By What Authority?
June 30, 2019
Today's message can be found below.
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OPENING SONGS
Try to dance, move, sing, hum or play along with this music – or enjoy a meditative listen with deep, mindful breaths
Love
Lana Del Rey
Opening READINGS
From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture
Deuteronomy 5:22-27
These are the commandments the Lord proclaimed in a loud voice to your whole assembly there on the mountain from out of the fire, the cloud and the deep darkness; and he added nothing more. Then he wrote them on two stone tabletsand gave them to me.
When you heard the voice out of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire, all the leaders of your tribes and your elders came to me. And you said, “The Lord our God has shown us his glory and his majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a person can live even if God speaks with them. But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer. For what mortal has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire, as we have, and survived?Go near and listen to all that the Lord our God says. Then tell us whatever the Lordour God tells you. We will listen and obey.”
Mark 11:27-33
They arrived again in Jerusalem, and while Jesus was walking in the temple courts, the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders came to him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you authority to do this?”
Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin? Tell me!”
They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin’ …” (They feared the people, for everyone held that John really was a prophet.)
So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.”
Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
True Christianity 42
Another important thing to know is that life in its greatest perfection is not thinking, it is perceiving truth in the light of truth. The level of this perfection in people can be used to determine what level of life they have. For example, there are people who, immediately upon hearing something true, perceive the truth of it. In the spiritual world they are represented as eagles. Then there are people who do not perceive what is true, but who do arrive at truth from argumentation based on other things that are apparent. They are represented as songbirds. There are people who believe something to be true because it was decreed by someone in authority. They are represented as jays or magpies.
By What Authority?
By Rev. Dr. George Dole
The Gospel of Luke includes a story about some disciples of John the Baptist whom John had sent to Jesus with the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Luke 7:19). They asked their question, but were not given a straight answer. “Go tell John what you have seen and heard,” Jesus said. “The blind are receiving their sight, the lame are walking, lepers are being cleansed, the deaf are hearing, the dead are being raised, the poor are hearing the good news” (Luke 7:22). In the same vein, when Philip told Nathaniel, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth,” and Nathaniel doubted that anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip said simply, “Come and see.”
Jesus could have told them that he was the one. Why should anyone believe him? Philip could have told Nathaniel about his own experiences. That would have been just words. There is simply no substitute for seeing for oneself. Reality has far more “authority” than any description of it.
This immediately needs to be qualified in two ways. First of all, “reality” can be hard to read. The long-term effects of an action may be quite different from the immediate effects. Pain medication cam make us feel better right now, but it may prevent us from recognizing and dealing with deeper problems. Surgery may leave us flat on our backs for days, but far healthier in the long run. A fundamental cause of our present economic turmoil was a kind of culture of short-sightedness enveloping government, business, and consumers, all dedicated to an illusion of prosperity that rested on a foundation of debt.
Second, if my wife tells me that the front burner is still hot, I do not have to put my hand on it. I can take her word for it. Especially in a world where we do not understand the inner workings of a great many of our everyday conveniences, we have little choice but to trust “the authorities,” the people who do understand. The fact remains, though, that their authority is valid only as it rests on reality. Even more to the point, I don’t learn much by believing them. I don’t know just how hot the burner is or just what is wrong with the church furnace. Life is too short to become experienced in stoves and furnaces and internal combustion engines and electric motors and plumbing and wiring and television sets and cell phones and computers and digital watches and printing presses and steamrollers and all the services we can find listed in the Yellow Pages.
The Bible and the theology of our church, though, are about us, and we use ourselves every day, so to speak, full time. It certainly makes sense to understand how we ourselves work. We use our bodies, so Mehmet Oz’s book title, YOU: The Owner’s Manual, is all by itself reminding us something we need to remember. We also use our minds, and that is where things get really complicated. When our third reading advises us that “life in its greatest perfection is not thinking, it is perceiving truth in the light of truth,” it sounds lovely, but what does it mean? How can we perceive something in the light of itself?
Let’s look at the alternatives first. The “songbirds” of our third reading are people who use their heads, who figure things out on the basis of what they experience. This is less perfect that simply seeing that something is true, but it evidently works. We might think of needing to consult a map to figure out just where we are and how to get to our destination, while the eagle can simply see the whole territory. If we keep comparing the map with our experience, we gradually become familiar with that territory.
The third alternative, believing what some authority says, we might compare with following the directions of a GPS. We have no idea why we should turn left here, but the voice tells us to. “That which is believed on authority,” it says in Secrets of Heaven 10124:3, “is of others in ourselves, and is not our own.” Our decisions are not really ours at all. They are the decisions of the GPS, and we are more like programmed robots than active, intelligent partners, and we are not likely to learn very much.
This is of critical importance when it comes to matters of religion—at least to the extent that we take religion seriously as offering us the principles by which we should live. Especially it times of confusion, there can be a longing for certainty that translates into a felt need for authority. It is this need that gives rise to fanaticism. In the telling words of Eric Hoffer, “All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it.”[1] This is pure ideology at its blindest.
Our own church is by no means immune to this frame of mind. Whether it is expressed in the authority of the Word, the authority of the writings, the authority of the church, or the authority of the clergy, the basic brilliance and beauty of our theology has at times led to the belief that “the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in [our] doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it”—this despite the insistence of the theology itself that every religion on earth provides the guidance necessary for the kind of life that leads to heaven (Divine Providence 326:9-10). I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if Luther had chosen as watchword not the familiar passage in Romans about justification by faith (Romans 3:28) but the earlier statement from the same epistle that “There will be . . . glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (Romans 2:10).
The felt need for an authority figure is concisely expressed in the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25). There is very definitely a need for standards. The root meaning of the word “religious” involves "binding," and I would suggest that the recurrent subtext of religion, a meaning that runs just below the surface, is one of being bound or committed to something or someone beyond oneself. It involves a belief that there is a way things really, really are, and that there is nothing we can do about that basic fact. The opposite of religion is the belief that reality is whatever we say it is. One obvious way of avoiding this disastrous failing is to subject oneself to the authority of the king—or the church, or the clergy, or the Word, or the doctrines—all of which can do no more than describe the way things really are, and none of which can do so completely and perfectly.
Some descriptions are better than others. How can we tell which is best? The magpie way avoids the problem. Let someone else tell us. The songbird way calls us to think seriously, to compare the description with our own experience, to test the theory and find out whether it works. The eagle way is the “Aha!” experience of simply seeing, having something become so obvious that we can scarcely believe we never saw it before.
It certainly seems that we cannot make this happen. That is at least suggested by the phrase, “perceiving truth in the light of truth.” That is the Lord’s light, and not our own. We cannot turn it on or off.
What we can do, though, is try to move out of our own shadow, so to speak. Very simply, we can try to see ourselves, others, and our relationships in the light of our faith. This means recognizing that each one of us is a wondrous creation, a beloved of the Lord, prompting joy at everything we see that is good and sorrow at everything we see that is wrong. We can turn to the Word not to prove that we are right but to learn, to be taught, and to be taught in order to live more Christ-like lives. Again, the answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” depends on the answer to a previous question: “What would Jesus see?” When the man asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Mark’s gospel tells us that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). In the light of that love, Jesus saw what stood between the man and eternal life.
She, looking at her husband, loved him. He, looking at his wife, loved her. They, looking at their children, loved them. She looking at herself, loved herself. He, looking at his boss, loved him. She, looking at her employee, loved her. The kind of love we are talking about has nothing to do with possessiveness or self-gratification. It has everything to do with wanting the absolute best for the person seen, wanting that individual to realize his or her unique gifts and to find the place or places where she or he is needed and welcomed. It is wanting healed relationships, inner peace, the “at-oneness” that is the original meaning of the word “atonement.”
A direct and necessary corollary of this is being honest enough with ourselves to recognize when we are unable to love, facing the fact that at such times we cannot trust our own judgment and have to turn to the old adage, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” We rarely get completely carried away. We can usually exert at least some control over our words and our deeds. We know fairly well how we ought to behave.
Of one thing we can be sure—reality will have the last word; and this is a good thing indeed, because the ultimate reality is, after all, the Lord.
Amen.
[1] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), p. 75.
CLOSING SONGS
Here Comes the Sun
George Harrison
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