Church of the Holy City

Your God Reigns

Your God Reigns!
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
April 17, 2011
Palm Sunday

Isaiah 52:7-15 Matthew 21:1-11 Psalm 118

Palm Sunday is a day for celebration. It celebrates the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, while people received him with shouts of joy, spreading their cloaks in front of Him. They recited a line from Psalm 118, which we read this Sunday, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” That same psalm speaks of parading up to the altar of the temple waving palms fronds. In our reading from Isaiah, we heard about watchmen who shout for joy when the Lord returns to Zion. (Zion was where the temple was in Jerusalem.) The Isaiah passage celebrates God redeeming His people from the destruction of former conquests. God’s glory will be manifest. Isaiah says, “Kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see.” In fact, all the world will see God’s deliverance. Isaiah says, “All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.”
These passages bring to mind the many ways and times we celebrate what God has done in our lives. We may celebrate what God has done for us when we are healed from illness. Beethoven wrote a beautiful string quartet to celebrate being delivered from a long illness. He called it a song of prayer for deliverance, and it is one of my favorite string quartets of Beethoven. We may celebrate a new job, or feel grateful for the one we have in a difficult economy. We may celebrate in prayer. We may celebrate in a church. We may celebrate in a quiet word of thanks spoken only in our hearts.
But what brings the deepest and most heartfelt celebration is when we feel God moving in our souls. Palm Sunday was one special day of celebration. After it, Jesus returned to teaching as he had done before it. And those special times when we feel a particular closeness to God may not always last throughout the other times in our lives. Today, though, we celebrate those times in our life when it feels as if God has filled us with His Spirit and we feel a particular closeness to God. It is as if we see God with an inner sight, and we are filled with joy. We, like the psalmist, say, “You are my God, and I will praise you; you are my God, and I will exalt you.”
The Isaiah passage celebrates God’s power after Jerusalem had been ruined by Babylon. Though the city had been devastated by Babylon, this prophesy tells the Israelites that God will reign again in Jerusalem. He tells the Israelites, “Burst into songs of joy together, you ruins of Jerusalem, for the LORD has comforted His people, he has redeemed Jerusalem.” It is often the case in our lives that we feel God most strongly when we have gone through some kind of struggle–either physical or spiritual. I’ve already mentioned things like illness or work issues. Maybe our life is difficult and we are beset with trouble, and worry, and strife that comes to us seemingly undeserved. Then there are other struggles of a more spiritual nature. There may be issues in our character or personality that we have wanted to change. Maybe our trust in God is wavering. Maybe we have a certain sin that is disturbing our peace. Maybe we feel we have lost our spiritual footing and are wandering without clear guidance. These are times when we echo the psalmist’s words, “The LORD has chastened me severely.” We know that God never does chasten us, as the Bible suggests. This line would be called by Swedenborg an “appearance” of truth–not actual truth. But when we are in desperate straits, it may feel like God is heaping burdens on us, almost that we cannot bear. But when these times subside, or a solution is found, when we are no longer disturbed by our difficulties and peace returns–these are the times when we celebrate God’s return to Zion. Then we sing for joy along with the psalmist, “I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation. . . . the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
What I like about the Psalms is that they speak to the whole human situation. In them we find lines of struggle and even despair. But they usually don’t end there. Usually, after the verses about trouble, there are verses about gratitude to God. This is the case in today’s psalm. We didn’t read the whole psalm, as I wanted to emphasize the celebration of Palm Sunday. But in the early parts of the Psalm, we find the words, “In my anguish I cried to the LORD, and he answered by setting me free.” This pattern is so much like the lives we all lead. We go through periods of struggle. And we go through periods of celebration for deliverance. Swedenborg suggests that we need to go through trials and struggles in order to shake up our love for the world and our self-interest. Only by means of trials and struggles are our externals broken up and our spiritual internals able to shine through them. Our internals are made up of what Swedenborg calls remains. They are all those innocent feelings of love that we were gifted with in childhood, and continue to be gifted with throughout our lives. These shine through our external degree when it has been broken down by temptations, or trials and struggles. Swedenborg describes this process:
The second state [of regeneration] is when a distinction is made between the things which are the Lord’s and those which are the person’s own. Those that are the Lord’s are called in the Word remains; and here are especially knowledges of faith which have been learned from infancy. These are stored up, and not manifested until he comes into this state; which is a state rarely attained at this day without trials, misfortune, and sorrow, that cause the things of the body and the world . . . to become quiescent” (AC 8).
After our worldly interests have been broken up, then the remains of truth and love can show themselves in our external person. That is the time when we celebrate God entering Zion. That is the time, especially, when we feel God working in our lives. And God indeed is working more powerfully in our lives in these times. By breaking up our external person, God can bring His love and wisdom more deeply into our lives. We feel God closer because He has penetrated our souls and our personality more profoundly.
God’s love is continually flowing into every person always. But we are not always in a state of mind to accept it. Only after we have gone through trials and temptations does God’s love become part of our whole person. Before periods of temptation, God is so far above our consciousness that He is only present as life itself. After temptations, God flows down into our very personality and life. Swedenborg writes, “temptations remove what is of self-love and of contempt for others in comparison with self, consequently what is of self-glory” (AC 3318). After going through these periods of trial, our external person becomes aligned with the love that flows in from God. All the things we call spiritual knowledge, or truth, are nothing more than vessels that hold love, or good. Truth is nothing more than love put into language. Before temptations, the truths we have learned resist God’s love and serve self and the world. But after they are softened by temptations, then they are able to receive God’s love. Our whole personality changes into a humble, mild disposition.
When therefore the vessels [or truths] are somewhat tempered and softened by temptations, then they begin to become yielding to, and compliant with the life of the Lord’s love, which continually flows in with man. Hence then it is, that good begins to be conjoined to truths, first in the rational man and afterward in the natural . . . . From these considerations it may now be evident what use temptations promote, namely this, that good from the Lord may not only flow in, but may dispose the vessels to obedience, and thus conjoin itself with them (AC 3318).
Last Sunday we looked at the three levels to the human personality. There is the internal, the rational, and the natural. The truths that Swedenborg is talking about above are in the rational and natural degrees of our personality. While we always have God in the deepest level of our soul, in order to actually feel God’s Spirit and in order for us to become angelic, God’s love needs to penetrate down into the rational and natural degree of our personality. It is by means of temptations that our rational and natural degrees are made compliant with the love flowing down from God. And that is why, after the periods of struggle we go through, we so often feel God’s presence more keenly than before. God actually has entered our lives more deeply. God has come into our rational and natural degrees, so we feel Him more closely. The truths we have in our memory now lead our steps into what is good and loving.
I need to be clear about one point, though. God does not bring about our struggles and trials. He does not lead us into temptation. We fall ill because of our body’s biology. There are viruses and bacteria out there. And our bodies are subject to stress, fatigue, and aging. We encounter economic hardships because we live in a society that has an unjust distribution of wealth. We encounter spiritual struggles, not because God gives them to us. Rather it is actually because God is flowing into us with His love that we feel struggles. We want to hold on to our ego-driven ways, and God’s love is unselfish and reaches out to everyone. So our innate drive for self kicks against God’s inflowing love and we feel struggles. While God doesn’t bring on any of these trials, He turns them all to our spiritual wellbeing.
But as we progress spiritually, step by step we celebrate with joy our new awareness of God. Like the residents of Jerusalem, our hearts shout and sing as we welcome the Lord into the Holy City of our souls. It is times like this, that the words of Isaiah seem so fitting,
How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation;
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!” (52:7)