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.

Let the Lord onto the Battlefield

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; January 12, 2025

Readings: 1 Samuel 17:4-11, 24-37 (children’s talk); True Christian Religion §§276, 122

Today’s talk is about letting the Lord help us overcome our pride. Because that’s what the story of David and Goliath is about, in its internal or spiritual sense. It’s easy to see that their confrontation is symbolic. One the one hand you have David, whose confidence in the Lord is so unshakeable. On the other hand you have Goliath—this terrifying person who defies the armies of Israel. So their confrontation represents a battle within our minds between something that is from the Lord and something that isn’t. In the teachings of the New Church, in a book called The Doctrine of Faith, we’re told that Goliath symbolizes conceit in one’s own intelligence (§52). And when you look at how Goliath behaves in the story, that makes sense. When we think that we know better than anyone else, our intelligence is gigantic—at least in our own eyes. And Goliath is arrogant. He’s sure he can defeat any champion that the Israelites put forward. He knows he’s intimidating, and he flaunts it.

Today we didn’t get to the part of the story where David actually fights Goliath: we won’t talk about their battle until next week. Today’s story brought us to the point where the army of Israel was willing to let David go out and fight Goliath. So today’s talk is about how we reach the point where we’re willing to let the Lord fight for us. It’s about reaching the point where we’re willing to let the Lord onto the battlefield.

And this is harder than we might think it should be—particularly when the demon that we’re struggling with is pride. Because pride’s whole deal is that it doesn’t want help—not from God, not from anyone. The Lord might be telling us that we could be happier if we did it a different way, but if we have too high an opinion of our own intelligence, we’re probably not listening to Him. How do we reach the point where we’re willing to let the Lord set our own pride in its place?

It’s really clear that David represents the Lord. The Lord Himself is called David in many passages in the Word—for example, in this prophecy of the Messiah from the book of Ezekiel: “I will establish one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them—My servant David. He shall feed them and be their shepherd” (34:23) Many passages from the teachings of the New Church confirm that David represents the Lord (SH §1888; Lord §43; cf. SH §4763.4, AR §174). The only part of this idea that’s a little bit challenging is that David is the hero of the story, and people tend to want to identify with the hero of a story. But in this story, the hero is the Lord—not us.

David is initially dismissed by everybody in this story. None of the other Israelites are open to the thought of him fighting Goliath. And this is a picture of something that we do to the Lord. We keep Him off the battlefield. We tell Him, “this isn’t Your fight.”

As for Goliath, it’s easy to see that he symbolizes a kind of pride. Goliath was a Philistine, and throughout the Word, Philistines symbolize faith that is divorced from charity (Faith §§49-54). To be in faith divorced from charity is to value the ideas that go with religion, but not the life that goes with religion. The teachings of the New Church say that, “In the Ancient Church all were called Philistines who spoke much about faith and who asserted that salvation lay in faith, and yet possessed nothing of the life of faith” (SH §1197). So Goliath and all of the Philistines stand for a mentality that’s very into ideas and not into doing anything with those ideas. But Goliath is specifically the champion of the Philistines: he fights on behalf of the Philistines. And the thing that champions this “ideas are all that matter” mentality is conceit in our own intelligence (cf. Faith §52). In other words, we don’t fall into this trap of thinking that ideas are all that matter unless we’re a bit too much in love with our own ability to figure things out.

We turn now to a reading from the teachings of the New Church—a reading that makes it even easier to see what this “Goliath mentality” is like. This reading comes from a section of the book True Christian Religion that explains why the human race needs the Word (§§273-276). This section says that we wouldn’t know anything about the Lord or eternal life if these things hadn’t been revealed to us. So if we think that we can discover the truth without any help from above, we’re deluding ourselves. We read: [§276].

This idea that we can figure it all out with no help from above—without needing to be taught by someone who knows more than we do—leads us to the kind of reckless confidence that we see in Goliath. Goliath was sure that nothing could knock him down… and he was wrong about that.

Of course, pride is something that we can have more of or less of. In its most extreme form, conceit in our own intelligence leads to a total rejection of God, because we’re convinced that we have no use for Him. But conceit can also take milder forms. It might show up simply as an inclination to tell the Lord, “Look, I’m busy figuring stuff out—You’re not what I need right now.”

To understand the rest of the story, we have to understand that this kind of pride can be a menace in anybody’s life… and that we can choose to separate ourselves from it. If we step back and look at the internal sense of the story as it’s been laid out so far, we have David, who represents the Lord, going out to fight Goliath, who represents our pride. And sometimes we can’t tell the difference between our pride and ourselves. So is the story saying that we have to let the Lord fight against us? Would a loving God even do that?

The thing is, that spirit of pride that Goliath symbolizes might be a real part of our spiritual landscape, but it doesn’t have to be us. The teachings of the New Church say, “it should be recognized that all evil flows in from hell and all good from the Lord by way of heaven” (SH §6206). We can make the evil that flows into us our own, but we don’t have to. We’re told:

… if [a person] believed what is really so he would think, the instant evil flowed in, that it came from the evil spirits present with him; and since that was what he thought the angels could ward that evil off and repel it. (ibid.)

When we recognize that there is pride within us, we can choose to say that that pride is who we are, and that we must just be bad people. Or we can choose to say that that spirit of pride is coming to us from hell, and that we don’t want it. So, when we look at today’s story, we can choose to identify with Goliath if we really want to. But we’ll probably feel better if we choose to identify with the army of Israel—with all of those people who were menaced by Goliath, the people that David fought for.

            Of course, even the people of the army of Israel have their issues, in this story. They didn’t want David to fight for them. His brother Eliab accused him of shirking his work: he said, “I know your pride and the insolence of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle” (1 Sam. 17:28). King Saul told him, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are a youth, and he a man of war from his youth.” (v. 33). And David represents the Lord. These interactions are pictures of how we might respond to the Lord, when we find ourselves struggling with our pride. Like Eliab, we might try to chase Him away. Like Saul, we might tell Him, “you can’t help me with this.” That menacing, arrogant spirit that Goliath represents puts us into a state of mind where it’s difficult for us to accept help. How do we get past that? How do we get to the point where we’re willing to let the Lord onto the battlefield?

            The first piece of the answer to this question is that, in practice, we usually don’t start looking to the Lord for help until we’ve started to feel that where we are isn’t working. We see this in today’s story: Goliath is a menace. The army of Israel is dismayed and terrified by him (vv. 11, 24). This is a picture of us watching our pride in action and not liking what we see. Even Goliath’s own behavior hints at the ways in which our pride makes us unhappy. He stood in front of the armies of Israel and defied them—dared them to fight against him. And in a piece of the story that wasn’t read to the children, we’re told that he did this for forty days, morning and evening (v. 16). For forty days he went out, twice a day, and shouted at everybody, “I’m better than you are!” And that’s what pride does. It strives, relentlessly, to prove that it really is what it claims to be. That part of us that believes that we don’t need help from God is constantly reviewing the facts and reasserting its conclusion. Multiple times a day it says, “I’ve got this, I’ve got this. I can overcome anything.” And the reason our pride does this so relentlessly is that it’s haunted by the fear that one day we might not be able to prove that we’ve “got it.”

            So this story is about us coming to ourselves and realizing that we’re fighting this exhausting fight inside our own heads—a fight to be great, a fight to be giants in our own eyes. And we realize, “maybe the spirit that’s fighting this fight isn’t me—maybe this is a spirit from hell that’s bullying me.” So we come to see that our pride isn’t “us:” it is our enemy.

But what it really takes to let the Lord onto the battlefield is faith in Him, or trust in Him. And to have that, we have to have some understanding of who He is, and what He does. Saul wouldn’t let David go out to fight until David told him about the lion and the bear that he had overcome, in order to save his sheep (vv. 34-36). He told Saul, “The Lord, who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (v. 37). This story that David tells is a picture of the Lord’s power and His willingness to save His people. We turn now to our final reading for today, which is also from True Christian Religion [read §122].

The Lord is a Redeemer. He rescues His people from their enemies. He’s like a king who saves his children from their kidnappers, or like a shepherd who throws himself between his sheep and their predators—as David did—and drives those predators away. We are His children; we are His sheep. In the Word He promises, over and over, that He can fight for us, He will fight for us: He will deliver us, and lead us to living waters. That’s what He does. That’s who He is. And we need to understand that. We need to know that He says that He can get us out of the mess that we’re in right now. We need to know this, even if we’re not sure we believe it.

Today’s recitation, from the book of Isaiah, begins with the words, “Shall the prey be taken from the mighty?” (49:24). In other words, if something mighty has made you its prey, who’s going to save you? If you’re trapped by towering pride, how are you going to get away from that?

But thus says the Lord: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible be delivered; for I will contend with him who contends with you, and I will save your children.” (v. 25)

The Lord will contend with the sprits that contend with us. He will go out against the giants in our heads, like David went out against Goliath.

            And we just need to give Him a chance. We don’t need to be filled with emotional faith: we need to be willing to see what happens if we try to do it His way. Saul probably wasn’t confident that David could defeat Goliath, but he let him try. We may not be sure that the Lord can do what He says He’ll do; we may not be sure that what He says is truer than what we see. What we need to do is bow our spirits—bend our pride—just enough to give Him a chance. Let Him onto the battlefield, and see what happens.

Amen.

The Lord Looks at the Heart

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; December 29, 2024

Readings: Matthew 2:13-16 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §§2379, 6724.2

            One of the things that’s most striking about the story of the flight to Egypt is just how vulnerable the baby Lord was in that moment. Here He was, the Savior that the world had waited for. The salvation of the human race depended on Him. Yet He was a baby—He was incapable of defending Himself. If His enemies had gotten their hands on Him, it would have been over.

            And for protection, He had Mary and Joseph—two very ordinary people. There’s probably a part of us that says that it would have made more sense for the Lord to have been born into some circumstance in which He could have been surrounded by elite bodyguards at all times. After all, He was so important. But no—Mary and Joseph were all He had. Think of them leaving Bethlehem by night; imagine how scary the darkness all around them would have seemed to them. What if Herod’s soldiers met them along the way? What could they have done?

            In this story, the baby Lord seems so close to the danger, so close to the darkness that wanted to swallow Him up. And yet, Herod never laid a finger on the Lord. And Mary and Joseph weren’t actually alone—they weren’t the Lord’s only protectors. To their eyes it would have seemed like they were, but in fact, heaven was with them. And actually, angels who will guide you away from danger before it ever comes near to you are better protection than hundreds of bodyguards.

            In this story, it seems that the Lord is so close to the things that want to hurt Him; it seems that there is almost no barrier between Him and the darkness. Yet the truth is that He is completely safe. And this is a pattern, or a theme, in the Scriptures: when the Lord protects people, He doesn’t always supply the kinds of barriers and buffer zones that His people might wish for. Danger remains so close to them: it surrounds them completely. And yet, His people are completely safe. This pattern, or this kind of protection, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the rest of today’s service—because this pattern reflects how the Lord protects our spirits. When our minds and our hearts are crowded and oppressed by anxiety, by fear, by troubles that we can’t solve, it can seem to us that heaven’s protection is far from us. But it needn’t be so. It can seem to us that we will never feel safe unless our troubles are somehow driven far away. But it needn’t be so. The Lord protects us from within, and He can make the heart of who we are into something that all the fear and all the darkness simply cannot touch.

            To begin with, we’ll look at a few more examples of this kind of protection in the Scriptures. The story of Daniel in the lions’ den is a particularly good example. Daniel was a slave in Babylon who served king Darius. He was also a faithful servant of the Lord, who prayed to the Lord three times a day. A number of powerful people in that kingdom were envious of Daniel, because he was a talented man. So they persuaded the king to make the worship of the Lord illegal. But Daniel continued to pray to the Lord three times a day, so he fell afoul of the new law. As a consequence, he was thrown into a den of lions. We read:

So the king gave the command, and they brought Daniel and cast him into the den of lions. But the king spoke, saying to Daniel, “Your God, whom you serve continually, He will deliver you.” Then a stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring…. (Dan. 6:16, 17).

Obviously this was meant to be a death sentence. What could an unarmed man possibly do to protect himself from a caveful of hungry lions? But Daniel was unscathed. We read:

Then the king arose very early in the morning and went in haste to the den of lions. And when he came to the den, he cried out with a lamenting voice to Daniel. The king spoke, saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?”

Then Daniel said to the king, “O king, live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths, so that they have not hurt me, because I was found innocent before Him….” (Dan. 6:19-22)

If you were to spend a night surrounded by lions, what would you require, in order to believe that we were safe? A steel fence? A concrete wall? Maybe both? How hard would it be to believe that you were safe if you had none of those things? Daniel had no such protection: the lions were just there. Yet he was safe. The lions in this story symbolize predatory spirits from hell, spirits that want to consume our happiness. We’d all prefer it if we never had to think about these spirits—if they could be shut away behind a great big wall. But sometimes they are close. Even so, the Lord can protect the heart of us. Daniel spent the night in the lion’s den, and the Lord shut the lions’ mouths. And in the morning, Daniel was set free.

There are many more stories in the Word that follow this pattern—too many to name them all. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship a false God. They walked out of the fire unscathed (Dan. 3). Noah and his family were tossed on the waters of the flood for forty days and forty nights, surrounded by chaos; but they were safe inside the ark (Genesis 7). Even the crucifixion story in the gospel follows this pattern. Throughout the crucifixion sequence, the Lord is surrounded by hatred, by mockeries of justice—and none of that evil sticks to Him. He rises above it all. So, on the cross, He says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” (Luke 23:34).

In the book of Genesis, there’s a story in which a man named Lot tries to protect two angels who have come to stay at his house from a mob. The mob surrounds Lot’s house (Gen. 19:4). Lot goes out and tries to reason with them, but they intend violence. Then, we read, the two angels “reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door” (v. 10). There was still a mob outside, but Lot was brought into the house, to be with the angels. Here’s how the internal meaning of these words is explained in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church: [read SH §2379].

Those who are brought into good are brought into heaven, and those who are brought into heaven are brought to the Lord, and so are protected against every assault on their souls. This is what it all comes down to: when we do the right thing, our souls are brought into the presence of the Lord. The things in our external lives that trouble us won’t simply disappear. But in the midst of those things, we can find peace with the Lord. And that peace can be more than some sort of lovely, distant promise: it can be where the heart of us lives.

The reading says that a person with whom good is present is in communion with angels, and so is actually in heaven, even while they’re still living in this world, in the body. While we’re in the body we aren’t directly conscious of the presence of those angels; we can’t feel the fulness of their joy. But we are with them. The inner regions of our spirits are completely safe. This is how the Lord protects all good people.

Here’s another passage from the Heavenly Doctrine that explains, in a little more detail, how all of this works. The important distinction that this passage introduces is the distinction between the external mind and the internal mind. The external mind is where we live most of the time. It’s the part of us that we’re conscious of, the part that interacts with this world. The internal mind is a much deeper part of us that we usually aren’t directly conscious of. It’s the part of us that’s able to be with the angels, even while we live in this world. We read: [SH §6247.2].

While we’re being reformed—that is, while we’re being made into the people that we’re meant to be—evils and falsities are let into our external minds. This is permitted to happen because when we come face-to-face with evil, we have an opportunity to consciously reject it. We experience these evils and falsities as fear, as confusion, as anger—as troubled thoughts and feelings of every kind. These things can fill our external minds… and yet we can be so protected by the goodness and truth that flow into us through the internal that hell cannot harm us. All of that evil might feel so close, but it needn’t have any power over us at all. If the Lord is with us, it will wash over us and leave what we really are unscathed.

But that second reading introduced an important caveat: “But there must in that case be goodness and truth in the external in which influx from the internal can be firmly established” (ibid.). In other words, we have to give heaven’s power a foothold somewhere in our external lives. We have to do something good, something right, so that heaven has something it can throw its weight behind. And the really hard part is that if we’re going to be doing good—if we’re going to be giving heaven an opportunity to act into our lives—we can’t be doing evil at the same time.

To put all of this in terms of life as we might experience it: sometimes our minds are full of fear, or doubt, or resentment, or some other spirit that we want to be far away from. Sometimes hell seems close to us. When this is how we feel, our instinct might be to do our very best to hide from our feelings altogether. But when we try to hide from those unpleasant feelings, we often end up being driven by them. We let them spill into the way that we treat other people. It is virtually impossible for our hearts to feel safe while we’re being unkind to another human being. The Heavenly Doctrine says that enmity, hatred and revenge “avert and repel” the Lord’s protection (AE §556.9). So we need to try our hardest to be decent human beings—not necessarily because we feel like decent human beings, but because it’s the right thing to do. Because other people deserve to be treated decently. We need to give heaven a foothold: we need to give the angels something to work with. When we do that, heaven’s love and heaven’s peace are carried to the heart of us. A safe space is created, in the very center of our lives.

The hard part is that even while our spirits are being protected this way, the worldly fears and tensions that made us feel troubled in the first place tend to remain what they are. To rise above those things and find peace with the Lord even while our worldly problems remain requires tremendous faith. It can require a kind of fierce determination. It’s not an easy thing to do. But we can flip that line of thought on its head: we don’t have to fix all the problems of this world before we can find peace. Which is good news, because often those problems are too much for us to fix. We can find peace with the Lord while the darkness remains. In time, as we create those footholds for heaven, that internal safety will become more real to us. We’ll learn to recognize the moments in our lives in which we are Daniel in the lions’ den, or Mary and Joseph in the dark, fleeing to Egypt. We’ll learn to look at the darkness, see it for what it is, grieve for it if we have to, and believe nonetheless that the center of our life is calm, is safe—because there, in the center of our life, God is present.

The more you look at the Word of the Lord, the clearer it becomes that His power to protect us from within is something He longs for us to believe in. So He says, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27).

Amen.

Spiritual Safety

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; December 29, 2024

Readings: Matthew 2:13-16 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §§2379, 6724.2

            One of the things that’s most striking about the story of the flight to Egypt is just how vulnerable the baby Lord was in that moment. Here He was, the Savior that the world had waited for. The salvation of the human race depended on Him. Yet He was a baby—He was incapable of defending Himself. If His enemies had gotten their hands on Him, it would have been over.

            And for protection, He had Mary and Joseph—two very ordinary people. There’s probably a part of us that says that it would have made more sense for the Lord to have been born into some circumstance in which He could have been surrounded by elite bodyguards at all times. After all, He was so important. But no—Mary and Joseph were all He had. Think of them leaving Bethlehem by night; imagine how scary the darkness all around them would have seemed to them. What if Herod’s soldiers met them along the way? What could they have done?

            In this story, the baby Lord seems so close to the danger, so close to the darkness that wanted to swallow Him up. And yet, Herod never laid a finger on the Lord. And Mary and Joseph weren’t actually alone—they weren’t the Lord’s only protectors. To their eyes it would have seemed like they were, but in fact, heaven was with them. And actually, angels who will guide you away from danger before it ever comes near to you are better protection than hundreds of bodyguards.

            In this story, it seems that the Lord is so close to the things that want to hurt Him; it seems that there is almost no barrier between Him and the darkness. Yet the truth is that He is completely safe. And this is a pattern, or a theme, in the Scriptures: when the Lord protects people, He doesn’t always supply the kinds of barriers and buffer zones that His people might wish for. Danger remains so close to them: it surrounds them completely. And yet, His people are completely safe. This pattern, or this kind of protection, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the rest of today’s service—because this pattern reflects how the Lord protects our spirits. When our minds and our hearts are crowded and oppressed by anxiety, by fear, by troubles that we can’t solve, it can seem to us that heaven’s protection is far from us. But it needn’t be so. It can seem to us that we will never feel safe unless our troubles are somehow driven far away. But it needn’t be so. The Lord protects us from within, and He can make the heart of who we are into something that all the fear and all the darkness simply cannot touch.

            To begin with, we’ll look at a few more examples of this kind of protection in the Scriptures. The story of Daniel in the lions’ den is a particularly good example. Daniel was a slave in Babylon who served king Darius. He was also a faithful servant of the Lord, who prayed to the Lord three times a day. A number of powerful people in that kingdom were envious of Daniel, because he was a talented man. So they persuaded the king to make the worship of the Lord illegal. But Daniel continued to pray to the Lord three times a day, so he fell afoul of the new law. As a consequence, he was thrown into a den of lions. We read:

So the king gave the command, and they brought Daniel and cast him into the den of lions. But the king spoke, saying to Daniel, “Your God, whom you serve continually, He will deliver you.” Then a stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring…. (Dan. 6:16, 17).

Obviously this was meant to be a death sentence. What could an unarmed man possibly do to protect himself from a caveful of hungry lions? But Daniel was unscathed. We read:

Then the king arose very early in the morning and went in haste to the den of lions. And when he came to the den, he cried out with a lamenting voice to Daniel. The king spoke, saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?”

Then Daniel said to the king, “O king, live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths, so that they have not hurt me, because I was found innocent before Him….” (Dan. 6:19-22)

If you were to spend a night surrounded by lions, what would you require, in order to believe that we were safe? A steel fence? A concrete wall? Maybe both? How hard would it be to believe that you were safe if you had none of those things? Daniel had no such protection: the lions were just there. Yet he was safe. The lions in this story symbolize predatory spirits from hell, spirits that want to consume our happiness. We’d all prefer it if we never had to think about these spirits—if they could be shut away behind a great big wall. But sometimes they are close. Even so, the Lord can protect the heart of us. Daniel spent the night in the lion’s den, and the Lord shut the lions’ mouths. And in the morning, Daniel was set free.

There are many more stories in the Word that follow this pattern—too many to name them all. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship a false God. They walked out of the fire unscathed (Dan. 3). Noah and his family were tossed on the waters of the flood for forty days and forty nights, surrounded by chaos; but they were safe inside the ark (Genesis 7). Even the crucifixion story in the gospel follows this pattern. Throughout the crucifixion sequence, the Lord is surrounded by hatred, by mockeries of justice—and none of that evil sticks to Him. He rises above it all. So, on the cross, He says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” (Luke 23:34).

In the book of Genesis, there’s a story in which a man named Lot tries to protect two angels who have come to stay at his house from a mob. The mob surrounds Lot’s house (Gen. 19:4). Lot goes out and tries to reason with them, but they intend violence. Then, we read, the two angels “reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door” (v. 10). There was still a mob outside, but Lot was brought into the house, to be with the angels. Here’s how the internal meaning of these words is explained in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church: [read SH §2379].

Those who are brought into good are brought into heaven, and those who are brought into heaven are brought to the Lord, and so are protected against every assault on their souls. This is what it all comes down to: when we do the right thing, our souls are brought into the presence of the Lord. The things in our external lives that trouble us won’t simply disappear. But in the midst of those things, we can find peace with the Lord. And that peace can be more than some sort of lovely, distant promise: it can be where the heart of us lives.

The reading says that a person with whom good is present is in communion with angels, and so is actually in heaven, even while they’re still living in this world, in the body. While we’re in the body we aren’t directly conscious of the presence of those angels; we can’t feel the fulness of their joy. But we are with them. The inner regions of our spirits are completely safe. This is how the Lord protects all good people.

Here’s another passage from the Heavenly Doctrine that explains, in a little more detail, how all of this works. The important distinction that this passage introduces is the distinction between the external mind and the internal mind. The external mind is where we live most of the time. It’s the part of us that we’re conscious of, the part that interacts with this world. The internal mind is a much deeper part of us that we usually aren’t directly conscious of. It’s the part of us that’s able to be with the angels, even while we live in this world. We read: [SH §6247.2].

While we’re being reformed—that is, while we’re being made into the people that we’re meant to be—evils and falsities are let into our external minds. This is permitted to happen because when we come face-to-face with evil, we have an opportunity to consciously reject it. We experience these evils and falsities as fear, as confusion, as anger—as troubled thoughts and feelings of every kind. These things can fill our external minds… and yet we can be so protected by the goodness and truth that flow into us through the internal that hell cannot harm us. All of that evil might feel so close, but it needn’t have any power over us at all. If the Lord is with us, it will wash over us and leave what we really are unscathed.

But that second reading introduced an important caveat: “But there must in that case be goodness and truth in the external in which influx from the internal can be firmly established” (ibid.). In other words, we have to give heaven’s power a foothold somewhere in our external lives. We have to do something good, something right, so that heaven has something it can throw its weight behind. And the really hard part is that if we’re going to be doing good—if we’re going to be giving heaven an opportunity to act into our lives—we can’t be doing evil at the same time.

To put all of this in terms of life as we might experience it: sometimes our minds are full of fear, or doubt, or resentment, or some other spirit that we want to be far away from. Sometimes hell seems close to us. When this is how we feel, our instinct might be to do our very best to hide from our feelings altogether. But when we try to hide from those unpleasant feelings, we often end up being driven by them. We let them spill into the way that we treat other people. It is virtually impossible for our hearts to feel safe while we’re being unkind to another human being. The Heavenly Doctrine says that enmity, hatred and revenge “avert and repel” the Lord’s protection (AE §556.9). So we need to try our hardest to be decent human beings—not necessarily because we feel like decent human beings, but because it’s the right thing to do. Because other people deserve to be treated decently. We need to give heaven a foothold: we need to give the angels something to work with. When we do that, heaven’s love and heaven’s peace are carried to the heart of us. A safe space is created, in the very center of our lives.

The hard part is that even while our spirits are being protected this way, the worldly fears and tensions that made us feel troubled in the first place tend to remain what they are. To rise above those things and find peace with the Lord even while our worldly problems remain requires tremendous faith. It can require a kind of fierce determination. It’s not an easy thing to do. But we can flip that line of thought on its head: we don’t have to fix all the problems of this world before we can find peace. Which is good news, because often those problems are too much for us to fix. We can find peace with the Lord while the darkness remains. In time, as we create those footholds for heaven, that internal safety will become more real to us. We’ll learn to recognize the moments in our lives in which we are Daniel in the lions’ den, or Mary and Joseph in the dark, fleeing to Egypt. We’ll learn to look at the darkness, see it for what it is, grieve for it if we have to, and believe nonetheless that the center of our life is calm, is safe—because there, in the center of our life, God is present.

The more you look at the Word of the Lord, the clearer it becomes that His power to protect us from within is something He longs for us to believe in. So He says, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27).

Amen.

Does It Cost Us Anything to Magnify the Lord?

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; December 15, 2024

Readings: Luke 1:36-38 (children’s talk), 39-56; Secrets of Heaven §§7550, 4459.4

            In this portion of today’s service, we’re going to continue to follow Mary’s story, as it’s recounted in the gospel of Luke. This next reading picks up exactly where the reading for the children’s talk left off. We read: [1:39-56].

            This scene is full of tender moments, and full of joy. Elizabeth’s unborn child leaps in her womb—the innocence that surrounded that baby was alive and awake to the presence of the Lord, though the Lord’s human form had only just begun to grow within Mary. The deference that Elizabeth shows to Mary is also touching. Elizabeth was older than Mary, and theirs was a culture in which seniority was important. But Elizabeth suggests that she’s unworthy that the mother of her Lord should come to her (v. 43). Mary and Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s baby all seem to be sharing a sense of joyful astonishment. Then Mary praises the Lord, and her praise begins with the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (v. 46).

            The psalm, or prayer, that Mary voices in this scene is often called the Magnificat, because in Latin translations of the Bible, the first word of this prayer is magnificat, which means “magnifies.” Magnificat anima mea Dominum—“my soul magnifies the Lord.” To magnify the Lord is to make Him great. The rest of this sermon is going to be about the Magnificat. Mary’s joy in the Lord, and the humility that she voices here, set an example for us to follow. We aren’t Mary, but the Lord loves us just as much as He loved her—so in the end, we have just as much to rejoice in. The specific question that we’re going to explore today is, Does it cost us anything to magnify the Lord? The answer is both “yes” and “no.”

            We’ll look first at why the answer is “no.” In general, it doesn’t cost us anything to praise anybody. If, for example, we say that another human being looks good in the clothes they’re wearing, we’re not simultaneously saying that our own clothes make us look bad. Another person’s profit doesn’t have to be our loss. Praising another person doesn’t cost us anything, because it isn’t about us at all. At least, it shouldn’t be—sometimes we praise people because we’re hoping to receive compliments in return. But that isn’t real praise: real praise is a heartfelt expression of joy, and it looks outward, not inward. Praising the Lord isn’t so very different from praising another person: it isn’t about us, so why should it cost us anything? What do we lose when we magnify the Lord?

            That said, the reality might be that when we try to do as Mary does in this story, we’ll feel like we’re losing something. There is a sense in which magnifying the Lord costs us something. It can feel like it costs us a great deal. This is assuming that our praises are heartfelt. Empty praise is cheap: we can pour out empty praise all day, and the only cost will be a tired throat. To praise the Lord from the heart takes a little more than that. We’re going to spend some time exploring why this is; the first thing we’re going to do is look more closely at Mary’s words.

            Some of the things she says are completely self-explanatory: “My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior… He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name” (vv. 47, 49). But other parts of the Magnificat are less obviously connected to the good news that both Mary and Elizabeth had received. Mary says that the Lord, “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty” (vv. 51-53). Obviously it’s good to fill the hungry with good things… but what do the proud and the mighty and the rich have to do with any of Mary’s blessings?

One interpretation of these words is that Mary is exulting because she—and not some rich or powerful woman—was chosen to be the mother of the Lord. At the beginning of the Magnificat Mary identifies herself as a lowly maidservant (v. 48). Since that’s how she saw herself, it makes sense that she would be surprised to receive the honor that she was given. That sort of surprise is lovely and admirable. But for Mary to exult over the rich and mighty women who weren’t honored as she herself was honored wouldn’t be so admirable.

A better interpretation of these words is that the terms “rich” and “mighty” and “lowly” and “hungry” are all being used symbolically, and that what Mary is really celebrating is that justice is being done. The Lord has come to bring justice to his people. There are a number of passages in the Old Testament that associate the rich with profiting at the expense of others. For example, in Jeremiah we read, “For among My people are found wicked men; they lie in wait as one who sets snares; they set a trap; they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become great and grown rich” (5:26, 27). This doesn’t mean that people who are literally rich are also always wicked and deceitful. The point is that the word “rich” has these symbolic associations in passages like that one from Jeremiah, and that Mary’s words in the Magnificat draw on those associations.

And if Mary is using symbolic language when she speaks of the rich and the mighty, then she’s also using symbolic language when she speaks of the lowly and the hungry. And she associates herself with the lowly and the hungry. As part of her praise of the Lord, she identifies herself as someone who is low and in need—not literally or externally, but in a deeper sense. In other words, she magnifies the Lord, and—subtly—she makes herself low. There is a connection between those two things.

Elsewhere in the Gospel, John the Baptist makes the same connection, but much more overtly. When Jesus begins His public ministry, John’s disciples come to him and note how everyone is going to Jesus to be baptized (John 3:26). Essentially they point out that Jesus is “upstaging” John, or stealing his thunder. But John is at peace with this, because he knows that Jesus is Christ the Lord, and that he himself is not (v. 28). And John says, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (v. 30). As the Lord is magnified, we ourselves diminish—or at least that’s sometimes how it seems.

What all of these ideas boil down to is this: if God is great, then greatness is His, and it’s not ours. Everybody who believes in God knows this, but we don’t always get it. To magnify the Lord is to get it—to recognize and acknowledge that He is great, to feel a dawning awe and humility because He is what we can never be. And that costs us something: the cost is that we have to recognize what we’re not.

We turn now to the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, to a passage from the book Secrets of Heaven. The first part of this passage, which I’m not going to read, is about the spiritual meaning of a Scripture from Exodus in which the Lord says that He wants His name to be declared in all the earth (9:16). The passage then acknowledges that when the Lord speaks this way, it can sound to us like He’s being selfish—like all He cares about is His own glory. But the reading then explains that that is not the case: when the Lord speaks of His greatness, He does so not for His own sake, but for ours. We read: [§7550].

The Lord extols His own power and glory in the Word because it is so important that we learn to humble ourselves before Him. He wants to save us, and to give us eternal happiness—but He cannot do that unless we’re willing to worship Him in humility. To worship Him in humility is to praise Him, to magnify Him—but, according to that reading, worshipping Him in humility also requires that we acknowledge that, left to ourselves, we are dust and ashes, that is, nothing but evil. And it must be said that that is a challenging teaching.

Sure, the Lord is greater than we are… but do we really have to make ourselves so very low? It’s important to understand this teaching correctly: the Lord does not want us to believe that everything we’ve ever done or thought or felt has been evil. We’ve all done good things; we all love good things, and those loves are real. But humility is to recognize that those good loves are blessings that we’ve been given: God kindled those fires within us. The power to do a good deed—to help another human being—isn’t something that we create within ourselves. It’s God’s power moving within us, flowing through our very veins. Without Him, we really would have nothing. He is never going to forsake us, so we’re never going to be reduced to dust and ashes. But everything that makes us more than dust and ashes is a blessing from a Divine Father who loves us. And it’s when we understand this that we truly see the greatness of God.

Acknowledging our own lowliness isn’t really about making ourselves low. We are very lowly, compared to God—but when we dwell on our own lowliness, we miss the point. The point is that we understand the difference between ourselves and the Lord. He does not want us to hate ourselves, or to look upon ourselves with contempt. Far from it. That’s not the point. What matters is that we know—really know—that we are not God. We’re not God at all. If we lay claim to what is His, we’ve put unclean hands on something Holy. It is not ours. We’re not like that Holiness—not like it at all. If we make ourselves our own gods, then the Lord can’t be our God, and the stream of blessings that He would pour into us is cut off. We can’t bless ourselves with those blessings. We have nothing. Our hands are empty—our spirits are dust and our hearts are ash. But the Lord, the Lord is God, and all blessings are His to give to His children.

To truly magnify the Lord—to magnify Him from the heart—we have to understand just how unlike Him we ourselves are. And that can feel like a heavy price to pay. Humility is not easily learned. But the real truth, the deeper truth, is that in the end, magnifying the Lord costs us nothing at all—because everything that we give away when we humble ourselves before Him is paid back many times over, in the end. Humbling ourselves might feel hard at first—it might make us feel wretched and unhappy with ourselves. But that is not where we remain. Because, as we heard in the reading from Secrets of Heaven, when we humble ourselves, the Lord flows in with the life of His love (§7550). In the Gospel He says, “whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11, 18:14). When we acknowledge the difference between ourselves and the Lord, the Lord is able to lift us up—to fill our spirits with elation. The reward for humility isn’t a pat on the back or a spiritual gold star for us to stick on our foreheads: the reward is a living awareness of the blessings and the power that the Lord gives to us. In Secrets of Heaven we read: [§4459.4].

To conclude this sermon, let’s circle back to Mary: Mary humbled herself before the Lord. She called herself lowly (Luke 1:48) She called herself a servant of the Lord (vv. 38, 48). Did choosing to regard herself that way make her feel miserable? Not in the slightest. The Lord had blessed her, and she knew it. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior” (vv. 46, 47).

Amen.

The Lord Whose Coming We Await

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; December 1, 2024

Readings: Isaiah 9:6, 7 (children’s talk), 42:1-7, Secrets of Heaven §905; Isaiah 59:15-19;

True Christian Religion §123; Malachi 3:1-3

            If you read through the Old Testament, something you may be struck by is just how much of it consists of prophecies of the Lord’s advent. The prophecy I read to the children is one of the most famous, but there are so many more. On the deepest level, the entirety of the Old Testament is about the Lord who was to come (cf. Luke 24:27). Why is so much of the Word devoted to this topic? It seems that the Lord really wanted His people to think about what would happen when He came to them.

            We just started the Christmas season, which means that we’re getting ready to celebrate the advent that the Lord made a long time ago—but one of the teachings of the New Church is that the Lord’s advent is ongoing. He is waiting to be received, waiting to be—as it were—born to each of us individually. When we receive Him, which happens when we acknowledge Him as our God, that is His first coming (TCR §766). And over time, our acknowledgment of the Lord can change, and deepen. When it does, He comes to us again: He enters our awareness in a new way.

This means that all of those prophecies of the Lord’s advent are about something that happened a long time ago, but they’re also about the Lord whom we receive, and about what goes on within our spirits when we receive Him. Again, this is something that the Word talks about a lot. When you look at the Word, and at just how many prophecies it contains, it stands out that the Lord wants us to think about His advent to us. And why? Maybe that’s a silly question. Who is the God who is drawing near to us? What will it feel like when He comes close? We won’t be ready to receive Him if we’re expecting something other than what He really is.

The rest of this sermon is going to be built around three different prophecies of the Lord’s advent. They’re all very different—they have different tones, and emphasize different aspects of the Lord. Two things that you’re invited to reflect on as you listen to these prophecies are: 1) That the Lord’s advent doesn’t always feel the same. He comes to us in different ways at different points in our lives. The tone of His advent has a lot to do with what’s going on inside of us. So what kind of advent do you need right now? And 2) as I was saying to the children, the Lord is many different things, but He is also one Lord. We can focus on His strength, or His love, or whatever we need to focus on. But to truly know Him, we need to understand that He is loving, and strong, and so many other things, at once.

The first prophecy is from the book of Isaiah. Throughout this prophecy the Lord is talking about the humanity that He will take on when He is born on earth. The “Servant” that is mentioned in the first line of the prophecy refers to that humanity that would be born to Him, because that humanity served the Divine that was within Him (SH §2159). We read: [42:1-7].

This prophecy emphasizes the Lord’s gentleness and His compassion. It’s easy to see that the Messiah who is described here is the same person as Jesus Christ who is revealed in the gospel. The prophecy says that He won’t cry out or raise His voice (v. 2). In the gospel Jesus does cry out occasionally (John 7:28, 37; 12:44), but for the most part He’s strikingly patient, and understated, and gentle. The prophecy says that He will bring justice to the gentiles, will open blind eyes and bring prisoners out of prison (vv. 1, 7). This is a picture of a God who comes to us as a healer and a savior. This is the God that we need when our hearts ache, when we’re in a rut and we know it, when we need to be comforted, and shown something we can hope in. The Lord comes to us to do exactly these things. The prophecy says that He is given as “a covenant to the people” and “a light to the gentiles” (v. 6). He is light: His presence is a promise that heaven is within our reach.

One especially interesting detail in this prophecy is the statement that the Lord won’t break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax. What this means, in the literal sense, is that the Lord won’t destroy anything—not even trivial things like reeds, not even if they’re already damaged. This is a picture of how He treats us. There are a lot of things inside of us that are damaged: motives that are flawed, ideas that are incorrect. But the Lord doesn’t break these things; instead, we’re told, He bends them towards truth and good (SH §25). The Lord is gentle, even with the parts of us that are messed up. This is the aspect of the Lord that most people are most likely to think they need—a God who forgives them, a God who loves them no matter what. The Lord is exactly that. This prophecy describes one of the ways that He comes to us.

As a conclusion to our reflections on this first prophecy, I’m going to read a passage from the Heavenly Doctrine that talks about the Lord’s gentleness and respect for us, and contrasts these qualities with the behavior of the hells, who are the ones who try to keep us in a wounded condition. We read: [SH §905]

The comments that that passage makes about the hells’ desire to dominate us make for a good segue to the next prophecy, because the next prophecy is about the Lord’s battle with the hells. This one is also from Isaiah, but it presents us with a very different image of the Lord: here He’s revealed as a warrior and a redeemer.  The context of this prophecy is a long description of the mess that the Lord’s people have gotten themselves into. Justice has fallen apart and nothing is safe. We read: [59:15-19].

The Lord saw that there was no justice, and it displeased Him (v. 15). He saw that His people were alone—that there was no one to intercede for them—so He Himself went out to fight for them. “His own arm brought salvation for Him” (v. 16). He armored Himself for battle, and clothed Himself with zeal as with a cloak (v. 17).

We don’t always like to think of the Lord as a warrior, but that’s at least partly because we don’t always like to think about just how scary hell actually is. But evil is real, and when we meet it—either in the outside world or within ourselves—and we realize that we’re looking at a spirit that means only harm, that’s when we might realize that we need the Lord who is revealed in this prophecy. When you’re losing your enemy, there is nothing so good as the arrival of an ally who will fight for you—a God who is strong enough to take you out of the enemy’s hands. He is stronger than the hells: that’s part of who He is, and that matters so much.

Something else that’s a little challenging is that this prophecy talks about the Lord seeking vengeance (vv. 17, 18): we need to understand that that’s just an appearance. The truth is that the Lord loves even the hells, and never seeks vengeance—but when He goes out to protect His people, the hells feel like He’s out for vengeance. There is a kind of ferocity to the Lord’s zeal. In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that the breastplate of righteousness with which the Lord arms Himself stands for “zeal for rescuing the faithful from hell and the Divine love of saving the human race” (AE §577.3). Think about it: if someone that you loved was in hell—literally in hell—but they wanted out, and you could get them out, wouldn’t you also clothe yourself with zeal, and go to meet the hells with a countenance that might frighten them?

The prophecy says that when He—the Lord—“comes in like a narrow river, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard within Him” (v. 19). A standard means a banner, and when we’re in the midst of a battle, the arrival of a banner is a sign that help has come. When the Lord comes to us with that banner, He is like a narrow river. His power pours into us like a rushing river. The power that He has against the hells is overwhelming—and we have no idea how much we need it, until we learn just how much we need it. In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told: [read TCR §123].

The last prophecy that we’ll consider today is from the book of Malachi. We read: [3:1-3]. This prophecy speaks first of a “messenger,” and then of the “Messenger of the Covenant” (v. 1). The messenger is John the Baptist, who prepared Judea for the coming of the Lord (see Luke 7:27; TCR §688). The Messenger of the Covenant is the Lord Himself. The prophecy says that He will, “suddenly come to His temple” (v. 1). His temple means His body, or the humanity that He took on when He was born on earth (see John 2:21; AR §882).

The things that this prophecy says next are kind of challenging: “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears?” (v. 2). The implication is that the Lord’s advent is frightening. The reason for this is that He is “like a refiner’s fire, and like launderer’s soap” (ibid.). A refiner’s fire is used to purify metals, and soap—obviously—is used to cleanse things. The things that need to be purified and cleansed are the Lord’s people. “He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver” (v. 3). The Heavenly Doctrine says that the sons of Levi symbolize people who belong to the Lord’s spiritual church (SH §§8159.2, 9293.6). We might be in the Lord’s spiritual church—or at least trying to be. The idea that the Lord is coming to purify us like fire and cleanse us like soap is challenging.

Prophecies that take this tone are probably the ones that we’re least likely to reach out for as we prepare ourselves for the advent of the Lord. We might not want to hear this sort of prophecy at Christmastime. But the fact of the matter is that most of the time, what stands between us and a new advent of the Lord is us—something in us that needs to be burned away. We’re told that a refiner’s fire symbolizes temptation (SH §8159.2). The Lord doesn’t tempt us, but when He comes close to us He gives us the power to withstand temptation. So sometimes His arrival triggers a spiritual crisis—now that He’s here, we’re ready to deal with something that we couldn’t have dealt with before. So something painful is brought to light—and that’s part of the process of healing. Letting Him to come close to us might feel like moving into that refining fire. His love burns bright and it will illuminate the jagged edges of ourselves—and that’s okay. It’s part of the process. If we’re going to receive Him, we need to be willing to be changed.

But we can’t forget the other aspects of the Lord that are revealed in the other prophecies. Yes, the Lord asks us to change—and even as He asks this, He is fighting for us with all His strength, and looking at us with more love than our hearts can hold. He is many things; He is Wonderful, Counselor, God, the Mighty One, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace (Is. 9:6).

Amen.

Dying So That We Can Live

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; November 24, 2024

Readings: Judges 16:21-31 (children’s talk); Revelation 14:12, 13; Apocalypse Revealed §639

            Samson defeated his enemies with a single motion—a final act of strength—and with the same motion, he laid down his own life. His last words were, “let me die with the Philistines” (Judges 16:30). So his death and his victory were simultaneous. This is an illustration of something that happens within our spirits. This story is about an aspect of our growth as human beings.

This union of death and victory can happen when a person’s physical body dies. Whenever one person lays down their life for another—as, for example, a soldier might do—that is a kind of victory. On a deeper level, every death can be a victory, because after the death of the body we rise again, and if we’re received into heaven, that is the ultimate victory. But today’s sermon isn’t about moving from this world to the next. Today we’re focusing on something a lot more mundane: the loss, or death, of something inside of us that needs to go, and the victory that comes with being willing to lay that thing down. Sometimes the choices that we need to make, in order to be decent people, in order to follow the Lord, feel like Samson’s choice. It’s as though we say to ourselves, “let me die with my enemies—I will get rid of this thing, this habit, whatever, though in the process I have to let go of a piece of myself.” In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told, “a person’s old self and its passions must die, in order that he may become a new creature” (SH §9708).

Last week we looked at the story of Samson’s defeat by Delilah. We talked about how obvious it should have been to Samson that Delilah meant him harm, and that cooperating with her was not going to lead him anywhere good. But the opening words of the Samson and Delilah story are these: “Afterward it happened that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah” (Judges 16:4). He loved Delilah, though she was clearly a destructive force in his life. And we do the same thing: we love things that aren’t good for us. We do things that clearly won’t make us happy in the long run, because we love those things. What we heard last week is that the Lord preserves everybody’s ability to see the truth (SH §10367.5). Even when we’re overwhelmed with desires to do the wrong thing, we can still see the truth, and that ability is our lifeline. It makes it possible for us to recognize that we don’t want to love the things we love. We don’t want Delilah anymore. We want to get out.

Today’s story is about how we escape. We can be set free from hellish loves. That’s one of those truths that we need to cling to with all our hearts. Just because we love something unhealthy right now does not mean that we have to love it forever. It can seem impossible that we could stop loving Delilah—that we could stop wanting what we want. But that’s where the Lord comes into the picture. He’s not called a Savior for nothing. In Isaiah He says, “I will go before you and make the crooked places straight; I will break in pieces the gates of bronze and cut the bars of iron” (45:2). Nothing is too wonderful for the Lord (cf. Gen. 18:14). There is no prison that He cannot break us out of. But the catch is that the part of us that wants to stay in prison has to die. The part of us that loves Delilah—or whatever Delilah stands for—has to die. Our task, our challenge, is to lay that love down: when we do, we receive freedom, and new life.

“Death” is a strong word, and using death as a symbol or a metaphor for an aspect of spiritual growth might seem a bit extreme. Surely the Lord doesn’t want us to feel like we’re dying. Of course He doesn’t. It should be said that when we talk about feeling like we’re dying, the image that comes to mind might extremely melodramatic—an image of Romeo feeling unable to go on because he believes that his Juliet is dead. The Lord doesn’t need us to experience anything that melodramatic. The kind of death that we’re talking about today—the death of an affection within ourselves—can be a quiet thing. It can be a choice that we make silently within our spirits. The people around us don’t have to know that it’s happening. We don’t have to be going through a crisis in our external lives. We just let go of something within ourselves. Sometimes that doesn’t even feel like dying—it just feels like the right thing to do. Other times it does feel like dying. It feels like tearing out a piece of our lives. And it’s important to use this kind of language, because when we feel like our lives are threatened, our instinct is to hold on with everything we have. It takes conscious and deliberate effort, and it takes trust in the Lord, for us to believe that this kind of loss is okay, and that it will actually make us happier in the end.

Samson’s death is not the only death in the Word that represents a willingness to receive new life. The Lord talks about death reasonably often, and in many cases it’s plain to see, even if we’re only looking at the literal sense of the Word, that He’s talking about something good. For example, here’s a brief passage from the book of Revelation: [read 14:12, 13].

We turn now to our reading from the Heavenly Doctrine: this is from the section in the book Apocalypse Revealed that explains the spiritual meaning of the words that we just heard from Revelation [read portions of §639].

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Rev. 14:13). The reading from Apocalypse Revealed makes it very clear that “death” here doesn’t mean physical death: it means the temptations or trials that people experience because of their faith in the Lord and their commitment to living in accordance with His commandments. These temptations are tests of character. It’s easy for us to say that we want to keep the Lord’s commandments—but what we do when that commitment is challenged is what determines who we are. What happens when there’s a part of us that really wants something that goes against the Lord’s commandments? That’s the test—that’s a temptation. And temptation is called “death” because when we let an unclean desire burn out, by refusing to feed it, it’s as though a part of us has died. But, as the reading says, that death is blessed—because in place of the thing that’s died we receive new life, and peace with the Lord.

We should spend some time talking about the last section of that reading, because almost every statement that it makes is challenging. It says that the dead—who are blessed—symbolize people who have afflicted their souls and crucified their flesh. Is that really what the Lord asks of us? Afflicting our souls sounds like really beating ourselves up, and crucifying our flesh sounds worse. These words may fill our minds with all sorts of melodramatic images, but again, the Lord doesn’t ask us to do anything melodramatic. “Crucifying the flesh,” though it sounds extreme, can actually be a quiet and ordinary sort of thing. Here’s a silly example: whenever we really want to eat another cookie, but we refuse to do so, we “crucify the flesh.” That bodily appetite that feels like it needs another cookie is pained when it looks at the plate of delicious cookies. It takes mettle to endure that pain and hold fast to our commitment to being done with cookies. This sort of struggle is ordinary. It may not be easy, but it isn’t mystical or frightening either. Of course, the more deeply we’re hooked on whatever it is that we want, but shouldn’t have, the harder and more painful it is for us to hold ourselves back.

The reading also says that people who crucify the flesh and undergo temptations end their previous life and “become as though dead in the eyes of the world.” Once again, that phrase sounds kind of extreme. Are religious people supposed to be so austere, so penitent and so gloomy that they hardly even seem to be alive? That can’t be what the Lord wants for us. Doing what He says is supposed to make us feel more alive, not less. What the reading actually says is that people who undergo temptations become as though dead “in the eyes of the world.” The world means everything around us that’s merely natural—everything around us that has nothing to do with spiritual life. The joy that we receive when we shake off our unhealthy desires is joy that the world cannot see. It’s joy that we can’t understand when we’re in a worldly state of mind. In a worldly state of mind, we say to ourselves, “I know that I’ll feel better if I lie my way out of this situation; I know that I’ll feel satisfaction if I take revenge on this person who has wronged me.” But in that state of mind, we don’t understand what we’re going to get if we withhold ourselves from those evils. When we let go of the things that need to go, all that our worldly mind can see is what we’re losing. And that’s important to understand, because sometimes the worldly mind is just about the only part of us that’s awake. The truth that we’re fighting for is a star shining alone in the dark, and down here on the ground, just about all we know is that this spiritual work stinks. It’s hard. We’re doing the things we know we’re supposed to do, and life hasn’t gotten any better just yet. We have to hold on. The light of the world cannot illuminate the reward that is given to us when we do that kind of work. But when we let go of worldly things, little by little the Lord wakes up our spirits—and in spiritual light, the benefits of victory over the world are unmistakable.

So what does it look like, in practice, to lay down our lives—to let go of a piece of ourselves? We’ve already talked about refusing to give in to bodily appetites; and refusing to lie, though lying would get us out of trouble; and refusing to seek revenge, though revenge would feel nice. In a word, whenever we choose to cling to the Lord and His commandments, instead of doing something that we want to do, we’re letting a part of ourselves die. Imagine being on the edge of throwing open a door, and storming into a room to share your anger with someone. Tearing yourself away from that door, and giving up your anger, might feel like tearing something out of yourself. And what about when our pride is wounded, and we realize that we need to let go of our pride? Sometimes our faith in the Lord flounders because life isn’t going the way it’s supposed to—and the truth is that our ideas about the way that life was supposed to go need to die.

In any case, to give these things up—to turn our backs on our anger, or our lust, or whatever it is that we once loved—is to take Samson’s final action. We separate ourselves from our enemies and, at the same time, we give up the part of us that loves them. Samson’s power to take that final action was a gift from the Lord. His hair, which regrew while he was in prison, symbolizes the truths of the Word of the Lord—truths that hold power. Our enemies—the hells—want to take that truth away from us, because without it, the only life we know is the life they give us. We end up being trapped in a prison that’s made out of our own affections.

Only, those affections aren’t ours. At least they don’t have to be. We don’t have to love the things the hells want us to love. The Word of the Lord speaks of eternal life and joy that the world cannot know—that can be our life and our joy. From the Lord and from His Word we can receive the strength of Samson—strength to cast off the old, strength to begin a new life. The Lord said, “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

Amen.

In Love With the Enemy

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; November 17, 2024

Readings: Judges 16:4-20 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §10367.5; Divine Providence §35

            It’s really obvious that Samson shouldn’t have cooperated with Delilah. He shouldn’t have told her the secret of his strength. What we’re going to focus on, in this portion of the service, is why he did this. Why did he behave so foolishly? The answer to that question isn’t exactly a secret either. The story tells us the answer in the very first verse: “it happened that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah” (Judges 16:4). He loved Delilah, and that meant more to him than a lot of other things.

            But even if you bear in mind that he loved her (or thought he loved her), when you look at this story with anything approaching a rational mindset, the questions just come flooding in. It’s obvious that he distrusted her from the beginning, because he told her lies from the beginning. Why, then, was he with her at all? Why does he bother to make up these elaborate lies about how he can be bound, once he’s had the opportunity to realize that Delilah will test his lies and she will see through them? And she accuses him of mocking her—she says, “How can you say, ‘I love you’” (vv. 10, 13, 15). No one wants to hear those sorts of things from someone they’re romantically involved with, but surely Samson could see what Delilah was trying to do to him. Why was the opinion of someone who was trying to destroy him worth so much to him? How could those accusations weigh on him more heavily than his desire to preserve his integrity and his own life? Is love really powerful enough to make us that irrational? Well yes, it is.

            Of course, our real focus today is on this story’s application to our own lives. The Word has an internal sense or a deeper meaning that is entirely about spiritual things, and both Samson and Delilah symbolize things that are part of our internal, spiritual, landscape. Last week we learned that Samson stands for a part of us that receives strength from the Lord. Specifically, we learned that Samson’s hair, which he was never to cut, symbolizes the truths of the letter of the Word—the teachings that are written in this book (SS §49.3, et al.). These truths have way more power than they might appear to. In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told: “The power of Divine truth is especially a power against falsities and evils, thus against the hells. One must fight against these by means of truths from the Word’s literal sense” (SS §49). As long as he didn’t cut his hair, Samson represented the power that can be present with us by means of the Word of the Lord. That’s why he was so strong.

But at the end of today’s story, Samson gives away his secret, and his hair is cut. This is a picture of us allowing ourselves to be separated from the truths that we know. Our spiritual enemies want to distance us from the Word, so that it becomes vague and remote, and not something that’s present in our lives with power.

            As I said to the children, Delilah symbolizes an evil spirit, or a hellish influence that is present with us (cf. SEm §§4746-4747). The story makes it pretty clear that Delilah is just not a nice person. It says that she “pestered [Samson] daily with her words, and pressed him, so that his soul was vexed to death” (Judges 16:16). What sort of spirit treats us like that? Then when she’s finally defeated Samson the story says that she “began to torment him” (v. 19). So she stands for something present with us that really doesn’t wish us well. But Samson loved Delilah—that’s the crux of the whole story. This thing that Delilah symbolizes is something that we love—something within our spirits that we value, and listen to—even though it’s clear that it isn’t good for us. So the question is, what are the “Delilahs” in our lives? What is it that we love, and hold onto, even though we know that it doesn’t do us any good?

            There are two things that I want to address, just to get them out of the way, so that they don’t lead our thoughts down the wrong track. The first is that sometimes we treat love like it’s always a good thing, but love can be unhealthy. When we say that a man loves a woman, we could be talking about a husband’s commitment to his wife, which is a beautiful kind of love, or we could be talking about a really shallow kind of love—love that doesn’t go much deeper than infatuation with a woman’s beauty. It’s pretty obvious that Samson’s love for Delilah was the second kind.

            The second thing I want to address is that this story is not making a universal statement about relationships between men and women. In this particular story, Delilah is the villain and Samson, though he’s not very bright, is the hero. This is not a commentary on our own relationships. Notably, this story is not here to give men permission to conclude that the women in their lives are the problem. Really, the story isn’t about romantic love, or relationships, at all. These things are just illustrations of spiritual dynamics. Both Samson and Delilah stand for things that are present with everybody’s spirit: Samson is a part of us that’s strengthened by the Lord’s truth, and Delilah is something that attracts us—something we love—even though it means us harm.

            With those things out of the way, let’s go back to the idea that Samson’s love for Delilah caused him to make bad decisions—decisions that flew in the face of reason. The same thing happens to us. Unhealthy loves will persuade us to make decisions that we know to be bad. Love can make us forget the truth we know. We’re going to turn, now, to the Heavenly Doctrine—to a couple of passages that talk about love’s ability to override the truth we know. The first of these passages is from Secrets of Heaven: [read §10367.5]

            The basic message of that reading is that people who love their evils can know the truth, but they can’t be healed by it, or empowered by it. The passage says that people who love their evils, whatever those evils may be, can’t be regenerated. They can’t go to heaven. That’s a scary statement, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for you if you love something bad. One of the fundamental truths of the faith of the New Church is that we can change what we love. We can reject evil loves and learn to love better things. The reading also says that everyone can “grasp and have some understanding” of the truths of the Word—and it says that the ability to do this is something that the Lord preserves in everybody, even in evil people, because that ability to see the truth is what makes it possible for us to be regenerated. That ability is our lifeline, when we’re in a dark place. And the last thing that the reading says is that when people love evil, the truth they know only makes it as far as the external mind. And truth that is in the external mind, and not at the same time in the internal, has no power over us. It’s just knowledge. We like to imagine that knowing the truth, or knowing what we should do, is enough to make us do what we should do. But when merely external knowledge butts heads with what we want, what we want is going to win, every time.

The next reading gives makes it even easier to understand what this merely external truth is like. This passage is from Divine Providence [read §35].

Wisdom that isn’t joined to love is the same thing as merely external truth. Such wisdom is “like a meteor in the sky that vanishes, or like a falling star.” That image is pretty helpful. Can you think of a time in your life when you wanted to do something, and the truth “I’m not supposed to do this” flashed across your mind like a shooting star, and then that truth went dark, and you did the thing you wanted to do? We are ruled by what we love, and rational truths that we don’t actually care about have almost no power to withstand what we love. Our loves can make us forget what we know—they can override our rational minds. Just like Delilah did to Samson.

So, again, what are the things in our lives that behave like Delilah? They could be any number of things. They could be patterns of interaction with other people: we get nasty and give someone a piece of our mind, or we talk about people behind their backs, even though there’s a part of us that knows that we’re going to feel bad when we walk away from those conversations. Addictions behave like Delilah. To be addicted is to be in a pattern of indulging a behavior, because we feel like we need that behavior in order to feel good, even though the behavior is causing us harm, and we know it. The “classic” addictions are to drugs and to alcohol, but people can be addicted to all kinds of things: food, pornography… even endlessly scrolling on their phones. And these are just a few examples of things we might do as a result of holding on to what we love, even when it’s plain to see that those loves are harmful.

The way out is simple enough, though it isn’t easy. The reading from Divine Providence told us what we need to do: “A person has a love of wisdom to the extent that he shuns the devil’s crew, which are the lusts of evil and falsity” (§35). When we shun the lusts of evil and falsity, the wisdom, that we possess is joined to love, and that’s when we receive the power to resist evil. So we need to shun—or flee from—that thing that behaves like Delilah. We need to look at it as honestly as we possibly can, and be as honest as we possibly can about the hell that that love is dragging us into. And we need to reach a point where we’re willing to say that we don’t want that thing. Remember, the Lord preserves our ability to see the truth, even when we’re soaked with desires to do the wrong thing, and that ability is our lifeline. The light of a shooting star doesn’t illuminate very much, but even that fleeting light can tip us off that the thing we’re in love with is monstrous. We need to reach a point where we want to get away from that thing. Being honest enough ask ourselves “why am I doing this?” is a first step. And then we need to run away from that thing that behaves like Delilah.

Rejecting that evil can be the same thing as fighting for the Lord’s truth, because the Lord told us not to do evil. He said, “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal,” and so on (Ex. 20:13-15). One of the reasons why these commandments are phrased in the negative is that sometimes the truth that evil is evil is just about the only truth that we can see clearly enough to hold onto. If we reject evil, and we reject it not just because it hurts us, but because the Lord said not to do it, then we’re holding on to the truths of the letter of the Word. And those truths have power. And that’s like Samson refusing to let Delilah cut his hair.

Of course, in the story Samson does let Delilah cut his hair. So today’s story is about one of those times when the bad guys win. There’s really nothing that’s cheerful or uplifting about the story that we heard today. But that’s because the story isn’t over. Next week we’re going to look at the part of the story where Samson’s power is restored to him. If we look at the whole arc of the Samson story, one of its clearest messages is that the Lord can redeem us even when we really mess up. As long as we draw breath there is hope, because the Lord will always give us a chance to try again. And with God all things are possible.

So where I want to leave you today is with the thought that sometimes Delilah wins—sometimes the hells get their way. And that doesn’t mean that it’s over. In the book of Micah we read:

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)

Amen.