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.