Love Wins - sermon July 5th

Opening Prayer 

Lord, you love us into existence, and wish only that we are free to love you in return.  We are here on this weekend of celebration, grateful for freedom. We are grateful for the sacrifices of all those who have struggled to establish and protect this freedom.  God of love, even so, somehow so many of us are still not free.  We are enslaved by debt, or trapped in hurtful relationships; we are oppressed by prejudice and injustice and the abuse of power; and we are so often imprisoned by our own bad habits.  In every way that we are blocked from experiencing and living in wise love, we are not free.  Our prisons are sometimes of our making, but often from an unjust world too.

And so today we meditate on all the ways we as a country and as members of the human race have yet to become free. We set our hope on the unstoppable mercy of your great Love—Your Love that seeks only to set us free and teach us the ways of peace.  Including the whole world as one community, hear the prayers of our hearts.

Love Wins

Rev. Alison Longstaff, July 5, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Isaiah 55:10-13; Matthew 13:1-9; Heaven and Hell 57

These readings are included at the end of this document.

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55: 10-11

When I sat down with today’s text, a bounty of meaning spilled out like so many jewels scattering across the floor.  I had to work to select only one or two gems to lift up and display, or we would be here for days. Still, I hope that somehow through this talk you will get a sense of the tremendous storehouse of beauty that lies hidden in the words. 

For a start, today’s text raises the age-old question about God’s power.  Just how powerful is God?  Since God is Love, the question becomes also, “Just how powerful is Love?”

The short answer?  “Pretty darn powerful!”

In a now, somewhat infamous incident, the Rev. Rob Bell, then pastor of the Mars Hill mega-church on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, Michigan, found that a quote by Gandhi displayed in his church had a note pinned over it.  The notice blocking the Gandhi quote said, “Reality check: He's in hell.”

This incident threw Bell into a crisis of faith.  On the one hand he well knew the traditional Christian teaching that only those who confess belief in Jesus Christ “go to heaven.” On the other hand, he had his own inner conviction that the God of love, the creator of every human soul, could not be so simplistic and exclusive. 

So, what was the truth?  Do only confessing Jesus-believers go to heaven, or do all good souls?  After much meditation, questioning, and research, Bell published his conclusion in what would be the controversial best seller, Love Wins. 

Bell’s book outraged many Christian conservatives, because in it he concludes that the God of Love opens heaven to every one of all faiths.  There is a reason he called his book “Love Wins.” According to all his best research and the voice of his heart, Love triumphs in the end, not ideology.

I think he’s on to something.

“So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, it will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

This small verse from Isaiah promises big things.  It tells us that God’s word will accomplish God’s will. God’s word will accomplish God’s will.  And what is God’s will?  Well, according to Swedenborg, it is that every created soul should go to heaven.  Every created soul.  Every one.  Sit still with that a minute.

It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”  I ask again, Just how powerful is God’s love?

“You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn-bush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.”

I love to dig into the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible.  I love to see what treasures come into view.  In today’s text, the Hebrew for “thorn-bush” sounds like “not-suits” literally meaning “the thing that pricks.”  Since everything in the Bible is speaking about our own lives and our own spiritual journeys, this “thorn-bush” then is anything in our life that scratches, stabs, and sticks into the spirit like a thorn.  “Pine” in the Hebrew here sounds like bear-oash, and means any noble, stately evergreen tree indigenous to the holy land.  Not only are these trees good for shade, they were the sort used to build their houses of worship. 

“Instead of the thorn-bush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.”

“Brier” or "sar-pad" is some unknown desert plant, something like a nettle.  It is something low and stinging, similar to a thorn-bush, but not the same.  “Myrtle” or "hadas" however could grow up to twenty feet tall when well watered.  It produces dark, scented leaves, star-shaped flowers, and an edible berry.  The myrtle signifies God’s blessings.  Which would you rather have in your spiritual life?  Nettles or these amazing myrtle trees?

What do you think this text is promising?  I believe it the promise of what happens when God’s will is done in our lives.  Tangles and prickers become shelter and sweetness.  Stinging nettles become lush fruit trees.  This isn’t an old promise about a long ago and far away desert and some random plants, but about your life and mine, right here, right now. This is God’s promise to each of us that though we may encounter spiritual brambles in our spiritual journey—brambles which tangle and tear at our feet, and impede our way—we will eventually enter a land of giant, shady trees—trees which shelter our way, offer strength and protection, and all we could need to build spiritual homes. 

God’s word will bring about God’s will. This is what the text seems to be saying.  “So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire, and will achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Let’s look closer.  The text talks about God’s word; about God’s word from God’s mouth.  Think of the mouth.  Think of all the things it is used for.  It is the way through which we communicate—through words and songs, through smiles and laughter, through touches and kisses.  From the most sublime words, to the silliest sayings, to the most intimate gestures of love—all this is the effected by the mouth. 

Have you noticed how babies bring everything to their mouths?  This is not because they have an eating fixation, but because at that stage the mouth and the lips are the most developed area on their bodies.  They explore with their lips the way a blind person explores with their fingers.  Later, their hands will catch up in sensitivity, but at the infant age and stage, it is all about the mouth. 

The mouth.  This passage is about God’s mouth.  What a powerful image!  What is God’s mouth?  It is the means by which God speaks to us; it is the means by which God laughs with us, sings with us, and the means by which God kisses you and me and every created soul.  “God’s mouth” represents all the ways God finds to communicate love.  It is Sacred Scripture, yes!  But it is also nature, creation, great art and music, the sound of a happy child, that certain lyric running through your head, that picture, that spoken word. It is every way God finds to touch our hearts both directly and through each other—that awakens our hearts to the reality of God’s great love.

“So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and will achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Whew!  That’s pretty intense.  God is coming to you and to me, and there is no stopping that gentle, insistent love.

Let me tell you a story.  It goes back to when I was in seminary, and I was working on one of my first sermons.  Now, I can’t speak for other seminary students, but a mood had come over me while writing this sermon.  It was as if something slowly rose up inside me, and I felt very important.  I was going to do what a good minister should do—I was going to be sure to remind everyone that they were a little bit evil and ought to worry about it.  It was my job, you see, to point out all the ways people might be being selfish in life, so they could be warned and feel bad and do something about it.  Because they might otherwise go to hell!  So my sermon had a definite warning and scolding section, because that was my duty.

I brought this terrific sermon to a meeting with a supervising pastor. I showed it to him proudly, fairly sure of his approval.  He read it through, and looked very thoughtful.  He found a few positive things to say, and then said something which stopped me in my tracks.  He said something like, “It is always good to remember that it is our job to preach the gospel, which is the good news, which is that God is Love.”

My ego went down like a house of cards. But along with the crash of my ego came an overwhelming sense of relief.  This mentor had given me permission to stop needing to be one of the world’s jail wardens and watchdogs. I had picked up a burden God had never asked me to carry and never wanted me to carry. Once I set that burden down, what emerged was an amazing, bubbling joy.

It wasn’t as though I hadn’t heard this message before, I just hadn’t really understood it.  Suddenly a huge weight was lifted from my heart.  I didn’t have to scold and warn, I could preach all about the miracle of God’s love—and I could absolutely trust God’s love to do the rest.

There is an old saying that a preacher’s job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  But in my experience, just about everybody is afflicted.  Some may hide it better than others, but there is plenty of affliction to go around.  Most hearts are heavy—just look at the state of the world!  I think a healthy dose of God’s love is just about always the best medicine.  God’s love can accomplish all that it sets out to do.

Before this, I had been trapped in a common misconception.  This misperception is that THE TRUTH is somehow not really THE TRUTH unless it hurts.  Haven’t we all encountered that idea at some time or other?  “Tell me the truth” so often means “tell me the harsh, uncomfortable bit that I don’t want to hear,” eh?  In fact, one pastor I know, in another denomination, made his lead article in a church newsletter about telling visitors “THE TRUTH."  His message was about how we so often want to be nice to visitors who come to the church, but that eventually our job is to tell them “the truth,” which is that they are full of sin and need to repent and to work relentlessly not to be evil.  His main question in the article was how one might navigate that bait and switch.  He knew we wanted to be nice, and that niceness attracts people, but deep down he believed that the main “truth” people needed to hear is that they are full of evil and must remain vigilant to fight the dreadful darkness within.  That was essentially his message. 

I would say he was thoroughly trapped in the false belief that truth has to hurt.  Where is the gospel?  Where is the good news?  I have to say, I am helped by remembering that God’s love is far more powerful than the darkness any day. Please don't point at the darkness and tell me to be afraid; point at the light and offer me hope.

That notion—that the way to heaven must be hard and full of struggle, and that we haven’t had a spiritual experience unless we’ve been made to feel bad about ourselves—is rampant throughout the Christian world.  But it is a false notion. 

Suffering and feeling bad about ourselves is an inevitable part of our human condition. But it isn’t innately spiritual. Suffering is just suffering.  It can help deepen our spiritual experience, but it isn’t necessary in order for us to become deeply spiritual.  Neither is deprivation of comfort somehow spiritual, nor is poverty, nor is celibacy. And self-loathing blocks us from feeling God's love unless it can be healed back to neutrality. Every experience life brings us can teach us, but negative experiences and suffering do not need to be sought to prove we are spiritual.  They will find us, regardless!

This is the same false principle that says that a “real truth,” like a “real man,” must be battling something or conquering something or punishing something to be REAL truth, just like the (senseless and hurtful) idea that a man must be rough and hard and a bit of a bully to be a real man. 

Boys of all ages continue to tease and bully other boys if they show any signs of softness in our culture. This is a practice so deeply ingrained in our male culture that it is hardly even questioned, yet it is pervasive and deeply damaging to the male psyche. I believe that this is a reflection of our false idea about what truth is supposed to be. If you asked, “What would Jesus teach our boys?  I’m guessing “Turn the other cheek” would be a lot more like it, not “Have bigger guns than anybody else.”

It is love, not harshness that conquers all.  Listen to our text: “[The] word that goes out from my mouth…will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Those are phrases of absolute power, yet they are devoid of intimidation or coercion. 

Love and wisdom together accomplish God’s purpose.  The Word, proceeding from Gods mouth, which is everything and every way God communicates love and wisdom with us, will accomplish all it sets out to do, with gentleness, persistence. 

I hope you collected even a few gems from the bounty in today’s text.  The more time I spend with God’s Word, the more I see that the Bible is one big love letter from God. Every single phrase in today’s passage overflowed with the story of the God’s great love for us, and of that love’s infinite power to effect God’s will. 

Without bullying or force, without harshness or brutality, Love will do what it sets out to do.  However you understand that, it is the gospel. 

Love wins indeed!  : D

Amen

Originally preached July 10, 2011, Kitchener, Ontario. Revised

Closing Prayer

We have gathered together in the spirit of love and freedom. We have rested our cares in God’s strong and powerful hands.  We have reflected on the way God’s Love sweeps us all towards heaven as gently and relentlessly as the sun calls the seeds to grow. May we remember this as we go forward into our week ahead, that though life may wrap brambles around our feet, God is working powerfully to turn them into shade trees and shelter.  May we remember that every prickly person and stinging word we encounter can some day be transformed into compassionate angels and warm encouragements.  May we seek to see the ways we sting and ensnare others, that we might be healed, and instead give smiles of encouragement and a helping hand.   For what we give we will receive, and what we would receive we must give.  In gratitude for all that You give us, Lord—for freedom, for love—may we learn to give freely in return.

The Readings

Heaven and Hell 57

You were created that you might come into heaven and become an angel. Anyone who has goodness from the Lord within is a kind of angel-on-earth.  What you have in common with an angel is that your inner nature is designed in the image of heaven, and so far as you are living from good will guided by a faith in God, you become an image of heaven. Mortals on earth also have an outer nature shaped by the culture of the world around you; yet so far as you are living from genuine good will toward others, your outer nature will be subordinate to heaven and will serve heaven. When this happens, the Lord is present with you in both worlds, just as if you were in heaven. 

Isaiah 55:10-13

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn-bush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the LORD's renown, for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed.

Matthew 13: 1-9

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop--a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear.”

Shed A Little Light - sermon January 18

Shed a Little Light

Rev. Alison Longstaff, Jan 18, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

2 Kings 4:1-7; Matthew 14:13-21; New Jerusalem’s Heavenly Doctrine 151-2  

Elisha said, “I wonder how I can be of help. Tell me, what do you have in your house?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Well, I do have a little oil.”

On this Martin Luther King Sunday, I wanted to talk about what it takes to be a hero, and it might not be what you think. 

I first saw Joe Black in the line at Café Crème down here on Front Street.  My immediate impression of his mustache and tattoos and piercings was, “Scary.  Give that one lots of room!”

 

I happened to be in line with Carolyn Lockwood.  What she said to me next dragged my needle right off that record.  She said with a big smile, “Have you met Joe Black?  He is such a great guy.  Everyone loves him!”  I then learned about his daily Facebook “Message of Awesomeness,” and of the many other ways he brightens the lives of many in this community just by showing up in life with optimism and words of support and encouragement.  Jaded cynics beware.  Joe’s light shines on through the darkest days.  He is a local hero.  

Here I sat down with Joe and asked him the following questions. He answered with his heart.  I have included some summations of his answers. His words encouraged us all to make what difference we can with what we have.  He revealed how we never know when kind words from us might save someone's life.  His words of kindness and way of being loving has inspired at least one person and probably more not to commit suicide.

Tell us a bit about your background, where you grew up and went to school.  How would you describe your childhood and teenage years?   Joe grew up in Bath, attending the local schools.

You got an award from Maine Street Bath, what was it for?  It is for being a good citizen---for his Messages of Awesomeness and Hugs and contributing in many ways, such as the reading program and youth program.

You post daily messages of awesomeness on Facebook and have a commitment to being positive and loving.  What else do you do, and why do you do these things?  He helped see that a skate park was built and he promotes literacy in the schools.

So, do you feel positive and loving all the time? Not at all.  Sometimes he is writing his positive messages to remind himself to stay positive. 

Tell me about a few favorite memories or moments that have happened because of your commitment to being positive and loving and real. A woman told him she was still alive because of his words of encouragement.  Just seeing him stopped her from killing herself.

It sounds very rewarding. What does it cost you to put yourself out there the way you do?  He said it costs him nothing.  He just tries to be himself every day.

We applauded Joe.  He sat down, and then I tied the interview and Scripture together with the theme.

Our Scripture readings pointed us to the way God can take the few resources that we have and make them more than enough for us to accomplish good in the world.  God works through what we love, which is represented by the oil in the widow’s house.  All she had was a little oil, and she thought it was nothing.  But oil represents love.  Oil represents the best in us, it is the spark of joy that can make us serve for hours without fatigue because we are so full of love.  That spark is different for each of us.  It is a spiritual love that shows up in physical ways.

When we tap our inner love, we discover that it is something that never runs out.

That is the message in today’s Scriptures.  That there is always enough when we focus on what matters spiritually. Who among us has not experienced that timelessness and inexhaustible focus that can come over us, when we are engaged in something that truly calls to us?

Our deep spiritual love is bigger and harder to define than the ways it shows up in what we do on earth, but we can get glimpses into what it is by what we love to do.

Some understandings of Swedenborg say that we have a “good” love and an “evil” love, and that we have to “shun” the evil love and try to let God put the good love in us more.  But there is another way to look at it that is simpler and easier to work with.  Let’s picture us as different parts of one body, and I might be, say, part of the liver, and you might be part of a muscle on the right arm, or a red blood cell, or maybe a brain cell. There is so much possibility, and every single cell is needed.  I can be a healthy liver cell, or an infected one.  I might be disease-free or covered in cancer.  But I remain a liver-cell.  I am neither evil nor good, I am a potential useful contributor, but my usefulness is impaired or not by the darkness or disease that is attacking me.   I am what I am.  The problem is the disease or imbalance that affects me. My job is to become aware of and work to remove the diseases or imbalances, not shun my very nature. This model takes a lot of shame and blame and self-loathing out of the picture. It recruits us in being strong against the blocks, or “cancers and diseases” that stop us from living our love.  Do you see the difference in the model?

It is like the difference between a healthy rabbit and a rabbit with rabies.  The rabbit isn't “evil”.  But the rabies will cause the rabbit to do harm until the rabies is removed from it. That is how good loves can be hijacked for harm.  We are made to be expressions of good love.  We can learn about the things that twist our good love and do harm through us by learning about the “hijackers” and protecting against them.

In any case, our good deep spiritual love can show up in all sorts of diverse natural expressions.  For one person, it might show up as rescuing cats; for another, volunteering many hours for a hospital.  For you it might be helping one person at a time with a kind word or an errand; for me it might be making people smile and chuckle in the grocery checkout line.  The speaker at Rotary two weeks ago went to Cambodia to work on a clean drinking water project!  But for someone with massive health challenges it might be all they can do to be patient and kind with their caregivers.  But each one, no matter what the scale, is making a difference in the world towards greater ease, greater peace, and a better life for each other. 

It isn't size or scope that matters.  It is what we do with what we have at hand no matter how small that matters, and God promises that whatever that is, it is enough. 

And it isn't a competition.  It is good that we give awards to thank the ones who make a difference. I loved witnessing the standing ovation offered to Joe when he won his Main Street Bath Award.  But most of us will go unrecognized, and that is okay, because when we are truly living our love, we don’t really care about being recognized anyway, we are having too much fun living our love.

In our Hebrew Bible lesson the widow was also advised to “sell” her oil.  This means that she was commanded to value it and to allow others to value it.  This is not a lesson in capitalism but in self-respect.  It is we who can fail to recognize the value of what we have to offer and can have a hard time accepting love and respect and praise from others for what we bring to life. One woman in this congregation whose initials might be A.S. regularly dismisses her kindness and gentleness and sweetness as being not worth much, and yet there isn't a soul in this congregation who doesn't see her as a treasure beyond words.  (And by the way, before I was married, my initials were A.S. and I still struggle to see that what I bring to the world is valuable, so I am preaching what I need to keep learning.  Why is it is so much easier to see the lovability and worth of someone else, while I struggle to give it to myself?)

So, no matter what your initials are, if you are a self-dismisser I encourage you to rethink and realize the worth you bring, yes, just by being you.  It is no big and great and hard task.  It is like brushing the dirt and stones off a beautifully planted garden, and letting God’s love do the rest.  You are the garden.  You are the seeds.   You are the beautiful plant just needing the right conditions to blossom.

Swedenborg teaches that our very nature is love, and he calls us to “repent.”  “Repent” is an old fashioned word that means “use God’s help to remove the things that block you from being more loving.”  Our job is “repentance”.  God’s job is to do all the rest.  God stands ready to help us battle the weeds and insects and (switching metaphors) spiritual cancer cells that may attack along the way.  Those things are not our fault.  They just are, from years of human darkness on this planet.

Yes, there will be weeds!  There will be nasty creatures that try to stunt our growth, block our path, and eat our happiness.  But God is bigger and stronger than any weed or insect or spiritual cancer cell.  And God made us to grow and bloom and spread joy.

The hero’s journey is not an easy one, but it is the only one worth travelling.  The path to love, the path to you becoming your best self is the path to more joy than you can imagine.  Even death is no enemy when your deepest love is the goal.  Just ask Jesus.  So even though you may feel sometimes like you are walking through the shadow of death, fear no evil.  The God that made you—the God of Love—is with you, and the angels, and all these people around you too.  And all are whispering, “Grow!”

Amen.

Musical interlude "Shed a Little Light" by James Taylor

Shed a Little Light by James Taylor

Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King,
and recognize that there are ties between us—all men and women

living on the earth—ties of hope and love, of sister and brotherhood.

That we are bound together in our desire to see the world become

a place in which our children can grow free and strong.
We are bound together by the task that stands before us and the road that lies ahead.
We are bound and we are bound.

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

Shed a little light, oh Lord! So that we can see—just a little light, oh Lord.
’Want to stand it on up, stand it on up, oh Lord.
’Want to walk it on down.  Shed a little light, oh Lord.

Can't get no light from the dollar bill. Don’t give me no light from a TV screen.
When I open my eyes I want to drink my fill from the Well on the Hill.
Do you know what I mean?

Shed a little light, oh Lord! ….

Oh, let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King,
And recognize that there are ties between us—all men and women

living on the earth—ties of hope and love, of sister and brotherhood.

Readings:

2 Kings 4:1-7

One day the wife of a man from the guild of prophets called out to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead. You well know what a good man he was, devoted to God. And now the man to whom he was in debt is on his way to collect by taking my two children as slaves.”

Elisha said, “I wonder how I can be of help. Tell me, what do you have in your house?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Well, I do have a little oil.”

“Here’s what you do,” said Elisha. “Go up and down the street and borrow jugs and bowls from all your neighbors. And not just a few—all you can get. Then come home and lock the door behind you, you and your sons. Pour oil into each container; when each is full, set it aside.”

She did what he said. She locked the door behind her and her sons; as they brought the containers to her, she filled them. When all the jugs and bowls were full, she said to one of her sons, “Another jug, please.”

He said, “That’s it. There are no more jugs.”

Then the oil stopped.

She went and told the story to the man of God. He said, “Go sell the oil and make good on your debts. Then both you and your sons may live on the rest.”

Matthew 14:13-21

When Jesus heard that John had been killed, he went away from there by boat for a deserted place. But when the people heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities around the lake. When Jesus went ashore He saw the huge crowd. And He was moved with compassion toward them, and He healed their sick.

When it was evening, His disciples came to Him, saying, “This is a lonely place and the day is now over. Send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy themselves food.”

But Jesus said to them, “They do not need to depart. You give them something to eat.”

They said to Him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.”

He said, “Bring them here to Me.”  Then He commanded the crowds to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke and gave the loaves to His disciples; and the disciples gave them to the crowds.  They all ate and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments that remained.  Those who had eaten were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 151, 152 portions

151. To do good to the neighbor which is actually good, it must be done from a good love—that is, for the sake of helping or serving others. Those who truly love serving others are not eager to hear of reward, for they simply love to help others, and they get satisfaction from making a difference.  In fact, they are sad if they consider that what they do might be for selfish reasons.

152. Those who do good because they want something for themselves out of it do not do good in service to the Lord, but in service to themselves.  For their first motivation is self-serving—they are looking out only for themselves. Meanwhile they view the good of the neighbor, which is the good of fellow-citizens, of their community, of their country, and of all humanity as nothing but a means to an end.  This means that a short-sighted attachment to self-service and gain at others’ expense can lie hidden inside good deeds, and so far as self-service and selfish gain lie hidden within a good deed, it is not actually good at all.  

“The Mother Clothed with the Sun” - sermon

“The Mother Clothed with the Sun”

Rev. Alison Longstaff, May 11, 2014

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Psalm 104: 22-35; Rev 12: 1-9; AE 707

 “Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process.  It is being birthed in every experience of your life.  Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you.  All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul.  You are here to realize and honour these possibilities.” -John O’Donohue- Anam Cara (pp 6,9)

               

Happy Mother’s Day.  Yes, mother’s day is a secular holiday, but my inner feminist still loves it—any chance to raise up and honor some very important people in our lives whom we otherwise tend to take for granted.  And while secular, Mother’s Day does have certain spiritual overtones; and I can use it as a great segue into the “New Church’s” birthday, which Swedenborgians celebrate on the 19^th day of June.

           

There are many powerful mothers in the Bible, from Sarah the wife of Abraham, to Hannah the mother of the prophet Samuel, to Mary the mother of Jesus.  But I am choosing as our focus the Woman clothed with the Sun in the Apocalypse.  In our text from the book of Revelation this woman gives birth, which makes her a mother—a mother clothed with the sun, making her perhaps one of the most beautiful mothers imaginable.  She is clothed with the sun, which means (in Swedenborgian terms) that she radiates love.  The natural sun is pure fire, and so it represents God’s love to us: the same love that filled the disciples at Pentecost and urged them to go out and spread this love throughout the world.  That is why tongues of fire appeared above their heads.  They were lit from within by God’s love for the human race and all of creation.  And that is why they could speak in every language, because God’s love crosses all cultural barriers and longs to sweep all peoples into its loving embrace.

           

So, who is this Mother Clothed with the Sun, and what meaning does she convey?  To start with, she probably represents the same thing that all princesses, damsels, and wise women represent in all the fairy tales—she represents all that is soft and beautiful, nurturing and life-giving in the human spirit.  She represents all the gentleness, compassion, and tenderness that typify the archetypal Mother.  No, we flesh and blood mothers never achieve such a perfection of gentle beauty.  We are clumsy and goofy and we get zits.  We have PMS and bad hair days, and each of us has our emotional and spiritual stuff that we have to work through—which means we often fall seriously short of motherly perfection.   But that’s not the point.  We still honour motherhood, today and every day, for the loving care our mothers did achieve, and for that incredible, God-given, self-sacrificing love that we have all seen and long for and cherish in our human community.         

               In Swedenborg’s writings we discover that this Mother clothed with the Sun represents “the church.”  But be careful: “church” here does not mean the specific religious group to which we belong or even more abstractly, organized Christian religion.  The Mother clothed with the Sun represents the great collective of all the good people on the earth who are trying to live good and conscientious lives.  This collective crosses all denominational boundaries.  And any one group that claims they are IT, has missed the boat.   In particular, the Woman clothed with the Sun represents all those people who are able to incubate, nurture and give birth to a healthy, living understanding of what it means to live a life according to God’s Word, which means God’s love.  Sometimes, that is you and me.  And most specifically, this woman represents God’s Love Itself.  She radiates such love that the only way to describe her is “clothed with the sun.”  Have you looked at the sun lately?  It can be blinding in its brilliance.

           

So, in our story from Revelation we have a beautiful damsel in distress, she is in labour, which is probably the most vulnerable time ever in a woman’s life.  And right then, a dragon appears! (I hate it when that happens)—a big red one with seven heads and ten horns.  This dragon’s sole intent is to eat up the tiny new baby.  That’s just creepy.  What is this dragon doing in God’s Word?  What message is it telling us about our human struggle to become loving people?  This dragon is identified as “Satan” which in Hebrew means “Tempter” or “Adversary.”  The dragon represents all the things that distract us from God’s love and make us afraid.   The dragon is a natural side-effect of being born not omniscient, not omnipotent, and not omnipresent.  We can’t help it.  We just get afraid.  We worry about things, and then we try to control things and manipulate people so that we won’t be hurt.  And we tend to invent formulas and rules and we think they will be our salvation.  We are scared of the dark, and we line up our defences so we’ll be safe.  We can’t help but be sure that there is a monster under the bed.  We are afraid to trust God.  We are afraid to love.  Loving can feel WAY too vulnerable.

           

God knew this is what we would do, and that’s why the dragon is in the story.  It’s not a warning; it is just what we do while we are learning.  The dragon continues to be in the story and cause problems until it is no longer in the story.  Eventually we stop being afraid and we stop trying to control things and we open up to love.  God knows this will happen too.  That is why the dragon disappears from the story, never to be seen again.  The dragon never wins.  In the end, fear never wins.

            There are many theories out in the world about this dragon, with most of them full of fear, and asserting that this dragon is or will be some specific earthly organisation at a set time in history doing some bad things. *Sigh.* The eternal and timeless nature of God’s love and God’s Word is never so limited and specific.  God’s Word speaks to all humans of all time, and is uniquely designed to do so.  No one story, not even one abstruse and fantastical prophecy in the Bible is ever secretly about helicopters or bar codes or which nation controls the land west of the Jordan River.  God’s Word is incapable of being so limited.  The Bible is about spiritual human dynamics.  It is about the individual journey of the human heart towards God.  It is about our struggle to learn to trust God and trust the process.  We don’t need to be afraid of any story in the Bible.  Even the number 666, or “the mark of the beast” is simply describing the nature of religion when it stops teaching love.  When we are loving, we embody the best of what is human.  But when we forget compassion and loving-kindness, when we think we need to be afraid and to judge and to make religion to be about rules and a certain lifestyle, we look more like a beast.  We become inhuman.  The number 666 is a simple spiritual representation of “getting it all wrong.”  666 means we completely missed the boat.   *Buzzer sound* “Try again.”  And the beauty is, we can. 

           

Yes, sometimes we are the beast.  Sometimes we are the dragon, but God’s plan is for each of us eventually, finally and completely to become a part of the enormous, beautiful, blindingly radiant woman clothed with the sun. 

           

So, in our story, right on cue, the brave knight shows up to rescue the princess, or in this case, to rescue the new mother.  There is a great battle with swords and everything.  Swords are “truth” or in this case remembering that love and compassion are the heart of the life of religion.  You and I battle the dragon with our swords when we hold fast to the thought, “I am to treat each person with loving respect because he or she is a child of God.”  Period.  The dragon and his thinking would say something like: “There are the right sort of people and the wrong sort of people.  I don’t respect the wrong sort because they believe such-and-such, or they wear such-and-such, or they look like such-and-such.... Those people are the problem and I am okay so long as I reject them.”   I would guess we’ve all been on both the giving as well as on the receiving end of such an attitude from time to time.  It is no fun.  It does not feel good.  It does not feel like God.

           

Fortunately, the dragon has no power over God’s love.  It is finally cast out of “heaven” in the story, which means we eventually really, really learn that the fearful, judging way of doing religion doesn’t produce heaven in our lives.  We really get that it doesn’t belong anywhere near heaven.  That is when the dragon is cast out of heaven.

            This arc in the Bible that tells the story of the Mother clothed with the Sun and the Great Red Dragon has a sort of muddled, repetitive nature to it.  It seems like the dragon is cast out for good, only to show up again and make more problems.  There’s something familiar-sounding in that.  Isn’t that how it so often goes in our lives?  We think we’ve licked something, and then it shows up again in a slightly new form and all the trouble starts again.  That’s just the way things go on this epic journey.  It’s not our fault.  It’s the shape of things.  But just maybe it is in the Bible not to tell us we are losers, but to give us heart. 

            Remember, the Bible is also the story of the journey Jesus made on his path from human infant to Divine Human.  That means even Jesus had to battle this spiritual dragon, and it didn’t want to go away for Him either.  I think we see it when the devil promises him, “Just bow down to me, and all the world will be yours.”  It must have been very tempting to want to simply force us all to be good—to take control—to remove the process and zap us all into instant perfection.  We can be so slow to learn!  And we do such horrible things to each other in the process!  We did such horrible things to Jesus.  He must have been tempted to simply eliminate all the struggling and pain and suffering.

           But He also knew that to do that would not be the most loving thing, though that can be hard for us to understand.  Eliminating the struggle for us also eliminates the overwhelming joy and triumph we will feel when we finally reach the end of the race.  It eliminates us feeling like a someone, or as if we own our own spiritual life. That is important.  What does your child learn when you clean their room for them?  What do they learn when they have to clean it themselves?

This spiritual journey is a marathon, and it is worth every drop of sweat and every ounce of stamina and patience and endurance.  It draws these qualities out in us, and teaches us compassion.  It grows us up from spiritual amoebas to spiritual ninja angels (we hope)! Good things take time.  Very good things take a very long time.  If it wasn’t worth the time it takes, God wouldn’t have created this life the way it is.

            So forgive yourself when you are facing the dragon once again.  You are not alone.  And remember the goal in sight: protecting the vision and reality of the Mother Clothed with the Sun, which will be a growing collective of human hearts and minds that understand that LOVE is what matters most.

           

So, on this lovely Mother’s Day, celebrate all the forms of love in your life.  Honour everyone who has “mothered” you on your journey—old and young, male and female.  Celebrate all the ways this church and others have been a spiritual mother to your spiritual life.  And celebrate the good home this church has made—that we make for each other here by trying our best to be as kind and loving as we can be.  And as you go forward from this house, let the love of God so shine in your life, that you—that we all—will be clothed with the sun, if only for a little while.

            God’s blessing on this Mother’s day Sunday.  Amen.

Modified from a sermon originally preached May 2008

Readings:

Psalm 104: 24-35

O Lord, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all. The earth is full of Your possessions—this sea great and broad, in which are swarms without number, living things both great and small. There the ships sail about; there is that Leviathan which You have made to play there. These all wait for You, that You may give them their food in due season.

What You give them they gather in; You open Your hand, they are filled with good.  You hide Your face, they are troubled; You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; and You renew the face of the earth.

May the glory of the Lord endure forever; May the Lord rejoice in His works.

He looks on the earth, and it quakes; He touches the hills, and they smoke.

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.

May my meditation be sweet to Him; I will be glad in the Lord.

Bless the Lord, O my soul! Praise the Lord!

Rev 12: 1-9

1 A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4 His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days. And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, ⁸ but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. ⁹ So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Apocalypse Explained n. 707 (my paraphrase) A woman clothed with the sun, signifies “the church” (or spirituality) with those who are in love to the Lord, and consequently in love towards the neighbor. One can see this when one knows that the “sun,” signifies the Lord, especially regarding Divine love. “Clothed with the sun” signifies living from that love.  This “woman” signifies a New Spirituality (which radiates love), which is being established by the Lord as the less mature and sometimes harmful ideologies of existing faith systems are seen to be broken and are therefore abandoned.