Sermon

If we look at the history of churches, including our own, we cannot help but notice a persistent tendency toward schism. What starts out as a single group, apparently united against the rest of the world, sooner or later becomes divided against itself. We may suspect in fact that the seeds of division were there from the beginning, but that they sprouted only in the course of time. Or to use what may be a more appropriate metaphor, the rifts were there all along, but were initially hidden by the greenery of first enthusiasm.

It might seem as though these differences would ultimately prove to be differences about the goals of the church. After all, if we are all working toward the same goals, will we not find ways to work together? If we simply differ as to means, won’t we discover sooner or later which means really work best?

It doesn’t seem to be that simple, and the reason may well be that even when we are in substantial agreement about the goals, we do not really agree about where it is that we are starting from. In fact, if we look in our theology we can find some views that are not easy to reconcile; and we can find those views reflected in the divisions of our church.

I have in mind one primary difference. Time after time, it seems as though our theology reminds us that “as of ourselves,” we are nothing but evil. However, the same theology tells us that those in the church are inwardly angels (True Christian Religion 1). It tells us that each of us has an inmost where the Lord flows directly into us (Arcana Coelestia 2973:3). At one point, Swedenborg even makes a quite astonishing statement (I quote from the Standard Edition):

This interior man, that is, the soul or spirit, is not the internal man, but the internal man is in it when mutual love is in it. The things that are of the internal man are the Lord’s; so that it may be said that the internal man is the Lord (Arcana Coelestia 1594:5).

It does in fact seem as though one strong tendency in the church is to stress our sinfulness, and another strong tendency is to stress our heavenly potential. Psychology too tends to divide along similar lines. There are schools which see human nature as essentially self-centered, with a fundamental need of adjustment for the sake of social survival. There are schools which see human nature as essentially good, warped only by the maltreatment we suffer in a very imperfect society.

In the church, those who stress our heavenly potential can be seen as minimizing or even ignoring the very real problems of evil. There is anxiety that moral discipline will become too lax, that things will get out of control. On the other hand, those who stress our sinfulness can be seen as fertilizing a sense of hopelessness and even cynicism. There is a conviction that people are being condemned when they what they need is encouragement.

Perhaps one of the first things we need to do is to make quite clear whom it is that we are talking about. Are we talking about ourselves as individuals, or about each other? It would seem to be one thing for me to admit to myself that I am nothing but evil, but rather a different thing to tell you that you are nothing but evil. Experience tells us that people have a tendency to live up to our expectations of them--if we expect them to be hostile, we will, so to speak, push any hostile buttons that they have. We will make it easier for them to be hostile than to be friendly.

In a way, it seems as though the opposite is true about our attitude toward ourselves. If we do not recognize our own anger, for instance, it will break out uncontrolled. If we refuse to admit the extent to which we are ruled by something like a desire to be thought well of, we are quite helpless to resist the promptings of that desire. This is why we are reminded time and time again that the road to heaven begins with honest self-examination, with a willingness and even a desire to find out what is wrong with us.

At this point, it seems as though we are left in a very strange and rather grim position. That is, what seems to work best is to believe the best about everyone else and the worst about ourselves. I suspect that there are people who would say that this is quite right, and I suspect this because I know that I have been in this position myself. But when I step back just a little way, this begins to sound ridiculous. Think of two people with this attitude, each saying “You are wonderful, and I am terrible.” They cannot both be right.

However, they can both be wrong, and if we press just a little further into our theology, that seems to be the message we get. At the close of heaven and hell, for example, we are told that throughout our lives in this world, we are kept in a kind of balance between good and evil. That is what gives us the freedom to choose heaven or hell for ourselves. In the meantime, we are more or less undecided. We are neither wonderful nor terrible in any final sense.

This is the message of some familiar words from our New Testament reading. “You are the salt of the earth.” This is clearly a way of saying that we are good, that we are of real value. But it does not stop there. “But if the salt has lost its savor, it is worthless.” Our goodness is not automatic. We cannot take it for granted. It can be lost, and if it is, the loss is very real.

If we press just a little further, it appears that the terrible is on the outside and the good on the inside. That is, it is the lower or “natural” person that is evil. The inmost is the Lord’s dwelling place, and the “internal man” or inner person is already an angel. In this image, what is needed is not so much a purification of the internals but simply their opening. In this image we do not destroy the inner person when we lead evil lives, but simply close that inner person in.

It is only a short step to one more aspect of the question. While our theology has no hesitation in branding self-love as evil, when Swedenborg is being careful (which is not always), he qualifies this. Self-love is evil when it rules, when it is exalted in our priorities above love of the neighbor or love of the Lord. In its own place, it is both good and necessary. This view sees the problem as one of orientation. When we are in our evil states, we have everything upside down.

There is a kind of paradox involved in our Old Testament lesson, the story of the eating of the forbidden fruit. In the early days of the church, this story was not taken as the beginning of “original sin,” not at all. Before Augustine--or more significantly, before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman state--the story was taken as telling us that the Lord had granted us freedom to choose. In a sense, we chose to leave the garden of innocence because it was also the garden of ignorance. We chose to learn, to grow up, with all the mistakes and pain this process involves. We talk sometimes of a good thing being “a mixed blessing”--to the early church, the eating of the forbidden fruit was “a mixed curse.”

The consequence of this for us, in our own times, is that we need self-love, but that it is also an extremely seductive trap. Without self love, we will mistrust and maltreat ourselves to the point that we are worthless to anyone else. Psychologists call this a lack of self-esteem, and if we remember that esteem is just another word for value, this is quite accurate. After all, the Lord told us that we were “of more value than many sparrows.” We are not supposed to believe that we are worthless.

Is this a bit confusing? What are we supposed to think about ourselves? What value are we supposed to place on ourselves? Is there a way we can avoid both the frying pan of self-hatred and the fire of self-inflation?

I think there is. In another context, I once recommended that people memorize a simple three-word sentence, and look for occasions to use it. The same sentence is appropriate for our own self-evaluation. It is “I don’t know.” We have no way of placing any definitive value on ourselves or on each other. We can know a great deal about ourselves. We can become familiar with our strengths and our weaknesses, our generous and our ignoble impulses, our comprehensions and our confusions, our skills and our clumsiness. and this is essential to our progress toward the Lord’s kingdom.

What we do not and cannot know is how all these factors balance out in us. We do not know how much weight to attach to the fact that we really try not to do others harm. We do not know how much weight to attach to the fact that we sometimes worry more about what others will think of us than about what the Lord thinks of us, or that we keep finding some taint of self-seeking in our motives. We know that we seem to alternate between better and worse states of mind, that we have our good days and our bad days; but even if we could count them precisely and compare them quantitatively, we would not come out with a significant judgment of our quality. For all we know, we may be doing better when we are struggling just to hang in there through a long series of bad days than when we are doing wonderful things because we are feeling wonderful.

The final score, so to speak, is really none of our business. Our business is to care for each other and ourselves as best we can day after day, and trust the Lord to make the best of our efforts. Anything else is simply giving in to self-concern. We can indeed trust the Lord in everything that is beyond our knowledge and control. We can look for the good in ourselves and others, we can be frank about the evil in ourselves and others, and we can admit that beyond that, we neither know nor need to know. All we need to know was said by the Psalmist: “The Lord will give grace and glory: No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”

Amen.