5 Satan--I

5 Satan--I

Today begins a three-part series on the subject of Satan. Today's sermon will focus on the essential character and function of Satan. Next week we will take a broader look at Satan's appearance as a character in mythological and literary creations, seen in as much historical perspective as possible. The third sermon will be on demon possession, beginning with examples from the Bible and then on to various other examples of that horrible reality.

Let me be clear from the outset that, although further on, we will be speaking of Satan in terms of mythologies and other types of literature concerning him, I hope that you do not, for one minute, conclude, from this, that I am suggesting that Satan is not real, that he is like a hero in a story, or that he is in any way some kind of good guy. I have firsthand knowledge of this entity as a living personality, and I do not wish to imply by any stretch of the imagination that by discussing Satan as a mythological figure I am taking away from the absolute reality of him.

I believe that, for the practicing Christian, it is less important to understand Satan's character than it is to understand his function: the bottom line of any interpretation of Satan's character is that his function is to ensnare us and to enslave us. His wiles are often highly intellectual, sometimes purely physical, but always his aim is to divert us from the spiritual path. The possible reasons for this, we will discuss in greater detail later on, but let us establish the ground rules of the outset: whatever positive things I end up quoting about Satan, have no illusions, I distrust him, and, without the support of the armor of God, I totally fear him.

Indeed, there are various interpretations of his person, some of which portray him as a tragic figure, sensitive and misunderstood, or, ultimately, as a servant God. We will get into that, but I want to underline the bottom line: if Satan is possessed of any virtue at all, because of  his ultimate origins or cosmic function, the person himself is never to be trusted with anything we value. I do not want you to get the idea that I feel anything but self-righteous hatred for him. One his wiles is playing on our sympathies to draw us into his webs of deception. This sermon is very much about paradox, and there will therefore be many statements that reflect almost affectionately on Satan, poor kid; but don't for a minute get me wrong, whatever his virtues, Satan is not a good guy.

John 8:44

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

History tends to offer very black and white (mostly black) interpretations of him as the ultimate evil and as the totally negative force in the universe. However there are other interpretations of Satan that imply a more positive spin on his nature, and his reason for being.  No matter what his purpose, he is still the accuser, the tester, and the above-all- to-be-avoided person in the created cosmogony. Nevertheless it is of interest to look into some of these original and somewhat contradictory or paradoxical interpretations of the person.

C.S. Lewis wrote this in the introduction to The Screwtape Letters:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or magician with the same delight.”

We will return to the various interpretations on Satan's character in a moment but first let's begin with a generic survey from Wikipedia:

"Satan (Hebrew: הַשָּׂטָן ha-Satan, "the opposer,") is a character appearing in the texts of the Abrahamic religions.

Hebrew Bible
The original Hebrew term, satan, is a noun from a verb meaning primarily to, “obstruct, oppose,” as it is found in Numbers 22:22, 1 Samuel 29:4, Psalms 109:6. Ha-Satan is traditionally translated as “the accuser,” or “the adversary.” The definite article “ha-,” English “the," is used to show that this is a title bestowed on a being, versus the name of a being. Thus this being would be referred to as “the satan.”

Book of Job
In the Book of Job, ha-Satan is a member of the Divine Council, "the sons of God" who are subservient to God. Ha-Satan, in this capacity, is many times translated as "the prosecutor", and is charged by God to tempt humans and to report back to God all who go against His decrees.

At the beginning of the book, Job is a good person "who feared God and turned away from evil" (Job 1:1), and has therefore been rewarded by God. When the Divine Council meets, God informs ha-Satan about Job's blameless, morally upright character. Between Job 1:9–10 and 2:4–5, ha-Satan merely points out that God has given Job everything that a man could want, so of course Job would be loyal to God; if all Job has been given, even his health, were to be taken away from him, however, his faith would collapse. God therefore grants ha-Satan the chance to test Job. Due to this, it has been interpreted that ha-Satan is under God's control and cannot act without God's permission. This is further shown in the epilogue of Job in which God is speaking to Job, ha-Satan is absent from these dialogues. "For Job, for [Job's] friends, and for the narrator, it is ultimately Yahweh himself who is responsible for Job's suffering; as Yahweh says to the 'satan', 'You have incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.'" (Job 2:3)

[Sidebar: With this paragraph, we encounter the first in a long series of comments to come, suggesting that Satan's mischief (so to speak) is actually in obedience with the Divine Plan. Usually, we will see Satan pictured as an evil demon whose pride has set him up in opposition to God, in competition with God; but there are just as many interpretations of Satan that make him out to be a faithful servant of God--whose temptations are not only condoned by God, but ORDERED by God: the function of these temptations is to temper the souls of those entities trapped in the lower planes, and prepare them to graduate to higher planes of existence. Those who succeed in passing the temptation-tests of Satan are free to move on up the ladder of spiritual evolution--those who fail, are sent back down to try again.

Thus, demons may be seen to FUNCTION in a way that is for the ultimate good of the flowering Christian, in the same way that a cruel army drill sergeant may be seen to work in service of the training recruit. Twice, in the Old Testament, once in the case of Job, and earlier in the case of Abraham and his son Isaac, God is seen in the role of a tempter; in both cases, the purpose is to test and temper the will and the faith of a man in question. In this way, negative energy may be said to bring forth positive energy.

Similarly, even though the ugly and ferocious gargoyles, atop the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, are fearsome and threatening, their purpose is beneficent: they are meant to frighten the people INTO church, so that the folk may be saved from the Hellfires out of which these demons momentarily spring. (Note that the people must pass right by the horrible dragon-headed monsters to get into the church.) I guess right action isn't necessarily pretty.  So it is that it becomes easier to imagine Satan not as a negative force in the universe, but merely as a component in the purification process of man's soul as he evolves ever upward toward a more perfect spiritual union with God.

A similar positive spin on Satan appears in the New Age religion, Eckankar, inspired by the teachings of Paul Twitchell. Eckankar is described in this way by GotQuestions?org:

"Of all the strange and bizarre belief systems in the world today, Eckankar has to be one of the strangest. Sadly, it is also one of the most dangerous."

The Satan figure in the Eckankar cosmography is called KAL NIRANJAN. Kal Niranjan is characterized as the:

"Full name of the Negative Power, often shortened to Kal. Niranjan means "beyond illusion,"and is applied to Kal ("Time") because he is the creator of illusion. (Time beyond illusion.)"

Kal is described in Eckankar writings in terms very similar to the way Christian writers discuss Satan, especially in terms of his service to God (here, Sat Puruch) as a tempter:

"Although Kal fell, his original beauty is not completely destroyed; it makes his claim to be God more credible and his temptations more effective. Why should Sat Purush have been pleased with this devotion? Kabir never explains this, yet it is a pivotal point in the development of Anurag Sugar.

Kal means "Time,"and since the devotion described implies the suspension of all his activity, for incalculable periods of "time," it would appear that the practices done by Kal please Sat Purush because of their implications when done by him, rather than because standing on one foot has any particular objective merit. The period of Kal's austerities-seventy yugas- is more than fifteen times as long as the period of creation--four yugas.

By stopping himself dead for such long periods, he postponed his own fall and thus allowed the jivas (souls) that much more time with their Father before being sent into the lower worlds. If this is true, it certainly is a cosmic paradox: his devotion postponed his fall, but it also brought it about. But, as we have seen, the fall of Time was probably inevitable once he was separated from the One."

[Sidebar: Notice, in the preceding claims of some positive virtue of Satan's activities in the grand scheme of things, there is still the question of the fall. The implied contradiction is that: even though Satan's tempting is by divine decree, and with divine ratification, it is still performed by a fallen angel. How the fallen Angel can be both functioning in the service of the Father, and also functioning in opposition to the Father is a paradox of tremendous interest. I myself have no rational solution to this paradox, except to suggest that all God's creations are not only, or even mainly, perfect in themselves, but perfect in relation to each other.]

To add fuel to the fire, so to speak, ha ha, the following excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia suggests that Satan may have been pre-ordained to rebel against God, not only FROM the very beginning of Creation, but even BEFORE the beginning. The section has much to say about time and the very instant of creation:

"As might be expected from the attention they had bestowed on the question of the intellectual powers of the angels, the medieval theologians had much to say on the time of their probation. The angelic mind was conceived of as acting instantaneously, not, like the mind of man, passing by discursive reasoning from premises to conclusions. It was pure intelligence as distinguished from reason. Hence it would seem that there was no need of any extended trial.
And in fact we find St. Thomas and Scotus discussing the question whether the whole course might not have been accomplished in the first instant in which the angels were created. The Angelic Doctor argues that the Fall could not have taken place in the first instant. And it certainly seems that if the creature came into being in the very act of sinning the sin itself might be said to come from the Creator.

[Sidebar: Note how this sentence affirms William Blake's theory of contraries,
". . . the very act of sinning the sin itself might be said to come from the Creator."
If that's not a wild suggestion, I don't know what is!
 However, remember that we are dealing with a spiritual world in which we encounter paradox at every turn in the road; that no moral imperative can remain untouched or unaltered by the flow of events through a warped window of time; furthermore, remember that Blake insists that it takes positive and negative to make a world, so why should not this characteristic not extend into the domain of the Mind of God; if He made such a world, how could it not?

Back to the Catholic Encyclopedia:]

"But this argument, [that "the very act of sinning the sin itself might be said to come from the Creator"] together with many others, is answered with his accustomed acuteness by Scotus, who maintains the abstract possibility of sin in the first instant.
But whether possible or not, it is agreed that this is not what actually happened. For the authority of the passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel, which were generally accepted as referring to the fall of Lucifer, might well suffice to show that for at least one instant he had existed in a state of innocence and brightness." 

Isaiah 14:12

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!"

To modern readers the notion that the sin was committed in the second instant of creation may seem scarcely less incredible than the possibility of a fall in the very first. But this may be partly due to the fact that we are really thinking of human modes of knowledge, and fail to take into account the Scholastic conception of angelic cognition. For a being who was capable of seeing many things at once, a single instant might be equivalent to the longer period needed by slowly-moving mortals. 

This dispute, as to the time taken by the probation and fall of Satan, has a purely speculative interest. But the corresponding question as to the rapidity of the sentence and punishment is in some ways a more important matter. There can indeed be no doubt that Satan and his rebel angels were very speedily punished for their rebellion. This would seem to be sufficiently indicated in some of the texts which are understood to refer to the fall of the angels. It might be inferred, moreover, from the swiftness with which punishment followed on the offense in the case of our first parents, although man's mind moves more slowly than that of the angels, and he had more excuse in his own weakness and in the power of his tempter. It was partly for this reason, indeed, that man found mercy, whereas there was no redemption for the angels. For, as St. Peter says,  

2 Peter 2:4

"God spared not the angels that sinned."

This, it may be observed, is asserted universally, indicating that all who fell suffered punishment. For these and other reasons theologians very commonly teach that the doom and punishment followed in the next instant after the offense, and many go so far as to say there was no possibility of repentance."

The imbroglio of complications surrounding the issue of the fall occurring in the second instant of creation works to support the idea that Satan's function in the cosmogony was an element in the total divine plan from its very inception. If Satan's fall occurred at the very instant of creation then it can be seen, or at least suggested, that the fall of Satan was not an act of pride on the part of the person himself, but was always part of the divine plan in the mind of God before creation. Furthermore this goes to support the idea that, rather than being a rebellious angel, Satan is merely an Angel performing the function for which he was he was created in the first instant by God. It was a dirty job, but SOMEBODY had to do it.

Back to wikipedia:

"Devil
(Greek diabolos; Latin diabolus).
The name commonly given to the fallen angels, who are also known as demons. With the article (ho) it denotes Lucifer, their chief, as in 

Matthew 25:41:

"Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

It may be said of this name, as St. Gregory says of the word angel, "nomen est officii, non naturæ"--the designation of an office, not of a nature. For the Greek word (from diaballein, "to traduce") means a slanderer, or accuser, and in this sense it is applied to him of whom it is written "the accuser [ho kategoros] of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night". It thus answers to the Hebrew name Satan which signifies an adversary, or an accuser."

With the statement of St. Gregory's that the word "angel" denotes an "office" not a "nature", we once again have the suggestion that Satan is not a "character" but a "function". Therefore, it might be said that the "office" of Satan is to "tempt", and is, therefore, as integral a part of the the vast cosmic structure as is the "office" of Jesus to mediate and redeem.

The preceding suggestions of Satan's positive function in the divine hierarchy do not necessarily negate the concept of Satan's fall. We have it on pretty good authority that he screwed up--big time. However, there are two attributes of Lucifer's character which must be mentioned--attributes which must play a part in our overall understanding of Satan-- one of them is the ambitious pride of rule:

As we said before, many people believe that Satan's fall was due to pride--that he wanted to compete with God; he wanted to replace God; to be as powerful as God.

But the other one is concerned with the feeling that it was unfair of God to create the Angels, and then suddenly turn around and create man, and put man above the Angels:

Lucifer is sometimes described as the angel who was most in love with God, who most cherished God, and therefore was most threatened and upset by the arrival on the scene of man, whom God seemingly allows to replace the Angels in his affections.

from Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell, 1972

"One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian — a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused — because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other beings! 

The Persian poets have asked, "By what power is Satan sustained?" And the answer that they have found is this: 

"By his memory of the sound of God's voice when he said, 'Be gone!'"

What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!"

Thus, it is a twisted tale of unrequited love that brings us closer to the actual character of Satan; it also brings us closer to an essential character, or, certainly, an ingredient of sin: which is love or pleasure.

Remember the quote we read last week from Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell :

"... hellish fire is self-love and love of the world, it is every craving that belongs to those loves, the craving being an extension of love because a person constantly craves what he loves.  It is also a pleasure, since when a person gets what he loves or craves, he perceives it as pleasant.  This is the only source of heartfelt joy for man.  So hellish fire is a craving and a pleasure that well up from these two loves as their sources... "

In the paradoxical nature of love, the two-sided aspect of love, there is much food for thought; the conundrum may, ultimately, find its solution in the very essence of the Divine Nature. Certainly there is a duality here that bears on the problem. The two sides of love are:

the object of the love, and
the lover himself;

when these two become confused, there is sin. The following Wikipedia comment on William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell affirms the idea that a world without paradox is not in conformity with the Personality (in the most idealized sense of the word) of God:

"Moreover he explores the contrary nature of reason and of energy, believing that two types of people existed: the "energetic creators" and the "rational organizers", or as he calls them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "devils" and "angels". Both are necessary to life according to Blake."

Blake's idea of the energetic, as opposed to the passive, was, again, a reflection on the the sort of carnal or material-based character of sin. Blake insisted that the paradoxical nature of existence is to be embraced and has a positive function, even though it is still possible for the opposites to become confused and really start to tear each other down.

Indeed, it was the love-hate dimension of Satan's relationship to God that laid him low; whether we take the tack that Satan loved God too much to bow before Adam, or the tack that Satan identified with God so much that he wanted to BE God, the bottom line is that Satan confused himself with God in an unwholesome way. This seems to me to be a very important aspect of Satan's character, in that this carnal energy comes from a place of high affection for God. Satan's over-the-top self-involvement with God erupted in energetic action that crossed some kind of line. It was the too-egocentric affection, the too-narcissistic affection for God, that was Satan's downfall. If he could simply have put God first, then God's decrees would have never been in conflict with his love. But his love became narcissistic; he became obsessed with himself, and in himself he lost sight of his love. Thus, a love, that is too wrapped up in itself, becomes a perversion of that love, and the price must be paid. This is a lesson we must all bear in mind: it is very easy to lose sight of the one we love, by loving too much, or finding in our love of the other a too-vivid reflection of ourselves.

Regarding Satan's Fall, remember Blake's proverb:

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

Clearly, Satan learned what was more than enough the hard way!

[How often do we learn what is more than enough, and how often are we forgiven? It's too bad that Jesus did not die for Satan's sins--he might have been forgiven too; but there is no forgiveness for angels.]


Here is a parallel prophetic passage in Ezekiel's lamentation upon the king of Tyre:

Ezekiel 28:12-15:
"You were the seal of resemblance, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. You were in the pleasures of the paradise of God; every precious stone was thy covering; the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite, and the onyx, and the beryl, the sapphire, and the carbuncle, and the emerald; gold the work of your beauty: and your pipes were prepared in the day that you were created. You a cherub stretched out, and protecting, and I set you in the holy mountain of God, you have walked in the midst of the stones of fire. You were perfect in your wave from the day of creation, until iniquity was found in you."

There is much in the context that can only be understood literally of an earthly king concerning whom the words are professedly spoken, but it is clear that in any case the king is likened to an angel in Paradise who is ruined by his own iniquity.

There is something here that very intimately connected to our sermon of last week: we talked about the razor's edge between the sin that damns and the sin that saves. Clearly, the perversion of love into a mockery of itself should be one of the tell-tale signs that pleasure has turned to sin.

I believe that the pivotal question in the discussion of Satan and the discussion of sin is this: at what point does the pleasure turn to sin? There is a not insignificant connection here between the moment of Satan's fall (in the first or second moment of creation (whatever)) and the moment when WE have crossed the line. We have spoken many times of the epiphanic moment when spirit descends into the physical. I am sure there is a similar epiphanic moment that separates good from evil, right from wrong.

It is well understood that most sinners live in denial; that even the most ruthless murderer sees his violent acts as justified, in some sense, by a twisted inner motivation; in his mind lurks the thought, if ever so dimly, that he is doing something right, something that, on some level or other, is okay. When does the thought finally come to him that it was not okay, that obsession with self has worked a wrong against the common good? When will he see that his actions, which he mistook for pleasures, were really constructions, elaborated in his mind, on a mental template supplied by the Devil?

Satan does not use argument in anything like the way of making rational sense--he uses words to befuddle us and to make something bad sound like something good. When we speak of Satan's "persuasions" we are speaking merely of a low vibrational sing-song that fills plastic bottles with empty phrases that tempt our lowest (most easily got at) impulses. As Screwtape says:

"Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!"

If the demon succeeds in luring the sinner's mind away from any potent expressions, his mind will be distracted from the emptiness of his life, a life buoyed up like a helium balloon, and just as doomed to drop. As one unfortunate sinner said, in The Screwtape Letters:

"I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".

Satan, as the Accuser, might be seen to be performing a meritorious function, by pointing a finger at the sinner's transgressions . . . if it were not for the fact that Satan may NEVER be relied on to tell the truth: he always accuses us of something we are usually not even guilty of; Satan's accusations of sin encourage the sinner either:

to turn his back on the truth, or, more likely,
to divert his attention to some other perversion of the actual truth--

a diversion which allows the sinner to justify his sinful deeds in is mind; as C. S. Lewis points out, above, Satan's accusations are not meant to teach; his accusations are meant to direct the sinner away from the truth, not point him towards it; that judgmental function is reserved for Jesus on the last day.

Sooner or later, the sinner will to stand before the Mediator and be astonished to discover, when Jesus shines the true light of judgment on his heart, that he has been sinning against himself all along; he will realize, at last, that, all through his career, when he was doubtless feeling that he was a wronged man doing battle against an unfair world, that the unfairness was in himself--and his own sense of shame will condemn him.

It is a contemporary philosophical commonplace that there is no black and white--only gray; but this position allows contemporary man to dig a very comfortable buffer for himself between his sins and their spiritual consequences; this buffer allows him to excuse his sins, his gray-area sins, as exceptions to a rule which he has made so flexible it can hardly bear any weight at all. This, no doubt, pleases Satan immensely. Blocking the truth from our eyes pleases Satan the most, because it allows him to divert our attention into all sorts of sidelines.

The truth is that, in a vast cosmic expanse of eternity upon eternity, there must be at some point an actual right and an actual wrong. There are waves and there are particles, (these two are one), but there is a moment when a wave becomes a particle, a real actual, discernible moment. Likewise, when we cross the border from right into wrong, we choose to condemn ourselves, because this choice is always made, on some level, consciously.

In next week's sermon, we will make the very important point that Satan always makes a great deal of sense-- but his lies cannot penetrate to the heart; only the authority and the compassion of Jesus can do that.

The philosophical edifice of impenetrable mysteries overwhelms the mind with insoluble paradoxes. No matter what we SAY about sin, whatever thought we have about Satan's function in the cosmic hierarchy, the inescapable bottom line is this: Jesus, and only Jesus stands between us and the desperate fate of the Fallen Angel. So sin, stated as simply as possible, is really turning our backs on Jesus; and when we turn our backs on the light of Jesus, we turn to the shadow realities of Satan, and experience, with that turning away, a fall from grace like his.

Next week we will speak, again, about the armor of God which allows us to deflect the lies of Satan from entering into our consciousness; for now, let us end with this thought:

It may be that Satan's function, his office as ordained by God, is to tempt us away from the Father, from the Son, and from ourselves; but our commission is to turn away from Satan's lies into the comforting and revealing light of Divine Truth.

Let us pray: Jesus help us block from our minds the words that make our world into a paper moon. Give us the reality of your love that blinds the evil one, that illuminates our path, so that we do not stumble into traps and snares, and which drowns out the rasping voice of the tempter with heavenly music. Amen.

4. The Cheerful Sinner

4. The Cheerful Sinner

Today's sermon is a study in paradox: we will be taking a closer look at sin and investigating its dualistic properties. We will suggest that, as in all spiritual things, one man's sin may well be another man's righteous act.

First, here is some generic background material from Wikipedia:

"In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God's will. Sin can also be viewed as anything within individuals that violates the ideal relationship between them and God.
Some crimes are regarded as sins and some sins are regarded as greater than others. In this nuanced concept of sin, sins fall in a spectrum from minor errors to deadly misdeeds. Catholicism regards the least corrupt sins as venial sins—which are part of human living and carry little divine consequence. Conversely, sins of great evil are mortal sins—which bring the dire consequence of going to Hell if unrepented for.
History of the term
The word derives from “Old English syn(n), for original *sunjō,... The stem may be related to that of Latin sons, sont-is guilty. In Old English there are examples of the original general sense, ‘offence, wrong-doing, misdeed'”. The Biblical terms that have been translated from Greek and Hebrew literally refer to missing a target, i.e. error.

Religions:
Bahá'í
In the Bahá'í Faith, humans are considered naturally good (perfect), fundamentally spiritual beings. Human beings were created because of God's immeasurable love. However, the Bahá'í teachings compare the human heart to a mirror, which, if turned away from the light of the sun (i.e. God), is incapable of receiving God's love.

Christianity
In Western Christianity, sin is believed to alienate the sinner from God. It has damaged, and completely severed, the relationship of humanity to God. That relationship can only be restored through acceptance of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice for mankind's sin.
In Eastern Christianity, sin is viewed in terms of its effects on relationships, both among people and between people and God. Sin is seen as the refusal to follow God's plan, and the desire to be "like God" (Genesis 3:5) and thus in direct opposition to God's will (see the account of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis).
Original sin is a Western concept which states that sin entered the human world through Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden, and that human beings have since lived with the consequences of this first sin. 

Hinduism
In Hinduism, the term sin (pāpa in Sanskrit) is often used to describe actions that create negative karma by violating moral and ethical codes, which automatically brings negative consequences. This is different from Abrahamic sin in the sense that pāpa is not a crime against the will of God, but against (1) Dharma, or moral order, and (2) one's own self.

[Sidebar: We will return to sins against the self presently.]

Islam
Muslims see sin (dhanb, thanb ذنب) as anything that goes against the commands of God (Allah). Islam teaches that sin is an act and not a state of being. The Qur'an teaches that "the soul is certainly prone to evil, unless the Lord does bestow His Mercy" and that even the prophets do not absolve themselves of the blame. It is believed that Iblis (Satan) has a significant role in tempting humankind towards sin.

[Sidebar: We will certainly have cause to return to the subject of Satan; my next sermon will deal with him.]

Judaism
Judaism teaches that sin is an act, but one has an inclination to do evil "from his youth". . . All sin has a consequence. The righteous suffer their sins in this world and receive their reward in the world to come. The wicked cannot correct their sins in this world and hence do not suffer them here, but in gehinom (hell). If they have not become completely corrupted, they repent in hell and thereafter join the righteous. The very evil do not repent even at the gates of hell. Such people prosper in this world to receive their reward for any good deed, but cannot be cleansed by and hence leave gehinom, because they don't or can't repent. This world can therefore seem unjust where the righteous suffer, while the wicked prosper. Many great thinkers have contemplated this, but God's justice is long, precise and just."

The comments above, taken from Wikipedia, state very generally accepted principles--there is none of the paradoxical promised in my introductory paragraph. But stay with me--the plot thickens.
Last week I introduced into these sermons some writings of William Blake. I mentioned that Blake was really the great-grandaddy of the Spiritualist movement, about seventy-five years ahead of everybody else; that he was an intensely original thinker, with a magnificently open heart, and a cosmically resonant vision.

For the next few moments we will be looking at some material taken from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Proverbs of Hell. The following is from the Wikipedia article:

"The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical foment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell published in Latin 33 years earlier.  

Unlike that of Milton or Dante, Blake's conception of Hell begins not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven."

Here is our first hint of paradox: to Blake, Hell is not necessarily a place of punishment, but a source of energy; it follows therefore, that sin may not be merely an expression of evil, but a release of power--power that can impress itself upon the world. Energy is central to everything Blake has to say in the following quotations: he is making a case for the idea that: what the church, as a dogmatic authority, considers evil, may simply be active expressions, in the material plane, of the passive principles of the spiritual plane.

Indeed, it was the contemplation of the polar opposites of passive and active that inspired today’s sermon. I have often been in violent disagreement with many of the church's moral positions; its dogmatic pronouncements about what was sinful and what wasn't--especially since I have so often been pigeonholed on the sinful end of that continuum. Many times throughout history, the church, as a formal body, has condemned certain human acts, and the people who performed these acts, as sinful; sadly, these socially-invented moral codes have, quite often, been created by a committee of just a few church authorities. Thus, the general opinion has been created by a parochial opinion; a minority has spoken for the majority, without the majority's consent. How lame is that?

I have found that many of the activities, identified as sinful by the established church, are, in fact, FOR ME, very spiritually profitable and morally uplifting; and when I have acted in opposition to the church's moral directives I have felt myself righteous and spiritual. You may recall the sermon, given a few months ago, concerning hate (16 Happiness/Joy II). We discovered several contexts in which righteous hatred was not only acceptable, but which expressed a moral imperative. So, as we go more deeply into the subject of the active and the passive, the carnal and the spiritual, we will arrive at a deeper understanding of the message of Jesus, which, as we have said many times in the past several months, was to bring Heaven to Earth, and to allow man to enjoy the eternal spirituality inherent in physical existence.

As we consider the passive and active poles, one of the main expressions of the passive would be: obedience. We all agree that, as Christians, we must give over our will to that of the Father and allow our will become His. However, this is where the passive part ends, because once we are filled with spirit, we are filled with moral imperatives which command us to perform certain aggressive acts. And these acts, though active, though involved in carnal life, carnal relationships, earthly relationships, mundane  institutions and entities, are still expressions of passive obedience to Divine Will, and, like the Christ Consciousness, or perhaps the same as the Christ Consciousness, these acts become the realization of a divine thought in the mind of God.

We continue, now, with more Wikipedia comments on Blake, but first we must insert a clarification concerning the 19th century definition of the word "genius", which is different than the meaning it has assumed in the 20th century:

genius=imagination

a plural genii : an attendant spirit of a person or place
In ancient Rome, the genius (plural in Latin genii) was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family (gens), or place (genius loci).

The noun is related to the Latin verb gigno, genui, genitus, "to bring into being, create, produce." Because the achievements of exceptional individuals seemed to indicate the presence of a particularly powerful genius, by the time of Augustus the word began to acquire its secondary meaning of "inspiration, talent."

Now, Wikipedia:

"Blake's purpose [in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell] is to create what he called a "memorable fancy" in order to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion, which he describes thus:

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

[Sidebar: I'm sure that Blake found that crack about the priesthood to be sarcastically hilarious:

(Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar)

but we must not overlook the serious side of the comment, which is that: the common man all too often surrenders to the priesthood responsibility for defining his own personal perception and experience of the truth. The general principle, here, is that: passive order that stifles spontaneous action it is not spiritual at all. Blake makes the claim that religion replaces spirituality with authoritarianism and therefore works contrary to true spiritual freedom.]

Back to Wikipedia:

"In the most famous part of the book, Blake reveals the Proverbs of Hell. These display a very different kind of wisdom from the Biblical Book of Proverbs. The diabolical proverbs are provocative and paradoxical. Their purpose is to energise thought. Several of Blake's proverbs have become famous:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction"

Blake explains that,

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.

Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

Blake's theory of contraries was not a belief in opposites but rather a belief that each person reflects the contrary nature of God, and that progression in life is impossible without contraries. Moreover he explores the contrary nature of reason and of energy, believing that two types of people existed: the "energetic creators" and the "rational organizers", or as he calls them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "devils" and "angels". Both are necessary to life according to Blake."

[Sidebar: Before we can appreciate the next bundle of quotes, we must agree that operating in opposition to one's true identity is a sin against the self. Thus, if the pleasure of the flesh exalts the spiritual essence of the flesh, there can be no sin. Perhaps it is as simple as, "you can't have white without black." Blake insists (or let's say I insist)that the self, the self as an extension of the Godhead, can only act in its own service in a righteous way-- that those sins against the self are sins against the spontaneous expression of the divine impulses which may or may not be controlled, which may be, in fact, overwhelming. Also, remember that this overwhelming feeling may be just an illusion created by man's self-limiting concept of himself; and as we overcome our self-limiting concepts we come closer to the spontaneous acts which are engendered by true spirituality.]

Other Provebs from Hell include:

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound
or outward circumference of Energy.

Energy is Eternal Delight. Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.

Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improve-
ment are roads of Genius.

He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.

Eternity is in love with the forms of time.

Back to Wikipedia:

"Influence
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is probably the most influential of Blake's works. Its vision of a dynamic relationship between a stable "Heaven" and an energized "Hell" has fascinated theologians, aestheticians and psychologists. Aldous Huxley took the name of one of his most famous works, The Doors of Perception, from this work, which in turn also inspired American rock band The Doors' name. Huxley's contemporary C. S. Lewis wrote The Great Divorce about the divorce of Heaven and Hell, in response to Blake's Marriage."

We see a similarly paradoxical attitude toward Hell expressed in Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell :

"... hellish fire is self-love and love of the world, it is every craving that belongs to those loves, the craving being an extension of love because a person constantly craves what he loves.  It is also a pleasure, since when a person gets what he loves or craves, he perceives it as pleasant.  This is the only source of heartfelt joy for man.  So hellish fire is a craving and a pleasure that well up from these two loves as their sources... "

This statement is even more paradoxical than Blake's, because it suggests that self-love is at the heart of sin. Here, Swedenborg is giving the impression that acts of self-love are acts of sinful, carnal indulgence. But, please remember that our joys are to be found in glorifying our true selves; therefore self-love can only be thought of as the highest form of devotion to God. Furthermore, the craving as an extension of love sounds a lot like sehnsucht to me, and splits up the idea of pleasure not only between Heaven and Hell, but Present and Future. Thus, the difference between love of pleasure as a sin, and love of pleasure as self-affirmation, becomes a razor's edge between which only the most spiritually discriminating can distinguish.

Blake's ruthless criticism of the priesthood, as the representatives of organized religion, and the bloodsuckers of true spirituality, is echoed in Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth:

"The Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature…The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed." (p. 197)

"Our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. " (p. 99)

The next section touches on the subtleties and some ramifications of Original Sin. There are many arguments which are in agreement with Blake, but there is a fatal flaw embedded in the argument that Original Sin is a bondage. Needless to say, next week's sermon on Satan must deal extensively with original sin. For now, just a few comments must suffice:

Commenting on the concept of original sin, a modern Scholar, Elaine Pagels explains:

"...I came to see that for nearly the first four hundred years of our era, Christians regarded "FREEDOM as the primary message of Genesis 1-3. Freedom in its many forms, including free will, freedom from demonic powers, freedom from social and sexual obligations, freedom from tyrannical government and from fate; and self mastery as the source of such freedom."

[Sidebar: The message here is that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden was originally thought to be an expulsion into freedom from the animalistic, unthinking, intuitive world of the unconscious, into the unlimited spaces of thought--almost, an entry from Earth into Heaven. The only problem is that, the freedom of thought gave Man the ability to reject God, because for the first time he could DISTINGUISH himself from God, he could tell where God ended and he began. Thus the freedom of thought is a kind of slavery--another razor's edge.

Back to Campbell:]

"As we examine this story for metaphor, it becomes clear that God somehow made known to early man that with consciousness and self-awareness came consequences:
And the Lord God commanded man saying,

'Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat but of the tree of knowledge of good end evil you shall not eat for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die.    (Genesis 2:16-18)

It needs to be pointed out here, that while it is so often taught that the serpent is a representation of the devil, the Bible never says that. In many cultures, the snake is seen as a life force, and perhaps this meaning could be applied, and much more constructively, to the Creation Stories."

[Sidebar: Notice this "life force" idea, that is so much a part of pagan religions; life force, and active energy--sound familiar? It is this expression "life force" that was so abhorrent to C.S. Lewis; to him it meant the depersonalization of God into an anonymous, faceless, natural power, the idea of which totally omits a consideration of the central concern of Christianity-Jesus. We will get back to this.

Back to Campbell:]

"It becomes God's plan that mankind evolve to have intellect and free will. Thus, the temptation of consciousness (knowledge of good and evil) becomes the force of human life itself."

Life force, again. Ah, me.

One of the pivotal concepts in regard to Original Sin, suggested by many New Age sources, is the idea of Jesus as the first and second Adam. This is an idea which is bound to create much disagreement, the truth of which we can never really know. But Edgar Cayce makes maintains that, at a certain stage of human evolution, the world was surrounded by spirits who gradually started, recreationally, taking on human form. According to Cayce, Adam was merely the first one of these spirits to lose sight of his spiritual origin, getting completely enthralled and ensnared by the illusions of carnal reality. Thus, Original Sin, which is simply a function of higher consciousness losing itself in the material plane, was born.

Now, concerning Original Sin, the Garden of Eden, and Adam, all the arguments made by enlightened, modern, liberal Christians (as opposed to dull-witted, old-fashioned, fundamentalist Christians) encourage us to take all the Old Testament stories in a metaphoric sense. Although you have heard me speak out, many times, against a too-literal interpretation of biblical passages, you may be surprised to hear me speak out, in this case, of the danger in taking this story in a too-metaphoric sense. Stating that Original Sin is a general state of mind, that there was no actual Garden, no actual Adam, no actual serpent, suggests that there wasn't really any Original Sin. Where, in this picture, does that leave Jesus? Turning Adam (whoever he was) into a symbolic mythological character, reduces to insignificance the historical Jesus--second Adam or not.

There is one sin that I consider to be particularly abhorrent, and that is the sin of guilt. I was raised in a household where guilt was a very powerful, and omnipresent family stock-in-trade; it was the currency by which my parents negotiated their relationships with their children and each other. Thus, guilt became a primary source of emotional pain; pain inflicted by a moral attitude which, though possibly righteous in its origin and intention, was expressed in terms that were completely negative and and hurtful. Guilt was the tool that my mother used to make me feel bad about anything I did that was outside the passive realm of strict obedience. I will never forget the famous words of my grandmother who, in attempting to make my little brother feel bad about forgetting to take out the garbage cried passionately, “Honey, Jesus WANTS you to take out the garbage.” I'll admit that, in retrospect, that was extremely funny, but, in a way, it's very sad, because that sort of manipulation was was ever-present in my household and made, Jesus into a punishment-mongering ogre instead of a loving Shepherd.

A word on proselytizing suggests itself, because, on the surface, proselytizing appears to be aggressive righteous action. All of us have had the experience of opening the door to a group of two or three Jehovah's Witnesses, with their halos tightly pressed down on their foreheads, who have come to teach us the true way. Now, as we have discussed many times, it is our Christian duty to speak the truth, but it is not our duty to inflict our truth on other people when they are not ready for it. We discussed how such uninvited behavior would just tend to turn people away from the truth, instead of inviting them into it. Jehovah's Witnesses stand on your doorstep, inflicting their truth on you, thereby making you dislike them all the more, and reject whatever it is they have to say all the more. The parables of Jesus are an example of how the truth is veiled, and given to the people in small bits, in such a way that it can be digested a little bit at a time, and not thrown in their faces.
Thus, unwelcome spiritual aggression is not really spiritual action because it is not a true expression of Divine personality, but a mask, or façade. Jehovah's Witnesses are very comfortable standing there performing an act that is insulated by the common beliefs of their parochial community, wearing their little Jehovah's Witnesses uniforms. (Frank Zappa says, “Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself.”) Passive aggressive action is not action at all, because it hides the self behind a shield that promotes anonymity instead of identity; it is a form of theater in which they are substituting some sort of made-up character for themselves; they are like the children in the marketplace saying, “We have piped and you have not danced, we have wept and you have not mourned.” These people are pretend Christians, and in their pretend proselytizing, they are pretending to speak the truth. There is nothing heroic about throwing truisms out over a protective wall created by your friends.

However, there are moments in our lives when speaking the truth really matters, moments when speaking the truth is really an act of righteous aggression, moments that take courage, and put you on the line. Responding to a moral imperative in telling a friend in a bar, “I think maybe you drink too much.” or, telling your son, “That friend of yours is not good for you.” or confessing to an associate, “I can’t be a party to this situation.” It is when speaking the truth exposes you to censure and rejection that it is a true act of charity and a great righteous aggression.

We have encountered several times, in the course of these readings, the phrase, “Sin against the self.” I find that sins against the self are the worst; this may require some explanation. We have said that to be truly ourselves we must surrender our will to the will of the Father. On the surface, many things, like:

drinking, or
gluttony, or
recreational drug use, or
casual sex, or
cheating on your income tax,

to be very obviously sinful; but we must remember that our true self is the truth of the self that merges with the Self of the Father; and it easy enough to imagine scenarios in which any of the above-mentioned sins might work to strengthen our relationship with the Father, not weaken it.
We have a commandment from God not to kill, and yet there are many a situations in which killing is the only moral imperative open to us. If there's an activity which is self-enhancing, which truly does not compromise our relationship with the Father, strengthens our relationship to the Father by bringing the joy of carnality into the spiritual domain, this can be thought of as a cheerful or joyful sin.

And thus, we arrive at the crux of the sermon here today: the idea of a cheerful sin is the idea of a sin that may be considered by others, (and in fact might BE for others) a sin, a step away from the Father, but which, to us, is really a step toward the Father. Thus, we have paradoxical sayings like Blake’s,

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."



"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

To most of us, the road of excess leads to the tenement of ruin, and the tortoises of patience are wiser than the hares of flippancy. But not necessarily. These expressions of Blake's glorify the fact that human carnality is a gift and a blessing, and that only by embracing our physical being and penetrating to the spiritual source of that physical being, and relishing, and glorifying, and exalting the physical, will we get to the true meaning of our lives, seemingly so enslaved on the material plane. The energy in Blake can easily be mistaken for the blind self-indulgence of Satan, but if the energy that so enlivens the tigers of wrath are an outpouring, and overflowing of spirit, who dares complain?

The Buddhist may retreat into the world of abstraction and find the Christ Consciousness in the upper regions, but if he is not using the mediation of Jesus to connect with the physical world, he is doing nothing to serve the greater good. We've been hearing, recently, about the monasteries, and how there are two types of Monks:

1.)    that type of Monk who retreats inward and seeks personal glorification by joining Himself to the abstract All, and
2.)    that type of Monk who reaches out into the world to do good works.

I myself have always preferred the extroverted expressions of spirituality, and therefore find Christianity a much more attractive and truthful belief system. In the Buddhist system, which is certainly, in its description, more highflown is really a kind of narcissistic religion-- is a retreat from the gifts which God have given us on this earth. I prefer to fly, unbridled by the chains of mundane conception, on wings of angel music, rolling and flowing through clouds of eternal bliss.

Let us pray: Jesus, thank you for allowing us to access the mind of God in a flower, in a breeze, in a touch, in a song. Teach us to tell the difference between the world that drags us down to Hell, and the world that buoys us up to Heaven. Let us focus our imaginations on the direction we ought to take, and let us remember that that direction always draws an image of your face looming in the distance. Amen.

3. All Judgment to the Son: Hell

The subject of Hell has been of interest to me ever since I was a child; as I have had ample occasion to mention before, the reminder of the ultimate unthinkable threat of eternal hellfire was constantly flaunted before my impressionable, sensitive eyes, every single day of my young life. Therefore Hell was one of the first Christian concepts I easily, cheerfully, dispensed with during my long days of atheism and agnosticism.

One of my big problems, with Hell, always used to be that it seemed so unfair; not only were living people, who had never heard of Jesus, automatically condemned to Hell, but generation upon generation of men who walked the earth BEFORE Jesus came, were also condemned to Hell. A few days ago, I read an online article  that very clearly stated that Martin Luther was in Hell, because he had been ex-communicated by the Pope. My God! All these people are condemned to Hell who never heard of Jesus, who never had any opportunity of accepting or rejecting Him--or maybe they are condemned just because a guy in a pointy hat says so. A world in which this kind of injustice can prevail is not the creation of a loving God! Everybody except the chosen measly few are created to suffer in eternal hellfire! Hell this, Hell that, so easily they speak the word! From this it seemed that, in the thousands of years before Christ, Earth was just a breeding ground for Hell. It just didn't seem reasonable to me.

Since then, as faith has grown in me, so has my ability to include such unpleasant realities as Hell into my self-constructed cosmography. Reality is not pretty. But, again, we run upon the horns of the literal vs. symbolic dialectic: the question of whether Hell is a really live place, or whether it is merely a state of mind? Spiritually speaking, I figure it can't make that much difference, either way; but I make no pretense of having perfect understanding of this matter. However, I will say this: in an eternity of eternities, eternal damnation is no longer an impossible thing for me to imagine.

I have often encountered New Age accounts of where souls actually come from, and where they go, etc., and I have wondered about the various possibilities they suggest. If we accept the Rudolf Steiner view that humankind is always in a state of evolution toward some ever more perfect state, it is not hard to imagine the opposite: the scenario of a wasted soul, a soul which could never make more of itself, a soul which digressed rather than progressed--I say, it is not hard to imagine such a soul being recycled into some lower-vibratory stuff of the universe and losing its personal identity: this, to me, would be death. It is also not hard for me to imagine a place of ultimate torment; and since all eternity is included in a moment, it is therefore not hard to imagine a place of eternal torment. Nevertheless, the jury is still out on this one, as you will see from the following opinions on the subject of Hell.

The Rudolf Steiner explanation of the situation, in terms of the evolution of Mankind, has much less to do with the afterlife than it has to do with the presence of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The reality of Heaven on Earth is what Jesus, as Mediator, made available to Mankind for the first time; that's the importance of Jesus' coming: it wasn't to bring Heaven as a substitute for Hell, it was supposed to eliminate Hell; it was simply supposed to make us understand that eternity is available here and now in whatever form we ask it to take, material or otherwise; that the fruits of Heaven and the fruits of Hell are available on any dimension of creation at any time.

First, I must mention how I came upon this subject: it has to do with my survey of John, which was postponed while subjects of a more seasonal character were discussed; coming back to John, I give the following quotation:


John 5:22-27 (ESV Bible)

"22 The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,
23 that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
25 “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.
27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man."

I was attracted to the idea of the Son as Judge. I don't think I ever imagined Jesus presiding over the Last Judgment, even though I have heard the words of the Credo many many times--when I read this, I realized that I have always thought of the Father as Judge, and the Son as, maybe, the executor. Putting Jesus in the throne of Judgment suddenly sheds new light on Jesus' position in the Spiritual hierarchy, and lends enhanced significance to my personal relationship with Him. I also breathe a sigh of relief, because I figure I can get away with stuff with Jesus that I can't get away with from God. On the other hand, it says, that the Son must be a representation of the Father. . . Oh, well.

It makes sense, though, for who better than a former Man, to judge other Men fairly? The coming of the Mediator brought the coming of the necessity for judgment; the fact that Jesus could weep with us, shows that He will always weigh the rewards and punishments in favor of pity, and mercy, and forgiveness. Indeed, I don't think that Jesus must ultimately judge anything or anybody--that we make the decision to enter Hell or Heaven on our own.

This is the thesis sentence of the sermon, which we will return to in time.

"I don't think that Jesus must ultimately judge anything or anybody--that we make the decision to enter Hell or Heaven on our own."

Indeed, our good friend C. S. Lewis always makes a point, in those one-on-one interviews with Aslan that all the Narnia books have--the scene where all pretense is stripped away, and Aslan reads the soul of the child before Him, and the child confesses all truly. In the presence of Aslan, no one can lie, even to oneself. Thus, the absolute honesty, that the presence of the Christ compels, makes each Man to confess each his own condemnation, each his own salvation. This is how Jesus stands in judgment; he makes Men see the truth of themselves, and reveals to them the consequences of choices they have already made.

However, before we can justify a conclusion, there is much amplifying material to sort through. We will begin to explore this subject with a piece from Paramount Church.com : What is the Gospel? This piece makes a case for the justification of such a place as Hell:

"God is terribly angry with the sin man is born with, as well as the sins man personally commits, and thus will punish sinful man both now and in eternity. Though God is merciful, He is also just. The Lord God is a holy God. He is a consuming fire, a jealous God. Thus, His justice demands that sin, committed against His supreme majesty be punished with the supreme penalty, namely eternal punishment of body and soul in hell.

Matt. 10:28

28 And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Matt 25:40-46

40 And the King will answer them, Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

The eternal Son of God had to become man because sinful man cannot pay for others the debt they owe to God. Christ, the Mediator, had to be born of a virgin  and become a man because God’s justice demands that human nature, which has sinned, must pay for its sin.

Yet, it was necessary that our Mediator also be God so that by His own power, He might bear the weight of God’s anger in His humanity and earn for us and restore us to righteousness and life."

Thus, from this author's point of view, Hell is man's just punishment for his so-called "supreme" sin, even if it is, after all, Adam's sin.

The following piece, Beyond description, by Herman Bavinck
is all about: by what right Jesus claims the position to the right hand of God. The main point is that: the sacrifice is commensurate with the reward. The piece goes on to elaborate on what it is that Jesus' sacrifice has won Him, and on what it is we gain from the mediation of the Son.

“What Christ acquired by this sacrifice is beyond description. For Himself He acquired by it His entire exaltation, His resurrection, His ascension to heaven, His seating at the right hand of God, His elevation as head of the church, the name that is above every name, the glory of the mediator, power over all things in heaven and on earth, the final judgment.
In addition He acquired for His own, for humanity, for the world, an interminable series of blessings. In His person He is Himself the sum of all those blessings: the light of the world, the true bread, the true vine, the way, the truth, the resurrection, and the life, our wisdom, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption, our peace, the firstborn and the firstfruits who is followed by many others, the second and last Adam, the head of the church, the cornerstone of the temple of God; and for that reason there is no participation in His benefits except by communion with His person."

[Sidebar: Thank you, Jesus, for that lofty yet utterly simple idea:
". . . there is no participation in His benefits except by communion with His person."
How this sums it all up for me! Participation in the great Ocean of Jesus, focussed in the Christ Consciousness, is the ultimate authority of belief, and the ultimate end of our time on Earth. The Person of Jesus; what a lovely expression!

Back to Bavinck:]

"Yet from Him flow all the benefits, the whole of salvation, and more specifically the forgiveness of sins; the removal of our sins; the cleansing or deliverance of a bad conscience; justification; righteousness; sonship; confident access to God; God’s laying aside His wrath in virtue of Christ’s sacrifice, that is, the sacrifice of atonement; the disposition in God that replaced it, the new reconciled—no longer hostile but favorable—disposition of peace toward the world; the disposition of people vis-à-vis God; further, the gift of the Holy Spirit; the second birth and the power to become children of God; sanctification; participation in Christ’s death; the dying to sin; the being crucified to the world; the cleansing and the washing away of sins by being sprinkled with the blood of Christ; walking in the Spirit and in the newness of life; participation in the resurrection and ascension of Christ; the imitation of Christ; increased freedom from the curse of the law; the fulfillment of the old and the inauguration of a new covenant; redemption from the power of Satan; victory over the world; deliverance from death and from the fear of death; escape from judgment; and, finally, the resurrection of the last day; ascension; glorification; the heavenly inheritance; eternal life already beginning here with the inception of faith  and one day fully manifesting itself in glory; the new heaven and new earth; and the restoration of all things.”

Notice, in the previous quotation, the reference to Jesus as the first and second Adam. I was surprised to stumble across that expression in mainline Christian material, but you must know that it's a common enough concept in New Age Spiritual Theory: many New Age authors, including Edgar Cayce and Elizabeth Claire Prophet, among many others, have insisted that Jesus was the reincarnation of Adam--that because Adam had committed the first sin, it was up to Him to make restitution for it, by undoing the damage caused by His original sin. Hence, the first and second Adam. The details of these beliefs are, as usual, of little interest to me, (and I have no intention of committing to one such belief or another, especially since there are so many variants); but it is definitely tantalizing to imagine that Jesus' authority over us comes from his commission of the original sin. That Jesus should finally come forward and redeem that sin is a very interesting thought. Some might think this interpretation diminishes the force of Jesus' proclaimed Divinity, but I don't think so--its just one more way the story works.

The Martin Luther feature for today consists only of two short excerpts:

The following is from: Christians at MOMENT BY MOMENT REST:

Martin Luther stated; "Thou (God the Father) hast put all things in subjection under His feet. For in that He put all in subjection under Him, He left nothing that is not put under Him (to chance, as He will rid Himself of this evil existence in due time!). But now we seen not (viewing the destructive pattern that this world is following currently) yet all things put under Him."

Afterlife and Salvation by: Ted Vial

"Martin Luther, like most traditional Christians, believed that this life was simply a pilgrimage, a journey toward our final destination. That destination was an eternity spent either in heaven or in hell. There was nothing one could do to earn a spot in heaven-God freely forgave the sins of some, and they could enter heaven. Heaven is a state of blessedness where you exist in the presence of God, something humans have not been able to do since the fall in the Garden of Eden. Hell was a place of torment, as just punishment for sin.
. . .
The conservative wing of the Lutheran Church maintains its belief in an afterlife spent in a literal place, either heaven or hell. More liberal Lutherans tend to downplay hell, often because the image of God torturing people for eternity, even if they are sinners, is not easy to square with their idea of a loving God. Nor is it easy to square the idea of a just God with one who casts people into hell just because, as the result of fortune for which they are not responsible, they have not lived in a place where the Gospel of Jesus was preached.
Far more Americans say that they believe in heaven in recent surveys, than say they believe in hell.There are also Lutherans since the mid-20th century (this is true of all Protestant denominations) who hold that neither heaven nor hell are literal places. If the core of salvation as described above is to live in the presence of God, heaven is then a metaphor for blessedness or a divine relationship in this life. Hell is a metaphor for living in the absence of God in this life."

If my mother had heard the last few sentences of the piece I just read, she would have rejected totally anything the guy was trying to say, because, to her, there is no gray area: the Bible says Heaven and Hell are real places, so all this symbolic baloney carries no weight. To her the physical reality is more important than the spiritual reality; she is so unspiritual, she can only imagine physical realities (albeit coaxed into being, somehow, by magic). And there are many, many, many people who, like my mother, find it comforting to think of a literal Heaven or a literal Hell. To me, it's a trivial point, because the Heaven experience is all about enjoying blessedness, and the point of Hell is to suffer. If there is one thing I know, Man is capable of suffering on any dimension.

On the subject of suicide, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that, if people are suffering in life, they must certainly continue to suffer in death; a soul in pain is a soul in pain, regardless of the dimension it is focussed in, physical or otherwise. I have to agree with the philosophy I read many years ago, which is states that suicide never solves anything or delivers anybody from anything, because we take our problems with us wherever we go. If we're in such torment that we can't stand to live, we must be in Hell already--so, if we kill ourselves, we just take our Hell with us, maybe in a more intense form. This has never seemed to be a very good economic solution.

As you will have noted, I have presented readings from many theologians, philosophers, and poets, including writings from many ancient masters, as well such New Age philosophers as Steiner, Campbell, and Lewis. There is a New Age writer whom we have not mentioned often enough, and that is William Blake. Blake was really the great-grandaddy of the Spiritualist movement, about seventy-five years ahead of everybody else. He was an intensely original thinker, with a magnificently open heart, and a cosmically resonant vision.

The following is from: William Blake's Proverbs of Hell:

"Unlike that of Milton or Dante, Blake's conception of Hell begins not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven."

[Sidebar: Remember Steiner's point that the material world is tainted all by Luciferian vibrations. Hell is the tang of those one-too-many beers. Very subtle, very comfortable. It is that neon-lit glow of sin that tempts us into Hell; that wild and crazy freedom of sin, of carnality, of excess. Shaw's Don Juan in Hell paints Hell as one great aristocratic ball. What present of the Magi would be the perfect blend of Earth and Heaven?]

"Blake's purpose is to create what he called a "memorable fancy" in order to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion, which he describes thus:

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

In the most famous part of the book, Blake reveals the Proverbs of Hell. These display a very different kind of wisdom from the Biblical Book of Proverbs. The diabolical proverbs are provocative and paradoxical. Their purpose is to energise thought. Several of Blake's proverbs have become famous:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction"

Blake explains that,

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

We see a similar attitude toward the temptations of Hell expressed in Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell :

"... hellish fire is self-love and love of the world, it is every craving that belongs to those loves, the craving being an extension of love because a person constantly craves what he loves.  It is also a pleasure, since when a person gets what he loves or craves, he perceives it as pleasant.  This is the only source of heartfelt joy for man.  So hellish fire is a craving and a pleasure that well up from these two loves as their sources... "

The following is from Job:

"Job again took up his parable, and said:

"Oh that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; when his lamp shone on my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, as I was in the ripeness of my days, when the friendship of God was in my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me, and my children were around me,
when my steps were washed with butter, and the rock poured out streams of oil for me, when I went forth to the city gate, when I prepared my seat in the street.

The young men saw me and hid themselves.  The aged rose up and stood. The princes refrained from talking, and laid their hand on their mouth. The voice of the nobles was hushed, and their tongue stuck to the roof of their mouth.

For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it commended me:

Because I delivered the poor who cried, and the fatherless also, who had none to help him, the blessing of him who was ready to perish came on me, and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.

I put on righteousness, and it clothed me.  My justice was as a robe and a diadem.

I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy.  The cause of him who I didn't know, I searched out. I broke the jaws of the unrighteous, and plucked the prey out of his teeth.

Then I said, 'I shall die in my own house, I shall number my days as the sand. My root is spread out to the waters.  The dew lies all night on my branch. My glory is fresh in me.  My bow is renewed in my hand.'"

I find this last quotation from Job, just in terms of its literary quality, to be astonishingly beautiful poetry; but I was drawn to this passage for the single moment, in the long progression, that refers to justice. The reference to justice, in this quotation, bears directly on Jesus' authority to judge and to mete out punishment and reward. Thus, not only is it beautiful poem, a poem that affirms the possibilities for good that come with life, it is a prophetic poem, as well, because, through the mouth of Job, it speaks about putting on the authority of the sun in order to administer one's affairs--that the blessings of God will bring happiness into his life; a long life such that, when he grows older and looks back on this, he will see it as a good thing. The justice of the Son justifies (duh) the world and all that is in the world.


The following is from Joseph Campbell on Jesus and Metaphor:

CAMPBELL: "The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.

For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy, Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility, But if you read "Jesus ascended to heaven" in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward – not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source."

"This is the problem that can be metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. The Christ in you doesn't die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects. Or you can identify that with Shiva. I am Shiva--this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other."

One of the problems with the word "symbol" is that it sort of has the the undertone connotation that it's not actually real-- that when something "symbolizes" something, it's somehow talking about an abstraction-- something made up, pretend. But one of the things I have talked about, repeatedly, in these sermons, is that a symbol is a real thing. A symbol which comes to animate a physical object, has its origin in the mental world of abstraction, as an incidence of thought; it's an idea, born as a thought in the mind of God, which becomes realized in the physical plane. So, a symbol is not a nonphysical, nonreal entity, it is actually the physical invasion of matter by thought energy that previously existed in the mind of God.

Therefore, to think of Hell symbolically, for me, does not in any way diminish the terror of Hell. Hell is suffering. Hell is eternal regret, no matter what dimension it takes place in. The prospect of the physical torments, promised by Hell, actually seem much less forbidding than the spiritual hell, because we understand that spirit just keeps going on and on, while we are conditioned to think that physical matter must eventually be burned up. For this reason, it is easier for me to imagine an eternity of spiritual Hell, than it is to imagine an eternity of physical hell. Also, the idea of Jesus going up to heaven is simply a matter of imagining Him disappearing from the physical dimension into a nonphysical dimension. This is not rocket science.

The following is from Waldorf Watch: ‪hell‬:

"According to Rudolf Steiner, hell is not a location, in any normal sense, but a spiritual state: the lowest such state imaginable. Going to hell means losing one’s soul, falling out of evolution, becoming trapped in a totally material realm, becoming totally corrupted.

In general, Steiner delivered upbeat messages in his books and lectures, often indicating that everyone and everything may be redeemed. But not always. In his teachings, there is no absolute guarantee of winning through to divinity. The divine plans of the good gods can be derailed; and even if everything works out, evil souls will have hell to pay before being redeemed.

Here is a sampling of Steiner’s descriptions of hell in its various guises."

HELL

"We have in modern consciousness the feeling of a contrast between heaven and hell; others call it spirit and matter. Fundamentally there are differences only in degree between the heaven and hell of the peasant [in former times] and the matter and spirit of the philosophers of our day."


"Old-fashioned ways of speaking about “hell” are obsolete. But the descent into hell is a real danger. Hell is, in a sense, the world we occupy, the material plane, if we do not overcome its dark temptations."

Speaking of benevolent spiritual beings who helped mankind to evolve, Steiner said:

"These former divine companions confronted, as an inimical world, what even in earlier times was called 'hell.' But the efficacy of these spiritual beings stopped short at the gates of hell. These spiritual beings worked upon humankind. The forces of humankind extend even into hell. . . The divine spiritual beings felt this as a world opposed to them. They saw it rise up out of the Earth and felt it to be an exceedingly problematic world ... In His way the Christ gained the victory over death.  And therewith entered, I might say, the opposite pole to the Descent into Hell, the ascent into the spiritual world ...  [Christ] descended to that to which humankind is exposed ... Thus in the Easter thought we see united in a certain way the Descent into the region of Hell, and through this descent the winning of the heavenly region for the further evolution of humankind."

Is Jesus the judge being fair? Does every tit add up to tat? Thank God, no! Our sins are too far beyond our own power to forgive ourselves--it is Jesus that we must turn to, for forgiveness.

Let me remind you of thesis sentence of the sermon read at the beginning of the sermon:

"I don't think that Jesus must ultimately judge anything or anybody--that we make the decision to enter Hell or Heaven on our own."

"Indeed, our good friend C. S. Lewis always makes a point, in those one-on-one interviews with Aslan that all the Narnia books have at some point--you know, the scene where all pretense is stripped away, and Aslan reads the soul of the child before Him, and the child confesses all truly. In the presence of Aslan, no one can lie, even to oneself. Thus, the absolute honesty, that the presence of the Christ compels, makes each Man to confess each his own condemnation, each his own salvation. This is how Jesus stands in judgment; he makes Men see the truth of themselves, and reveals to them the consequences of choices they have already made."

Thus, C. S. Lewis, and Steiner as well, strongly affirm that hell is a choice. Jesus, as mediator sitting in judgment, merely affirms or rejects spiritual choices already made by the sinner. The miracle is that so much love gives us so many chances. Daily I fall down in my aspired spirituality, and daily I am reminded that without the mercy of an unjust savior, I would be burning in Hell right now.

Let us pray: Jesus thank you for the truth. Thank you for the sense that all things add up to a great good, and thank you for taking responsibility for us. Thank you for giving the truth of ourselves to ourselves, and thank you for escorting me through the gates of your Heavenly Kingdom. Amen.

2. We Three Kings

2 We Three Kings --The Search for Jesus

From Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary

"Those who live at the greatest distance from the means of grace often use most diligence, and learn to know the most of Christ and his salvation. But no curious arts, or mere human learning, can direct men unto him. We must learn of Christ by attending to the word of God, as a light that shineth in a dark place, and by seeking the teaching of the Holy Spirit. What joy these wise men felt upon this sight of the star, none know so well as those who, after a long and melancholy night of temptation and desertion, under the power of a spirit of bondage, at length receive the Spirit of adoption, witnessing with their spirits that they are the children of God."

This sermon will consist of excerpts from several sources, but the bottom line to which we will be wending is the symbology of the Wise Men who use the art of nature to search for Jesus.

You would think that, chronologically, a sermon on the Three Wise Men would come AFTER Christmas, because that is when the Wise Men are traditionally thought to have come to the manger, January 6th, to be precise. I have chosen this strategy because it is with the same fervor of seek-to-find, that preoccupied the three kings, that I am preparing myself to solemnize the anniversary of the coming of the Messiah into the world; and it is with the same wonder that illuminated the eyes of the Magi on that first day of Epiphany, that I hope to contemplate the savior lying in a manger on Christmas Day in the morning.

The symbology of the Magi divides neatly into two distinct stages of discovery; seeking is the first stage, while the finding is merely the culmination of a much longer process. When you think about it, the thinking about the symbol, the preparation for the spiritual symbol, takes a lot more time,, and is lot more involved than the actual revelation of the spiritual reality. The fact is that, although the Three Kings are usually associated with Epiphany, the FINDING of Jesus, the moment of RECOGNITION in which the Christ Presence is made manifest to Man, this is not the whole story--there is the whole issue of the SEARCH for Jesus that preceded the FINDING. Thus, seeking and finding are very much a part of the Christmas season. Looking back and looking forward may be thought of in the same way. Remember our discussion of sehnsucht as the intense joy of unfulfilled desire, and our discussion of HOPE as the realization of a future good brought into the present.

Munachi E. Ezeogu, CSSP says:

“We are all seekers. There is something about this time of year that reveals the hunger in our hearts, this yearning for something.”

The Wise Men must have been filled with longing, a yearning for an undefined reality which, when it finally fell on them in that first moment of epiphany, must have been as overwhelming as it was transforming. How the realization of an expectation must have been completely unexpected! How it must have looked so completely different, from what they thought they were going to see, how new! How they must have struggled, in those first few moments, to get their minds around such a radical departure from the past.


The Rev. Shawn Hughes, Queen’s University, Ontario:

“This is exactly what this feast day is about – change – transformation. Our spiritual lives can never be stagnant, they must always be moving, always be seeking, always striving for that more intimate experience of Christ. ... The Magi are transformed by the revelation at the end of their journey. They live on uncomfortably as men of the new dispensation among people of the old. That is a lifelong spiritual tension with which we must all learn to live. ... The spiritual journey is long. The journey is difficult. But, like the Magi, the reward is so great we leave completely transformed. The reward is not possible without the journey.”

In this preceding paragraph we have heard how the Kings existed in two time frames at once, the old and the new--the older frame of reference was the seeking of they knew-not-what, and the new is the moment of finding they know-not-how-to-say.

Writes scholar David W. Congdon:

"The quest of the Magi has been the topic of poems, stories and artwork for centuries. For C.S. Lewis, the Magi teach us to see the universe through a “baptized” lens: they understood that the world is infused with significance, and they were willing to trust what they saw and experienced. We too are called to see the star, trust our instincts and act. Our lives, T.S. Eliot says in Journey of the Magi, will never be the same:

"'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kiking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."

Before we go any deeper into the symbology of the wise men, let us turn to Wikipedia, to provide some background information, all of which is very entertaining, and very useful in filling out Christmas trivia questionnaires:

Biblical Magi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"The Magi (play /ˈmædʒaɪ/; Greek: μάγοι, magoi), also referred to as the (Three) Wise Men, (Three) Kings, or Kings from the East, were, according to Christianity, a group of distinguished foreigners who visited Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They are regular figures in traditional accounts of the nativity celebrations of Christmas and are an important part of the Christian tradition.

The Gospel of Matthew, the only one of the four Canonical gospels to mention the Magi, states that they came "from the east" to worship the Christ, "born King of the Jews." Although the account does not tell how many they were, the three gifts led to a widespread assumption that they were three as well. In the East, the magi traditionally number twelve. Their identification as kings in later Christian writings is probably linked to Psalms 72:11, "May all kings fall down before him".
Contents

Original account
The New Revised Standard Version of Matthew 2:1–12 describes the visit of the Magi:

    "In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: 'And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.'" Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another path."

They are mentioned twice shortly thereafter, in reference to their avoidance of Herod after seeing Jesus, and what Herod had learned from their earlier meeting.

[Sidebar: I don't think it is a trivial point that seeking the truth is very often an activity that is accompanied by danger. The truth always represents a threat to those who are small- minded, and determined to avoid change. Indeed, the idea of change must necessarily be thought of as the object of the seeking process, even if we don't know what that change will consist of. We know that we are seeking something we lack, and that, when we achieve what we lack, there must be change. Since change is always a threat to the status quo, is always a threat to the left brain's insistence on rational sequentiality and definition, change will always be perceived as a threat to those who insist more on thinking that they are right than on thinking what is true. Thus, for the rigid-minded individual, apart from the familiarity and sanctity of repeated traditions and rituals, Christmas ought to be a terrifying time. For those of us who enjoy change, and who are prepared for change, the meeting of the past in the face of the emerging present is both terrifying and wonderful at the same time. Hoo-yah!

Back to Wikipedia:]

"Description
The Magi are popularly referred to as wise men and kings. The word magi is the plural of Latin magus, borrowed from Greek μάγος magos, as used in the original Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew. Greek magos itself is derived from Old Persian maguŝ from the Avestan magâunô, i.e. the religious caste into which Zoroaster was born. The term refers to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their religion, these priests paid particular attention to the stars, and gained an international reputation for astrology, which was at that time highly regarded as a science. Their religious practices and use of astrology caused derivatives of the term Magi to be applied to the occult in general and led to the English term magic. Translated in the King James Version as wise men, the same translation is applied to the wise men led by Daniel of earlier Hebrew Scriptures (Daniel 2:48). The same word is given as sorcerer and sorcery when describing "Elymas the sorcerer" in Acts 13:6–11, and Simon Magus, considered a heretic by the early Church, in Acts 8:9–13.

Names
The three Magi (Balthasar, Caspar, Melchior)

Traditions identify a variety of different names for the Magi. In the Western Christian church they have been commonly known as:

    Melchior, a Persian scholar
    Caspar, an Indian scholar
    Balthazar, an Arabian scholar.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, the Magi found Jesus by 'following' a star, which thus traditionally became known as the Star of Bethlehem. Various theories have been presented as to what this phenomenon refers to, since stars do not visibly move and therefore cannot be followed. Some believe that they followed a planet, which without a telescope could be mistaken as a star, as it slowly moved across the sky.

On finding him, they gave him three symbolic gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Warned in a dream that Judean king Herod intended to kill the child, they decided to return home by a different route. This prompted Herod to resort to killing all the young children in Bethlehem, an act called the Massacre of the Innocents, in an attempt to eliminate a rival heir to his throne. Jesus and his family had, however, escaped to Egypt beforehand. After these events they passed into obscurity. The story of the nativity in Matthew glorifies Jesus, likens him to Moses, and shows his life as fulfilling prophecy.

The historian of Christianity, Sebastian Brock, has said: 

"It was no doubt among converts from Zoroastrianism that… certain legends were developed around the Magi of the Gospels". 

And Anders Hutgård concluded that the Gospel story of the Magi was influenced by an Iranian legend concerning magi and a star, which was connected with Persian beliefs in the rise of a star predicting the birth of a ruler and with myths describing the manifestation of a divine figure in fire and light.

The Magi are described as "falling down", "kneeling" or "bowing" in the worship of Jesus. This gesture, together with the use of kneeling in Luke's birth narrative, had an important effect on Christian religious practices. They were indicative of great respect, and typically used when venerating a king. Inspired by these verses, kneeling and prostration were adopted in the early Church. While prostration is now rarely practiced in the West, it is still relatively common in the Eastern Churches, especially during Lent. Kneeling has remained an important element of Christian worship to this day."

I find it very interesting that so many of our religious ceremonies come from the accepted reports of the Magi-behavior--the "kneeling" is just one element of the whole royalty obeisance bit. The reference to Jesus as the "King of Kings, and Lord of Lords" definitely puts Jesus, as a descendant of the House of David, into the upper social class of a world in which class consciousness was (and is) a major indicator of the prestige enjoyed by royalty. I really think Jesus has to laugh at this--I believe He must be more democratic in His social attitudes, at the same time being aware that all men are NOT created equal.


Of course, the main Magi-behavior we imitate today is the gift-giving. Thus, with the following Martin Luther excerpt, our discussion of the Wise Men shifts from seeking to giving gifts. 

Sermon for the Epiphany; Matthew 2:1-12:A Sermon by Martin Luther; taken from his Church Postil of 1522.


"3.This Gospel harmonizes with the Epistle and speaks of the temporal coming of the heathen to Christ, by which their spiritual coming to Christ, mentioned in the Epistle, is signified and commenced. It is both a terrifying and consoling Gospel: terrifying to the great and wise, the self-satisfied and the mighty, because they all reject Christ; consoling to the humble and despised, because to them alone Christ is revealed.

4. These wise men are usually called the three Kings. As not much depends on this, we will grant this opinion to the simple minded people. However, it is not known whether there were two, three or more. But they certainly came from the rich country Arabia or Sheba, which is evident from their gifts viz. gold, frankincense and myrrh. All three of these are very precious in that country. It can certainly not be assumed that they had bought these elsewhere, for it is customary in these Eastern countries to do homage and make presents of the choice fruits and wealth of the country. just like Jacob commanded his sons to carry presents of the choice fruits of the land to Joseph in Egypt. Gen. 43, 11. Had these gifts of the wise men not been of their own country, why should they then have brought frankincense, myrrh and gold produced in the land of Judea, instead of silver and precious stones or fruits of some other country?

5. Therefore these gifts were not presented to Christ like artists paint the scenery that one offers gold, another frankincense and the third myrrh, but they presented the gifts in common as one man. And probably there were quite a number present, a few of them being the leaders, just as now a prince or a city sends a few brave men as messengers to the emperor with presents.

6. The Evangelist calls these men wise men which means in German weissager, i. e. (predictors, diviners); not in the same manner as the prophets predicted, but like those whom we call wise men and wise women, who can tell people all kinds of things; who know a great deal about the secret arts and follow adventures. The art of such people is called magic, which is sometimes accomplished by the black arts and the help of the devil, but not in all things as by the witches and sorcerers. For the wise men imitate the true prophets and prophesy like the true prophets, though not by the spirit of God. For this reason they sometimes happen to be correct as their work is not, like that of the witches, altogether the devil's work, but rather human reason aided by the devil.

7. Again, their miraculous deeds are not altogether done by the devil's cunning, like the doings of the witches, but by a combination of natural forces and the power of the devil. Hence a magician always imitates the real natural arts. For there are many hidden forces in nature, and he who knows how to apply them performs miracles in the eyes of those who know no better as, for instance, the alchemists make gold out of copper.

8. Of these secret forces of nature Solomon knew a great deal by the spirit of God, and made good use of this knowledge when he judged between the two women concerning the living and the dead child, I Kings 3, 25, discovering the real mother by appealing to the deepest feelings of nature. Again, Jacob also made use of this art when he used the peeled rods and the flocks brought forth speckled and spotted lambs, Gen. 30,39.

9. This is a fine and a truly natural art by which is derived all that physicians and others know about the properties of herbs, plants, metals, stones etc. The Scriptures also recognize this art when they make comparisons of animals, stones, trees, plants etc. This art was especially practiced and studied among the Persians, Arabians and in other Eastern countries, was an honorable art and made wise people.

10. But later on swine and block-heads meddled with it, as usually happens with all arts and doctrines, and have gone far from the truth, have confounded this noble art with juggling and sorcery, and have tried to follow and master both. But when they could not do this, they relinquished the real art and became jugglers and conjurers, prophesying and do-ing miracles by the help of the devil, though sometimes through the forces of nature. For the devil has retained much of this art and at times uses it through the magicians. Thus the word magic has become disreputable, meaning nothing else now than foretelling and doing miraculous deeds through the evil spirit, though at times it is reliable and helps men because natural forces, which are always reliable, are coupled with it and used by evil spirit.


11. Hence these magi or wise men were not kings, but men learned and experienced in this natural art though without doubt they also practiced conjury. Even to this day men from these eastern countries are possessed of great and various magic powers and, when this real art ceased, being despised they brought forth sorcery and spread it throughout the world but prior to this they relied entirely on the course of the heavenly bodies. Thus presumptuous human reason has always mixed and disgraced that which was good by imitation and indiscretion, attempting to ape everything that it sees and bears. Hence false prophets imitate the true prophets, false work-righteous saints the true saints, and the falsely learned the truly learned. If we look at the world we will find, that the work of human reason is but aping to imitate the good, only perverts it and thus deceives itself and others.

12. These wise men, therefore, were nothing else than what the philosophers were in Greece and the priests in Egypt, and the learned among us in the universities. In short, they were the priests and learned in the rich country of Arabia; just as if learned men are priests from the universities were now sent to a prince with presents. For the universities also claim that they teach natural arts which they call philosophy while in reality they are teaching not only tomfoolery, but also poisonous error and idle dreams.

13. For the natural art, which was formerly called magic but now physiology, is to learn the forces and work of nature; as for example, that a deer with its breath through the nose will draw a snake from the crevice in the rocks, kill and eat it and then on account of the great heat of the poison pants for cooling streams as stated in Ps. 42, 1. Again, that a weasel will induce a snake to come out of its hiding place by wagging its tail before the opening to anger and excite the snake; and then lies in wait so that, when the snake looks up after its enemy the weasel fastens its teeth in the neck of the snake below the venomous fang and thus killing its enemy in its own house.

Such arts the wise men studied, and in them is concealed a great deal of wisdom concerning Christ as well as the conduct of men in life. But this art is not taught in the universities now. Hence even the peasants know more about it than our wise men or natural masters who are not wrongfully called natural fools, because in spite of so much labor and trouble they have only retrograded and are the devil's mockingbirds. If we would therefore truly interpret this Gospel we must say: The masters of nature from the East or the naturalists from Arabia have come.

30. But how these wise men could see in this star a sign that unmistakably signified a new- born king, I do not know. Perhaps they read in their histories and chronicles that aforetime the birth of other kings had been signified in the heavens or through a star. For we find also in the histories of the Romans and the Greeks that the coming or birth of some great princes and extraordinary men had been foretold by miracles and signs in the air and in the heavens. These wise men also knew quite well that these Jews were the chosen people of God, who were and had been above all other people, especially favored of God. Therefore, as this was such a beautiful star, they certainly thought that God had given this people a new king. But the claim of some that these wise men knew the saying of Balaam: "There shall come forth a star out of Jacob," etc. (Num. 24, 17), will avail nothing, as this speaks mainly of the spiritual coming of Christ, who is the star himself. But whoever is not satisfied with this may think as he pleases about it. Perhaps they knew all by divine revelation."

This preceding Martin Luther excerpt is quite involved and has many intertwining ideas. Perhaps the most important overarching point, that Luther is making, is that: as we seek the Christ, and we give him his presents, we must be careful to remember that Jesus does not suffer fools; finding the precise distinction between magic philosophy and true spirituality is a slippery slope, a razor's edge. I find that the whole idea of the word "Magi" leading to "Magic" is an untrivial philological coincidence, and is emblematic of the feeling of magic and wonder associated with our Christmas traditions and ceremonies. But cultivating wonder does not mean accepting false prophets for mere dramatic effect; neither does the fact that there are false prophets out there mean that every strange and new thing is also false. Every natural event must be evaluated on its own merits, with an open heart and mind. Thus as we seek, and find, and then give, we must make sure that we are seeking the right thing, finding the right thing, and giving of ourselves, our truest selves and not counterfeits. With Jesus as our arbiter and interpreter we cannot go wrong.

The following Rudolf Steiner excerpt throws some significant light on the quality of the symbology of the gifts of the Magi:

Rudolph Steiner: The Festivals and Their Meaning: I Christmas--On The Three Magi: Schmidt Number: S-0994 VI (Extract from a lecture) Berlin, 30th December, 1904 GA B60

"You will remember that I have spoken of the meaning of the Christmas Festival in its connection with the evolution of races, or, better said, the epochs of civilisation, and indeed the significance of the Festival lies in this very connection both in respect of the past and of the future. 

I want to speak to-day about a Festival to which in modern times less importance is attached than to the Christmas Festival itself, namely, the Festival of the Three Kings, of the Magi who came from the East to greet the newly born Jesus. This Festival of the Epiphany (celebrated on the 6th of January) will assume greater and greater significance when its symbolism is understood. 

It will be obvious to you that very profound symbolism is contained in the Festival of the Three Magi from the East. Until the 15th century, this symbolism was kept very secret and no definite indications were available. But since that century some light has been thrown on the Festival of the Magi by exoteric presentations. One of the Three Kings — Caspar — is portrayed as a Moor, an inhabitant of Africa; one as a white man, a European — Melchior; and one — Balthasar — as an Asiatic; the colour of his skin is that of an inhabitant of India. They bring Myrrh, Gold and Frankincense as offerings to the Child Jesus in Bethlehem. 

These three offerings are full of meaning and in keeping with the whole symbolism of the Festival celebrated on the 6th of January. Exoterically, the date itself throws some light; esoterically, the Festival is pregnant with meaning. The 6th of January is the same date as that on which, in ancient Egypt, the Festival of Osiris was celebrated, the Festival of the re-finding of Osiris. As you know, Osiris was overcome by his enemy Typhon: Isis seeks and eventually finds him. This re-finding of Osiris, the Son of God, is represented in the Festival of the 6th of January. The Festival of the Three Kings is the same Festival, but in its Christian form. This Festival was also celebrated among the Assyrians, the Armenians and the Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a Festival connected with a kind of universal baptism — a rebirth from out of the water.

Of this epoch the Bible says: ‘The Spirit of God brooded over the waters.’ The principle of Love was not within the beings, but outside, manifesting as earthly Kama (that is to say, earthly passion or desire). Kama is egotistic love. The first bringer of Love free of all egoism is Christ Who appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
Who are the Magi? They represent the Initiates of the three preceding races or epochs of culture, the Initiates of mankind up to the time of the coming of Christ, the Bringer of the Love that is free of egoism — the resurrected Osiris.

By what are the Three Holy Kings guided, and whither are they led? They are guided by a Star to a grotto, a cave in Bethlehem. This is something that can be understood only by one who has knowledge of the so-called lower, or astral mysteries. To be led by a Star means nothing else than to see the soul itself as a Star. But when is the soul seen as a Star? When a man can behold the soul as a radiant aura. But what kind of aura is so radiant that it can be a guide? There is the aura that glimmers with only a feeble light; such an aura cannot guide. There is a higher aura, that of the intelligence, which has, it is true, a flowing, up-surging light, but is not yet able to guide. But the bright aura, aglow with Budhi, is in very truth a Star, is a radiant guide. In Christ, the Star of Budhi lights up — the Star which accompanies the evolution of mankind. The Light that shines before the Magi is the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines before the Magi and over the cave in Bethlehem. 

The Festival of the Three Kings is celebrated every year on the 6th of January, and its significance will steadily increase. Men will understand more and more what a Magi is, and what the great Magi, the Masters, are. And then understanding of Christianity will lead to understanding of spiritual science."

To reiterate the subject line of this sermon:

the bottom line to which we will be wending is the symbology of the Wise Men who use the art of nature to search for Jesus. 

By that we mean that, the search for Jesus may involve the seeker in signs and symbols that appear in the natural world, but which resonate in Eternity. As the search evolves, the seeker is transformed in unexpected ways, and the final Epiphany is a Rite of Passage into a new world. This arrival results in an out-pouring of spiritual gifts which, again, symbolize spiritual realities potent with energy and meaning.

This last quote of today's sermon is taken from the very end of my favorite Christmas movie The Bishop's Wife. It is a Christmas Eve sermon delivered by the Bishop at the end of the movie, and is a profound reflection on the best Christmas presents we can give to each other and to Jesus on his birthday:

"Tonight I want to tell you the story of an empty stocking. Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child's cry. A blazing star hung over a stable and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven't forgotten that night down the centuries; we celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, the sound of bells and with gifts. But especially with gifts. You give me a book; I give you a tie. Aunt Martha has always wanted an orange squeezer, and Uncle Henry could do with a new pipe. We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled -- all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It's his birthday we are celebrating. Don't ever let us forget that. Let us ask ourselves what he would wish for most, and then let each put in his share. Loving kindness, warm hearts and the stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth."

Let us pray: Jesus, as the enactment of your birth approaches, let us open our eyes to the magic of the Magi, and discover with them the incalculable gifts you have given to us in the infinity of Your love. Amen