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Paradise Southern
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Bridgewater,
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Genesis
13 Abram and Lot separate
So
Abram went up from Egypt into
the South, with his wife and
everything he had, and Lot went
with him. Abram had become very
wealthy in livestock and in
silver and gold.
From
the South he went from place to
place until he came to Bethel,
to the place between Bethel and
Ai where his tent had been
earlier and where he had first
built an altar. There Abram
called on the name of the Lord.
Now
Lot, who was moving about with
Abram, also had flocks and herds
and tents. But the land could
not support them while they
stayed together, for their
possessions were so great that
they were not able to stay
together. And quarrelling arose
between Abram's herdsmen and the
herdsmen of Lot. The Canaanites
and Perizzites were also living
in the land at that time.
So
Abram said to Lot, "Let's
not have any quarrelling between
you and me, or between your
herdsmen and mine, for we are
brothers. Is not the whole land
before you? Let's part company.
If you go to the left, I'll go
to the right; if you go to the
right, I'll go to the
left."
Lot
looked up and saw that the whole
plain of the Jordan was well
watered, like the garden of the
Lord, like the land of Egypt,
towards Zoar. (This was before
the Lord destroyed Sodom and
Gomorrah.) So Lot chose for
himself the whole plain of the
Jordan and set out towards the
east. The two men parted
company: Abram lived in the land
of Canaan, while Lot lived among
the cities of the plain and
pitched his tents near Sodom.
Now the people of Sodom were
wicked and were sinning greatly
against the Lord.
The
Lord said to Abram after Lot had
parted from him, "Lift up
your eyes from where you are and
look north and south, east and
west. All the land that you see
I will give to you and your
offspring forever. I will make
your offspring like the dust of
the earth, so that if anyone
could count the dust, then your
offspring could be counted. Go,
walk through the length and
breadth of the land, for I am
giving it to you."
So
Abram moved his tents and went
to live near the great trees of
Mamre at Hebron, where he built
an altar to the Lord.
Matthew
3:11, 13-17 The baptism of Jesus
"I
baptize you with water for
repentance. But after me will
come one who is more powerful
than I, whose sandals I am not
fit to carry. He will baptize
you with the Holy Spirit and
with fire." . . .
Then
Jesus came from Galilee to the
Jordan to be baptized by John.
But John tried to deter him,
saying, "I need to be
baptized by you, and do you come
to me?"
Jesus
replied, "Let it be so now;
it is proper for us to do this
to fulfill all
righteousness." Then John
consented.
As
soon as Jesus was baptized, he
went up out of the water. At
that moment heaven was opened,
and he saw the Spirit of God
descending like a dove and
lighting on him. And a voice
from heaven said, "This is
my Son, whom I love; with him I
am well pleased."
Arcana
Coelestia #1586 A well-watered
land
"The
whole plain was
well-watered" means that
good and true things could grow
there.
"I
baptize you with water for
repentance. But after me will
come one who is more powerful
than I, whose sandals I am not
fit to carry. He will baptize
you with the Holy Spirit and
with fire." (Matthew 3:11)
As
we follow both the Old Testament
story of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and the New Testament
story of Jesus as an infant, a
young boy, and a man, we find
that they are parallel stories.
They are, in fact, telling the
same story.
We
know from the Lord's
conversation with the two
disciples on the road to Emmaus
after his resurrection that the
entire Word as it is found in
the Old Testament is speaking,
at a deeper level, of the Lord.
It says in Luke 24:27:
And
beginning with Moses and all
the Prophets, he explained to
them what was said in all the
Scriptures concerning himself.
And
a little later in the same
chapter, in Luke 24:44, 45, we
read:
He
said to them, "This is
what I told you while I was
still with you: Everything
must be fulfilled that is
written about me in the Law of
Moses, the Prophets, and the
Psalms." Then he opened
their minds so they could
understand the Scriptures.
Now,
if there were no deeper meaning,
there would be no need for the
Lord to "open their
minds." But he did open
their minds, and it was to see
how the Law, the Prophets, and
the Psalms spoke of himself.
So
here we are, along the road to
Emmaus, in the new Christian
era, having our minds opened to
what is written in the
Scriptures concerning the Lord.
We
last saw Abram living in the
Holy Land two sermons ago in the
first part of Genesis chapter
12. There, God called Abram to
leave his family's home and move
to the land of Canaan. This, as
we have already discovered,
symbolizes the Lord's inner
journeys--and ours as well--from
a stage of being concerned
mostly with outward, worldly
things to a state of being
concerned primarily with deeper,
spiritual things.
Yet
spiritually speaking, even in
the land of Canaan there was a
tension between the inner and
the outer--between the world and
heaven. This, you may recall, is
symbolized in the text by Abram
pitching his tent between
Bethel, "the house of
God," meaning heaven, and
Ai, representing our
material-world interests. So as
the Lord set out on his
spiritual journey in his
earliest childhood, he felt the
tension between the attractions
and pleasures of this world on
the one side, and the deeper
callings and aspirations toward
heaven and God on the other.
Last
time we spoke of how this
struggle within himself led the
Lord to move "toward the
South"--meaning toward the
greater light of learning and
understanding. And since that
"South" is in
Canaan--the Holy Land--it
symbolizes learning and
understanding on the spiritual
side of life.
Yet
Abram didn't stop there. There
was a famine in the land.
Feeling the pinch of hunger,
Abram took his family to Egypt,
where there were stores of food
unaffected by the rainfall that
determined crops everywhere
else. Egypt, the granary of the
region, also represented
learning and knowledge, but on
the level of facts and
intellectual curiosity rather
than of deeper understanding and
wisdom. And just as we need to
strengthen our minds with a
broad array of knowledge to be
well-equipped for both material
and spiritual life, so Jesus, as
a young boy, needed to gain an
inner wealth of
knowledge--especially the
knowledge of the Scriptures and
of the spiritual laws that
govern the universe and the
world of humanity.
As
we move from chapter twelve to
chapter thirteen in Genesis, we
find Abram returning from his
stay in Egypt to the South of
Canaan. And we are told in
Genesis 13:2 that he "had
become very wealthy in livestock
and in silver and gold."
Here we have a picture of the
Lord as a boy moving inwardly
from a stage of learning largely
for the fascination of learning
and knowing, represented by
Egypt, back to the deeper,
spiritual understanding and
wisdom that he had first sought
when he metaphorically moved
from Haran to Canaan. He was now
wealthy in spiritual and
heavenly truth and goodness,
represented by the cattle,
silver, and gold that he had
acquired in Egypt--meaning in
his stage of childhood
curiosity, study, and learning.
In
other words, Jesus, in his
boyhood, was moving into a stage
that we generally arrive at in
our young adulthood at best. For
us, our "Egypt" stage
goes through our whole time of
schooling, which, in this
culture, generally stretches
from the time we are about five
years old up to anywhere from
our late teens to our mid to
late twenties, depending on how
long we stay in school. All of
these years are years in which
our primary focus is on
equipping ourselves with the
knowledge we will need in order
to get along in this world, and
to follow the career or life
path that we are interested in.
Yet
as long as we are in school, the
knowledge we are gaining remains
largely theoretical. It is a
collection of facts that we file
away for future use, or simply
"drink in" from our
curiosity to learn and know as
much as we can. We are
metaphorically "sojourning
in Egypt"; temporarily
staying in the "land of
learning." There, if we
apply ourselves to our studies,
we do become "rich" in
knowledge and understanding, and
in many other good things that
will support and sustain us as
we move on in life.
But
mere knowledge is not enough. If
we stayed in school all of our
lives, not only would it get
tedious for most of us, but all
the intellectual riches that we
were storing up for ourselves
would never be put to use. We do
need to move out of our youthful
phase of focusing primarily on
learning, and into an adult
phase of putting our knowledge
to work in useful service to
others.
For
us, this happens as we move out
of school and into the working
world. And though we still have
a long way to go before our
primary focus is on heavenly and
spiritual things, the very fact
of putting our knowledge to work
in useful employments involves
moving from the theoretical to
the real. We are moving from
Egypt to Canaan, from mere
learning to the
"heaven" of using what
we have learned to serve our
fellow human beings.
In
the Gospel stories, we do not
have a continuous account of the
Lord's childhood and youth. In
fact, as I've said before, after
the stories of the Lord's birth
and infancy, we have only one
story of Jesus at the Temple as
a twelve-year-old boy, and then
nothing more until he began his
public ministry at the age of
thirty.
Yet
even in the story of the
beginning of his public
ministry, we gain some hints as
to what was happening within him
spiritually during the years of
his youth and young adulthood.
In the account of the Lord's
baptism in the Gospel of
Matthew, we read, "I
baptize you with water for
repentance. But after me will
come one who is more powerful
than I. . . . He
will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit and with fire."
Here,
John the Baptist contrasts his
water baptism with the Lord's
baptism with the Spirit, and
with fire. If we focus for now
on the contrast between baptism
with water and baptism with the
spirit, we find that there is a
tension precisely parallel to
the one that comes into our Old
Testament story between Abram
and Lot. Because, Swedenborg
tells us, the baptism of water
involves our outward actions,
whereas the baptism of the
spirit involves our inner,
spiritual self.
In
Genesis 13, Abram returned to
Canaan, together with his nephew
Lot, and their families and
possessions. But now that they
were wealthy and had large
flocks, we find that the land
where they had formerly lived
together in peace and harmony
was no longer large enough to
support both families. And so
"quarreling arose between
Abram's herdsmen and the
herdsmen of Lot."
Spiritually,
Lot represents the same thing
that "water" does in
our New Testament reading. He
represents the knowledge of
material and worldly things, and
our outward, natural-world life
in general. Abram is the
"spirit" side of
things. He represents our deeper
aspirations--our sense of God
calling us to a higher mission
in life.
Especially
in the Lord's life, both of
these had become very wealthy.
We know that he learned the
trade of carpentry, and that he
was able to get along in this
world. We also know that he
studied and learned the
Scriptures very deeply--so much
so that at the age of twelve his
understanding and his answers
amazed the learned men at the
Temple, along with everyone else
who heard him speak.
Equipped
with both material and spiritual
learning, he returned to the
task that God (his divine soul)
had called him to. He returned
from Egypt to Canaan, wealthy in
spiritual cattle, silver, and
gold. Yet his lower, material
self, represented by Lot, also
came back with him, and
"also had flocks and herds
and tents." And once again,
the two families moved to the
place between Bethel and Ai
where Abram had pitched his tent
earlier. Figuratively speaking,
once again the Lord was caught
between his higher, heavenly
calling, represented by Bethel,
and the attractions of worldly
success, represented by Ai.
There was conflict between Abram
and Lot--between the things of
the spirit and the things of the
world.
Isn't
this what happens in us also as
we move out of our long stage of
study and learning in school,
and into the working world? Even
if we were brought up through
Sunday School and Church, and
were taught the Bible and the
principles of spiritual living,
we still find the pleasures of
this world very attractive. Of
course, there are great
satisfactions to be had by
following a spiritual course.
But the world also offers many
pleasures and satisfactions. Not
only are there the purely bodily
pleasures such as eating and
physical activity and sexual
expression, there are also the
pleasures of friends and family,
social events, music, movies,
parties, and, of course, the
pleasure of making money and
using it to gain not only
houses, cars, clothes,
electronics, and other
possessions, but also the
status, power, and position that
this world gives to those who
are wealthier than others. This
world gives us plenty of things
to strive after, no matter what
our personality may be.
As
I have said many times before,
there is nothing wrong with
enjoying the pleasures of this
world. God gave us bodies and
minds with many amazing
capabilities, with the intention
that we would use and enjoy
them.
However,
as in the story of Abram and
Lot, tension can arise when our
lower self--our physical body
and our worldly knowledge and
capabilities--comes into tension
with our higher, spiritual self.
It doesn't take us long in life
to realize that both the
pleasures and the demands of
this world are constant--and
they will take up all of our
time, energy, and attention if
we allow them to. Though our
physical and mental capabilities
are meant to serve the will of
our deeper self, much more
often, like Lot's herdsmen
quarreling with those of Abram,
our experience is that our
involvement it work and family,
sports and social events tends
to push our spiritual self to
the side, and deny it any room.
And
so, in the metaphor of Genesis
13, there is quarreling between
our lower self and our higher
self. Which will we follow?
In
the story, Lot took the
lowlands, in the southern
plains, near Sodom and Gomorrah,
which were later destroyed by
the Lord for their wickedness.
Meanwhile, Abram chose the
higher ground, where God gave
him a vision of the entire land
of Canaan, which would one day
belong to his descendants.
Jesus
did keep one foot in the
material world and one in the
spiritual world. And we can do
the same. As long as we keep
things in their proper place and
perspective, we can be baptized
both with the water of a good
outward life and with the spirit
of a deeper, spiritual life,
which will also give us the
"fire" of love to keep
our souls warm and moving. Amen.
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The Lord God Jesus Christ and John the Baptist
courtesy of Paradise
Southern Baptist Church
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Music: In the Garden
1999 Bruce DeBoer
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