Spiritual Momentum | Rev. Derek P. Elphick

Well, good morning and welcome to our Palm Sunday festival service and welcome to those of you joining us online.

Before we begin, I just want to tell you where the Palm Sunday processional will come in.

It'll come in after these readings and after the family talk this morning.

You'll be invited to rise and file out, uh file out on the side aisles here, go back, file down to the back there, and then process up the center aisle.

And the palm fronds are on the tables at the very back.

So today we begin with the account of the triumphal entry as it is recorded in the Gospel of Luke.

And it came to pass when Jesus came near to Bethparge and Bethany at the mountain called Olivet, that he sent two of his disciples, saying, Go into the village opposite you, where as you enter you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever sat.

Loose him and bring him here.

And if any one asks you, Why are you loosing him?

thus you shall say to him, Because the Lord has need of him.

So those who were sent departed and found it just as he had said to them.

But as they were loosing the colt, the owners of it said to them, Why are you loosing the colt?

And they said, The Lord has need of him.

Then they brought him to Jesus, and they threw their own garments on the colt, and as and they set Jesus on him.

And as he went, they spread their clothes on the road.

Then as he was now drawing near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying, Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven, and glory in the highest.

And some of the Pharisees called out to him from the crowd, Teacher, rebuke your disciples.

But he answered and said to them, I tell you that if these should keep silent, the very stones on the road will burst out cheering.

Amen.

And two passages from the teachings of the new church, one from the work True Christianity, and the other from the book Heaven and Hell, both of which describe how our faith can grow and gather momentum.

This idea of spiritual momentum that we'll be talking about in a moment.

Since faith in its essence is truth, our faith becomes more spiritual and more perfectly spiritual depending on the quantity, the quantity of truths we have and how well they fit together.

That is, our faith becomes less and less sense-oriented and earthly because it then rises up into a higher region of our mind.

From that perspective, it sees below itself a host of things in the nature of the world that strengthen and support it.

True faith, achieved through a quantity of truths that fit together like strands in a cable, also becomes more enlightening, perceivable, obvious, and clear.

True faith also becomes more easily united with acts of goodwill, and therefore more alienated from evils and progressively more remote from the enticements of the eye and the cravings of the flesh.

Therefore, faith becomes truly happy.

Above all, it becomes more powerful against evils and falsities, and therefore more and more living and empowered to save.

It is not so difficult to lead the life of heaven as people think, because it is simply a matter of recognizing when something attractive comes up that we know is dishonest and unfair, that this is not to be done because it is against the divine commandments.

If we get used to thinking like this and from this familiarity form a habit, then we are gradually united to heaven.

To the extent that we are united to heaven, the higher levels of our minds are opened, and to the extent that they are opened, we see what is dishonest and unfair, and to the extent that we see this, these qualities can be dispelled.

For no evil can be banished unless it is seen.

This is a state we can enter because of our freedom, since everyone is free to think in this way.

And once the process has started, the Lord quickens or strengthens all that is good in us, and causes us not only to see evils, but to refuse them and eventually to turn away from them.

This is the meaning of the Lord's words.

My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Amen.

Here end our lessons.

Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.

So I'd like us to briefly think about this idea or this concept of spiritual momentum.

And let me explain what I mean by momentum.

We all experience it.

Probably most of you have had the experience, if you were born and raised in this town, of running down the cathedral hill right behind you.

And as you run down the cathedral hill, there's momentum.

It's like usually it can take over and you might actually take a tumble.

So it's that feeling of just of just being buoyed along or even pushed along where there's very little effort.

So this idea of momentum, it happens in lots of ways.

For us, we might be simply reading a book where we really get absorbed in the book, and our mind is just sort of effortless.

We lose all track of time.

And it's just we've entered this whole different world in reading a book.

Or we're involved in a task or some sort of project or some kind of activity, and we're what we call we're on a roll.

We're on a roll, we're in a zone.

It's just time seems to just go by, and we don't even recognize how much time has gone by because of this momentum that we have.

So there's this mental, uh, mental kind of momentum and a physical kind of momentum.

And it's a very powerful thing.

Well, this there's an equivalent one that we have in our spiritual lives.

And it's captured so beautifully in this story of the Lord riding into Jerusalem as king, what has come to be known as Palm Sunday.

To all appearances, it seems like nothing has changed.

The Lord is riding in on a donkey, and that was unusual, and people really were hailing him as a king, rightly so.

But right afterwards, he went back to teaching in the synagogue, healing people, gathering disciples.

So on the surface, it seemed like nothing had changed.

But we get a little glimpse, sort of a glimpse behind the curtain, of something that had changed.

Because in the Lord's own life, what the Lord was, it was coming to the end of his life on earth.

There was just what's called, we're celebrating Palm Sunday today, and then there's Easter week, and the Lord rises on the third day of the Sunday.

And so we got a little glimpse of something that had happened.

The Lord had almost completed his work, his work of glorifying or making divine the very body, the very mind that he had received here on earth.

And so there was an incredible power that was coming out of him and all around him.

And this is the part I just love, is because in that story, the Pharisees, some of the Pharisees said when people started cheering, and in a moment we're going to have our celebration coming forward with the palm fronds and recognizing the Lord as King.

People were cheering, and the and the Pharisees said, called out to the Lord, Jesus, rebuke or restrain your disciples.

And in a way it was sort of laughable.

Stop these disciples from cheering, from being happy, from being able to recognize you as the king and seeing that you have the power to save, from seeing the mighty works that you have done.

Shut them up, stop, close down the festivities.

And it's laughable in the sense that it was too late.

The Lord's power, the Lord's momentum, the things that the Lord had taught people, the things that people had seen, was so powerful now there was no stopping it.

There was this spiritual momentum.

And that's a very, very powerful thing.

Now, in the reading today that you heard, there was a challenging statement that said, our faith, basically to summarize, our faith grows stronger and has more momentum the more truths it has.

It talks about the quantity of truths.

And we might say, well, isn't it the quality of truths that we have from the Lord's Word that matter?

Is quantity really that important?

Well, if you stop and think about it, if we're talking about truth, every single truth from the Lord's Word is of the highest quality.

So that's not the issue.

But why would we learn about the fact that the more truths we have, the stronger our faith is, and internally, the more momentum we would have?

Because people sometimes say, they look at the Bible, and you have a Bible in front of you there in the little pew slot, people sometimes say, why so many words?

If the message of the Lord's word is to love the Lord and love the neighbor, why do we have 66 books bound together in the Bible?

And people might say, Why do we have 30 volumes of New Church teachings?

Isn't that a bit redundant?

Why so many words?

And what we learn is that there's one reason for it, and it is the presence of evil in and around us.

This is why we need to, sort of like uh arrows in a quiver, we need to build up as many truths from the Lord's word as we can, because we need to do battle against evil.

And evil in and around us is, if you think about it, it makes us into very poor listeners.

The Lord has to say many things in many different ways to be able to get through to us.

And we say, oh, yes, that's right.

Um evil pits us against each other.

Evil causes chaos.

We know these things, but what we may not realize, or what's wonderful to be reminded of, is that when we gather more and more truths, we are become stronger in our faith, stronger in our ability to withstand uh the negative thoughts and feelings that come to us from around us and inside of us.

And I just want to just very quickly go through that reading that we had about what the quantity of truths does in terms of giving us the spiritual momentum that we crave.

We all want to, deep down inside, be able to move forward, to have forward motion, to be able to not get bogged down in negative thoughts and feelings.

And so it says, it's almost like a domino effect.

The more truths that we can get from the Lord's word, the more our faith will become less and less sense-oriented and earthly.

The more truths that we have from the Lord's Word, specific truths, uh, the higher regions of our mind will be opened.

The more specific truths that we have from the Lord's Word will enable us to see confirming evidence of the Lord in nature, we'll start to see more and more of the Lord's wonder in nature around us.

We will find it much easier to reach out to others with acts of goodwill, because if the word just simply said, love the Lord and love the neighbor, Amen.

That would not be enough.

We would say, well, how?

I tried and it didn't work.

Or I don't want to love this person because they've done something that is really upsetting to me.

We need many truths over many years to find ways to navigate this world that we live in and the interactions that we find ourselves in.

This is why we need many truths.

And truth is not a this this acquisition of many truths is not an intellectual exercise, it's not an academic performance.

The Lord's truth is really the Lord's love speaking.

And anyone who loves someone will try all kinds of ways to be able to reach them, even if they've stopped listening, or even if they've given up.

That is why we need so many of these truths.

And the list goes on, but it's a cascading effect.

But what a beautiful thing that we have the Lord in his word in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and in the teachings of the new church.

And these truths and these sayings are not in isolation, they're not just random sayings, they're all connected to each other.

They're all connected to each other and they build and build.

And so that's why we gather them, because as they build, we have more and more momentum, and we can figure out very special ways in which to be able to love and serve our neighbor and ultimately love and serve the Lord.

Amen.