We have arrived at the sixth day In our series of sermons about the six days of creation. In the previous five services touching on this theme we have seen that in the first day God awakens deep spiritual feelings in us, referred to as the coming of light or our awareness of our spiritual nature. In the second day we experience a separating of the waters, representing the differentiation of worldly matters from spiritual matters in our understanding. On the third day, dry land appears and plants grow. The plants represent our new ideas and understanding, our ability to recognize the difference between what is good and what is not good.
God reminds us of the positive feelings that dwell within us from the care we are given freely by those who love us, especially in our early childhood. Emanuel Swedenborg calls these remembered feelings our remains and they assist us in discerning the difference between what is good and what is not good.
This step in our regeneration requires repentance on our part. We must be willing to admit that we are far from perfect and need to change. This recognition of our reality requires discernment resulting from honest self-examination. Such self-examination requires that we receive help from the Lord, portrayed in the Genesis account as the greater and lesser luminaries symbolized in the fourth day of creation by the Sun and the Moon. These represent the enlightenment that comes to us from God if we are seeking to reform and regenerate. If we are willing to humble ourselves before God and sincerely desire that He regenerate us, make us new in His image, then we are open to receiving that enlightenment.
On the fifth day, the regenerational process has moved from our brain to our heart, or from simply understanding to actually caring enough to act. We must move from simply thinking and reasoning about regeneration to actually feeling, actually desiring, it and then acting accordingly. Ultimately, It is a matter of motivation from love. When we finally come to genuinely love goodness and truth and seek God in our very being, we have reached the fifth day.
Which brings us to this final stage of regeneration, the sixth day. Remember that we saw that the Bible is, in its entirety a book about us. It is a book about us and our relationship with Reality. There is no avoiding the truth of its inner meaning. It is God’s Word to us, God’s explanation of who we are and what our potential is.
We are created to become angels, to take our place in the heavenly community for which we were created and thus to assist in the perfection of heaven. If we fail in this regard, our life is essentially a failure no matter what great earthly things we may have accomplished. Our only true purpose in this life is to become fit for residence in a heavenly community, or, in other words, become an angel.
That is a very strong statement. I hesitated including it in these comments because it so strictly defines the purpose of our life on this planet. I hesitated because there is so much to life involved in our everyday activities that boiling its purpose down to this one goal seemed too limiting. But, in Reality, everything else we do must come under the heading of preparing ourselves for a role in heaven, since creating heaven is the ultimate purpose of our existence.
In the Reality that we live, becoming an angel is the bottom line. This is the Reality with a capital “R” that we are living. It is created by God for only one purpose, to create heaven. It is why on the sixth day of creation God commands that every real creature God creates should be fruitful and multiply. This doesn’t mean have a lot of kids. Being fruitful and multiplying is more spiritual than that. It means that we should develop as spiritual beings. Being is becoming. As we are we are incomplete. What we are intended to become is a spiritual being who loves goodness and truth and is capable of taking a place intended specifically for that one person, in your case, you.
Filling a spiritual place only you can fill is the main reason you are alive. Every one of us is unique. If you think you can’t possibly be that important to God, think again. You are the only person God has created to fill your place in heaven. Without you, that one place remains empty and heaven is less perfect, more incomplete.
So as our reading today says, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The creation of both men and women represents in the Bible’s inner meaning the joining of the will, the heart or feelings represented by the woman, with the man, representing the understanding and the intellect.
When our understanding of the way things are, of what this Reality is, agrees with what we love, we have no more conflict within us. We are made whole. This is what the entire “book about us” is really about. It is a union within us of our disposition, what we are inclined to do, and our understanding of what actions will have good effects if we do them.
In other words, we begin to want to be good, and to be able to be good, not for what it can get us in this world, but for the sake of goodness itself, for the sake of fulfilling our role in creating heaven. As we grow and develop from early childhood onward, God is constantly trying to draw us to what is good and true.
God created us capable of understanding abstract concepts, not just cold facts. This is what differentiates us from other animals. We can care. We can understand and care about things that exist above the level of the physical world. We can care about effects that do not effect us directly because we can understand the effect they are having on someone or something else and we are capable of caring about that something or someone else.
Just this last week I began listening to Minnesota Public Radio’s classical station. For years I have been glued to it’s news station because of the stress and import of current events. But with the election behind us and Christmas coming I wanted to hear some more traditional Christmas music than the current stuff I’m hearing in stores and on commercial stations. The musician in me really loves harmony. I love singing with others and making chords that ring in the air and create overtones above the tones we are singing.
Its one of the things I love about this church and I am so thankful for our musicians. They create an audible image of what harmony is, capturing in sound what is created by loving and caring for others. Harmony is an essential character of love.
Harmony is like gravity. It is what joins everything together. The music of the spheres. Gravity brings objects together in a fixed, observable form. Harmony is a representation of sound forming an audible image of love. Harmony, precise spaces between individual sounds, turns noise into music. Precise intervals ring with overtones. Reality expands. When we live in harmony with others and with the natural world around us, we are helping God create heaven.
This is God’s purpose in creating us. It is God’s expression of God’s self in a concrete form, a fixed state of being at the outer limits of God’s existence, capable of sustaining life in fixed forms, these physical bodies we can live and move and have our being in while we transform into angels. When we choose to live according to God’s will, creating harmony in the physical realm, we are assisting God in perfecting everything. We become, in a sense, co-creators with God.
This is what is meant by the idea that we are created in God’s image. If we live rightly we perform God’s works on the physical level of being. This is the foundation of everything. Just as the literal meaning of the Holy Word in the Bible carries within it the true meaning of existence, our bodies carry within them our spirit, the true existence of our self. That self consists of two main parts, represented in the sixth day of creation in the image of woman and man being joined together to create new life.
We must join these two parts of our self within our self, join the intellectual understanding of being with the feeling of love for truth and goodness, in order to become an individual capable of filling a specific place in the vastness of existence God has created. In this way we assist God in forming a more perfect world, both here on this physical level, and then moving into the spiritual realm and taking our place in heaven.
Let us contemplate a little during this festive season celebrating the coming of the Lord to the earth to show us the truth of his Word, and to teach about himself and our relationship with Him. Let us listen to the harmony around us, and do what we can to make this holiday season harmonious, uplifting, expanding to all we meet.
Let’s expand our self to embrace more of reality with the kindness and love that will serve to move us toward our designated place in the heavenly realm that awaits us.
Merry Christmas everyone.