Sermon

The image Isaiah presents here is one which I profoundly hope we cherish for our own church. In past generations, it was certainly so. There was a conviction that ¡°the New Church¡± was the crown of the churches, and that in time it would be recognized as such. It would be established in the top of the mountains, and all nations would turn to it to learn the Lord¡¯s ways.

Certainly one cannot read our theology without sooner or later encountering this vision of the New Church. Swedenborg is consistent and unequivocal about it. The previous dispensation has ended, destroyed by our placing our own institutional and personal interests ahead of ¡°the weightier matters of the law¡±--¡±judgment, mercy, and faith¡± in the words of Matthew, or ¡°judgment and the love of God¡± in the words of Luke. In theological terms, this is the separation of charity from faith, and can only result in the death of the church.

We do not hear much these days about the vision of the coming triumph of the New Church. It was apparently easier to believe in it when things were going well for us than it is now, when things are not going so well. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, the dominant mood in our whole country was that progress was an irresistible force. Good and thoughtful people believed that they might see all social problems solved within their own lifetimes. After all, with the discovery of electricity, a source of power had been found that was so cheap that it was accessible even to the poor. They would soon have comforts they had never dreamed of, and the underlying causes of crime would have been removed.

This same spirit in our church organizations was nurtured by the fact that we were in our own way prestigious, and were growing. We could point with pride to eminent members--to a Clarence Barron in New York, to a Jonathan Young Scammon in Chicago. to the Carter family in Boston or the Cutlers in St. Paul. We could look at the new congregations gathering, and the old ones building larger buildings.

If we look back now with honest eyes, though, we cannot help but see how much of this apparent prosperity was founded on illusion. The national faith in irresistible progress did not recognize the extent to which our apparent prosperity rested on the abuse of child and immigrant labor and the plundering of our natural resources. More seriously, this national faith was quite blind to the depth and strength of human selfishness. Clearly, from what has happened since, anyone who thinks that getting cures greed is living in a fool¡¯s paradise.

Our own church was permeated by this faith, and added to it a further element. We operated on the unchallenged assumption that we were ¡°the New Church¡± described in our theology. That was what we had set out to be in the forming of a separate organization, that was what we called ourselves, and that was what we thought we were.

I do not want to take much time to refute this assumption, because it doesn¡¯t need much. I would simply state that you can search the writings as long as you like without finding any clear references to ¡°the New Church¡± as an ecclesiastical organization. What you will find, especially in Swedenborg¡¯s treatment of the vision of the Holy City New Jerusalem, are trenchant descriptions of the New Church as a total quality of life. In this New Church, for example, the Word will be translucent from its spiritual sense, everything in it will flow from the good of love, everything in it will appear in the light, and there will be nothing external that is separate from its appropriate internal. Its members will not be in the love of self or in the pride of their own intelligence.

Whatever this is a description of, it is not a description of our church organization as it is now or as it ever has been. It is, I would urge, a description of the state which the human race must eventually reach if it is to survive. In that sense, there is something irresistible about it. When we are, so to speak, in our right minds, when our minds are not clouded by our pervasive self-concern, it is irresistibly clear that no lasting human society can be founded on greed or pride or the desire for preeminent power. Wherever these operate, they set up situations where the more we have, the less there is for others--where our satisfaction brings privation to others.

Actually, the New Church described in our theology is essentially heaven on earth. Heaven in this context is not a reward for having done well in this life, but a way of living together. The central characteristic of this way of living together is that the joy of each is shared by all, and that the joy of all comes to focus in each individual. In a sense, each individual is at the center of the care and the concern of the whole. No one can be contented while any single person is in distress, so any distress instantly brings all the resources of the spiritual world to bear on it.

On a far smaller scale, we have some idea of what this is like. When one of our own members is ill or in need, our concerns to come to focus on that individual. If this intense and focused care were the constant and dominant state of our church, and especially if it extended beyond our own limited membership to our communities, our nation, and our world, then we might begin to talk about our being in some measure ¡°the New Church.¡±

Further, if this were the case, there would be a quality about this church that would be immensely attractive. There would be a sense of deep mutual affection and understanding that I can only describe as ¡°winsome,¡± as tending to win hearts and minds over to itself. To anyone longing for the coming of the Lord¡¯s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, the appeal might well be irresistible.

The Sermon on the Mount advises us to take the speck of sawdust out of our own eyes before we try to take the plank out of someone else¡¯s. There are plenty of planks to be seen these days. Crime and addiction and domestic violence are so clearly wrong, so clearly productive of nothing but pain and misery, that it seems hardly worth talking about them. Anyone with half a grain of sense can condemn them as ways of life.

Underlying the Lord¡¯s words, though, is a rather formidable awareness. Let me put it this way. Whatever may be our view of domestic violence, say, it appeals to the person who commits it. We, then, do not know what to do for that person until we identify what appeals to us, what feels good to us, and find ways to get beyond that powerfully persuasive feeling of rightness.

Think for a moment of some of the disagreements that have come up in church affairs. Both sides really believe in what they are saying, and often both cannot be right. Perhaps more often than we would like to admit neither is right, but that is beside the point. The point is that we have our little blindnesses--little only in the sense that they do not seem to have huge consequences. We have the attitudes and practices that are dear to us, that are rooted in is through long years of living. When things go wrong, these matters seem to expand and fill our horizons. We can¡¯t step back and look at the whole situation, we can¡¯t appreciate what other people are trying to tell us, or how they are feeling. We can¡¯t really tell whether our concern is as important as it seems--whether we have hold of something that is really vital, or whether we have just had our personal feelings threatened.

I find our theology telling us in many ways that we are intended to live in community, and that our little communities are intended to live as members of larger communities. Our faith is not one of simply purifying ourselves, it is one of ¡°charity,¡± to use the traditional Swedenborgian name. I find our theology telling us in many ways that a fair-minded society can be made only of fair-minded individuals. The dream of a mechanism by which self-interest is supposedly transmuted into economic justice is as illusory as the alchemist¡¯s dream of a substance that would transmute lead into gold.

I find our Lord telling us that we must come to grips with our own inadequacies. If we follow his example, this will involve times of withdrawal and introspection, but most of the work will be done in our relationships with each other. The first letter of John puts it very concisely and simply--¡±Beloved, let us love each other, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.¡±

The risk is that we, in our lazy fashion, allow this to degenerate into a sloppy sentimentalism, and equate ¡°love¡± with ¡°feeling good.¡± No, to love another person is to discipline oneself to pay real attention to that person. It is to bend one¡¯s being to understand who that other is, what that other needs and what that other has to offer. To love another is to learn to be honest with oneself about oneself, to know when to say ¡°Do not trust me in this respect, for I know I cannot trust myself.¡±

Suppose for a moment that this were not just something we occasionally rise to, but were our normal style of interaction. The visitor would come in to our midst, and we would not say, ¡°Here is a prospective member.¡± We would say instead, ¡°The Lord has brought about this meeting, and we don¡¯t know why. We need to find out. Maybe our church would be good for this individual, and vice versa, and maybe not.¡± With an absolute horror of pushiness or intrusiveness, we would try to understand the other and be understood by the other. This would be our best way of obeying the Lord¡¯s laws about how we should treat each other.

We cannot wait until we are pure to begin the effort, because we will not become pure except by trying to live well together, The inner and the outer efforts will go hand in hand. If we do walk in his ways, many will come, and the mountain of the Lord¡¯s house, the heavenly way of life, will be supreme.

Amen.