How Joseph Prepared for the Lord

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; December 14, 2025

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Readings: Matthew 1:18-25 (children’s talk); True Christian Religion §766; Matthew 18:15-17

            Last Sunday we talked about Mary, and how her acceptance of the call to become the mother of the Lord sets an example for us all. When the Lord calls us in unexpected ways, we can strive to answer as she answered: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). This Sunday we’re reflecting on Mary’s husband, Joseph, and what we can learn from him about receiving the Lord.

            Of course none of us will receive the Lord the way that Mary and Joseph did—as a baby to physically care for. He has already been born on earth, and never will be again, because Divine work does not get undone. But it’s not like the Lord made His advent to a certain set of people who lived thousands of years ago and doesn’t come to us today. Right now He is striving to make a spiritual advent to each of us, as individuals. We’re told as much in True Christian Religion; you can find this reading in your handout [read §766].

 When we receive the Lord, He comes to us and is present with us in a new way—something new dawns within us. And that moment of reception is the advent of the Lord. And in many ways it’s what Christmas is all about. It is so important to celebrate what happened two thousand years ago; but for us right now, the thing that makes the biggest difference is our willingness to receive Him not just as “somebody’s God” but as our God, Creator, Redeemer and Savior. When we are so willing, something new from Him is born within us.

            And Mary and Joseph show us this willingness. They show us how to receive Him. They accepted that He would come and turn their lives upside down two thousand years ago; and in the internal sense of the Word, they represent the attitudes and qualities that are able to receive the Lord—the Lord who even now is with you, urging and pressing to be received.

            More than anything else, the quality that receives the Lord is a humble willingness to let Him change our lives; that’s the quality that Mary demonstrates so wonderfully. In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told what she symbolizes in the internal sense of the Word: she symbolizes “the church as to the affection of truth” (God the Savior §37). In other words she stands for a tender affection, an innocent affection for what is right and beautiful. But, as I said, we’re focusing on Joseph today, not on Mary.

            The Heavenly Doctrine doesn’t spell out what Joseph symbolizes. But there’s a lot that we can work out just by looking at the story: he is Mary’s husband, her other half. She symbolizes an affection, which has to do with the will, or the heart; so he must symbolize something having to do with the understanding, or the head. The understanding is the partner to the will. If you look at the story, it’s pretty conspicuous that Mary’s job is tender—her job was to carry a baby—and that Joseph’s job is less so: he’s associated with all of the hard decisions that needed to be made to protect Mary and the baby. She stands for innocence within us, and he stands for something thoughtful.

            In many ways, Mary’s job was the more important one: she was the one who actually bore the Lord into the world. But it’s also pretty clear that if Joseph hadn’t been there, and if he hadn’t done the things he did, the Christmas story would not have ended happily. If he had publicly accused Mary of adultery, she might have been put to death. Even if she wasn’t, she would have been outcast and shunned, and then the Lord wouldn’t have been born into the orderly context that He needed to be born into. We’re told in the Heavenly Doctrine that, “It was necessary for Him to be born of a virgin in legitimate marriage with Joseph” (God the Savior §38). Joseph also provided for Mary; it was difficult for women to earn money in that era and culture. Food seems like a trivial thing when we’re thinking about the Lord who saved heaven and earth—but if Mary hadn’t been able to eat, she couldn’t have had a baby. Joseph was also the one who received the warning, from an angel in a dream, that Herod would try to destroy the Lord (Matthew 2:13), and he was the one who took Mary and the baby to safety in Egypt (v. 14).

            The point is that Joseph symbolizes something necessary: if we’re to receive the Lord, if He is to make His advent to us, then there needs to be something in us that plays Joseph’s part. And again, Mary represents something having to do with the will—and we need to be willing to receive the Lord—while Joseph represents something having to do with the understanding. Our understanding needs to be prepared, if we’re to receive the Lord.

            So what we’re going to do now is look more closely at Joseph’s behavior, as it’s described in the reading from Matthew, and reflect on what we can learn from him about how we should prepare ourselves to receive the Lord. There are two specific things that Joseph does that we’re going to focus on: the first is that he acts thoughtfully and carefully, and with integrity. The second is that he is willing to get himself out of the way.

            His commitment to acting thoughtfully is testified to in these verses:

After … Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to put her away secretly. But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream… (Matt. 1:18-20)

The text passes over these events pretty quickly, and we should be careful not to invent whole stories where the Word itself only gives us a few lines. But those few lines do say a lot. Mary was found with child. Joseph knew he was not the father. Think about the emotions that he would have experienced. His eyes would have told him that he had been betrayed, and that kind of betrayal cuts deep. And it’s not like he was twitching at shadows—it’s not like he saw Mary talking to some guy and jumped to a conclusion. She was pregnant. The Word doesn’t tell us how that whole conversation went, but it does tell us that Joseph was a just man who took that emotional reaction and subjugated it to a consideration of what was right. He thought before he acted. And that is the job of the understanding. We need to use our ability to search for the truth to keep ourselves—and our feelings—in line, and that effort is necessary, if there is to be a safe space in us for the Lord to be born.

            Again, we don’t know how the conversation went, but presumably Mary told Joseph the truth—told him what the angel Gabriel told her. But Joseph was still “minded to put her away secretly,” which means he wasn’t fully convinced by her story. He had the opportunity to hear the truth, to hear the angel’s words in Mary’s mouth. But he didn’t completely buy what she told him. And maybe that’s reprehensible, but it’s hard to blame him too much. Can you imagine yourself in that situation—hearing your partner tell you that she was pregnant with the Child of God? In any case, we can see that Joseph wasn’t perfect—and neither are we. No one’s understanding comes up with the whole truth all on its own. What’s admirable about Joseph isn’t that he knew exactly what to do, but that he rose above his emotional response and looked for the right thing to do. And when we do that, we give the Lord an opportunity to send His angels to us; and the angels bring the light of heaven and show us things we could not have seen on our own.

            Joseph’s thoughtfulness and his measured response to a perceived injury resonates with other teachings from the Word. For example, here’s what the Lord says to us in Matthew about conflict resolution:

Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that “by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.” And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector. (18:15-17)

What this teaching communicates is that the Lord wants us to escalate slowly. Start with a one-on-one conversation, and only get other people involved in your dispute if that one-on-one conversation doesn’t work. Don’t make your dispute public unless you have no other recourse. This is essentially what Joseph did: he didn’t make Mary a public example, but tried to fix his issues with her privately. Measuring and disciplining our responses to difficult circumstances is the job of the understanding; and when the understanding does that job, there is a safe space in us—a space that holds angry emotions and hellish voices at bay. And the affection that Mary represents needs that safe space, that quiet space—it needs the boundaries that the understanding establishes. Within that protected space, that affection can receive the Lord.

            The other admirable thing that Joseph did is that he got himself out of the way. We read, “Then Joseph, being aroused from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took to him his wife, and did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn Son” (Matt. 1:24, 25). Like Mary, he accepted that his life was going to go very differently than he had expected it to. He got married, but for months he couldn’t consummate the marriage. Clearly he perceived that that would not have been appropriate. In that significant respect, his own marriage was not about himself (at least not at the beginning). And there were probably other ways in which he took a back seat within his own marriage. Once he realized that Mary was carrying the Son of God, he surely experienced a kind of reverence, or deference. She was doing holy work, and his job was to support her in her work.

            A lot of fathers have said that it was hard for them to watch their wives deal with all of the challenges that go with carrying a child—and especially hard for them to be with their wives while they were in labor—because they wanted to do more, they wanted to take on more of the work, but they couldn’t. This is partly because a lot of men struggle with being in the passenger seat (both figuratively and literally), and partly because a lot of husbands genuinely wish they could take their wives’ burdens from them. Think how much more Joseph would have struggled with feeling sidelined when it wasn’t even his child that his wife was carrying! But that was his role: he had to get himself out of the way. The wonderful things that were happening were not about him.

            The point is not that men should take a backseat in their marriages; in marriages there should be no dominion of one over the other of any kind (HH §380). The point is that if the Lord is to make His advent to us, our understanding has to yield. Like Joseph we need to try to do what’s right; we need to think about what’s right, so that we can preserve that ordered space within ourselves in which our innocent affections can safely dwell. And then, at a certain point, we have to give it up. We have to tell the Lord, “I don’t know; I just don’t know. Show me.”

When He makes His advent, He’ll come with light that we have never seen before. He’ll teach us wisdom we have never known. It isn’t about what we know; it’s about what He can show us. As John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I decrease” (John 3:30).

            These are just a few things that we can learn from Joseph, as we prepare ourselves to receive a new spirit from the Lord.

Amen.

Mary's Innocent Wisdom

A Sermon by Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

December 7th, 2025

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Picture this: Mary was about to start the happiest chapter of her life. She had finally found the love of her life, Joseph, and she was going to marry him. Everything that she could possibly hope for was coming together, and all of a sudden something happened that changed everything. An angel of the Lord came to her and told her: “Mary, you are going to have a baby, you are going to have the son of God: you are going to give birth to the Lord.”

In our own lives, we oftentimes go through things that are very similar to what Mary was going through in the story. Life is going great, we have a well-paying job, we have a good community around us, and the place we live in is comfortable. Everything is going okay in general, but then something comes into our mind, something that tells us to make a big change in our lives. We get a SPIRITUAL CALLING to do something completely new, a calling to do more, to give more to others, to find a way to be more useful to our neighbors. Maybe we feel a calling to find a new job that is closer to our true values and what we really want to bring to the world, or we feel the calling to volunteer for a good cause that we really believe in.

All these things are spiritual callings for change that are really good, and they can bring a lot of positive things into our lives, and yet there is always an element of uncertainty when we are faced with this powerful spiritual calling. We may feel the calling in our hearts, but we don’t know HOW this calling is going to come to life, we don’t know how it is actually going to happen. When we are faced with this level of uncertainty, we are in a position that is very similar to what Mary was experiencing in the story.

When Mary was faced with this huge calling, she could have been thinking about all the different ways in which it could have gone wrong: she could have lost her marriage, she could have lost her standing in the community, she could have even lost her life. And yet, she didn’t think about any of these things. She did not respond to the angel by asking “what if everything goes wrong?” Her answer had this childlike wonder to it, this INNOCENCE. Mary asked the angel “how can this be, since I am a virgin?”

While there was some uncertainty on her part about this new calling, her uncertainty wasn’t about WHETHER the Lord was going to make this miracle happen or not, but about HOW the Lord was going to make this miracle happen. There wasn’t a doubt in Mary’s mind that the Lord would bring this miracle to her life, and she was fully willing to be led by the Lord. Mary’s response in the story teaches us about innocence, and about how we can grow to develop a true innocence that comes from wisdom.

The innocence of wisdom is a very important concept in New Church doctrine. When we are children, we are in a first state of innocence that comes from not having knowledge of the world, so we have an innocence that comes from ignorance, and it presents as a childlike willingness to being led by our parents, teachers, and other adults in our lives. However, innocence that comes from wisdom is wanting to be led by the Lord. It is the innocent belief that the Lord is the one who is in charge, that He is the one who is going to carry us to a good result, and it is the willingness to be led by Him to that good result. The innocence that comes from wisdom in our adulthood is having experience of the world and knowledge of life and truth, and making an informed decision to allow ourselves to be guided by the Lord and by his Word. That's what the true innocence of wisdom is.

Mary, being a virgin, was still in the first state of innocence. In the Word, a “virgin” symbolizes an innocent state in us in which we want to be united with the Lord and to be led by Him. However, when Mary responded to the angel saying “how can this be?” she was taking the first steps to transition from the first state of childlike innocence to the adult state of innocence from wisdom, because she was starting to think more deeply about HOW the Lord was going to guide her, rather than passively following commands without giving them a second thought.

We can understand this more fully through this passage in Heaven and Hell, which you can find in the back of your handout, where it says that:

Real innocence is wisdom because to the extent that we are wise we want to be led by the Lord; or what amounts to the same thing, to the extent that we love being led by the Lord, we are wise. (HH 341)

In our own lives when we get this big spiritual calling for change, and we are uncertain about how this is going to happen, it can be a good approach to wonder about it and be curious about how the Lord will guide us through that calling, rather than being negative about the outcome before we’ve even gone down that journey. In the same way that Mary asked how the Lord was going to make this wonderful thing happen in her life, we can ask ourselves or meditate in prayer how He is going to make this calling come to life for us, and trust that He has a good plan for us.

This is the way to develop the real innocence from wisdom: we can do this by having an Affirmative Attitude. This affirmative attitude is the idea that while we may not understand something from the Lord, we are still willing to follow it, keep learning about it, and accept it in our lives, knowing that it is a good thing because it is coming from the Lord. That's what Mary was doing in this story, she had an affirmative attitude when the angel told her that she was going to give birth to the Lord. When she asked how this would happen, she didn't ask it from the perspective of not believing that the Lord was going to make it happen, she asked it from the perspective of wondering HOW the Lord was going to make it happen. There was no doubt in Mary's mind that the Lord was going to give her a baby while being a virgin, she was just wondering how the process was going to look.

It's interesting that the angel told her about her cousin Elizabeth and her husband Zachariah, because Elizabeth and Zachariah show a different end of the spectrum of how we can have an affirmative attitude and an innocent wisdom in allowing ourselves to be led by the Lord. Zachariah was told by the angel of the Lord that his wife Elizabeth, who was an elderly woman, was going to have a child. However, Zachariah responded in the opposite way to Mary. Zachariah did not believe that this was going to happen, he didn’t trust that the Lord would make his wife have a baby, and as a punishment he was not able to speak until his child was born.

This shows the difference between an affirmative attitude and an attitude that is not affirmative, and the difference between an innocent wisdom and a wisdom that does not allow itself to be innocent. We can't say that Zachariah was not a wise man, he wanted to follow the Lord, and he wanted to follow and teach the Law, he was a good, wise man. But he didn't fully trust that what the Lord was saying was actually going to happen. So, the road to receiving the blessing of having a child was a lot more difficult for him than what happened with Mary.

We can see this explained more deeply in this passage from Secrets of Heaven, which you can find in the back of your handout, which explains that:

Good cannot pass into a negative attitude, nor even into one of doubt, until this [attitude] becomes affirmative. (…) For good is flowing in constantly from the Lord, but where no affirmative attitude exists it is not accepted. An affirmative attitude is therefore the first means and so to speak first dwelling-place of the good flowing in from the Lord. (AC 3913)

In our own lives the more we resist a spiritual calling to become better and do more for others, and the more we push back against this spiritual growth, the harder it is for good things to happen in our lives. For example, if we get a calling to start a new job that is closer to our values and is of more use to the neighbor, if we push back against it and really don't want to embrace the calling, at some point we may start feeling unfulfilled at our job, until we make the decision to embrace this calling and go to a job that really does fulfill us and that really gives us a purpose. So even though change and growth may still happen somewhere down the line, and we may finally embrace this new calling from the Lord to change our lives, the road to getting to those blessings will be a whole lot more difficult if we don't have that affirmative attitude and that innocence of wisdom of allowing ourselves to be led by the Lord to that good result.

In the story, after Mary asked the angel how this would come to pass, and the angel told her how the Lord was going to make it happen, Mary responded by humbling herself and saying, “let it be according to your Word, I am the servant of the Lord.” Through this response, Mary was showing the development of the true innocence of wisdom in her mind and heart. Mary opened herself up to this blessing with humility, she allowed herself to be open to the change that the Lord was going to bring to her life and she allowed herself to be led in this path to come to that good result, to have the blessing of bringing life into the world. When we humble ourselves in this way, and we accept the leadership of the Lord, that is the innocence of wisdom in action.

Notice how at the end of the story Mary was neither distressed nor fearful. All that Mary had was PEACE. Peace in knowing that the Lord was taking care of her through this big life change. Peace and innocence go hand in hand, because peace itself is trust that the Lord is leading us to a good result. When we trust in the Lord, navigating change and going through all these different things in our lives becomes a whole lot more peaceful, and a lot less uncertain. The book Secrets of Heaven says that those who are in the innocence of wisdom “know that for those who trust in the Divine all things advance toward a happy state to eternity, and that whatever befalls them in time is still conducive to it” (AC 8478).

When we humble ourselves and consciously choose to be led by the Lord in our new calling, not only do we allow the Lord to bring blessings into our own lives, we allow the Lord to bring blessings and good to the lives of other people around us as well. When Mary opened herself up to that calling from the Lord, she brought the Lord to the world, she brought life. And this was not only joyful for her back then, it was joyful for every single one of us here today, thousands of years after it happened. We can do that too when we allow ourselves to innocently accept the calling: we can bring joy, peace, love, and life not only to ourselves, but to everybody around us. When we have this innocent wisdom and we are affirming, and we decide to follow our new spiritual calling, whatever that may be, wonderful things can happen!

So, if we are thinking about a new spiritual calling to do better, to be closer to the Lord and more useful and kind to others around us, let us allow ourselves to embrace the blessings that the Lord wants to bring into our lives, let us allow ourselves to make the wise choice of letting the Lord guide us, so that we may respond in the same innocent way that Mary did, by saying the words: “Behold, I am the Lord’s servant; may it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Amen.

LESSON: Luke 1:26-38.

Thanksgiving (Getting What We Need)

A Sermon by Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

November 27th, 2025

Sometimes when we really want something, we pray to the Lord and ask Him to give us what we want. We may ask the Lord to help us get our dream job, a relationship with someone we really like, or even a vacation trip to the Caribbean. We ask the Lord to please help us achieve our goals, and when we achieve them we are very grateful, and we say thank you to the Lord for giving us all the wonderful things that we wanted. But sometimes, even if we pray to the Lord for something that we really, really want, we still don't get it. Sometimes we don’t get the job, the person that we wanted to start a relationship with was not interested, and we can’t go on that trip to the Caribbean.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord promised us that we could always reach out to Him asking for what we want, and He said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or what person is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf of bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? So if you, despite being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! (Matthew 7:7-11)

The Lord told us we could ask Him for what we wanted and He would provide for us. So, when we reach out to the Lord, and we pray for the things that we want, and we don't get them, a lot of times we may feel betrayed. Maybe we worry that we have done something wrong to make the Lord angry at us, or maybe we think that He's ignoring our prayers or that we don't deserve any good things and that the Lord is not going to help us because He doesn't like us and He doesn't really care about us, and doesn't want us to be happy, and we get all of these crazy thoughts. When this happens, it can make us feel very sad, because we want to have that connection with the Lord and we want to feel that we are being taken care of, and when we pray for something and we don't get it, it can be pretty hard to believe that the Lord is taking care of us.

There is an old song by this band called The Rolling Stones, and this song it's called “You can't always get what you want.” And the chorus goes “you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes then you just might find you get what you need.” And it may not be a religious song but there are very few songs that describe so perfectly how the Lord takes care of us.

What the Lord wants more than anything in the entire universe is for us to be happy, and everything that happens in our lives is being guided by the Lord to lead us to the happiest possible result. And sometimes that means that we don't get exactly what we want but we get what we really need. For example, who here would like to eat pizza, ice cream, cookies and cake for dinner every single day? That sounds great, right? But if we did that, we would probably get pretty sick, pretty quickly. So even if it is what we want it isn't what we need. What we need is healthy food. That's what the Lord is providing for us all the time. The Lord isn't always giving us what we want but He's always giving us what we need.

And even when it feels like the Lord is not listening to our prayers the truth is that He is always listening to our prayers, but He responds to those prayers based on what we really need in our lives. This passage from Secrets of Heaven says this:

Little attention is paid to the prayers of those in the middle of temptation; for the Lord desires the end in view, which is a person's salvation. The Lord knows that end, but a person does not, and the Lord does not do what prayers ask for if that is contrary to the end, which is salvation. (…) In prayer, when inspired by God, there is always the thought and belief that the Lord alone knows whether what is sought would be beneficial or not. Therefore, the one who prays leaves the Lord to decide whether to listen to what he asks for, then accordingly pleads that the Lord's will may be done, not his own, in keeping with the Lord's words. (AC 8179)

This is why when we say the Lord's prayer, we say “give us today Our Daily Bread.” We ask the Lord to provide us with the things that we want, and the things that we need, but we also have to say “Thy will be done” meaning that while we may ask for things, the Lord is the only one who knows for sure what we need and we have to trust that even when we don't get the things that we want every single time we ask for them, the Lord always knows exactly what we actually need in our lives.

The Lord is constantly providing us with the things that we need to be happy, and He does it every single moment of every single day. This is why the Lord told us in the sermon on the mount:

“Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the sky, that they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather crops into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more important than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single day to his life’s span? And why are you worried about clothing? Notice how the lilies of the field grow; they do not labor nor do they spin thread for cloth, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you. (Matthew 6:25-33)

So, when we are feeling frustrated when we pray for something but don’t get it, we can deal with that frustration by accepting that the Lord is in charge of everything good that happens in our lives, and He always knows better when it comes to what we need. When we don't get something that we really wanted, chances are that it wasn't going to be that good for us, and the Lord is making some space for us to get the things that will make us actually happy. For example, maybe we didn't get the job that we really wanted but we got a new offer for a job that is even better. Maybe the person that we were interested in was not available for a relationship but then we meet someone else who is just perfect for us and is interested. Maybe we didn’t get that trip to the Caribbean, but if we had gone on that trip we would have gotten caught in the middle of a hurricane, so it actually worked out that we didn’t go on that trip. Sometimes we don't get the things that we think we really want in the moment so that we can get the things that will make us the happiest in the long term later down the line.

Even if we don’t get what we want every time, we can still be grateful to the Lord for all the wonderful gifts that He has given us and all the ways in which He provides for us. And if we make it a point every day to say thank you to the Lord and be grateful for all the good things that He is already giving us, our whole outlook on life is going to change. When we live every day with gratefulness, it becomes a whole lot easier to see all the good things that we already have in our lives, instead of focusing on whatever things we don’t have. Having a grateful attitude helps us to be much happier and much more connected with the Lord. In fact, this is why the Lord tells us to be grateful to Him for all the good things that He does for us. He doesn't tell us to be grateful to Him for His own sake, He tells us to be grateful for our own well-being.

This passage from Secrets of Heaven which you can find in the back of your handout goes into this in more detail by saying this:

The Lord does, it is true, demand humility, worship, thanksgiving, and much else from a person, which seem like repayment, so that His gifts do not seem to be free. But the Lord does not demand those things for His own sake, for the Divine derives no glory at all from a person's humility, worship, or thanksgiving. It is completely inconceivable that any selfishness should exist within the Divine, causing Him to require such actions for His own sake. Rather, they are required for a person’s own sake, for if someone possesses humility he is able to accept good from the Lord, since in that case he has been parted from selfishness and its evils which stand in the way of his accepting [that good from the Lord]. Therefore, the Lord desires a state of humility in a person for that person's sake, because the Lord can flow in with heavenly good when that state exists in [a person]. The same applies to worship and thanksgiving. (AC 5957)

The more we focus on being grateful to the Lord for all the good things that He gives us every day, the easier it is for the Lord to bring even more happiness into our lives. Let's test that theory right now. Let’s share what we are grateful for.

DO EXERCISE

Do you notice how you instantly feel better when you focus on being grateful for the things that you have? The more we focus on being grateful the easier it is for us to see all the good things that the Lord is already doing for us. The Lord is always taking care of us, He's protecting us, He's providing for us, He is leading us to all the things that will make us the happiest that we can possibly be, not just for this life on earth but also for Heaven. Sometimes when the Lord is providing for us, we will not get every single thing that we want, but the Lord is making sure that we are getting everything that we need to be saved and closer to Him. So today as we go home and spend time with our loved ones and share a delicious meal, let’s take a moment to look around and be grateful to the Lord for providing us with all these wonderful blessings. Let’s be grateful for our family, for the food, for our community, for the gift of being alive. Let us take a moment and say thank you to the Lord, because when we didn't get what we wanted, He gave us exactly what we needed. Amen.

Humbling Ourselves for the Lord

A Sermon by Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

November 9th, 2025

One of the best feelings in the world is the feeling of being in control. That feeling we get when we are on top of everything in our life, when we get everything that we need to get done finished in our To Do List, when we are keeping track of our health, working out and eating healthy, when we are paying all our bills, when we are getting all our errands done, and when we are moving forward in life knowing that we are getting things done and that we are in control. When we are in this great situation, we almost feel like we are a commander of an army, being able to direct every part of our life to go the way that we want. It truly feels amazing to be in charge.

But then of course as it happens we realize that we are not in charge. Life comes at us really fast, and before we know it we are faced with just how limited we are, and how much we do not have control over the world. Maybe we lose our job because there were cuts, maybe we get into an accident and get injured, maybe we get sick, maybe a family member passes away, or there is some sort of a natural disaster. All these things are completely out of our control and most of the time we cannot really keep them from happening. When we are faced with these challenges in our lives we have to look at ourselves and realize that we are limited human beings and that we are actually not in charge. This realization that we are limited and that we do not have the power to control everything in the world can bring a lot of pain to us, because we like to believe that we have the power to control everything that can happen to us and that we have the power to take control over the world around us and avoid any bad thing that may come our way. And of course, the reality is that we do not have that power and when we face that reality it can be very painful because then we come face to face with the fact that in many ways we are completely, absolutely, powerless.

The centurion in the story that we just read today for the children's talk was in a very similar situation to this. For context, a centurion as we talked about was a commander of the Roman army who was in charge of 100 warriors, sometimes even more and they were chosen to become centurions after proving themselves in battle and after passing very strict standards of physical ability and martial prowess. Centurions in many cases were from wealthy backgrounds, but a wealthy background was not enough to get them in that position. They had to prove that they were warriors who were strong enough and powerful enough to command 100 Roman soldiers for the most dominant empire on earth. So clearly, a centurion was someone you did not want to mess with. A centurion had a lot of control over the lives of others, and yet in this story this centurion did not have the power to heal his servant. The centurion had enough authority to command over 100 warriors and he probably had the resources to get the best medicine available to anyone in the world at that time with him being a high-ranking officer of the Roman army, and yet he still wasn’t able to change his situation. He could not heal his servant, he was completely powerless to do so.

In our own lives we like to believe that we are like the centurion, that we have all this power and authority over our lives. Maybe it comes from our education, from the wealth that we have been able to accumulate or that has been passed down to us, or maybe it comes from our physical prowess or even our appearance. And we may go through life thinking that we are in control and that we have the power to take charge over any situation that comes our way and yet we have to be faced a lot of times with the fact that we don't have that power, we don't have that authority. We cannot miraculously heal every illness, we cannot prevent natural disasters from happening, and we cannot bring the dead back to life. We are not God. We are limited. We are powerless.

If the centurion had decided to rely on his own power and his own authority to deal with his servant’s illness, his servant would have died. If we do not accept our limitations, we will bring tremendous suffering into our lives and even the lives of others. We can become riddled with anxiety over the fact that we have to be on top of everything, and we have to be in control of every single little part of our lives and if anything doesn't go according to plan then we become distressed because we feel that we are failing at being worthy human beings. If we go through life believing that we must be in control all the time when we are faced with the absolute truth that we are not in control and that left to our own devices we are actually powerless we may very well lose hope, we may lose faith, we may lose our confidence, and we may end up living in fear that something is going to happen to us and we won’t be able to do anything about it. Or on the other hand, we will try to bite a whole lot more than we can chew trying to take control over situations that we cannot control, living in denial over our own limitations.

If someone in our lives was to develop an incurable disease, we would do that person a terrible disservice if we were to tell them that we have the power to heal them. In the same way we would do ourselves and our families a terrible disservice if we were to see the weather forecast in the news saying that there is a dangerous tornado coming our way and because we weren’t ready and it didn’t go according to our plan for that evening, we freeze up and become desperate. In all these situations we end up asking ourselves the same question, “What do I do?”

It may sound counterintuitive but the best way to deal with this difficult situation is to humble ourselves and surrender to the supreme authority of God. This is something that may challenge a lot of our notions in our modern culture that call on us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get over it and just push through and try to take control under any circumstance. Humility and allowing the Lord to take charge of our lives aren’t really qualities that are seen as positive in our modern world. But really that is an unhealthy and unrealistic way of trying to deal with our limitations as human beings. In this story, the centurion recognized this, and he reached out to the Lord and asked Him to heal his servant. Recognizing that there is a power greater than ourselves that can actually help us and guide us and take care of us is the first step in achieving the humility we need to allow the Lord to lead us through life.

This passage from Secrets of Heaven which you can find in the back of your handout explains this state of humility further, by saying this:

A state of true humility can only exist when people acknowledge that of themselves they are profane and condemned, and so of themselves are incapable of looking towards the Lord where everything is Divine and Holy. To the extent therefore that a person acknowledges his own condition he can possess true humility, and when engaged in worship can have real devotion. For all worship must contain humility, and if separated from it no adoration and so no worship at all is present. The reason a state of humility is vital to worship itself is that insofar as the heart is humbled selfishness and all resulting evil come to an end; and insofar as these come to an end good and truth, that is, charity and faith, flow in from the Lord.

This recognition that by ourselves we are powerless and we cannot lead good lives without the guidance of the Lord is at the core of humility. When we acknowledge that we are limited, that everything that is good in our souls and in our lives comes from the Lord and not from ourselves, then we can achieve a level of humility that will allow us to overcome the challenges in our lives because we will no longer be relying on our own strength but on the infinite strength of the Lord. While we may not have the power or authority to be in control of everything in the world or in our lives there is one thing that we are absolutely in control of, and that is our willingness to humble ourselves and allow the Lord to take charge of our lives.

And when we allow ourselves to rely on the Lord, He is able to come into our lives and bring peace and healing. As the Lord was reaching the centurion’s house, the centurion sent messengers and said, “Lord you do not have to enter my house because I am not worthy of it. I know that if you simply want it to be so my servant will be healed.” The centurion completely humbled himself before the Lord and he was absolutely convinced that the Lord could heal his servant, that the Lord had the power to take over the situation, and that He was in charge. The centurion recognized that his own authority as a powerful warrior, as a leader of 100 men was meaningless compared to the supreme authority of the Lord, and when he humbled himself in this way he allowed the Lord to do His work and heal his servant.

Heavenly peace, which is the peace that is experienced by angels in heaven, comes from an absolute reliance in the authority of the Lord. One of the most important passages in the Heavenly Doctrines, from the book Secrets of Heaven, says this:

Peace holds within itself trust in the Lord, the trust that He governs all things and provides all things, and that He leads towards an end that is good. When a person believes these things about Him he is at peace, since he fears nothing and no anxiety about things to come disturbs him.

When we recognize that the Lord is in charge and that He is always leading us to a good result we can surrender to His care, and we can end up appreciating the fact that our lack of control over the world is a very good thing. We don't have control over the weather, we don't have control over death, we don't have control over what is going to happen tomorrow. And thank goodness that we don't have that control! Thank goodness that we are not in charge! Because there is someone who is looking at every single miniscule detail of our lives and carefully guiding us to the best possible result that will make us happy and fulfilled, and that person is the Lord. When we trust in His care, we know that we can deal with every situation that comes our way, no matter what it is, because we are not relying on ourselves, we are relying on the Lord.

While we may go through life thinking that we are in control and that we have the ultimate authority to take charge of everything in the world around us, the truth is that we do not have that power but when we humble ourselves, and surrender to the care and guidance of God, we can let go of all the anxiety and pain that we've been going through while worrying about being in charge. We can achieve heavenly peace and spiritual healing by relying on the higher power that is taking care of us at every single moment of our lives. We can let Him take the lead, let Him be the centurion and commander of every aspect of our lives, because He will guide us to the best possible result, not only in this life but to eternity. Amen.

Serving the Naked

A Sermon by Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

September 28th, 2025

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Fall is finally here, and soon we will find ourselves in the middle of winter. Now in this part of the world that we live in winter can be very, very cold, and there are few things that are more comforting during the winter than having a good winter coat that can keep us warm. This not only applies to winter of course, but during the summer we wear clothes that are lighter and allow us to stay cool. If we are working a blue collar job like in construction we need clothing that is fitting for our job, like good work boots or gloves that can help us work safely, and depending on what kind of office we work at, it’s important to wear appropriate business clothes for the way we present ourselves. Clothing is something that a lot of times we can take for granted but it is so important to our quality of life on so many levels from our personal expression to our personal safety and comfort.

Unfortunately, while we can take these things for granted, the truth is that there are millions of people in the world who do not have access to these privileges. There are millions of people who do not have access to a good winter coat or shoes so they can walk safely in the streets, or who only have a few items of clothing that are ripped and broken. Millions of people in the world, including children, women, and the elderly, are struggling because they do not have access to good quality clothes that can protect them in different kinds of weather.

The Lord told us to serve our neighbors, and for the last few weeks we have been talking about the different kinds of people that the Lord tells us to serve. We have talked about serving the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger, and today we will be talking about serving the naked. Now of course in this part of the world that we live in we don't tend to see a lot of naked people in the streets, but if we think of the naked as people who do not have access to appropriate clothes to protect them, then we can see more easily how we can serve people in this situation. There are many organizations across the world that take clothing donations and will distribute those clothes for people in need, and we can donate from our own clothes to these organizations. It can be a very powerful thing to look at our wardrobe and see if there are clothes that we don't really need or that we don't really care about and take those clothes and bring them to a place where there will be people who are really in need of those things that we take for granted. It can be a very powerful shift in perspective to see those clothes that we don't really think about mean so much to somebody else. When we do this, we can serve the naked in the natural sense as the Lord told us to do.

Now, of course as we have covered in previous sermons in this series, we're not only told to serve our neighbor in a natural sense, but we're also told to serve our neighbors in a spiritual sense. So, who are the spiritually naked that we are meant to serve? The spiritually naked are people who are lacking truth, or people who are lacking guiding principles in their life, and who are looking for that truth to guide them and protect them from the hardship of the world. This comes from the fact that in the Word, whenever clothing is mentioned, the Word is speaking about truth. The book Apocalypse Revealed says that:

Clothes in the Word symbolize truths that clothe good, and in an opposite sense, falsities that clothe evil. For a person embodies either his goodness or his evil. Truths or falsities are therefore his clothes. (AR 45)

It's easy to see why clothing has this spiritual meaning: all truth and good comes from the Lord, none of it comes from us. So, if we don't have the truth, faith, and values that come from the Lord, then we have nothing of our own, we are spiritually naked. For example, when we feel grief over losing a loved one, if we don’t have any idea that there is an afterlife or that the person who passed is at peace in the other world, then we feel pain, like not having a coat during a snowstorm. If we are going through life trying to keep our integrity, but we don’t have any solid foundation of values and faith, then it is like walking down a rocky path with no shoes on. We need truths from the Lord to cover us, to keep us safe as we go through life.

On the one hand, it seems pretty obvious how we can serve the spiritually naked who are lacking truths in their life and are looking for it. We can share the truths that we get from the Word, we can help instruct them in these ideas from the Word, and in doing so we can in a way donate spiritual clothing from our own spiritual wardrobe to those people. We can share the spiritual clothing that we get from the Lord, and the good thing is there's a surplus, there's a never-ending amount of spiritual clothing that we can get from the Word and that we can share with other people.

But there is another aspect to this problem of being spiritually naked, that isn’t just the lack of truth when facing adversity. Clothing serves to protect us from the elements, but it also serves as a powerful form of personal expression of our identity. This is something that starts very early on in our lives when we are teenagers and young adults, when we experiment with using clothing to represent our personality, and we continue to do that throughout our lives whether we realize it or not. The clothes that we wear are often a representation of our identity, from the brands that we buy from, to the quality of the fabric and the style that we wear, our clothes can be a representation of everything from how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived, to even things like our tax bracket. We can learn a lot about a person by seeing the way that they dress. All these things can be an external representation of our identity whether we are realizing it or not.

We can see how this applies to the spiritually naked, because as we go through life we are searching for our identity, we are searching for who we truly are, and there are many people in the world right now who are searching for an identity, and they look for it in all sorts of places. This happens especially with teenagers and young adults who oftentimes look for an identity in trends on social media like TikTok or YouTube, and who are struggling to find who they really are. Adults can do that too, but we tend to do it based on political parties or ideologies or even our economic status. We hold on to these things and try to build an identity around them, but ultimately those are external things, they are superficial and flawed, they're not real spiritual clothing that can provide us with a true sense of self, and if we take a good look in the mirror, we realize that we are actually spiritually naked if we look for an identity in these places. It is very similar to the story of the emperor’s new clothes, in that we can go out into the world thinking that we are wearing magnificent clothes, thinking that we have a powerful identity, but really we are walking around spiritually naked, going along with what others are telling us our identity should be.

We may look at this problem of people who are struggling with an identity crisis, who are struggling to figure out who they are in this world, and think to ourselves, “how do we serve these people?” If we believe that without the Lord we have nothing, doesn’t that mean that we ourselves in the New Church don’t have an identity at all, that we lose our personal identity when we surrender to following the Lord? Isn’t putting on the Lord's spiritual clothing like putting on a uniform and conforming to a single way of being?

The thing is that just as the Lord's truth is infinite, it also manifests itself in infinite kinds of spiritual clothing. The Lord doesn't give us uniforms, He provides us with infinite styles and infinite kinds of ways that we can cover ourselves with His truth and His kindness, but they all have the same fabric, which is His truth. In fact, the more that we decide to surrender ourselves to the Lord, the more that we accept that without Him we are spiritually naked, the more we can develop an identity of our own, and the freer we become as individuals.

The book Divine Providence explains this further in a series of passages, saying that:

The more closely we are united to the Lord, the more clearly we seem to have our own identity, and yet the more obvious it is to us that we belong to the Lord. The reason we are more clearly aware that we belong to the Lord as our sense of identity becomes clearer is that the more closely we are united to the Lord the wiser we become; and wisdom both teaches this and is conscious of it. Since the goal of the Lord's divine providence is a heaven from the human race, it follows that the goal is the union of the human race with the Lord. It also follows that the goal is for us to become wiser and happier because of this union, because we are given heaven through our wisdom and in proportion to it, and this is what gives us happiness. Lastly, it follows that the goal is for us to have a clearer sense of our identity and yet to be more clearly aware that we belong to the Lord (DP 42, 44, 45).

When we willingly surrender ourselves to the care and guidance of the Lord, and we accept that without Him we are stripped of anything good and true in our lives, we realize that there is actually tremendous freedom to develop as individuals when we accept this. Think of it like this: we all depend on electricity. We take it for granted, it powers our homes, our phones, our cars, and we have all decided to depend on it without really questioning it, and in doing so we have found tremendous freedom to develop as individuals. How much more can we develop as individuals if we accept that every good thing we have in our lives comes from the Lord and not from ourselves or other sources? How many more unique ways of expressing our identity can we find if we surrender ourselves to the care of the Lord, who provides us with all kinds of spiritual clothing?

When we willingly cover ourselves with the truth that the Lord provides by means of His Word, and we become willing to follow Him instead of trying to find an identity in other places, we will find that we are actually much freer and unique, because we are covering ourselves with clothing that is everlasting, that is not going to degrade or break, and that is custom-made for us. The Lord doesn’t want to take away our individuality, on the contrary, He wants to provide us with spiritual clothing that is perfectly suited for each one of us individually, so that we can express ourselves to the best of our capability under His guidance.

There is a good chance that we all know someone who is struggling with an identity crisis. It might be a younger person who is struggling to find their place in the world, it may be someone who is going through a divorce or separation and is trying to figure out who they are without their spouse, it may be someone who is grieving after losing someone they love and discovering what life is without them, or it may be someone recovering from substance abuse who is finding their way into a new sober life. In all these circumstances people look at themselves and ask, “who am I? What is my identity?” And we can help people in that situation by sharing truths from the Word so that they can explore what it means to grow more as an individual by following the Lord and looking to be united with Him.

Just how we can serve those who are struggling with a lack of access to clothes by donating some of our own clothes, we can serve those who are spiritually naked by sharing with them some of the truths that we carry on us, that have helped us develop our own identity. Once we share those spiritual clothes with others, they will have the opportunity to develop their identity in unity with God, an identity that is not dependent on external appearances or labels, but rather an identity that is based on a deep connection with the timeless infinity of God. Amen.

Serving the Thirsty

A sermon by Rev. Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

September 14th, 2025

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There are currently 2 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water. That is one in four human beings who do not have access to safe water to drink. Over 1 million people die every year from lack of access to safe drinking water, and it is estimated that every two minutes a child dies from an illness due to contaminated water. These are horrifying statistics from the year 2025, after centuries of technological development and sanitation efforts, and it is truly painful to imagine what life would have been like 2000 years ago, in the times when Jesus was ministering to the people of Israel. Dying of thirst or diseases from drinking contaminated water would have been a common experience in the lives of the people of Israel. So when the Lord is telling us to serve the thirsty, at the time when He was saying that He wasn't just referring to someone who is coming home from a hot day and could really use a glass of water. Thirst, both 2000 years ago and in our modern world, was an all too prevalent life-or-death situation.

There are millions of people in the world who can only get water from sources that are hours away from their homes who can only get water once every few days.  And even for many of these people who have some access to water when that water is contaminated it can lead to multiple deadly illnesses. Now thankfully we live in a part of the world in which this is not as much of a problem. Most of us have not dealt with extreme thirst nor have we ever dealt with lack of immediate access to safe drinking water but nevertheless this is still a massive problem that is affecting millions of people around the world, and if the Lord is telling us to help the thirsty, how do we help the people who are dealing with these terrible conditions? Fortunately, there are many organizations that provide clean drinking water and water treatment equipment in many affected communities and households around the world, and there are many opportunities for us to donate to those organizations and volunteer to help in making sure that every human being around the world can have access to clean drinking water.

However, in the New Church we not only focus on serving others in a natural way, but we are also called by the Lord to serve others in a spiritual way. Last week we talked about how serving the hungry does not only mean to serve people who are suffering from food insecurity but also serving people who are lacking good and charity in their life. Water provides the other side of that coin. Serving the thirsty in the natural sense means to help provide clean drinking water for people who need it, but in the spiritual sense it means helping those who are struggling to find truth and meaning and hope in their lives.

This is because just as food in the Word is a symbol for good, water in the Word is a symbol for truth. Now these truths aren't just factual knowledge from science and philosophy, but these are deeper spiritual truths that we can find in the Word. These are truths such as that there is a God who created us and who wants us to be happy; that there is goodness within every single one of us; and that there is an eternal life. These are all truths that we can find in the Word, and they can help us fulfill a very important need within ourselves: the need for meaning. Because we all struggle with these universal questions about meaning and faith, like “why are we here? What is our purpose? Is there any hope for the future?” And when we struggle to find answers to these questions there can be a lot of suffering in our hearts. And that's suffering that comes from a lack of truth, which is represented in the Word by thirst.

A passage from the book Secrets of Heaven, which you can find in the back of your pamphlet, explains this idea further, by saying that:

'Thirst' represents a craving and desiring, and it has a reference to truth just as 'hunger' has reference to good; and this from the meaning of 'water' as the truth of faith. (…) When a person enters temptation because of a lack of truth he is gripped by an intense desire for it, and at the same time by despair of eternal salvation on account of this. These feelings are responsible for the grief at that time and for the complaining. (AC 8568)

When we lack truth, we can end up suffering in ways that spiritually can be very similar to the pain that we experience when we don't have access to water. You may have heard this fact before, but while we can survive without eating any food for as long as a month, we cannot survive without drinking water for more than three days. In the same way, when we are going through really hard challenges in our lives, there may be times in which we can make it through those difficult challenges for a longer period of time even when we lack good or kindness around us, if we have some truths to hold on to. But if we do not have truths to hold onto, if we lack meaning, if we lack hope, if we lack faith, our chances of making it through those challenges become much lower.

There is a story from the book “Man's search for meaning” that was written by psychologist Viktor Frankl about his experience as a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War 2. In his book Frankl mentioned that from Christmas time in 1944 to New Years in 1945, the death rate among the prisoners in the concentration camp skyrocketed. And while trying to figure out why this happened, they arrived at the conclusion that the main reason why these victims passed in this time period was not necessarily because the conditions in the camp became harder than they already were, but because they lost hope. These prisoners had been told that they would be out of the concentration camp by Christmas time and when they realized that this was not going to happen, when that hope was taken away from them, they lost their faith, and their will to live. Meanwhile, prisoners who were able to hold on to the hope that they would make it out of that terrible situation were able to survive longer. And when reflecting on these experiences in his book, Viktor Frankl said this:

“Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. (…) Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.”

In these terrible conditions, where these prisoners were surrounded by hatred, anger, death and violence, all they had to hold on to in order to survive was their faith, and once they lost that faith, they weren't able to make it. This is a horrifying example from a very dark time in history, but it serves to illustrate the idea that we are talking about. When we don’t have truth or faith to hold onto, we may go through a crisis and suffering that can be very difficult to overcome.

Spiritual thirst can take many forms, and chances are that we know people who are struggling with it right now. There may be people in our lives who are struggling with things like low self-esteem, where they aren’t able to see anything good about themselves, or perhaps we know people who are struggling with anxiety about the news, or even people who are struggling to find any hope that there will ever be a good future for them in this world.

Now it is very important to recognize that in the natural level of the problem of lacking access to clean drinking water, one of the most important aspects of that problem it's not only the access to water, but the access to water that is safe and clean to consume. If those who are spiritually thirsty find bad answers to the problems that they are struggling with, it would be like someone who is dying of thirst drinking contaminated water in the hopes of surviving. People in that situation are already struggling so they will drink whatever they have available to them even if it is contaminated and unfortunately that is something that happens a lot when dealing with spiritual thirst in our world. A lot of people who are struggling with these spiritual problems will find answers to their problems in very unhealthy places that will lead them down a path of hatred, ignorance, materialism or selfishness. For example, when someone is struggling with self esteem if they watch a YouTube video that tells them that it’s true, they are worthless and nobody will ever love them, that is a terrible falsity but it is the only idea that a lot of people receive when they are suffering from spiritual thirst, and this happens quite often. So how can we as people of the New Church, who are trying to help others who are struggling with spiritual thirst, provide good clean spiritual water? How can we support these people who are suffering? Thankfully we have access to the original source of endless clean spiritual water: the Word.

The Lord has told us that whoever drinks the water that He provides will never be thirsty again, because the water that He will give us will become a fountain of water springing up to eternal life. This is a very powerful spiritual concept because the Lord is telling us that when we are suffering from spiritual thirst, we can go to the Word to look for the truth. The Lord is telling us where we can find the truth that can satisfy that spiritual thirst. When we are serving people who are suffering from spiritual thirst, we can share with them the ideas and the truths and the doctrines that we learn from the Word and the Writings. That can have a massive impact on someone's life. For example, when someone is struggling with finding worth in themselves, we can tell them that they are a miniature heaven, and that the Lord created them to bring something to the world that is unique and special. When we find someone who is struggling with the question of “why are we here?” we can answer “you are here because the Lord loves you and wanted you to exist so that He could share good and loving things with you.” When someone is wondering “what is the purpose of life?” We can answer the purpose of life is to become an angel and that means acting in such a way that will emulate what an Angel is by treating others with kindness and following the commandments of the Lord. When someone wonders if there is ever going to be a good future, we can answer “yes, the Lord is constantly working to lead all of us to a good result not only on this natural world, but also in the spiritual world, even to eternity.”

There is endless clean spiritual water from the Word that we can share with the people who are struggling in our lives. And while we ourselves as individuals may not be able to completely change that person's perspective or completely satisfy that spiritual thirst maybe we can help at the very least by guiding the people in our lives who are struggling with spiritual thirst towards a good direction. Perhaps we can point them to a story from the Word that may apply to them, or a verse from the book of Psalms that may offer some comfort, or a number from Divine Providence that may bring them some hope. And the Lord will take it from there. So we can minister not only in sharing our own understandings of what the Word has to say to make someone’s life richer and fuller and healthier but more importantly, we can share the original source of those truths with them, and when we go to the original source of that truth which is the Word there will never be any end to the spiritual water and sustenance that we can share with others from it.

Just as we can do with those who are struggling with natural thirst, we can serve the people who are struggling with spiritual thirst by helping to connect them with a source of sustenance. We can connect others with the original source of clean spiritual water and sustenance: the Word. When we do this, we will be serving the thirsty in the way that the Lord wants us to do. Amen.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

A sermon by Rev. Dan Calvo

August 31, 2025.

Pittsburgh New Church

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When we choose to live a life in which we are trying to follow the Lord, sometimes we may feel that we’re not doing enough. The Lord tells us that we need to follow His commandments, that we need to live by this higher standard of morality and that to live a real spiritual life we need to practice charity. We may look at ourselves and the flaws in our personality, or we may look at the world around us and all the people that are hurting that we could be helping, and see that there is a lot more that we could be doing to improve ourselves and the lives of those around us. Maybe we start thinking, “I should be out there saving the world, I should donate all my money to charity, and I should spend every waking moment working really hard to make the world a better place and I should become a perfect human being.” And it's easy to feel this way because as religious people we do have a responsibility to each other and to society at large to become the best version of ourselves and to share the goodness of the Lord with other people, and sometimes when we still say or do bad things, or when we are not doing massive acts of service every day, or even when we do great acts of service like volunteering, we may think that we are not doing enough, that we should be having a much bigger impact in society at large, and that can be very frustrating. This can bring a lot of feelings of disappointment in ourselves and perhaps it may make us feel that we are failing at following the Lord the way that He wants us to follow Him.

The Lord knows that we can worry about our impact and about how much we are doing on an everyday basis. Luckily for us He taught us through His parables how to deal with this problem, and the Lord did this by teaching us the parable of the mustard seed. When the Lord was describing what the Kingdom of heaven is like he said this:

And He was saying, “How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is the smallest of all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants, and forms large branches, with the result that the birds of the sky can nest under its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32)

When we think of the Kingdom of heaven we think of this massive, glorious universe, we think of angels, light, beauty, and love, and we think of this infinity of goodness that comes from the Lord and being close to Him. When we hear the phrase “kingdom of Heaven” we don't think of a seed. And yet in this story the Lord tells us that the beginning of the Kingdom of heaven is in a seed, a seed which can then grow into a large tree.

When we plant a seed, we are helping in the growth of new life, we are setting the basis for the creation of a new crop or a tree. The Lord is teaching us in this story that when we have a little bit of faith, and when we take small steps to follow Him that is the beginning of bringing the Kingdom of heaven into our own lives and the lives of others, just how a small seed can grow into a massive tree.

What are some seeds that the Lord is telling us to plant? Well, for example, if we believe in the simple idea that the Lord is constantly guiding us to a good result, that can have a massive impact in the way that we live our lives. It can bring us so much peace to believe that the Lord is bringing us to a good result even though that can be a very simple idea but just that very small simple idea can change the way that we deal with life as a whole. To give another example, not saying something mean or rude to another person, can have massive consequences in other people's lives because just in the same way that us saying something mean to somebody else can have a huge impact in that person, not doing something bad can also have a massive impact in the lives of other people. Another example, preparing a meal for somebody who is struggling with grief or something like food insecurity can bring so much support and comfort to that person’s life. And those are all such small ideas, those are all such seemingly small actions, like little seeds but then they end up having a massive impact in the world.

It's very interesting that the Lord used the example of a mustard seed in the parable. The Lord could have used any tree for this example, and yet He specifically used the idea of a mustard seed. There are many reasons for that. A mustard seed is extremely small. I couldn't find mustard seeds to bring today but even if I was holding one up right now you wouldn't be able to see it unless you had a really good camera. A mustard seed is about 1 to 2 millimeters, or 0.07 inches long. That’s about 1/12th of an inch. So, it is barely noticeable, it's one of the smallest seeds in all of nature. and yet that seed when it is planted, grows into a tree that can be as big as 20 feet tall. It is a massive tree with huge branches and leaves, and it all comes from this very tiny seed. In this story the Lord is telling us that every small action that we can take today, whether it is to believe in a very simple idea like trusting that there is good from the Lord in the world we live in, or doing small acts of service like taking over a chore when somebody else is tired, doing the dishes or taking out the trash, or taking the time to visit someone who is sick, even if these are all such simple, small actions, can grow into such a massive wonderful thing that can change someone's day and not only does it change the world around us in a massive way, it also changes us.

There is a passage in the book Apocalypse Explained that describes the spiritual meaning of this parable, and it says that:

"A tree from a grain of mustard seed" symbolizes a person of the church, and also a church beginning from a very little spiritual good by means of truth; for if only a very little spiritual good takes root with a person it grows like a seed in good ground. And as a "tree" thus symbolizes a person of the church, it follows that "the birds of the sky" that made nests in its branches symbolize the knowledges of truth and thoughts from them. (AE 1100)

Now I have a quick question for you: when you plant a seed and you water it and you sit down and you look at it for a little bit, does it grow into a tree right away? How about if you wait for an hour? How about the next day? The next week? Next month? No! More often than not it takes a really long time for a tree to grow. In fact, it takes 90 to 95 days for a mustard seed to grow fully into a mustard tree, sometimes even longer. That's around 3 months, or close to 100 days, it's a long time. However, in the grand scheme of things mustard trees are actually known for growing much faster than other kinds of plants. So even though it takes a long time the effects start happening immediately even if we can't see them in the moment. So, the Lord is telling us to take the small step, to plant the little seed and even if we can't see the results right away, that seed is growing into a beautiful, massive tree. If we keep affirming truths from the Word, and practicing small acts of service, and supporting our neighbors when they need it, we’re starting a chain of events that can lead to immense positive change in our own lives and the lives of those around us, even if we can’t see it right now. If we just keep planting the seeds the Lord will make them grow.

And that's another very important thing to remember is that we don't make trees grow. If trees needed human beings to grow, the world would have a lot less trees, we would be in a very bad situation. We can help by planting the seed but ultimately it is only the Lord who can make the tree grow. The Lord is the one who provides the sun, the Lord is the one who provides the water, the only one who provides the soil and nutrients for the plant to grow. To take it even further, the Lord is the one who created the seed in the first place! The Lord is the one that makes it so that seeds can grow and become a full tree. In the same way in our own lives, we can believe all of these wonderful things, we can plant the seeds of choosing to believe truths from the Word, we can plant the seed of following the 10 commandments, we can plant the seeds of doing acts of service for other people around us but it is ultimately the Lord who takes those seeds and turns them into something greater and much more impactful in the lives of people. The Lord takes that seed that we plant, and He takes it from there. Our job is not necessarily to focus on taking the seed and following it as it grows, our job is to keep planting the seeds and as we do this the Lord will take over, and He will make those seeds grow.

So here is an exercise that I would like us to do. We are going to plant some spiritual seeds today. I am going to read some ideas that all come from the Heavenly Doctrines and from the Word, and I would like to invite you to repeat them after me. This is something that is known as affirmations, and there are a lot of studies that say that when we repeat positive affirmations it can have a massive impact in the way that we look at the world, and it can change our mental health and even our physical health. So, we are going to say some New Church affirmations today and plant some seeds. Are you ready?

1.       The Lord loves me.

2.       I was created to become an angel.

3.       The Lord is always guiding me to a good result.

4.       There is a place in Heaven for me.

5.       There is good all over the world.

6.       The Lord does not need me to be perfect.

7.       The Lord is always with me.

Now after saying these affirmations whether we realize it or not we just planted some seeds in our hearts and in our minds, and if we keep repeating those ideas and we keep affirming them in our lives, and we keep putting them to practice, those ideas can take root and they can grow and they can change our whole life. Whenever we think that we are not doing enough that we should be doing more to change the world the Lord is telling us that we don't need to save the world in one day. We're individuals, we're limited, we're just human beings. And yes, we are called to become the best version of ourselves, and to love our neighbor and to serve others and to do as much good as possible in society, all of that is absolutely true and extremely important, they are at the core of a religious life. But we're not called to change the world in one day, we're not called to change ourselves entirely into a perfect being overnight. That's an unfair expectation and the Lord would never have that kind of unfair expectation of us because the Lord is incapable of being unfair. But the Lord tells us to plant the seeds, and He will take it from there, and if we keep planting seeds every day as small as they may seem, the Lord will take those seeds and He will make them grow into something beautiful. Amen.

The Vineyard Worker's Reward

A sermon by Rev. Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

August 3rd, 2025

AR 650: A vineyard symbolizes the church which has the Word and where the Lord is thereby known, thus in this case the Christian Church, [which] can be seen from (…) Jesus' likening the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who hired "laborers for his vineyard" (Matthew 20:1-8).

AC 9210: Anyone who does not know what Christian charity is may think that it consists not only in giving to the needy and poor but also in doing good to his fellow citizen, country, or Church for any reason whatever, that is, with no matter what end in view. But he should recognize that the end is what gives all of a person's deeds their true character. If the end or intention is to do good for the sake of reputation, in order to acquire important positions or else monetary gain, the good that he does is not good because it is done for the sake of self and thus also originates in self. But if the end is to do good for his fellow citizen's, country's, or Church's sake, thus for his neighbour's sake, the good he does is good since it is done for the sake of good itself, which in general is the real neighbour, and so is also done for the Lord's sake since such good does not have its origin in the person but in the Lord, and what originates in the Lord is the Lord's.

The Lord has promised us a lot of wonderful rewards for following Him. The Lord has promised us that if we follow Him we will be much happier and much more fulfilled in our natural life, and He also has told us that we will go to Heaven if we follow His commandments honestly and keep His love in our heart. But sometimes we can get too caught up on the idea of the reward, and we start to think that based on how many good things we do, we’ll get better rewards from the Lord. For example, if we help enough old ladies to cross the street or if we memorize enough doctrines, maybe we’ll get a really nice car, or maybe we’ll live in a castle when we get to heaven. This can create the false idea in us that we can somehow accumulate points on a scorecard to get an even bigger and better reward from the Lord!

This was something that the disciples of the Lord were struggling with. One day, the disciples of the Lord were talking to Him and they told Him, “Lord, we have left so many things behind! We have left our jobs, our family, and our homes, in order to follow you. What are we going to get in return? What will be our reward?” And then, the Lord told them a parable. As you may know, a parable is a story that is meant to teach us something, and the Lord taught His disciples and most of the people around Him by using parables. The parable that the Lord told His disciples, which we are going to read today, is the parable of The Workers in the Vineyard, and this parable talks about what kind of reward we can expect for following the Lord. The story goes like this:

 (Matthew 20:1-16)

The Lord told His disciples this story because He was trying to teach them what kind of reward they would get for following Him. The disciples were expecting a great reward for leaving everything behind and sacrificing so much for following the Lord, but the Lord was teaching us in this story that every single person who decides to follow the Lord and work in His vineyard gets the same reward of being welcome in the Lord's Kingdom, even those who in our view may not have worked as hard or sacrificed so much to get there.

Every single person in this world is invited to work at the Lord’s vineyard, which is a symbol for His church. Some people are blessed to arrive at the Lord's vineyard a little earlier in their life. Maybe they were raised in a religious belief in the Lord, or maybe they encountered religion very early in their life, and they have remained in it faithfully since then. Other people arrive at the vineyard a little later in their life, and they had a different journey of how they got there, but they are still invited to work at the Lord's vineyard. And there are some people who have gone through a lot of very different paths in their life, and haven’t been able to find a place they can call their spiritual home, like workers who have not been hired, but in the end they make it to the Lord's vineyard and they accept that invitation to work there. All these different people are invited by the Lord to come work at the vineyard and all of those who accept the invitation are welcomed by the Lord and they all receive the same reward.

Now what does it look like to work at the Lord's vineyard? What is the kind of work that the Lord is asking us to do in His church? Well, first and foremost, the Lord is asking us to follow His Ten Commandments. He tells us to respect our parents, to not hurt other people, to respect our marriage, to not steal, to not lie in order to get ahead in life, and overall He tells us to respect His church and the dignity and wellbeing of our neighbors. When we avoid doing evil things to others, and actively do good things for the people around us, we are working at the Lord’s vineyard as members of His church, and whether we arrived here a little earlier or whether we arrived there a little later our reward is going to be the same: a happier, healthier life by following the Lord, and an invitation to the Kingdom of heaven.

But sometimes that might seem a little bit unfair, because if we arrived earlier into the church shouldn't we have a bigger reward? Shouldn't we get special treatment from the Lord if we made it to the vineyard and worked there for longer than people who got there later? When we start to think that way we can get into some false unhealthy ideas because what the Lord is trying to teach us in this story is that the important thing is not the reward, but the work itself.

The rewards are wonderful: there’s nothing greater than the promise of heavenly peace and joy for those who follow the Lord, but the rewards of goodness and truth belong to the Lord and the Lord alone, and it is His choice to extend that same reward to everyone who accepts the invitation to work at His vineyard, just like the owner of the vineyard paid all his workers equally as it was his right because it was his money. Everybody gets the same blessing, nobody gets special treatment for being here longer or for doing more good works than others, in the same way that nobody gets special treatment for arriving to the vineyard later than others, because the Lord doesn't want us to work only for the sake of the reward of going to Heaven. The Lord wants us to work at His vineyard to be useful, and to be useful not only to the Lord's purpose which is a heaven for humanity, but to be useful for the purpose of making other people happier and making our world right now a better place to live in.

A Gentle Voice

A sermon by Rev. Dan Calvo

Pittsburgh New Church

June 29th, 2025

Video:

Text:

(1 Kings 19:9-18)

SECRETS OF HEAVEN 219: The voice of Jehovah in the Word is taken to mean the Word itself, teachings about faith, conscience (or an alertness to what is inside us), and every reproof of conscience.

Elijah was looking for God because he had nowhere else to go.

He ran away to save his life through the desert for forty days and forty nights, facing the blazing sun by day and the dangerous animals and deadly cold by night, with the threat of queen Jezebel’s soldiers looming over his head. One night, Elijah found a cave to protect himself and hid there. This wasn’t just any cave, however: this cave was in Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai, where Moses had received the ten commandments several generations ago, the same ten commandments that Elijah had tried to uphold against the heresy of queen Jezebel and her evil priests. And yet, Elijah was now in fear for his life because he had tried to uphold these commandments of the Lord.

It's easy to feel like Elijah sometimes. While we may not encounter ourselves in life-and-death situations in our everyday lives, we can become overwhelmed with the evils of the world just how Elijah did. We watch the news and see how the world is falling to evil, how wars break out causing suffering to innocent victims, how love for our neighbor is replaced by hatred, selfishness and greed in almost every conceivable way. It seems that there is no end to these evils, and sometimes we want to run away from them and hide away in a cave! We are trying to save ourselves from that evil, and we are looking for God to save us from them.

Elijah felt powerless in this story, and with good reason. Elijah was hiding away in the cave after he did everything right! He obeyed the Lord’s commandments, and when he defeated the evil priests, he did it all under the guidance of God. Yet, he was now in danger of being murdered. It was as if all his faith and work were meaningless in an evil world. Because unfortunately, after everything that Elijah tried to do, the world didn’t change all that much. Queen Jezebel was still ruling over in her kingdom, she had killed the priests of the Lord, she was continuing her heresy, and she was getting ready to kill Elijah. And now, Elijah was looking for some sign from God that he could overcome this, that change could actually happen, that evil could finally be defeated. He was looking for a sign from God that the world could change for the better.

We can feel like this sometimes when we are hiding in our caves, so to speak, thinking that we need some kind of extreme change because it seems to us that what we are doing in our lives is meaningless in the bigger picture. There are many ways in which people look for that change in the world, and these different approaches are represented by the signs of power in the story. The wind, earthquake, and fire all have deeper spiritual meanings that reveal in what ways people look for change in an evil world.

The first sign that Elijah saw was a powerful wind that was so mighty that it could even destroy rocks. In the Word, wind can represent many different things, but we can interpret it in this story as an agent of destruction (AC 7679). Broken rocks can represent false ideas about religion, or more specifically, the false ideas that come from thinking about the Word in purely literal terms (AC 10582). If people only interpret the Word based on its external meaning, without trying to go deeper, then many false ideas can come from this, and these may lead to evil. For example, if we were to take “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” literally, we would end up looking for revenge against every person that has ever wronged us or done something evil. In our own lives, we may want the Lord to come down and destroy every one of these false ideas in the world, so that only pure truth prevails.

However, we are told that God is not in this destructive wind! If God was to destroy all these false ideas in people, He would remove our freedom to think more deeply about the Word ourselves. People must be free to think about religion in whatever way they are able, even if it leads to something that we do not agree with or that is false. Eliminating this freedom of thought would not destroy evil in the world but would remove the very thing that makes faith and charity valuable: freedom of choice.

The second sign that Elijah saw, the earthquake, has a similar spiritual meaning. In the Word, an earthquake represents changes in the church, or more specifically, changes of good and truth, which are the things that make the church (AC 3355). When looking at all the evil in the world, and particularly the way that the literal sense of the Word is used by some institutions to cause division and hatred amongst people, we may think that it would be best to just destroy all organized religion. Either that, or we think that it would be best to change it completely to fit our own view of what religion should be, removing everything we disagree with. Yet, we’re told that God is not in the earthquake either. Change cannot happen without any kind of guidance, design, or order. When we think about the ways we can change the world for the better, we must always do so using the Word as our foundation, instead of our own perceptions of what good and truth are.

If we were to create a world based only on what we think is good and true, then it would be a world that excludes everybody else’s view, and we would never be able to move beyond our own limited, biased understanding of what the world should be like. Looking at the Word for guidance provides us with an objective universal foundation that tries to accommodate as many people as possible, while still maintaining order, and it helps us keep love for the Lord and for our neighbor as the most important part of any changes that may take place.

After the wind and the earthquake, the third sign that Elijah saw was a powerful fire. In the Word, fire is often a symbol for a destructive kind of selfishness (AC 934). It is easy to see why God wouldn’t be present in this kind of fire! When we see the evil in the world, we may often think that if everybody was to listen to what we say, and start doing things OUR WAY, then everything would be changed for the better. We may think that our own desires and ideas should guide people’s lives, not religion or faith or other people’s thoughts, but our own. After all, we have all the answers, right? Yet, that would lead to all sorts of problems. When we seek to dominate over others, we are no longer living life with love in our hearts, but with hatred. Removing freedom from others and looking to bend them to our will is always evil, regardless of whether we think we are in the right or not.

So, we just saw that the wind that could break rocks symbolizes destruction, the earthquake symbolizes extreme changes of good and truth, and the fire symbolizes the kind of selfishness that can lead to a desire to dominate over others. We can fall into any of these things very easily when thinking about how to eliminate the evils in the world. Yet, we find that God isn’t in any of these big, extreme changes.

So, where is God?

God was not present in the powerful signs, but He WAS PRESENT in a small, gentle voice, which led Elijah out of the cave. Elijah went looking for the Lord and may have been expecting Him to be in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, but ultimately, he was able to find God in a more intimate way. God is not found in extreme, destructive changes, but He is found in the still moments when we turn to Him with a humble heart. When we become overwhelmed with evil, and we want change, oftentimes we forget that positive change can begin with the small gesture of reading the Word for comfort and guidance. This seemingly small action can bring the Lord into our lives, so we are not creating change without guidance. That’s how we can hear the gentle voice of the Lord.

We may not have the power to change the world at large by ourselves, but we can change ourselves and how we interact with the world. And we can find the voice of God telling us how to change ourselves in the truths that we read in the Word. Like the Ten Commandments, which show us the things we must not do to others in order to live a spiritual life. The golden rule, treating others as we want to be treated. The Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. The doctrines found in the Writings that teach us that every single person around us is the neighbor, and we must always look for the good in others.

The act of reading the Word, as simple as it is, as seemingly small as it may be at a first glance, can be life-changing. Not only that, the truths that we find in the Word can legitimately change the world, even if it’s just our immediate surroundings. Every single one of our actions guided by the truths of the Word can have an impact that goes further beyond what we can imagine.

Secrets of Heaven number 6490 says that: “every moment of life holds a chain of consequences stretching into eternity.” If we believe in this teaching, we can rest in the knowledge, that even if it might not seem like it, changing ourselves by going to the Word, reading its teachings, and following them, can have a chain reaction of consequences that affect the world at large, even to infinity. Because when we follow the Word, and allow it to make us happier, more fulfilled, and more connected with a greater good, the world becomes a better place. But that tremendous change starts with listening to that small, gentle voice that we find in the Word.

That is what happened to Elijah in the story. After he heard God’s gentle voice, Elijah received a new command from the Lord. Elijah was to go to Syria and Israel, to anoint new kings that would fight against the corruption of Jezebel and her evil priests. Not only that, Elijah was supposed to anoint a new prophet, Elisha, who would join him in upholding the Word of God. There was hope. The gentle voice of God promised that the world would change for the better and it delivered.

When we are overwhelmed with the evils of the world, and we want things to change, we cannot bring about that change by destroying other people’s beliefs, drastically changing religion altogether, or imposing our own desires upon others. But we can make changes in our life, small as they might be, by looking at the truths of the Word for guidance. Without the faith we get from the Word, any changes we want to do in the world will only bring about even more evil and grief for others. If we listen to the gentle voice of God found in the Word, and use the truths found there to lead our efforts for change, we will be able to change ourselves and the world in the best way possible. Instead of looking for God in the great powerful signs, let us look for God in the most powerful sign of all: His small, gentle voice, speaking to us from the Word.

The People were called to Serve

The Hungry

Rev. Jared Buss

Pittsburgh New Church; September 7, 2025

Readings: Matthew 25:31-46; Secrets of Heaven §4955

Video:

 Text:

            In the teachings of the New Church we’re told that we’re not born for our own sake, but for the sake of others; that is, we’re not born to live for ourselves alone, but for others (TCR §406). That is a clear message. A challenging message, at times—because everybody sometimes wants life to be all about themselves. But the truth of this teaching is self-evident.

            And of course, this teaching is an exact echo of what the Lord said in the reading from Matthew 25: that He wants us to serve His people, and that those who choose not to serve have chosen the path of unhappiness. So if we’re serious about living a Godly life, the question isn’t whether or not we’ll serve somebody other than ourselves; the question is how will we serve?

            We’re told that the Lord’s kingdom is a kingdom of uses,[1] and also that the variety in His kingdom is endless.[2] It follows that the uses we can serve—or the ways that we can choose to answer the Lord’s call—are pretty much endless. In other words, you get to decide for yourself how you’re going to answer that call: the church and the priesthood aren’t here to tell you how to serve. The thing that will unite those who worship here and make them one church isn’t serving the same uses but going to the Lord together, asking for wisdom and the strength to serve.

            But there are principles from the Word that should lead and shape all of our efforts to serve. One of those principles is that the Lord really wants us to minister to our neighbors’ spiritual needs as well as to their natural needs. If you look at what the teachings of the New Church have to say about that story from Matthew 25, that principle comes up over and over again. The conditions that the Lord names, the needs that He asks us to meet, are real, visible needs that people have; and these words that the Lord says also have a deeper meaning, and on that deeper level He’s teaching us how we can minister to people’s interior needs, with the goal of supporting them on a journey towards heaven. This deeper level is very much something that we should bear in mind when we go to the Lord, to ask Him what He’s calling us to do.

            With all that said, we’ll turn to the reading that’s on the back of the worship handout, which is taken from the book Secrets of Heaven. This reading is all about the levels of meaning within the acts of service that the Lord names in Matthew 25. We read: [from §4955.] Something to be clear on, at this point, is that this passage is not saying that the Lord wants us to serve in deeper ways instead of ministering to people’s physical needs. The point is simply that there are layers to what the Lord says to us. To really listen to Him is to listen to all the layers of His commandments. The reading continues: [conclude reading].

            So all of the different needs named in the Word describe an external need, and they symbolize an internal need. And understanding those internal needs, and how they’re different from one another, and how they’re related to the physical needs that represent them, is really useful—because, as the reading says, then we know “what to do for one person, and what for another.” A hungry person and a person who lacks clothing are alike, in that they both need something; but the things they need are different, and if we want to be helpful we need to understand that difference. You can’t eat clothing and you can’t wear food.

            Internal needs work the same way. Loneliness and ignorance need to be addressed differently. Everybody knows that you don’t want advice when all you want is a hug, and vice versa. If we’re willing to pay attention to what the Lord says about these internal needs, then we can enter this arena equipped with wisdom—and wisdom gives us an ability to really help people. It should go without saying that ministering to people’s internal needs can have a profound effect on their happiness. The world sometimes speaks as though external needs are all that matter. External needs do matter—it’s hard to feel truly happy if you’re starving. But it’s also true that people can have all of their external needs met, they can lead physically comfortable lives, and still be unhappy. And when all’s said and done, happiness comes from within. Internal peace can triumph over a bad external situation, but that isn’t true the other way around. So, again, the point is that ministering to people’s hearts and minds and spirits is powerful. The point is that because we have the Word we have the opportunity to learn how to minister that way, and that opportunity is worth some thought.

            Today’s sermon is the first in a series of six sermons on the “classes of the neighbor” that the Lord names in Matthew 25: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. Each sermon is going to focus on one of these needs, and on what it means in its deeper sense, and on what we can do to minister to that need.

So we are going to spend a little bit of time today talking specifically about the hungry, but not that much time—partly because we don’t have that much time, and partly because hunger is probably the easiest of these needs to understand on a deeper level. We kind of already know what spiritual hunger is: in everyday speech we already talk about being hungry for affection. The teachings of the New Church say that spiritual food is love and charity, [3] and the hungry, in the spiritual sense, are those who want spiritual food. Secrets of Heaven says that the hungry mean “those led by affection to desire good” (§4956). The hungry are people who want goodness, and goodness is love and charity. It’s worth noting that people sometimes want to be loved in unhealthy ways: they want to be put first, or they want to be validated whether they do right or wrong. Those are hungers, but not hungers that we’re called to feed. They’re like cravings for junk food, or maybe even cravings for addictive substances. The Lord wants us to feed people with things that are good for them. One teaching says, “To hunger and thirst therefore signifies to hunger and thirst for such things as pertain to eternal life or give that life, and these, in general, have reference to the good of love and the truth of faith” (AE §386.27). Good spiritual food is food that leads or contributes in some way to eternal life. It’s food that sustains a person on the road to eternal life.

How to meet the needs of the hungry is, for the most part, something that we already know—or at least know the basics of. The only thing to say about feeding those who are physically hungry is that it’s important, even though in this sermon we’re focusing on spiritual hunger. This is most obvious if you imagine telling someone who’s physically starving, “I love you, but you can’t have any of my food.” That doesn’t ring true. Physical hunger is a real need, and it is present in our neighborhoods, and if you feel called to minister to that need the pastors will gladly direct you to some resources. There are lots of organizations out there doing good work.

When it comes to ministering to spiritual hunger, again we already know the basics of what we need to do: those who need love should be loved. And if the Lord is with us, loving people is something we can do. It does take wisdom to figure out the best way to love somebody in a specific situation: Does this person want my friendship? Do they want to be comforted? Do they just want to be treated with respect? But it’s also generally true that making an effort to show somebody that you care about them is a good thing to do, even if you don’t get the details just right. It is important to bear in mind that good spiritual food is food that sustains a person on the road to eternal life. How do we make sure that that’s the kind of food we’re sharing? Here are three more observations about feeding the hungry:

1.       We can’t expect the love that we show people to sustain them forever. It’s the same as it is with feeding physical hunger: giving a physically hungry person a meal won’t keep them full forever. It won’t fix all of their problems. But it’s still a good thing to do.

2.       The second observation is closely related to the first: we can’t feed everybody. Sometimes giving food to a needy person can kick off a little crisis of conscience, because we immediately becomes aware of all the other needy people that we aren’t ministering to. But if you follow that thought, what comes to light is that there are way more hungry people in this world than we could ever feed. Even if you spent every cent you have on food and gave it all away, hunger would still exist. What this means is that it can’t be our job to feed everybody. We can’t do everything, but we need to do something. God will be the one who holds everything; we need to serve somehow. It’s okay to focus on a specific ministry; we can’t dedicate our lives to every good cause. But we should keep our eyes open, because sometimes the Lord will put people in our paths and call us to serve them in ways that take us outside our comfort zone.

3.       The third observation is that if we want to feed those who are spiritually hungry, one of the best things we can do is work through the process of repentance. Repentance is all about uprooting selfishness and getting rid of it, so that love from the Lord can flow in. How can we share good love if we aren’t receiving good love? To repent is to go over the shelves in our spirits and clean out all of the expired food, all the moldy vegetables. Then the Lord can stock our shelves with good things.

After we sing our next hymn, the sacrament of the Lord’s Holy Supper will be celebrated. All adults here are invited to participate in the sacrament, if they feel called to do so. We’ve been talking about feeding the hungry, and that’s exactly what the Holy Supper is all about. The bread and the wine of the sacrament symbolize the Lord’s love and wisdom, or His willingness and His ability to save. If we want to become useful servants of the Lord, then going to Him and asking Him to save us from the evils that we find within, and to feed us with heavenly food, is perhaps the most powerful thing that we can do. Ultimately, the bread that sustains on the road to heaven is His alone to give. He says, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).

Amen.

[1] E.g. SH §997; HH §387; DP §26

[2] E.g. SH §§3744, 7236, 9002; ML §35

[3] E.g. SH §§680, 3478, 4217