new church life: march/april 2015
so that together they can become one flesh,
interacting, as Swedenborg has so effectively
put it, like the heart and lungs. And through
genuine commitment they can eventually
make one mind, a united love and wisdom in a
life lived for others.
To talk of two “likes” – two people of
the same sex – marrying each other, is as
nonsensical as trying to join the north poles of
two magnets. To use Kipling’s words, “never the twain shall meet.”
For Jesus, marriage was sacrosanct. In truth, it was – it is – heaven. The
Lord, in fact, likened heaven to marriage in parables. His early followers
understood this. They understood the centrality of marriage to the Divine
provision of human happiness. Consequently, Paul said in a letter to Christians
in Corinth:
For Jesus, marriage
was sacrosanct. In
truth, it was –
it is – heaven.
I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people….
Don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not
be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor
sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners
will inherit the kingdom of God. (I Corinthians 6: 9, 10)
What this comes down to is that there is no place in that eternal human
community after death called heaven for anyone who puts his or her own
personal pleasure ahead of the welfare of others. And is this not what the
attempt to join a man with a man, or a woman with a woman – mentally and
physically – comes down to?
Sexual love between two members of the same sex is essentially selfsatisfying. Consequently this unnatural conjunction is both inimical to the
welfare of the individual men and women involved, and is destructive of true
community and the welfare of society as a whole. There would be no loving
human family on earth if all were homosexuals.
So it is that while in the Word “Sodom” symbolically stands for the evil
that consists in the worst form of adultery, more broadly it means every evil
that stems from self-love and the dreadful things that well up out of it. (See
Arcana Coelestia 2220:1)
But just how, one may ask, can same-sex marriage actually be bad for
human beings? The answer is that it is harmful because it misuses pleasure
and therefore ultimately cannot do other than bring on unhappiness.
That’s the way it is with pleasure. Pleasure – supremely sexual pleasure
– in itself is good. It is a gift of God, of His Divine love. Pleasure is misused,
however, whenever it doesn’t serve its God-given purpose.
Take taste: The purpose of taste is to motivate us to eat so that our bodies
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