight” (2 Sam. 6:21, 22). In other words, David said “what does my dignity matter, and what does your contempt matter, if what I do is good in the eyes of the Lord?” One of the many, many good things that comes of following the Lord is that our lives come to be centered on someone who will never put us down. We don’t need to prove anything to Him. He knows our weaknesses, and He knows our potential, and He loves us, right now. What is contempt in the face of His love?

Amen.

Taken Captive

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; March 2, 2025

Readings: 1 Samuel 30:1-10, 15-19 (children’s talk); Exodus 17:8-13; Secrets of Heaven §8593

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         The story that was read to the children was about David and his men overcoming in the face of an almost hopeless situation, and rescuing their families. They overcame because David “strengthened himself in the Lord his God” (1 Sam. 30:6).

What we’re going to focus on now is the enemy that appears in this story—we’re going to focus on the Amalekites, and on what they symbolize. This is worth doing because the Amalekites symbolize a particularly sneaky spiritual opponent. They symbolize falsities, or lies, that are slipped into our thinking and attack us when we’re down. So what we’re really focusing on today is how to recognize these falsities for what they are: how to recognize when the thing that’s oppressing us, the thing that’s making us feel hopeless, is a lie. These lies rob us of our happiness—but if we look to the Lord we can beat the Amalekites, and take that happiness back.

The next passage from the Word that we’re going to consider is another story about a battle between Israelites and Amalekites. This is part of the story of the exodus from Egypt. The things that are described here happened after the children of Israel had crossed the Red Sea, as they were traveling through the wilderness to Mount Sinai. The Israelites have been complaining about being hungry (Ex. 16:2, 3) and thirsty (15:24, 17:3), and have been “contending” with Moses, their leader (17:2, 7). This is important to bear in mind, because the Amalekites attack us when we’re down. That’s the context, and here’s the reading: [17:8-13].

The bit about Moses needing to hold the rod of God above his head is interesting, because it’s so obviously symbolic. We’ll come back to that detail. For now, we’re focusing on the Amalekites. The Amalekites attacked when the people were wandering in the wilderness—when they were hungry and thirsty and already inclined to be angry with the Lord. And this was their M.O. They were opportunists who attacked weak points. Much later, in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the children of Israel of these events, and here’s what he says:

Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you were coming out of Egypt, how he met you on the way and attacked your rear ranks, all the stragglers at your rear, when you were tired and weary; and he did not fear God. (25:17, 18)

The Amalekites attacked from behind, and they attacked the weakest people in the group. We see the same sort of thing in the reading from 1 Samuel: the Amalekites attacked Ziklag when David and his warriors were not present. In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that all of the enemies of the children of Israel symbolize specific evils (e.g. SH §§1444.4, 1868). You could also say that they symbolize specific kinds of evil spirits—the spirits that inspire those specific evils. The idea that the Amalekites were opportunists who attacked weak points gives us a pretty good sense of the kind of spirit that they symbolize.

            The term that’s used in the teachings of the New Church to describe this Amalekite spirit is “falsity arising from interior evil” (SH §8593). Falsity means lies. And our next reading, which is from the book Secrets of Heaven, explains what “interior evil” means [read from §8593].

            We’ll continue with the reading in a moment, but we should note that what we’ve read so far is mostly talking about not-so-nice people who live in this world. But the next part of the reading is about those same not-so-nice people after they’ve died and entered the spiritual world. Specifically, it’s about the way that those spirits attack us [read from §8593.2].

            So the first part of that reading is about people who really don’t mean well, but do an awfully good job of appearing to love their neighbors. It’s good to be aware that people like that exist. Obviously the Lord doesn’t want us to becomes suspicious of everyone who seems nice—“are you secretly an Amalekite?” And obviously this reading isn’t an invitation for us to start judging people’s hearts. But it is useful for us to be aware that evil often doesn’t want to look evil. It goes to great lengths to pass itself off as good.

            But for today’s purposes, the more significant part of that reading is the second part—the part that describes how these Amalekite spirits treat us. They never pick a fight when we’re in a strong position. They wait until we’re staggering, and then they show up to give us the final push. And don’t we all know what that feels like? Don’t we all know that it’s when we’re already struggling, when we’re already stressed and tired, that the craziest and nastiest thoughts pop into our heads? The Amalekites symbolize that spirit that comes to us in our lowest moments and nudges us towards rage or despair.

            Remember, the Amalekites are said to be “falsity from interior evil.” The way they nudge us towards despair is by telling us lies. And the lies that they tell are sneaky.  When you hear the word “falsity,” what do you think of? Sometimes “falsity” makes us think of great big false concepts—like “the world is flat.” And we imagine that the way we fight falsity is by hitting it with the truth—“no, the world is round.” We tend to imagine that if hell is coming at us with falsity, that means that hell is trying to contradict the things that we believe. “You think God is real? No, God isn’t real!”

But the reading from Secrets of Heaven says that these Amalekite spirits don’t attack the truths of faith—they attack the good of faith (§8593.2). Because these spirits know that if we have any faith in God, then that faith is a source of strength. And they don’t attack us where we’re strong. There’s a book called The Screwtape Letters, written by C. S. Lewis, and in this book a fictional devil named Screwtape advises another devil on how to corrupt human beings. The purpose of the book is to expose the tricks that the hells try to use on us. And Screwtape’s very first piece of advice in this book is “don’t argue with people.” He says, “by the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?” (p. 2). The “patient” means the person that these devils are trying to lead astray. The point is that clever devils don’t argue with us, because they know that if they do we might start to argue back. This is a pretty good illustration of what we’re taught in the Word.

The Amalekites don’t attack our faith. They don’t try to take the things we believe and turn them on their heads. They tell us lies, but the lies they tell are designed to attack our affections. The Amalekites are sneaky. They come in the dark and attack the parts of us that we ourselves understand most poorly: they attack our feelings. The teachings of the New Church compare their lies to “deadly and imperceptible poison” (SH §8625.2).

Those lies probably take thousands of subtle forms. But here are a few examples of the kinds of things these spirits might be trying to make us believe:

·         The world is an awful, greedy place where might makes right.

·         If I take someone down so I can get ahead, I’m only doing what they wish they could have done to me.

·         Pleasure is the only good thing.

·         What this person did actually is unforgivable.

·         I can never be better than this.

So far we’ve focused on a lot of unpleasant things. There is a use in that: it’s good to know your enemy. But of course, what we really want to know is how to escape this enemy. How do we overcome the Amalekites? To overcome them is to rise out of a dark and tangled state of mind. It’s to rise up from the overwhelm that we feel when our emotions—our anger and our fear—have been weaponized against us.

No one will be surprised to hear that if we’re going to overcome this evil, the first thing we need to do is look to the Lord. David was overwhelmed with grief, his own people were turning against him, but he “strengthened Himself in the Lord his God” (1 Sam. 30:4, 6). He asked the Lord what He should do, and the Lord gave him purpose and a direction: “Pursue, for you shall surely overtake them…” (v. 8). We see the same dynamic in the story from Exodus: Joshua went down to fight with the Amalekites, but Moses went to the top of a hill and held up the rod of God (17:9). The rod of God symbolizes the power of the Lord—the power of truth that is joined to good (SH §§8598, 8599). While Moses held his hands up, the Israelites were able to beat the Amalekites. But if he put his hands down, the Amalekites started to win (Ex. 17:11). What this means is very simple: if we look to the Lord, we can overcome what hell throws at us. If we stop looking to the Lord, we will stumble (SH §8604).

This teaching might seem too simple. “Yes, yes—look to the Lord.” We can get the impression that the Lord is supposed to be a magic wand, and that if we wave the magic wand we’ll feel fine. But there are no magic wands. Part of what the Word is saying when it tells us to look to the Lord is that we need to just get out of the mentality that the hells construct for us. Their strategy is to overwhelm us with doubt and darkness, and often they succeed at trapping us in the middle of that doubt and darkness. They get us to play the game on their terms, and we spend time and energy trying to hold all of the feelings that they give us, trying to answer the unanswerable questions that they give us. And what the Word tells us is to just get out! Stop believing that you need to hold what hell gives you. The Lord is like the sun in the sky, above the smoke and the darkness—lift up your eyes, and let Him lift you out! We don’t have to follow the crooked road that hell has put beneath our feet. Just find the Lord. Find Him in prayer. Find Him in His Word. What does He say? In today’s recitation He says, “I am with you to save you and deliver you” (Jer. 15:20).

Looking to the Lord is the first step to freedom—but it’s not like our problems go away as soon as we look to the Lord. We have to keep going until the battle is over. David strengthened himself in the Lord, and after that he and his people had to pursue the Amalekites. And that would have been exhausting. It was so exhausting that two hundred of David’s men gave up the chase and stayed behind at the brook Besor (1 Sam. 30:9, 10). And when David finally caught up with the Amalekites, he still had to fight them, and that fight lasted “from twilight until the evening of the next day” (v. 17). We see the same thing in the story from Exodus: Moses couldn’t just put his hands up once. He had to keep them up throughout the battle. And his hands became heavy (17:12). Looking to the Lord isn’t so hard, but keeping Him in our thoughts is harder. We need to find things that strengthen and support us in our commitment to following Him (cf. v. 12; SH §§8608-8613). We need to stay the course. That was the message of last week’s sermon.

And it sure helps to do these things with a bit of a fighting spirit. Moses was up on the hill with the rod of God in his hands, but Joshua was down in the valley fighting the battle, and Joshua symbolizes “fighting truth” (SH §8595). Think of the zeal that David and his people must have felt, as they chased down the Amalekites to take back their wives and their children. Hell wants to take what’s good away from us, and when we say “no” to hell, it doesn’t hurt to let there be some fire in our voices. That defiant edge is captured in these words from the book of Micah: “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy; when I fall, I will arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me” (7:8).

This fighting spirit will let us down if we look to ourselves for strength. True confidence—confidence that we can get up every time we fall—is confidence in the Lord. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” (Ps. 27:1).

Amen.

Looking for Miracles

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; February 23, 2025

Readings: 1 Samuel 28:6-17; Mark 10:17-22; Secrets of Heaven §9014.3; Heaven and Hell §533

Video: 

           Text:

Today’s sermon is about looking for miracles. It’s about the idea that there are things out there, that we can find, that will make our problems “just go away.” Most people are wise enough to remember—at least most of the time—that life doesn’t work that way. Problems don’t magically disappear. But the urge to look for magical solutions is powerful, and maybe it sways our thinking more than we realize. And, just to make things more complicated, maybe there’s kind of miracle that we should be looking for. After all, the Word of the Lord is full of miracles.

            In today’s story from first Samuel, Saul turns to actual magic to fix his problems. He seeks the help of a “mistress of necromancy” (28:7ff). And he does this specifically to bypass the Lord, because the Lord isn’t answering him—or at least, isn’t telling him the answers that he wants to hear. This shortcut, this quick fix, doesn’t work out for Saul. Now we’re going to turn to the gospel of Mark, to hear another story about someone who was probably looking for a shortcut. We read: [10:17-22].

            Why did that man go away sorrowful (v. 22)? The reading says that it was because he had “great possessions” (ibid.). Evidently he was also quite attached to his possessions, and didn’t want to sell them and give to the poor, as the Lord had instructed (v. 21). But that instruction wouldn’t have upset him so much if he’d been expecting it. Clearly he was hoping for a different answer. When he enthusiastically asked the Lord, “what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” (v. 17), he was hoping or even expecting to be told to do something easy. He seems to have taken the first part of the Lord’s answer as a confirmation that it really would be easy. “All I have to do is keep the commandments? I’ve always done that!” (v. 20). We get the impression that for a moment this man dared to hope that the Lord was about to tell him, “congratulations—you’ve already crossed the finish line.”

            But no. The Lord said he had to do more. He had to sell his possessions—which means he had to let go of his love of riches. He had to take up his cross—that is, he had to enter into temptation and fight against evil. And he had to follow the Lord (v. 21; cf. Life §66). So much for having crossed the finish line.

            There’s something inside of everybody that doesn’t want to hear that we have to work to get where we want to go. If it wasn’t so, the market wouldn’t be flooded with so many products that “guarantee” quick and easy results. Think about just how many ads are designed to convince us that the advertised product is a shortcut to something that we would otherwise have to work for. Everybody knows, at least in one half of their brain, that magical solutions are almost always too good to be true, and that old-fashioned work is often the only way to do something properly. But there are thousands of “miracle products” out there, and they wouldn’t be sold if no one bought them. Think about how popular casinos are—and what is gambling if not hoping for a kind of miracle?

            There are so many subtle ways in which we get lured into this kind of thinking. Without realizing it, we convince ourselves that if we could just attain this one goal, we’d be set—our lives would come together and we’d be happy. “If I could just get that job, if I could just find my soul mate, if I could just get through this one hardship that’s in front of me right now, the rest would be smooth sailing.” Or we secretly convince ourselves that some new activity is going to turn our lives around: “If I could just start a daily exercise habit, I’d have so much more energy and would be so much more productive.” A thought like that might even be mostly true, but often we expect too much. And then we give up the good habit when it turns out that it doesn’t fix everything. Coming at it from a different angle, this longing for magical solutions is also one of the reasons why people take drugs, or drink heavily, or even simply eat too much junk food. We look to something that’s within our reach to “just make it all better” for a short time.

            And of course, people have come up with a lot of magical solutions within the realm of religion. There are no shortcuts to heaven, but religions often promise shortcuts, because shortcuts are what people want. “If you give X amount of money to the church, your salvation is assured.” “If you participate in this one ritual, your salvation is assured.” “If you say these words, if you believe these ideas, if you belong to this group, your salvation is assured.”

            The man in the reading from Mark wanted to hear that there was a quick and easy path to heaven. He didn’t want to hear what the Lord told him. Of course, what the Lord said to that man is said to all of us. If we want to inherit eternal life, we have to keep the commandments. But being good on the outside isn’t enough. We also have to take up the cross internally, and follow the Lord in our hearts. Following Him may not be hard, but it isn’t quick and easy either. It isn’t something we just do once. If we follow Him for a month and then stop following Him, we’re not following Him.

            The Lord consistently teaches that we simply need to do the work He gives us to do, one day at a time, one step at a time, for as long as it takes. This has always been His message, but in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church these ideas are made especially clear. We’re going to turn to the Heavenly Doctrine now, and listen to two passages that talk about the gradual nature of spiritual change. The first is from Secrets of Heaven: [read §9014.3].

            This passage focuses on forgiveness, not on salvation in general. But being forgiven is part of salvation, so if being forgiven takes time, then salvation takes time. And the point that this passage is making is that the forgiveness of sins “cannot take place within an hour, nor within a year” (ibid.). It’s easy for us to imagine that we’ll be forgiven as soon as God says the word, and that His forgiveness is like water He can pour over us, washing us clean immediately. The truth is more complicated. The Lord always forgives us. He has no desire whatsoever to hold us down. But to truly be forgiven is to be set free from the evil that we once acted on, and we can’t be set free from that evil unless we separate ourselves from it. So we have to repent, we have to begin a new life, and we have to stay the course. If we stay the course, there will come a point at which we’ve entered so fully into the new life that we want nothing to do with the old life. We’ll look back at the evils of our former life and “abhor” them (ibid.). And that’s the point at which we’re truly forgiven, because that’s the point at which the Lord’s forgiveness comes home to us. But to get there we have to turn our lives around, and we have to make that change real by living it day after day. That’s why forgiveness—and salvation—can’t take place within an hour, or even within a year.

            Our second reading from the Heavenly Doctrine is perhaps a little bit more encouraging, but it says the same thing about the gradual nature of salvation. We read from Heaven and Hell: [§533].

            The rich man in the story from Mark hoped that it would be easy to get to heaven, and it turns out that it isn’t as easy as he wanted it to be. But it also isn’t as hard to get to heaven as some people think it is. The road to heaven may be long, but it isn’t full of booby traps and barbed wire. At least it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to torture ourselves to get to heaven; we don’t have to rip everything fun out of our lives. We just have to pay attention to our thoughts and our motivations, and when we recognize that we’re inclined to do something wrong, we need to push that thing away because it’s not what the Lord wants us to do. The catch is that we can’t just do that once. The reading says that we need to form a habit of thinking this way, and that as we form this habit we are gradually conjoined to heaven (ibid.).

            There just isn’t any way around it: there’s no fast track to salvation. There’s no shortcut to real happiness. There’s no substitute for patiently doing the work that we’ve been given. Really, this is one of the core teachings of the New Church: you just have to do the work. The trouble is that this isn’t a very inspiring teaching. A professor at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church once told his students that he’d seen a bumper sticker that read, “Salvation: Sixty seconds that will change your life.” He said that he’d considered this, and concluded that a better bumper sticker would read, “Repentance: Sixty years that will change your life.” This represents the theology of the New Church pretty well, but it doesn’t make for a catchy bumper sticker.

            The teaching that there are no shortcuts is powerful because it’s realistic, but it can leave us with the impression that life is just one long labor—and that that’s what God wants it to be. That’s not an inspiring thought. Nor is it accurate. The Lord says, “My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). The work that’s in front of us might feel hard, but life isn’t meant to feel that way forever. And here’s the missing piece, the vital piece that we haven’t talked about so far: we have work to do, and we don’t work miracles, but the Lord works with us. Whenever we do the good work that He’s given us, He is there working alongside us—sometimes openly, sometimes in secret. In the gospel of Mark He says:

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. For the earth yields fruit of its own accord: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. But when the fruit is ripe, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. (4:26-29)

The kingdom of God is heaven, and the Lord compares the heavenly spirit that He forms within us to the work of a farmer who scatters seeds on the ground. Farming—especially farming in the ancient world, before tractors were invented—is a good example of a task that requires patience, and requires a willingness to simply do the work. That’s what it takes to become a good person: we have to get up and plant those good seeds, or else they simply will not grow. But we also don’t make the seeds grow. “The earth yields fruit of its own accord.” The Lord makes good things grow, and He makes them grow, in secret, while we work and even while we sleep. And every now and then, if we’re paying attention, we’ll see what He’s made, and we’ll stop and wonder at it. Because He does astonishing things. He creates life in parts of us where there was no life before.

            Think of the reading from Secrets of Heaven—the one about forgiveness. That passage says that we don’t truly become forgiven until we’re able to look back at the evils of our former lives and see that we don’t want them anymore (§9014.3). And isn’t it astonishing that that’s even possible? That the Lord can transform us so completely? That He can take a vessel that once held hellish thoughts and feelings and fill it with actual love—unselfish love—and the clear light of heaven?

            There are miracles in our lives. It’s just that we don’t enact them. And we usually only see them in retrospect. So waiting for miracles, for quick and easy miraculous solutions, is probably a poor use of our time. We have work to do—seeds that the Lord has given us to plant—and we’d best be getting on with our work. The miracles will become apparent when we aren’t looking for them.

Amen.

Love From a Distance

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; February 16, 2025

Readings: 1 Samuel 26:5-21 (children’s talk); Matthew 18:15-17; Secrets of Heaven §5854

            The story we read last week ended with Saul tearfully admitting that he had done wrong to David (1 Sam. 24:16-21). He had sought David’s life, but David had shown him mercy. Last week we focused on David’s mercy, and on how the Lord Himself meets evil with mercy. It’s clear that we’re meant to follow that example. The Lord says that we’re to love even our enemies (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:35). And because David showed mercy to Saul, there was a reconciliation between them at the end of last week’s story. That wouldn’t have happened if he’d struck back at Saul.

            But in today’s story, Saul is after David’s life again. So much for their reconciliation. David shows mercy to Saul again, and Saul repents, again. But it’s clear that David doesn’t trust Saul at this point. At the end of today’s story he and Saul go their separate ways, and here’s the very next thing that the Word tells us:

And David said in his heart, “Now I shall perish someday by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape to the land of the Philistines; and Saul will despair of me, to seek me anymore in any part of Israel. So I shall escape out of his hand.” (1 Sam. 27:1)

Saul had said, “I will harm you no more” (26:21), but it’s clear that David no longer believes those sorts of promises from Saul. And who can blame him?

            It’s still a good thing that he showed mercy to Saul—that he forbade his companion to stab the king while he was sleeping (26:8). The Lord wants us to meet evil with mercy. Over and over He tells us to forgive. But what are we supposed to do when people seem to treat our forgiveness as carte blanche to do the bad stuff all over again? How do we show mercy to people who are actively doing things that hurt us—or to people that we don’t feel safe with, because of a pattern that’s been established over time? That’s what we’re exploring today. And the message of today’s sermon, in a nutshell, is that it is possible for us to love people and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

            We’re going to turn to the Gospel now, and listen to what the Lord says about how we balance reconciliation with setting boundaries. We read from Matthew 18: [vv. 15-17].

            These instructions outline the process that the Lord wants us to follow when someone is doing things that hurt us. He says, “if your brother sins against you” (v. 15), but it’s pretty clear that He’s using that word “brother” to mean our neighbor in general (see SH §2360.6, 7; AE §746.15). These instructions apply whenever someone that we have a relationship with is doing something that hurts us.

The last thing the Lord says is that if we can’t work it out with our “brother,” we’re to treat him as “a heathen and a tax collector” (v. 17). If that’s the only part of these instructions that we pay attention to, then they sound pretty harsh. But if that’s the only part of these instructions that we pay attention to, then we’re missing the whole point—which is that we mustn’t jump straight from having a problem with someone to shunning them. There’s a process that we’re meant to follow, and we’re meant to take it one step at a time, and we’re only meant to go to that last step if we absolutely have to. As human beings, we’re prone to all-or-nothing thinking. This is especially true if we’re mad at someone, or if their behavior is making us feel unsafe. We think, “either I’m close to this person, and there are no boundaries between us, or I’ve separated myself from them and there’s no bond between us.” Cognitively we may know that it doesn’t have to be like that, but often our emotions say that that’s the way it needs to be. It takes maturity and it takes wisdom to hold the middle ground—to acknowledge and address the harm that another person’s behavior is doing to us, without completely cutting ourselves off from that person. It isn’t the easiest or the most natural path to take. But it’s the path the Lord asks us to take.

            He says that if our brother sins against us, the first step is to, “go and tell him his fault between you and him alone” (v. 15). It makes a lot of sense that this is the first step. If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it. The thing is, we need to make sure that this is the first step we take. Step two is to get other people involved, and sometimes we take step two before we take step one. We complain to our friends about the person who’s offended us, before we’ve even talked to that person about their behavior. When we do that, we usually just sink deeper into resentment. Sometimes we want to get advice before we talk to the person who’s hurt us—and it can be appropriate to seek advice from a mentor or a professional. But we need to not make the problem someone else’s business. At least not right away. If you’re upset with someone, start by talking to them as one grown up to another. This is what gives us the best shot at actual reconciliation. The Lord says, “… if your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother” (ibid.).

            Obviously this doesn’t mean that we should put ourselves into dangerous situations. If someone’s hurt us badly enough, it might not feel safe to meet with them one-on-one. The spirit of this teaching is that we mustn’t skip step one unless we have to. And there are things that we can do to protect ourselves during that initial conversation. We can take a leaf out of David’s book, and talk to the person who’s hurt us from a distance (1 Sam. 26:13). Talk to them on the phone, or write a letter. Or we can have the conversation in a public place, like a restaurant, where we’ll feel safer.

            If we have that one-on-one conversation and our brother still refuses to hear us, then the Lord says we can take with us “one or two more.” (v. 16). In other words, at that point we can get other people involved, if we need to. Just one or two people. We’re not supposed to rally a posse—that’s escalating too fast. And of course, it’s important to pick the right people. The people we involve should be wise, level-headed people. Ideally, they’ll be people who are trusted by both ourselves and the person we have a grievance with, because those people can build bridges and act as mediators. We need to bear in mind that when we get third parties involved, we are escalating things, and there’s a chance that the person we have a grievance with will feel ganged up on and react badly. If we need to get other people involved, the Lord says that we can—but we shouldn’t take this step unless we have to.

            The third step is to “tell it to the church” (v. 17). This doesn’t mean that we should air our grievances with each other when we gather for refreshments after worship. The Greek word here translated as “church” (ἐκκλησία) really just means “gathering,” or “assembly.” So the Lord’s point is that if someone won’t listen to us or change their hurtful behavior—though we and a handful of trusted people have talked to them about it—then we’re allowed to speak openly about our grievance. We can get our community involved, if that’s a useful thing to do. Perhaps “telling it to the church” implies that we’re allowed to seek some sort of public arbitration. In ancient times, the leaders of the church would have done that sort of thing. Nowadays, if we want public arbitration we usually go to court.

            The last step, according to the Lord’s words in Matthew 18, is to regard our brother as “a heathen and a tax collector” (v. 17). This doesn’t mean that we’re allowed to disdain or revile or hate the person we have a problem with—we’re never allowed to do those things. It simply means that if all else fails, and the person who hurt us is continuing to hurt us, we’re allowed to separate ourselves from them. We’re allowed to treat them as someone who isn’t part of our sphere. In practice, this would involve limiting our interactions and communications with the person who’s hurt us.

            The Lord says that we’re allowed to do these kinds of things—we’re allowed to set boundaries, if we have to. But there’s a process to follow. We can’t escalate straight from getting our feelings hurt to cutting ties with the offender. And here’s the really challenging part: right after the Lord says these things about the boundaries we’re allowed to set, He has this conversation with His disciples:

Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?”

Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” (Matt. 18:21-22)

In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told that “seventy times seven” means “always, without counting” (AE §257.4, cf. §391.21). In our recitation from Luke the Lord says something similar:

If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, “I repent,” you shall forgive him. (17:3, 4)

The Lord says that we’re allowed to set boundaries, but He also says that we need to forgive people every single time they hurt us. And the whole point of this sermon is that we can do both at the same time. Forgiveness is not the same thing as giving people permission to treat us badly. To forgive someone is to give up your right to hold that person beneath yourself, in your mind and in your heart. To forgive is to give up the right to hate. This is something we do for our own sake, for the sake of our own peace, because hate poisons the soul.

            In a way, forgiving a person isn’t even about the person we forgive. To forgive is to get ourselves right with the Lord. When Joseph’s brothers asked him for forgiveness, he answered, “am I in the place of God?” (Gen. 50:19). In other words, he said that it wasn’t his job to either judge his brothers or absolve them of their sins. That was God’s job. Determining whether or not another human being is worthy of forgiveness isn’t our job. We are commanded to love our neighbors—to love even our enemies—and that commandment governs every interaction that we have with every other human being. And if we’re going to love someone, we cannot hold on to resentment. We cannot give ourselves permission to hate. But loving a person and setting boundaries with them can happen simultaneously. To hold on to that truth is to hold a space in the middle, to steer clear of “either-or” thinking—either we’re close and there are no boundaries, or we’ve separated and there is no love. To hold that middle space takes wisdom and maturity—and that’s what the Lord asks of us.

            We’re going to wrap up by looking at a passage from the Heavenly Doctrine, a passage that describes the way the angels treat us when we choose evil. We read from Secrets of Heaven: [§5854].

            The angels are always with us, protecting us in ways that we can neither see nor feel. And it’s good that they’re there: in a different passage we’re told that if they weren’t present with us, we would “immediately perish” (SH §50). But those angels can’t be present in the midst of evil thoughts or evil affections—so when we choose evil, we push the angels away.

            But they don’t go all the way away. When we choose evil they’re still with us—but remotely so. The deeper we sink into evil the further away they’re driven, but they’re still there. They’d prefer to be near to us: they’d prefer to love us up close. But if they can’t do that, they love us from a distance. Sometimes we assume that love and distance are mutually exclusive: that we’re either close to someone, or we can’t love them at all. But it isn’t so. We can follow the example of the angels. We can love from a distance, if we have to. The angels themselves are following the example of the Lord—who will not say that evil is good, who is nonetheless ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all who call upon Him (Ps. 86:5).

Amen.

Mercy

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; February 9, 2025

Readings: 1 Samuel 24:1-12, 16, 17 (children’s talk); Matthew 23:13-17, 27-39;

Secrets of Heaven §7206.2

            David could have killed Saul. Saul was treating Him like an enemy, and he certainly could have responded in kind. But he refused to do so. One word for that is mercy. David showed mercy to Saul. And today’s sermon is about mercy. The basic message is that the Lord answers evil with mercy. And this’s relevant because there’s a lot of evil in the world. If you read too many news articles, you can start to feel overwhelmed by the amount of evil that’s present in the world. We see wars, we see people in power apparently using their power to accomplish destructive things. The Lord meets that evil with mercy, and few things are more powerful than the example that He sets for us in so doing.

We need to understand His example, so that we can follow it. So we’re going to turn to the Gospel. What you’re about to hear might not sound like an example of a merciful response to evil, but it is—and that’s exactly why we’re considering this particular passage. These are words that the Lord Himself speaks in Matthew 23: [vv. 13-17, 27-39].

            So how does this passage illustrate the Lord’s mercy? The words He speaks here are not gentle. They might even strike us as brutal, or ruthless—though they can’t be, because we can’t attach those qualities to the Lord. But where is the mercy in this passage? The Lord is God, and only speaks the truth, so the words that He says here must be true, and they must be justified—but where is the mercy?

            We need to define mercy before we can go any further. When we hear the word “mercy,” we tend to think of the sort of thing that we saw in the story about David and Saul: David could have killed Saul, but he chose not to. He showed forbearance. The Lord doesn’t seem to be demonstrating much forbearance in the reading from Matthew. He seems to be “letting the Pharisees have it.”

            Forbearance is related to mercy, but mercy itself is something different. Here’s a simple definition: to show mercy is to respond to evil, or to misery, with love. In the teachings of the New Church we read that “love, when it is shown towards those in a state of wretchedness, is called mercy” (SH §9219). So the fact that David chose not to kill Saul is an important part of that story… but that forbearance by itself isn’t what makes that story a story of mercy. It’s a story of mercy because David believed that Saul was valued by the Lord, and he insisted on acting accordingly. Saul was the Lord’s anointed, and he would not stretch out his hand against the Lord’s anointed (1 Sam. 24:6, 10). That’s how love behaves. Saul was in a deeply disturbed state of mind; he’d tried to kill David on multiple occasions. But David appears to have responded to that evil with love—and that is mercy.

            There’s plenty of evil in evidence in the reading from Matthew. The hypocritical, power-hungry mentality of the scribes and Pharisees is awful. But where is the love, in this reading? Where do we hear the Lord’s love? The answer is that we hear it in His grief. It’s easy to hear the Lord’s words in this reading as a diatribe—as an angry, judgmental denunciation. If we assume that His words were spoken in that tone, it’s going to be hard to hear his mercy. But that changes if we assume that His words were spoken with a tone of grief. That’s the tone we’re meant to hear.

            The first and biggest clue to this is the word “woe.” Over and over He says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees” (vv. 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27, 29). We might be inclined to hear that word “woe” as a finger-wagging word—as if the Lord is repeatedly telling the scribes and Pharisees, “you guys are gonna get it!” But that’s not what “woe” means. It means sadness. In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that, “‘woe’ symbolizes a lamentation over the evil in someone, and so over his unhappy state” (AR §416).

            The Lord grieves for the scribes and Pharisees. He grieves that they don’t see the damage they’re doing to the church and to their own souls. And if we make that assumption about His tone, instead of assuming that His words are just angry, the meaning of some of His statements shifts a little. For example, He says, “Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?” (v. 33). We could assume that this question is rhetorical, and that the Lord’s point is simply that they cannot escape condemnation. Or we could hear it as a sincere question: How can the Pharisees escape? He sees that they’ve put themselves in hell, and He grieves for that, and He longs to see them escape.

This interpretation is supported by the next thing He says: “Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men and scribes” (v. 34). He sends them prophets to give them the warning that they need to hear, and to teach them the way out of hell. And of course, He Himself was one of those prophets: He is called the greatest Prophet (TCR §§126-131). He longs to show them the way out of hell, but He also knows that they will not choose to follow. He says, “I send you prophets, wise men and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city” (v. 34). So He grieves.

It's at the end of this reading that His grief becomes most apparent. He says:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (v. 37)

This lamentation is for Jerusalem, not for the scribes and Pharisees. But Jerusalem symbolizes the church, and the scribes and Pharisees were the leaders of that church. Here He says, in so many words, that He longs to gather the children of that church under His wings. He loves them and He longs to protect them, but they are not willing. This lamentation runs beneath everything that He says to the scribes and the Pharisees, prior to this point.

            You don’t feel grief unless you love something. The Lord’s love is revealed in His grief. And love that meets evil not with anger, but with sorrow, is mercy—that is the definition of mercy! In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that “mercy is love that is grieving” (SH §5480).

            The idea that the Lord is merciful is one we hear all the time. We hear it so often that it can seem like a platitude. The power of mercy is only evident when we see and understand both mercy and the evil that that mercy responds to. So it’s important to understand that what the Pharisees did was destructive. They corrupted the truths of the church to make themselves powerful. They turned truth into falsity and good into evil. We see in the Gospel that they were willing to commit murder in the name of their religion. And the truths of the church are given to us for the sake of our salvation. The Pharisees were hurting the souls of the people who followed them. So the Lord says, “you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (v. 13). That was an evil that the Lord had to address: He had to challenge it, He had to break the power of that evil. But He did so with grief—with mercy—and not with anger. He loved even the scribes and the Pharisees. If they were willing, He would have gathered them under His wings. In the teachings of the New Church we read:

… even when someone lives like a wild animal, loving nothing whatsoever but himself and things regarding himself, still the Lord’s mercy, being Divine and Infinite, is so great that He does not abandon him, but by means of angels continually breathes His life into him. (SH §714)

No matter how great the evils of this world or the evils in our hearts may be, the Lord regards us with mercy.

Of course, grief isn’t the only affection we hear in His words to the scribes and Pharisees. We also hear zeal. He loves them, but He still speaks hard words to them. He still calls them serpents and a brood of vipers (v. 33). One truth we can take away from this is that mercy isn’t always soft-spoken. Love has a backbone. Another way to put it is that the Lord needed to get through to the scribes and the Pharisees because He wanted to save them—and that was far more important to Him than whether or not He offended them. Mercy is not the same thing as an inability to confront evil, and love is not the same thing as telling people what they want to hear. When the Lord speaks to people who are in a state of evil, the leading edge of His message is the truth. And when truth leads, or appears to lead, it feels hard. It’s important to understand that there are hard things that the Lord needs to say, because this world is not altogether as it should be. And it’s important to understand that His truth is never separated from His mercy. We turn now to our final reading, which is from the teachings of the New Church, from the book Secrets of Heaven [§7206.2].

One of the functions of truth is to reveal evil for what it is. So the reading says, “By [judgements from Divine truth] people steeped in … evil are shown to be damned.” That’s what the Lord does in the reading from Matthew. He reveals an evil, and the consequences of that evil. But the truth He speaks does not damn anyone—the reading says that His truths are “nothing other than expressions of mercy.” His mercy runs through everything He says. And mercy is love; mercy is a yearning to save. Instead, it’s people who damn themselves when they refuse to accept His mercy. The reading then goes on to explain that everyone needs mercy. Knowing the truths of faith is not enough: we need help from the Lord, and we need to understand that He helps us solely because He has compassion on us. Left to ourselves, we’re full of evils—but by the Lord’s mercy we are withheld from evil and maintained in good, and with great force.

So what are we to do with these teachings? It’s good to know that the Lord is merciful—good to be able to hear His love, even when He speaks hard words to the Pharisees. But what are we to do with these teachings? There’s a pretty obvious answer: we’re meant to follow His example. In Luke He says, “Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful” (6:36).

In this world, we will encounter evil. Sometimes we go looking for it, sometimes it runs up and smacks us on the nose. Sometimes the evil that we see, or read about, is frustrating—and sometimes it’s overwhelming. Sometimes it’s appalling. When we’re appalled, it’s easy to feel a kind of heat. Sometimes that’s the heat of zeal, sometimes it’s just anger. Sometimes it wavers in between. We’re allowed to oppose evil—we’re meant to oppose it. Love is not spineless. But the Lord meets evil with love. If His love is moved to grief, it grieves. But He does not rage. He does not despise. He does not hate. No matter who He’s looking at.

And of course, there’s the old saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” Sometimes we do the very things that we’re tempted to despise when other people do them. When we’ve done wrong, and we know it, the Lord’s truth feels hard and it can make us want to hide in holes in the ground. But His mercy runs through His truth. In Isaiah He says:

With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment; but with everlasting mercy I will have compassion on you…. For this is like the waters of Noah to Me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be angry with you, nor rebuke you. For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but My mercy shall not depart from you, nor shall My covenant of peace be removed …. (54:8-10)

Amen.

Smooth Stones

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; January 19, 2025

Readings: 1 Sam. 17:38-50 (children’s talk); Matt. 7:24, 25; John 4:10-14; Secrets of Heaven §4884.2

Today’s sermon is about the tools we’re meant to use against the Goliaths that we meet within ourselves. When David went out to fight Goliath, “he chose for himself five smooth stones from the brook” (1 Sam. 17:40). These smooth stones symbolize powerful spiritual tools, and they’re tools that are within our reach.

A good portion of last week’s sermon was about the spiritual quality, or state of mind, that Goliath symbolizes. In brief, he symbolizes pride. Specifically, he symbolizes conceit in our own intelligence (Faith §52)—that is, the belief that what we see for ourselves is the truth, and that we don’t need to be taught by God in order to understand how things really are. Our pride, like Goliath, poses as the mightiest of warriors, equipped with all the best weapons, the best arguments. But pride doesn’t actually make us happy. This idea that we don’t need the Lord doesn’t make us happy. But how to get rid of it? Even if there’s a part of us that wants to learn humility, pride is a giant that doesn’t want to be pushed around. If we’re going to confront the spirit of pride, we need smooth stones.

Of course, pride isn’t the only demon that people encounter. It isn’t the only thing that can cast a long shadow over our minds. Other spirits, like apathy and despair and anger, can be just as menacing as Goliath. The Word only mentions smooth stones in context of David’s battle with Goliath, which symbolizes a battle against conceit in our own intelligence. But let’s look more closely at what these smooth stones stand for. It’s probably fair to say that these are the tools we need no matter what kind of giant we’re facing.

To put it very simply, smooth stones symbolize truths. Throughout the Word, rocks of any kind symbolize truth. The stones that David used were taken from a brook. They were stones that had been worn smooth by tumbling in running water for ages. And throughout the Word, waters also symbolize truths. So there you go: to fight giants you need truth.

But there has to be more to it than that. Because everyone knows true things, and we still struggle with spiritual giants. It’s clear that learning as much truth as possible—reading as many books as possible—isn’t the answer. It might help, but it isn’t the answer. Sometimes when we hear that we’re supposed to “use the truth” against our spiritual enemies, we visualize ourselves taking a random teaching out of a book and throwing it into the dark. Clearly that’s not effective.

The truths that are effective against giants are truths that have been worn smooth over time. They’re truths that have been tumbled in the water of life for a long time. In other words, they’re truths that we’ve tested, truths we’ve wrestled with, and truths that we’ve used again and again.

We’re going to turn, now, to a series of passages from the Word that shed light on the specific kinds of truth that stones and waters symbolize. The first is a familiar passage from Matthew about building on the rock [read 7:24, 25].

In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that the rock upon which the wise man built his house symbolizes Divine truth from the Word (AE §411.11; cf. AR §409; AE §644.24). The teachings specifically say that stones represent the lowest level of Divine truth, which is the letter of the Word, because the letter of the Word is the foundation upon which higher things rest (SH §§8609, 9025, 10376; AR §231). The truths written in this book are what they are—they’re like a rock, in that they don’t change.

But note how the reading connects building on the rock with hearing the Lord’s teachings and doing them (v. 24). The Word doesn’t become a rock in our lives until we act on it—until we obey it and do it. Ideas that we know but never put to use have a vague and airy quality. Whereas actions are concrete: actions are the building blocks of anything that ever becomes real. So when the Word speaks of stones, we’re meant to think of truths that come all the way down to earth, as it were: the truths that are written in the Word that we obey as we’re meant to obey them.

Water also represents truth, but the quality of water is very different from that of stone. Water—and running water in particular—is notable for its energy and its adaptability. Water seems much more alive than stone. And of course, we need water to keep our bodies alive. So it isn’t surprising that in the Word, the Lord frequently talks about living waters. Here’s a portion of a conversation that the Lord had with a Samaritan after He had asked this woman to give Him a drink from a well: [read John 4:10-14].

In this passage, the Lord makes it pretty clear that the water of life is something internal. The thirst that it quenches is not physical thirst. The water of life gives life to the spirit. The teachings of the New Church say in many places that water symbolizes the truths of faith (e.g. SH §§2072, 3058). Truths of faith are truths that flow from an internal sight of the Lord and of the spiritual life that He wants us to lead. These are truths that have some amount of life from the Lord in them. They’re higher and more alive than the kinds of truths that rocks symbolize.

Smooth stones from the brook are stones that have been worn smooth by running, living waters. So they’re concrete, actionable teachings from the Word—but teachings that we’ve exposed to that stream of spiritual thought again and again. To put it simply, these are truths that we’ve really tried to understand—truths that we’ve worn smooth by constantly handling them, constantly turning them over. But they aren’t truths that we ponder simply because pondering them makes us feel smart. They’re truths that we work with and wrestle with because we want to understand how to use them. Because they matter to us.

A lot of the time, these smooth stone truths are surprisingly simple. In the David and Goliath story, David repeatedly voices a truth that serves him as a smooth stone truth:

The Lord… will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine. (1 Sam. 17:37)

You come to me with a sword, with a spear, and with a javelin. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand…. (vv. 45, 46)

The Lord is stronger than our enemies. With the Lord, we can overcome. This idea all by itself is simple—even simplistic. And if this idea is untested—if it’s one that we’ve never used before, if we simply snatch it off the shelf and wave it in Goliath’s face—it’s going to feel hollow. This truth is worn smooth when we carry it into action. When we try to apply it to real-life situations. When we face real things that trouble us, and we tell the Lord that we want to believe that He can keep us safe. When we ask Him how it is that He can deliver us from our enemies, when our enemies are so big? When we ask Him again and again, and search for His answer, and live our lives like we want to trust in the Lord—that’s when this stone is worn smooth. That’s when the truth that the Lord is strong becomes a truth that we can hold with confidence—enough confidence to look a giant in the eye and say “I come to you in the name of the Lord.”

            The teachings of the New Church have a lot to say about the difference between truth that we merely know and truth that we live; our final reading for today is one of the passages that discusses this difference. This passage talks about the “truth of intelligence,” and to understand this phrase we need to understand that “intelligence,” in this context, doesn’t mean book smarts: it means the ability to understand spiritual things. So the truth of intelligence is spiritual truth that we really see and understand. Here is the reading: [SH §4884.2].

            Truth that we know, but have no desire to act on, has no part with us. It’s like a bit of straw that is stuck to us, and liable to be blown away in the wind. When we will a truth—that is, when we want to obey it, when we want it to be our reality—that truth stands at the threshold of our life. And when we will the truth and do it, it becomes part of us. It fills our minds, it fills our actions: it fills all of us. And, according to that reading, when we do the truth frequently, it returns to us not merely out of habit, but from affection and thus from freedom.

Whenever we begin to do something that the Word says to do, we do it because know we’re supposed to. For example, we go through the motions of forgiving those who have trespassed against us because we know we’re supposed to. We try to do our jobs honestly and faithfully because we know we’re supposed to. Over time, if we stick with them, those actions become habits. And then they become more than habits. We develop an affection for those actions, and because of that affection, we feel free when we do them. We feel free when we obey the teachings of the Word—when we forgive, when we serve honestly and faithfully. And with that freedom comes power and vitality and confidence—enough confidence to defy a giant. That’s the point at which a teaching from the Word has become a smooth stone.

            So a smooth stone is more than just an idea that we’ve spent time pondering. It isn’t a hobby-horse that we like to trot out, or an idea that we like to argue about because we think we understand it so well. Nor is it an idea that we’ve always believed, and have never questioned and never tested. A smooth stone is a truth that we have tumbled in the water of life for a long time. It’s a truth we’ve wrestled with, a truth we’ve gone back to, a truth that we keep on reaching for because we want it to be part of our lives.

            Here are some examples of ideas that could become smooth stones. I’m going to present these ideas as questions, because that’s the form that they tend to take while we’re “tumbling” them:

·         Am I in charge, or is God?

·         Is obedience to God more important to me than my short-term happiness?

·         Am I fundamentally alone, or am I part of something far greater than myself?

·         Am I self-sufficient, or do I need the mercy of a Divine being?

Of course, these questions don’t become smooth stones until we’ve answered them—until we’ve pushed through the veil of doubt to the truth that lies behind it. Then we have a truth that’s ready for battle, because it’s been tested. It’s been worn smooth.

            So how do we acquire these smooth stones? We have to start by going to the Word. Stones represent truths from the Word, and a brook represents spiritual truth that flows from the Word. This is why it’s important for us to read the Word, and to attend Scripture study classes and so on: knowing more teachings really does help. But knowing what the book says is just the beginning. We need to distil actionable ideas from the teachings of the Word. So the Word says, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37). We know what those words mean, but what are we actually supposed to do with that teaching? We need to put what we understand into action. And then we need to prayerfully take our understanding back to the Lord: are we seeing what He wants us to see? We need to take the doubts that arise when “real life” confronts the truth, and wrestle with them in the presence of the Lord. We need to wear that truth smooth by working with it.

And we need to let it be the Lord’s truth, and not our own. Let it be a truth from His Word. It’s powerful to say, “the Lord is on my side,” but more powerful still to say, “You come to me with a sword, with a spear, and with a javelin. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts…” (1 Sam. 17:45).

            So which truths from the Word are you willing to work with until they’re worn smooth?

Amen.