The New Christianity

By the Rev. Lee Woofenden

Bridgewater, Massachusetts, May 16, 1999

Readings

Jeremiah 31:31-34 The New Covenant

"The time is coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the Lord.

"This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbors or their brothers, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."

 

Revelation 21:1-5, 22-26 The New Jerusalem

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is among humans, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." . . .

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

 

The Heavenly City #8, 9 Faith and kindness in religion

A religious era comes to an end when there is no more faith because there is no more kindness. Today [1758], the Christian denominations are divided among themselves only by points of faith. But when there is no kindness, there is no faith. So . . . I would like to say something about the ancient people's perspective on kindness. . . .

The perspective on kindness, a philosophy about life, was the central concept in the ancient religions. This perspective united all the religions; though there were many of them, they all worked together, since they considered all people who spent their lives doing good things through kindness to be religious people. They called them brothers even if they disagreed about what was true--which is what we call "faith" in our day.

 

Sermon

"This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbors or their brothers, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:33, 34)

Today, over two hundred and forty years after Emanuel Swedenborg declared that the Last Judgment had taken place, and the long-awaited Second Coming of the Lord was underway, things finally do seem to be going in our direction.

When those early readers of Swedenborg's works first gathered together a decade or so after his death and began moving toward the formation of a distinct church organization that would go under the name of the New Jerusalem, the political, social, and religious scene was very different than it is today. Politically, most of Europe was still under monarchy of one kind or another, and the people of most nations had little say over how their country was run. Socially, the lines of class, race, and gender were sharply drawn, and dictated much of people's lives. And the religious scene was dominated by established church hierarchies that had little use for any upstart group that dared to challenge their authority.

And so, the brave little band of New Church people huddled together for support. They pressed forward with the preaching and the living of their beliefs in a world that was largely hostile, or perhaps worse, indifferent to the wonders that were opening on the minds of those few receivers of the new Christianity. There were wonders of the spiritual world: of heaven, hell, and the intermediate World of Spirits, hidden for ages, that were now opened through the mind and the pen of Emanuel Swedenborg. And even more precious to these devout Christian converts to the New Church, there were the wonders of the spiritual meaning of the Bible, as the veil that had hidden so much of the Bible in the mists of literal obscurity was torn in two, and the whole Bible shown brilliantly with a divine light.

It must have been painful for those early pioneers of the Swedenborgian Church to see how indifferent the larger world around them was to these wonders. Although they lectured and published extensively, they learned to be careful about gushing to their friends and acquaintances about the wonders of their beliefs. Most people, they found out, were not all that interested, beyond mere politeness, and some were downright hostile.

And so, we as a church inherited their reluctance to talk about the wonders of our faith. When I was growing up in the church, the common wisdom was that when talking to a new person, it was best to take our time about bringing up Swedenborg's claimed to have spent the last twenty-seven years of his life with full access to the spiritual world, walking and talking with angels and spirits. It was just too weird, and people would think we were strange if we talked about such things right away. So we'd start with the big three: our beliefs about the Lord, the Bible, and the life that leads to heaven . . . and hold off on Swedenborg's spiritual experiences until they were "hooked," or until they asked too many questions.

How things have changed! In the last few decades we have seen an accelerating pace of popular interest in angels, near death experiences, personal development, and generally in things spiritual. Where we used to be a bit shy about Swedenborg's spiritual experiences, now we're almost inclined to brag. It's a little like the old fish stories: "You say that an angel talked to your guy? Why, that's nothing! Our guy spent almost thirty years talking to 'em! And that was over two hundred years ago--before everyone started doing it!"

Seriously, though, things really do seem to be going our way. In so many areas where in previous decades we felt like isolated islands of belief, we now find that thousands, even millions of others in our society share our beliefs. There are highly popular angel programs right on TV, and everyone is talking about personal development and spiritual growth. We can relax and talk much more openly about our beliefs--and many people don't even gasp anymore when we say that we think the Second Coming has already happened!

Of course, there are still many areas where we have a long way to go. The heavenly city hasn't quite hit the ground yet. But as we approach the new millennium, I do believe that the world is moving in that direction more quickly and more clearly than we did in the first two centuries after Swedenborg published his message of spiritual reality to the world.

There is one area, though, where we as a church have not quite gotten our walking legs. It was highlighted for me recently by a friend, who, after I mentioned a nice thought about heaven from Swedenborg, replied, "Oh, he had some looks at heaven, all right. . . . Too bad he had to fit his visions and enlightenments into the existing Christian framework."

The problem we have had is this: For millions of people who are not committed Christians themselves, Christ has a bad name. And it's not hard to see why. Looking over the history of the Christian Church since just a few centuries after Christ, it is not a pretty picture. With the emperor Constantine in the early 300s AD, Christianity became a state religion, and the grasping for power and wealth in the name of Christ began in earnest. Corruption piled upon corruption, and soon Christians were killing non-Christians, and even fellow Christians who happened to be of a different stripe, all in the name of Christ.

Meanwhile, as the Christian Church became a vehicle of the human hankering for power and money, the beautiful teachings of Christ--which were based on loving one another and doing good for both friends and enemies--were increasingly trampled underfoot. In their place grew a monstrosity of so-called "faith" as the sole avenue of salvation, without the need for love and kindness to our fellow human beings. Senseless dogmas and formulas took the place of real religion. Meanwhile, other parts of the Christian Church taught that good works were still necessary, but drove people to them through guilt and shame rather than through infusing people's lives with the powerful love of the Lord.

These schemes seemed to work as long as human minds were kept in bondage to powerful church institutions that commanded faith on pain of ostracism, ruin, and even death. But in the fullness of time the Lord saw that this situation could no longer be allowed to continue. The people of earth needed to be freed from their mental and spiritual bondage. And so, Swedenborg tells us, in the mid-1700s the Lord saw fit to accomplish a Last Judgment and clear the spiritual atmosphere, freeing human minds to think for ourselves and make up our own minds about religion.

In the centuries since that happened, an increasing number of people have used that freedom to completely leave behind what they saw as the irrational tyranny of religion. They either became atheists, or they pushed religion to the side and lived their lives largely in the material and social planes of existence, with little reference to God or spirit.

Then, starting earlier in this century, a popular spiritual revival began. Under a loose umbrella that is sometimes called the New Age Movement, people who had rejected the Christianity in which they had grown up were turning to every form of spirituality except Christianity. Meanwhile, the revival of fundamentalist Christianity, with its harshness of teaching, helped to drive those spiritual seekers farther away from the religion of their birth.

We Swedenborgians were caught in the middle. On the one hand, we could appreciate the spiritual seekers' groping for a deeper basis for spirituality than the existing Christian churches seemed to be offering. But on the other hand, our own faith and theology was thoroughly and firmly Christian--although of a different flavor than traditional Christian teaching. And so we were caught in the conundrum of whether to proclaim our Christianity, and thereby turn off many spiritual seekers who would otherwise be open to our message, or downplay our Christianity and thereby wrap in a blanket the most beautiful part of our faith.

I believe that this is one of the growing edges of our church right now: Becoming fully Christian, while opening our Christianity up to the full power of the deeper and truer spirit of Christ--which was so absent from the Christian Church for so many centuries. And I believe that the mainline churches are working on the same growing edge.

What we have to offer, both to ourselves and to those who might be open to our message, is a belief about Jesus Christ that overcomes the old resistance to Christianity by raising our vision of Christ out of the mire of power politics and the desire to be right at all costs, and into the sphere where Jesus truly is: the sphere of the human heart and mind. And here, we come full circle to where we started:

"This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbors or their brothers, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:33, 34)

Isn't this what the coming of Jesus Christ into our world is all about? It is not about appeasing God the Father; God never had to be appeased in the first place. And although Jesus was willing to die for us, even his death was not about paying some supposed penalty for our sins. God is not a tyrant who requires punishment for every infraction. No, even Jesus' death on the cross was about the lengths and depths to which God's love will go to show us just how much God cares about us. As Jesus himself said, "Greater love has no one than this: that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

Jesus is not about paying penalties and appeasing an angry God. Not at all! Jesus is about God loving us so deeply and so fully that God just had to come among us, as one of us, and show us how to find our way back to our Lord and our God. Jesus is about expressing God's infinitely human love and understanding in a human presence that we can know and love--a personal Savior that we can turn to in our struggles and our triumphs, our grief and our joy. Jesus Christ is about God showing tender love to each one of us, and asking for our love in return. Jesus is about blanketing the world with the knowledge of the Lord, so that we will no longer have to make the Lord known to one another, because we will all feel the Lord's living presence in our hearts and minds.

This is a new Christian faith that we can talk to our friends and acquaintances about without feeling shy or nervous in calling ourselves Christian. It is a Christian faith that we believe is destined to fill the earth with a new era of spiritual enlightenment--and especially, with a new era of mutual love and kindness among all people.

I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. (Revelation 21:22-25)

Amen.

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Graphics courtesy of the Swedenborgian Church