The Battles of the Heart

By the Rev. Lee Woofenden

Bridgewater, Massachusetts, December 10, 2000
Second Sunday of Advent


Readings

Joshua 8:1-8 The battle of Ai

Then the Lord said to Joshua, "Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city."

So Joshua and the whole army moved out to attack Ai. He chose thirty thousand of his best fighting men and sent them out at night with these orders: "Listen carefully. You are to set an ambush behind the city. Don't go very far from it. All of you be on the alert. I and all those with me will advance on the city, and when the men come out against us, as they did before, we will flee from them. They will pursue us until we have lured them away from the city, for they will say, 'They are running away from us as they did before.' So when we flee from them, you are to rise up from ambush and take the city. The Lord your God will give it into your hand. When you have taken the city, set it on fire. Do what the Lord has commanded. See to it; you have my orders."

Luke 1:67-80 Zechariah's song

John's father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us--to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace."

Arcana Coelestia #8391 Practicing daily repentance

If we are living a life of faith, we practice repentance daily. We pay attention to the evils in ourselves, acknowledge them, are on our guard against them, and pray to the Lord for help. For by ourselves we are constantly falling down; but the Lord is constantly putting us on our feet again. By ourselves we fall down whenever our mind desires something evil; and the Lord puts us on our feet again whenever we resist that evil, and therefore do not carry it out.

Sermon

The Lord said to Joshua, "Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. (Joshua 8:1)

In the sermon last week, based on the story of the Lord's call to Joshua, we looked at how we are called to a new life at this time of the Lord's Advent, and how it is not as easy to answer that call as we may first imagine. In fact, it will involve struggle and sacrifice to claim the wonderful new land of spiritual life that the Lord has promised us--and to make ourselves ready for the Lord's new birth into our life.

Of course, it is much more traditional to focus on "positive" topics during the Advent season. And I promise, we'll get to that next week! But there is also a danger in continually focusing on the "good" aspects of the Lord's birth, and ignoring the tough and difficult aspects of it. In fact, the prophet Amos warned:

Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord! Why do you long for the day of the Lord? That day will be darkness, not light. It will be as though someone fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him. Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light--pitch dark, without a ray of brightness? (Amos 5:18-20)

I hope it won't be quite that bad! Amos was speaking of those who refuse to prepare for the Lord's coming. He was speaking of those who trusted in the Lord to save them from all their enemies when they were not willing to battle their inner enemies of greed and selfishness. And as I mentioned last week, if we are not willing to leave behind our old ways and old habits, the Lord's coming is, indeed, a day of trouble and darkness, and not of light.

We would prefer to think of Christmas--the time of the Lord's coming--as a time of pure light, laughter, and joy. But then, why do we celebrate Christmas at the darkest and coldest time of year? If the significance of Christmas were all lightness and joy, why would it not be located in the spring, when there is the joy of new life in nature all around us? Or in the summer, when all is warm and green? Or even in the fall, when we have the bounty of the harvest? Why is Christmas so close to the winter solstice, when everything is cold and dormant, the days are at their shortest, and the dark nights at their longest?

Emotionally, too, Christmas is a time of darkness and struggle for many people. The very expectation that we should be happy and joyful comes as a burden for those who are weighed down under the crushing load of life, or who have lost loved ones with whom they used to celebrate the holidays. It is hard to put on a happy face when inwardly we are feeling something entirely different. The Grinch is not the only one who has trouble with Christmas. And it is not only human grinches who find this season difficult.

So before we join the crowd to celebrate the joy of Christmas, let's take a realistic look at the darkness surrounding Christmas--including the darkness within ourselves--that must be overcome if Christmas is to be a blessing rather than a curse to us.

In our Bible story, we have come to a place where Joshua is faced with a task that is quite literally an uphill battle. He has already led the Israelites to victory over Jericho--though it was really the Lord who did the hard work of that battle by causing the walls of Jericho to fall down. Jericho was located on the edge of the plain that ran alongside the Jordan River in the area where the Israelites crossed over. Right above Jericho were the bluffs that led up into the hill country of central Palestine.

Ai was located well up one of the steep valleys that gave access to the hill country. Just two more miles of climbing up that valley brought a traveler to the top of the rise and to the city of Bethel, whose name means "The House of God." So in order to take Ai, the Israelites had to climb up into the hills to approach the city.

The first time they tried to capture Ai, with only a small, selected fighting force, they were driven back down the slopes by the warriors of the city. They had not only grown overconfident in their easy conquest of Jericho, but one of their soldiers, a man named Achan, had broken the Lord's commandment by taking some of the spoils of that city. Achan had to be dealt with in the brutal ways of the time period before the Israelites could once again go up against Ai--this time with their entire fighting force.

However, Joshua knew that he was fighting an uphill battle against this city, both literally due to its commanding position far up the steep valley, and psychologically due to the defeat his men had suffered in their first encounter with the defenders of Ai. So instead of leading his army on a full frontal assault of Ai, he took only a slightly larger force than he had taken the first time to face the city, and had all the rest hide themselves in ambush behind the city--so that they would be coming from farther up the valley in the direction of Bethel. This strategy is described in our reading from Joshua, and the chapter goes on to relate that it worked exactly as planned. Soon, Ai was in the Israelites' hands, and their corridor to the heart of the Holy Land was secure.

Now to ask the same question we asked last week: What does all of this stuff about war and battle have to do with the approaching birth of the Lord Jesus?

If we look at the prophecies of the Messiah found in the Hebrew Scriptures, we will notice that many of them describe a warlike king in the line of David who would free the downtrodden Israelites from all of their enemies by heroic acts of war. Our Responsive Reading from Isaiah 63:1-9 is an excellent example of these bellicose, blood-stained prophecies. Other prophecies, such as the one found in our opening invocation from Zechariah 9:9-10, foretell a time when the great King will cause wars to cease from the earth, and bring a reign of never-ending peace.

Jesus himself reflected both prophecies. At one point, he said, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). Yet when one of his followers used a sword to defend him from the mob sent by the chief priests to apprehend him in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus reprimanded him, saying, "Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). And when he was preparing his disciples for his death, he said those comforting words, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid" (John 14:27).

If we take those prophecies and these statements of Jesus literally, we end out with a confusing and contradictory picture. Did the Lord come to bring us war or peace? It is only when we look deeper, to the Bible's spiritual meaning, that it all begins to make sense. When we read in the Bible about Joshua capturing Ai and destroying the city and all its inhabitants, or about prophecies of the Messiah coming as a victorious hero of war, or about Jesus saying he came not to bring peace, but a sword, it does not refer primarily to literal battles with weapons, bloodshed, and death. Instead, it refers to the battles of the heart. It refers to those inner battles that we must face and fight in order to make ourselves receptive to the birth of the baby Jesus within us, and to the reign of the Lord as our spiritual king.

In these battles, we do not use swords made of bronze or steel, but swords fashioned from the penetrating truth that we find in the Bible. And there is no physical bloodshed or death, but rather a spiritual ebbing away of the lifeblood of our old faulty attitudes and ideas, and the death of everything within us that prevents us from wholeheartedly accepting the Lord's presence and rule in our lives. What do these battles involve? Swedenborg gives a thumbnail view in Arcana Coelestia:

If we are living a life of faith, we practice repentance daily. We pay attention to the evils in ourselves, acknowledge them, are on our guard against them, and pray to the Lord for help. For by ourselves we are constantly falling down; but the Lord is constantly putting us on our feet again. By ourselves we fall down whenever our mind desires something evil; and the Lord puts us on our feet again whenever we resist that evil, and therefore do not carry it out.

These are the inner battles that we must face in order to make ourselves receptive to the Lord. These are the battles we must face as we travel on our journey toward heaven. When we notice something evil in ourselves--some bad habit or faulty attitude that causes us to treat others and ourselves with something less than love and respect--we face a battle in order to root that spiritual enemy out of our lives. Sometimes the enemy we face is not so much a specific thing evil that we desire to do, but rather an overall sense of discouragement or depression that stands in the way of our accepting the inner peace and joy that the Lord offers us. That, too, is a spiritual enemy that we must face and conquer in our lives.

The weapons we use are the spiritual truths that we learn from reading the Bible, listening to sermons, reading spiritual literature such as Emanuel Swedenborg's writings, and discussing spiritual subjects with others who are on a journey toward angelhood.

We can never have too many of these weapons, because our inner enemies are constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated at blocking our path, so that we continually need new and stronger weapons and strategies to face them. Just as we start with an easy victory in Jericho, down on the plain, and then must struggle our way up the steep mountain valley to capture Ai, our spiritual battles begin with our lower-level and more obvious faults and bad habits, and progress toward deeper and more insidious inner enemies as we gain the strength to face those deeper obstacles to our spiritual growth.

Sometimes our enemies are strong and fearsome. Sometimes, as with the Israelites' first attack on Ai, we underestimate the task, or we try to take improper shortcuts, and we are routed by our enemies in a painful and humiliating defeat. Sometimes, in fact, it is necessary for us to suffer a defeat in order to get us back on the track of following the Lord's way instead of our own way, and trusting in the Lord instead of in ourselves.

But the story of Ai also provides us with some wonderful strategy in overcoming our inner enemies. The city of Bethel was just two miles farther up the valley from Ai, situated at the top of the rise. Bethel, the "house of God," symbolizes the deeper, spiritual knowledge and insight that we gain from our relationship with the Lord through the Bible. And this is where we ambush our spiritual enemies. In her Bible Study Notes, Anita Dole writes:

The company placed in ambush toward Bethel pictures the hidden reserves of strength which come from spiritual knowledge. We by our own reasoning cannot meet the attack of worldly arguments; but reinforced by spiritual knowledge, whose power the worldly-minded do not suspect, we can easily conquer.

If, in our times of inner struggle, we turn to those extra reserves of spiritual knowledge and insight that we have gained along our life's path, we will find that the Lord has provided us with just the spiritual weapons and warriors we need in order to ambush and overcome those inner enemies that face us in our battles of the heart. Then Zechariah's prophecy at the time of John the Baptist's birth will be fulfilled in our own lives:

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. . . . [He has come] to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. . . . The rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.

Amen.

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