The Power That is in the Word

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; November 10, 2024

Readings: Judges 15:9-20 (children’s talk); Matthew 4:1-11; Secrets of Heaven §§9410.5 & 9407.13

            Samson’s battle against the Philistines is an illustration of a spiritual battle that people who are trying to follow the Lord are probably going to have to fight, at one point or another. And if we think of the story in those terms, it becomes pretty obvious that the message is that, with the Lord, we can win that battle—no matter how unlikely that might feel. Samson’s strength represents the Lord’s strength, and the strength that He can give to His people. Specifically, Samson’s strength is an illustration of the power that is present, from the Lord, in the last and lowest things of the Word—in the teachings that are written in this book. The truths that are written in this book have power like Samson’s power. That may not seem to be the case. How are words supposed to defeat our spiritual enemies? But that’s the whole point of today’s story. How was Samson supposed to defeat a thousand Philistines?

            But before we look any closer at the story of Samson, we’re going to turn to a different story. This story is overtly about the Lord, and it shows us that the teachings of the Word have power over evil. We read from the gospel of Matthew: [4:1-11].

            All three of the Lord’s responses to the devil are centered around a quote from the Word. Every time He says “it is written,” He proceeds to quote from the Word—specifically, all three quotes that He uses are taken from the book of Deuteronomy. This story isn’t as dramatic as the Samson story—the devil isn’t “vanquished,” the way that the Philistines were vanquished at Lehi. But what we see in the story from Matthew is that the devil never has a response to the Lord’s statements from the Word. When the Lord quotes the Word, the devil has to abandon whatever it was that he was trying to do. He can’t contradict the Word; he can’t get around the Word. So the story from Matthew testifies to the power of the Word.

            And the message of today’s sermon is that the Word has the same sort of power when we use it—when we speak it. As long as we use it faithfully and charitably. Because the Lord is in His Word. His power is in His Word. For this reason, we’re told in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church that “ One must fight against [the hells] by means of truths from the Word’s literal sense” (SS §49).

            But how do we get this teaching about the power of the Word to intersect with life as we experience it? I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be true that everyone in this room has, at one point or another, thought about going to the Word, or tried to go to the Word for strength, and felt like it hasn’t made much difference. The idea that there is such power in the Word can make it seem like the Scriptures are supposed to be magic spells—we just say them, and our problems go away. But that isn’t how life actually works. Spiritual growth and spiritual health are not attained by “saying magic words”—they are the products of a life well lived. So how does the power of the Word tie into that? How do we invite the power of the Word into our lives, for real?

            As I said, Samson represents the Lord, and he also represents people who are willing to receive strength from the Lord. Specifically, He represents the Lord’s Divine Natural—the Lord’s power in last and lowest things (SH §§3301.3-4, 5247.4, 6437). And this has everything to do with Samson’s status as a Nazirite. Before Samson was born, his parents were told that he would be “a Nazirite to God from the womb” (Judges 13:5). Ordinarily, a Nazirite was someone who consecrated their life to God for a period of time (see Num. 6:1-20). Superhuman strength wasn’t usually part of the deal, but Samson was a special kind of Nazirite. Something that all Nazirites had in common, however, was that they weren’t supposed to cut their hair. This was because of the symbolism, or the correspondence, of the hair on our heads.

            The head is the highest part of the body, so it represents the highest wisdom that people are capable of. But our hair is the most external part of us—it’s on the very outsides of our bodies. So we’re told that, “the hair of the head symbolizes the wisdom of heaven in ultimates, and also Divine truth in ultimates” (SS §49.3). The teachings that are written in this book are ultimates, or last and lowest things. And the thing about what’s last and lowest is that it’s the resting place for everything that comes before it. All of the weight of the body rests on the feet. All Divine truth and all of the wisdom of heaven come to rest in these teachings. They hold power from the Lord. That’s why Samson had incredible strength as long as he didn’t cut his hair. He is a picture of the power of Divine truth in last and lowest things.

            Something that’s pretty conspicuous about Samson is that he isn’t exactly a bookish guy. In fact he comes across as pretty meat-headed. He seems like someone who knows he’s strong, and assumes that being strong means that he is also smart. But being “clever” tends not to work out for him, and he has to resort to brute force to fix his problems. And he keeps on getting involved with Philistine women, even though the Philistines are his enemies. More on that next week. None of this means that the Lord or His truth are brutish. That’s not how we should think about the Lord. The Lord is wise, and He is gentle. The use of taking note of the fact that Samson isn’t exactly an academic is that it helps us recognize that we don’t have to be scholars to access the power of the Lord’s truth. We do have to read the Word—we have to know what it says—but we don’t have to be brilliant. Samson was a man of action. And that’s what we need to be: men and women of action, equipped with the teachings of the Word.

            All of this makes even more sense when we consider who Samson’s enemies were. Before he was even born, his mother was told that his job was to deliver Israel from the Philistines (Judges 13:5). The Heavenly Doctrine says that the Philistines symbolize faith that is divorced from charity (Faith §49). Faith divorced from charity is one of the primordial enemies of religion. It takes many forms: it isn’t tied to a specific religious tradition. Faith divorced from charity is what we get whenever we allow ourselves to be persuaded that “knowing the right things, or believing the right things,” equals “being who we’re supposed to be.” In other words, to divorce faith from charity is to put being right over being good. The temptation to do this is surprisingly aggressive. Notice how the story says that the Philistines came “shouting” against Samson (Judges 15:14). To divorce faith from charity might seem like an academic sort of a problem, but the spirit that divorces faith from charity is violent—it does violence to charity. It’s aggressive about forcing itself into the minds of religious people. It leads us into self-righteous arrogance and hard-heartedness, and it feeds us justifications for our bad behavior. It’s not a spirit we should shake a finger at—it’s a spirit we need to fight. We need to be Samson. Samson was a fighter. He was a man of action.

            It makes sense that we combat faith divorced from charity by being action-oriented… but what about the part where Samson represents the power of the Word? When our problem is that we’re too engrossed with being right, and have put that above charity, how is “more truth” the answer? The thing is, real truth has everything to do with action, or activity. We’re going to turn, now, to the Heavenly Doctrine, to a couple of passages that talk about what truth really is. Both of them are from the book Secrets of Heaven [read §§9410.5, 9401.13].

            The truth seems like nothing more than words—nothing more than ideas at best. But it is so much more. “Divine Truth is the one true substance from which all things come into being” (SH §9410.5). The teachings in this book are the last and lowest expressions of that truth. The power that built the universe comes to rest here. That’s real, whether we see it or not. There is power in the Word that we just can’t come up with on our own. We just heard that the angels, who are in the power of the Lord’s truth, are so strong that one of them can drive away a thousand evil spirits. Just as Samson overcame a thousand Philistines. We like to believe that we’re pretty strong even when we aren’t fighting the hells by means of the truths of the Word (cf. SS §49.3). But isn’t it fair to say that the hells “get us” pretty often? Isn’t it true that they sometimes manage to be so entirely in control that we don’t even realize that they’re there? We really do need help, don’t we?

            So we come back to those questions that I keep on putting in front of you: How do we invite the power of the Word into our lives, for real? How do we use the teachings of the Word to fight against that spirit that divorces faith from charity? The teachings in this book are not magic words. We can’t just “throw them out there” like incantations. We need to use the teachings of the Word the way they’re meant to be used. And there are two things that I want to say about that.

            The first is that the truths of the Word have power because they are the Lord’s truths. He built the world, and the power of His wisdom is what comes to rest here—and that’s why these truths have power. So when you go to the Word for strength—when you tell the devil, “it is written,” and you voice a teaching from the Word—remember that the Lord is present in the words you speak. Affirm that truth. Throw your weight behind it. The Lord is here! The Lord is the one who spoke those words. They have power because they are His.

            The second thing I want to say is closely related to the first: the Lord’s truth does things. His truth makes things. When He says “Let there be light,” there is light (Gen. 1:3). In the gospel of John we’re told that all things were made through the Word (1:3). His truth is an active force, and that’s why it has power. If we quote His truth, but we turn it into an abstraction—we say it, but we separate it from the action that it’s supposed to result in—well, then we’ve separated it from everything that gives it power. We can’t just say the truth. We can’t just plonk it out there. Use the truth. Every truth in the Word is there to accomplish something useful. What is that? Lean into it. We can’t act directly or immediately on every teaching, but we can hold the teachings with a spirit that is ready to act.

When the Lord spoke the Ten Commandments, He was telling us what we need to do. Can we tell the devil “it is written ‘you shall not murder’” or “‘you shall not commit adultery,’” and speak those words like we are bound to act on them? When the Lord said, “whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matt. 5:39), He was telling us what to do when we are faced with evil. Those words push our spirits towards something good. Can we let ourselves be pushed? Within those words is a spirit of compassion that soars above evil. Can we let that spirit move us?

When the Lord said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.” (Mark 14:16), He was modeling the humility that makes it possible for His power to be present with us. The spirit within those words lifts us into the presence of the power that made heaven and earth. When the hells are close, and we feel threatened, can we look to the Lord and tell him, “not what I will, but what you will,” and let the spirit within those words push us into action? That’s when we find the strength of Samson.

Amen.

Resounding Truth

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; October 13, 2024

Readings: Judges 7:16-20 (children’s talk); Exodus 19:16-20; Secrets of Heaven §8815

            The trumpets that Gideon’s three hundred men blew around the camp of Midian symbolize truth sounding from heaven—they symbolize a clear, strong message coming from within and resonating in our minds. That resounding truth is what we’re going to be focusing on today; and the big question is, what do we need to do to hear it? Perhaps you can remember a moment in your life in which the power of a true idea made itself felt—a moment in which you felt compelled by a truth, because you saw it with such clarity. But then, there are lots of moments in everybody’s life in which we experience no such clarity. Sometimes that’s because we’re confused: one good idea seems to conflict with another, and we don’t know what to believe. Other times it’s because our minds are down here in the world and we’re just not thinking on that higher level. But when we realize that we want something more—that we want answers that are more than just words on a page, we want to hear truth that gives us hope and confidence—what do we need to do?

            This truth that resounds from heaven is symbolized by the blast of a trumpet, and there are lots of stories in the Word that feature trumpets—today’s story about Gideon being one of them. These stories illustrate the quality of this higher truth far better than any words of mine ever could; so here are two more passages that talk about trumpets. First, from the book of Exodus: [read 19:16-20]. After He’s come down on the mountain, the Lord speaks the Ten Commandments in the hearing of all His people [Ex. 20]. The next reading is from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, and it explains the deeper meaning of those trumpets that sounded when the Lord appeared on Sinai [read SH §8815].

            In all of the stories that that passage refers to, the sounding of trumpets is accompanied by a revelation. This is most obvious in the reading from Exodus: when the trumpet sounds, the Lord Himself appears at the top of the mountain and speaks the Ten Commandments. The revelations in the other stories mentioned there are symbolic: when the trumpet sounds, things that symbolize falsity are knocked down and scattered. The reading from Secrets of Heaven says that God’s truth passing through the heavens, “perfects the good but destroys the evil” (§8815.2). This shouldn’t be taken to mean that the evil are literally destroyed or killed when God speaks. Rather, when God’s truth sounds, the illusions that evil hides behind are blown away—so evil’s power crumbles. But everything good is strengthened and uplifted by God’s truth. As ever, it’s most useful to think of the stories of the Word as descriptions of things that take place within ourselves, not as descriptions of things that happen to other people. In other words, don’t dwell on the Lord’s power to scatter “those people who are wrong”—dwell on the Lord’s power to scatter the darkness within yourself.

            As I said before, this sounding of the trumpet, this sudden influx of clarity, might feel really good when we experience it, but we don’t always experience it. A lot of the time we don’t even especially want it—our minds are on other things. We’re thinking about lunch and the Steelers, and we’re busy trying not to think too hard about the fact that tomorrow is Monday. But even when we want to go up to that higher place—where we can see something that we believe in—we don’t always know how. We don’t always feel as confident in the truth we know as we wish we did. Sooner or later everybody questions the things that they were taught as a child. That’s appropriate, because sooner or later everybody has to start believing the things that they believe, instead of the things that somebody else told them to believe. But questioning ideas that we once held with confidence is exhausting. And it can be really discouraging. When we get bumped out of our intellectual comfort zones, it’s like the floor gets taken out from under us. It’s hard to feel like a competent adult in that state of mind—we go back to feeling like we’re too small to navigate the world around us. And the world is full of conflicting opinions. Even the so-called facts sometimes seem to conflict with one another. Even within the church we’ll encounter opinions that challenge our own. Sometimes life makes us question even the bedrock of our faith, and while that’s normal, it is not enjoyable.

            And all of this gets even more complicated when you throw in the consideration that having a strong sense of conviction isn’t necessarily the same thing as being guided by heaven’s truth. People can be passionate about ideas that are deeply flawed—and we don’t want that to be true of ourselves. Maybe it’s better to doubt than to be blindly swept along by an overwhelming need for certainty. It isn’t enough to believe something, or to cling to the ideas we have because they’re the ideas we have. We need the truth. We long to hear that clarity and that power that are not of this world. So, perhaps, we go to the Word—because most of us have been taught, since childhood, that the Word is the repository of truth. And it is. But sometimes even the Word seems like a sea of information that isn’t enlivened by any light from within. It isn’t enough to have the teachings: we want to see heaven within the teachings. Even the teachings of the Word can be bent away from heaven, if the wrong spirit champions them. When we want to hear the Lord’s spirit speaking to us, and we don’t hear it, what do we do?

            In the story from the book of Judges that we heard today, the enemies of the children of Israel are the Midianites, and the Midianites have a vast army. We’re told that they were, “as numerous as locusts; and their camels were without number, as the sand by the seashore in multitude” (7:12). The reading from Secrets of Heaven says that these enemies symbolize “those immersed in evils and in falsities arising from them” (§8815.2) More specifically, the Midianites symbolize a spiritual state in which we have the truths of faith—we know what the Word says—but only in an external way. Those truths can’t rise up to the higher levels of our minds, because we aren’t living them: they aren’t being joined to the good of life, and the good of life is what opens the higher levels of the mind. So the truth we know is just so much information—and because it isn’t being used the way it’s meant to be used, it gets turned into falsity (SH §§3242, 4756, 4788; AE §455.9). The hells that are present with us use that falsity against us. Apparent truths or half-truths are sent out to war against real truths, and the result is that we end up second-guessing everything we believe. And when we’re in this troubled and frustrated state of mind, we often end up behaving badly. We do selfish things that we really know we shouldn’t do, and our excuse is that we’re just so troubled and so frustrated.

            One thing to note is that we can’t get out of this situation until we’re willing to admit that it is what it is. But looking that honestly at what’s going on inside us can be difficult. So we simmer along in a stew of confusion—until we reach the point where we’re willing to say that we’re lost and confused, and that we see that unkind parts of us are using our confusion as a shield, and we’re ready to be done with it. We’re ready to roll that whole internal landscape into a ball and throw it away and be done. That’s the beginning of a solution, but only the beginning.

            In the literal sense of the Word, the Lord’s solution to the Midianite problem was to go to Gideon, a man who didn’t believe that he was good enough to save Israel, and tell him that he’d been called to save Israel (Judges 6:14-16). Gideon assembled an army of thirty-two thousand, and the Lord winnowed that army down to just three hundred men (7:1-7). Then the Lord sent those three hundred men against the Midianites, armed with trumpets, pitchers and torches.

            One of the main points of last week’s sermon was that Gideon was clearly not a very confident leader. He did what the Lord said, but he did it at night, because he was afraid (Judges 6:27). He was constantly asking the Lord for signs, or for reassurance (6:17, 36-40). His lack of confidence matches the story that he appears in: it makes sense that if we feel like we’re swimming in a sea of falsity and confusion, the part of us that stumbles forward will do so without much confidence. But the other side of that coin is that Gideon did what the Lord said, even though he wasn’t confident. He didn’t know everything, but he knew what the Lord was telling him to do, and he did that—and the difference that that makes cannot be overstated. This is an idea that we’ll come back to.

            The other thing that was emphasized in last week’s sermon is that the Lord saved Israel not with a great big army, but with just three hundred men—and those three hundred men were the three hundred who lapped water with their tongues, as a dog laps, when they went down to the river to drink (Judges 7:5, 6). In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that dogs, in this context, symbolize appetite and eagerness (AE §455.9); so the three hundred who lapped like dogs symbolize an appetite for the truth—an eagerness or a longing for the truth, a willingness to be shown the truth. The Lord doesn’t ask us to somehow become so smart that we know the things we need to know without being taught. He asks us to let Him teach us. It isn’t our confusion or our lack of confusion that matters, our wisdom or our lack of wisdom. If we want to hear the truth, what we need is a heart that lets Him show us what we haven’t seen.

            The bottom line is that the truth that resounds from heaven isn’t ours. It isn’t something that we figure out; it isn’t an essay that we write or a diagram that we draw. It is the Lord’s, and He reveals that truth to our spirits and speaks it to our hearts, when we make ourselves ready. Any truth that is clear enough and strong enough to rise above the noise of the world only is so clear and so strong because the Lord is in it. It is the Lord’s truth; it is His to give. We receive it, when we’re ready. And making ourselves ready involves all of the things that we’ve already discussed. We have to recognize, first of all, that where we are isn’t where we want to be. There’s no saving or fixing the sea of confusion—we just need to get out of it. We need to be lifted up. We make ourselves ready to receive the truth when we humble ourselves. We don’t need to be brilliant, and we certainly don’t need to beat our heads against the wall until we figure it out—buried underneath that sort of thinking is the assumption that it’s all about us. It isn’t all about us. There is a God in heaven who knows what’s good and what’s right, and He can teach us. He will teach us, when we’re ready.

And we make ourselves ready when we do as He says. The good of life is what opens the higher levels of the mind. We may not understand everything that the Lord wants us to do, but surely we understand some things. We can do those things. We can keep the Ten Commandments. We can do our jobs sincerely, justly and faithfully. We can come to church, and pray to the Lord, and read His Word. If we do what we know how to do—if we put ourselves in front of Him—then sooner or later He’ll show us something that we hadn’t seen before. In a quiet place within our hearts, a truth from heaven will resound.

            All of these ideas are echoes of what the Lord Himself says to His disciples in the Gospel:

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves…. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles.  But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak;  for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. (Matt. 10:16, 18-20)

Amen.

The Army We Don't Need

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; October 6, 2024

Readings: Judges 7:1-8 (children’s talk); Judges 6:25-27, 36-40; Secrets of Heaven §8478.2, 3

            We’re going to begin this portion of the service by reading more of the story of Gideon, from the book of Judges. We’re going back in time, a little bit: these readings are about things that happened before Gideon winnowed his army down to just three hundred men. And all of these readings point to Gideon’s struggle with confidence. When the Angel of the Lord told Gideon that he was called to deliver Israel, Gideon answered, “O my Lord, how can I save Israel? Indeed my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house” (Judges 6:15). Clearly he felt that he was inadequate. Here’s what we’re told about the first assignment that the Lord gave to Gideon: [read vv. 25-27]. And a little further on, we read: [vv. 36-40].

            So Gideon did what the Lord told him to do: he tore down the altar of Baal. But he did it at night, because he was afraid. Then, when he was getting ready to go out to battle with the Midianites, he asked the Lord for a sign. He needed reassurance that the Lord was really there. Fair enough. So he laid out a fleece, and asked the Lord to make the ground dry but the fleece wet. The Lord did what he asked—and Gideon still wasn’t confident! He needed another sign. He needed the Lord to make the ground wet, and the fleece dry. It’s pretty clear that he was struggling to feel ready to do what the Lord was calling him to do.

            A lack of confidence is a pretty familiar thing. Who here can’t remember a time when they had to do something that they just didn’t feel ready to do, or didn’t think they were good enough to do? A presentation or a performance of some kind, just as an example. In situations like those, doubt and anxiety can feel like massive weights holding us down. Self-doubt and anxiety can also run through people’s lives below the surface—sometimes just below the surface. Sometimes they climb up and overwhelm us, maybe because we’re dealing with something hard, maybe for no reason that we can identify.

            When we struggle with a lack of confidence, we want reassurance. Of course the Lord is willing to reassure us. That’s very much a thing that He does. That’s what we just see in the story of Gideon and the fleece: Gideon asks for signs, and the Lord patiently gives them to him. And this isn’t the first story in which Gideon asks for a sign, by the way—he asked the Lord for a sign the very first time that the Lord ever appeared to him (Judges 6:17).

            But in the story that we heard during the children’s talk, the Lord takes Gideon’s army and He makes it smaller. He winnows it down to almost nothing. That would be an unusual way to prepare for battle under any circumstances, but it’s especially strange when you consider that the Lord knew He was working with an insecure commander. How was shrinking Gideon’s army from thirty-two thousand to three hundred going to help him feel confident? You’d think that this sort of thing would happen when the Lord was working with someone who was shockingly arrogant. “You think you’ve got it in the bag, because of your grand army? Let me show you what I can do without your army.” You’d think that if anyone needed to feel thirty-two thousand allies at their back, it would be someone like Gideon.

            But the Lord knows what He’s doing. So what does He do when we lack confidence? What does He tell us? What does He ask us to do?

            As I said, the Lord does reassure His people. Sometimes we just need comfort; and sometimes when we go to the Word, or turn to the Lord in prayer, comfort is exactly what we find. But sometimes the Lord takes our army and makes it smaller. Gideon’s army, thirty-two thousand strong, must symbolize things we think we need that we actually don’t need. In the internal sense of the Word, armies symbolize truths—because the truth that we have from the Lord is what goes out to battle against falsity and evil (SH §§3448, 7236). A big army, therefore, would symbolize a whole host of truths—an expansive knowledge of the truth. That seems like a good thing. How could an expansive knowledge of the truth be bad? But maybe the problem that this story identifies isn’t “having a big army”—maybe the problem is “needing a big army.” Maybe the problem is the feeling that we need to understand more than we’re capable of understanding, and the belief that if we make it through the things we’re dealing with, it will be because we figured it out. We found the right tool. So we hoard as many tools as we can.

This lines up with what the Lord says in the story: “The people who are with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel claim glory for itself against Me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me’” (Judges 7:2). The whole point of so many of the stories of the Word is that we need the Lord. We cannot save ourselves, no matter how big an army we have at our backs. But the bigger the army we have, the more likely we are to forget we need Him.

When we’re afraid, or when we lack confidence, our instinct is often to amass as big an army as we can. We gather truths—we take inventories of our abilities and our intelligence. We hoard affirmations; we count our successes, and use those lists of successes to prop up our faltering confidence. Maybe we become the spiritual or emotional equivalents of people who build bunkers in anticipation of the end of the world. We stock our bunker with every imaginable piece of equipment, but doing so doesn’t really make us feel more secure. It only reinforces the fear that drove us to that task in the first place. And while we’re focused on all of that, we tend to forget the one thing we truly need—which is the Lord.

The Lord reduced Gideon’s army to just three hundred men, and He selected the men who lapped water with their tongues, as a dog laps (Judges 7:5). In the internal sense of the Word, three hundred symbolizes fullness, or a complete amount (SH §5955). And in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we’re told that those who lapped water with their tongues like dogs:

… mean such as have an appetite for truths, thus they who from some natural affection seek to know truths, a “dog” signifying appetite and eagerness, “waters” [signifying] truths, and “lapping them with the tongue” [signifying] to have an appetite for and eagerly seek. (AE §455.9)

What we know isn’t really what matters; what matters is our eagerness to know, or our willingness to learn. The Lord doesn’t need us to be brilliant—He needs us to be willing to follow. If we’re willing to create a space in which He is the first and the only thing, and we ask Him to show us what we need to do, He will show us something. And that will be what we need. Maybe not what we thought we needed—but what we need.

            I’m going to share a longer reading from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church. This passage is about people who are “concerned for the morrow,” which is the same thing as not trusting in the Lord. What I invite you to note in this reading is how it emphasizes that the people described here are people who need everything—people who need to possess or control all things. The reading is from Secrets of Heaven [read §8478.2].

            We’ll pause there before we continue with the second half of the reading. This passage puts “anxiety over the future” side-by-side with “the desire to possess all things and exercise control over all other people.” Amassing an army of tools so that we will be equipped to fix every problem might seem like the way to cure our anxiety, but it actually tends to make anxiety worse. This can turn into a vicious cycle: The more we try to control everything, the more we feel like we’re failing—because we aren’t that strong—and the more we feel like we’re failing, the more out of control the world feels, so the more we try to control everything. Now I’ll continue with the second part of the reading [SH §8478.3].

Trust in the Lord changes everything. The whole point of the paragraph I just read is that when we trust in the Lord, it doesn’t matter what we have—or what we don’t have. We have the Lord, and He is the architect of every good thing. For what it’s worth, I’m not aware of a single passage anywhere in the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Heavenly Doctrine that speaks well of self-confidence. When we lack confidence, we tend to think that self-confidence is what we need. But if “self-confidence” means that we look ourselves to create the things that will make us happy, our self-confidence will fail us. Because we can’t create those things. True confidence is confidence in the Lord, because the Lord is the one who creates love and joy and peace; and He’s strong enough to put them into our hands. And then, from the Lord, we receive a kind of self-confidence, which is confidence that we are able to do what we need to do, because The Lord is with us.

            All of this is illustrated in another story from the Old Testament—the story of David and Goliath. David was a very different sort of hero from Gideon. David was a teenager who chose to go up against a giant, without being asked to, because he was confident that the Lord was with him. The whole point was that it was a one-on-one fight, so nobody thought that David should have a big army. But Saul, the king, tried give David all the best equipment. He gave David his own armor. But David refused the king’s armor—he said he couldn’t walk in it (1 Sam. 17:39). He went out to face Goliath with nothing but stones and a sling; and, famously, he told the giant: “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” (v. 45). And then he won the battle. All the armor—all the resources in the world—cannot save us by themselves. They cannot heal our souls; they cannot give us peace. But as for that willingness to follow the Lord, a little is enough, and enough is everything.

            When the Lord is with us, we’re invincible. It doesn’t matter how little we know—how small we are in the face of the world. Being outnumbered by the demons we encounter is nothing: we have the Lord. At the end of his life, Joshua, who had been the commander of the armies of Israel, told the people: “One man of you shall chase a thousand, for the Lord your God is He who fights for you, as He promised you” (Josh. 23:10). In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that what Joshua says here is exactly what goes on within our spirits: “The angels, being governed by good, have so much power and control over hellish spirits that just one of them can subdue thousands of those from hell” (SH §6677). We don’t need armies: we need the Lord. We need to let His goodness govern our lives. Joshua said: “One man of you shall chase a thousand, for the Lord your God is He who fights for you, as He promised you. Therefore take careful heed to yourselves, that you love the Lord your God” (Josh 23:10, 11).

Amen.

No Glory

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; September 22, 2024

Readings: Judges 4:1-18; Secrets of Heaven §§10488, 1950.3

            In this portion of the service we’re going to dig deeper into the story of Deborah and Barak. This is one of those stories that can feel hard to derive a message from: on the face of it, it’s a story about a battle that happened a long time ago. Maybe it’s interesting… but why did the Lord tell us this story? Really, it can be hard to recognize the Lord’s voice in any of the stories of the book of Judges, if you don’t know that there’s an internal sense, or a deeper meaning, to these stories. So we’re going to be looking closely at what the teachings of the New Church reveal about the internal meaning of today’s text.

            But before we do that, we’re going to hear the second half of the story. This reading starts with Deborah’s response to Barak, after he tells her that he won’t go to battle unless she goes with him. It then goes on to describe the battle itself, and its outcome. We read: [Judges 4:8-18].

            The story goes on to describe how Sisera falls asleep in Jael’s tent, and how she kills him in his sleep (vv. 19-21). Then Barak comes to the tent, chasing Sisera, but he finds that Sisera is already dead (v. 22). So Barak is denied the honor, or the glory, of personally defeating the commander of the enemy army. That glory goes to a woman who isn’t even under his command.

            There are two pieces of this story that we’re going to focus on. The first is the piece that we already looked at during the children’s talk—the fact that Barak wouldn’t go to battle unless Deborah went with him (v. 8). The second piece is Deborah’s statement to Barak that she would go with him, but that there would be no glory for him in the journey (v. 9).

            Both of these details are about the truths that the church has from the Lord, and the way we hold them, or the way we use them. The fact that all of us are here right now is a strong indication that we recognize that learning the truth the Lord teaches is important. We want to understand. It’s been said that knowledge is power—how much more powerful, then, is an understanding of spiritual truth?

            But it’s also pretty obvious that the truth can be a challenging thing, and that churches, and religious people, don’t always know how to hold it, or how to use it. We know that we shouldn’t turn religious knowledge into something that is worshiped in its own right, and we know that we shouldn’t use the truths of the Word to attack other people or establish intellectual dominance over them. But of course, those things still happen. And sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to use the truth, how to speak the truth, without being arrogant or aggressive about it. How do you let the light of the truth shine out, without making it into something it shouldn’t be? In practice, when you’re dealing with people who might not agree with you, how do you hold the truth that you hear the Lord speaking to you, in His Word?

            Unfortunately, today’s sermon isn’t going to provide you with finished answers to any of these questions. But the story of Deborah and Barak does speak to these questions. Deborah and Barak are a leadership team. She is a prophetess and a judge (v. 4); he is a commander of soldiers (vv. 6, 10). It’s important to note that Deborah is the judge—she’s in charge. She calls Barak from his home, and she tells him that the Lord is sending him to do battle with Sisera (v. 6). That relationship between the two of them is particularly important to understand when you look to the internal sense of the Word—because in the internal sense of the Word, Deborah and Barak together symbolize truth from good (AE §447.4). Deborah lands on the “good” side of that equation; Barak lands on the “truth” side. She is the goodness from which truth comes; he is the truth that answers the call of what is good. And goodness is meant to lead the truth. The teachings of the New Church say that truth is like a body, and goodness is like the soul within that body (SH §§6344, 8530). The soul commands the body—and a desire to do good is meant to command the truth we know.

            This idea will be familiar to anyone who has spent any time with the teachings of the New Church. But there’s hearing this idea, and then there’s hearing it. The Doctrines make this point so clearly; and our next reading, which is from Secrets of Heaven, demonstrates this: [read §10488].

            Truth without good has “no power at all” (ibid.). We see this in the story: Barak was the mighty warrior, but the story doesn’t simply say that he couldn’t win the battle without Deborah—he wouldn’t even fight the battle without Deborah (Judges 4:8). Truth without goodness doesn’t do anything at all: as the reading says, “it is no more than lifeless factual knowledge” (§10488).

            Later on in the story, when they’re actually coming to grips with Sisera’s army, we see Deborah impelling Barak into battle. She says to him, “Up! For this is the day in which the Lord has delivered Sisera into your hand. Has not the Lord gone out before you?” (Judges 4:14). Goodness—or love, or affection—motivates the truth. It drives it forward. Without that motivation, the truth is inert, like a pile of letters on a page.

            The reading from Secrets of Heaven says that truth from good means a life in keeping with the truth, “for good is connected with life” (§10488). In other words, the truth is just so much information until we use it—until we allow our lives, or our behavior, to be changed by it. The truth of the Lord’s Word has no power in our lives until it is showing up, in our lives. That’s pretty self-evident. It’s also pretty obvious that living the truth doesn’t mean putting on an empty show—being a hypocrite praying on the street corner (cf. Matt. 6:5). The truth becomes part of our lives when we use it purposefully. So Deborah doesn’t stand for a hollow effort to do what we know we’re supposed to do—when that’s our motivation, the truth we know doesn’t have much power. Deborah stands for an affection that’s connected to the Lord’s purpose for us—and the Lord’s purpose is to bless His children and give them joy. That love is life itself. So Deborah stands for an affection that is connected to the life within all this information in the Word.

            Let’s talk about the practical applications of these ideas. The most obvious takeaway is that knowing the truth does not save us. It does not make us good people. We don’t begin to be good until we try to do what the truth says to do, and to love what the truth says to love. A more subtle application of these ideas is that when we’re trying to figure out what to do with the truth—what to make of the Lord’s teachings on repentance, or the second coming, or marriage, or anything—we should look for the affection behind them. Why did the Lord give us these teachings? How do they tie in to His purpose for us? And when we obey a specific teaching, what affection are we supposed to be expressing? If that truth is Barak, where and what is the Deborah? What is the affection that will impel that truth to do what it’s actually meant to do?

            Here’s an example: a teaching in the Doctrine that people sometimes struggle with is the teaching that the heart we’ve been born with is corrupt. We’re born inclining to evils of every kind (TCR §§520, 521). What is the point of that teaching? It’s there to show us that we need to change—and that we need the Lord’s help if we’re going to do so. And I believe that the affection that’s meant to go with that teaching has to do with humility—with realizing that we need the Lord—but it also has to do with hope, because when we ask for His help we receive it. That doctrine with its corresponding affection and that doctrine without it are two very different things.

            It must be said that goodness needs truth just as much as truth needs goodness. This is also something that the story illustrates: Deborah was in charge, but she worked through Barak. He was the one who commanded the troops in battle. The Canaanites that they were fighting against symbolize falsity from evil (AE §447.4)—and we’re told that they had nine hundred chariots of iron (Judges 4:3). As I said to the children, a chariot corps that strong would have been terrifying. And in the internal sense of the Word, those chariots symbolize an overwhelmingly sturdy system of false ideas. Chariots symbolize doctrine, and iron symbolizes unyielding truth—or, in this case, unyielding falsity. So to go up against Sisera and his nine hundred chariots of iron is to confront established systems of thought within ourselves. It’s to confront false ideas that have accumulated overwhelming momentum. It’s pretty obvious that a yearning to do good, all by itself, isn’t enough to challenge that falsity. We need more than just good intentions: we need light. We need to know what to do—and what not to do. The truth is that light. There’s a passage in the teachings of the New Church that says that good without truth is blunt, or rounded—but that with truth it becomes sharp (TCR §86). Truth enables love to be applied with clarity and with precision. The bottom line is that we need them both. The Lord gave us heads and hearts because we need them both.

            Now, at last, I want to go back to Deborah’s statement that she would go with Barak, but that there would be no glory for him in the journey (Judges 4:9). Deborah symbolizes goodness, and Barak symbolizes truth. When goodness and truth are joined together the way they’re meant to be, the truth does not have glory. The truth doesn’t get the spotlight. So if we find that we’re inclined to glory in the truth we know, that’s an indication that we’ve separated truth from goodness.

            This idea should become a little clearer after we’ve turned to our final reading for today, which is also from the book Secrets of Heaven. This reading is part of a whole series of passages that describe the quality of truth that is separated from goodness. We read: [§1950.3].

            Truth that is separated from good is ornery. It’s contentious—it looks for conflict. It’s insufferable and stubborn—it’s said to be like a wild donkey that’s unable to live with others. And truth separated from goodness glories in victory. It loves being right—it loves proving how right it is. It wants to outshine the other lights around it. Now, as I said, this mentality is insufferable. We know we’re not supposed to be this way… so if that impulse to give glory to the truth we know shows up in us, it will do so sneakily. What forms might it take? It could show up as a tendency to turn discussions about values and beliefs into arguments about values and beliefs. It could show up as an anxious or even desperate need to convince ourselves that we do know the truth. It could take the form of shower thoughts in which we rehearse speeches that demonstrate how right we are. In general, if we feel that our emotional or intellectual security depends on being right, we’re giving glory to the truth. But the truth is only meant to be a servant.

The glory belongs to the Lord. The Lord teaches us His truth, and He means for us to use it. But the truth can never do what it is meant to do unless an affection from the Lord goes with it. That affection directs the truth: it impels the truth to serve its genuine purpose, even as Deborah said to Barak: “Up! For this is the day in which the Lord has delivered Sisera into your hand. Has not the Lord gone out before you?” (Judge 4:14).

Amen.

Piece by Piece

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; September 8, 2024

Readings: Judges 2:11-19 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §1820.5; Divine Providence §279

            How long are our spiritual struggles supposed to last? How long should we expect to battle against the same spiritual enemy? If we make a change for the better, and then our old demons re-emerge, okay that’s normal; if we try again, and then the demons resurface again, okay that’s still normal. But how long is that cycle meant to go on? Is there a point at which it’s no longer normal for us to still be wrestling with the same old issue?

            Today we’re talking about the children of Israel’s cyclical struggles against their various enemies: they would be delivered, and then they’d be enslaved again, over and over. In the spiritual sense of the Word, the children of Israel symbolize the church, and their enemies symbolize the hells. So the stories of the book of Judges are about our struggles with evil. This means that they’re about temptation and repentance: temptation and repentance are processes in which we wrestle with and reject the evils that we find in ourselves. When this sermon is over, all of you will be invited to take the Lord’s Holy Supper. The Holy Supper doesn’t have to be a sacrament of repentance, but it can be. There is a connection between Holy Supper and repentance (see TCR §§526, 530, 567.7-8, 722). The Holy Supper is an opportunity for each of us to come to the Lord with our struggles and with our commitments to continue to strive for what is right. It’s an opportunity to ask Him for His strength. This is just something to bear in mind, as you listen to the sermon.

            When the children of Israel were stuck at the edge of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians were coming after them, to kill or enslave them all, Moses said to them: “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall see again no more forever” (Ex. 14:13). That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if all of our victories could be like that? If we, with the help of the Lord, could escape from our spiritual enemies, and know that we would see them again no more forever? Isn’t that how it’s meant to be? Isn’t there supposed to be a point at which we actually finish the fight—actually escape from our problems, and move on, with no need to ever look back? That is what the Lord wants for us.

            We get a similar impression from the description of the process of repentance that we find in the book True Christian Religion. We read: “The question then is, How are we to repent? The answer is, we are to do so actively. That is, we are to examine ourselves, recognize and admit to our sins, pray to the Lord, and begin a new life” (§530). Beginning a new life sure sounds like moving on, and, perhaps, seeing our enemies again no more forever. And in fact there are passages in the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church that say, in about so many words, that once we’ve overcome a specific spiritual enemy, or a specific hell, that enemy loses its power over us, and can trouble us no more. Our next reading is an example of such a passage. The passage discusses temptations, and victories in temptations, and then it says: [read SH §1820.5].

            That passage sure sounds like it says that if we, from the Lord, receive the strength to withstand an evil that we’re inclined to, that evil loses its ability to trouble us—forever. But when we look at the battles against evil that we have fought, is that what we see? The children of Israel made the same mistakes over and over. And some of their enemies—for example the Philistines—troubled them again and again. And the children of Israel symbolize us. That is, to the degree that we’re trying to be part of the spiritual church that they represent, they symbolize us.

            Many people have said that they see themselves in the children of Israel. They’ve said that they used to shake their heads in disbelief, marveling at this group of people who just can’t seem to learn—that is, until they were smitten by the rod of self-awareness, and they realized just how many times they themselves have had to be taught the same lessons. It’s also pretty normal for people to talk about struggling with the same fundamental issues for years, or even for their entire lives. Does that mean that those people are failing at repentance? Was there a final victory that they were meant to experience a long time ago that they just didn’t obtain?

            This is a painful line of thought, because the evils that we’re trying to uproot from our lives are usually things that we really want to be rid of. This isn’t an arena in which failure is easy to swallow. When we sincerely try to do better, and we make forward progress, and then we see that old enemy—that old habit, that old behavior—come out again, and drag us down again, it’s easy to lose heart. Those stubborn old enemies can become sources of tremendous shame. And I think that people sometimes fear that they’re broken—that they should have kicked their bad habit a long time ago.

            Of course, the truth is that spiritual growth is complicated. It’s true that the best time to kick a bad habit is right now. Actually, the best time to kick a bad habit is before you ever start it. It’s true that there are easier and harder ways of doing things—shorter and longer roads to the Lord. And we should try to take the short road. But if we find that we’re on the long road, it is what it is. No one takes the short road every single time. And we really need to remember that the Lord isn’t shocked by our mistakes. He watched the children of Israel make the same mistakes over and over—and He kept working with them. He knows how complicated we are. He knows—far better than we do—just how much is involved in the regeneration, or rebirth, of a human being.

            And there are a lot of passages in the Heavenly Doctrine that talk about this: a lot of passages that say that deliverance from evil is never instantaneous. Our final reading is one such passage. This is from the book Divine Providence: [read DP §279].

            If evils can be removed only gradually, then what are we to make of that passage that was read earlier—the one that said that spiritual victories make it so that evil spirits do not dare to trouble us? To reconcile these two teachings, we need to understand just how complicated our spirits are, and just how complicated a single bad habit actually is. The reading from Divine Providence  goes on to make exactly this point. It says that “there are thousands of lusts which enter into and compose each evil” (§279.5). Another passage says:

Every evil appears to a person’s sight as a simple entity. That is how hatred and vengeance appear, theft and fraud, adultery and licentiousness, arrogance and haughtiness, and so on. But people do not know that every evil contains countless constituents—more than the number of fibers and vessels in a person’s body. (DP §296)

So when we fight against hatred, for example, we aren’t fighting a single entity. We’re fighting thousands of different lusts. And we fight them one after another. This means that there’s no way for us to overcome all hatred forever with a single spiritual victory. But it also means that the victories we experience really are victories. Every time we feel an urge to act with hatred, but instead we reach for the Lord and say “I will not do this, because it is a sin against God” (cf. TCR §567.5), and we turn away from that hellish path, we have achieved a victory. A little piece of hell has lost its power over us. And yes, hell is big. There’s a lot more work to be done. But the Lord is bigger. He can see us through the process, one step at a time.

            His will is to make us new, one piece at a time. The reading from Divine Providence says that our thoughts and affections are simply changes in the states and the forms of the organic substances of our minds (§279). The word “minds,” in this context, doesn’t refer to our physical brains—it refers to the spiritual minds that inhabit our physical bodies. The thing is, our minds are just as complicated as our bodies. In fact, the human body is an image of the human mind. Thoughts and affections move through our minds just as blood flows through our arteries, just as electrical impulses move across the synapses in our brains. And the Lord is causing our minds to be regenerated, or reborn. He is making us new. If you were to replace every fiber in the human body, every vessel, every synapse, with a new fiber, a new vessel, a new heavenly synapse, how long would that take? That’s exactly what the Lord is doing. So long as we walk with Him, He’s renewing us piece by piece. It’s okay for that process to take time.

            This doesn’t mean that we can tell ourselves that it’s okay to be evil for a while. Regeneration does take time, but we shouldn’t turn that into an excuse. Each of us only actually lives in the present, and in the present we choose good or evil. We can’t choose both at the same time. If we’re actually going to reject evil and choose the Lord, we have to put our hearts and our souls into that choice, in the here and now. If repentance is to be real, it has to be wholehearted. If, in the backs of our minds, we give ourselves permission to hold onto our evils, because we know we’ll get another chance to repent later, that isn’t really repenting. And yes, even if we put our hearts into rejecting an evil, some cousin of that evil is going to rear its head somewhere down the line. Repentance is not a one and done. There is no spiritual victory to end all victories. But every little victory counts.

            I spoke to the children about the cycle of the judges—about the children of Israel turning to the Lord and away from Him again and again. I’m going to end this sermon by looking at the other side of that picture—by looking at what the Scriptures say about the Lord who watches His people turn towards Him and away from Him, the Lord who guides us through this whole, long process. There are hundreds of Scriptures that touch on this theme, but here are three of them.

            From Isaiah:

I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you. (44:22)

            From Jeremiah:

“If you will return, O Israel,” says the Lord, “return to Me; and if you will put away your abominations out of My sight, then you shall not be moved. (4:1)

            And from Malachi:

“Yet from the days of your fathers you have gone away from My ordinances and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord of hosts. (3:7)

Amen.

Sell Whatever You Have

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; July 28, 2024

Readings: Mark 10:17-22 (children’s talk); Doctrine of Life §66; Secrets of Heaven §141

            The Lord told that rich man, “Go your way, sell whatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me” (Mark 10:21). It’s pretty clear that He doesn’t expect us to follow these instructions to the letter. At least, that had better be the case—because if He wants us to literally sell all that we have, then none of us are listening to Him.

            The thing is, He still meant something when He said these words. When we look at a teaching from the Word and say, “the Lord can’t mean for me to take that literally,” we sometimes then proceed to put that teaching away entirely. “I don’t have to take it literally” turns into “I don’t have to take it seriously.” But the Lord doesn’t say empty words. When He says things that don’t make sense on the surface, He’s inviting us to think carefully. What does it really mean to sell whatever we have?

            Whatever it means, it’s probably pretty important that we do it. After all, the Lord gave this instruction after He was asked, “what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). The rich man asked the Lord, “how do I get to heaven?” And the Lord answered, “sell whatever you have.”

            Our next reading is from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, from the book Doctrine of Life. This reading gives us a simple overview of the deeper meaning of the things that the Lord does and says in the story we heard from Mark [read §66].

            The first thing this passage notes is that the Lord is said to have looked at the rich man and loved him, because that man was able to say that he had kept the commandments from his youth (Life §66; cf. Mark 10:21). It’s important not to gloss over this moment. The love that was on the Lord’s face was an affirmation that this man had done something right. The rich man’s claim might strike our ears as overconfident and maybe even conceited—“oh, I’ve always kept all the commandments all my life.” It was certainly a big claim, and probably not one hundred percent true. This man had lots to learn. But he had done something right. Keeping the commandments really matters. Even if the upshot of keeping the commandments is that we become a little too sure of our own goodness, it’s still far better to keep the commandments than to break them.

            Of course the Lord loves us whether we keep his commandments or not. When we do the right thing He looks at us with joy and with love; and when we do the wrong thing He looks at us with sorrow and with love. But the story from Mark calls attention to the look of love that came onto the Lord’s face when the rich man said that he had kept the commandments—and the reason for this is that when we obey the Lord we turn towards Him, and we perceive the love that shines from Him. When our backs are turned to Him, we don’t see His love.

            But let’s go back to the instructions that the Lord gave this man. The reading says that to sell what we have is to withdraw our hearts from our riches; to take up the cross is to fight against our lusts; and to follow the Lord is to acknowledge Him as God (Life §66). Those instructions are easy enough to understand. We’re not going to spend any more time today talking about taking up the cross and acknowledging the Lord; those ideas will have to wait for another sermon. I want to focus on the instruction to sell whatever we have.

            By these words the Lord means that we should withdraw our hearts from our riches. Fair enough—that makes sense. If our stuff is more important to us than heaven, then our stuff is what we’re moving towards—not heaven. To fix this problem, we don’t have to literally get rid of our stuff: we simply need to put heaven above our riches. We need to value heavenly things most. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21).

            These ideas are borne out by the conversation that immediately follows today’s story from Mark. The Lord says to His disciples, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” (10:23). Then, because they’re astonished, He clarifies: “Children, how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 24). Riches aren’t the problem: the problem is trusting in riches, or investing our hearts in our riches.

            Of course, it’s easy to say that heaven is more important than our stuff. It’s obvious that this is the truth. Whether or not we believe this truth in our hearts is another matter. Our actual priorities are the ones we act on. Do we value heaven in practice, when we’re not sitting in church? Often this comes down to seemingly small choices, like whether we make time for prayer and the Word of the Lord, or choose to give that time to things like chores, or social media.

            An interesting thought experiment is to consider how much of your stuff you would be willing to part with, for the sake of a neighbor who had been injured. Would you give them a band-aid? Band-aids cost money. But not much. It’s unlikely that anyone would balk at parting with a band-aid. What about more expensive first aid equipment? Would you give up whatever activity you were in the middle of, to drive your neighbor to the hospital? If they were truly destitute, would you pay their hospital bill?

Now let’s do the same thought experiment, except that there’s no neighbor involved—what’s at stake is simply heaven, and your integrity with the Lord. If keeping the Lord’s commandments cost you a hundred dollars, would you part with the money? What if it cost ten thousand dollars? What if it cost you your house, or your job?

None of this is to say that you ought to go around paying strangers’ hospital bills. That might be a wise and charitable thing to do, but it also might not. The point is that it’s easy to enjoy being generous—as long as no one’s asking us to give too much. Picturing yourself giving what you have for a good cause probably feels good. But is there a point at which you begin to feel that something within you resists the thought experiment? “That’s too much—I couldn’t part with that much.”

The Lord makes it pretty clear that heaven is worth everything that we have. He says:

If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.  For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matt. 16:24-26)

What are you actually willing to part with, for the sake of heaven—or for the sake of the love that fills the heavens?

So far we’ve been talking about parting with our stuff—our worldly possessions—and maybe also our time. But the riches that the Lord says we mustn’t trust in can also be understood to mean spiritual riches. In the spiritual sense of the Word, “riches” symbolize knowledges of good and truth (HH §365, et al.). These things are like treasures to us. The Lord doesn’t ask us to get rid of any genuine spiritual treasures. But some of the truths that we treasure are only half-truths. Some of them aren’t truths at all: they’re ideas that we hold dear, but in the end, there’s no place for them in the home that the Lord is calling us to. We all have our own ideas about the ways our lives are “supposed” to go. When life doesn’t go that way, it’s easy to feel cheated. But where did those ideas actually come from? Were they founded on the Lord’s own promises? We all have our own ideas about what it looks like to be good, and how much our religion can reasonably require of us, and what it means to be a man or a woman or a spouse or a parent or a neighbor. If we find that the Lord, in His Word, teaches something different, are we willing to part with our own ideas? Are we willing to sell what we have?

By the way, nobody—least of all the Lord—says that this kind of thing is supposed to be easy. In the story from Mark, the man heard that he should sell whatever he had, and he went away sorrowful (10:22). The Lord saw this. He knew that that man would struggle to accept the truth that He needed to hear. The Lord spoke the truth anyway. He also looked at that man and loved him (v. 21). The Lord’s mercy is forever. His patience is forever. He will not be angry with us if it takes us a long time to find the willingness to sell all that we have. And in the meantime, every little step counts for something. Every time we look at the way life has gone and say, “I guess the Lord’s plan was different from my plan,” we’re inching in the direction of giving up what is our own—and that’s good.

There is yet another way of understanding the instruction to sell all we have—another idea that’s even deeper and even more challenging than the ones we’ve talked about so far. In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told: “That [this man] should sell all that he had, and give to the poor, signifies, in the spiritual sense, that he should put away from himself and reject the things of his proprium” (AE §893.4; cf. §934.2). Proprium is a Latin word that sometimes gets copy-pasted into English translations of the Heavenly Doctrine. One of the best ways to understand this word is to recognize that it is the origin of the English words “property” and “appropriate.” Our proprium is what belongs to us—what is our own, and nobody else’s. It’s the stuff in our hearts that belongs to us, as opposed to what belongs to the Lord. The Lord says that we should put away and reject the proprium, because the proprium is fundamentally selfish (cf. SH §154). When we’re immersed in the proprium, we feel that we’re the center of the world. The beliefs and behaviors that belong to that mentality need to go.

The thing is, when we’re immersed in the proprium, the proprium is all we know. It’s when we’re caught up ourselves that it’s hardest to believe that anything else has value. The delight of selfishness feels like life itself. To give it up feels like giving up everything we have. We feel that the Lord wants to take everything from us. Of course this isn’t true at all. We turn now to our final reading, which is from the Heavenly Doctrine, from the book Secrets of Heaven [read §141].

One of the wonderful truths of spiritual growth is that everything we give up, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, is replaced with something better. This is why the Lord tells us to “sell” what we have, not to give it away. To sell something is to exchange it for something we want more. When we let go of the proprium—when we let go of the conviction that it’s supposed to go our way—the Lord gives us a heavenly proprium. He gives us life, and He gives us an awareness of that life and of the joy that goes with it, and He gives these things to us as though they are our own. This is what He meant when He said, “whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

He really does ask us to sell all that we have—He asks us to let go of the belief that what we have now is better than what He’s going to give us. He told the rich man, “Go your way, sell whatever you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me” (Mark 10:21).

Amen.

Life is Eternal

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; July 21, 2024

Readings: John 16:17-22 (children’s talk);

Luke 20:27-38; Divine Providence §73.6, 7; Secrets of Heaven §10409.3

            Today’s sermon is about the idea that life is eternal. Death is not final; it’s merely a transition. We were not created to strive for a while and then wink out of existence. We are precious to God: He will not allow what we really are to perish. We were created to live to eternity in a blessed state (DP §324.6).

            That there is an afterlife is one of the most basic tenets of the faith of the New Church. It’s right up there with “there is a God” and “we should be nice to people.” It’s an idea that most of us have heard before. So why spend a sermon talking about it? Well, the simplest truths are also, usually, the most powerful ones. We can learn these sorts of truths in a moment, but we’ll spend our lives learning how to really see them. It’s one thing to know that life is eternal; it’s another thing to live with eternity in our minds and in our hearts.

            So today’s sermon is about what it really means to believe in eternal life. The readings from the Heavenly Doctrine that you’ll hear in a little while are about the effect that such a belief is able to have on our thinking and our worldview. But before we get to those readings, we’re going to consider the Sadducees.

            The Sadducees were a Jewish sect that was active at the time of the Lord’s life on earth. One of the tenets of their faith was that there is no afterlife—no resurrection after death. They brought this belief to the Lord, and here’s how the conversation went: [read Luke 20:27-38].

            So the Sadducees present the Lord with a somewhat unlikely scenario: a woman has seven husbands—all of them brothers—one after another; and after all seven brothers have died, the woman herself dies. The Sadducees ask, “In the resurrection, whose wife does she become?” (v. 33). If they had been sincerely asking this question, the Lord’s response might have been something along the lines of, “Well, whose wife does she want to be?” But the Sadducees weren’t really asking anything: they were arguing that there cannot be an afterlife. It’s a pretty weak argument too: people sometimes have complicated relationships, and if there were an afterlife, people would take those complicated relationships into the afterlife. And since that’s obviously just unacceptable, it’s clear that there can’t be an afterlife.

            The Lord doesn’t really engage with this argument. The first part of his response to the Sadducees is more confusing than we might wish it to be: He says, “those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage” (v. 35). It sounds a lot like He’s saying that marriage is an earthly thing, and that no one in the afterlife is married. But the teachings of the New Church make it overwhelmingly clear that this is not the case: there are marriages in heaven (ML §§27-41; HH §§366-386). We’re told that when the Lord says that no one after the resurrection is given in marriage, the only kind of marriage that He’s referring to is spiritual marriage, which is conjunction with the Lord (ML §41). If we don’t choose to conjoin ourselves with the Lord in this life, we won’t choose to do so in the life to come, either. That’s the point that the Lord is really making here. We might wish that the He’d been more direct with the Sadducees, because it’s important for married partners to believe that their marriages can last forever. True married love wants to last forever; we’re told that eternity is “inherent” in this love (ML §216). But we have to trust that what the Lord said to the Sadducees was what needed to be said at that time.

            But it’s the next part of what the Lord says to the Sadducees that’s especially relevant to today’s topic: “But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised, when he called the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ For He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him” (vv. 37, 38). He is not the God of the dead. It’s outrageous, even blasphemous, to conclude that the Lord—who is love—presides over death and decay, over a world that’s doing nothing but inexorably fall apart. God does better work than that. What He makes is made to last. It’s made to live. He is the God of the living. All live to Him: all human beings are alive in His sight. We were created to live.

            In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that, “The Lord did not create the universe for His own sake, but for the sake of those with whom He would be in heaven” (DP §27.2; cf. TCR §§43, 46). And He wants us to be with Him in heaven so that He can make us happy. We read:

Divine love… has as its end a heaven consisting of people who have become or who are becoming angels, to whom it is possible for the Lord to impart all the blessings and happiness connected with love and wisdom, and to impart these from Himself in them. (ibid.)

That’s why we exist. That’s why we were made. It’s a bafflingly wonderful idea. The power that holds the universe together wants nothing more than to make us happy. How could love like that ever permit our lives—or any good thing—to be stolen from us forever?

            As I’ve been saying, these ideas have the power to reshape the ways we look at the lives we’re leading right now, and the ways we look at the world. I’m going to read two passages from the Heavenly Doctrine—two passages that show us the impact of a real belief in eternal life. The first is from a section of the book Divine Providence that talks about different kinds of freedom. There is natural freedom—which is the freedom to think and will the evils that we naturally incline to (§73.3). And then there is spiritual freedom, which is the freedom to be a spiritual person, and do what is right in God’s eyes. We read: [§73.6].

            If the seven or eight or nine decades that we spend on this earth are all that we have, why should we strive to change our hearts? Why should we delay gratification? If life in this world is all we have, we should grab every pleasure we can reach. We should all be hedonists. Why do anything that we don’t want to do?

            But everything changes if life is eternal—if, as the reading says, the delight and blessedness that are within our reach right now are, “but as a fleeting shadow compared to the delight and blessedness of life in eternity, to eternity” (DP §73.6). If eternal life outshines the here and now so completely, then striving to become a better person is not a waste of time. Resisting evil will still be work, but it will be worth it. Every moment of spiritual struggle, every ounce of our labor, will be worthwhile, and a thousand times more than worthwhile—because our labor in this world is just a fleeting shadow before to what is to come. To truly believe in eternal life changes the way we look at the work that’s in front of us right now. It gives us a reason to do that work. It gives us the will to do that work, and the freedom to become spiritual people.

            The second reading from the Heavenly Doctrine is from Secrets of Heaven. This context of this passage is a discussion of the idea that Divine providence can’t possibly be guiding the whole human race—because so often it’s the bad people who end up having good things, and good people who end up with bad things (§10409.2). Surely that wouldn’t happen if God were in charge! This perspective is easy enough to sympathize with. When we look at the world, it sure does seem that too often it’s the power-hungry people who end up in power, not the decent people. And we see good people falling on hard times—being handed burdens that they didn’t ask for and don’t deserve. Where is the Lord in all of that? Now we turn to what the Lord says in the heavenly Doctrine: [read SH §10409.3].

            The point is simple enough: worldly blessings like wealth and status don’t contribute much to our eternal happiness. In fact, they sometimes push us towards eternal unhappiness: sometimes they aren’t blessings at all—they’re curses. So fair enough—the Lord wants us to lay up treasures in heaven, not treasures on earth (Matt. 6:19, 20). But sometimes when we accept these truths, we accept them kind of resentfully. What we actually hear is the Lord explaining to us why we can’t have nice things, and at the end of it all we’ll get a pat on the back for being good. If we aren’t really looking to eternal life, then worldly pleasures and comforts seem pretty important, and it’s pretty unfair that some people get them and others don’t.

The Lord does care about whether or not we’re happy right now. When we’re upset because our car got scratched, He cares. When we’re sad because we didn’t get the job we applied for, He cares. But He’s looking to eternity—and we generally struggle to recognize just how small these things are in the face of eternity. The reading says that what endures to eternity “is.” What comes to an end “relatively is not.” In other words, these earthly things, the things that belong to this life and this life alone, are so temporary, so inconsequential, that in the face of eternity they practically don’t even exist. They just aren’t what matters to the One who values our eternal happiness. He only cares about worldly things insofar as they lead us to or from heaven. The next life outshines this one completely. This perspective shift is hard to make: this world in front of us feels pretty big and important. But the more we can direct our minds and our hearts towards eternity, the more peace we’ll find—the more order we’ll see—when we look at the world. The things that truly matter always have been and always will be intact in the hands of God.

On that note, one more powerful consequence of believing in eternal life is that we can know that the ones we love who have died are not lost. They are safe in the hands of God; they are more alive than they ever were in this world. He did not create us to die, and disappear: He is the God of the living. To believe this, when we’re faced with the loss of one we love, is one of the greatest consolations that a human being can be given. Our hearts know that what is alive doesn’t die. In Secrets of Heaven we read, “who does not say of his children who have died that they are in heaven?” (§5078.5). Earlier I said that true married love looks to eternity, because eternity is inherent in that love. And we’re told:

When married partners … love each other tenderly, they think of eternity in regard to the marriage covenant, and not at all of its being terminated by death. Or if they do think about this, they grieve, until strengthened again with hope by the thought of its continuing in the life to come. (ML §216)

When our minds tell us that death has taken someone we love away from us forever, our hearts are left holding a belief that they just can’t accept. It’s such a painful thing to hold, and it isn’t true at all. Nothing so precious as a human life can ever be lost. And the time we spend apart from the ones we love is only a fleeting shadow, compared to the eternity that we will share with them.

            When the Lord was about to die, He told His disciples, “I will see you again” (John 16:22). “I will see you again.” Those words matter so much. This world is only a doorstep: it takes us just a moment to cross it. So much of what we see and understand right now will be left behind. But everything good is eternal. “You now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you” (ibid.).

Amen.

Hope

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church

Readings: Genesis 50:15-21 (children’s talk); Secrets of Heaven §6578;

Lamentations 3:15-26; Coronis §59.4

            Today’s sermon is about hope—and the message I hope to leave you with is that the Lord designed us to hope. Hope is powerful, and He wants us to lean into it.

            The Word definitely talks about hope. During our prayers this morning we said, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word do I hope.” Those lines are from Psalm 130 (v. 5), and there are many similar Scriptures. But the Word doesn’t treat “hope” like a theological term, and it’s never discussed at length. In the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church we find countless passages about things like love and wisdom; hope, on the other hand, is mentioned here and there.

            But we know, from experience, that hope is important. If you pay attention, you start to notice just how often we use the word in everyday speech. Perhaps you recognize, intuitively, that hopefulness is bound up with spiritual happiness. And of course the opposite of hope is hopelessness, and nobody wants to be hopeless.

            To begin with, we need to define hope. It’s a familiar word; if you hear a phrase like, “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” you know exactly what that means. But just to be crystal clear: hope combines four elements. [1] If we hope for something, that means we want it. [2] The thing we hope for is something we look towards, something that isn’t here yet, something in the future. [3] If we hope for something, that means we’re willing to believe that we can receive it—it can be real. [4] And when we say we hope for something, we’re admitting that we don’t control it. We don’t control the weather, so we don’t say, “I choose for it to be sunny tomorrow.” We say, “I hope it’s sunny.”

            We’ll turn now to the Heavenly Doctrine. This next reading doesn’t exactly define hope, but it does help us understand it. The story that was read to the children says that Joseph consoled his brothers and spoke to their heart (Gen. 50:21). This reading is part of the explanation of the spiritual meaning of those words: [SH §6578].

            All of our internal experiences are seated either in the will or in the understanding—the heart or the head. “Hope” is a fairly emotional word, and we might assume that hope belongs to the heart, or to the will. But the reading says something different: “hope is of the understanding by means of truth.” This doesn’t mean that hope is cold or academic: real hope always touches the heart. But fundamentally, hope belongs to the mind. To hope is to look towards something, and the sense of sight corresponds to the understanding (SH §§4404-4411; AE §260). Without that something to look towards, hope is meaningless. We can’t “just hope,” we have to hope for something. We have to see something to hope for.

            The reading said that Joseph’s efforts to console his brothers symbolize hope. “Consolation,” again, might seem like a pretty emotional word; but again, consolation actually belongs to the understanding. When you console someone, you’re trying to tell them—or better yet, show them—that everything’s going to be okay. You’re trying to help them believe that everything is going to be okay.

            The reason why all of this matters is what we get to choose what we look towards. Emotions are slippery, and we can’t make ourselves feel them. If hope is an emotion, then we have little or no control over it. We can’t create that emotion. But we can choose to look to the Lord. We can choose to look towards heaven—towards the heavenly rest that the Lord has promised us. We can choose to look towards happiness in our marriages, or the happiness of our neighbors whom we serve in our daily work. And so on. When we choose to look to those things, the Lord bends our hearts to follow our gaze. There are lots of feelings that attend hope: a kind of tender longing; a certain straining or striving; a kind of comfort. When we choose to hope, those feelings follow. Though not always right away, which is an idea that we’ll come back to later.

            Earlier I said that the Lord designed us to hope. Ultimately, He designed us to be happy—that’s His plan for us (DP §27.2; TCR §43; SH §1735). And the Heavenly Doctrine indicates that our ability to hope is integral to our ability to be happy. The underlaying idea here is that we need to be spiritually free in order to be happy: if we aren’t free to think and to will, then happiness can never be assigned to us because there is no “us.” We need to be free in order to be happy. And hope is connected to freedom.

There’s a passage in the Heavenly Doctrine that contrasts hope with certainty—the kind of certainty that we would have if we were permitted to see into the future, as the Lord does. The passage says that hoping is a much happier condition than knowing. We read: “if in consequence of some Divine prediction [a person] were to know the end result or outcome, his reason would surrender, and with reason his love” (DP §178). The passage goes on to explain that hope comes from our reason—that is, our ability to think—looking towards what we love. So if our reason surrenders, our hope also disappears.

In other words, when we’re looking towards an outcome that we aren’t certain of, our reason and our love are engaged. When we don’t know what’s going to happen, we have to invest ourselves in hoping for something. Our freedom of choice is invested in that hope. Whereas if we’re certain of what’s coming, we go slack. The future becomes a freight train bearing down on us. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, and we have nothing to do with it. Our freedom has nothing to do with it. Hope is fundamentally free, because in a state of hope we don’t know the outcome—we choose what we want the outcome to be. And because there’s freedom in hope, hope is alive. Certainty, on the other hand, is static.

The long and short of it is that hoping is a happier condition than knowing. One illustration of this is the fact that people often observe that anticipating something can be better than having it. Waiting for Christmas can be better than Christmas. Another illustration is the fact that stories are way more exciting when we don’t know how they’re going to end. The Lord designed us not to know the future, but to look into the future with hope, because He knows that hoping will make us happier. And we can lean into that design.

The main points that have been put before you so far are [1] that hope is something we have a measure of control over, because we can choose what we look towards, and [2] that we are meant to hope—we are meant to use that ability to look forward and long for something, because in so doing we choose what we want, and choosing makes us feel alive.

Obviously there are wise hopes, and there are unwise hopes. Investing your life in the hope of becoming the greatest athlete in history may not be wise. There are also good hopes and evil hopes. Hoping that that maniac driver loses control of his car and gets what he “deserves” is evil. If we have some control over what we hope for, then we also have some responsibility to hope for things that are wise and good.

There are lots of good hopes. But the surest of them all is hope in the Lord. The Lord is always there, and He never changes. We can’t know the future, but we can have unshakeable confidence that when we come into the presence of the Lord, we will be met with peace, with tenderness, with forgiveness, with mercy, and with joy. Other hopes can be defeated, but the Lord has all power in heaven and on earth—and His plan for us is good. If we’re willing to hope in the Lord, we can do it. And it will make us happier.

This isn’t to say that hope in the Lord is like a light that we can switch on. We might wish to hope, and feel that we simply can’t. Hopelessness and despair and apathy are heavy weights, and the Word by no means tells us that we should be able to get out from underneath these things effortlessly. On the contrary, the Lord goes to some lengths to show us that He understands our despair. But even in despair He is present, and He has all power, and He loves us—so we can hope in Him.

Our next reading is an illustration of someone choosing to hope in the Lord, even in the midst of ruin and grief. The reading is from the book of Lamentations, which, as the title suggests, is not a cheerful book. It’s essentially one long lament for Jerusalem and her people, written after the city was besieged and then conquered by the Babylonians. The Babylonians burnt the temple, looted the city, and carried off many of the people. Those who were left were left with ruins. The book of Lamentations is filled with grief for these things. In the midst of that grief, we find these words: [3:15-26]

Near the beginning of the reading, the speaker says that his strength and his hope have perished (v. 18). Then something shifts, and he says, “This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope” (v. 21). And what he recalls seems to be the simple truth that the Lord’s compassions fail not (v. 22). Great is His faithfulness (v. 23). “‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I hope in Him’” (v. 24).

Hope can be casual. We can say things like, “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” and not have much invested in those words. Hope may not seem especially powerful. When things are going well, it generally doesn’t seem so significant. But hope comes into a new light when we grieve, or when what’s in front of us is despair. That is, the light that is hope shines so much more brightly when the world is dark. And when the world is dark we need that light—we yearn for hope, we search for any hope that we can find. Hope in the Lord is always there to be found.

Our last reading for today is from the Heavenly Doctrine, from the book called Coronis.  The main point of this passage is that we need the Lord: we cannot conquer in temptation without Him. The passage offers us a series of illustrations to reinforce this point. But there’s a subtle shift partway through the series of illustrations that I’d like to call your attention to. The first several illustrations show us that we need the Lord—He is the one who sustains us in temptation. Then the illustrations start to suggest that hope in the Lord is what sustains us in temptation. We read: [§59.4]

Hope in the Lord is like hope in the sunrise. Believing that the sun will rise isn’t like switching on a light—it doesn’t make the darkness disappear. But to know that the darkness will not last makes all the difference.

This I recall to my mind,

Therefore I have hope.

Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,

Because His compassions fail not.

They are new every morning…. (Lamentations 3:21-23)

Amen.

High Walls and Open Gates

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; June 16, 2024

Readings: Revelation 21:10-21 (children’s talk), 21:22-27; Apocalypse Revealed  §§922, 952

            The Holy City New Jerusalem symbolizes the New Church—a church that the Lord has made and is making still. This New Church isn’t an organization. It isn’t a building. It is His kingdom on earth. It’s a spiritual community that all people are invited into. It’s also everything that this particular congregation is stiving to embody.

            Today I want to focus on two details from the description of the Holy City that help us understand the character and the quality of this thing that the Lord is creating. We’re told that the New Jerusalem is surrounded by a great and high wall (Rev. 21:12); we’re also told that there are twelve gates in this wall (ibid.). At face value, there’s nothing remarkable about this: lot of ancient cities had walls around them, and of course if you have walls, you also have gates. But the New Jerusalem isn’t an ancient city: it’s the spiritual home that all of us are called to. The fact that the Lord’s church has both walls and gates illustrates an important tension. The walls around a city are there to protect the people in the city—and they do this by keeping enemies out. But the gates are there to let people in. So this city is enclosed, and separate from what is around it. Yet the city is open to what is around it.

            This tension becomes even more evident when you consider the rest of what’s said in chapter 21 of Revelation, which we’ll read now [vv. 22-27].

            The twelve gates of the Holy City are never shut. They’re never closed by day, and there is no night in that place (v. 25). The symbolism of a closed gate, or a closed door, is pretty obvious. Churches and church communities built by people can be closed: they can be suspicious of and hostile to the world around them. But the Lord’s church is open. The Lord’s church is not ruled by a defensive or an exclusionary mentality.

            But the New Jerusalem still has walls, and there are things that cannot enter it. “There shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie” (v. 27). Now we’ve said two things that might not seem like they mesh very well: the Lord’s church is not exclusive, but there are things that cannot enter it. But both of these statements are true. The gates of the Holy City are always open. All people are invited in. The spirit that fills the Lord’s church is a warm spirit, a generous spirit, an open-hearted spirit. And evil has no place in the Lord’s church or in the kingdom of heaven. Each of these truths is pretty self-evident when it’s the only truth we’re looking at. But when we try to join them together, we can get confused. Trying to build a church community that joins these truths together is hard. It’s much easier to double down on one and ignore the other—to be the church of the door or the church of the wall, the church that has no boundaries or the church that has nothing but boundaries. But the Holy City has both walls and open gates.

            We’re going to look a little more closely at what is let into the city; then we’ll look a little more closely at what is kept out. Here’s what we’re told in the Heavenly Doctrine, in Apocalypse Revealed, about the spiritual meaning of the open gates. This is the first of the readings you’ll find printed in the worship handout: [read §922].

            As I said before, the gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut—this means that people are continually invited in. That image is so important. After all, we’re told in the Gospel that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who need no repentance (Luke 15:7). The joy of the angels is to receive us into heaven (see SH §5992.3). And to receive us into the church, because the Lord’s church is the resting place of heaven on earth. And if that’s the attitude that the angels hold, how much more does the Lord Himself rejoice to receive His children into His kingdom? How could the doors of the New Jerusalem be shut? How could Divine love put up barriers against us?

            The reading from Apocalypse Revealed says, at first, that those who are received into the New Jerusalem are those who “possess truths that spring from the goodness of love from the Lord” (§922). In other words, good people. The people who are received into the Lord’s kingdom are good people… no surprises there. But then the reading says, “Its gates not being closed … means, symbolically, that people who wish to enter are continually being let in” (ibid.). That language is important to hear. The Lord gives heaven to those who want it. No one who sincerely seeks out what He offers is ever turned away. Of course, in the end, those who actually want heaven and those who are moved by good loves are the same people.

            But what do these teachings tell us about our roles as would-be members of the New Church? First of all, they tell us that we can dial down the impostor’s syndrome by several degrees. We may not be “good enough” for the Lord’s kingdom, but that’s okay—nobody is! We’re allowed to be part of the New Church, as long as we want to be part of the New Church. But these teachings also say that we need to maintain an open door mentality. Who are we to deem anyone unworthy? If someone comes to this building, to learn the truth or to find something good, who are we to put barriers in their path? Who are we to close what the Lord has opened?

            But we haven’t talked about the walls yet. You could argue that the walls of the New Jerusalem aren’t really there to keep people out—walls aren’t really barriers if the gates are always open. The function that those walls do serve is to make it very clear what the city is, and what it is not. The New Jerusalem is the kingdom of heaven on earth, and “there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie” (Rev. 21:27). The walls of the city draw a line between light and darkness.

            The distinction between what is in the city and what is not becomes even more vivid when you consider the whole description of the New Jerusalem, which fills chapters twenty-one and twenty-two of Revelation. Today’s recitation was taken from Revelation twenty-two; the second half of the recitation reads: “Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have their power in the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city” (v. 14). The very next verse reads: “But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie” (v. 15). These two verses create a stark contrast. The city is a blessed place, a city of crystal and gold, filled with the glory of the Lord. But outside the city—forever outside—is the darkness of evil.

            Many of the evils in that list are self-explanatory—murder, for example. Others, such as being a “dog,” are not. Here’s what the Heavenly Doctrine has to say about this verse: this is the second reading printed in the handout [read AR §952].

            To put it simply, those who are outside the city are those who do not keep the Ten Commandments. The categories of people who are said to be outside the walls line up with the things that are forbidden by the Ten Commandments. The sexually immoral are those who break the sixth commandment, the commandment against adultery. Murderers are those who break the fifth commandment. Idolaters break the first commandment. Those who love and practice lies break the eighth commandment. “Sorcerers” is a little harder to make sense of, but in an earlier passage in Apocalypse Revealed, we’re told that sorcerers are those who break the seventh commandment, since sorcery symbolizes spiritual theft (§892). And dogs, as the reading explains, symbolize those who break the ninth and tenth commandments—the commandments against coveting. As an aside, this passage is not here to tell us that our pets are evil, or that you can’t go to heaven if you own a dog, or any such nonsense. The Lord created dogs, and for a dog to be like a dog is just fine. But for a human being to hunger like a dog is not good—and that’s what this passage is talking about.

            The point is that we can’t take evil into the Lord’s kingdom. We can’t take it into heaven, and we can’t take it into the church—at least not into the true church. Not into the New Jerusalem. On paper, this makes total sense. The whole point of heaven is that it’s a place where there is no evil. But in practice, people often have trouble with boundaries that are drawn against evil. To hear the Lord say that certain kinds of people are not allowed into His city can strike our ears as stern, and even harsh. But evil is evil because it hurts people: it hurts the perpetrators, and it hurts those around the perpetrators. The Lord doesn’t want us to be hurt. He can’t save us from the harm we do to ourselves, if we don’t want to be saved—but that doesn’t mean that we’re entitled to inflict harm on those who make better choices. Those who are willing to be saved are taken to a place where evil is not welcome—a city that is guarded by shining walls.

            Something that’s very important to say, at this juncture, is that it is way more useful for us to focus on the evils that we can’t carry into the New Jerusalem than to focus on the evils that someone else can’t carry into the New Jerusalem. It is true that if this congregation is to be a congregation of the New Church, then the people of the congregation must strive, collectively, to make it a place where evil is not welcome. That means that if someone tries to bring a flagrant evil into the midst of this community, they probably need to be asked to leave. But it can be hard to figure out where to draw that line, since everyone is a sinner. A church is meant to be a place of healing for flawed human beings. The Lord did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:32).

Still, the Word makes it clear that setting boundaries is not an evil thing. The New Jerusalem has boundaries. The passage I read earlier about the open gates of the Holy City says that those who possess truth from good from the Lord are continually let in—and then it makes this statement: “If any others enter, they are not welcomed, because they are of a discordant character, and they then either leave of their own accord because they cannot endure [the] light, or they are sent away” (AR §922).

But again, it’s way more useful to focus on the things that we can’t carry into the Holy City than on the things that someone else can’t carry in. Only God knows how hard someone else is trying. What we can know is that the gates of the New Jerusalem are open, and that we are free to go in—and that there’s stuff we can’t bring with us. So is the city open to us or closed? The answer is simple: it’s closed to everyone who clings to their baggage. It’s open to everyone who puts their baggage down.

According to an old fable, the way you catch a monkey is by getting a big jar that has a small opening, and filling it with something tasty while you know the monkey is watching. Then you go away. The monkey will come and reach into the jar and grab a big handful of the stuff inside—and then it will be caught, because its loaded fist will be too big to fit through the opening of the jar. It could get free just by letting go of the handful of stuff, but it won’t, because it wants that stuff. This may or may not be a true story about the behavior of monkeys, but it illustrates a spiritual truth. Sometimes we get stuck because we’ve grabbed a big handful of anger, or lust, or entitlement. And we feel that we’re stuck—and we also hear the Lord, in His Word, telling us that we can have heaven if we want it. And we might tell Him, “that sure doesn’t feel true to me!”

But the gates of the Holy City are open. Heaven and the church are never shut against anyone. There are things that we can’t carry into it—but from God, we have the power to put those things down. “Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have their power in the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city” (Rev. 22:14).

Amen.