When we were young kids, which I know is a long time ago for most of us here, almost everyone learned the rules for baseball. Since for decades it was considered the national pastime, and almost everybody was forced to play it in gym class, we all learned the rules. I wasn’t very good at the game and one of the rules I ran into often was striking out. I was known to my playmates as an easy out. Three strikes. It sometimes only took three pitches.
Baseball has contributed much to our national lore, and one of the most well-known allusions to the game is the saying, “Three strikes and you’re out.” Applied to our legal system, it literally means that three strikes can put you out of society for awhile.
But strikes aren’t always bad. One place striking can be an effective way to win is if you are in a labor union. Strikes are also good if you are a blacksmith. Three strikes in baseball is a bad thing, but in almost everything else getting three strikes is a good thing. Take bowling. Three strikes is about as good as it gets in bowling.
In looking for answers I wondered what some of our past philosophers might have said about the future. So I looked up my favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, to see what he might have to say about it and I found an applicable quote. Yogi once observed, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” When you think about it, he was absolutely right about that. With each passing moment the future is no longer what it used to be.
That might be a good rule to keep in mind when we are trying to understand the Bible. With each passing moment the world has changed. What people believed centuries or eons ago may no longer be applicable. That seeming to be the case, it might be hard for some people to believe that the Bible is still applicable after all the centuries of its existence. But we should remember that it is one form of the Word of God and the Word of God has been present always. So even though the world has changed outwardly, in its essence it is still God’s creation, evolving toward the purpose for which God is creating it.
According to Swedenborg, there have been four churches or eras on this earth. The first is called Adam in the Bible. The second was Noah. The third was the Jewish church and the fourth is the one we are in now, the Christian church. To some extent their histories are presented in the literal text of the Bible, but within the literal meaning is another meaning that applies equally to the individual human being, and describes the process God uses to regenerate us. This process is found outlined in the six days of creation. My past two sermons dealt with the first two days. The first day shows us that God created human beings to populate a heaven that God can love, because God, being Love itself, needs something to love. In order for us to have free will and be human, we must have the ability to choose, and to be able to choose we must be able to understand the difference between good and evil. Therefore, evil is a necessary part of this world for our regeneration.
Two weeks ago I talked about the first day of creation. When God said on the first day of creation, “Let there be light” it was not physical light, but human consciousness and intelligence that were referred to. God did create the physical universe, but the first chapter in Genesis is really about the creation of the human being written in a sort of code referring to the human being as the earth and the heavens. We can’t understand this inner meaning if we choose to only understand the literal meaning.
Last week I talked about the second day of creation in which God created the waters and divided them with an expanse between the higher and lower waters. In its inner or spiritual meaning this represents the levels in our minds, not the oceans and the sky.
In this natural, physical life we mostly live in the lowest level of our minds, what we refer to as our conscious mind, but which is actually the least conscious level. The second verse tells how God separates the levels. This allows us to put values into proper order within us, if we choose to rise above our natural self and engage our spiritual self consciously and deliberately.
So this brings us to day three. “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and, let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth. And the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, ‘Let the Earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.’ And it was so. The earth brought fourth vegetation, plants yielding seed, according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.”
‘Dry land’ refers to our remains. Remember them from last week? This does not mean what’s left of our body after we leave it for the spiritual world. It means the memories and feelings we have of our very early years in which we were loved and cared for while we were helpless babies and young children. These remains are our sense of the presence of goodness, of God, in our lives. They represent the love which God is. Until we are ready to purse regeneration, God protects these remains within us so that they can be available to us when the time comes for our regeneration.
The separation of the waters in the second verse is a picture of the discernment that must take place in our minds between what is good and what is evil. Swedenborg defines evil as anything that turns us away from God. Such things need not be only things that we readily recognize as being bad, such as violations of the Ten Commandments, but more precisely those things which keep each of us personally from turning wholeheartedly to our Lord.
We say we need to be saved. What that means is not some magical intervention by God. It means that we need to be changed, reformed, regenerated. We have to change. The irony here is that by ourselves we can’t change…that God must change us. But God will only change us if we truly desire to be changed, and we demonstrate this desire by the actions it produces. Simply saying we want to change won’t do it. We need to take action. We need to be our changed self, actually become it, not just desire it.
If you have read Swedenborg’s Writings or attended one of our study groups you have probably come across the idea of purpose, means, and result. ‘Purpose’ is about what we desire to change, ‘means’ refer to the way we intend to make the change, and ‘result’ is the actions we actually take towards changing. Swedenborg says that virtually every choice we make has purpose, means, and result in it. We cannot act otherwise. We mostly do this unconsciously.
If we wish to reform and be regenerated we must look inside ourselves and learn to ‘think in a new way’, as Maurice Nicoll puts it. This is what salvation is really about. It is not some magic God performs to “save” us. What’s God magically saving us from? In reality, God is saving us from ourselves. But if God does this without any effort from us, we would lose our sense of being a self, lose the integrity of our being, become essentially a robot, with no self, and God could not actually relate with us and creation of a heaven would be futile. So we must make the effort to change ourselves and if we do, then God can recreate us in God’s own image. We can become beings who experience real choice and live real life as God has created it to be, rather than this artificial, imagination we live in, this illusion of freedom we call life on this earth.
Our task in this is two-fold. First we must identify and reject the evil we presently love. Having done this, at least to some extent, we must then begin to actually do good. And we must do good not for our own sake, but for God’s sake and the sake of others. In other words we need to reform ourselves into loving, caring beings, eventually becoming a person whose instinctive response is to look out for those around us. We must have faith that if we live selflessly, God will protect us. This doesn’t mean we should ignore our own legitimate needs, just that we need to be honest with ourselves about what we really, actually need, and what is just selfishness.
These are hard things to consider. Can we really be this selfless? Well, certainly not all at once. It takes time and effort to change, to ‘think in a new way’. It comes gradually. We must let the dry land form within us, let the Lord plant the seeds, and then we must nurture them and help them grow. This can only happen if we actively engage in self-examination. Perhaps we can start by identifying one thing we should give up or avoid doing. It takes whatever time we have on this earth. Don’t expect to change quickly. But the Lord will work with us as long as it takes if we are sincerely trying.
Swedenborg writes that there are three duties of repentance: confession before the Lord, prayer for the Lord's help, and the conscious willingness to begin a new life. This is the Conjunctive Design from which God has created the world. It relies on human free will and cooperation and Swedenborg points out that if we make even a tiny effort sincerely, light the tiniest little fire within us, the Lord will fan that flame and feed it until it grows into an enormous bonfire of love for God and our neighbor. This is what saving us means. We must consciously desire to make the first step. We must find something in ourself to change and get serious about it. Then we must turn to God in prayer and pray that the Lord will help us. And then we must persevere through some trying times when all we want to do is give up. It’s not easy, but with God’s help, we can do it.