Readings: Genesis 41; Matthew 6:19-21; Arcana Coelestia 5342

“And all the land of Egypt was famished, and the people cried to Pharaoh for bread; and Pharaoh said to all Egypt, Go to Joseph; what he says to you, do.” (Genesis 41:55)

There was a famine throughout all the land.  Today, and in this part of the world, it may be hard for us now to imagine what a famine is like. Imagine the hungriest you’ve ever been, and then imagine that kind of hunger lasting over weeks, months, years. That’s the kind of famine we can picture taking place in our story, and the famine does not last one season, but seven long years.  But hope was not entirely lost – because there was food in the land of Egypt.  We can imagine people from all the nations around pouring into Egypt to receive sustenance – just enough food to survive for a little while longer, until the famine passed.  There was food in Egypt, but the famine was there too – the famine was unavoidable, but could be survived due to the seven years of plenty that came before.

But before any of that, before even the years of plenty began, Pharaoh had his dreams.  He dreamt of seven fat, beautiful cows that came up from the river, and ate grass by the river bank.  But after them came up seven skinny, ugly cows, that ate up those seven fat, good cows.  And again he dreamed: seven good ears of grain grew on one stalk – but after them came up seven dry, withered husks, and consumed the good ears of grain.  Both were disturbing dreams, and Pharaoh wanted to know the interpretation; but none of his counselors was able to tell him.  At that moment, Pharaoh’s butler remembered Joseph, who had interpreted his dream in prison; and after the butler had spoken to Pharaoh, Joseph was called up from prison to interpret the dream.  Joseph told Pharaoh the dream’s meaning: that there would be seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine.  Beyond this, though, Joseph told Pharaoh what he should do with the knowledge from this dream: appoint someone over the land of Egypt, and appoint governors, to store up the grain during the good years, and then to distribute it during the bad.  Pharaoh saw the wisdom in Joseph’s advice, and made Joseph himself that governor over all of Egypt.

Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of Pharaoh was accurate – but it was a natural interpretation, not a spiritual one.  For the Word to be the Word, everything in it must have something to do with God, a deeper meaning about love to the Lord and love to the neighbour.  And there is a deeper meaning to the dreams of Pharaoh, and a deeper meaning to the events in the story, even though they really did take place as described.  Pharaoh’s dreams at first described a state of plenty, of good things.  They foretold seven years of plenty, when the crops yielded abundantly and there was more than enough food for everyone.  And this described something that happens in our lives.  We have times of plenty.  Every one of us experiences states where things go well – where we feel the Lord’s presence, where things come naturally to us, where we look forward to the day every morning.

The images in the dreams – the good cows and the good ears of grain – specifically represent things we learn and know.  The cows represent a deeper sort of knowledge, the things we know but might have a hard time putting into words; the ears of grain represent the more external knowledges, but still knowledges that contain goodness and love within them, just as an ear of corn contains the kernels of corn within it (see Arcana Coelestia 5198, 5212).  The cows are said to be beautiful and fat.  All true beauty, the Writings say, comes from an affection for truth, a love for truth.  And the fatness of the cows represents love to the neighbour, or charity.  These images are all images of true ideas that we learn with eagerness and affection, because they have to do with love.

And so these seven years, the seven cows, the seven ears of grain, represent times in our lives when we are seeing truth from an affection for it.  We learn about the ideals of marriage, and we love that picture, and we see how it could be possible.  We learn about what it means to be a good parent, by reading the Word and by seeing the example of people we admire.  We learn all the things it takes to follow the Lord: to follow the Ten Commandments, and to acknowledge that it is only with His help that we’re able to do this.  The state described by these seven years of plenty is a state where it’s not uncommon for us to say, “Yeah, I get it!” or “Hey, I just realized this,” or, “Listen to what I just read, isn’t it incredible?”

We all have these states, where we’re learning truth with affection.  Think of a time even when you were a child, when you were learning about something that touches your heart even now: that your parents loved you, that God loved you, that you were being taken care of, that there is a hope for true marriage love, that there is a heaven.  When children learn these things, they’re not just abstract concepts, and it’s not a struggle for them to accept them: of course a person can get married and live happily ever after, of course I’ll go to heaven, of course the Lord loves me.

Even in adulthood, we do have states where things come more easily than at other times.  And Joseph gives Pharaoh advice about these times: if you’re in a state of plenty, appoint someone to store those good things up.  In this story, Joseph represents something deeper in ourselves, and in the highest sense He represents something of the Lord with us.  And the truth is that anytime we’re learning truth with affection, the Lord is storing those truths up within our minds.  But we can also try to make sure we are open to that.  A truth is stored up within us when we see how it can apply to life and when we want to apply it to life.  And so in those good states, we can do several things to ensure that the Lord stores up those good things in us.  We can make an effort to immediately take what we know and see how it leads to greater love for the neighbour.  We can make an effort to learn as much as we can from the Lord.  And we can remind ourselves to thank the Lord for the good things He is blessing us with.  And the Lord does store up every single good and true feeling and thought that we have – we never lose those.

There are seven years of plenty.  But immediately following those seven years of plenty, the famine comes.  Remember, this is not merely talking about a time of hunger – this is talking about a time of complete desolation, of starvation and need.  And as much as we would like to avoid it – and it’s true that we do not want to seek it out – there will be times in our spiritual lives when we experience spiritual famine, spiritual desolation.  The Lord Himself experienced it, many times; He cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46) – and He said, “I thirst” (John 19:28).  The Lord’s despair and thirst came from an inability, in that moment, to see how His goal could possibly be accomplished, to see the truth that the human race could be redeemed.  And just as there are times when we learn the truth and see it clearly, there are times in our lives when we feel blind and hungry.

Remember, those good cows and those good ears of grain represent things we know, things that come into our minds with affection.  But they are not the only things that we take in with our minds.  Even as we learn truth and rejoice in it, we have voices from hell pouring in thoughts and ideas that are harmful and destructive – those seven skinny cows, those seven parched ears of grain.  These are the ideas that say, “Look around you – what makes you think there’s anything other than the physical world?  We have a physical explanation for everything.”  We look around and see all the failed relationships, all the broken marriages, and we think that there’s no such thing as true, lasting love.  And those ideas start to eat up the good and true ideas we had earlier.  We lose our ability to see things that were so clear before.  We thought we knew what it meant to be a good parent, but now we find ourselves at a loss.  We thought we knew what it meant to love other people, but now we find that as much as we want to, we don’t know how.  We experience these times of desolation, when we want so, so much to follow the Lord – and yet the truth seems to be lacking.

These are times when there’s a disconnect between all those ideals we had before, and the way we experience our everyday natural lives.  The truth is, all those good things and true ideas we had before have not gone away.  They’ve been stored up more deeply inside of us, and at times we catch glimpses of them still.  But they can seem so foreign, so distant from where we are now, that they might as well not be there at all.  And often, we can’t even catch glimpses.  The Writings say that those true ideas tied to affections for goodness are drawn up within us for a reason.  There’s a reason for desolation – even though the Lord never wants us to have to experience desolation, He allows it so that good can come of it.  One primary reason that the Lord allows this to take place is that without experiencing times of famine, we do not really appreciate the times of plenty.  By contrast, we’re able to be grateful when we do have those times of plenty.  Also, by times of desolation – which the Word also refers to as times of temptation – we learn that there is nothing good or true that comes from ourselves.  Before experiencing those times, we can think that we know the things we do because we’re good people, or wise from ourselves.  But when those certainties are taken away – when everything is brought into doubt – then we realize that we are not in control of those things.  They don’t belong to us.  We don’t earn salvation – the Lord grants it to us, by giving us the ability to love Him and follow His truth.  By going through times of desolation, we come to a state where we can acknowledge that everything we have, we have because of the Lord’s mercy. And when they return to us, they are softer, more gentle – we do not hold them with pride, but with gratitude and humility.

But what do we do when we are in those times of famine?  Even if we have some idea of why the Lord allows them, we still feel the pangs of starvation.  We still have that desire to love, but lack the knowledge of how to do so.  And those goods and truths that are stored up within us, again, seem remote – the storehouses of Egypt are far away.  What can we do for those true ideas to come back down to the natural level of our levels, into our everyday reality, rather than just being a fading memory?

The people of Egypt did not have immediate access to the food that had been stored up.  Pharaoh told them how they would receive it.  He said to them, “Go to Joseph, and what he says to you, do.”  The way for them to receive as much food as was useful for them was to go to Joseph and then act in obedience to him.  Now remember, Joseph in this story represents something deeper within us, specifically a love for the Lord within the spiritual level of our mind.  And for us to receive food in times of famine, we need to submit the lower levels of our minds, and the natural level of our lives, to something higher.  The book Arcana Coelestia describes it this way:

It is the internal man that should command, and the external that should obey, and that does obey when the man does not have the world as the end, but heaven, and does not have self as the end, but the neighbor, consequently when he regards bodily and worldly things as means and not as the end. (Arcana Coelestia 5368)

The way to submit our external lives to what is higher is to act based on principles of love toward our neighbour.

Now, in times of famine, it is not always easy to see how we can do that.  That is where the hunger is.  But even if we can’t see the specifics of what we should do in a given situation, we can at least act in obedience to this general rule: we ought to submit our own desires for pleasure and worldly things to a higher desire that we act in love toward our neighbour.  This does not mean we have to do away with everything we find enjoyable – but it does mean that we have to look as our own enjoyment – our relaxation, our fun, our pleasure – as only a means so that we can better serve others.

The thing, is, though, that when we do this it does not usually feel very connected to those higher ideals.  It takes compelling ourselves to shun evils as sins, and when we compel ourselves, it mostly feels like hard work, and it contains almost nothing of that inspirational, higher delight that we had in those times of plenty.  The reason for this is that when we seemingly compel ourselves, it is really something deeper within ourselves compelling us, our true selves – but we are mostly conscious on the level of our external selves in those times of famine, and so we feel like we’re being pushed around.  And being fed in times of famine is not the same as being fed in times of plenty.  We do not suddenly end the famine, we do not suddenly force truth to start coming easily again.  But when we compel ourselves to shun selfishness, to shun harsh thoughts and actions even toward people we don’t like, when we force ourselves not to give into the things we’ve always given into before – then we can be fed.  Slowly but surely, we start to see that those deeper things, the things we thought might never have been real, start to take root even in our everyday, normal interactions.

All this takes place, though, only if we acknowledge that these things do not come from ourselves.  It takes place only if we rely completely on the Lord Jesus Christ, praying to Him and acknowledging that He is the source of everything good.  Even that self-compulsion, which feels so much like it comes from us, is actually from the the Lord and all His angels stirring those good things in us, causing us to desire them.  We can’t determine when or how we will once again start to see the Lord around us, or to feel His presence; in fact, the Writings say that the Lord does not answer prayers for a temptation to end, because He knows that if it were ended early, it would do more harm than good for a person.  But we can trust that He will give us as much wisdom and as much love as we need for every day – our daily bread.  And we can trust that, even though it may take seven long years of famine, years of scraping through, the times of plenty will come again.

Joseph himself experienced these cycles again and again.  From being his father’s favourite son, he found himself a slave in Egypt; from being the head of Potiphar’s household, he found himself in Pharaoh’s dungeon.  He experienced times of plenty, followed by times of hardship.  And yet, he trusted that even in the times of hardship, the Lord was doing what was best for him.  Because of the famine, his brothers came from the land of Canaan to seek food – and Joseph was able to save them, to forgive them, and to be reconciled to them.  And in their reconciliation, Joseph expressed the great truth about times of desolation: although the Lord does not cause it, and the evil spirits who bring it about do so for evil causes, yet the Lord uses it for good.  When Joseph’s brothers feared for their lives because of the evil they had done to him, Joseph said to them, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 50:20).

Amen.

“And I will bring together the remnant of My flock out of all lands whither I have driven them, and will return them to their homes; and they shall be fruitful and multiply.” (Jeremiah 23:3)

The remnant will return, and be made fruitful.  The word “remnant” means those who remain.  It’s a promise at the heart of the Old Testament.  Every time the people is captured by an enemy and carried away from their homeland, the Lord promises that he will preserve those few who remain faithful.  He will take that remnant and return them to their land, and will rebuild His people from that small remnant.  Even before the time of Israel, we see the same thing play out in the story of Noah.  The entire world had become evil, and so the Lord sent a flood to destroy the world – but he preserved a few, those who had not completely shut off their interiors against Him.  A remnant was saved, and from them, the earth was repopulated.

The Writings for the New Church explain that in a deeper sense, these stories about remnants being protected and restored represents the way that even in the darkest times of a church, the Lord preserves a few who have not completely destroyed their faith and love in Him.  When the Lord raises up a New Church, it is raised up with that remnant of the old church, along with a people from outside of the church, who had not been able to twist the Lord’s Word because they had never heard it before.

It had been prophesied that when the Messiah came, He would save a remnant of His people, and establish them as the hope for the world.  At the time of the Lord’s birth, the people was in spiritual captivity.  Fewer and fewer people were able to tell right from wrong.  The religious leaders had placed their own traditions above the basic commandments of love and mercy and justice.  The world was becoming darker and darker, because the Lord’s Word was less and less able to reach people.  Meanwhile, the forces of hell were multiplying in the spiritual world, infesting even the lowest levels of heaven, where simple spirits were not able to distinguish between those who were truly good and those who were only pretending in order to get what they wanted.  Unless the Lord had come, to fight the forces of hell and to show Himself as a Divine Human, the human race would have been completely destroyed.

The world was dark.  But there was a remnant, a few who remained, who had not destroyed the goodness and truth in themselves.  These were mostly not the learned class, the priests and the rabbis, since these had perverted the teachings of the Lord.  Most of this remnant were simple people who were not experts in the Word, but who had some amount of natural goodness and natural understanding of truth.  But even though they had not destroyed everything good in themselves, they were still surrounded by that same darkness.  They did not have much knowledge, and not much goodness – only enough, enough that they were open to the Lord.

And so when Jesus was born, there were shepherds in the same country.  Shepherds in the Word usually represent people who teach and lead, and we still use this description – the word “pastor” actually just means “shepherd.”  But the teachers and leaders of Israel, the scribes and Pharisees and rabbis and priests, were mostly corrupt.  In our lesson from Jeremiah, the Lord made a promise that when He came, He would bring up good shepherds.  And these literal shepherds who the angels appeared to really did become the first preachers of the gospel, the good news that the Lord had come.

But at first, they were simple shepherds.  And in addition to representing teachers, shepherds represent an affection for truth within a person, since it is an affection for truth that inspires us to be taught and led.   The shepherds represent the kind of person or the attitude of being humble enough to acknowledge that they need truth.  They seem to have been part of that remnant.

But they were living in darkness – they were out watching their flock by night.  And this is not necessarily as peaceful a scene as it can sound: they’re literally described as “guarding a guard” over their sheep.  They were taking shifts to stay awake throughout the night to watch for whatever unknown predators might come to attack their sheep.  We can imagine that it was already a tense situation, to be sitting in darkness, not knowing what could come out of the darkness – a bear, or a wolf, or a lion.

But they were guarding their sheep.  They are a picture of true innocence – a trust and willingness to follow the Lord.  And we need to fight in defense of that innocence.  This is what these shepherds are pictured as doing – the light has gone, darkness has come on them – but they are still going to guard and protect whatever innocence they have left in themselves and the world.

We can imagine whatever shepherds were awake sitting up, peering out into the darkness, trying to stay awake, trying to catch a glimpse of any wild animals that might come and attack their sheep.  And while they’re straining to catch even the glimpse of a movement in the darkness – suddenly an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them.  And they feared a great fear.

Imagine that – being along in the darkness, and suddenly surrounded by an incredibly bright light, the glory of the Lord.  That glory is heavenly light; it is Divine truth.  And the first time a person really sees the truth, it can be overwhelming.  Swedenborg describes a time when person in the spiritual world heard something from the internal sense of the word – and his eyes filled with tears, and he was not even able to keep reading because he was so profoundly moved.  This is a picture of the kind of awe a person can experience as they realize for the first time in their lives: I am seeing the Lord here.  That is the glory of the Lord – the Lord’s Divine Truth.  And it can be almost frightening, because it is so intense, so brilliant, and so much bigger than our own idea of the truth.

But the angel said to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid.”  And he said, “Behold, I bring unto you good tidings of a great joy that will be to all the people.”  Great joy that would be to all the people.  This was the “good news,” or the gospel: that there would be great joy to all the people.  Literally, all the people here could be taken to mean all the people of Israel; but a people in the internal sense represents those who are willing to receive the truth of the Lord, and so this is a promise of great joy to all those who receive the Lord’s truth.  This is the Lord’s ultimate purpose in everything: we can talk about goodness and truth, we can talk about sin and evil, but the purpose of dealing with all those things is so that the Lord can join us to himself, and bless us to eternity in heaven – to give us great joy.

And where does that great joy come from?  The angels said to the shepherds, “For unto you is born this day a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord.”  When the angels said that this was “Christ, the Lord,” they were telling the shepherds two things: first, that the Christ, or the Messiah, had come.  This was the fulfillment of prophecies throughout the Old Testament: that an “anointed” one would come, who would save the people Israel, and bless the world.  The word “Christ” means anointed, as in the act of pouring oil over the head of a king.  And as a king, the Lord would rule with His Divine Truth.  This is the side of the Lord that ensures that justice is done, that there is fairness and rightness in the world.  But He was not just Christ – He was Christ the Lord.  “The Lord” was the word that Jews in those days used for “Jehovah” mentioned in the Old Testament, the name of God.  And as “the Lord,” this newborn baby was an embodiment of Divine Love – the Lord’s mercy, His compassion.  In this baby, as is written in Psalm 85, “mercy and truth have met together; justice and peace have kissed.”

And the angel told the shepherds that this would be a sign: they would find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  Those swaddling clothes represent those first, most basic truths – the truths of innocence, of trusting the Lord and following Him.  These would be the first truths those shepherds were able to grasp.  He would be lying in a manger, a feeding trough for horses.  A horse represents a person’s understanding – and so the Lord’s lying in a manger represents instruction from the Lord’s words.  Visiting the Lord in the manger represented the way that He would instruct those who wanted to be instructed with truths from His own Word.

But most importantly was that this was a newborn infant, a human being.  The people of the most ancient church were able to have a direct perception of the Lord, but since that time, people had had a cloudy image of who He was.  By coming as a human being – and throughout the process of His life, making that Human Divine – the Lord could enlighten even people who were not able to think about the most natural level.  He could save even them.

So these shepherds, who represent people who want to be good but don’t know how, were given hope of a Saviour.  But still, the remnant was only with a few – and maybe these shepherds still felt alone.  But suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, glorifying and praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”  Just as in the story of Elisha and his servant, when they saw that the Lord’s army vastly outnumbered the enemy army, the shepherds saw that they were not alone at all – that all the army of heaven was rejoicing at this birth.  And this was not an army that sought out war; instead, they declared, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men.”

So the shepherds had heard this good news – but they wanted to see it for themselves.  So the journeyed to where the Lord was, and saw the baby lying in a manger, just as the angel had said.  That manger, as a feeding trough, represents the Lord’s Word, through which the Lord feeds our mind just as the food in a manger feeds a horse.  And they made it known abroad – they went throughout the land to spread the good news – and they returned, “glorifying and praising God.”

So we see that these natural shepherds – who because they are simple, unlearned people, are humble enough to accept the Lord – we see them acting as spiritual shepherds, declaring the Lord’s glory, declaring the good news of the great joy that would be to all the people.  In the same way, the Lord later called simple fishermen to be His disciples, saying that they would become “fishers of men” – that is, that they would teach truth.  The shepherds didn’t have a deep, complex understanding of the Lord’s glorification, or the different levels of the Lord’s Divinity and His Humanity – but they knew enough: that He would redeem the world, that He would make it possible for people to be saved, and that He was the Lord.  They had that innocent desire to follow Him as the good shepherd.

And here we come to our place in the story.  At His birth, the Lord came to establish a new church that would worship Him as the one human God.  But along the way, that church lost its focus.  Kings and emperors began to use it as a justification for their own power.  They split God into three, and they lost the focus on love to the Lord and to the neighbour as the two primary things of worship.  And so, the Lord came again, but this time not in person.  He came in a revelation of Himself within the internal sense of the Word.  And in that, He helps us to see not only His body, but the deeper levels of His mind.  And He again has showed us what He showed those shepherds: that He is both human and Divine, and that because of this, He can be present with us.  And He comes to us as the glory in the clouds, the internal sense within the literal sense of the Word.  He comes when we seek for Him in His Word – when we see everything in His Word as an expression of His love and His wisdom, and as instruction for how to bring those into life.

He defeated the power of hell, and can now keep it in check to eternity.  But to receive that, we have to have the attitude of those shepherds.  If we think we know everything, the Lord cannot come in.  If we think that we can save ourselves, the Lord cannot come in.  The world was dark at the Lord’s second coming, and we still see a lot of darkness in the world.  Like the shepherds, we can fight in this darkness to protect the sheep, to protect what is good and innocent in this world.  And if we continue to come to the Lord with humility, we can see the Divine Human – we can see the Lord in the pages of His Word just as the shepherds saw the infant Jesus in the manger.  And we can behold the glory of the Lord.  It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time we can catch a glimpse of that intense truth – truth that all has to do with love.  That glory is the internal sense of the Word, seen within the cloud of the literal sense.

And we do not need to be great scholars to see that glory.  Sometimes we can get lost in the intricacies of trying to understand exactly how the Lord glorified His humanity, trying to explain logically why it’s important that He is Human and Divine.  It is useful to try to understand these things – but it is much more important to simply come and see.  It can never be fully explained even to the comprehension of the highest angels what a difference it makes to worship Jesus as God.  But if you innocently trust His Word and just do it, to try as much as you can to worship Him as God, you can experience a difference that is difficult to describe – as long as you are at the same time trying to glorify Him in your life by living in charity toward the neighbour.  Simple shepherds saw more clearly than the greatest scholars why the Lord’s presence as an infant would bring great joy to the world.  And like the shepherds, when we see the Lord, we can glorify Him.  This is not just about singing His praises, but also about living by what He teaches – being a living expression of His love.  The Lord said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”  When we live in obedience to the Lord’s Word, we glorify our Heavenly Father, and we contribute to true peace and true love in this world.  As the angels said, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Amen.

Readings: Genesis 28:11-22; John 1:35-51; Arcana Coelestia 3701

Throughout the Lord’s Word we find stories of competing brothers: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and in the story for today, Esau and Jacob.  We did not read the earlier part of this story, but Esau and Jacob were twin brothers.  Esau was born first – but Jacob had sold him a pot of stew for his birthright, and tricked their father Isaac into blessing him rather than Esau.  When Jacob left for the land of Haran, he left for two reasons: to find a wife, and to flee from Esau, who had threatened to kill him.

Why are there all these stories of competing brothers in the Word?  For the Lord’s Word to truly be His Word, it has to be about spiritual things – even in those places that seem to simply be literal histories.  These competing brothers throughout the Word are a picture of two things that compete in our minds for priority: love and wisdom, charity and faith, good and truth.  Which is the most important?  In the earliest days of the Christian church, Christians knew the answer; the apostle Paul wrote, “And now abide faith, hope, love [or charity], these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:3).  The most important thing is love.  But it is not always as straightforward as this.  The goal is that all of us will act from love; but we are not born into acting from love – first, we have to learn truth, and live by it, and only gradually do we come to love doing that.

In this story, Esau specifically represents the love side of things on the natural level – the feelings, the pleasure, we get from love.  And Jacob represents the wisdom side of things on that same level – not the deeper wisdom, but simply knowledge of what is true.  Esau is born first – because love is really the more important thing.  But early on in a person’s development, that love is unfocused and mixed up with bad loves – a person can’t act based on his feelings alone.  So while a person develops, Jacob has the lead – that acting according to knowledges.  That’s what it means for Jacob to have stolen the birthright.

The story begins in a place called Beersheba.  The name Beersheba means both “seven wells” and “well of the promise.”  The deep wells of water there represent doctrines, the many teachings of the church.  Since Jacob represents knowledges, and he lived in Beersheba, he represents part of us that knows the doctrine of the church.  But at this point, that knowledge was not married to life.  It was simply knowledge.  Looked at from this spiritual sense, we can understand what it means that Esau, that love side of things, was getting frustrated with Jacob.  The same thing happens when we spend a lot of time learning things but not much time using it.  The will within us gets frustrated – we just want to start doing, not learning.  It’s a good impulse – but at first we can think it means we should stop learning altogether, that our knowledge is useless.  Esau wants to kill Jacob.  But rather than get rid of our knowledge, the right course is to see how we can live by it.

And so Jacob leaves his home, and sets out toward the land of Haran.  After a day’s journey, Jacob needs to rest, so he piled up rocks for a pillow.  This place where Jacob was, with those rocks he used for pillows, a place remote from Beersheba or doctrinal things, represents the Lord’s truth on the most external level.  This is the Lord’s truth as it exists in the stories of the Lord’s Word, such as this story itself of Jacob’s ladder.  When we are beginning the process of regeneration, even though we might have a lot of doctrinal knowledge, when we’re starting to look at how we ought to live, we have to start with the basics – the essential, literal teachings of the Word.

And Jacob lay down there and slept.  As he slept, he dreamed, and he saw a stairway stretched out before him, from the ground up to heaven.  And on that stairway he saw angels ascending going up to God and returning back down to earth.  The way this is described is a little unusual – we might expect the angels first to be described as coming down from God, then returning to Him.  But this vision is a vision of the process of regeneration, and it does take place in this way – first as an ascent, and then as a return.  It’s a process that takes place on a larger scale over the course of a person’s life, but it’s also a process that occurs again and again on a smaller scale throughout a person’s life to eternity.

Remember, that ground where Jacob lay represented the literal stories from the Lord’s Word – it represented the most external level of truth as it exists with a person, in those basic knowledges.  But from these knowledges, there is an ascent to God.  Arcana Coelestia gives an example (from AC 3690): the first thing a person learns about the Ten Commandments from the Word is the story of how they were given – how the Lord descended on Mount Sinai in smoke and fire, how Moses climbed up the mountain, how he returned to deliver them to the children of Israel at the bottom.  That story forms a foundation.  As a person grows older, he begins to see that those commandments were not just part of a story, that they were not just for the children of Israel, but that they are necessary for all society.  He begins to intentionally try to live by them; for example, he begins by honouring and obeying his parents in accordance with that law of the Ten Commandments.  But as he gets older, his understanding deepens – he realizes that truly following this commandment does not mean literally agreeing with everything his parents say, but honouring what is good in them.  As he goes further, he realizes that honouring this commandment means loving good and truth itself, and above all, loving the Lord as His father.  That is the ascent up that staircase, to the Lord at the top.

But all this progress is made when a person lives by what he knows, forcing himself to act according to his understanding of what is right.  And something else happens as he does this.  More and more, he starts to love following these commandments.  At some point there is a switch – instead doing good because he knows it’s right, he starts doing what is right because he feels the love and goodness in it.  This is the angels’ return back down to earth – when a person acts primarily from love, rather than truth, and brings love down to earth, putting it in practice.

And it’s important that the Lord is at the top there.  That is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Divinely Human God.  All of this stems from His love, as all the angels acknowledge.  From Him, a person goes through this process, in different areas of his life.  It is the Lord who changes our hearts, and gives us the love to do what is right.

We see the same process on a much smaller and more natural scale in the way we form habits, or break habits.  When we’re first trying to form a habit – say turning off the lights when we leave a room – it can be hard to do.  We forget, or we’re in a hurry, and we have to force ourselves to do it.  But gradually we do it enough that it becomes second nature.

Now picture the same thing on a more spiritual scale.  What if the habit you want to form is not tearing people down.  If you’re in that habit, it takes work at first.  It feels artificial because it IS artificial.  You have to make yourself do it.  But gradually, over time, the Lord changes that habit.  When that switch happens, when you reach the point where you no longer WANT to tear people down, where that feels unpleasant – that’s that point where those angels are coming back down the stairway.  It is summed up this way in Arcana Coelestia: “Act precedes; willing follows” (AC 4353).

But this is a gradual process.  We don’t climb up that stairway very quickly – we take one step at a time.  In our reading from the Writings this morning, we found an example of the very gradual steps the Lord leads us on, so gentle that we don’t even realize we’re ascending until we look back.  At first, early in our process of regeneration, we act mostly from love of self.  The Lord doesn’t destroy this love, but He gently modifies it.  We learn truths that don’t directly contradict that love, but that also lead us forward.  We learn that we do need to take care of ourselves – but that we also need to take care of others.  From these truths we gradually progress, until we get to the point where those truths about taking care of ourselves cease to be the highest truths, but instead become the lowest truths, with the love of the neighbour and love of the Lord as higher.  There is an inversion, that is, it is flipped around – the love of self is still there, but in the last place rather than the first.  The angels come down the stairway after ascending.

Another way to think about this is in terms of families.  Within our families, we have tendencies toward selfishness; but at the same time, we do want our siblings, and especially our kids and grandkids, to have the things they need to make them happy.  Even people who are mostly selfish tend to want good things for their kids.  And even that – wanting something for their kids – is a step up from only loving themselves.  From that step, a person can take the next step up – what will really make my kids happy?  It isn’t to give them everything they want, it’s to give them the things that will help them live fulfilling lives.  The next step up is a love for their use in society, and so on, until what we are really loving in our children is the Lord’s love for others in them.  Step by step, the Lord lifts us up the ladder in that particular area of our lives.  We reach the top and begin to come back down when our interactions with our families stem from this love for what is good for them and what is good in them.

When those new loves have been formed in us, we start to see even the lower things in the world and the Word in a new way.  We start to see things in the world in terms of the use they serve.  Those simple stories from the Lord’s Word touch us in ways they never had before, because we’ve experienced the depth within them.  They have life in them.  When we’re acting from love, we can see the way that the Lord is everywhere, even in the most external things, even in the everyday interactions we have with the people around us.  Everything is full of the Lord.

When Jacob wakes up, the Lord promises him that He will protect him and be with him and return him to this land, and would make him fruitful and multiply him.  In the internal sense, it’s a promise that when we have been regenerated, we see countless new truths in the Word and in the world around us, and begin to feel countless new affections even on that outermost level.  This is what is represented by that rock that Jacob set up and anointed with oil.  That rock represents those outermost truths, the truths in the literal sense of the Word, and the natural world.  And the oil on top represents the way that these become holy when we see them again from love.

Jacob calls that rock the house of God.  When we are able to see the world and the Word from love, we see it as the dwelling place of God.  When the people of the Most Ancient Church, who loved the Lord above all else, looked around them, they saw everything in creation as a representation of God.  Everything was alive to them. We can see this even now in the way a young child sees the world as alive, and in the delight a child takes in reading the Lord’s Word, which the Writings tell us gives the angels the greatest delight.

And this joy that is provided to the angels when a child or a sincere person reads the Word, or when we see the Lord in the things of this world, is the other lesson of this story of Jacob’s dream.  That stairway stretched all the way up into heaven – but it also touched the earth.   Heaven could not exist without a foundation on earth.  And as human beings, living in this world, we have an opportunity that even the angels do not have – we can be a link between the outermost things of the Lord’s creation and the Lord himself.  Arcana Coelestia puts it this way: “Man has been so created that the Divine things of the Lord may descend through him down to the last things of nature, and from the last things of nature may ascend to Him” (AC 3702). We allow this to happen when we use the things the Lord has created in service toward others.  When we do something mundane – bake food for a loved one – we are taking things from the animal, vegetable, mineral kingdom, and using them in service to something higher, to love.  In the same way, if we see a beautiful garden, and from that reflect on the beauty of the Lord’s truth, we are connecting something in this world with the Lord himself – we are helping form the base of that stairway.  Without heaven, this world is lifeless; without this world, heaven would have no foundation.

And this is the house of God.  The Lord lives with us even here.  When He was in the world, the Lord made His humanity completely Divine – even down to the physical level.  The Lord is present in this plane.  A lot of the time we don’t notice the His presence in the world around us.  But He is here, as Jacob discovered.  The Lord was in that place – that place where a person sees the way that even the literal stories in the Word, even the physical stuff of this world, can be a home for the Lord.  And we can see this after the angels with us have drawn us step by step up that stairway, and when we have turned around to bring back the Lord’s love into the world.  As Jacob said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Readings: Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 19:3-12; Arcana Coelestia 1241

THE LESSER EVIL

A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn

“Moses, because of your hard​heartedness, permitted you to send away your wives; but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:8)

Does the Lord’s law ever change?  It can seem that the obvious answer would be no.  The Lord Himself said, “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than one little​ ​horn of the Law to fall” (Luke 16:17).  And yet, in some senses it seems like the law did change.  When the Lord came into the world, he abolished sacrifices.  He did away with the ceremonially laws of the Jewish faith.  And in the passage we read from the Gospels this morning, He did away with the Jewish laws that permitted a husband to divorce his wife for reasons other than her adultery.  He did change the law, it seems.

But the law that the Lord abolished at that time was not the true law.  It represented the true law, and it contained the true law within it.  That’s why Jesus could say that nothing would fall away from the law, that he did not come to do away with the law, but to fulfill it – even though He seemingly DID do away with the law.  He was not adding something new – He was revealing what had been inherent in the law all along.  That’s why He said, “From the beginning” it was not so that divorce was permitted – because from the beginning, the original law, was that “a man should leave His father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two should become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

So what was the purpose of the old law?  The primary purpose of all the laws of the Jewish faith were to represent spiritual things – as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians, all the sacrifices and feasts were a “shadow” of Christ who was going to come (Colossians 2:17).  But if they would be fulfilled and changed into spiritual laws at the time of the Lord’s coming, why were the children of Israel not simply given those spiritual laws in the first place?  The Lord gave answered that question in his teaching about divorce: “because of the hardness of their hearts.”  The Writings tell us that if God had revealed these deeper laws about marriage to the people at that time, they would have completely rejected Him.  And so He offered them the lesser of two evils – instead of having them completely reject the truth, which would condemn them to a deeper hell, He permitted them to marry multiple wives, to put away their wives for less important things.

The same thing is true with sacrifices.  The Lord has no desire for sacrifice, as he says in Hosea: “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings,” (Hosea 6:6).  Among the people of the Most Ancient Church, the earliest worshippers of God, represented by Adam and Eve, the idea of slaughtering an animal as an act of worship would have seemed profane.  But the Lord permitted animal sacrifice to prevent a much greater evil: the evil of human sacrifice, which was common in the people around them at the time, and which they fell into whenever they turned away from the Lord.  We see this permission of animal sacrifice play out on a smaller scale in the story of Abraham.  Now, in the internal sense of this story, the willingness to sacrifice Isaac represents a good thing – a willingness in the Lord to give up all that was merely human within Himself, and to make His rational mind holy.  But in the literal sense, it would have been a terrible thing for Abraham to sacrifice his son.  And so in place of his son, he was permitted to sacrifice instead a ram.

Again, the Lord permits a lesser evil to avoid a greater one.  And the truth is, all around us, all the time, the Lord is permitting lesser evils for the sake of avoiding greater evils.  We can sometimes have a tendency to paint all evils with the same brush, to look at an evil and think only about how bad it is, without realizing that there may have been worse alternatives.  There is a value in seeing the different degrees within evil, that there are lighter and more serious evils.  Today we’re going to talk about three uses in distinguishing between these degrees of evil.  First of all, it helps us understand why the Lord permits evil at all.  Second of all, it helps us make decisions in seemingly impossible situations, where we feel that all we can choose is the lesser of two evils.  And finally, it helps us to refrain from judging the spiritual state of the people around us whom we see committing evil.

The first use in distinguishing between lesser and greater evils is that it helps us understand why the Lord permits what He does permit.  With all the evil we see in the world around us, it may seem that the God does nothing to prevent evil.  The truth is, He is constantly preventing evil, and leading toward greater and greater good.  The book Divine Providence says, “The withdrawal of a wicked person from evil is effected by the Lord in a thousand ways that are most secret” (DP 295).  Although the Lord leaves each person in freedom, He works with that freedom and subtly modifies it.  For example, he inspires people who desire nothing more than their own power to act in ways that benefit society – from that person’s point of view, they are still acting on a lust for power, but the restraints of society keep that from breaking out, and keep the person in some order.  And if He is not able to lift a person into heaven, He at least continually prevents them from plunging themselves into a deeper hell, which is where all of us would go if left to ourselves.

In general, the Lord permits any evil for the sake of His ultimate purpose – the salvation of every person.  The Lord permits people to act on their evil because if it were bottled up inside them, and they were forced to act in good, no one could be saved.  The lesser evil is to allow people to act on their evil inclinations.  Even terrible evils are sometimes allowed so that their true nature can be seen, which is better than them remaining hidden within people’s hearts.  The Lord did not will the horrors of the holocause – but without them, maybe the human race would never have realized the poisonous, murderous intent at the heart of all racism.  Perhaps He permitted that atrocity so that evil could be seen clearly for what it was.  Perhaps it was a lesser evil than for the human race to continually live in continuous hatred of other races.

In all the workings of His providence, the Lord desires that people may live.  The Lord cannot force people to do good, because they would then not be human – they would simply be extensions of the Lord, and not capable of being joined to Him and blessed as separate beings, which is the Lord’s goal in creation.  To be truly happy, people must choose good.  And so it is a lesser evil to allow people to act in freedom.

Besides keeping people in freedom, the Lord in His providence does all that He can to prevent a person from profaning what is good and true.  A person profanes goodness and truth if he for a time acknowledges, loves, and lives by what is good – and then afterwards completely rejects it.  This is much more harmful than if a person never accepts the truth in the first place, and for this reason, the Lord never allows a person into any more goodness and truth than they are capable of being kept in to the end of their lives.  It was to prevent profanation that the Lord did not give the children of Israel the true commandments on marriage – He knew that there nature was such that they would embrace this at first as Divine, but then afterwards reject the teaching, and reject Him altogether.  He gave permission for a lesser evil to prevent a greater one.

The final reason the Lord permits lesser evils is that a person must gradually progress from the evil inclinations that he is born into.  If they were removed all at once, the person would in fact fall down dead – because early on in a person’s path of regeneration, most of his motivation comes from selfishness and a love of worldly things.  If those motivations were taken away, he would simply have no motivation at all, no life.  And so the Lord gradually leads a person from greater evils to lesser evils, and then on from lesser evils to true good.  This is why the children of Israel were told that their enemies in the land of Canaan would not all be driven out at once, but little by little (see Exodus 23:30).

And this leads us into the next reason we mentioned for learning about lesser and greater degrees of evil: to help us make decisions in our own lives.  Because there are times in our lives when it seems that we have to choose between the lesser of two evils.  And this really will be the case sometimes – the Lord cannot rid of us our evils immediately.  What matters is that we are moving in the right direction.

One of the fundamental choices we often have to make has to do with our motivations.  At the beginning of our regeneration, as just mentioned, most of our motives are selfish.  And the fact is, at first we cannot help but think of merit and reward for doing good.  We cannot help but think that the good we do comes from ourselves.  There’s a story in Genesis about the time when Joseph had become a great leader in Egypt, and his brothers came asking for food, not recognizing them.  When Joseph sent them back to their father with food, he had his servants place a silver cup in his youngest brother Benjamin’s bag of grain – and when they returned, he accused Benjamin of stealing it!  This can seem like an odd story, but in the internal sense, it is about the fact that at first, we cannot help stealing from the Lord, in the sense of taking credit for things that really belong to Him.

But this means we have a choice: we can either do good which has some sense of merit in it, or we can hang down our hands and wait for the Lord to flow in, and do nothing at all.  Both of these choices have evil in them – but the first choice is a lesser evil than the second.  Now, this does not mean that we should rest content with the fact that we are doing evil – we should continually strive to truly acknowledge the Lord as the source.  But we do not have to feel bad that at first we are still in an evil.  What matters is that we are progressing toward goodness.  A passage from the book Doctrine of Life, says, “Let people even once in a week, or twice in a month, resist the evils they are inclined to, and they will perceive a change” (Life 97).  It is better to catch ourselves even twice in a month doing some particular evil, and to stop ourselves, then to think we have to be perfect and immediately give up on the task as impossible.  What matters is our progress.

But how do we know what the lesser evil is?  It is not always easy.  The only way to truly know is to search the Word, to continually try to understand.  The book Conjugial Love, for example, says that a young man at first often does not see the difference between having sex with an unmarried woman and with a married woman – when the truth is that the evil of adultery is a much graver evil than the evil of fornication (see CL 486).  Similarly, the same book says, if a young man truly cannot restrain himself from having sex, it is a lesser evil for him to restrict himself to one, than to sleep with many women from a lust for variety, or to fall into the even worse evils of adultery or rape (see CL 459).  It is especially in the laws around sexuality that we find teachings on the importance of distinguishing between lesser and greater degrees of evil.

Sometimes there really are cases where we have to choose between a lesser or greater evil.  And the determining factor is the goal, or motivation – what are we working towards, what are we progressing towards?  If a person truly sees a state of goodness – for example, true marriage love – as the goal, then what matters most is that he is taking steps in that direction.  But there are also time, of course, when it seems that we have a choice between two evils, and the reality is, we could choose neither.  For example, in treating of those permissions around sexuality, the Writings say, “What has been said, however, is not for those who can restrain the heat of their lust, nor for those who can enter into marriage as soon as they attain to manhood” (CL 459).  Those permissions are there for people who truly cannot restrain themselves without harmful effects – and yet it is all too easy to use permissions to lesser evils as an excuse, when we really could reject evil altogether.

There is no easy answer within ourselves to whether we are using the teachings on permission as an excuse, or truly as a lesser evil.  In times when we seem to have to make that choice, it is useful to take a step back and pray to the Lord for wisdom to see if there are other choices.  We can do simple things like write down all the options we have, trying to see if we’ve missed any.  And the Word itself can help us see more options than there seem to be at first.  For example, in the case of certain kinds of dysfunctional marriage – for example, if one partner is an alcoholic – it may seem like the only options are to live in that dysfunction, or to divorce.  But the Writings say that in these cases, where there has not been adultery, the best option is not necessarily to stay together, and definitely not to get a divorce, but to be separated – to still be technically married, to not start new relationships outside of the marriage, but to live separately from each other, perhaps even with court-ordered limits.  That is the better choice in a situation where none of the choices are very good.  We need to study the Word to see what truly is a lesser evil – since we often are wrong about which is the greater and lesser evil.  And we need to pray to the Lord for help resisting evil, to pray for a sight of the goal, which is goodness – and to pray for the strength to be honest with ourselves.

And this brings us to our final purpose in looking at these different degrees of evil.  Within ourselves, we can be honest about whether or not we are truly fighting evil with all our hearts, whether we are giving into an evil because it will prevent a lesser evil, or giving into it simply because we want to.  But we cannot make the same judgment when looking at others.  When we see others around us doing evil, we ought to judge their actions as evil – the Lord said, “Judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).  We ought to do what we can to prevent them, for the sake of the people they may be hurting, and for their own sake.  But we cannot judge their hearts, because we do not know their motivation.  We do not know if they are choosing the lesser of two evils.

In the book Conjugial Love, Emanuel Swedenborg describes seeing several people living similarly, in ways that could be considered bad – dressing finely, eating well, making off-color jokes.  And yet the angels said that for some of the people these were sins, and others were not.  For those who had good as their end, motivation, and goal, these actions were not sinful; whereas for those who had evil as their end, these actions were considered sins.  The motivation made the difference (Conjugial Love 527).

We cannot make spiritual judgments because we cannot know another person’s motivation.  Now, again, we should not use this as an excuse for our own evils – Swedenborg talked to evil spirits who justified their own adultery by saying, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”  But it can help us to acknowledge how it could possibly be that someone who is externally in evil could still be looking and moving in the right direction.

Evil and good are diametrically opposed.  Good does not decrease until it becomes evil – evil is a twisting of good.  And it is important to keep the two separate, to carefully distinguish between good and evil.  But it is also important to distinguish between the different degrees of evil.  Realizing that there are lesser evils helps us see the mercy in the Lord’s providence, in continually leading to lesser evil.  It helps us to make hard decisions, in choosing between two bad alternatives.  And it helps us to see others who are in evil as still capable of making progress toward good.  And in all this, good is the goal.  Heaven is the goal.  And a return to the Lord’s original, eternal law, the law of love and wisdom, is the goal.  “Moses, because of your hardheartedness, permitted [this] – but from the beginning it was not so.”

Readings: Genesis 12:1-10; Luke 9:57-62; Arcana Coelestia 5135

LEAVING THE LAND OF OUR BIRTH

A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn

“Get thee out of thy land, and from thy birth, and from thy father’s house, to the land that I will cause thee to see.” (Genesis 12:1)

When Abram was seventy-five years old, he left his home.  He left his father and mother, his siblings and most of his family, and began a journey to a land where he had never been before.  He and his wife Sarai and his nephew Laban left the land of their youth to begin a new life.

The literal sense of this story, when we take the time to reflect on it, has some deep emotions in it.  It would not have been easy for Abram to leave everything he knew – but the story does not focus on that.  It rather focuses on Abram’s total faith – the Lord says to go, and Abram goes.

We don’t have to dig very deep to see a clear message in this story: a message about trusting God, and being willing to go to uncomfortable and unknown places simply because the Lord has told us to go.

But there is a lot more to this story than first meets the eye.  Abram is a model for us – but in a deeper sense, he represents the Lord Himself, Jesus Christ, when He was in this world.  By learning about the deeper sense of this story, we can get to know the Lord better.

This might sound like a startling statement to make, that Abram represents the Lord, since it’s not at all clear from the literal sense of the story.  But even the earliest Christians knew that everything in the Old Testament prefigured the life of Jesus Christ.  On several occasions the Lord referred to passages from the Old Testament that referred to David or Israel, and showed how in a deeper sense, they were about Him.  For example, the prophet Hosea wrote, “When Israel was a child, I loved Him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1) – but in the gospel of Matthew, this is revealed as a prophecy of the Lord, who would go down to Egypt as an infant with His parents, and return at the death of Herod the king.  And so it is not at all a stretch to suggest that Abram’s travels into Egypt also represent something about the Lord’s development.

From passages like this, it is clear that the Old Testament stories represent different aspects of the Lord’s life.  What is not so clear is exactly what part of the Lord’s internal life all these different characters and stories represent.

Fortunately, the Writings for the New Church – and in particular the work Arcana Coelestia – reveal what it is that these stories teach us about the Lord.  And this story, in its deepest sense, is the story about the Lord’s first progression, when He was child, toward becoming completely Divine.

This is a story about the Lord’s early childhood.  The Word makes it clear that the Lord, in His soul, was always God, from the moment he was conceived.  But although His soul and the internal elements of His mind came from God, His body and the external elements of His mind came from His mother Mary.  From His mother, the Lord inherited tendencies toward earthly and worldly things, including tendencies toward evil – although He never gave in to these tendencies.  Throughout His entire life, the Lord was going through a process that the Writings call glorification – the process of replacing those parts of Himself that were merely human, that He had from his mother Mary, with things that were Divinely Human, from His soul, the Father, God.

Why does it matter that we know about this process, though?  Is this practical knowledge?  Why does Arcana Coelestia focus so much on the Lord’s process, when this process for the most part is above even the comprehension of the angels?

The reason it is practical and useful to learn these things is that they help us to love God, which is the first and great commandment.  Think about it – how can you come to love someone until you learn about what they are like – not just their external actions, but some of what goes in on their minds and hearts?  The story of the Lord’s internal life, told in the spiritual sense of the stories of the Old Testament, helps us to know Him better and love Him more.

But more than this, the Lord’s process of glorification is the model for a process that every person must go through to reach heaven: the process of regeneration.  Now, the Lord went through His process much more thoroughly and completely than we go through ours – but by looking at the Lord’s process, we can see how he is present with us as we go through that process of our own rebirth.

So to return to the story of Abram.  The story begins, “And Jehovah said to Abram…”  That voice of Jehovah was the Lord’s first mental awareness of the Divine that was within Himself.  And that voice told Abram, “Get thee out of thy land, and from thy birth, and from thy father’s house, to the land that I will cause thee to see.”  That land where Abram was told to leave was a land of idol worship, and because of this, in the internal sense it represents a state of relative blindness or obscurity.  It represents the lower levels of the mind.  And Abram was told to go to a new land.

The Lord felt within Himself a calling to leave behind the things He had inherited from His mother – the merely natural things – and to begin the journey that would last throughout His entire life, the journey towards becoming completely Divine – and yet still completely human.  And the first step in that process was to leave behind those comfortable things of his infancy and move toward something new.

This specifically is describing the Lord’s mind as an infant and young child.  But in general terms, it is also an image of a call that comes to us over and over again: to move from lower things to higher things, from where we have been to somewhere new – from what is comfortable and known to what is uncomfortable and unknown.

We see this call in several places in the Lord’s Word.  From the creation of Adam and Eve, the Lord said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife.”  In our reading from the New Testament this morning, the Lord went even further: He would not even let a disciple return home to bid his parents farewell.  What did He mean by that?

We know that in other places the Lord did command His disciples to honour their father and mother.  But what He was telling His disciples in this case was that they would have to let go of things that they had from their past, and specifically from their parents.  They would have to move on to new things.

What are those things that we have from our parents that we need to leave behind?  The Writings tell us that from our parents – even if they are very good people, even angelic people – we inherit inclinations toward evils of every kind.  We are born with a tendency toward selfishness.  Little children are clearly selfish – they have to be taught to share with others.  This is not to say that they are bad, because their selfishness is from innocence, and can even be lovable because it’s so sincere.  But at some point we have to move beyond that childhood desire to have everything the way we want it to be.  We have to leave behind the land of our birth.

But the truth is that it is not only bad things that we need to leave behind in our childhood.  There are many things that are very good and absolutely necessary for us in our childhood states, but that we need to leave behind, or at least to change, as we get older.  No matter who we are or what religion we were raised in, at some point we have to let our faith develop into something new, something deeper, than it was when we were children.

The Writings describe this process, and we read a passage this morning describing the way this takes place.  And again, this does not necessarily mean we reject our childhood faith.  In fact, that is not the ideal way for it to happen.  Abram leaves the land of his father – but he does not cut off ties.  He sends his servant back to this land to find a wife for his son Isaac.  Isaac’s son Jacob, too, is commanded to return to this land, to Abram’s relative Laban, to find a wife to marry.  But the person’s relationship to that childhood faith changes – it grows and deepens.

The faith we have as children is based primarily on things we have been taught, especially by our parents.  It is good for us to learn this way – this is the orderly way for things to happen.  The Lord, too, learned things in the way we do.  But at some point, as a child grows up, he begins to question things.  This is often strongest when a person is in their teen years – but if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us still have things that we believe simply because we were raised to believe that way.

But there are different ways of progressing on our journey, some ways better than others.  Sometimes a person will look within himself, and ask, do I really believe this?  Or do I only believe this because this is how I was raised?  For some people, when they realize that they’ve never really believed in God, or angels, or life after death, they say, “I’m going to start being honest with myself – and that means not pretending to believe these things that I don’t really believe.”  Many people who reject faith in this way say it is freeing, because they are no longer lying to themselves.

But this is not the only way to journey on from childhood faith – or even the ideal way.  The essential thing in developing our faith is always to remain committed to loving others.  If we continue to make charity to the neighbour the primary thing, the Lord will keep leading us toward Him, no matter what the path may look like.  And so, when we realize that we are not sure of the things we’ve always believed, we can at least hold on to this: we should love others.

Love for the human race was always the thing that motivated the Lord.  It was never love for Himself.  Right after Abram was told to leave the land of his father, he was given a promise: that he would be made into a great nation; that Jehovah would bless him, and make his name great.  From these things, it could sound like the motivation for Abram – and thus the Lord – was to be selfish.  But the promise continues – that Abram would be a blessing, and that in him all the families of the ground would be blessed.  And in a deeper sense, this prophecy is about the people who the Lord would reach, and draw into His kingdom.  The great nation that would come from Abram represents all the people who would have faith in the Lord.  And the Lord would be a blessing to the whole world.  It is for this reason – and not for Himself – that the Lord willingly pushed Himself to fight against the forces of hell that assailed Him.

And so the primary thing we can do to ensure that our faith will develop is to focus on loving others and living in charity.  Charity is the life within faith, and our faith will never feel real if it isn’t connected to love for others and love to the Lord.  And when we see that the faith we have within ourselves doesn’t seem real to us, rather than saying, “I’ve been lying to myself,” we can ask, “How can this faith come to life in me so that it is real?”

But that’s not the only thing.  The truth is, what we actually believe will change, even if we don’t throw it out.  For example, the passage we read this morning described important things that we learn as children and that form the core of our faith – but it included the teaching that God rewards the good and punishes the evil.  We do need to have this idea as children – but as we grow, we come to understand it in a deeper way – that the Lord punishes no one, but evil punishes itself.

It is important for our childhood faith to be joined to charity, and so to come alive; but there are also ways that in this process, it will change.  How do we know what to believe?  How do we know what parts of our faith are from God, and what parts are merely from our culture or our parents or our ministers?  Again, the primary thing here is to focus on love: love to the Lord, and love to the neighbour.  And when we are focusing on love, then we can move to the next step – seeking what the Lord actually says.

This means turning to the Lord’s Word, and seeking for truth there – seeing if what we’ve been taught actually measures up to the Lord’s revelation.  In our story, Abram journeys down through the land of Canaan.  His stops along the way represent a growing perception in the Lord, a perception that came from His celestial love.  But it represents a dim perception, because even though He had the love, He had not learned the truths He needed to clearly see and comprehend that love.  In that state He could not stay in the land.  He needed knowledge as a vessel for that higher love within him, to clarify His perception.  And so He continued down to the land of Egypt.

Egypt was well known in the ancient world as a storehouse of knowledge.  And so Egypt itself came to represent knowledge, and sojourning there came to represent being instructed in that knowledge.  And in the Lord’s case, all that knowledge came from the Word.

This exploring of knowledge helps develop a person’s faith if he is approaching knowledge for the sake of love, for the sake of usefulness.  Abram would not stay in the land of Egypt, nor would his descendants.  The Lord did not learn knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of using that knowledge to serve.  And so in the course of developing our faith, the right order is for us to first learn the doctrine of our church from parents and teachers and ministers – but as we get older, to seek what the Word really says when we look to it in the light of the two great commandments – to love the Lord, and to love our neighbour.

Learning truth from the Lord’s Word does not only deepen our faith – it also gives us the ability to fight against the tendencies toward evil that we develop.  In the story of Abram, we read that as Abram first passed through the land of Canaan, “the Canaanite was then in the land.”  The Canaanites – the enemy of the people of Israel – represent those evil spirits who tempted the Lord and attacked Him through those merely human things he had acquired from His mother.  Here Abram is not able to fight them – he merely passes through the land and goes down to Egypt.  And for the Lord, it was only later, after He had gained knowledge from the Word, that He knew enough to be able to resist those evil spirits, to do battle against them.

And so if we want to develop our faith, we can turn to the Lord’s Word, and ask, “What is the Lord really saying?”  It can be a difficult process, as ideas we’ve grown up with may be overthrown.  But if we approach the Word always seeking for ways that we can live by it, for ways that it can help us grow in love to the Lord and love to the neighbour, it will always be leading toward a place where we have a more and more real faith, and truer and truer love.  And throughout this process, it is really the Lord who is fighting for us, fighting to give us a place in heaven – just as He fought for the entire human race when He was in the world.  “And I will make thee into a great nation; and I will bless thee, and will make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” Amen

Lessons: Genesis 3:1-19; Revelation 20:1-3, 7-10; Arcana Coelestia 206

“And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden eating thou may eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eat of it, dying thou shalt​ die.” (Genesis 2:16, 17)

            We live in a fallen world.  When we look around at the violence and poverty, the cruelty that one person inflicts on another, we acknowledge this.  We live in a broken world.  And we are part of that broken world.  We see the same tendencies in ourselves that appal us in others – greed, selfishness, vengeance.  We know that our world is broken, and there are two questions that we ask: how can something God created be so full of pain and suffering?  And can the world be redeemed?

These questions have been at the heart of many religions for thousands of years.  And for thousands of years, Jews and Christians have turned to the story of Adam and Eve for answers.  In its basic outlines, the story is clear: in the beginning, God created everything, and it was good.  The world was in a state of harmony and peace, and everything was provided for man freely.  There was only one law: they were not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  But they broke this law – and this first sin spelled the downfall from that state of Eden.

That general outline is clear – but the specific interpretation is anything but.  Many Christians take the story literally.  Others believe it to be an allegory or a parable – it represents something.  But few agree on what it represents.

In the New Church, we’ve been blessed with an explanation of the true meaning of the story of the Fall of Man.  The Writings for the New Church show that it is a true story – not that there literally was one man named Adam and one woman named Eve, but that these characters represent a group of people who really did live lives of harmony and peace.  Their sin was not the taking of a single fruit – but the story of taking that fruit perfectly represents what their first sin was.

It’s not at all a stretch to say that the story of Adam and Eve is a parable.  The name “Adam” simply means “man” or “human” – and so it’s a story of the way that humanity fell.  If the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil was simply a fruit, and the action was only a sin because it disobeyed God, then why is the tree named “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and not simply “the forbidden tree?”  Clearly, that tree represents something to do with the knowledge of good and evil.

So if Adam simply means “man,” and Adam and Eve stand for a group of people rather than just for two individuals, who are they standing for?  The Writings for the New Church provide an answer: they stand for the earliest human beings, who were members of what is called the Most Ancient Church.  When the Writings use the word “church,” they’re referring to the group of people who have a special revelation from the Lord – and the Most Ancient Church was made of the first people, who worshipped God.

The people who became the members of the Most Ancient Church went through the process of becoming an image and likeness of God that is described in the creation story. The people of that church became even more a likeness of God than we are today.  Because the human race had not yet fallen, every person of that age born with a will that was not corrupt.  And in fact, the entire structure of their mind was different – their will and their intellect was not divided as it is today.  The things that they loved, they thought, and the things that they thought, they loved.

Because they had this will of good, they had a perception that is unknown today.  The Lord revealed Himself to them directly, speaking to them as if from person to person.  They were able to perceive spiritual realities from a close connection to the spiritual world.  And they had perception of the natural world, too.  Their ability to perceive things from all different sources is what is meant by all the trees that they were allowed to eat from.  Everything they looked at and interacted with contributed to their celestial wisdom; it provided celestial food.  And in the centre of the garden was the tree of life: perception from loving the Lord and trusting in Him.

But there was one tree in the garden that they were not allowed to eat from: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  That tree has a specific meaning; but before we look at that, it’s important to look at the different characters in the story as they were before the fall and see what they represent.

In the story of creation, the Lord created all animals on the sixth day, and gave man dominion over all of them.  The different animals represent different affections.  And the Lord created lower animals like snakes as well as the higher animals.  These lower animals represented the sensual level of the mind – our five senses and their desires, as well as the thoughts that spring directly from these.  This sensual level was and is necessary – but man, or the internal person, is supposed to have dominion over it.  But as it was necessary, there was a snake in the garden.

The second chapter of Genesis describes the creation of woman as being from Adam’s rib.  This woman, as she is created from a rib, represents a person’s proprium, or what is a person’s own, made alive by the acknowledgment and perception that what seems to be our own really flows into us from the Lord.  We need to have a sense that we live from ourselves – but for it to be living, it needs to include that acknowledgment that life is really from the Lord.  That sense of self-life is Eve.

Finally, Adam in this story represents the rational level of the mind, and the internal man – the part of the person that was making decisions, the person himself.  So the serpent is the lowest level of the mind, Eve is our sense of life from ourselves, and Adam is the higher, rational part of our mind.  With this in mind, we can look again at how the Most Ancient Church fell away.

The Lord had put all trees in the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they were not to eat from.  At first, this can seem strange – isn’t it good that people would want to know what was good and what was evil?  It is – but the tree of knowledge of good and evil represented something different than simply knowing.  It represented the desire for a person to know from himself what was good and evil, rather than listening to God.  That’s why the serpent said, “In the day that you eat of it… you shall be like God, knowing good and evil.”  It represents that belief that a person can be his own God, and determine for himself what is good and what is evil.

Remember, that serpent represents the sensuous level of the mind, the operation of the five senses, the knowledge we have from them and the desires we have from them.  The ability to do whatever we like is seductive, and appeals to our sensuous desires.  And the knowledge we have from the five senses can be seductive too, because it can sometimes seem more real than higher, abstract concepts.  And the strongest desire in the lowest part of our minds is the love of self.  That is the head of the serpent.

That serpent – desires and thoughts from the lowest part of the mind – appealed to Eve.  In a good sense, Eve represents an own, a proprium, a sense of self-life, that has been made living by the acknowledgment that life is from the Lord.  But in a negative sense, Eve represents both the sense and the belief that we live from ourselves.  That sense is seduced by the serpent, those sensuous things of our mind – because it feels like we live from ourselves.

This is what happened to that generation of the people of the Most Ancient Church.  They allowed themselves to be seduced by the lowest level of the mind.  They allowed themselves to be seduced by the appearance that they lived from themselves.  And they confirmed those things even in their interiors, on the rational level of the mind represented by Adam.  This was the fall of mankind, and has been the fall of every church ever since: from a love of self, people believed that they could know good and evil from themselves, from things of the five senses, rather than from the Lord.

It can seem hard to believe that this is the cause of the fall, that this attitude leads to death.  The serpent says, “In the day that you eat of it, you shall not surely die!”  It seems like people can make decisions based on their own desires and thoughts and still live moral lives.  But that morality is just a covering, like those fig leaves Adam and Eve used to try to cover their nakedness.  It does not penetrate to the level of the internal man.

But this may seem contrary to the teachings of the New Church.  Doesn’t the New Church teach that everyone is saved if they live by what they believe to be right?  Well, yes and no.  The New Church teaches that anyone who believes in God and lives in charity according to the teachings of their own religion is saved.  And it is not bad that different people have different understandings of what the Lord is saying in His Word.  Two people can understand the Word completely differently, and still be trying to follow it.  But the important thing is still that those people have an attitude that they are taking guidance from the Lord’s Word – not that they are coming up with their own plan of living.

The case is completely different with someone who refuses to believe anything other than what they see with their five senses.       Those who refuse to believe anything they cannot see or feel trust in themselves and not in the Lord; they live from and for the love of self.  Many even acknowledge this, saying that all humans act from self-love – which extends also to putting one’s own offspring above others – and that this is the only rational way to act.

Now again, it may not seem like this attitude really is the source of all evil.  After all, we know atheists who live morally.  And we can’t judge anyone’s interiors; some people may believe in a higher power, an absolute morality, even if they don’t call it by the name of God.  But anyone who truly believes that there is nothing beyond the realm of the senses cannot believe in an absolute morality.  Morality for them is based on “whatever works” to keep society in order.  And if there is no absolute morality, then there is nothing inherently wrong in lying or stealing or committing adultery.  The laws against them are necessary for society, but there is nothing “wrong” if I break them and no one finds out – even “right” and “wrong” rely on a belief in something higher.

But if this attitude – that we can determine right and wrong for ourselves – is at the root of all evil, then of course it extends far beyond those who have confirmed themselves in atheism.  We all are tempted by the love of self – and along with that comes a love of our own intelligence.  Even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as particularly smart or learned have a tendency to love our own intelligence more than we love to seek wisdom.  We have a tendency to fall in love with our own ideas.

How many of us have our own pet theories about the way the world really works, or what’s really needed to live a life of religion?  How many of us find at least one way to make an exception for something that is said in the Word?  “Well, yes, I know what the Word says about that; I’ll let the others believe that and I won’t say anything about it, but really I know differently.”  Again, this is different from saying, “I sincerely understand the Word differently from the way you do”; it is saying, “I don’t buy that part of the Word.”  It is basing our beliefs on what we want to be true or what we feel is true, not on what the Lord says.

It’s hard not to do this, to base our beliefs more on the external evidence of our senses than on what the Word says – that serpent of feelings is powerful.  For example, the Word says that it is wrong to act on lust.  But many people do it anyway, and when they do, they often say something like, “It doesn’t feel wrong.  It doesn’t even feel like a big deal.  I don’t feel like it really made any difference.”  Our feelings trump our understanding of what the Word says.

But putting our faith in our feelings rather than the Lord’s Word is the path that leads to death.  Because by nature, we’re inclined to evils of every kind.  And evil feels good.  Once a person is able to “move past” whatever hang-ups they have from their upbringing or culture around them, they realize that committing adultery sometimes just feels right.  If a person can let go of that old belief that revenge is evil, and just completely destroy someone who’s hurt them – that feels great!  When people start to make their own feelings the arbiter of morality, the world begins to collapse.

Have you ever read or heard testimony from people who steal or commit fraud or even murder?  Many, many of them continue to justify their actions.  There is always a justification readily available, and if we’re free to determine our own morality based on what feels right, there will always be murders and rapists and thieves.  There will always be war and violence, because people will always justify the lust for power as the natural way of things – the way human beings are.

We live in a fallen world.  But there is hope.

When the Most Ancient people fell, their wills became corrupted.  And because their will and their understanding were so closely tied, they could not be revived by a knowledge of what was true.  And it may have seemed, then, like the human race was hopeless.

But from the time when the Most Ancient Church began to fall, the Lord provided people with hope, in the form of a prophecy.  God told the serpent that he would bruise the heel of the Seed of the woman – but that the woman’s Seed would bruise his head.  That Seed of the woman is the Lord.  This was the first prophecy of the Lord’s coming – and faith in the Lord to come sustained His church for the next several thousand years.

The will of man would be still be evil from birth.  But the Lord would separate the understanding from the will, so that a person could know what was right and choose to live by what was right.  That higher perception of the will would be closed off, because the will was evil.  But there was a way that the Lord could show himself even to the lowest level of the mind.  The Lord would come as a Divine Human, a visible God, and reach even people with fallen wills.

And so there is hope for us today.  We still are born with corrupt wills.  But we can learn what is true.  We can humbly ask the Lord to teach us what is right, then choose to live by that, acknowledging that it is only because the Lord came and conquered the forces of hell that we are able to do so.  We can force ourselves to live, not based on our own intelligence, or what we feel like doing, but on our understanding of His Word.  And when we do that, the Lord gives us a new heart.  When we act in obedience to the Lord’s Word, He creates in us a new, heavenly will, a will to do what we know is right.  And He can bring us into the New Jerusalem – where once again we find the tree of life: love to the Lord, and the acknowledgment that our lives come from the Him, and not from ourselves.  When we fight against the temptation to live based on our own selfish desires, and instead to live by the Lord’s truth, that serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, is cast down, and we are made free.

Readings: Matthew 6:7-13; Matthew 26:36-44; Arcana Coelestia 2535

LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY

Throughout the world, probably throughout the entirety of human history, people have been praying.  Even with all the diversity among religions in the world, almost every religion has some kind of prayer – an attempt to communicate with something greater, and to ask something of that higher power.

But the religions of the world vary in how they pray, what form of prayer they believe will be effective.  Within the land of Judea, the Lord’s disciples saw many different forms of prayer, by both Jews and Gentiles; and they naturally wondered how they should pray.  The gospel of Luke recounts a time that they saw the Lord praying, and came to ask Him about it: “And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, when He had ceased, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1).  His response to them was to teach them what we now know as the Lord’s prayer.

In that gospel, the Lord said, “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father, who art in the heavens…”  He told them to use the exact words of that prayer, and there’s evidence that the earliest Christians did pray the Lord’s Prayer regularly.  And there is power in those very words.  In fact, the book Arcana Coelestia says of this prayer, “In the contents of this Prayer there are more things than the universal heaven is capable of comprehending.”  By praying the Lord’s Prayer, we open ourselves up to countless thoughts and affections from heaven.

But the occasion recorded in Luke was not the only time the Lord taught His disciples to pray this prayer.  He taught the same prayer also as part of the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.  And on that occasion, rather than telling His followers to say those exact words, He told them to pray “in this way” – that is, for all their prayers to be modelled on the Lord’s Prayer.

Like the disciples, we wonder how we ought to pray.  Who do we pray to?  What kinds of things should we pray for?  How should we pray in a way that will really make a difference?  The Lord provides us with His prayer as a model to answer these questions.

Our Father who art in the heavens:

We begin with the question of Who we should pray to.  And we begin with the most important part of the prayer, which is contained in all the things that follow.  We can think of the entire prayer as a column descending from highest to lowest, a picture of the Lord in His essence descending down into all levels of creation (see Arcana Coelestia 8864:4).  The first thing in the prayer is “Our Father,” and in the original Greek text, this is actually, “Father of us” – Father is the first and most important thing.

Think of the relationship we’re invited to have with the God of the Universe – not as a distant, unknowable being, but as our own Father, in the relationship between a parent and child.  “Our Father” is the Lord in His essence, which is His infinite Divine love.

Now, for those who think of a God as a Trinity of persons, it may seem like we are supposed to pray to “the Father” rather than “the Son.”  Swedenborg recounts an experience with spirits who tried to argue just that (see True Christian Religion 112).  But the Lord Himself made clear over and over again that it is impossible to approach the Father except through the Son, because the Father is in the Son as the Soul is in the Body.  Jesus said, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30).  When they asked Him to show them the Father, Jesus told His disciples, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).  “Our Father” is the Lord God Our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Hallowed be Thy name

A person’s name is an external thing that still contains within it an idea of who they are.  For example, even the mention of the name of a friend brings to mind all that friend’s qualities.  And so, our Father’s “name” represents all His qualities and all the ways He manifests Himself to us.  And the way He manifests Himself is in His Divine Humanity, as the Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s why when Jesus said, “Father, glorify Thy name,” a voice from heaven answered and said, “I have both glorified, and will glorify again” (John 12:28).  The Father’s name, in the deepest sense, represents His Divine Human.

This is who we pray to: the Lord God Jesus Christ, in His essence of Divine Love (the Father) and all His qualities and manifestations (His name).

Thy kingdom come

We know come to the content of the prayer – what we pray for (although praying “hallowed be Thy name” is actually the beginning of this).  Praying for the Lord’s kingdom means praying for spiritual things – for the Lord’s good and truth to descend into the world – since as the Lord said, His kingdom is not of this world.  And in the most general terms, prayers that are answered are prayers for spiritual things.  One of our lessons, taken from Arcana Colestia 2535, says, “If a person prays from love and faith, and for only heavenly and spiritual things, there then comes forth in the prayer something like a revelation… as to hope, consolation, or a certain inward joy.”  More specifically, the prayer that the Lord’s kingdom come is a prayer that His New Church will descend more and more into the world – that is, that more and more people will be able to see that the Lord Jesus Christ is the one and only God, and that salvation comes from living according to the Ten Commandments.

Thy will be done

Following right after the prayer that the Lord’s kingdom come is this prayer that His will be done.  This statement is essential in every prayer, as it says in Arcana Coelestia 8179:

For in prayer from the Divine it is always thought and believed that the Lord alone knows whether it is profitable or not; and therefore the suppliant submits the hearing to the Lord, and immediately after prays that the will of the Lord, and not his own, may be done, according to the Lord’s words in His own most grievous temptation at Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39, 42, 44).

This prayer that the Lord’s will be done makes a prayer spiritual.  For example, we may pray, “Lord, I really want to get this job.”  In itself, that is a natural prayer.  But if we pray along with this, “Not my will, but Your will be done,” the prayer becomes spiritual – we are praying that we get the job if it is going to be the best thing for our spiritual welfare, and the best thing in the Lord’s providence.  We acknowledge that He knows what is best for us, and that He will grant it.

As in heaven, so upon the earth

Although some English translations have this as, “on earth as it is in heaven,” the original Greek has heaven first.  This continues the picture of the prayer as descending down from the Lord in a column – beginning with His essence (the Father) down through His kingdom (heaven and the church within people) into every level of human life.

Give us this day our daily bread

The Lord’s Prayer continues to model the kinds of things we ought to ask for in all our prayers.  “Bread” represents goodness and love, and so by asking for bread we are asking that the Lord inspire us with love – another element in spiritual prayer.  It’s also important to note that the prayer is to give us today our daily bread.  We don’t ask for bread for a week or a month – we ask that the Lord give us as much as we need for today.  It echoes the Lord’s command to the children of Israel to only gather as much manna as they needed for a day.  When we pray that the Lord give us only what we need, the Lord can inspire us with a greater trust – so that we can be free from some of the worry about “what we shall eat, or what we shall drink, or what we shall wear” (Matthew 6:31).

But forgive us our debts

Some translations have this as “forgive us our trespasses” – and immediately following this prayer in the sermon on the mount the Lord said, “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” – but in the prayer itself, it literally says, “Forgive us our debts.”  The reality is, we all owe an unpayable debt to the Lord.  He gives us life and the ability to act – and when we take that life and use it for evil, to trespass against others – we have stolen something from Him.  We owe Him a debt.  But the Lord forgives every debt.  He doesn’t keep a tally sheet.  But for that forgiveness to be effective, we have to repent of our sin, as the Lord calls us to do over and over again.  “But if a wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed, keeps all My statutes, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die” (Ezekiel 18:23).

As we also forgive our debtors

For the Lord to flow in with forgiveness, we need to have a spirit of forgiveness ourselves.  The image of debt here helps us see the ways that we can be unforgiving – when we keep track of all the ways people have wronged us, the way they “owe” us, when we keep a tally sheet of how we are better than them.  The Lord asks us to throw that away.  This doesn’t mean we let harmful people continue to do harm – but in our attitude toward them, we are not to hold anger or hatred against them.  This part of the prayer also acts as a model showing us that true prayer must come from a spirit of charity, as said above in Arcana Coelestia 2535.

And lead us not into temptation

The Lord never actually does lead anyone into temptation, as is known in the Christian world from the epistle of James: “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.” (James 1:13-14)  But it can appear that God leads us into temptation, and this part of the prayer is a prayer that the Lord protect us in temptations, as well as an acknowledgment that He does not tempt.

But deliver us from evil

We’ve seen several different things that we can ask the Lord for in prayer.  We ask that His kingdom come – a prayer for the spiritual state not just of ourselves, but for everyone in the universe.  We ask that He give us our daily bread – the good things that are necessary for our spiritual well-being.  And now we descend to the lowest level, where evil spirits attack us; and the final thing we pray for is that the Lord protect us from evil.  It is an acknowledgment that the Lord is present with us on all levels – from where He dwells “in the heavens” to the valley of the shadow of death, where he delivers us from evil.

In this part of the prayer there is an acknowledgment that we are in evil, and that of ourselves we are helpless to get out of it.  And one of the essentials in true worship is humility – the acknowledgment that of ourselves we are nothing but evil, and that all goodness and truth comes from the Lord alone.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

The other side of the acknowledgment that we are powerless against evil is the acknowledgment that the Lord does have power.  This final acknowledgment encapsulates the entire prayer, showing the Lord’s presence on every level of our lives.  We acknowledge that the kingdom is His – all good and truth with angels and spirits and men.  We acknowledge that the power is His – the power He has to act from Divine Love.  And we acknowledge that the glory is His – the awe-inspiring wisdom and truth from Him, that we can only ever capture a glimpse of.

Two final questions

The Lord’s prayer gives us a model for true prayer.  We pray for spiritual things, and from charity.  We pray that the Lord’s will be done.

But there may still be a question: if we are praying that the Lord’s will be done, do our prayers really make a difference?  Right before teaching His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, the Lord said, “Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him” (Matthew 6:8).  If our Father knows what we need, does asking make any difference?

The answer is clearly yes.  Because in the act of asking, we open ourselves up to receive the things that the Lord wants to give us.  We open ourselves up to the answers to our prayers, which come as “something like a revelation as to hope, consolation, or a certain inward joy.”

And this raises one final question: do our prayers make any difference to anyone else, or only to ourselves, in opening us up?  The Writings say little on this topic directly.  But we are told that anyone who knows of the Lord’s second coming, and the New Heaven and the New Church, pray that the Lord come with light (Apocalypse Revealed 956).

The Writings do teach that we all exist in our spirits in the spiritual world, and that when we think of someone else with love, our spirits draw closer (see for example Arcana Coelestia 1277).  And so perhaps this is the way that prayers do affect others.  When we pray that the Lord’s will be done, we are not going to change the Lord’s will – but we can align ourselves with it and act as another vessel for it.  If we know someone who is suffering, for example – the Lord is already flowing into that person with His love and wisdom.  He is flowing in directly, and He is flowing in through countless angels and spirits.  When we pray for that person that the Lord be with them and that the Lord’s will be done, we join that spiritual force that the Lord is able to flow through.  We will not be the sole difference-maker – but we can say, “I want to be on that team” that the Lord is acting through.

Conclusion

In praying our prayers, we open ourselves up to be vessels of the Lord’s will, so that through us His kingdom can come more fully into this world.  The Lord’s prayer provides a model for us to acknowledge the Lord’s power and ability, His love and wisdom, on every level of our lives.

“Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, as in heaven so upon the earth.”

Amen

Lessons: Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 3:1-12; Arcana Coelestia 154

EZEKIEL AND THE DRY BONES

“And I prophesied as He commanded me, and the spirit came into them, and they lived, a very great army.” (Ezekiel 37:10)

In the children’s talk this morning, we talked about the story of Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones.  We heard some of the context there – the people of Judah were in captivity in Babylon, and they were crying out to the Lord that their bones were dried up, they had been cut off – they were alive but they felt dead.  And so the Lord took Ezekiel to this valley of dry bones.

Before we begin to look at the internal sense it would be useful to look a little more at the concept of spirit, since it plays such an important role in this story.  In Hebrew, as well as Greek and Latin, the word for “spirit” is the same as the word for “breath” and the word for “wind.”  The concept of “the spirit” was more than just the concept of natural wind or natural breath – there was a concept that the entire world was maintained by the breath or spirit of God.  And so when a person breathed that was the spirit breathing in them.

With that in mind, let’s dig a little deeper into the internal sense of this story.

The story begins with the prophet Ezekiel being taken by the hand of the Lord to a valley – a low place, a dark place.  It’s a valley where a great host of people has been killed, and their bones lie scattered.  They’ve been there for ages – the flesh has gone from off of them, and the bones have been dried out in the sun.  The Lord asked Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?”  Ezekiel is humble enough to simply say, “O Lord Jehovih, you know” – but the answer clearly seems to be “no,” they cannot.

We are those bones.  When we begin our spiritual lives, we are dead.  In the children’s talk, we talked about times when we feel dead.  And this story is about those times – but it’s also about times when we are spiritually dead without even realizing it.  Because before we are born again, we are spiritually dead.  The people in the earliest days of the Christian church knew this well.  For example, in his letter to the Ephesians the Apostle Paul wrote, “You who were dead in trespasses and sins He made alive” (Ephesians 2:1).

Those dry bones in particular represent a part of ourselves that is both dead in itself, and that is the source of evil and death.  The Writings for the New Church refer to this as our proprium, which is a Latin word meaning, “what is our own.”  Now, the concept of the proprium is a complex one, and it’s hard to describe briefly even what it is.  One way to think of our “proprium” is as our sense that we live from ourselves.  It’s a sense of ownership, that things within us belong to us.  It’s similar in some ways to the concept of a sense of self

But is this bad?  We need to have a sense of self – we wouldn’t be human without it.  This is true.  Everyone – angels and people and evil spirits alike – have an Own or a proprium, and in fact, it’s this sense that we live from ourselves that allows us to be joined to the Lord in freedom as separate beings from Him.  But there is an enormous difference between the heavenly proprium and the natural proprium that we are born with.  The heavenly proprium is called the “vivified proprium,” or the proprium that has been given life.  And this story of the dry bones is a story about how that happens, how the dead, bony proprium is brought to life.

What is our sense of “own” like in that first, dead state?  In it, we think of everything in our lives as coming from ourselves.  All our good qualities, everything we like about ourselves – that’s US, and we feel a lot of affection for me.  Our thoughts are focused on ourselves – if we’re daydreaming or our minds are wandering, chances are the focus is not on others, but on something we want for ourselves.

It’s hard to believe, but in this state, from the perspective of the angels, we are nothing but scattered bones.  When we believe that life is in us and from us, and that everything in our lives is from ourselves, we are not yet alive in a true sense.

It’s important to note, also, that those dead bodies did not just die naturally – they were killed, probably in battle.  There are evil spirits around us constantly who would love nothing more than to convince us that we live from ourselves, that we are the most important thing in our lives, that we should love ourselves first and foremost.  There is an enemy that killed us and wants us to stay dead.

Is there really any hope for us?  Can we really be so radically changed that we move from the sense that life is from ourselves, to a real acknowledgment that life is something that flows in from heaven?  Because this is what it’s going to take.  It can seem impossible – Ezekiel was not sure that the bones could be brought back to life.  But he did not deny it.  He simply said, “O Lord Jehovih, you know.”

Now, many people think of being born again as something that happens in an instant.  But that’s not the way it happens.  It’s a process.  And it’s a process in this story.

So how does it happen?  How do we start to acknowledge that life is something that flows in, not something that belongs to us?   Some people would say the solution – the way to feel like life is from God – is simply to stop trying to do things on your own and wait for God to flow in.  But if the spirit had blown into those dead bones, nothing would have happened.  They had to first be arranged in such a way that they could receive that spirit flowing in from God.

We’re the same way.  The way to experience the Lord’s life, rather than life that we think of as our own, is not to just sit around and wait for it.  We have to act completely as if from ourselves for God to give us a renewed proprium that acknowledges life as coming from Him.

So Ezekiel prophesies to the bones – and they start to move.  As a prophet, Ezekiel represents the Lord’s Word, since he spoke the Lord’s Word.  The first step in the revival of our proprium is to go to the Lord’s Word.

We go to the Word first with the intellectual side of our minds.  Those bones but they especially represent the “own” in our understanding, our intellect.  This is where we first hear and respond to the Word.   That proprium in the understanding is all our thoughts, and the sense that our thinking is from ourselves – the sense that the things in our mind belong to us.

We do need to have that sense – that our thoughts are our own – for us to learn anything.  And at first, our motivation for learning anything is going to be mixed, and in large part selfish – because we want to feel smart, or for other people to think of us as smart.  But there can still be the beginnings of life there – to the extent that we want to learn truth for the sake of living better.  The bones start to move.  And it’s a focus on how to use truth that brings those bones together, to start to form a skeleton.  We sometimes even talk in these terms about concepts – the framework of an idea we call the skeleton, the most important part of it the backbone, etc.

This can sound abstract, so let’s use an example.  We know lots of scattered truth, things we’ve picked up from talking to other people, from sermons, and especially from the Word.  But when we focus on how to live by them, certain ones start to stand out as being the most important.  The backbone of it all is to love the Lord and to love the neighbour.  The finger bones might be the specific, practical things we’ve learned about how to love the neighbour – for example, that we have to fight against a tendency to snap at our spouse when we’re in a bad mood.  All the different truths we know will play some role just like the different bones in our bodies plays, and even the different parts of the different bones – because there is a direct correspondence or relationship between the spiritual function of truth and the functions of the bones of our bodies.

When we learn truth and think about how it could apply to life, those bones start to join together.  But the body is more than bones.  And as Ezekiel looked on, sinews and flesh and skin came onto the bones, so that they lay there complete human forms – still without life, but whole and new again as they had been when they had been alive.

The Writings say that this flesh that is put onto the bones represents that heavenly proprium – an “own” that is tied to a new will, born in the understanding.  And it’s what happens when we start to put those truths we know into life – it’s what happens when we live truth and it begins to turn into goodness.

Now again, in this story, it can seem like all of this happens without any effort on a person’s part.  But this is not actually the way that new proprium or sense of self-life is formed.  In fact, it is just the opposite – it is self-compulsion that forms that new will.  When we don’t want to do something, and yet we force ourselves to do it, it does not feel like we’re very free.  In fact, it feels like we’re giving up our freedom.  But the reality is that in compelling ourselves, we are coming into more freedom than ever before.  The truth is that before we fight against sin, we are slaves to sin.  Before we make ourselves get up and do something, we are slaves to lethargy and laziness.  It’s only in compelling ourselves that our higher selves begin to have dominance over our lower selves.  It’s that higher self where the new proprium resides.

But even then the process is not complete.  In Ezekiel’s vision the bones had come together and flesh had covered them, but there was still no life in them – no spirit.  And so at the Lord’s command Ezekiel prophecied to the four winds to breathe spirit into these bodies.  And the four winds blew and spirit came into the bodies and they stood up on their feet, a great army.

As we mentioned in the children’s talk, our culture is rife with images of the undead – of living skeletons, of green-skinned zombies.  That is not what we are to picture here – we are to picture an army of healthy, strong, living human beings.  Because this is an image of what happens when our proprium is made new.  We read a passage from Arcana Coelestia this morning describing the immense difference between a person’s “own” and a person’s “own” that has been vivified, or brought to life, by the Lord’s Own, the Lord’s proprium – that is, all the things that really belong to the Lord that He us to feel as our own.  The first proprium, when we believe that life is from ourselves, is so ugly that nothing could be uglier; but the things in the vivified own appear beautiful.

And the key here is that breath, that wind, the spirit that flows into these bodies and brings them to life.  The spirit represents life inflowing from the Lord.  We act as if ourselves to learn truth and to live by it – but it is the Lord who breathes His spirit into that and brings it to life.  It happens in the moment when we realize that we actually want to do good to others – that it isn’t any longer something we have to force ourselves to do.  It happens when we realize that our desires and attitudes have changed – and we realize that we weren’t the ones who brought about those changes.  And it happens when we realize that the good things in us are not our own, but they belong instead to the Lord God Jesus Christ.

The primary characteristic of the heavenly proprium is that even though it continues to feel as if it lives from itself, it perceives and acknowledges that all life is from the Lord.  All angels are in this acknowledgment – the acknowledgment that of themselves they are nothing but evil, that what is their own is hard and bony and dead.  But from the Lord they are granted a new proprium – a perception that they are merely vessels of the Lord’s life, and that they are blessed with the opportunity to serve as expressions of the Lord’s love.

The angels are constantly in this perception that life is the Lord’s.  Even so, though, we read in Arcana Coelestia, “the angels perceive that they live from the Lord, although when not reflecting on the subject they know no other than that they live from themselves.”  They still feel like life is from themselves.  And so we can’t expect to constantly feel the Lord’s life in us.  But when we are reflecting by ourselves, we can acknowledge it, and as we progress, even perceive it – that all of our own efforts toward goodness, all our ability to love, even our life itself, is from the Lord.  This is one of the great secrets of the New Church – that our own efforts are not somehow evil or wrong, but that we know the Lord in those efforts when we realize that they are really His efforts in us.  That’s the vivified, renewed proprium – the sense of ourselves that does not want to live from ourselves, but simply wants to be a vessel.  And yet the Lord grants us to feel life of ourselves so that we can freely choose to join ourselves to Him in sharing His love for humanity.

It’s hard to believe that we’re dead until we come into this acknowledgment.  But the Lord does let us catch glimpses of what it’s like to get out of ourselves and have moments where we aren’t so focused on our selves, or where we actually realize that the good things in us don’t belong to us.  When we compare the life in those moments to the life in our regular, self-centered moments, we can realize that the more we are in our self-life, the more dead we are.  But this story is also a story of hope – if the Lord could revive dead bones, scattered in a valley and left to dry, He also can bring us to life.  This is the new life, this is regeneration, this is the new birth.

“And I shall put My spirit in you, and you shall live, and I shall place you on your own ground; and you shall know that I, Jehovah, have spoken it, and done, says Jehovah.”

Amen.

NAAMAN’S LEPROSY

“My father, if the prophet had spoken unto you of a great thing, would you not have done it? How much more then, when he says to you, ‘Bathe and be​ ​clean’?” (2 Kings 5:13)

What should we do to be cleaned?  How can we be cured of our spiritual diseases?  The answer is simple: wash, and be cleaned.  Cease to do evil, learn to do good.  But that simple answer is often unsatisfying.  Sometimes we want something much bigger, something immediate and powerful that heals us in an instant.  In those times, we are like Naaman, who we read about this morning.

Naaman was the commander of the army of the king of Syria – “a great man.”  He was a hero of his people – but he suffered from leprosy.  In those times, there was no known cure for leprosy.  It would have disfigured Naaman, and made his skin hard and white.  Besides this, when a person has leprosy they lose sensitivity, and they can easily hurt their bodies because they don’t feel pain.

We don’t know how long Naaman had been a leper, or whether he had tried anything to find a cure, but the story reveals that he was desperate– since he brought with him an incredible sum of money that he was willing to give to Elisha if the prophet was able to cure him.  In fact, the disease may have been life-threatening, since when the king of Israel was asked to find a cure, he cried out, “Am I God, to put to death and make to live?” – implying that Naaman was asking for his very life.

Elisha might have been Naaman’s last hope.  But Naaman would not have even known of Elisha if it were not for a young Israelite girl who had heard of his plight.  She had been captured by the Syrians in one of their frequent raids against Israel, and brought to the house of Naaman – but she did not seem to have borne any ill will against her captors.  On the contrary, she expressed a sincere desire for Naaman to be healed – she said to her mistress, Naaman’s wife, “Oh that my lord were before the prophet that is in Samaria – then would he recover him of his leprosy!”

And so, after the king of Syria had sent a letter to the king of Israel, and Elisha had promised that Naaman could be healed, Naaman came to Israel.  He came with his horse and chariot, and he went to the entrance of the house of Elisha the prophet.  No doubt he expected a great welcome fitting for a man of his greatness.  Imagine his surprise when instead a servant came out with a message: Elisha said to bathe seven times in the Jordan, and his flesh would be returned to him, and he would be clean.  That was it – Elisha did not even come out to see him.

Naaman was furious.  He had travelled over a hundred miles, he had crossed several rivers – including the Jordan, miles before – and the great prophet would not even speak to him in person.  He had expected a great ceremony; he had thought, “He will come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of Jehovah his God, and wave his hand over the place, and recover the leper!”  But this – a message, to simply bathe in the Jordan – was insulting!  The Jordan was not even a very great river – the rivers of Damascus, Naaman’s home city, were much more renowned.  If he had to bathe in a river to be cleaned, couldn’t he as well or better bathe in the great rivers of his home?  So he turned away in a rage to begin the journey back to Syria.

But his servants stopped him.  They said, “If the prophet had spoken unto you of a great thing, would you not have done it?   How much more when he says to you, bathe and be clean?”  That gave Naaman pause.  Imagine the struggle that this might have started in him.  On the one hand, he had been told to do something so simple and childish that it was almost insulting.  On the other hand, though, he still had his leprosy, and he had no one to turn to but Elisha.  And so, he swallowed his pride.  He went to the Jordan river; he dipped in it seven times – and his flesh was healed, and became soft like the skin of a young boy – and he was clean.

Naaman’s attitude in the story is one we may recognize in ourselves.  It is easy to fantasize about doing something great and wonderful in the service of mankind.  It’s more difficult to do the everyday things – to work thanklessly to clean the house, to put food on the table, to be nice to the cashier who messed up our order, to forgive the driver who cut us off.  We would rather do something grand than mundane.

That’s the overall sense of this story – it’s about the importance of having enough humility to do something simple and straightforward rather than large and noticeable.  With that general overview in mind, we can look deeper into the story, and see its particular application in terms of our regeneration, since everything in the Word has to do in the internal sense with the way we are reformed and made ready for heaven.

We begin the story with Naaman, the commander of the army of Syria.  He’s a successful commander, the “saviour of his people” – and yet, he has leprosy, a damaging disease.  Naaman comes from Syria, and it was known even in Old Testament times that there was religious knowledge and wisdom in Syria.  The fortune-teller Balaam came from Syria, and he knew God by His name, Jehovah.  The Writings for the New Church reveal that the Syrians had this knowledge because the ancient church, the true church before the founding of the Jewish religion, had existed with them.  But over time that church had become corrupt.  They falsified the truth that they knew, and the church left them.

Because of all this, Syria represents knowledge of truth from the Lord’s Word – and in a negative sense, a knowledge that has been falsified.  Leprosy, too, represents a falsification of truth, and the profaning of it.  And so Naaman stands for a person, or the part of us, that knows things from the Lord’s Word; but it knows them in a false way, a twisted way.  For example, Naaman might be the voice in us that says, “All power is from the Lord, and I have no power of my own” – which is true –  “so there’s nothing I can do for my spiritual life except wait and hope for God to flow in.”  Or Naaman might be the voice in us that says, “The Bible says sinners go to hell” – which is true – “and I’m a sinner – there’s no way I’ll ever be good enough for heaven, so I might as well give up.”  Or Naaman might be the voice that says, “God will put me where I’m going to be the happiest I can be” – which is true – “so there’s no point in trying to change.” As you can see, all of those have grains of truth in them – but the truth is falsified.

Those falsities in particular – that there is no point in trying to change, in putting effort toward our spiritual life – are falsities that keep us from goodness.  They are falsities that numb us, in the way that leprosy dulls the senses of someone suffering from it.  They’re falsities that make us feel dead, and that there’s nothing we can do to change where we are.  When we’re in a state like Naaman, we’re in a state where life feels dull and meaningless, and where we feel like nothing is ever going to change.  Naaman’s leprosy seemed incurable.

But into the scene comes that young Israelite girl.  As a little child, she represents innocence.  She knows of a cure for Naaman.  And catching sight of innocence – in ourselves or in someone else – can prompt us to believe that there is something more in life, a deeper kind of joy than we have now.  Many of us give up on the ideas of ever being innocent ourselves – we’ve seen too much, we’ve done too much – but a reminder that innocence does exist can prompt us to look for something more, to look for a cure for our spiritual leprosy.

And so Naaman comes to Israel, to Elisha the prophet.  In the same way, when we have that hope that we can be cured, that something in us really can change, we can come to the church – represented by the land of Israel – and to the Word – represented by the prophet Elisha, since as a prophet he spoke the word of the Lord.  We decide to see what the church has to say, what the Word has to say, and whether it can really do anything for us.

Sometimes we do this with an attitude of humility.  But there are other times when we do it with something of that attitude of Naaman.  We want immediate, drastic, visible change in our lives, and we won’t be satisfied with anything less.

We can come with those expectations or desires.  That’s certainly what Naaman came with.  But Elisha did not come out and perform some great, powerful ritual.  Instead he sent a simple message: if you want to be cured, go dip in the Jordan river seven times, and you will be clean.  Nothing dramatic, nothing immediate – just go back and bathe in the Jordan.

It’s clear to anyone reading this that there must be some deeper significance to the Jordan river, and to washing seven times.  As a river, the Jordan represents truth.  Truth quenches our thirst for understanding in the same way that water quenches our natural thirst.  Truth washes away falsity the same way that water washes away dirt and grime from our bodies.  And the river Jordan, because it was at the entrance to the land of Israel, represents the first, basic truths we learn from the Word.  That’s why John the Baptist baptized people in the Jordan: because baptism marks an entrance into the Lord’s church and a first introduction to the basic truths of the church.  These basic truths are the ones that are found right in the literal sense of the Word: that there is a God, that He wants us to love Him and love each other, that we must not murder, or steal, or bear false witness, or commit adultery.

The Jordan represents those basic truths, and washing in the Jordan means living by them.  It especially means repenting from the evils listed in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere in the literal sense of the Word.  That’s why John preached a baptism of “repentance, for the remission of sins.”

But to return to the story of Naaman.  Just as Naaman went to Israel and listened to Elisha, we have gone to the church and listened to the Word.  But our lives were not miraculously changed in an instant.  We did not immediately learn some great answer that solved all our problems.  Instead, we are told to bathe in the river Jordan seven times – that is, to live by the most basic teachings of the Lord’s Word.

It can be disappointing.  How in the world is that going to make any difference?  These are obvious things.  Everyone knows you’re not supposed to lie.  Everyone knows you’re not supposed to commit adultery.  Everyone knows it’s bad to murder.  These are so simple – they’re too simple.

And it really can be hard to believe that these will make any difference, because often we feel like we’re basically doing them anyway.  “Sure, maybe I lie sometimes, but I don’t most of the time, and I don’t see how cutting out those times when I do lie will make that big an impact on my life.”  “Sure, I look at other women and fantasize a bit, but I love my wife, and it doesn’t seem to do any harm.”  “Yes, I’ll occasionally fudge the numbers with my job, but it’s not really hurting anyone, and stopping it wouldn’t make some huge drastic change in my life.  Maybe ideally I’d do it, but that’s not really the issue.  That can’t be the issue – it’s much bigger than those little things I’m doing.”

But the answer to those objections is simple: if those things aren’t that big a deal, than why not stop doing them?  Why not start addressing those simple, everyday ways that you break the commandments.  Maybe they aren’t the biggest issue – but if you’d be willing to do something big and grand and life-changing – why not start with the little things and see what happens?

Naaman’s servants use the same line of reasoning with him.  If you’d be willing to do something great, why not do this small thing?  And so Naaman – perhaps still not entirely believing it will work – bathes in the Jordan seven times.  Throughout the Word, the number seven represents completeness.  Bathing in the Jordan seven times means completely deciding to follow those basic commandments.  It means whole-heartedly shunning evils as sins against the Lord – not just because they’re a bad idea, or might get us in trouble, but because they are blocking the Lord’s love for us, and making our lives hellish.  Again, it’s hard to believe that those everyday things are so important – but unless we shun even these evils because they are sins against God, nothing is really going to change.

And Naaman does notice a change.  His skin becomes like that of a young boy, and he is cleaned.  That image of a young boy again calls to mind that first impulse that made us want to change – a vision of innocence.  And we can find that there is hope that even we can become innocent again, with a new kind of innocence – not an innocence of ignorance, but an innocence of wisdom.

Now the change did not take place after dipping once in the Jordan, or twice, or three times.  You can imagine what Naaman may have been thinking as he went into the Jordan again and again and saw nothing being washed away.  Is this really going to work?  And the same thing can happen if we make a commitment to shunning some everyday evil in our lives – it can seem at first like it really makes no difference at all.  A person who is fighting an addiction to pornography, for example, might force himself to stop, and to shun that as a sin against God – but still at first not notice any difference in the way he relates to his wife or his girlfriend or people of the opposite sex in general.  But if he keeps at it and continues to shun it, after months or even years, if he looks back to where he was before, he will notice that his life has changed.

Now, if a person takes credit for the change, they end up right where they were before.  But Naaman knows that it is not due to his own greatness that he was cleaned.  At the end of the story, he goes back to Elisha and offers him great riches; and when Elisha turns those down, Naaman asks only for some dirt from the land of Israel to take back with him and worship on.  Think of the change that has happened in him: from the arrogant pride when he arrive; to the humility he displays here, valuing the dirt of Israel above his own wealth and reputation.

It’s easy to hear again and again in church about repentance, and to sigh, “Yes, I’ve heard that before!”  It’s pretty mundane.  It’s not that impressive.  And because it’s so familiar, we can think it’s not going to make any difference.  But challenge yourself.  Today, after you’ve gone home from church, look at an everyday, small evil in your life, and resolve to shun it as a sin against the Lord.  Pray to the Lord for help. And you will notice the beginnings of a change.  It willopen you up to new realizations about where you are spiritually, and where the Lord can take you.  And if you keep learning truth from the Lord’s Word, and living by it, you will be made clean.  “Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh shall return to you, and you shall be clean.”

Amen.

Lessons: Matthew 3:1-17; 2 Kings 5:1-19; Divine Providence 329

DP 329. What is the Decalogue at the present day but like a little closed book or religious primer, opened only in the hands of infants and children? Say to anyone of mature age, Do not do this because it is contrary to the Decalogue, and who pays any attention? But if you say, Do not do this because it is contrary to the Divine laws, he may give this his attention; and yet the commandments of the Decalogue are the Divine laws themselves. An experiment was made with several spirits in the spiritual world, and when the Decalogue or Catechism was mentioned they rejected it with contempt. The reason for this is that the Decalogue in its second table, which is man’s table, teaches that evils are to be shunned; and he who does not shun them, whether from impiety or from the religious belief that works avail nothing, but only faith, hears with some contempt the Decalogue or Catechism being mentioned as though he heard mention made of a book for children, n which is no longer of any use to him.

HONOURING FATHER AND MOTHER

“Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged upon the land which Jehovah your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12)

The Writings for the New Church tell us that there are deeper senses within the literal sense of the Word, although this does not do away with the importance of the literal sense.  Within the literal sense there is a spiritual sense, which is primarily about love toward the neighbour; and even deeper than this is a celestial sense, primarily about love to the Lord.  All of the Ten Commandments contain both of these deeper senses.  But the first three commandments in particular focus on love to the Lord, and the final six – the list of thou-shalt-not’s – particularly focus on love toward the neighbour.  Today, though, we’re focusing on the bridge commandment, the one that most clearly conjoins the two tables of love to the Lord and love to the neighbour.

In the literal sense, this precept commands us to honour our parents.  In this sense, the commandment is especially important for children, since in childhood parents stand in for the Lord, and much of a person’s relationship with God as an adult will be coloured by his childhood relationship with his parents.  Even as adults, though, we ought to follow this commandment in the literal sense.    Although we no longer owe them obedience, we still owe our parents gratitude and love.

It is impossible to list all the things parents do for their children – giving birth, feeding and clothing them, giving them protection and love.  They also introduce them into religion, into following the Lord.  The Writings describe that in the Most Ancient Church, or the golden age represented in the Word by Adam and Eve, people did not live in cities of countries, but in clans and families.  They did not have rulers as we do now, but they honoured the head of their family and showed gratitude to them because of the spiritual gifts their parents gave them, for their love and their wisdom, and especially for introducing them into the worship of the Lord.

Of course, not all parents do introduce their children into the worship of the Lord.  Parents make mistakes, and there are parents who do harm to their children.  Sometimes as we grow older we move away from parents who continue to hurt us, and sometimes this is a healthy thing, just as sometimes the healthiest thing for a marriage is for a couple to separate.  But even in these extreme cases, we have this commandment to honour our parents.  We are not to honour the evil in them – but as with anyone else, there is good in them, and we are commanded to honour whatever good there is, and to focus on that more than on the evil.  All of us – no matter what our relationship with our parents – are asked to find forgiveness for whatever harm they’ve done, and show gratitude for the goodness in them.

In the strictest literal sense, this commandment refers to honouring one’s actual parents, or legal guardians who stand in their place.  But the book True Christian Religion says that in a wider sense – although still on a natural level – this commandment refers to honouring our country and her leaders (TCR 305).

Just as our parents provide us with necessities of life and protection from harm when we are children, our nation provides us with necessities of life and protects us from invasion.  We call our homeland out “motherland” or “fatherland.”  The word “patriotism” comes from the Greek word “pater,” meaning father.

Our country does not just mean our government – it means all the people who make up our nation, and honouring our nation as parent extends beyond honouring our government.  But True Christian Religion says it also does mean showing honour to our leaders almost as parents, and teaching children to do the same.  The idea of honouring our leaders, or even expressing patriotism for our country, can make many of us today feel uneasy.  The twentieth century saw terrible abuses of nationalistic fervour, and the thought of honouring leaders and nations as parents for many people calls to mind frightening images of blind obedience to corrupt causes.

But honouring our country does not mean blind allegiance – it means supporting what is truly good in it, showing gratitude for this, and honouring our leaders’ efforts to promote the country’s welfare.  The book Charity, written as a manuscript by Swedenborg and published after his death, gives the example of the way that a Protestant born in Venice or Rome could love his homeland, even though those were Catholic cities at the time.  We read as follows:

For example: if I had been born in Venice or in Rome, and were a Reformed Christian, am I to love my country, or the country where I was born, because of its spiritual good? I cannot. Nor with respect to its moral and civil good, so far as this depends for existence upon its spiritual good. But so far as it does not depend upon this I can, even if that country hates me. Thus, I must not in hatred regard it as an enemy, nor as an adversary, but must still love it; doing it no injury, but consulting its good, so far as it is good for it, not consulting it in such a way that I confirm it in its falsity and evil. (Charity 86)

The way we honour a country as our father and mother is not by ignoring its evil, but by supporting whatever is good in it while as much as possible discouraging its evil.

So far all the aspects of the commandment we’ve looked at are part of the literal sense.  But it is easy to see how this commandment as an internal sense as well.  Throughout the Word, God is called our Father.  The Lord even said, “Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9).  This does not literally mean that we cannot call our fathers “father,” but that we should acknowledge that in a truer, deeper sense, God is our Father.  Honouring our father means loving and revering Him.

It may not seem as obvious at first, though, what it means to honour our motherin the spiritual sense.  But upon a close reading of the Word, a clear picture begins to emerge.  Throughout the prophets, the nation and people of Israel are referred to as “the mother” of the individual Israelites living there at the time.  In Ezekiel, the children of Israel are told, “Your mother was like a vine in your bloodline, planted by the waters, fruitful and full of branches because of many waters” (Ezekiel 19:10), talking about the way that the Lord established them as His people.  In the New Testament, John saw the Holy City New Jerusalem “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  Through this imagery, it becomes clear that the “bride” of the Lord, and the mother of each person, is the Lord’s people, or His church.  And so honouring our mother in the spiritual sense means revering and loving the church.

But what is this church that we are supposed to love and revere?  In the simplest sense, the church is a group of people who subscribe to the same doctrine.  In the strictest sense, it’s a local congregation.  Before we look deeper and beyond this, it’s important to recognize this simple view of the church.  It’s easy to feel general goodwill toward all the people who follow the Lord, which is the church in a broader sense; but it is sometimes harder to revere and love the actual people in a church congregation, the real people sitting in the pew next to us.  We may have disagreements or conflicts, or a clash of personalities.  But still we are to honour our church community for the good and truth that it contains and teaches.

What makes the church like a mother, according to True Christian Religion, is that just as a mother provides natural food, the church provides spiritual food.  From the church ministers we learn truths from the Word; from church members, we have encouragement and support in living by the Word.

The spiritual sense of this commandment is to love and revere God and the church.  Deeper than this, there is a celestial sense.  In the celestial sense of “honour your father and your mother,” “father” refers specifically to the Lord Jesus Christ, and “mother” refers to what is called the communion of saints, the church scattered throughout the world.

The Lord Jesus Christ is our heavenly Father.  The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…” – and one of the names of the Son who would be born is “everlasting Father” (Isaiah 9:6).  The Lord Himself said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

The Lord is our Father – and He describes the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, as His bride, adorned for her husband.  In this sense, our mother is not only our local church, or even the church throughout the world, but the Lord’s kingdom, which exists within people in this world and throughout heaven, in whoever acknowledges the Lord and has faith in Him and charity toward the neighbour (see True Christian Religion 416).  Although we cannot always feel their influence, the angels and good spirits act as our spiritual mothers.  The Lord flows into the heavens, and through the heavens into our minds.  This marriage of the Lord’s life with the responses of the angels gives birth to all the infinite truth and goods in our minds and hearts.

We can also think of the kingdom of God, though, apart from thinking of individual angels or other people.  The Lord said, “The kingdom of God is within you.”  And even this sense, the kingdom of God, or the church within us, is our mother.  What is the church within an individual?  The Writings tell us that in particular, the church within us that acts as a mother is the truth of the church.  We learn truth, and it becomes as if it were our own.  When we act according to the truth we know, the Lord joins His good to it – that is, the Lord adds love to it.  For example, we know in our ourselves that it is wrong to lie; as if of ourselves we resist the tendency to lie; and we gradually find over time that wedislike lying, that we would rather tell the truth.  The Lord has added His goodness to our truth.  This results in a new birth in us – a new perception of what it mean to follow the Lord, a new love for acting by that truth.

In this sense, our truth is the church, and it’s married to the Lord’s goodness and love. But in actuality, we know, even that truth that seems to be ours is really the Lord’s.  Even the effort to live by that truth is the Lord’s, even though it feels to all appearances as if it is from ourselves.  The Lord’s kingdom is our mother, but in the truest sense, the Lord’s kingdom is the Lord himself with us.  The angels acknowledge that heaven is heaven from the Lord in it, not from anything that belongs to themselves.  It is the same with the Lord’s kingdom on earth, which we call the church: anything good in it, anything that makes it the church, in reality is the Lord’s, although He allows us to experience it as if it belonged to us.

This is why the book Arcana Coelestia says that in the supreme sense, honouring our father means honouring the Lord as to good, and honouring our mother means honouring the Lord as to truth, which is loving the Lord’s kingdom.  We read, “’mother’ signifies truth, and in the supreme sense the Lord as to Divine truth, thus His kingdom, because the Divine truth which proceeds from the Lord makes heaven” (AC 8896).  Honouring the Lord as to truth is honouring His kingdom.  The Lord’s truth within angels is married to the Lord’s love.  This marriage – the marriage of the Lord’s good with the Lord’s truth, taking place within us and with our participation – is what makes heaven with a person.  That is why this commandment contains a promise: that if you follow it, “your days shall be prolonged upon the land which Jehovah your God is giving you.”  In the internal sense, these words mean that goodness will increase in a person in heaven to eternity because the Lord flows in wherever goodness and truth are joined together.

In the supreme sense, “mother” signifies the Lord as to Divine truth.  This does not mean that we are to picture the Lord as a woman, or as our mother, or as some kind of androgynous being.  The Lord came into the world as Jesus Christ, and we worship Him under this form.  It is vital that we worship Him as a human, and this includes even worshipping Him with the form He had in this world, although now glorified.

Still, though, in Himself, the Lord is the source of all good feminine qualities as well as masculine.  All the positive traits that we associate with motherhood come from the Lord.  When He was in the world, the Lord wept over Jerusalem, and said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37).  This image of a hen protecting her chicks describes a universal sphere that flows out from the Lord, a sphere of protecting what has been created.  In people, this sphere manifests itself as a love for little children.  This sphere directly affects women in a special way that it does not affect men, although it flows through women and from them does affect men.  The nurturing role of a mother stems from this nurturing sphere in the Lord, and when a good mother looks after her children, she is acting from the Lord’s love.

When we respond in gratitude to a mother’s love, then, we are in fact responding in gratitude to the Lord.  And so when we follow this commandment – to honour our father and our mother – on any level, we may in fact be following it on the deeper levels without being aware of it.  When we honour the good things in our parents, and in our country and leaders, we are really honouring the Lord and His church, since these qualities all come from the marriage of the Lord with his church.  And the more we learn about the internal senses within this commandment – that it means loving and revering God and the church, or specifically the Lord Jesus Christ and His kingdom – the more we learn about these things, the more consciously and fully we can follow the commandment on every level, and the more we can become aware of the blessings it gives.  We come into the fulfillment of that promise – “that your days may be prolonged upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” Amen.

Lessons: Exodus 20:1-17; Mark 3:31-35; True Christian Religion 305-307

True Christian Religion 305. Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may be well with thee upon the earth.

So reads this commandment in Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16. In the natural sense, which is that of the letter, “to honour thy father and thy mother” means to honour parents, to be obedient to them, to be devoted to them, and to return thanks to them for the benefits they confer, which are that they provide food and clothing for their children, and so introduce them into the world that they may act in it as civil and moral persons; and introduce them also into heaven by means of the precepts of religion, thus providing both for their temporal prosperity and their eternal happiness. All this parents do from a love which they have from the Lord, in whose stead they act. In a relative sense it means that if parents are dead, guardians should be honoured by their wards. In a broader sense, to honour the king and magistrates, is meant by this commandment, since these provide for all in general the necessities which parents provide in particular. In the broadest sense this commandment means that men should love their country, since it supports and protects them, therefore it is called fatherland from father. But to country, king, and magistrates honour must be rendered by parents and by them be implanted in their children.

306. In the spiritual sense, “to honor father and mother” means to reverence and love God and the church….

307. In the celestial sense, “father” means our Lord Jesus Christ, and “mother” the communion of saints, which means the Lord’s church spread throughout the whole world….