Sermon

Far and away the most popular of the books that Swedenborg wrote is his Heaven and Hell, and whether for this reason or not, he is most widely known for his claim to have talked with spirits and angels. How central is this teaching about the spiritual world to our theology as a whole? Or as one new reader put it recently, why so much attention to the other world?

Friedemann Horn has called attention to the fact that in the closest thing Swedenborg wrote to an overview of his theology, True Christian Religion, the subject of the spiritual world is scarcely dealt with. This is perhaps all the more noteworthy because he seems originally to have planned a full chapter heaven and hell, followed by one on our conjunction with them and the state of our life after death, followed by another on eternal life (Cf. A Brief Exposition, n. 16). We can only speculate on the reasons why he changed his plan--the fact remains that he decided at this point not to deal with the subject most closely associated with his name.

At least part of the reason may be found if we look at what he has to say about Biblical passages like our text, passages that have to do with foundations. Here are just a few of his comments. “Spiritual things are founded on natural ones” (Arcana Coelestia n. 4360e). “All the concepts of our thought are founded on the sorts of things that exist in this world” (ibid. n. 54772). “The external (of the church) serves as a foundation on which the internal may stand” (ibid. n. 62992). “The word in its letter and its more inward things are like a house and its foundation” (ibid. n. 94302).

In fact, in Heaven and Hell itself Swedenborg takes pains to stress the folly of “otherworldliness” and the need for engagement in this world. “If we are to receive the life of heaven, we must by all means live in this world . . . and then, through a moral and civic life, receive a spiritual one” (n. 5282). In more contemporary language, we must stay grounded. For him, a spiritual life apart from a moral and civic one would be like a house without a foundation. It would mean living in a dream world.

“Therefore thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: whoever believes shall not make haste.’” This is a wonderful image, well worth bearing in mind. Zion is the Lord’s holy mountain, the mountain top, the highest. In us, it is our deepest and best loves, the ones so dear that we mention them only to those we trust most completely. Sometimes it seems that there is an impassable gulf between those deepest loves and the outside world, the world we actually live in.

Yet it is in this world, if we follow our theology, that the foundation stone of Zion must be laid. Our everyday efforts to live responsibly provide a grounding, a basis, bring our unspoken longings down to earth. This is where our loves are tested. The foundation stone is “tried.”

Let us dwell a moment on this part of the text. The word for “tested” comes from the same verb that is used of testing gold in Zechariah (13:9). It is most often used of testing people--of examining them, or of putting them to the test. It is used also of our testing, or “tempting,” God (Psalm 95:9, Malachi 3:10, 15). It is surely worth noting that the Latin word traditionally translated as “temptation” comes from a verb meaning “to put to the test.” The only reason we translate it “temptation” rather than “testing” seems to be a kind of theological habit.

This calls to mind a little romantic story from years ago. The young man was very much in love, trying his best to persuade his girl friend to marry him. He set up every romantic situation he could think of and proposed time and again, and while she never really said “No,” she never said “Yes” either. One night when he was taking her out to dinner, everything went wrong. She was late, a tire blew, and I don’t know what else happened, after which she said “Yes.” She needed to know that it was not just the moonlight and roses talking. The professions of love needed to be tested against a little adversity.

True enough, life is not all moonlight and roses. Our deepest loves do need to be able to stand the tests of adverse circumstance, and if we read what our theology has to say about “temptation combats” bearing in mind that these are “tests,” we find a wealth of good sense. Temptations are not simply appeals to the worse side of our nature. That is taking an unnecessarily negative view of ourselves. Temptations are attacks against our very real best, challenges which can in fact strengthen that best.

The strength they provide is the strength of a foundation. Experience can reassure us that our ideals are not idle dreams, not ivory tower fantasies, but practical goals for effective living in this world. There is an abundance of evidence for this in the proliferation of “support groups” of all kinds, whether for single mothers, people recently widowed, people who have lost their jobs, or whatever. We turn instinctively to people who have been there, people whose theories have been tested by experience. Their theories may lack scholarly elegance, but they are “tried.”

The “tried stone” is also “a precious cornerstone.” It is no accident that the word “dear” can mean either “beloved” or “expensive.” As soon as we start talking about values, we are talking about loves. Our everyday decisions are a kind of index of our loves.

At this point, though, we need to be a little careful, because our freedom to choose is not unlimited. Each of us is presented with a limited range of alternatives, and the most we can do is to make the best choice we can within that range. We cannot be expected to choose things that are out of that range, and we cannot assume that other people have the same alternatives we do. We look with horror at some of the choices we see being made in the world around us--we would do well to suspect that these choices are being made by people like us, and to wonder what we would do if we were in their shoes.

This news is not all bad, either. We look at times when people rise to the occasion, when communities band together in response to disaster, when acts of admirable compassion and even of heroism seem to be the rule rather than the exception. We would do well to suspect that before the crisis, these were people very much like us, and wonder whether we might not respond similarly.

The main point is, though, that such comparisons are all in the realm of theory. They all involve imagining what things would be like if they were different. The urgent question is what things are like as they are, what we are doing in the circumstances that do obtain. It is here, within the range of possibilities open to us, that we affirm what is precious in our sight. It is here that we state our values, that we ground our loves.

The stone that the Lord would lay, the tried stone, the precious cornerstone, is “a true stone.” In very human terms, there is no pretending, no deception, no rationalizing about it. Our less noble loves do not stand this test. We have to dress them up to make them respectable. We have to make excuses for them, as though they were disreputable relatives. Swedenborg sees a moral life as the absolutely necessary foundation of a spiritual life, and he sees that moral life in terms of the Ten Commandments, in terms of devotion to the divine and integrity of behavior.

This brings us to the last statement of our text, which at first reading seems rather disconnected from the rest--”whoever believes shall not make haste.” It is not all that hard, though, to see a connection even on the literal level, since one of the basics of building is that it takes time and patience to lay a good foundation. This is all the more true spiritually. As we begin to sense the solidity of what we might call “grounded spirituality,” we do begin to feel less harried, more patient. The more we realize the value of integrity, the less we are obsessed with a need for quick results.

All of this comes together in our New Testament reading, in that extraordinary passage where Jesus identifies himself as “the stone that the builders rejected,” the stone that has become “the head of the corner.” The grounded life we are talking about has been perfectly led. The testing, the temptation, has been carried to its absolute extreme. Ultimate value has been lived out on earth. The Word has been made flesh, truth has become incarnate. Our Lord is supremely “tried, precious, and true.”

This becomes more than theological theory to us as we commit ourselves to the values he taught and exemplified. We may be incapable of the perfection of care and candor we see in the Gospel stories, but as we do our best, we gain a sense of their beauty and strength. As we treat others and ourselves as children of God, as precious in the sight of the Divine, we become impatient with impatience, mistrustful of the speedy and superficial, drawn to the profound and abiding. Strange as it may seem, this lack of haste is the quickest road to all that is truly dear. For the superficial takes us quickly hither and yon, now off to the left and now off to the right, now backwards and now forwards; while the apparently slow building on the true foundation takes us straight toward the head of the corner--the Lord.

Amen.