Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; February 23, 2025
Readings: 1 Samuel 28:6-17; Mark 10:17-22; Secrets of Heaven §9014.3; Heaven and Hell §533
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Today’s sermon is about looking for miracles. It’s about the idea that there are things out there, that we can find, that will make our problems “just go away.” Most people are wise enough to remember—at least most of the time—that life doesn’t work that way. Problems don’t magically disappear. But the urge to look for magical solutions is powerful, and maybe it sways our thinking more than we realize. And, just to make things more complicated, maybe there’s kind of miracle that we should be looking for. After all, the Word of the Lord is full of miracles.
In today’s story from first Samuel, Saul turns to actual magic to fix his problems. He seeks the help of a “mistress of necromancy” (28:7ff). And he does this specifically to bypass the Lord, because the Lord isn’t answering him—or at least, isn’t telling him the answers that he wants to hear. This shortcut, this quick fix, doesn’t work out for Saul. Now we’re going to turn to the gospel of Mark, to hear another story about someone who was probably looking for a shortcut. We read: [10:17-22].
Why did that man go away sorrowful (v. 22)? The reading says that it was because he had “great possessions” (ibid.). Evidently he was also quite attached to his possessions, and didn’t want to sell them and give to the poor, as the Lord had instructed (v. 21). But that instruction wouldn’t have upset him so much if he’d been expecting it. Clearly he was hoping for a different answer. When he enthusiastically asked the Lord, “what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” (v. 17), he was hoping or even expecting to be told to do something easy. He seems to have taken the first part of the Lord’s answer as a confirmation that it really would be easy. “All I have to do is keep the commandments? I’ve always done that!” (v. 20). We get the impression that for a moment this man dared to hope that the Lord was about to tell him, “congratulations—you’ve already crossed the finish line.”
But no. The Lord said he had to do more. He had to sell his possessions—which means he had to let go of his love of riches. He had to take up his cross—that is, he had to enter into temptation and fight against evil. And he had to follow the Lord (v. 21; cf. Life §66). So much for having crossed the finish line.
There’s something inside of everybody that doesn’t want to hear that we have to work to get where we want to go. If it wasn’t so, the market wouldn’t be flooded with so many products that “guarantee” quick and easy results. Think about just how many ads are designed to convince us that the advertised product is a shortcut to something that we would otherwise have to work for. Everybody knows, at least in one half of their brain, that magical solutions are almost always too good to be true, and that old-fashioned work is often the only way to do something properly. But there are thousands of “miracle products” out there, and they wouldn’t be sold if no one bought them. Think about how popular casinos are—and what is gambling if not hoping for a kind of miracle?
There are so many subtle ways in which we get lured into this kind of thinking. Without realizing it, we convince ourselves that if we could just attain this one goal, we’d be set—our lives would come together and we’d be happy. “If I could just get that job, if I could just find my soul mate, if I could just get through this one hardship that’s in front of me right now, the rest would be smooth sailing.” Or we secretly convince ourselves that some new activity is going to turn our lives around: “If I could just start a daily exercise habit, I’d have so much more energy and would be so much more productive.” A thought like that might even be mostly true, but often we expect too much. And then we give up the good habit when it turns out that it doesn’t fix everything. Coming at it from a different angle, this longing for magical solutions is also one of the reasons why people take drugs, or drink heavily, or even simply eat too much junk food. We look to something that’s within our reach to “just make it all better” for a short time.
And of course, people have come up with a lot of magical solutions within the realm of religion. There are no shortcuts to heaven, but religions often promise shortcuts, because shortcuts are what people want. “If you give X amount of money to the church, your salvation is assured.” “If you participate in this one ritual, your salvation is assured.” “If you say these words, if you believe these ideas, if you belong to this group, your salvation is assured.”
The man in the reading from Mark wanted to hear that there was a quick and easy path to heaven. He didn’t want to hear what the Lord told him. Of course, what the Lord said to that man is said to all of us. If we want to inherit eternal life, we have to keep the commandments. But being good on the outside isn’t enough. We also have to take up the cross internally, and follow the Lord in our hearts. Following Him may not be hard, but it isn’t quick and easy either. It isn’t something we just do once. If we follow Him for a month and then stop following Him, we’re not following Him.
The Lord consistently teaches that we simply need to do the work He gives us to do, one day at a time, one step at a time, for as long as it takes. This has always been His message, but in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church these ideas are made especially clear. We’re going to turn to the Heavenly Doctrine now, and listen to two passages that talk about the gradual nature of spiritual change. The first is from Secrets of Heaven: [read §9014.3].
This passage focuses on forgiveness, not on salvation in general. But being forgiven is part of salvation, so if being forgiven takes time, then salvation takes time. And the point that this passage is making is that the forgiveness of sins “cannot take place within an hour, nor within a year” (ibid.). It’s easy for us to imagine that we’ll be forgiven as soon as God says the word, and that His forgiveness is like water He can pour over us, washing us clean immediately. The truth is more complicated. The Lord always forgives us. He has no desire whatsoever to hold us down. But to truly be forgiven is to be set free from the evil that we once acted on, and we can’t be set free from that evil unless we separate ourselves from it. So we have to repent, we have to begin a new life, and we have to stay the course. If we stay the course, there will come a point at which we’ve entered so fully into the new life that we want nothing to do with the old life. We’ll look back at the evils of our former life and “abhor” them (ibid.). And that’s the point at which we’re truly forgiven, because that’s the point at which the Lord’s forgiveness comes home to us. But to get there we have to turn our lives around, and we have to make that change real by living it day after day. That’s why forgiveness—and salvation—can’t take place within an hour, or even within a year.
Our second reading from the Heavenly Doctrine is perhaps a little bit more encouraging, but it says the same thing about the gradual nature of salvation. We read from Heaven and Hell: [§533].
The rich man in the story from Mark hoped that it would be easy to get to heaven, and it turns out that it isn’t as easy as he wanted it to be. But it also isn’t as hard to get to heaven as some people think it is. The road to heaven may be long, but it isn’t full of booby traps and barbed wire. At least it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to torture ourselves to get to heaven; we don’t have to rip everything fun out of our lives. We just have to pay attention to our thoughts and our motivations, and when we recognize that we’re inclined to do something wrong, we need to push that thing away because it’s not what the Lord wants us to do. The catch is that we can’t just do that once. The reading says that we need to form a habit of thinking this way, and that as we form this habit we are gradually conjoined to heaven (ibid.).
There just isn’t any way around it: there’s no fast track to salvation. There’s no shortcut to real happiness. There’s no substitute for patiently doing the work that we’ve been given. Really, this is one of the core teachings of the New Church: you just have to do the work. The trouble is that this isn’t a very inspiring teaching. A professor at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church once told his students that he’d seen a bumper sticker that read, “Salvation: Sixty seconds that will change your life.” He said that he’d considered this, and concluded that a better bumper sticker would read, “Repentance: Sixty years that will change your life.” This represents the theology of the New Church pretty well, but it doesn’t make for a catchy bumper sticker.
The teaching that there are no shortcuts is powerful because it’s realistic, but it can leave us with the impression that life is just one long labor—and that that’s what God wants it to be. That’s not an inspiring thought. Nor is it accurate. The Lord says, “My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). The work that’s in front of us might feel hard, but life isn’t meant to feel that way forever. And here’s the missing piece, the vital piece that we haven’t talked about so far: we have work to do, and we don’t work miracles, but the Lord works with us. Whenever we do the good work that He’s given us, He is there working alongside us—sometimes openly, sometimes in secret. In the gospel of Mark He says:
The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how. For the earth yields fruit of its own accord: first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. But when the fruit is ripe, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. (4:26-29)
The kingdom of God is heaven, and the Lord compares the heavenly spirit that He forms within us to the work of a farmer who scatters seeds on the ground. Farming—especially farming in the ancient world, before tractors were invented—is a good example of a task that requires patience, and requires a willingness to simply do the work. That’s what it takes to become a good person: we have to get up and plant those good seeds, or else they simply will not grow. But we also don’t make the seeds grow. “The earth yields fruit of its own accord.” The Lord makes good things grow, and He makes them grow, in secret, while we work and even while we sleep. And every now and then, if we’re paying attention, we’ll see what He’s made, and we’ll stop and wonder at it. Because He does astonishing things. He creates life in parts of us where there was no life before.
Think of the reading from Secrets of Heaven—the one about forgiveness. That passage says that we don’t truly become forgiven until we’re able to look back at the evils of our former lives and see that we don’t want them anymore (§9014.3). And isn’t it astonishing that that’s even possible? That the Lord can transform us so completely? That He can take a vessel that once held hellish thoughts and feelings and fill it with actual love—unselfish love—and the clear light of heaven?
There are miracles in our lives. It’s just that we don’t enact them. And we usually only see them in retrospect. So waiting for miracles, for quick and easy miraculous solutions, is probably a poor use of our time. We have work to do—seeds that the Lord has given us to plant—and we’d best be getting on with our work. The miracles will become apparent when we aren’t looking for them.
Amen.