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Preached on 09-26-99

MANNA

A Sermon by the Rev. Patrick A. Rose

"And the sons of Israel saw, and they said a man to his brother, This is manna, for they knew not what is was. And Moses said to them, This is the bread which Jehovah has given you to eat." (Ex. 16:15)

OUR THIRD LESSON, FROM THE ARCANA COELESTIA, is one of the best known and best loved of all the passages in the Writings. It speaks of the stream of Divine Providence. "They who are in the stream of Providence are all the time carried along toward everything that is happy, whatever may be the appearance of the means; . . . " (AC 8478:4).

It is a beautiful passage -- one which brings comfort to the human heart. Life in this world is not easy. There are difficulties, hardships, and even tragedies. And yet despite this, despite "the appearance of the means," the Lord is leading us constantly towards eternal happiness.

It is a teaching we need to remember. We need to remember that the path to happiness passes, at times, through states of hardship, states of unhappiness. Times of difficulty, times of misery, are states we would prefer to avoid. They can, though, be times when we grow spiritually. Indeed, they can be an opportunity to change the way we live.

Certainly this is true of natural hardship. We might be so proud of what we have, so proud of what we have accomplished. We may have a sense that we ourselves are completely in control, and completely the masters of our own destiny. Then, all of a sudden, we encounter adversity. We come face to face with problems that are beyond our control. We feel helpless. And in such a state we are led to reflect, and to make a choice. Knowing just how helpless we really are, we can choose to place our trust in the Lord rather than in ourselves.

The same is true, on a deeper level, of spiritual hardship. Just as person has a tendency to think that he has control over his worldly fortune, so too, he tends to think that he is in complete control of whatever goes on within his own mind, within his own spirit.

Now it is certainly true that we are the ones who decide whether or not we will go to heaven, or go to hell. We have complete freedom of choice in this regard. The choice to go to heaven, though, cannot be separated from a choice to follow the Lord. If we choose to follow Him, then He will bless us with heavenly love; if not, then we condemn ourselves. Our tendency is, though, to imagine a third choice. We tend to think that instead of following the Lord, we will somehow find our own way into heaven, without His help and guidance.

Much of the process of regeneration centers around this very issue. The process of regeneration begins with repentance -- we must choose whether or not we will obey the Lord's commandments. Nevertheless, once we have chosen and determined to resist what is evil, we then face this other, deeper issue. Will we trust the Lord to lead us along the path we have chosen, or will we insist upon leading ourselves?

This is the issue which confronted the Israelites. The Israelites had certainly left Egypt willingly enough. They were only too eager to escape the bonds of slavery. But once out of Egypt, they had little confidence in the leading of the Lord. They had their own ideas as to the way things should be; and they constantly complained about where the Lord was leading them.

It is the same with us. The repeated complaints of the Israelites represent a series of temptations -- temptations in which we experience doubts about the way the Lord is leading us. We have our own ideas about how the Lord should go about leading us towards heaven, ideas that result, for the most part, from our own ignorance.

Where is it that we want to go? Where is it that we want the Lord to lead us? We want to go to heaven, don't we? This is why we make the effort to compel ourselves to shun evils as sins against the Lord. Yet do we really know what heaven is like? We do not. We cannot fully know heaven until we have experienced it for ourselves. We think of heaven in terms of our present state, and our past experience. We tend to think about it in a very external and even selfish way. We think of the beautiful houses, the beautiful clothes, the beautiful landscape. And though we know that heaven is, in essence, an internal delight which comes only through serving others, our focus is upon ourselves, and upon how happy we will be when we get there.

We therefore have this mistaken view of heaven and of heavenly happiness. We know that the Lord, in His Providence, is leading us towards happiness. We are thinking, though, in terms external happiness. And when such external happiness seems to elude us, we then begin to doubt the leading of the Lord.

In order to bring us into heaven, the Lord has to lead us out of one kind of happiness into another. And during this period, as we are passing from one kind of happiness towards another, we experience a loss of delight. This loss of delight is represented by the hunger that was experienced by the Israelites as they traveled through the wilderness.

Their hunger is said to represent the deprivation of good. When we sense good, we sense it as delight. We say that something is good if it is delightful to us. In order to lead us from natural good into spiritual good, the Lord must allow us to be deprived of natural delight for a time. We find ourselves feeling miserable. This state is a necessary stage along the path of regeneration. And yet we feel, at the time, as if life itself has lost its meaning.

The trouble we experience comes from the fact that to follow the Lord means that we must give up what we ourselves would want. We lose the very thing we love the most -- doing what we want to do. This is why we, as did the Israelites, lust after the fleshpots of Egypt. "Flesh" signifies what is our own. We hunger after the delight we sensed when we followed the promptings of our own desires. Indeed, we come to the point at which we wonder whether there can ever be any real lasting sense of delight in doing the Lord's will, when, it seems, we constantly have to deny ourselves. Perhaps we are doing what is good, but it doesn't feel good to us. If this is what heaven is like, perhaps it would indeed be better to remain in Egypt.

The underlying reason for this lack of satisfaction, this lack of delight in the doing of good, lies in the fact that what is internal has not yet descended into what is external. To put it another way, we may indeed be doing what is good, but we do not as yet sense the delight of this good on the level of the external conscious mind.

The external mind is, in a way, a paradox. It is that level of the mind we are aware of while we live in this world. There it is that we notice things. It is there that we notice whether we are happy, or whether we are sad, for it is there that delight, or lack of delight, is experienced. The external mind, then, is where we actually feel happiness. At the same time, though, it is this same external level of the mind which tends to lead us away from happiness. Because delight is felt in the external mind, we tend to think that what is external is the actual source of this delight. This is precisely why so many people seek happiness in external delights and pleasures. They seek to satisfy themselves by focussing upon themselves and upon the pleasures of the world.

The trouble with such an approach is that it is merely external. It lacks any depth. Certainly, when things go well, such people can experience a temporary sense of delight. But this delight, originating as it does, from self, and from selfish pleasures, is only a facade of true happiness. The Writings use the example of a painting -- a painting of a flower. The painting might look real -- it might look like a real flower. If, though, one carefully examines the underlying substance of a painting of a flower, it is seen to be only a "mixture of earthy particles lying in confusion" (AC 8480:1). On the other hand, the more closely one examines the underlying structure of a living flower, the more wonderful it appears. "Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these."

A similar relationship exists between merely external delight on the one hand, and happiness which comes from the Lord on the other. One is shallow and temporary. The other lasts forever. Delight which is merely external and selfish has no real depth. Happiness from the Lord, on the other hand, flows into the inmost levels of the human mind, and from there it descends, filling the whole mind with spiritual life and with indescribable joy.

But still, at first, this spiritual delight is not felt, for it has not yet descended to the external level of the mind. And so there comes this point, along the path of regeneration, when we begin to realize how superficial are the delights and pleasures of the world. We sense the need for something deeper, something of more value than purely external things. At the same time, though, the path of religion seems to hold little satisfaction for us. We may do the Lord's will, and this is good. But it does not really delight us. Where is this happiness that is supposed to come from following the Lord?

It is something quite different than we might think. As we have noted, we cannot really know what it is like until we experience it. We are promised happiness by the Lord. The Israelites were also given a promise. They were told that on the next day, in the morning, they would see the "glory of Jehovah" (Ex. 16:7). Then they would have as much bread as they wanted. Probably most of them imagined some kind of amazing miracle would occur the next day.

What they saw the next morning, though, was not startling, not earth-shattering. They saw dew on the ground. And as this dew evaporated, it left behind round things on the ground. They were white, and were so small that it looked as if there had been a frost. "What is this?" they asked. They didn't know what it was. They called it "manna." "Manna" simply means "What?" in Hebrew. Imagine them standing around looking at this strange-looking food the Lord had sent them.

This food, though, represented heavenly good. There gradually comes a time when the good of heaven begins to come down into the external conscious mind, and then we begin to consciously sense a completely new kind of happiness -- a happiness we had not expected.

We tend, by nature, to be wrapped up in ourselves. Even when we are doing what is good, there is a strong sense of self lurking in the background. We are concerned about ourselves, in one way or another, in virtually everything that we do. This is what delights us and motivates us. And this is why we tend to think of heavenly happiness in terms of ourselves. In heaven we will be happy. In heaven we will experience delight. Now it is most certainly true that heaven is filled, to fullness, with the most wonderful delights, external as well as internal. But the deepest delight we experience there is the happiness of others. Heaven is, first and foremost, a state in which others are happy, and our deepest joy will be contributing to their happiness.

A selfish person has no concept of such happiness. He cannot imagine a state in which the only real point is to forget about himself and enjoy making others happy instead. He calls such happiness, "Manna," because he does not know what it is. This, though, is the happiness of heaven. A completely unselfish delight in the happiness of others brings more joy than we could ever imagine.

We can only gradually begin to experience such happiness. The manna descended quietly as the dew. And just as the dew vivifies those plants on which it settles, so too we are gradually vivified -- we are made alive -- by a new sense of delight. We begin to feel something from within ourselves. We begin to experience a sense of peace, a contentment, in giving ourselves up completely to doing the Lord's will, and dedicating ourselves to the service of others. We begin to forget about ourselves.

And this is the joy of heaven. Heaven is not to be thought of as a place where we will be happy. Heaven is where others will be happy. Heaven is, in essence, a state in which we experience happiness, joy and delight in bringing happiness to other people. With each passing day, the angels of heaven forget about themselves more and more. They focus, more and more completely, upon bringing happiness to others. This is the very center of their lives, the very thing they live for.
And it is this happiness to which the Lord, in His Providence, is leading us, every moment of our lives. If we but trust in the Lord, remain obedient to His commandments, and so place ourselves in the stream of His Providence, then, no matter how bad things might seem at times, we will be led, in the end, to the happiness of heaven itself. We will be given the joy, the blessing, of bringing happiness to others to all eternity.

Amen.

Lessons: Ex. 16:1-15; Matt. 6:24-34; AC 8478:3-4.