What Does it Mean that We Must Die in Order Live?

Aug 18

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Today's message can be found below.

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Baker Street Gerry Rafferti

Opening READINGS

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Luke 9:22-24

And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings

What Does it Mean that We Must Die in Order Live?

By Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

There’s quite a transformation between being a young kid and an adult, isn’t there? Even for those of us who never quite grow up, I think we find that we’re not too similar to how we were when we were 5 or 6. As it’s said in Biblical scripture, we have to put up our childish ways, but I think, in a way, in order to truly follow the vein of scripture we might have to put some of those childish ways back on. We’ll come back to that.

It takes time to give up our old ways, to put away the things that serve us as a kid. Some things just fall away or transform as we grow up, and many others we have to really work at: putting on responsibilities, studiousness, regard for others, and on – these things take a good amount of processing. Take a moment to reflect on the vast transformation you’ve had since you were a kid, as well as noting some of the common threads that you still share.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest change is often how we look at the world and perceive our options, our desires. We also tend to come to find that our parents were much wiser than we sometimes thought, and that in some ways, we appreciate the similarities between us.

In a way, our old selves have perished, and we have been born anew – but really, many of the roots of who we are now can be followed all the way back into our early days.

This type of rebirth is true for our spiritual journeys as well as the call for continued, radical spiritual transformation too! Although this type of rebirth is even more amazing, as it describes a complete renewal and turning of our minds’ orientations. Indeed, the world’s scriptures are where we get the language of death and rebirth when it comes to this. As Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

And really, when we look into what our bodies of scripture call on us to do, we realize that in a way they ask us to rediscover some of the best aspects of what it was like to be a kid, at least in theory. This is the Christ’s point throughout the gospels, saying outright that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must become like children. Even so, I think that process can take our entire lives and even some more transformational steps in the afterlife (no matter our traditions or beliefs), as Emanuel Swedenborg describes.

As our unintentional namesake, the 18^th century scientist and nobleman turned mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, wrote that he saw in the afterlife: we often have some things to work through to become more childlike before we enter the diverse, unimaginable heavenly kingdom, where we will hopefully spend our days to eternity still growing. However, he says that this type of childishness is characterized by innocence from wisdom and love, an innocence like the one we’re told God(dess) has. We receive it from spiritual growth, reflection, and our willingness to receive heavenly transformation – which we perceive to be our own striving for goodness and love but that we start to recognize is actually a gift. And ultimately, this transformation is contingent on our willingness to let our old selfish ways “die.”

That’s the kicker, isn’t it? Christ describes the effort it takes for us to do this as taking up our cross daily. Daily! Crazy, right? Christ only had to pick up a cross for one day, as far as we know.

Morbid humor aside, scripture describes how Jesus had to “pick up his cross” throughout his life as well, undergoing and overcoming temptation until his glorification and resurrection. Christ is making the point that in order to follow Life, to follow Him, Goddess, the Personhood of Divinity, we have to suffer the pain of relinquishing the things that are evil, the things that are selfish, dominating, apathetic, judgmental, and unjust. We can joke about this process because it’s all too real for each of us. The negative aspects of our motives and minds tend to rule our spirit from an early age: we have a deep tendency to put ourselves and our desires above all else, including our neighbors and God, and we must pick up our cross and work to allow God to vanquish them in us. Scripture spells out these details left and right, although we tend to try to boil down our traditions into forms that serve our own purposes of domination. This is the opposite of becoming a childlike follower of Sophia Wisdom, it’s a state of spiritual decay.

So, in a spiritual sense, to die to our old selves is to give up decay and death. This relates to what it means to live forever in heaven, even in this life: you are living in a state that constitutes infinite life and that continues to grow, whereas when we’re in a hellish, dominating state we are in “the second death,” as scripture calls it. This is why when we give up our life for God we actually find life and relinquish death.

Unfortunately, giving up death and receiving life can often include quite the trials. Jesus wasn’t joking when he said that we must pick up our cross: it can be a painful struggle to follow the Holy One’s healthy example. And yet he promises to embolden us, he promises to bring us into healthier and healthier embodiment of his Divinity if we allow his saving work to commence. And this isn’t a process that is reserved only for one group of followers, but is instead a quintessentially human process that is true for all peoples across time – no matter what they call Divinity or Goodness or Life. Our trouble is that often we seek the deceptively easy path of refusing to pick up our crosses, and we believe that we can decide what is good and what is evil.

My own journey has many of those moments, parts of my younger life were marred with thinking that I can essentially behave selfishly within the bounds of the law, ignoring my higher consciousness or just being content with my selfish tendencies. Indeed, I think this continues somewhat today in me and most of humanity. Even if what we do doesn’t seem particularly destructive or abnormal, in retrospect, as we start to follow Love, we can see how almost every move we made centered on ourselves, which is a type of destructiveness.

It’s easy to get caught up in attributes the world tends to uplift as well and good (or at least, normal): vanity, lust, selfish ambition, anxiety and greed. As young people, with men especially, callousness and lustful action is often uplifted as hallmarks of worth, as epitomes of being. With no other strong compass to tell us otherwise, these seductive idols and others can easily become the center of our lives: dead gods in place of the Living One. These are the gods we’re told not to follow in the stead of the Living God, not Sophia vs. Christ, or Krishna vs. Allah, but death vs. life, selfishness as king vs. Love as Queen.

It can be hard to let those gods within us die. It takes work, process, humor, new discoveries, and a willingness to be vulnerable and listen to our Higher Power. It took most of my life so far to discover that I should orient my heart better, and I know that it can be sad in a way to realize that a seemingly large part of our lives must be laid down. But ultimately, within such a spiritual childhood, there begins the roots of adulthood – like a caterpillar before their bloom. This type of death is synonymous with resurrection, with opportunity and celebratory gratitude for the vast eternity of true living that awaits, if we all but let the dead part of us, die.