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.