Part 1: A Beautiful/Not Beautiful Day
What a beautiful day it is today. Just like yesterday – I went on a lovely bike ride (perhaps the last of the year?), looking at cloudless sky for most of the ride. I rode 27 miles. If it had been a gloomy, overcast day, I bet I wouldn’t have made it as far on my bike. So, sometimes when we say “beautiful day,” what we mean is that we get unlimited access to the most beautiful thing in our solar system: the sun. No clouds in the way.
Years ago, we took our children to Chicago, and we visited the Sears Tower (Willis Tower), and my older children were brave enough to get in the elevators and ride to the top. I don’t remember how much it cost then—now it costs $25 for adults, $18 per child—but I do remember the sign that said, “No refunds for cloudy days.” That would be a lot of money to waste to see clouds. And I remember my first time driving past Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Note that I said, “driving past” Pike’s Peak but not “seeing” Pike’s Peak: it was a cloudy day and I didn’t see anything at all. What an annoyance clouds can be. They are enough to ruin a beautiful day – or even worse, they can create great danger. How terrifying is it to drive a car (or any other form of transportation) when you can’t see what’s ahead of you? How many car crashes, train wrecks, shipwrecks, and plane crashes were the result of poor visibility?
On the other hand, clouds are a source of tremendous beauty. Think of the most beautiful part of many days: sunset. A cloudless sunset can be nice, seeing that horizontal rainbow of colors, but I doubt that anyone says to a family member, “You’ve got to come outside and see the sun setting – there’s not a cloud anywhere!” Usually, it’s the clouds that make it beautiful. It’s the clouds that give it color. It’s the clouds that make us use words like “glorious.” When my father and I published a book about preaching, we searched around for what to put on the front cover, and we ended up going with the obvious: clouds of glory. It’s a bit of a cliché: how many religious books and posters and paintings represent the divine and religious by using “clouds of glory”? And my father was not only a preacher, he was a painter, and perhaps his favorite thing about painting landscapes was doing the clouds.
Clouds make life interesting. They are perhaps the most changeable aspect of our visual lives. Sometimes a low cloud deck settles in for a whole day, but most of the time, they are like a slow movie being projected across the sky. If you don’t like it, wait an hour or two. One of my favorite sights is those days when you have several distinct cloud layers, and each layer is moving in a different direction from another one – the low moving clouds are moving east at a rapid clip while above them are high clouds slowly drifting west.
And of course, it is the clouds that give us life-giving rain. One of the most dramatic stories in the Old Testament concerns Elijah, who gets in a contest with the prophets of Baal to see whose God has true power, and the Israelite God wins in a decisive victory. What instigated this contest? A severe drought that had been going on for years, and they wanted to see whose God could bring the rain. After the God of Israel proved His power, the story ends with Elisha pointing out something on the distant horizon that no one had seen for a long time: a cloud.
This summer in Minnesota, we had many “beautiful” sunny days, but do you remember how much celebration there was when the rains finally came? Isn’t it interesting that rains only come with clouds? Well yes, there is such a thing as rain falling while the sun is out (sometimes just due to the angle of the sun), but that’s a very rare thing, and most of the time we either get sun or we get rain – not both at once.
So clouds have all these wonderful, frustrating, beautiful, annoying, life-giving, dangerous properties. And even without a knowledge of the correspondences and symbolism that Swedenborg teaches us about, we have always had many metaphors about what clouds represent. We might get frustrated that our thinking is “cloudy,” and we can’t see things clearly. If someone is suffering from depression, we depict them as having a dark cloud over their head. We compare emotional turmoil to stormy weather.
Part 2: Why Can’t the Bible Be Clear?
But let’s go back to that feeling of frustration. Let’s go back to that annoyance that my family would have had at the top of the Sears tower if it had been a cloudy day. And let’s talk about the Bible. This is, we are told, God’s letter to us – and that makes it the most important book ever written. It certainly is in terms of sales: 600 million Bibles are sold every year. Those sales figures are remarkable given the fact that it is a confusing, baffling, murky, cloudy book. It makes you wonder sometimes what people get out of it. Swedenborg says that every verse contains infinite depth of meaning – and yes, there are many passages that are deeply meaningful to people. But there is much more of the Bible that is baffling, or seems to be completely meaningless.
Now that we have Bibles in our pews, I can give you an example. Turn to Leviticus 13, verses 47-59, which the headline tells us concerns “Regulations About Defiling Molds.” Then turn to the next chapter, Leviticus 14, and the second half of that chapter is … also about molds. I can take it on faith that this has deeper spiritual meaning, but without help, I can’t figure out what it is, and when I am reading the Bible I just skip over those parts and resume when it gets to interesting stories. But those stories can be equally troublesome. People have made many attempts to film the Bible, but they tend to focus only on certain parts of the Bible. Some parts are so violent or sexual that the film would get an X rating. Some parts blatantly contradict other parts: in the New Testament is says, “God is love,” and Swedenborg tells us that God never gets angry at anyone – yet the Old Testament is filled with stories of the wrath of Jehovah, and it is often expressed as unimaginable cruelty. As just one example out of many, 1 Samuel 6 tells the story of the Ark of the Covenant being returned to the Children of Israel after the Philistines stole it. On the return journey, it passes through the territory of Beth Shemesh, and the people there rejoice at the sight of the ark, and made sacrifices to the Lord to celebrate. And then it verse 19 it says “But God struck down some of the inhabitants of Beth Shemesh, putting seventy of them to death because they looked into the ark of the Lord.” That doesn’t look like a loving God. What do those stories mean?
We are told that there is one God, yet there are many references that make it sound like there are three. This has caused billions of people to be confused about the nature of the trinity. Swedenborg came along and wrote many books explaining what it all means, but wouldn’t it have been better if the meaning had been clear from the outset? Why does it have to be so cloudy? I was raised in the Swedenborgian religion, by a Swedenborgian minister, and I took classes in high school and college about Swedenborg’s books explaining the Bible, and yet I still have a lot of trouble discerning the meaning of much of the Bible. And I can certainly understand why so many people look at it as a troublesome and archaic book.
What purpose does the cloudiness serve?
Part 3: When the Time Is Right
The answer is “protection”—as it explains in our reading from Secrets of Heaven—just as physical clouds protect us on earth. On an overcast day we may pray for the sun to come out – but if you have ever attended an outdoor event where you had had to sit or stand in direct sunlight for hours, you know what it’s like to pray for that protection. And that is Minnesota: in Arizona, it is a more serious business. In the Tucson newspaper, on the weather page they print how long it takes to get sunburned at different hours of the day, and in the high summer at noon, that number is nine minutes. And that is on earth, 93 million miles away from the sun. If we lived on the planet Mercury, we could never go outside at all. On a Minnesota summer’s day, we get a taste of how overpowering the direct sunshine can be – but that is the tiniest fraction of the true power of the sun. The Lord knows this, and knows that it would destroy us to be exposed to his full power. Even though that power is love, we couldn’t handle the unfiltered version.
Let’s look at Moses, and his introduction to the Lord. Last week I talked about his origins as a Hebrew baby raised in the Egyptian royal household, but it was not until later in life that he had any direct experience with God. That came when he was tending a flock of sheep in Midian - but notice how indirect his first contact was, and how long it took him to be ready to see God face to face. First, he sees the burning bush from a distance, and approaches it. God calls out to him, but also tells him “Do not come any closer.” And when God declared who He was, Moses hid his face “because he was afraid to look at God.” Moses has a long conversation with God, but does not see him. Then we get the ten plagues, the Passover, and the Children of Israel being released from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the story of the manna, and many other adventures, and through it all, Moses talks with God. But still, Moses has not seen God. In Exodus 19, God calls Moses to go up Mt. Sinai to receive the ten commandments, and says “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.” Then many more chapters pass, and it is not until Exodus 33 that Moses finally asks to actually see God’s glory, and God replies “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20), but He tells Moses to find a cleft in the rock and God will cover Moses’ face with his hand, and Exodus 33 ends with: “Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back, but my face must not be seen.”
This is all a metaphor for our experience with seeing God in the Bible: first we may be drawn in by curiosity, and hear some messages that give us guidance and comfort. But if we ask for the full glory—the complete understanding—God will say, “You are not ready yet—it would destroy you.”
A similar thing happens with Isaiah, who prophesied for the Lord for a long time before he has a direct experience with the Lord (Isaiah 6), which comes in the form of a vision: “I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple.” There were angels (seraphs) who called out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty: the whole earth is full of his glory” so loudly that it shook the doorposts, and the temple was filled with smoke. And Isaiah’s reaction was to say “Woe to me, I am ruined, for I am a man of unclean lips, and a live among a people of unclean lips.” In other words, when he has a direct interaction with the Lord, which he must have waited for a long time, he immediately recognizes that he is not ready.
And then there is the story of a Biblical character who does not seem unclean at all. I have given many sermons about people in the Bible with deep character flaws, people who were chosen by the Lord despite having committed crimes or at least done some very unsavory things. But not Daniel, who comes across as a faultless holy man. He is most famous for being placed in the lion’s den for refusing to worship King Darius, and breaking King Darius’ law by continuing to worship the Lord. Throughout the whole book that bears his name, Daniel is devout and pious and has a strong connection to the Lord. Well, he thinks so. But after the lion’s den, and after the story of his three friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abedniggo being placed in a fiery furnace, there is still something Daniel longs for: a visit from an angel. In Daniel 10, he gets his wish and an angel appears before him—and Daniel describes his reaction: “I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless. Then I heard him speaking, and as I listened to him, I fell into a deep sleep, my face to the ground.” And I love what the angel says back to him:
“Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.”
“Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding, your words were heard.” But it took a long time, and when the day arrived, all Daniel could do was tremble, speechless.
So here I am, reading the Bible, and getting frustrated that so much of it appears cloudy and meaningless. I often think I am ready for the “unvarnished truth”; I can handle it. But God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, knows that I’m wrong. When the time comes, I will see that truth and experience that divine love. Or, to put it another way, when the time comes, the clouds will part and I will see the sun.
In the meanwhile, I can catch glimpses of the light shining through the clouds. And I can appreciate the beautiful nature of clouds as a representation of how I see truth: always changing, adopting many shapes, sometimes layers moving in opposite directions, sometimes colorful, sometimes threatening, sometimes inviting and soft. It is the truth I am ready for at that moment.
Amen.
READINGS
Exodus 40:33-38
Then Moses set up the courtyard around the tabernacle and altar and put up the curtain at the entrance to the courtyard. And so Moses finished the work. Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. In all the travels of the Israelites, whenever the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, they would set out; but if the cloud did not lift, they did not set out—until the day it lifted. So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the Israelites during all their travels.
Mark 13:26-27
“At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.
Secrets of Heaven #6849
The Divine itself is pure love, and pure love is like a fire hotter than the fire of the sun in this world. Consequently if Divine Love in its purity were to flow into any angel, spirit, or person, we would be completely destroyed, which is why so many times in the Word Jehovah or the Lord is called a consuming fire. To ensure therefore that the angels in heaven suffer no harm from the flow of heat from the Lord as the sun, each of them is veiled with a kind of thin cloud suited to the individual, which moderates the heat flowing in from that sun.