Sermon

And they handed him the book of Isaiah; and when he had opened it, he found the place

where it was written, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to

preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach

deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those

who are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." . . . And he began to say to

them, "This day, this scripture is fulfilled in you ears."

Luke 4:18-21

This morning, I want to start with a little church history and use it to look at the

relationship of the Gospel accounts of the Lord's life to our own understanding of our own

lives.

There is a fairly common general impression that differences of opinion arose only

gradually in the early history of the Christian church, that the apostles themselves were

of one mind. A closer look discloses that this was not the case, not at all. The Book of

Acts tells of a difference of opinion as to whether circumcision and observance of Jewish

dietary laws should be required of Gentile converts, and there is other early literature

which makes it very clear that feelings ran rather higher than the account in Acts

suggests. Acts does tell us that before his conversion Paul was persecuting the

Christians. It does not tell us that some Christians held him responsible for the death of

Jesus' brother James, who was head of the church in Jerusalem, and never forgave him. To

them, he was the antichrist who failed in his overt persecution and then tried to subvert

from within.

In fact, there were intensely loyal followers who regarded Jesus in very straightforward

fashion as the last and greatest of the prophets, a second Moses come, as the Gospels tell

us, not to destroy the law but to fulfill it. In their view, he had come to purify the law

of all the concessions that had been made because of "the hardness of our

hearts,"--concessions such as sacrificial ritual and nationalism and kingship--and to get

down to the essence of loving relationships and profoundly ethical living. These people

took seriously Jesus' renunciation of wealth and accepted the label, "Ebionites," from a

Hebrew word meaning "the poor." Ultimately they were rejected by Judaism as schismatic and

by Christianity as heretical, and they seem to vanish from the pages of history in the

course of the second century.

While these people seemed to entertain no thought whatever that Jesus might be divine,

there were other followers who went to the opposite extreme. They came to be lumped

together as "gnostics," and some of them went so far as to say that Jesus was so

completely "God with us" that his human form was really only an illusion. These tended to

be people who had had what we would call mystical experiences, people for whom the

spiritual dimension of life was very real.

What came to be the mainstream church rejected both of these extremes and insisted that in

some way or other, Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. In efforts to explain

this, they turned to the methods of Greek philosophy and framed a rather abstruse doctrine

of the trinity which in some ways is more notable for what it denies than for what it

affirms.

There is one quite simple feature of this doctrine that I want to focus on, namely that

the relationship of the divine and the human natures was seen as static. It was suggested

by some that Jesus somehow developed from being human to being divine, but this suggestion

was consciously rejected, apparently because it left the door open for failure. Our own

theology, though, insists that "the glorification" was a lifelong process, that through

victories in temptations Jesus gradually "put off" his human nature and "put on" his

divine nature, that as we are to be born anew by the power of the Divine, he transformed

himself.

As I mentioned, the Ebionites had no thought of his divinity, but they did teach that

Jesus changed and grew. In their view, he was not born a prophet. He was born like any of

us, but by a life of perfect obedience he made himself a fit vessel for the spirit of

prophecy. For them, this was the spirit that descended upon him at his baptism.

This is not a far-out suggestion. What was the effect of the baptism? In a way, we do not

know, because we are told nothing about what Jesus's life had been like before that event.

We have the stories of his birth and the one story of his visit to the temple when he was

twelve, but it is presumed that he was about thirty years old when he came to the Jordan.

What had he been doing for those eighteen years?

In a sense, we simply do not know, but that does not tell the whole story. It seems quite

clear that he was not teaching, that he was not healing, that he was not calling

disciples. In other words, we do not know what he changed from but we know with as much

certainty as we can have at this remove in time that the baptism did signal an immense

change. When he started to preach in the synagogue in Capernaum his hearers were startled.

They did not expect this of him. He had not been like this before. "Isn't this Joseph's

son?"

Surely it is not too much to connect that change with the descent of the spirit. All

through the Hebrew Scriptures we find stories of the spirit filling someone or other and

resulting in inspired words or heroic deeds--in a startling departure from ordinary ways

of living and behaving. The prophet Joel caught the essence of it when he said, "And it

shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons

and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams your young men

shall see visions" (Joel 2:28).

And is this not what Jesus testifies of himself in this first "sermon" in Capernaum? He

finds the place in Isaiah--the prophet Isaiah--where it is written, "The spirit of the

Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me . . ." and says that this Scripture is

being fulfilled even while they are listening to it. Then, when they have their doubts

because they remember the kind of person he used to be, he says, "No prophet is accepted

in his own country."

This is what the Ebionites are saying. In a sense, we might say that Swedenborg is

listening. But then we must also say that Swedenborg is listening to the other "extreme"

as well. He teaches that this process of transformation did not stop with the descent of

the dove, but continued to complete glorification. The acceptance of the commission, so to

speak, was a huge step, but only a step on the path to complete identity with the giver of

the commission. So for Swedenborg, Jesus is as human as he was for the Ebionites and as

divine as he was for the gnostics; and the reason the Gospels give us no definitive answer

on this question is that he was in process. Sometimes he was so close to union that he

could say that he and the Father were simply one. Sometimes he felt so remote that he felt

utterly deserted and alone.

From a Swedenborgian point of view, then, the mainstream church centered in the right

place by refusing to eliminate either the divine or the human aspects, but in rejecting

the "extremes" of Ebionite and gnostic theology narrowed the range.

This, for me, is where we finally come to the subject of our own lives. The static and

narrow view of the nature (or natures) of Jesus tends to engender a static and narrow view

of our own natures. The Christian church does not seem to have done very well at calling

people to lives of total transformation. On the evangelical side there have been calls to

rebirth, but largely as an instantaneous event. The descent of the spirit is the hallmark

of Pentecostals of all kinds, but more as weekly episodes than as a lifelong process

moving to ever deeper levels of union.

For some time now there have been people, in the fields of education and psychology in

particular, who write about "stages of development," about a lifelong process that is

actually getting somewhere. The one contemporary individual who has looked most closely at

the religious implications is a theologian named James Fowler. Some years ago, our whole

SSR faculty went to a weekend workshop which he led on Faith Development and Evangelism.

There were some fifty people there, mostly clergy, I think, and they became quite excited

about the picture Fowler was presenting. But when it came to the relationship of this to

evangelism (or church growth) there was a moment of silence. Finally one individual said

something like this: "If we were going to use this material for church growth, then we'd

have to start faith development programs in our churches."

Now surely, it would seem that there is a kind of appropriateness to a church having

programs that center in the development of faith. To me, this remark bore a kind of sad

and unintentional witness to a static view of the religious life, to assumptions that

religion was something one should find, should arrive at. The process dimension has

largely been lost, and perhaps for the same reason it was rejected by the Christology of

the early church--it introduces an element of real uncertainty. It says, in a way, that we

can never rest secure. In the words of one hymn, it says, "Time makes ancient good

uncouth: They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of truth." If you are

looking for a pat on the back and an excuse for putting your feet up, look somewhere else.

There are times when that seems unreasonable, times when uncertainty seems intolerable.

But if we listen to some of the things the Gospels are telling us, it sounds as though the

Lord does not want our lives to be merely "reasonable," merely "tolerable." In that first

sermon he talked about healing and deliverance, recovery of sight and liberation. In his

discourse at the Last Supper we find a call to joy and to glory--"that my joy might be in

you, and that your joy might be full," "that they may be made perfect in one," and perhaps

most clearly drawing the parallel of our lives with his, "that they may be one just as we

are one, I in them and you in me."

The price of security is the loss of wonder. The compensation for the sense of insecurity

is the vision of joy. Over and over again, this is the message of the spirit of prophecy.

In a conversation that included appreciative mention Swedenborg, the composer Brahms spoke

very clearly about his reliance on spiritual inspiration for the process of composition;

and when he broke radically with the traditional in his German Requiem he included an

electrifying setting of a verse from Isaiah: "The redeemed of the Lord shall return again

and come rejoicing unto Zion, gladness and joy everlasting shall be upon their heads"

(Isaiah 51:11).

When Swedenborg says that angels are not a separate creation, that all angels were once

people like us, he is calling us out of any narrow and static view we may have of

ourselves and our lives. We are not called simply to be nice people or routine

time-servers, we are called to be angels. But further, we are not called to stop being

ourselves in order to be angels. To the extent that we simply give our own full attention

do understanding what the Lord's will is for us in our present circumstances, in our

present company, and to doing that will in our own unique ways, we are leading what we

might think of as the life before the baptism. Perhaps in this life, perhaps only in the

spiritual world, we will be open to accept the spirit. We will be angels.

It is no light matter to listen to a theology that refuses to be either static or narrow.

The Gospels never pretend that it is a light matter to be a Christian. The Christ we turn

to is full range and in full motion, so to speak. He is a sign that this is what we are

designed and created for--this life of challenge and change, with a destination of joy

beyond our conceiving.

Amen.