Sermon

The point I want to dwell on this morning has been very vividly summarized in a cartoon by Pfeiffer. In a series of scenes, a young woman comes to a guru and asks, “Whither?” He points off to the right and says “Thither,” and off she goes. Then, off to the right, there is a huge “Splat!” She comes back looking rather the worse for the wear, and the whole sequence is repeated. When the guru tells her “Thither” for the third time, she screams “No!” and asks, “Why thither?” The guru answers, “In life there is only one thither, and it’s a mile past splat.”

Our age is no different from any other, it seems, in trying to find easier ways. Evidently, we dearly want to believe that we can become more prosperous by paying less in taxes, that we can get more by giving less. We want to believe that we can become happier by listening to tapes in our sleep or by having our health plan provide the right medication or by meeting the special person who is perfect for us--and who recognizes our own perfections. We simply do not want to face squarely the fact that in the long run, we will get what we pay for. Our tax burden is already the lowest of any industrialized nation, and most of them seem to have fewer problems than we. Our health and happiness clearly depend on the way we live and the way we treat each other day after day, and neither chemicals nor tapes will avail if we mistreat ourselves and each other. Marriages do not happen by magic at the moment of the wedding, but are built day by day out of the decisions of the wife and the husband.

Not only that, there does seem to be a necessity that we go through real and daunting difficulties. We may not like the idea, but something in us tends to recognize its validity. If we believe that someone has had it easy from birth on, we suspect that that individual does not have much depth or strength of character. Much of what we feel we know about ourselves comes from the times when we have faced our severest challenges. As our country was coming into being, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and “try” here means “test.”

One of our Nobel Laureates, Ilya Prigogine, received his award because he worked this principle out in scientific detail. He demonstrated that organisms tend do develop only very slowly until they meet a challenge that is actually beyond their present capacities. Then they either flee the challenge and accept a limited role in our ecology, or they make a quantum leap to a new level of competence and thereby expand their domain. As a kind of illustration, we might think of the primitive fish encountering air. They either retreat into the water and stay there, or they develop the ability to breathe air and find the world of dry land opening out before them.

This pattern recurs time and time again in Scripture. Jacob got into so much trouble with his brother Esau that he had to flee to another country--where he prospered more than he ever had at home. Joseph was sold into slavery, and it was this disaster that led to his phenomenal rise to power in Egypt. It was the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt that set the stage for their deliverance, the deliverance that marked them forever as a people set apart.

But perhaps the central instance is the huge one that connects the Old Testament with the New. The prophets saw it coming. They saw the nation losing the fundamental integrity that held it together. They saw the handwriting on the wall. Again and again, they warned that disaster was imminent, that they were about to be overrun by their enemies, to cease to be a nation at all.

It was not easy to get this message across. After all, when Amos started to prophesy, the nation had lasted for some eight centuries--about four times as long as the United States. There was a solid tradition that God had founded the nation and would protect it, and eight centuries of survival provides pretty good support for such a faith. There had been ups and downs, true, but in good human fashion, the very fact that they had come through difficult times was evidence of the truth of the promise.

In fact, the prophets themselves still believed in the promise. While they did foresee disaster, they looked beyond the disaster to a restoration. In one way or another, every one of them saw the coming defeat and exile as part of a process of purification. There would be a remnant of the nation that would be chastened and instructed by these unwelcome events. The Lord would eventually gather them together and form the nation again, and this time the nation would have learned its lesson. This time, it would be a nation where justice reigned, where the commandments were kept, because hardship would have done its instructive work.

For centuries, this sort of happened, but not quite. Some of the Jews did return from Babylon and rebuild both Jerusalem and the temple. They did make a massive effort to know and obey the law in all its formidable detail. But they did not have either their independence or a king. They were part of the Persian Empire at first, then of the Greek, and then of the Roman. There was one brief period of successful rebellion and independence, but the reality was that they were utterly dwarfed by Roman might.

In New Testament times, though, even after almost six centuries of such existence, the promises were still remembered. In Luke we read of Simeon, who was “waiting for the consolation of Israel.” The Song of Mary speaks of revolution--of putting down the mighty and exalting the lowly--and the Song of Zacharias speaks of deliverance from enemies. When John the Baptist started his ministry, the Jerusalem establishment sent a delegation to ask who he was, and the questioning clearly had in mind the promises of restoration.

John’s message was that the kingdom of God was at hand--or the kingdom of heaven. The Lord began his ministry with the same proclamation. It must have been a cryptic message, in a way--the prophets do not talk about a kingdom of God or a kingdom of heaven, but about a kingdom of David or a kingdom of Israel. Were the prophecies on the verge of fulfillment?

On Palm Sunday, everyone would have said yes. Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem as king. He had made his statement about the commercialization of the temple. He was teaching daily in the capitol city.

But then he called his disciples together in the upper room and told them that he had to go away. He told them that there was grief for them to face--that they would desert him and be scattered. He told them also, though, that this would not be the end of the story. Their tribulation would be like that of a woman in labor, and would be forgotten as it is when the woman rejoices at the presence of the newborn child. Their sorrow would be turned into joy. He had already told them that if he did not go away, then he could not send them the Comforter--that as long as he was physically present, they could not be conscious of his inner presence with them. In short, there was no way to the joy of his spiritual presence except through the tragedy of his physical absence.

One of my favorite passages from Swedenborg presents another facet of the same process.

Before anything is brought back into order, it is quite normal for it to be brought first into a kind of confusion, a virtual chaos. It this way, things that fit together badly are severed from each other; and when they have been severed, then the Lord arranges them in order (A.C. 842:3).

We keep trying, as we must, to put things together, to take all the diverse bits of our lives and bring some sort of coherence and order into them. This quotation indicates that we probably do not do this very well at first. We may suspect from other passages that we put in high places some goals that do not belong there, and give too little importance to some things that matter a great deal.

Be that as it may, we do come up with arrangements that work more or less well, and we like the sense of security this offers us. We do not want to go through the uncertainty of change. In Shakespeare’s phrasing, we would “rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” So it takes more than a little misfortune to shift us. Things have to fall apart. We have to be bewildered, to be in that most uncomfortable position of knowing for sure that we do not have the answers.

This is fairly obvious, in a way. As long as we do think we have the answers, our minds will be effectively closed. We may be willing to make some minor adjustments, but there will be no significant change in our priorities. We will go on with our comfortable routine just as long as it is comfortable.

In reflecting on our text, it occurred to me that New Testament scholarship concludes that belief in the Lord’s divinity developed only after the Lord’s death. I suspect that Swedenborgians have resisted the notion that the disciples themselves did not believe in the Lord’s divinity, even though their own words clearly indicate that this is the case. But the Lord’s words here in John point in the same direction. “If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you.” The deeper recognition could not come as long as the physical presence was there as a distraction.

We are called to similar spurts of growth. Sooner or later, we will be called to let go of the religious habits that have brought us this far, and let the Lord show us a new and better pattern. It may have many of the same elements that make up our present pattern, but they will be rearranged. We do not need to hasten this change--its time will come when we are faced with problems our present views cannot manage. All we can do at present is our daily best, caring for each other and ourselves as well as we know how.

There is one thing we can do to lessen the severity of difficulties. We can be ready to admit our inadequacy. The longer we cling to illusions of competency, the more pain it will take to break through to us. The Lord does not will this pain--it is simply an attribute of our own rigidity. The Lord wills the joy and peace that ensue, and will bring them as fast as they can be brought.Amen.