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Bridgewater,
Massachusetts, January 4, 2004
Genesis
12:1-7 The call of Abram
The
Lord had said to Abram,
"Leave your country, your
people and your father's
household and go to the land I
will show you. I will make you
into a great nation and I will
bless you; I will make your name
great, and you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who
bless you, and whoever curses
you I will curse; and all
peoples on earth will be blessed
through you."
So
Abram left, as the Lord had told
him; and Lot went with him.
Abram was seventy-five years old
when he set out from Haran. He
took his wife Sarai, his nephew
Lot, all the possessions they
had accumulated and the souls
they had acquired in Haran, and
they set out for the land of
Canaan, and they arrived there.
Abram
traveled through the land as far
as the site of the great tree of
Moreh at Shechem. At that time
the Canaanites were in the land.
The Lord appeared to Abram and
said, "To your offspring I
will give this land." So he
built an altar there to the
Lord, who appeared to him.
Luke
2:21-32 Jesus presented in the Temple
On
the eighth day, when it was time
to circumcise him, he was named
Jesus, the name the angel had
given him before he had been
conceived.
When
the time of their purification
according to the Law of Moses
had been completed, Joseph and
Mary took him to Jerusalem to
present him to the Lord (as it
is written in the Law of the
Lord, "Every firstborn male
is to be consecrated to the
Lord"), and to offer a
sacrifice in keeping with what
is said in the Law of the Lord:
"a pair of doves or two
young pigeons."
Now
there was a man in Jerusalem
called Simeon, who was righteous
and devout. He was waiting for
the consolation of Israel, and
the Holy Spirit was upon him. It
had been revealed to him by the
Holy Spirit that he would not
die before he had seen the
Lord's Christ. Moved by the
Spirit, he went into the temple
courts. When the parents brought
in the child Jesus to do for him
what the custom of the Law
required, Simeon took him in his
arms and praised God, saying:
"Sovereign Lord, as you
have promised, you now dismiss
your servant in peace. For my
eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the
sight of all people, a light for
revelation to the Gentiles and
for glory to your people
Israel."
Arcana
Coelestia #1438 The Lord's early life
"And
they came into the land of
Canaan" means that the Lord
arrived at the heavenly things
of love. This is clear from what
was I have just explained about
the land of Canaan. Here the
Lord's early life is described,
from birth to childhood; during
this time he arrived at the
heavenly things of love. The
heavenly things of love are the
core realities; everything else
comes from them. He was filled
heavenly things first of all,
since from these, as from its
seed, everything else was then
made fruitful. With him the seed
itself was heavenly, for he was
born from Jehovah, and therefore
he was the only one who has ever
had that seed within himself.
Sovereign
Lord, as you have promised, you
now dismiss your servant in
peace. For my eyes have seen
your salvation, which you have
prepared in the sight of all
people, a light for revelation
to the Gentiles and for glory to
your people Israel. (Luke
2:29-32)
These
words, usually in a more
traditional translation, have
found their way into the closing
section of many worship
services. Yet though Simeon, who
spoke them, was close to his
departure from this world, he
was speaking in celebration of a
new beginning--in fact, of the
most wonderful new beginning
that has ever happened: the
birth of the Lord into the
world.
Our
Gospel reading tells first of
the naming of Jesus at his
circumcision when he was a week
old, and then of his
presentation in the Temple at
the completion of another
thirty-three days, which was the
prescribed period for ritual
purification of a woman after
the birth of a son. So at the
time of his presentation in the
temple, Jesus was forty days
old.
When
his parents brought him to the
temple, a devout man named
Simeon was also inwardly
directed, by the spirit of the
Lord, to come to the temple.
There, he took the infant Jesus
in his arms, and praised the
Lord, saying of the child,
"My eyes have seen your
salvation." This was the
meaning of the name
"Jesus" that the child
had been given according to the
instruction of the angel, as we
read in the Gospel of Matthew:
"You shall call his name
Jesus, for he will save his
people from their sins"
(Matthew 1:21).
"My
eyes have seen your
salvation." How could
Simeon say this of a baby less
than two months old? How could
this baby be the salvation not
only to the Jews, but to the
Gentiles as well--meaning the
Savior of all people?
The
spirit of God showed Simeon what
was already taking place in this
new life. For as we have once
again affirmed in the opening
sermons of this series, this was
no ordinary birth, and no
ordinary baby. In this baby
there was no human soul, but
rather, the soul of God himself
residing in a child born of a
human mother.
For
nearly two millennia, the inner
life of that child, and the man
he grew to be, has been largely
swathed in mystery. We get a few
brief glimpses in the Gospels of
the intense emotions and deep
struggles that the Lord went
through. But these are hardly
enough to build anything like a
complete picture of what was
happening within the Lord during
his life on earth. In fact, the
Gospels give practically no
information at all about the
vast bulk of the Lord's life on
earth. We are told how he was
born and spent some time in
Egypt with his parents during
his infancy. Then a decade is
passed by in silence, and we are
given one brief story of the
Lord at twelve years of age.
After that, nearly two decades
goes by in silence, before we
see the Lord beginning his
public ministry at the age of
thirty. What happened in the
intervening years? Can we ever
know anything about the Lord
during the bulk of his life?
The
outward details of the Lord's
life will forever remain a
mystery. Outwardly, he was an
ordinary boy from a poor family,
and no one would have taken
notice or recorded such a life.
It was only when he began his
public ministry, and began to
stand out from the crowd, that
anyone took notice, and that the
story of his life moves out of
the shadows and into the light.
However,
his inner life, though it goes
far beyond our finite, human
ability to grasp, is no longer
the mystery it once was, thanks
to the writings of Emanuel
Swedenborg. In his great work
Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of
Heaven), Swedenborg gives us an
extensive series on the Lord's
inner process of
"glorification," or of
becoming fully united with the
Divine Soul from which he came.
This series starts with the call
of Abram in Genesis 12, and
continues as a thread through
Swedenborg's explanations of all
the rest of the book of Genesis,
covering the lives of Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
This
is why I have chosen the story
of the call of Abram as our Old
Testament reading. As our series
on the inner life of the Lord
progresses, we will follow key
stories from the rest of
Genesis, relating them both to
the New Testament stories of the
Lord's life and to their
deepest, heavenly or
"celestial" meaning
that tells us of the Lord's
inner experience while he was
here on earth.
Even
Swedenborg's explanation of the
Lord's inner state in his
tiniest infancy is sketchy. In
explaining the first verse of
Genesis 12 he tells us:
Because
the Lord is the subject here,
these words contain more
secrets than anyone can
possibly conceive and explain.
For the deeper meaning here
speaks of the Lord's first
state after his birth. Because
that state is a very deep
secret, any understandable
explanation of it is
practically impossible. Let it
be said simply that he was
like any other human being,
except that he was conceived
from Jehovah, yet born of a
woman who was a virgin, and by
birth from that virgin he took
on all the weaknesses that are
common to all. These
weaknesses are physical, and
are referred to in this verse
in that he was to depart from
them so that heavenly and
spiritual things might be
brought into view for him. . . .
A
further secret is that the
Lord's human side also became
divine. In him alone there was
a correspondence of all things
of the body with the Divine.
This was a most perfect, or
infinitely perfect,
correspondence, and from it
there resulted a union of
physical things with divine
heavenly things, and of
sensory things with divine
spiritual things. Thus he
became the perfect human
being, and the only human
being. (Arcana Coelestia
#1414)
In
the highest, heavenly meaning of
the call of Abram in Genesis 12,
we have a picture of the Lord,
who was born from God through a
human mother, being called away
from the merely physical and
material side of his nature that
came from his mother, toward the
heavenly and divine things from
which his deeper nature came.
Now,
I would venture to say that none
of us ordinary mortals is aware
of any divine promptings while
we are still babes in arms. We
are aware, without conscious
thought, of the warmth of our
mother's body, and of less
warmth when we are separated
from human contact; we are aware
of taking in nourishment and
eliminating waste; we are aware
of comfort and discomfort; and
we are gradually learning to use
our eyes and distinguish things.
The
infant Jesus was aware of all of
these things, too. Physically
speaking, he was a human baby
like any other human baby, and
went through all the experiences
and phases that we do at that
early time of our lives.
Yet
unlike any other baby, the Lord
had God as his inner soul, his
inner being. So right from birth
he experienced everything at a
far deeper level, and with far
more clarity, than any of us
does. At a time when the center
of our lives is the warmth of
our mother, Jesus was already
beginning to feel the warmth of
God's infinite love welling up
from within, and calling him
toward higher things than we
will ever know or comprehend. A
little later in Arcana
Coelestia we read:
The
Lord's ability to learn went
beyond that of any other
person. Unlike others he
learned heavenly things before
spiritual ones. (Arcana
Coelestia #1464)
In
Swedenborg's way of speaking,
"heavenly" things,
when they are compared to
"spiritual" ones,
refer to the things of the
heart--to love--compared to the
things of the head--to truth. So
what he is saying here is that
the Lord became aware of and
learned things in his heart
first, and in his head only
afterwards.
This
is the reverse of what
ordinarily happens with us.
Generally speaking, we first
learn spiritual things in our
head, through Sunday School,
Bible reading, and hearing
religious teaching; only later
do we take them to heart and
make them a part of our lives.
This is because we are born
basically self-centered--focused
primarily on our own comfort and
well-being--and our hearts tend
toward the things that support
our own comfort. We have to be
trained and instructed from
outside to go in a higher
direction: toward loving the
Lord and loving our fellow human
beings more than we love
ourselves.
But
for Jesus, the Lord's love was
not outside of him; it was
within him, in his very soul.
And he felt those promptings
right from birth--even though a
conscious, intellectual
awareness of them still took
time to develop. This process of
moving from first awareness to a
clear mental grasp of the deeper
call is pictured by the journeys
of Abram.
It
is often stated mistakenly in
Bible commentaries and Sunday
School materials that Abram was
called from Ur of the Chaldees,
in the land of Babylonia. But in
fact, by the time Abram received
his call, his father Terah had
already taken him and his
family, along with his nephew
Lot, from Ur to Haran, which was
located halfway to Canaan (the
Holy Land) along the Fertile
Crescent in ancient Mesopotamia.
This story is told in the last
few verses of Genesis 11, just
before our Old Testament
reading.
Spiritually
speaking, the move from Ur to
Haran represents our early
travels from being focused
entirely on ourselves and our
own comforts (Babylon represents
self-love) to having some
awareness of others and their
feelings and needs (Haran
represents natural, outward
goodness). This happens even
before we have any conscious
promptings toward spiritual
life--represented by the Lord's
call to Abram. There is no
mention of the Lord calling
Terah to pick up his family and
move from Ur to Haran. He simply
does it. And our earliest inner
development begins before we
have any conscious awareness of
God.
The
Lord, also, had already traveled
away from an exclusive
self-awareness and focus on his
own sensations, comforts, and
discomforts by the time he
became consciously aware of the
Divine that was present within
himself. He was already aware of
others around him, and that his
own comfort and pleasure was not
to be the primary focus of his
life. As Genesis 12:4 makes
clear, Abram was called, not
from Ur, but from Haran.
What
takes place in Genesis 12 is the
first conscious call of God to
leave behind even the material
things of outward
goodness--enjoying the pleasures
of this life and the
companionship of friends and
family--as the main focus in
life. For us, it is the time we
first become aware that God is
calling us to higher, spiritual
things; that the rewards and
satisfactions of this life are
not enough; that we must begin
living, not according to human
standards, but according to
God's higher plan for our lives.
For
Jesus, this call was an even
higher and deeper one. It was a
call to awareness that he was
not only to live a good outward
life, represented by Haran, but
that he had a far greater
calling and mission in life. As
such, it was a call from human
obscurity to divine clarity.
Swedenborg tells us that this
call was already taking place in
Jesus in his very earliest
years, at the time he was moving
from infancy to childhood.
Like
everything that happened within
the Lord, this call did not
originate in intellectual
considerations. Once again, from
the Arcana, "The
Lord's ability to learn went
beyond that of any other person.
Unlike others he learned
heavenly things before spiritual
ones." In other words,
everything that entered the
Lord's higher conscious
awareness came from love.
And
the love that the Lord was being
called by was the same love that
brought him into the world: it
was the divine love that
prompted him to have mercy on a
dark and suffering world, to
come to us, and to save us from
the evil that had us it its
clutches.
Yes,
even from his earliest
childhood, practically from the
time he was a mere babe in arms,
the Lord was feeling the first
promptings of his divine
mission. He was feeling the
first callings of infinite love
from within, calling him forward
to his life's work: saving us
all from the power of evil and
hell, which we would never be
able to resist or overcome on
our own.
This
is why Simeon could say, when
Jesus was only forty days old,
"For my eyes have seen your
salvation, which you have
prepared in the sight of all
people, a light for revelation
to the Gentiles and for glory to
your people Israel." Amen.
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