“No where” vs. “Now Here” is one of the transformative shifts of life. We can see our lives and the opportunities essentially as “no where” or we can see those opportunities as “now here.”
The “no where” perspective is fear driven, blinded to the God given opportunities before it. As with anything, we can actually practice it and that is where the “no where” perspective can become increasingly a shut down, increasingly life into blindness. In “Divine Providence” Emanuel Swedenborg writes that unless we act on our intentions eventually our real intention becomes unwillingness. That was an eye opener for me – imagine if my intention was not just the lack of willingness of actual unwillingness!
The “Now Here” perspective, stated simply, is the perspective of angels. Angels “desire nothing more than to perform useful service.” (Secrets of Heaven) Restated, angels life is about the opportunity – seeing it and filling it. They fill it on their “own initiative on behalf of God.”
Love then is point – not love that grabs and points towards ourselves but love that we allow to flow through our selves. That is work, no question. But it is highly practical. As Seth Godin noted in his recent book “Linchpin”, the future belongs to those who offer “unasked for gifts of emotional labor.” Welcome to “Now Here.”
NewChurch LIVE seeks to be a growing, outward reaching presence in the world. In so doing our hope is to join many other churches and denominations in the real work of faith-based living. We join a movement, broader than any particular denomination. ”Movement” actually forms the very core of why churches were established – to draw a community together around a movement – a movement then supported by a disciplined community that inspires, informs and supports.
As such we actually need to travel to the edge of what feels like chaos. A growing church, as is true with any growing institution must carefully tread that line between the known and the unknown, finding the “sweet spot” where creative tension moves us from the “as is” to the “can be.”
That place is admittedly uncomfortable. We will take time to look at more extensively as we close the series with a sermon on “Blessed Unrest.” And that is where we are and where we need to be!
To keep our bearings, we need a “True North.” Easy to fall prey to mixing the busyness of congregational life for the business of congregational life. Our “business” centers on several key non-negotiable. I share these knowing there are numerous ways to state them.
God’s Word, a.k.a. the Bible
New Church Theology, a theology codified by Emanuel Swedenborg to articulate the true meaning of Christianity
Life lived for others without claiming cultural or spiritual superiority.
Respectful dialog that treasures belonging
From that place we tap into the co-creative capacity alive in all of us, a place from which a dynamic emergence grows into life – aka “A Monday Morning Church.” That is where our church hits its real capacity to be a positive force in the world. For the fact is, as Senior Pastor, maybe one of the more significant leadership insights I can offer is “I don’t know.” I don’t know. I don’t know where NCL is headed. And that is actually pretty exciting.
What do I know? I know the heart. We have seen it over and over again. It is a heart not unique to NCL but a heart where maybe NCL is a special expression. The other part I know? I know that while I don’t know where NCL is headed, I fully trust that you do. I trust that God is stirring something in your heart, that He is calling something into Being. ”True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of best efforts to deny it or avoid it.” I trust that the team will fashion and achitecturalize structures that support that “knowing.”
Then we will possess what I think Jesus calls us to – a true north that both settles and expands. So lets build a church!
I was born and raised in the New Church. As a church, at times it is called “Swedenborgian” because of our use of the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg as part of our religious canon. The term is used in a similar way to the way “Lutheran” churches reference their church. Both are clearly Christian with a unique “twist” presented by a central theologian.
I subscribe to the belief that Swedenborg’s theology is inspired revelation. That does not make it “perfect” – a dangerous standard I believe for any form of revelation, one that gives rise to fundamentalism. That being said, the core is “perfect” in the spiritual sense of the word – a perfection centered around a consistent view of God, this life, and the next.
The ideas that I find incredibly important ….
God: God is a loving being who took on a human body and lived as we lived. Therefore there is not a separation of God and Jesus. The two are one and the same, a unity Jesus lived into more and more in this life, culminating with His complete glorification on the Cross and with His resurrection.
This Life: So what is this life about? This life is about “ceasing to do evil, learning to do well.” We are born flawed AND with infinite potential. God helps us to live into that potential. That will call us to repentance (rethinking) and reformation (restructuring). God then can do His work which is changing loves focused on selfishness and materialism into loves that are focused on serving others and God, loves which in the end bring us the greatest amount of happiness (A process called “regeneration”). Restated, we do the best we can to cooperate with God in pushing the bad stuff out of the way so the good stuff can come front and center. His Word, others, science, our own experience etc… are all in place to help us. Important to note, that all are given a “path” by God. We do not make exclusive Christian claims that only those who are Christian can come into heaven. Any faith, well lived, can lead you there.
Next Life: We are angels-in-training in this life. In the next life, we will live more and more into that angelic mindset. We will find ourselves living in communities who share that basic orientation. We likewise will find ourselves sharing our eternal lives with our beloved spouses in a state called “conjugial love” or “true love in marriage.” We will be useful, productive individuals learning and growing to all eternity.
I work with a lot of folks who are trying to reconnect with faith, having given it up for dead, others who never had it and now are finding it, and those who remain atheist yet really love the community aspects of NewChurch LIVE and involve themselves for that reason. I love the mix.
Rumi’s quote that there is a field beyond right and wrong and “I will meet you there” carries a great deal of wisdom. I think we do faith a disservice by making it solely about “belief.” Always incredible, as a Swedenborgian, to consider that the biggest threat before us is not atheism but believers who keep their faith as a “head only” thing, aka “faith alone.”
What does this mean to me? Justice – my best understanding is that justice is the divine design and our job is to find those areas that have fallen out of that design and bring them back into congruity with it. (almost direct quotes) Yet faith, as I experience it, gets boiled down to questions of gender and sexuality. I witness huge amounts of energy expended debating homosexuality, the role of sex etc….. Not that these are unimportant topics to discuss but the bulk – as in 99.99% of Jesus’ message is somewhere else – and that 99.99% is not about “belief.” (Example … what is the #1 command in the bible according to the # of times it is said? “Fear not” – speaking to the dangers of fear and the chaos it creates. When was the last time you heard that topic on a talk show?)
That somewhere else was what Rumi spoke of. It is the appeal of Dali Lama. For me, it is where Swedenborg was pointing as well – to the deepest core of Christian messages which is taking care of each other – something far greater than belief, something that Jesus, even if one just holds Him as an amazing human sans any divinity, lived.
That is the common ground around which great things can be built. Our world cries out, I think, for really looking at topics like Justice. The atheist perspective is critical in that regard. As one author put it, atheists help people (and have helped me) to get clear on the god not to believe in. Compassionate belief centered on consequential faith may add something to the atheist perspective as well.
Karl Barth wrote of the challenge of “capturing” the Christian experience. Imagine drawing a bird in flight. One has two choices. Choice one is to “freeze” the bird’s motion and capture it as a still image. The other is to blurr the image to create the sense of movement. The former is the danger of the conservative – believing that the only way to understand something is to freeze it as a set piece. The latter is the danger of the liberal – believing the only way to understand something is in motion, nothing set, nothing clearly delineated.
Much of the Christian experience is in the letting go of this dualistic approach and simply observing the bird in flight as it is as. There are times where the frozen motion is instructive. There are times when the blurred image likewise is useful. But the reality of the bird in flight is the bird in flight.
In a discussion yesterday with a dear friend, we talked of that search for clear understanding, for the ability to somehow hold it all. That does not seem to be in the cards, regardless of our best efforts. Restated, we fall easily into believing that we can definitively and finally capture a bird in flight on canvas – be that the ‘canvas’ of worship, music, sacrament etc…. Maybe the call is for us to simply experience the bird in flight, time and time again in the non-manufactured ways it will show itself. Christian New Church theology is filled with many canvases as well as many areas where the author, Emanuel Swedenborg, simply reaches the limit of human understanding, using language about beauty that defies description – a bird in flight.
Maybe this is what Thomas Merton was addressing when he wrote …
Truth rises from the silence of being to the quiet, tremendous presence of the Word. Then, sinking again into silence, the truth of words bears us down into the silence of God. Or rather God rises out of the sea like a treasure in the waves, and when language recedes his brightness remains on the shore of our own being.
Ministers are trained to go out into life with a “pocket full of answers.” Easy to hold that as the job of clergy. What one comes to however is a realization that we seek relationship far more than we seek answers. The questions then gain precedence. Life becomes about curiosity – going out into life with a “pocket of full of questions.”
In that journey, we travel together. The line disappears between “expert” and “novice”, “teacher” and “student.” There is no monopoly on answers. What is left is openness to the questions that inform and open our lives. There is a movement into the sacred mystery, into paradox, into wonder, into oneness.
That is the Christian journey. Emanuel Swedenborg, who shared that prophetic imagination, penned the words from the Bible “Seek ye first the kingdom of God…” as he began the task of authoring the books that would form the theology of the New Church. Seek. Seek. Seek – one of Jesus’ consistent messsages. The kingdom of God is all around us though we may remain asleep to it. Maybe that is why often the experience of God is written of as an ecstatic experience having far more in common with the rising sun than a fixed point of reference.
Many people want to “see” God, experience God. But the “seeing”, the experience, eludes them. How then do we see God when our best efforts seem to leave us “without”, searching within what appears to b a vacuum?
To start, God simply “is.” That means that God is something we awaken to vs. journey to. We can often fall into the belief that certain actions will inevitably lead us to the experience of God. I have not found that to be true. My understanding is that we do those “actions’ – be they prayer, reading, meditation, service, worship – so that we are awake when God shows up. They do not create the experience. They do however ensure that we are awake enough to know when the experience arrives.
Secondly, God’s presence is most often not of the “clouds parting” “trumpet blaring” variety. The experiences tend to be far more gentle. One author compared God’s voice to being as quiet as the beating of our own heart (Try listening to your heart beating to get an idea of what that means). While some individuals do experience the granduer of God in dramatic fashion – i.e. Martin Luther, Emanuel Swedenborg, Bill Wilson – most of us experience God in more muted yet not any less powerful ways. That is why perhaps Jesus spoke of the presence of the Divine as the spirit, a word that can be translated “wind.”
One author’s point is one I have been thinking a great deal about recently. Her perspective grew out of a endless prayers for the experience of Divine. What she came to realize was that God’s answer to her longing was her longing. It was that love, that compassion, that “pull” in her heart that bore great fruit in her life, a “pull” that might have moved her more in her life than any dramatic presentation of God.
If the pull to experience God is moving you forward in your life, that might just be the whole point. That might just be the mercy and compassion of God at work in your life. Stay awake. Keep doing the work. God will show Himself in the ways He knows to be most important in light of goals that are eternal, not temporal. Those are not often the most dramatic but they are the most transformative.
Many folks who enjoy NewChurch LIVE ask what they could read. Not everyone is a reader, but if you are, these are my recommendations on where to start.
The Bible
I recommend starting with the New King James Version of the Bible. My favorite book in the Bible is the Gospel of John. It is often called the Gospel of Love with good reason. The New Church really are Gospel of John Christians with a twist in taking as truth Jesus’ words in that Gospel, “I and the Father are one.” No angry God, angry Father sacrificing His Son for our sins but a loving God come to earth in the form of Jesus Christ to save us by showing us how to live.
If you like history, go with a study bible that adds notes to flesh out the reading.
New Church Theology
I would recommend the New Century Edition of “True Christianity” by Emanuel Swedenborg. Volume I is currently available in the NCE. Volume II will be out shortly.
Notes About Canon
Religious Canon is a different kind of literature. It is not written with the consistently of a linear, narrative story being its primary concern. The primary concern is connecting God and man, to give us ideas by which we can live our lives. Therefore much of revelation is more closely attuned with poetry than prose. (Think, who can better describe the beauty and wonder of a sunset – a poem or a scientific article. I vote for the poem.)
Also, do not expect “perfection.” Theology is not about a perfect “answer” to every question in the world. It is not a mathematical equation. It more closely aligns with a compass than a map. Therefore don’t be thrown off by dated language or statements obviously well ensconced in a certain historical time period. Look for the deep ideas – the themes – underneath. Those “compass points” are where the transformation lies.
Finally, New Church Theology was drawn out of revelation based on the Bible and circles back to the Bible. New Church Theology is about “True Christianity” – a return to the roots of what Christianity truly means. Though we call ourselves the “New Church” the reality is that we are rather old and believe that in returning to those roots, we create something new.
With “Footprints” wrapped up, a few closing reflections.
From a Christian New Church/ Swedenborgian perspective, we as human beings were created as part of creation not apart from creation. At one time we did live as placed creatures within creation. That meant we could see God everywhere in creation – the two being inseparable.
Humanity however chose a different path – to place ourselves outside of creation. So we held God with one hand and creation with the other. With ourselves encamped in the middle so to speak, we now can “dominate” creation and yes even “dominate” God. We can push both to the edges of our lives.
What does it mean to have pushed creation to that edge? What does it mean to have God pushed to that edge? As I understand NewChurch theology, when we become the sole and only reference point, our lives in a sense collapse in on themselves. True happiness is when we bring God and creation back to the center.
Emanuel Swedenborg wrote extensively about that connection. Want to know about the course of our life? Look at a tree. Want to know how heaven is organized? Look at the human body.
When we put ourselves on the circumferance, we can then look with awe, wonder, and curriousity into the center. Ironically, we will then find ourselves not “lessened” but “strengthened” as we act in more integrity with the great notes of the Universe.
So that is where we choose. Shada Sullivan offered moving reflections at the close of Footprints to that effect. Yes, we can avoid leadership. If we are honest with ourselves, as she said, that avoidance often stems from a desire to avoid responsibility. Stepping up is challenging. And we need to step up. We need to really figure out our place in creation. We need to candidly look at areas in our lives which are driven by greed and envy and obey God’s command – “Thou Shalt Not Covet.” We need to take seriously the Sabbath – 1/7 of our lives dedicated to the active rest the Sabbath calls us to. We can do all this with a smile on our face -with grace and elegance – with joy in our heart. Those changes – a part of the Jesus’ 3rd way – in the end may actually be a part of returning home.
A remarkable piece of Christianity is the concept that we must surrender our lives up. It is a surrendering however to God in a way that helps us to uncover our true selves.
It is so easy though to play with faith. We live in a culture that worships the individual. And of course, that is a source of strength in many instances – loosing ourselves to a “system” is Orwellian.
But there are limits. As Tutu said, thankfully there really is not a “self-made man.” We are where we are by the grace of others and the grace of God. None of us got here “alone.”
A hope – that Christianity rediscovers its heart. We have played such games with faith. Games that include the view of a Church as a club, as a “golden ticket.”
Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door to protest the Pope’s use of indulgences. Emanuel Swedenborg, the New Church’s Martin Luther, figuratively nailed progressive Christian principles to the door of the Protestant Church to protest the concept of salvation by faith alone. Faith needs trust, compassion, kindness, service to be real. It is far more than belief.
