Advent Sunday 1, 2019: Be Empowered by Divine Hope

Dec 1

Today's message can be found below.

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All Are Welcome

SPIRIT Beyoncé

Opening Readings

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

John 3:16-21

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

Be Empowered by Divine Hope Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

Today is the first Sunday of the 2019 Advent or Christmas season, and typically, to mark the occasion, our interfaith Swedenborgian churches like many other churches light the first Advent candle (advent meaning “coming into being”). This is because we’re grounded in a mystical Christianity and most “Swedenborgians” profess affinity for the mystic Swedenborg’s pluralistic Christian ideas, and further, these rituals help to bring us hope. That includes the hope of a light shining even within the deeper mysteries of life and the hope of God’s warmth and love for all creation. As I’ve alluded to, we tend to view the imagery of God(dess) as light and heat as representing how Divinity enlightens and empowers all nature and all beings, from all faiths and traditions.

But what does it mean that God enlightens all things and how does that idea and awareness inspire our hope? Well, almost by definition enlightenment touches on each of us differently, inspiring our own type of genius and approach toward love – which is beautiful and hopeful in and of itself. Although the sun shines on each of us, we tend to choose to some degree how much of that light and heat we receive as well as what shades of light we share from the Divine source within (similar to the song, This Little Light of Mine). Scripture and the Biblical gospels particularly invite us to continue to work to allow such a Divine light to further illuminate our thinking toward wisdom and invigorate our hearts toward love: they invite us to allow the Lord to advent into our lives more and more. This process of “salvation” or “regeneration” involves living forward the love of God through our own thinking and behavior, as well as working to more deeply apply core principles of healthy living – which is what most scriptures strive to emphasize and share. Christ himself had a ministry that emphasized “turning around” (sometimes translated as “repentence”) back toward the reception of God’s Divine qualities, and he criticized unloving, closed-off dogma and religiosity. Thus, God-in-the-flesh had a ministry of inviting his own advent into our lives across the millennia.

Our personal journeys receiving God’s advent have many legs to them, but perhaps your journey is similar to mine in that a key part of your walk with God (whatever you call her) is initiated by a revelation, a change of heart, or something that inspires a new vigor of spiritual engagement and hope for your life. It’s this initiation and continued inspiration (“advent”) that we celebrate in the Advent season, as well as the Lord’s more literal advent into the world - to the extent that we believe in that. Of course, the literal gospel story of Christ shouldn’t be made light of, and neither should other beliefs in how Divinity may have manifested in history or in our own lives. These advent stories (for me, especially Jesus’) inspire us in so many ways to have a more hopeful, heavenly relationship with each other, God, and his Divine qualities in all things. Advent helps us to envision and accept God being born within our own spirit and life, and bringing similar warmth, transformation and growth.

The deeply cynical aspects of our lives and world are in desperate need of such transformative hope, aren’t they? We’re in need of hope not just for the future, but also a hope in God’s empowering presence with us today: that Goddess is here, with us right now and inspiring us toward the change that we’ll need in order to save our earth and to save our lives, perhaps both literally and spiritually.

Hope, in and of itself, is a Divine, heavenly attribute - I believe. In fact, Swedenborg writes that all goodness, all love, all wisdom, structure, and truth are “made out of God” in a most fundamental way. Both he and scripture share that all that makes us human and beautiful is a reception of part of God’s infinity. Thus, something as positive as hope must be received from a type of Divine Hope.

What would a Divine Hope look like? Well, the idea of hope - which is similar to faith - can also be characterized as a type of positive confidence in something. I would think that the more that confidence is grounded in reality and truth, or a deep knowledge, the greater our sense of hope – all other things equal. I would also think that God in her all-knowingness would have this quality to such an extent that we could scarcely call it hope: instead characterizing it as Divine Knowledge and Confidence or Assurance.

Further, the more that we see and accept what drives Goddess’ Divine Hope: her Divine Love, Wisdom and Providence at work in the universe, the more we tend to find that we are personally empowered by Divine Hope as well, because we have greater confidence in the greater purpose of the universe and the arc of history toward justice and love. Having hope doesn’t mean that we think all things are good and “Godly,” but instead it’s a hope in our collective, heavenly ability to work to allow God’s greater advent into the world in diversity and health as we relinquish domination and destruction.

When I think of Divine Hope, I can’t help but think about today’s scripture reading from John. God had such a hope for us that he literally incarnated into flesh (“gave his only begotten Son”), went through growth, relationship, trials, death, and resurrection, in order to do what was needed to be sure that his hope and desire would be fulfilled. And I think Christ’s advent is an image of how engaged God is in every moment of time with our lives and how she wants to be resurrected in our thinking. We’re told that he “so loved the world” and so he does all this – which tells us what his Divine Motive and Divine Hope is all within one simple phrase. God mainly seeks to love us and to share that love with us and through us.

Believing in God may mean to start to accept this idea of God’s loving engagement in our own way, as well as believing in the worth of God’s love so much that we start to accept its advent into our own modes of living; emulating Christ by working toward social justice, toward uplifting the downtrodden, toward doing to others what we would have done to ourselves (in the most healthy sense of that phrase), and working toward Divine Love within and without - in our thinking, in our affections, and in our deeds.

God’s is a type of love that clearly uplifts life, otherwise why the advent? Indeed, God tells us this himself. Christ (“the-one-who-saves”) clearly has a specific type of living love in mind, not just chaos, pain, or destruction, and he wants us to know that truth for our own hope-filled empowerment. Our scripture uses the comparison between light and darkness to help us understand the Lord’s goal of enlightening and empowering all things, versus the “darkness” we sometimes “love” (which is metaphor used for the clear dichotomy between having light and not having it, and not to villainize literal darkness itself). I should also mention that scripture says that the Lord sees even in darkness – which “is as light to him,” and God is of course infinitely present and discerning within even the deepest mysteries to us.

That being said, God’s advent into our lives dispels hopelessness and despair on many different levels the more we allow her to come. This holy-day season, allow your mind to return to what it means to you to have the Higher Power manifest more and more in our communities and in your life and love. What healing is called for? What connections must be furthered or let go of? What hopes do you have for your own enlightened journey with the living, advent, hope-filled Lord?

O Holy Night Jennifer Hudson