Sermon

Behold, I am sending you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: therefore be wise as

serpents and harmless as doves.

Matthew 10:16

In the sixties, there was a kind of rediscovery of love. In one sense, it is hard to argue

against this kind of impulse, but it is fairly clear by now that the rediscovery did not

transform our world or solve our nation's problems. It may seem invidious to make the

comparison, but there is an eerie resemblance to the rediscovery of greed in the eighties.

That promised great things as well, but they did not happen.

The reasons for the failures may not be quite the same, though. The theme of the eighties

was that we could get something for nothing. We could pay less and less in taxes and get

more and more for ourselves. This is simply bad economics dressed up in Sunday clothes.

The sixties may have been right, literally, in saying that love is the answer, but they

glossed over the rather obvious fact that people do not necessarily agree as to the

meaning of the word "love."

This is where our own theology is quite hard-nosed. Swedenborg is absolutely insistent

that the very essence of the Divine is love. In God there is no anger, no insensitivity,

no condemnation, no punishment. The negative images of God in the Bible describe human

perceptions, not ultimate reality. The Bible records not so much what God actually said as

what people heard, and those can be two very different things.

However, there is nothing fuzzy or weak about divine love. Our theology is equally

insistent that it is inseparable from divine wisdom. The Lord knows us through and

through. Every divine act is not only loving but also precise and skillful--in short,

brilliant. Whatever else love may be, it is not blind.

This is an aspect of the Gospel record that we may tend to overlook. At the heart of our

faith is the statement that we worship the glorified Christ, the Christ, if you will, of

the first chapter of Revelation, seen by the eyes of the spirit in radiant glory and

power. In the Jesus of the Gospels we see a human nature like ours in the process of

complete transformation, beginning as a newborn infant, moving through a life of loving

service to the ultimate act of selflessness to death and resurrection. The love we see in

that figure is so clear, the heart so evident, that we may pay little heed to the wisdom,

to the mind.

Part of the problem is that Jesus's mind did not express itself in the forms we have come

to associate with intellectual prowess. He did not write learned books. As far as I know,

his teaching is not included in courses on the history of philosophy or of science, or

even of literature. Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, yes. Jesus in that sense is a

little more like Socrates, who carried on his philosophizing not by writing but by

conversations. Socates's followers went on to found "schools" and write books. They

started a new way of thinking. Jesus's followers went on to heal souls and found a church.

They started a new way of living.

Let us take a few minutes, though, to describe the intellectual side of Jesus's ministry.

Clearly, his field of study was human nature, more specifically the human soul. He was

concerned with the growth and health of the soul and saw these as absolutely inseparable

from human community. He studied why people act the way they do and how their actions

affect themselves and each other. He was deeply religious, to say the least, but not

formally so. His theology centered in an inner relationship with the Divine that was

central to the transformative process he himself was undergoing, so in a sense he was his

own laboratory.

From an academic standpoint, this is an overwhelmingly vast field of study. There is a

staggering and ceaseless flow of information to be attended to and comprehended. The

interrelationships of feelings and thoughts and circumstances in any single individual are

impossibly complex, as we very soon discover when we try seriously to understand ourselves

or anyone else. Take that complexity and multiply it by a family or a community and the

computer has not yet been invented that can process the data. In fact, the computer has

not yet been invented that remotely approaches the intricacy of a single human brain.

This is the field of knowledge that Jesus mastered. But that is not all. He was not an

ivory tower researcher, he was a teacher. As such, he faced the most difficult of tasks.

He had to recruit students and motivate them to some very hard work with no obvious payoff

at the end. Then he had to find ways to communicate with them, out of his profound

comprehension, on their own level, and to communicate ideas that demanded major changes in

their attitudes and their lives. Finally, he knew that it was absolutely essential that he

not "persuade" his students, that he let them work things out for themselves.

Let me pause a moment and emphasize the fact that all these daunting requirements were in

fact essential demands of his love. That love reached out to find responsive students. It

wanted to awaken in them a new sense of what life is all about, a vision that would

motivate them to learn and to change. It wanted to do this with absolute respect for the

students' integrity as individuals, without a trace of manipulation or coercion. We are so

easily led by our weaknesses, but that is not the leading of love.

If we imagine ourselves in a situation like that, trying to design a course of action that

would meet all the requirements, perhaps we can begin to appreciate the intellectual

demands. Jesus's basic teaching method was to use parables and questions and paradoxes,

and the Gospels are telling us that he had, quite literally, a genius for coming up with

the right one at the right time.

Try it sometime. Think of a situation with someone dear to you. Think of understanding

that individual so well that you know what direction he or she needs to move in. You also

know that the worst thing you can do is to hand over the solution on a platter. Part of

the necessary motion is the very process of discovery. Somehow, you can put all this

together and come up with the one question that will lead to the answer if the individual

is willing to wrestle with it. Not only that, you know how to phrase it so that it will

get through. Or you know the right story to tell, a story that can be taken more than one

way.

There is too much subtlety here for us, too much intricacy for our minds. We much prefer

simpler solutions that give us the illusion of being in control. The trouble is that the

simple solutions tend also to be brutal. They wind up involving condemnation of what

troubles or offends us because that is so much easier than the effort to understand.

There is an extraordinary passage in Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia that says it better

than I can:

Where there is no compassion, selfishness is present, and particularly a hatred for

everyone who does not agree. This is why such people see nothing in their neighbors except

what is wrong with them, and if they see anything good, they either regard it as

insignificant or find a bad interpretation for it. . . . But compassionate people scarcely

see what is wrong with others. Instead, they are alert to everything in them that is good

and true, even putting a good interpretation on things that are evil and false. All angels

are like this and receive this attitude from the Lord, who bends everything toward the

good.

Arcana Coelestia 1079

This is how we ourselves function at our best, with those who are truly dear to us. It is

how the Lord functions toward absolutely everyone. It is how the Lord would have us

function toward absolutely everyone. I don't know about you, but I'm not at all sure I

can. If I see a televangelist and have an overwhelming sense that this is a charlatan who

is using people to gratify his own ego, I may not be perceptive enough to see "everything

in him that is good and true." Or should I say that I may not have the will to try to be

that perceptive?

Most of us, probably all of us, have such blind spots. We have strong emotional reactions

that turn off our will and therefore our capacity to understand. We have a set of current

labels for such blind spots or deficiencies of love, labels like "racism" and "sexism" and

"homophobia," which give the impression that the problems are social rather than

spiritual, but the social manifestations are simply inevitable results of the spiritual

inadequacies.

What can we do? Again, the sixties proposed a very simple answer, "Love everybody." It

turned out not to be that easy. When the harmlessness of doves does not have the wisdom of

serpents, the world of wolves is too much for it.

Let me suggest an approach which may not really face the complexities of life with

serpentine wisdom at its best, but at least does not pretend that things are simple. It

would go something like this. "I recognize that I cannot find it in myself to love this

individual or these individuals whom I know the Lord loves. Because I am out of touch with

the Lord's love in this instance, I cannot really understand this person or these people.

I will be honest with myself in recognizing this as my own inadequacy, my own limitation,

and I will do my level best not to let it control my actions or my words."

This rests on a principle that can be simply stated, love and understanding are ultimately

inseparable. In more personal terms, if I really loved, I would really understand, and if

I really understood, I would really love. The down side of this is can be stated just as

simply, but it is less palatable. If I do not love, it is because I do not understand, and

if I do not understand, it is because I do not love.

Obviously, there is no way out of this latter vicious cycle, which is why the Gospels tell

us that it is impossible--and go on to say that with God, all things are possible. This is

the impossibility that strictly secular efforts toward a better society ignore. It is the

impossibility that the Jesus of the Gospels refuses to ignore, the impossibility that is

directly addressed by his apparent indirectness--by his parables and his questions and his

paradoxes.

For obvious as it is on the theoretical level that there is no way out of this vicious

cycle, it is equally obvious on the practical level that there is a way out. People have

been transformed, sometimes spectacularly so, sometimes in little ways that make a huge

difference. We ourselves are not the people we were ten years ago. There is a tendency for

some of the sharp corners of our souls to soften as the years go by, for some external

things that were desperately important to lose their hold on us, and for deeper and in

many ways more demanding values to come to the surface.

The harmlessness of the dove without the wisdom of the serpent is simply weakness. The

wisdom of the serpent without the harmlessness of the dove is cynicism. Our Lord

exemplifies a way in which love can both learn and be learned--if we will take that first

fearful step of being honest with ourselves when we are unable to love and unwilling to

understand. This is the first step into the unknown of a faith in a Lord whose love and

wisdom are perfect, infinite, and inseparable.

Amen.