Sermon

As one means of demonstrating that there must be deeper meaning in Scripture, Swedenborg occasionally points out that there are contradictions in the literal sense. Our Scripture readings today involve one I had not noticed until I was preparing this sermon, looking at passages Swedenborg gathered in his The Doctrine of the Lord. In Isaiah, God says that he will not give his glory to another. In John, Jesus says not only that the Father has given him glory, but that he, Jesus, has in turn given it to his disciples.

It would be a mistake, I think, to try to juggle the words in some way that would make the contradiction disappear. As a general principle, I think we must face the fact that natural language will never be adequate to express spiritual truth. There is no way we can memorize a set of theological statements, no matter how vast the set or how carefully phrased, and equate this with an understanding of the truth the statements are intended to convey. At best, the sentences will serve as reminders of deeper things, like tips of icebergs showing us where larger masses lie concealed.

The contradictions, then, are a help. They remind us that we cannot put our faith in particular phrasings, that the truth we need for our lives cannot be handed to us on a verbal platter. If this seems hard, think for a moment about the people who mean the most to you. Can you put their qualities into words? Can you write a description that will serve as a substitute for your actual acquaintance with them? Of course you cannot. This does not mean that your understanding of these individuals is inadequate--far from it. It means that language in inadequate to express what we know in our hearts about each other.

This is a kind of back-door approach to my main theme this morning. To backtrack a little, it has been borne in on me in recent years that since theology is for the sake of life, there ought to be a way of living whatever we believe. If there is a doctrine that does not affect our lives, then that doctrine is not much use.

That is point one. Point two is that we are told that the central doctrine of our own church is its doctrine of the Lord, especially that it is absolutely essential that we believe in one God rather than in three. Swedenborg takes pains to reject the notion that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three “persons” in the usual sense of that word, and labels them instead three “essentials.”

Point three is best stated in question form. Is there a way we can live this teaching? Are there things that we do, or don’t do, or do differently because of it? If we were asked to present it without words, could we act it out? Can we, that is, make the bridge between this statement of overarching principle and the decisions we make in our dealings with each other? If not, then we must ask whether it is a teaching that we really need, whether it is not just a kind of intellectual ornament of no particular use.

Certainly, it contradicts one form of trinitarian thought that affects people’s behavior. If people believe that the Father is full of wrath at our sins and that the Son substitutes himself for us, they seem to divide the world into the saved and the damned. They may be moved by compassion for the damned and try to save them, or they may be content to bask in their own self-righteousness, but in any case, all their dealings with others are affected.

If on the contrary we believe that there is truly one God who is manifested with definitive clarity in the incarnation, then we believe that this God is at work all the time everywhere, and we look for evidences of that presence and power in everyone we meet--at least on our good days.

This brings us very close to the main point I want to make this morning. What is it that we look for? In traditional terms, what do we regard as the marks of the spirit? Various groups have focused on such things as speaking in tongues or handling snakes or affirmation of a catechism or acceptance of a sacrament verbal acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord. What would we choose?

We may find our answer in the discourse at the Last Supper. and particularly in the section quoted as our text. “And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” That is, we may not expect to see any visible glory. The glory is the foundation for something else, namely “that they may be one.” We come around, in other words, to this issue of the oneness of God, seeing it now as something that we ourselves are to embody in some fashion.

What does this mean for us? There is a fairly simple place to start toward an answer, namely by asking how often we as individuals are really “one.” This basic idea is expressed in the contemporary idiom, “having it all together.” How often, in contrast, are we divided against ourselves, caught in uncertainty, hearing within our minds different voices counselling different courses of action? How often do we feel ourselves to be wholly present to another human being, present without reserve? How often, in contrast, are we either guarding our weak spots or walking on eggshells?

What our theology is talking about, clearly, is not simply a numerical or arithmetical oneness. It is above all a qualitative oneness. There is no quality in the Father’s love that is at odds with the quality of the Son’s wisdom. There is not anger in the one and compassion in the other. They are one, as Swedenborg says, “distinguishably,” meaning that we can distinguish them mentally but can never separate them in fact. The wisdom is nothing but the form of the love, and the love is nothing but the substance of the wisdom.

There is nothing particularly abstruse or abstract about this. We need only look at the way our feelings color our thoughts and the way our thoughts evoke feelings. We see an acquaintance one way when we are feeling resentful and quite another way when we are feeling sympathetic. Our feelings toward people change as we learn more about them. Every idea we have has some emotional content, some emotional energy within it, and every feeling that surfaces takes some cognitive form. In a way, there is no such thing as “love”--it is always “love of,” and includes some perception of the person or thing that is loved.

The gospel of John takes us one step further. The disciples are to be one not just individually, but as a group. The kind of internal oneness to which we are called is a oneness that unites us with each other. It is not a oneness gained by building walls around ourselves and defining ourselves over against everyone else. It is a oneness that centers in finding our uniqueness, and therefore our unique places in the fabric of humanity.

Perhaps the point may be made clearer by contrasting this qualitative emphasis with a more traditional emphasis in power. When we think of the difference between the divine and the human in the incarnate Lord, it is all too easy to think of the difference between omnipotence and weakness, to think almost of a difference of size. This misses the point. I believe our theology is telling us that the Lord did not win his battles by the exertion of power in any usual sense, but by fidelity to quality. He did not convince his disciples by miraculous displays of strength, but by the beauty of his person.

I am reminded of the lovely description of “rational good” in n. 1950 of Arcana Coelestia:

Rational good never fights, no matter how it is attacked, because it is gentle and kindly, patient and yielding, since its essence is love and mercy. Even though it does not fight, though, it still conquers all without even thinking about combat or glorying in victory. This is because it is divine, and is secure in and of itself.

This captures the essence of the Lord’s strategy, if you will--to defeat the hells not by overpowering them, but by refusing to play their power games, to win souls by warmth rather than to drive them by fear.

There is one huge matter left, though, before we can say the bridge between our idea of God and our daily lives is complete. This is to recognize that we do not find ourselves able to be constantly “gentle and kindly, patient and yielding.” We do find ourselves able, though, to examine ourselves against this standard, to face our specific failings, and to press ourselves toward the ideal it presents. That is, we can admit that we are creatures in process, and that where we are in the process is less critical than where we are trying to go.

After a recent presentation on dysfunctional families at SSR, Renée Morris mentioned the importance of “the melting of the heart” toward those in any distress. This needs to go together with the sharpening of the mind if our gentleness is not to be simply weakness; and one of the central messages of our theology is that softness of heart and acuity of mind--or in more familiar terms, love and wisdom--are actually different aspects of a single entity.

Not everyone believes this. Sometimes it seems as though very few people do. The stereotype is that the soft-hearted person is uncritical and that the critical person is hard-hearted, and these particular combinations may seem easier to find than the one we are looking for. But the oneness of our God, the glory that is reflected in the Christ and offered to us, is that oneness of profound love and profound wisdom, of tender heart and discriminating mind.

Our doctrine of the trinity is a doctrine of life, once we look at it qualitatively. It leaves us no room for complacency, surely. It shows us instead a way of living our faith that is as daunting as it is beautiful, that scares us and draws us at the same time. “But with God, all things are possible.”

Amen.