Trials and Fermentations

Bridgewater, Massachusetts, October 12, 2003

Readings

Psalm 78:1-8
I will open my mouth in parables

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
     Incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable;
     I will utter dark sayings from of old,
Things that we have heard and known,
     That our ancestors have told us.
We will not hide them from their children;
     We will tell to the coming generation
The glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might,
     And the wonders that he has done.

He established a decree in Jacob,
     And appointed a law in Israel,
Which he commanded our ancestors
     To teach to their children;
That the next generation might know them,
     The children yet unborn,
And rise up and tell them to their children,
     So that they should set their hope in God,
And not forget the works of God,
     But keep his commandments;
And that they should not be like their ancestors,
     A stubborn and rebellious generation,
A generation whose heart was not steadfast,
     Whose spirit was not faithful to God.

Matthew 13:33-35
The parable of the yeast

He told them another parable: The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: "I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world."

Heaven and Hell #510, 511
Separating evil from good

After we die, we each go to the community where our spirit was while we were living in the world. In our spirit, we are actually united to some community, either heavenly or hellish. Evil people are connected with hellish communities, and good people with heavenly ones. As spirits, we are gradually brought there, and eventually we move in. . . .

The separation of evil spirits from good spirits takes place in our second stage after death. In the first stage, everyone was together. The reason is that as long as spirits are focused on external matters, it is like the situation in the world: evil people are together with good ones, and good people with evil ones. It is different when we have been brought into our inner nature, and are left to our own character and intentions.

Sermon

Our sermon series this fall has been focusing on heaven, as expressed in images in Jesus' parables of the kingdom of heaven in the Gospel of Matthew, and in plain language in Emanuel Swedenborg's book Heaven and Hell.

In a picture, dark lines and backgrounds bring out the lighter foreground image by providing contrast. In the same way, hell brings heaven into sharper relief. If we never experienced anything but good, we probably would not appreciate in. When we have experienced evil, pain, and sorrow, the good times are so much sweeter by comparison!

So today, along with our consideration of heaven, we're going to bring in a little of hell also. Even though it may not seem like it, that is what the parable of the yeast is all about. We usually think of yeast as something good. After all, it is yeast that makes our bread rise, so that we don't have to eat flat, hard bread, but can have nice, soft risen loaves that both look and taste better. It is true that the results of yeast are good. But one of the surprising revelations of the Bible's spiritual meaning is that it is actually evil that brings out this goodness. Yes, in God's economy, even evil is made to serve some good purpose.

This morning, as we explore how this works, let's look at the spiritual world first. Earlier in this series, we have talked about the approach of death, our passage into the other world, and the final judgment that each one of us faces there. Last week I mentioned that whatever is our "dominant love"--whatever we love most of all--will come out into the open there, no matter how well we may have hidden it from others here on earth. Then we will become entirely formed and driven by that dominant love, inside and out.

However, this does not happen all at once. When we first come into the spiritual world, we enter a place that Swedenborg calls the World of Spirits, which is halfway between heaven and hell, and not really a part of either one of them. Like earth, the World of Spirits has a mixture of good and evil, because like earth, heaven and hell meet and mix there. In fact, as we first start out our lives in the spiritual world, we return to what we were used to here on earth, and begin living exactly as we had lived before we died--and even in similar surroundings. You see, everything in the spiritual world is determined by our state of mind. And the mere fact of dying does not change the way we think and feel. We are still exactly the same person we were here. Our thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes, skills, ineptitudes, and the type of work we can do are all exactly the same as they were before we died. So naturally, we go back to a life like the one we had before.

This is our first stage after death, which Swedenborg calls the "stage of externals." At this point, if we weren't paying a lot of attention to what was happening as we died, we may think we are still here on earth, since things are so familiar to us.

Before long, though, the social masks we had learned to wear during our life on earth begin to wear away, and both we and others begin to see just what we are like inside. At the same time, we also begin to see just what our friends and companions are like. This is a time of change--and it can be quite uncomfortable. In fact, it could be called a time of trials and fermentations.

While we are on earth, we keep our social masks on most of the time while we are out and about, and for some things, even at home. There are things about ourselves that we want to hide from others, and even from ourselves. It can be an uncomfortable for those masks to come off out in public--as they do in the World of Spirits. Then we are confronted with exactly what we are like inside, both the good and the bad, and there is no concealing or minimizing it. It is the ultimate state of "what you see is what you get."

Of course, some people will