External Riches are Worthless Without Internal Ones

Nov 3

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Love Don't Cost a Thing Jennifer Lopez

Something's Got to Give Labrinth

Opening Readings

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Isaiah 1:11-18

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation - I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

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

From Secrets of Heaven #9473

The situation is the same as this with the good of love; unless it has internal good within it, it is not good... This good must be present within all other good if it is to be good; therefore no kind of good can exist unless its internal springs from the good that is Divine. Unless its internal springs from this it is not good but evil; for then it originates in the person himself, and that which emanates from the person is evil. This is so because in all the good he does the person has himself and also the world in view, and so not the Lord, nor heaven. If the Lord and heaven do enter into his thinking, they are for him only means that serve him in the attainment of personal position and gain. Those good deeds of his therefore are like white-washed sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful but inwardly are full of dead people's bones and of all uncleanness (from the book of Matthew 23:27, 29).

External Riches are Worthless Without Internal Ones: How Extravagance and the Trappings of Religion Can Mean Nothing

Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

I sometimes get caught up in some of the trappings of the rat-race, I confess. I think we all do. It’s easy to care about riches and our beauty and togetherness for shallow reasons – for our image with our friends and strangers, on social media, at work, for our dating life, and on. We often want these things to feed our ego and to feel a somewhat hollow comfort. We can want the dressings of extravagance and wealth for its prestige and perceived safety in spite of its impact on others, and in today’s world we can easily feel encouraged in that.

We live in a consumerist culture. It’s not a mystery that we purchase a mind-boggling amount of goods each year, making our shopping habits a type of distorted spiritual practice – perhaps in a way helping us to feel a more present engagement with the moment because of the shine of the new product, despite the monstrous implications of the resulting environmental impact and waste, as well as the waste of our poorly directed wealth. The US and Canada, both in the top 3 waste producers of the world per capita, respectively produce 8.4 billion and 1.3 billion metric tonnes of waste each year (25.9 and 36.1 metric tonnes per person!), not counting other types of environmental impacts in our goods’ production and transportation.

Further, although we produce so much, our workers get a monstrously undersized portion of that wealth. Instead, today’s version of publicly traded corporations have in their bylaws a rule that they must minimize how much they pay for their workers (called labor capital), which is considered an expense, while maximizing what they pay back for cash capital, which is called profit and a return on investment. Meaning that we treat people offering their lives as less worthy than a dollar bill invested. By and large, this method of capitalism enriches the astronomically wealthy in an unimaginably unequitable way, and those of us that are so rich tend to believe that our hidden away mountains of hoarded cash are our due. This - while children starve and die, families fight for survival, and our populace is abused due to the leveraging of our vulnerable positions.

Study after study tells us that such consumerism, egotism, and vanity is bad even for our own health as well as our peace and joy! Studies show that practices that support our arrogance and selfishness increase negative life factors: from bodily inflammation to narcissism, psychosis, depression, anxiety and insomnia. In a study on the impact of pay, it was found that in the U.S., every dollar over $70,000 a year brought no statistically significant increase in happiness, and yet so many of our wealthy brothers and sisters would say that $70,000 a year is an unlivable wage (while ignoring those far below the poverty line).

Incredible, isn’t it? And we know that it doesn’t have to be this way. And yet, don’t these sometimes seem like insurmountable issues? Unbreakable, encouraged even… yet catastrophic, with global and societal disaster, egotistical destruction, and psychological misery coming from it.

Like with global politics, we tend to feel disempowered when it comes to our culture’s consumerism and addiction to hoarding wealth and a beatific image. But like with politics, we disempower ourselves when we put the blame solely on the whole and don’t work to change our own lives. Although it may seem impossible, when we start to want to change our lives – and remind ourselves of that – we can! Especially when we’re willing to look to our Higher Power as the co-creator of that change (see Alcoholics Anonymous). It may take us looking for help and tools - perhaps looking above, toward spiritual practice or counseling in the face of our helplessness - but isn’t that true for most worthwhile projects and change?

Our scripture reading today from the Hebrew book of Isaiah is sometimes a shock to discover – God, telling the Israelites that all of their rituals and sacrifices mean nothing to her, and questioning them with, “Who asked this of you?” Well, “You did!” might feel like the appropriate answer, given what we hear from earlier Hebrew scriptures. And yet, at that time Divinity makes the point that because their hearts aren’t in the right place, because they’re set on evil, the rituals are worse than nothing to God: they’re actually “abominations.” Wow.

Similar to how we can work to enrich our external selves at the expense of our internal life and others’, the church and our various religions have acted similarly – often in unimaginably horrendous fashion. We see it throughout the history of the Christian church, for example, obsessed with window-dressing and ritual while endorsing selfish war, abuse, damnation of others, and deceit, among other hurtful things.

In a way we each can get caught up in some part of that in our religion or lack thereof. From Sunday worship liturgy and attendance to the prestige and image of our personal practices, we can easily become anxious, defensive, and egotistical about how things look, instead of focusing on our own inner health while practicing it. Further, the heart of religion: supportive love and community, can be ignored in the wake of our desire for riches - to maintain tradition, to feel external comfort, or uplift our ego. The trappings of religion are meant to help us uplift these inner goods, not abuse them. As God points out in our scripture, if we are centered on apathy and selfishness in one way or another, then our rituals and prayers mean little to him – he’s more concerned with the hurtful, ugly rituals of our hearts and the distorted intentions behind what we’re doing.

She tells us, clean it up. Rid yourself of evil, start to do good! He’s emphatic about it: “No, no, no, no – I can’t listen to your prayers and I don’t want to smell your incense with so much hurt going on.” Clean up your heart, work to change your practices, and transform your world away from the brink of destruction – then I’ll not only appreciate your rituals, but by then we’ll already be in a truly deep, living ritual that wisely expresses what I’m actually about: internal and external health, peace, and transformative love.

Our favorite scientist-turned-mystical-Christian-thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg, reflected on the Lord’s words and his reportedly God-given visions of the afterlife and said this, “The situation is the same as this with the good of love; unless it has internal good within it, it is not good.” And he goes on to quote Christ when he says that when we only have ourselves in mind, and not Life, not Goodness, not God, then the good things that we seem to do “are like white-washed sepulchres [tombs], which outwardly appear beautiful but inwardly are full of dead people's bones and of all uncleanness.” (Matthew 23:27, 29) Harsh words from the loving Christ! And yet, perhaps such honesty in parable (or metaphor) is helpful given the serious consequences of our actions. Not only can we bury ourselves and our world with our desire for the trappings of riches, but we can also become white-washed tombs of goodness: seemingly moral, beneficent, and kind, but still have our own selfish interests at heart.

I don’t know about you, but this all hits close to home. And it’s easy to become defensive or dismissive about it, not only saying that change is largely impossible but that change and reflection isn’t even needed. As we see in religious history, it’s easy to become centered on the outward expression or label of things, instead of working to find God’s justice and Divine health in our lives and working to let go of the destructive, selfish intentions influencing us. We’re called to work to stave off personal and societal disaster by focusing more on healthy intentions, and communal and environmental health. Doing this will empower our more outward gifts and help us to use them in support of everyone, as described in Christ’s descriptions of the kingdom of heaven, instead of just ourselves. As we know from religions the world over, as well as the studies that show what’s actually healthy for us, for our own sake God asks us to use our gifts actively to level the playing field by uplifting others (materially, mentally, spiritually) and humbling ourselves.

Even our religious rites and riches have their place in service of good intentions, goodness in act, and the goodness of creation. May we recenter ourselves on the heart of things: inner riches and beauty, allowing our Higher Power’s transformative influence to illuminate our thinking, enriching our minds as well as our world in sustainability, helping us to uplift and live in a rich harmony with creation, ourselves, and the Prince(ss) of Peace.

I Need a Dollar Aloe Blacc